Thread by @fascinatorfun

Superb article from the exceptional science writer @edyong209

“How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation.”

Not just the USA

https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1290249724440633345

“America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.”

An anti-Goldilocks virus - just bad enough in every way.

There are deadlier pathogens. “We can’t even deal with a starter pandemic”

“It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep & foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound”

“A pandemic can be prevented in 2 ways
Stop an infection from ever arising, or
stop an infection from becoming thousands more
The 1st way is likely impossible
There are simply too many viruses & too many animals that harbor them”

WHO delayed too long in calling a PH emergency

However pulling the USA out of the WHO as Trump has declared, can only make the situation worse.

He weakened the CDC, dismissed expertise and evidence. Dismantled the office designed to respond to nascent pandemics and disregarded Intelligence briefings.

Ineffective five and inconsistent border controls create travel and people seek alternative back door routes to access countries and also deliberately conceal symptoms.

In the U.K., too, our border approach is incoherent.

A virologist in Harvard had tried to gain funding for years to create a surveillance network linking all US hospitals and track the virus through genetic sequencing.

It fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile the CDC test was defective and the centralisation meant Plan B did not exist.

“Water running along a pavement will readily seep into every crack; so, too, did the unchecked coronavirus seep into every fault line in the modern world.“

So have Trump and his administration’s lies, poisoning the well of necessary information.

“America’s nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1% of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40% of its coronavirus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and staff have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. “

Sounds familiar.

In some cases residents had to be evacuation because no one showed up to care for them.

Public Health exists to prevent population level spread of disease.

Yet the mind set of many in the US (& the U.K.) is one of individual responsibility.

Tell that to the virus.

“While the president prevaricated, Americans acted. Businesses sent their employees home. People practiced social distancing, even before Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13

This before “Governors and mayors subsequently issued formal stay-at-home orders, or closed schools, shops, and restaurants.”

Same in the U.K. citizens and employers were acting before the Government.

Indecision and bad planning plagued both countries.

And in both countries CV19 has laid bare the underlying inequalities, with elderly people treated as acceptable losses.

See @WestminsterWAG ‘s tweet yesterday.

It is the attitude of mind of leaders that drive the effectiveness of action. CV has laid that bare too.

In the US their Insurance based health system has been brutal with those who have it often having to pay extraordinary excess, not least due to the bloated admin it creates.

More than half of the 3.1 million Americans who have no health cover are BAME, 30% black.

Former slave states having the poorest investment in public health.

The U.K. Health system is comparitively lean, with the US getting little bang for its buck. MucH is wasted on administrative chicanery and unnecessary tests and treatments.

And they were unprepared for such a contagious pandemic, operating just in time supply chains.

4 out of 5 frontline nurses said they had inadequate PPE.

And Trump made things exponentially worse by failing to purchase centrally and deliver supplies equitably. Instead he set in motion a State free for all, and seized incoming supplies to boot.

The Gov actively drove it misinformation
The media added to the confusion. Drawn to novelty, journalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most Americans quietly stayed home. They wrote up every incremental scientific claim, even those that hadn’t been verified

A month before Trump’s inauguration Yong wrote “the question is not whether (Trump will) face a deadly outbreak during his presidency, but when”.

Yet Trump pretended he could not have known.

Yong went on to predict with great accuracy how Trump would respond.

CV‑19 is an assault on America’s body, and a Referendum on the ideas that animate its culture. Recovery is possible, but it demands radical introspection.

America would be wise to help reverse the ruination of the natural world, a process that continues to shunt animal diseases into human bodies.

“Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.

The pandemic has been both tragedy and teacher. Its very etymology offers a clue about what is at stake in the greatest challenges of the future”

The U.K. too.