The US response is a D. On a grading curve with Europe, it approaches a C+, maybe a B-. But this isn't grading on a paper, it has real life lasting consequences. So, D sticks. American, don't hire idiot to run your country, OKAY? Behavior and the dynamic of epidemics (brookings.edu) U.S. COVID response could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths: research | Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it. That is the conclusion of a group of research papers released at a Brookings Institution conference this week, offering an early and broad start to what will likely be an intense effort in coming years to assess the response to the worst pandemic in a century. U.S. COVID-19 fatalities could have stayed under 300,000, versus a death toll of 540,000 and rising, if by last May the country had adopted widespread mask, social distancing, and testing protocols while awaiting a vaccine, estimated Andrew Atkeson, economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles. He likened the state-by-state, patchwork response to a car’s cruise control. As the virus worsened people hunkered down, but when the situation improved restrictions were dropped and people were less careful, with the result that “the equilibrium level of daily deaths ... remains in a relatively narrow band” until the vaccine arrived. Atkeson projected a final fatality level of around 670,000 as vaccines spread and the crisis subsides. The outcome, had no vaccine been developed, would have been a far-worse 1.27 million, Atkeson estimated. The economic response, while mammoth, also could have been better tailored, argued University of California, Berkeley economics professor Christine Romer. She joins former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and several others from the last two Democratic administrations in criticizing the spending authorized since last spring, including the Biden team’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. While she said the federal government’s more than $5 trillion in pandemic-related spending won’t likely trigger a fiscal crisis, she worries that higher-priority investments will be deferred because of allocations to initiatives like the Paycheck Protection Program. Those forgivable small business loans were “an interesting and noble experiment,” but were also “problematic on many levels,” including an apparent cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars for each job saved, she said. “Spending on programs such as unemployment compensation and public heath was exactly what was called for,” she wrote, but other aspects, particularly the generous one-time payments to families, were “largely ineffective and wasteful.” “If something like the $1 trillion spent on stimulus payments that did little to help those most affected by the pandemic ends up precluding spending $1 trillion on infrastructure or climate change in the next few years, the United States will have made a very bad bargain indeed,” Romer wrote. Biden administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, argue the full package was needed to be sure all workers and families are kept economically intact until the job market recovers. In a separate paper, Minneapolis Federal Reserve researchers Krista Ruffini and Abigail Wozniak concluded the federal programs largely did what they intended by supporting income and spending, with the impact seen in how consumption changed in response to the approval and lapse of different government payments. But they also found room for improvement. Evidence of the PPP’s effectiveness in job retention, for example, was “mixed,” they found, and increases in food assistance didn’t account for things like higher grocery prices. “Food insecurity remained elevated throughout 2020,” they noted. The aim now, they said, should be on determining what worked in order to make the response to any similar crisis more effective. “The 2020 social insurance system response had many successes,” they said. “Given the scope and scale of the pandemic response, it is critical we continue to evaluate these efforts to understand the full extent of their reach, which populations were helped, who was left out.”
Interesting to read the Brooking Institute analysis of the handling of the pandemic and then look back through this thread. From the beginning you had trump supporters repeating trump spin that it was overhyped (by the media and Democrats). The lies and deflections only worsened over the months and the response failed miserably.
Why are so many flaunting trying to stop the spread of this disease? Sad Miami Beach officials say they're prepared for another weekend of large spring break crowds By Alaa Elassar, CNN Updated 5:36 AM EDT, Fri March 26, 2021 https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/26/us/miami-beach-spring-break-curfew/index.html
Two positive notes. 1) Soon the vast majority of the country will be vaccinated. 2) 50% of Republican men do not plan to get vaccinated. Their is reason to hope that things can get better in the country.
