The United States is a great country with the strongest national economy. We also have by far the premier military force in the world. But many of us have a myopic view of our country, believing in American exceptionalism so strongly that we can do no wrong. It is difficult to square that type of thinking with our dismal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the last several years, I have written numerous columns regarding how unprepared the United States was for the COVID pandemic. Over 1.1 million Americans have died due to the coronavirus. Even now, there are over 9,000 people hospitalized daily with COVID-19, per the CDC.
Our national media, progressive or conservative, virtually never mentions that the U.S. has one of the worst COVID death rates versus other countries. The U.S. mortality rate stands at 341 deaths per 100,000 people. All major democracies have a lower death rate, as do most less developed nations. For example, Denmark and Israel are each at 142 deaths per 100,000. Taiwan and South Korea are half that.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Both political parties blame the other for our national failure. But neither one has pushed to establish a 9/11-type commission to analyze what went wrong, fearing the inevitable political backlash.
Therefore, I was pleased to hear about the recent book “Lessons from the COVID War: An Investigative Report”, issued by the COVID Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization. As a follow up, the Miller Center of the University of Virginia had a seminar on this topic. Miller Center participants included the primary author of the report and several other national experts.
They detailed how we failed and why. To begin with, the U.S. had no technical or political plan on how to proceed. And we were and are both too decentralized and too polarized to act effectively as a nation. Instead of forming bipartisan, multi-state, objective taskforces -- as Australia and others did -- we devolved into political tribes.
Former President Donald Trump saw COVID-19 as only a political issue, even when he himself became infected and seriously ill. Trump initially just thought that he could talk people into believing that COVID was a minor problem that would just go away. Other national and state leaders were trying to balance public health and economic concerns, which led to intransigence. And some conservatives were not listening to science, reopening their state’s economy too quickly (like Gov. Brian Kemp did in Georgia).
Some even provided the public with false and misleading figures. “Anti-woke” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was and still is using his reactionary pandemic stance as a political tool. And his state surgeon general has also been accused of cooking the books to justify non-scientific COVID vaccination proclamations. Meanwhile, the task force chief author points out that the Florida death rate is twice as high as Spain and in fact generally much worse than other European nations.
On the federal bureaucracy end, the CDC was and still is overly political and primarily a research outfit. It’s not an organization oriented towards taking action in emergencies. It miserably botched the national COVID response, inexcusably delaying construction and distribution of COVID tests. Therefore, we had no actionable intelligence, per Dr. Danielle Allen of Harvard. Plus, we egotistically ignored what was already being done successfully in other nations.
Although they inherited a mess, the Democrats are not blameless. They controlled the Congress and the White House for two years. But they did not establish a bipartisan commission to make sure that we learned our lessons from the pandemic.
What is extremely troubling is that the book concludes that we are not well prepared for the next mass outbreak.
The report states that we still do not have the arsenal necessary to fight the next pandemic struggle. In 2019, regarding a major pandemic, our Public Health Director said to our local Board of Health - “It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s a question of ‘when.’”
And that is still true today.
Jack Bernard, a former health care executive, was the first director of health planning for Georgia. He’s a former Republican chairman of the Jasper County Commission.
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