3/22/20
How many people are sick with the coronavirus in the United States, and when did they get sick? These are crucial questions to answer, but they have never been answered well. Archived data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that the government dramatically misunderstood what was happening in America as the outbreak began. The United States is a country soon to be overrun with sick people. As the positive tests for the new coronavirus have ticked upward, so, inevitably, will the deaths. When Wuhan began burning with infections in December, the U.S. government took only illogical, inadequate actions to stop the virus’s spread. When the sparks of this conflagration hit, Seattle was aflame before anyone at the CDC had started to reach for water. COVID-19 is an American catastrophe, a slow-motion disaster only now coming into view. When its true proportions have been measured, it will make the early government response look even more outrageous than it already seems. Nearly every flaw in America’s response to the virus has one source: America did not test enough people for COVID-19. Testing should have told doctors how to triage patients and hospitals when to prepare their wards. It should have allowed governors to gauge the severity of a local outbreak and informed federal officials as they allocated scarce masks and ventilators. Testing should have answered the all-important question in any pandemic: How many people are sick right now? Had the nation known that, the systems that were put into place over years of pandemic planning could have powered on, protecting millions of Americans and containing the illness.
Instead, the CDC botched its own test development. It sent testing kits to state public-health labs with a non-functioning ingredient. And by then, the virus was already spreading. The virus was spreading as a delay in test kits became a national shortage. Every six days that the country did not test, every six days that it did not act, the number of infected Americans doubled. Without testing, there was only one way to know the severity of the outbreak: counting the dead. On February 29, Washington State confirmed that a man who had been at the Life Care Center outside Seattle had died, the first American death officially attributed to the virus. The death came at the end of a month that was America’s last chance at containing COVID-19. But it was too late. February had been lost. No one had the guts to say what needed to be said over the past month: To save our people, we will have to keep our cities in a chokehold and decimate our economy. It would have taken guts and the full-throated backing of every level of government and agency, as well as irrefutable data, for local officials to do something like that. No one told them to, and the data did not exist for them to come to that conclusion on their own. A week ago, an NBC reporter asked Trump during a White House briefing whether he took responsibility for the deadly testing delays. His reply was immediate: “No. I don’t take responsibility at all.”
