The crisis that shocked the world: America's response to the coronavirus

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

The crisis that shocked the world: America’s response to the coronavirus

Dysfunctional politics, a lack of funding for public health and a rush to reopen the economy ignited the resurgence of the virus

By Joel Achenbach, William Wan, Karin Brulliard and Chelsea Janes
7/19/2020, 4:00:57 p.m.

-snip-

Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation has failed spectacularly to contain it. The country’s ineffective response has shocked observers around the planet.

Many countries have rigorously driven infection rates nearly to zero. In the United States, coronavirus transmission is out of control. The national response is fragmented, shot through with political rancor and culture-war divisiveness. Testing shortcomings that revealed themselves in March have become acute in July, with week-long waits for results leaving the country blind to real-time virus spread and rendering contact tracing nearly irrelevant.

The United States may be heading toward a new spasm of wrenching economic shutdowns or to another massive spike in preventable deaths from covid-19 — or both.

How the world’s richest country got into this dismal situation is a complicated tale that exposes the flaws and fissures in a nation long proud of its ability to meet cataclysmic challenges.

The fumbling of the virus was not a fluke: The American coronavirus fiasco has exposed the country’s incoherent leadership, self-defeating political polarization, a lack of investment in public health, and persistent socioeconomic and racial inequities that have left millions of people vulnerable to disease and death.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/19/coronavirus-us-failure/

[louis-t]

1. In other news, an invasion of rabid, flying monkeys

is expected by August 1.

[dugog55]

2. Not "America's response", this is totally

the fault of Trump and his Republican sycophants. Period. There is a complete lack of leadership and abject stupidity towards science and common sense by everyone GOP.

[chriscan64]

3. That is an important point.

The acceptance of mask wearing and stay at home orders was not a knee-jerk reaction by the left that opposed some event or statement by the right. It was the understanding of reality. Every parent, teacher and student wants school to start, but not at all costs. The move to reopen them fully was introduced along with the false claim that the left didn't want to open schools for political reasons.

We are not divided because the left and the right are tearing the country apart in equal measure. The right is tearing us away from an objective view of reality.