"For Biden, a New Virus Dilemma: How to Handle a Looming Glut of Vaccine": https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/us/biden-coronavirus-vaccine.html excerpt: WASHINGTON — Biden administration officials are anticipating the supply of coronavirus vaccine to outstrip U.S. demand by mid-May if not sooner, and are grappling with what to do with looming surpluses when vaccine scarcity turns to glut. President Biden has promised enough doses by the end of May to immunize all of the nation’s roughly 260 million adults. But between then and the end of July, the government has locked in commitments from manufacturers for enough vaccine to cover 400 million people — about 70 million more than the nation’s entire population. Whether to keep, modify or redirect those orders is a question with significant implications, not just for the nation’s efforts to contain the virus but also for how soon the pandemic can be brought to an end. Of the vaccine doses given globally, about three-quarters have gone to only 10 countries. At least 30 countries have not yet injected a single person. And global scarcity threatens to grow more acute as nations and regions clamp down on vaccine exports. With infections soaring, India, which had been a major vaccine distributor, is now holding back nearly all of the 2.4 million doses manufactured daily by a private company there. That action follows the European Union’s decision this week to move emergency legislation that would curb vaccine exports for the next six weeks. more at the link
contrast that w Trump suggesting 'injection' of disinfectant to beat coronavirus and 'clean' the lung
"Nation’s first ‘vaccine passport’ coming to New York": https://nypost.com/2021/03/26/nations-first-covid-vaccine-passport-coming-to-new-york/
This was a response to one of my cousins posting about getting her first Covid vaccine by another cousin who is a die hard Trumper. "So you get the vaccine but still have to wear a mask.....not for me. A person that is vaccinated can still carry. I've got a great idea....no one and I mean no one should come see me cause I'll be damned if I'm gonna get vaccinated or wear a mask.....yes.....I LIVE IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT AREA. Now I will wear one if required....and I have total respect for elders I am going to see." Unfortunately, there will be bull headed people refusing to get vaccinated, and my guess is that the majority of them will be die hard Trump loving fools just doing it out of spite. I don't get the mentality. I asked her why she didn't want the vaccine, but got no response. The sad part is, her sister and mother who live in other states died from Covid. One was in a nursing home and the other was never tested, but died suddenly last February after saying she was really sick one weekend, with what she thought was a flu. That was before we knew much about Covid, but she was found dead in her home when her brother came to check on her. It had the signs of Covid written all over it.
A pandemic was one of the worst things that could happen to this country at this time. A pandemic requires things that this country isn't good at. Coordinated response at all levels of government, an informed public, a willingness to sacrifice in the short term for long term benefits, and more focus on the society than on the individual. This crisis was exacerbated by weak leadership from the top that provided conflicting messages, was more concerned about partisan infighting and blame deflection. Even with better national leadership we still likely would've lost a lot of people given that state leadership wasn't all online and as we see now with a different President state responses are still very different. Anti-lockdown protests still would've happened and many Americans still would've embraced denial and misinformation over the pandemic. Looking back it should've been inevitable that the US was going to handle this poorly and have the worst outcomes of any industrialized country.
Was just talking to my dad and in HK. He is in his late 70's and am pushing him to get vaccinated. He said he's holding off getting vaccinated as he's still talking to his cardiologist about which vaccine to take. HK currently has the Pfizer and the Sinovac vaccine. He and his doctor though aren't in a rush to get him vaccinated because HK 's cases of new infections are dropping with the 7 day average of 11 new infections a day. HK has a population of around 7 million. It is one of the densest places on Earth with most people living and working on top of each other and getting around by public transport. Since the start of the pandemic HK has had a total of 11,445 cases with 205 deaths. Let's compare that to Harris County. Harris County has a population of about 4.7 million while urbanized is far less dense than HK with most people living in single family housing and driving in private cars. Harris County's 7 day average of new infections is 648, a total of 374,152 cases 5,742 deaths. So even though HK has almost 1.5 times more population than Harris County, there have been almost 33 times as many new cases, 28 times the amount of deaths and currently a whopping 60 times new infections per 7 day average in Harris County. My dad lived in Houston for 30 years of his life and still has many friends here. He is far safer in HK than he would be in Houston. This is American Exceptionalism that none of us should be proud of.
