THIS NATION IS DYING FROM A LEADERSHIP VACUUM

 

                               …This man is responsible for the crisis in this nation

 

Our leader has failed the response to the pandemic

 

I have heard the following question being asked in a number of different ways.

Just how bad is the United States reaction to the Covid-19 virus and why is it so bad?

To refer to it in numbers, when the Chinese government locked down the area of the virus in Wuhan, China, the population of Wuhan is, 11 million.  The total population of Wuhan was required to stay inside their homes and to not leave except to obtain food…period.

Yes, it was very severe, but that is what a dictatorship can call for and  accomplish.

It is also said that when the lock-down was over, they found many corpses of people that had died from their lack of medicine and of starvation.  That can also be accomplished by a dictatorship.

The results do speak for themselves.  By eliminating the transmission of the disease, their death rate was reduced to 3 per million population (their stated numbers) , versus the current US rate of 500 per million.

In fact, the United States is so far behind in “test performed per infected persons,” that we are behind the backward nations of Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia.  Our lack of emphasis on developing the testing capacity is so low that the US test results are delayed so long, they are many time useless for any disease control.

The US instituted its quarantine and isolation measures so late and haphazardly, and without any real effort to enforce the measures, the efforts were useless.  In fact, our rules on social distancing have been so lackadaisical that disease control is useless.

The reason for all of this is down to one serious issue, and it starts at the very top.

The lack of real leadership in this country is so poor, all the efforts to control the disease have died from a leadership vacuum.

The magnitude of this failure is beyond comprehension. 

According to Johns Hopkins Center for Science & Engineering:  “The United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths, due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries such as China.”  The death rate in the US is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population by a factor of almost 50, and it even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries such as Vietnam by a factor of 2,000. 

The answer to this issue is simple.  It is how we behave, and we have behaved poorly.

China chose very strict quarantine and isolation that was severe, but it was very effective.  Those countries that also have very close connections and exchanges with China, such as Singapore, New Zealand and South Korea, they also took severe approaches and started testing and contact tracing very early on.  The results were very small outbreaks.  They have been able to properly and slowly reopen their societies. 

The reality is that many other democracies in general have done much better than the US by magnitudes of performance.

But the US came into this crisis with enormous advantages.  

Along with tremendous manufacturing capacity, we have biomedical research that is the envy of the world.  We have enormous expertise in public health, health policy, and basic biology.  We have consistently been able to turn that expertise into new therapies and preventive measures.  Much of that national expertise resides in our government institutions. Yet our leaders, especially the president, have largely chosen to ignore and denigrate science and the experts.

The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The president has largely abandoned disease control, and he gave it to the states.  The Governors have varied many times in their responses by their incompetence.  Whatever their competence, the states governors do not have the required tools that Washington and the president controls.

Instead of using those tools the president has undermined them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was the world’s leading disease response organization, has been made moot and has suffered dramatic testing and policy failures.  The National Institute of Health (NIH) have played a key role in vaccine development, but they have been excluded from crucial government decision making.  And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been shamefully politicized, appearing to respond to pressure from the Trump administration rather than scientific evidence.

Our president has undercut trust in science and in government, causing serious damage that will unfortunately, outlast even this president.  Instead of relying on expertise, this administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promotion of outright lies.

Let’s be clear about the cost of not taking even the simple measures.

The outbreak that has seriously affected communities of color and has exacerbated the tensions associated with the nation’s inequality.  Many of our children are missing school at critical times in their social and intellectual development.  The hard work of health care professionals, who have put their lives on the line, has not been used wisely.

Our current president takes pride in the economy, but while most of the world has opened up to some extent, the United States still suffers from its disease rates that have prevented many businesses from reopening.  With the resultant loss of hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of jobs.

In addition, more than 200,000 Americans have died. Some deaths from Covid-19 were unavoidable.  It is impossible to project the precise number of additional American lives lost because of weak and inappropriate government policies.  It is at least in the tens of thousands in a pandemic that has already killed more Americans than any conflict since World War II

This election gives us the power to render judgment. Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many political positions taken by candidates.  But the truth is neither liberal nor conservative.  When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current president has demonstrated that he is dangerously incompetent.

We should not allow him to enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing him and his supporting politicians to keep their jobs.

Copyright G. Ater 2020