Thread by @LaurenCaruba

As this article makes clear, the American response to the coronavirus has been an abject failure.

San Antonio’s surge this summer — tens of thousands of cases, thousands of hospitalizations, hundreds of deaths — is a direct result of this.
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

Over the past few months, as SA’s surge spiraled out of control, local officials pleaded with residents to distance, to wear masks. Devoid of an overarching state & federal response, they asked the public to individually respond to a collective problem. Of course it didn’t work.

When we talk about the spread of coronavirus only in terms of personal responsibility, it lets government officials & public health agencies off the hook for failing the general public on so many fronts. Testing. Contact tracing. PPE. Masks. Shutdowns & reopenings. Messaging.

In May, the governor of Texas reopened the state before benchmarks for containment were met. Is it any surprise that people took that as an indication that it was safe, when it so clearly was not?

I was reporting in a COVID ICU just before SA’s surge started. The nurses saw what was happening as the state reopened, and they already knew the spread would be bad. They had no way of preventing it, because they could only respond to the aftermath.

In San Antonio, our health department didn’t hire enough contact tracers until we were well into a surge. They were still filling out forms w/ pen & paper.

Texas officials prevented local ones from shutting down again & mandating masks until the state was already on fire.

I’ve heard experts argue things change during a pandemic.

That doesn’t make up for bungled public health messaging early on that told people masks weren’t necessary & the flu was worse, ideas that have been disproven but still persist among segments of the population.

This weekend, I attended a funeral for a woman who recently died of COVID in a San Antonio hospital. Talking to one of her family members, he worried that he was the one to bring the virus home.

There’s no way to know for sure how the virus was introduced to the family. Regardless, it wasn’t any of their faults that community transmission was uncontrolled, that there was an invisible threat in their midst. The virus’ spread is a failure of policy.

And her death was the result of systemic problems with our response to this virus.

It was preventable. So are the long-term health consequences that thousands of others may now suffer from because they managed to survive a horrible disease. The financial ruin.

Thinking about her family’s tears, their devastation and guilt, fills me with an unspeakable sadness. It didn’t have to be this way. They didn’t deserve the hell they’ve gone through.

What is happening with COVID in Texas and elsewhere in the U.S. should not be normalized. It’s not happening in other countries that took the right steps to flatten the curve and keep it flattened. We know that more could have been done, that time & resources were wasted.

Now, this crisis is colliding with attempts to reopen schools. It’s something that the country is now forging ahead with, even as the virus continues to ravage communities.

If in-person instruction returns when transmission remains high, it’s destined to fail. All it would take is a couple of outbreaks on campuses.

This, too, would be preventable.

After spending months reporting on this public health crisis, I can’t help but feel that my job has become documenting a great injustice that has been done to families, to health care workers, to communities.