![]() ![]() Deadlier pathogens almost certainly exist. SARS‑CoV‑2 is neither as lethal as some other coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS, nor as contagious as measles. These traits made the virus harder to control, but they also softened the pandemic’s punch. It spreads quickly enough to overload hospitals, but slowly enough that statistics don’t spike until too late. Its symptoms can be severe enough to kill millions but are often mild enough to allow infections to move undetected through a population. SARS‑CoV‑2 is something of an anti-Goldilocks virus: just bad enough in every way. But the COVID‑19 debacle has also touched-and implicated-nearly every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism. was not ready for a pandemic, and sounded warnings about the fragility of the nation’s health-care system and the slow process of creating a vaccine. ![]() In 2018, I wrote an article for The Atlantic arguing that the U.S. Health experts, business leaders, and even middle schoolers ran simulated exercises to game out the spread of new diseases. In recent decades, epidemics of SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 flu, Zika, and monkeypox showed the havoc that new and reemergent pathogens could wreak. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic. The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. And despite its considerable advantages-immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise-it floundered. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. The actual toll, though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens.ĭespite ample warning, the U.S. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths. In the first half of 2020, SARS‑CoV‑2-the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID‑19-infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app. ![]()
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