U.S. could have done more to prevent COVID-19 pandemic | Letter to the editor

Of course China lied about the virus in Wuhan! That shouldn’t surprise anyone – it’s what they do. But it is not an excuse for America’s shamefully slow and chaotic response.

Despite China’s presumed obfuscation, there were plenty of signs that the coronavirus could turn into a pandemic. In late 2019, the U.S. intelligence community was raising concerns about a possible pandemic, and in early January 2020 started including warnings in their daily briefings. On Jan. 3, 2020, China, while probably minimizing the epidemic’s seriousness, actually warned the CDC about the outbreak, and on Jan. 20 told the agency about person to person transmission.

On Jan. 30, HHS Secretary Alex Azar, in a phone conversation, warned the president of a pandemic, and followed with another warning two weeks later. On Feb. 25 the coronavirus task force concluded the US needed to implement aggressive social distancing. Yet, given these examples – and many more - the U.S. did not announce a national emergency until March 16.

In a pandemic, three weeks is a lifetime. From Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. rose from 15 to 4,226. Two weeks later there were over 100,000.

Could we have done better? Let’s look at a country that did. South Korea and the U.S. both confirmed their first case of COVID-19 at the same time, around Jan. 20. Unlike the U.S., however, South Korea immediately formed a successful public-private partnership to quickly ramp-up testing, and issued early social distancing guidelines.

As of April 8, deaths from the virus in South Korea were at 200, while in the US, deaths were at 13,000. Factoring in the difference in population, deaths per million in the U.S. were almost 10 times higher!

Could we have done better? I think the answer is yes.

Doug Broberg

Bradenton