Agree with most of your points, to different degrees but I don't agree with the last sentence. If we didn't have the two main issues below, I strongly believe we would be in a much better place, even with all the challenges. We had two major issues going on simultaneously with the pandemic that I think made it much worse than it should be. Issue one is a lack of a national strategy (unique to the US and some other countries). Issue two is a pandemic of misinformation from within top leadership (unique to the US and some other countries). While we have many of those challenges you pointed out, we also have some major advantages. We are the wealthiest nation in the world (we can throw plenty of resources at the problem and no governor, Rep or Dem would reject federal funding and help), we are probably the most advanced nation in the world in the field of medicine, we have a very stable infrastructure (not the best, but very solid) that can reach almost every single person in the nation (vaccination and distribution), and we have a very robust monitoring system for disease (if we choose to use it). The Biden admin took over mid-stream. It's very hard and probably mostly a waste of energy to go back upstream to change everything to what they wanted to do. But if there was a time machine and they could have started back from the start, I think you know there would be a national strategy and there would not be misinformation within top leadership. That would have made a huge difference. The national strategy they have now is less effective than if they had that from Feb 2010 simply because mitigation is 1000000x harder than prevention. So, I think it's invalid to judge the continuing American outcome and behaviors from a pandemic based on a strategy that starts at midstream vs if they had the strategy from the very start. I do want to point out some differences we see around a "national strategy". First, it's not completely accurate that we did NOT have a national strategy. The first massive set of lockdowns throughout the US were indeed NOT a national strategy, but you can almost say it's a de-facto one, given no hard pushback from anyone at that time. (I should also point out that American, as individualistic as we are, accepted the lockdown then, reflecting that we, as a society, is fluid but however, we need good feedback and leadership to move in a direction). Soon after that, the Trump admin made it KNOWN that there wouldn't be a national strategy, that each States are on their own. The national strategy here is that there is NO national strategy. That was not by accident - it was by choice. National-Strategy-for-the-COVID-19-Response-and-Pandemic-Preparedness.pdf (whitehouse.gov)
Brazil has a covid denier in chief and they are suffering greatly right now with very little hope at this time. They are now experiencing ~100k new cases and ~3K death per day with their health care system overwhelmed. Brazil’s Covid deaths soar to nearly 4,000 a day as health system nears collapse | Evening Standard Signs of collapse across Brazil as Covid spirals out of control. Bolsonaro seems to have little response | World | stltoday.com
Yes we have a lot of resources and advanced technology and that is why we were able to create vaccines quickly. While many states did go along with lockdowns early on to what extent those were enforced wasn't the same and there were states like SD that never locked down or had a mask mandate. This wasn't even a defacto national strategy and even if the previous Admin. had a national strategy that is still limited by the federal structure. With a highly contagious disease it is the weakest link. Unless we were to shut down state borders the country as a whole was affected by what the states with the weakest standards were doing. We saw a direct illustration of that when Sturgis, SD led to thousands of infections in many other states. We often hear the cliche "If we can put a man on the Moon we do X" The problem with that is that while putting a man on the Moon was a remarkable achievement it wasn't primarily a societal achievement. It wasn't as though if a family in Sioux Falls didn't drink Tang every morning we wouldn't get to the Moon. With a pandemic individual actions lead to a collective outcome. With things like going to the Moon or creating a vaccine in under a year those are primarily engineering problems. We can get our best minds together and throw a lot of money at it you're likely going to get the result you want. A pandemic is a sociological problem. Getting our best minds together and throwing a lot of money will help but unless the policies are put in place and most of the people follow them you won't get the result. The pandemic in the US isn't a failure of technology, resources or engineering. It's a failure of policy and individual attitudes.
