!!!PSA!!!
If you stopped socializing even a day early, you could prevent thousands of infections and deaths. Here’s an article to prove that.
Writing this at 3:52 am in the morning on March 17th, I really thought that the most anyone has procrastinated on anything was me writing this Blog #4 that was due almost 2 weeks ago. I soon was reminded, though, from news stories, insta stories, Facebook stories, stories on every goddamn website, that America procrastinated on the coronavirus for nearly two months now. The first case of coronavirus renamed COVID-19 so corona beer stock doesn’t suffer anymore(it didn’t work) was on January 19th, 2020 in Washington State.
This means that we had nearly a month’s head start compared to countries such as China and a few weeks compared to South Korea where scary initial outbreaks were eventually contained. The former did that by locking down the entire country through measures I admit would definitely be challenged constitutionally in the United States. However, nothing was against us following South Korea’s aggressive use of coronavirus testing; 4 days ago(3/13), they were testing 10,000 people per day while the US has tested 20,000 people total today(3/17).
How is this testing failure possible in the “Greatest Country on Earth” you might ask?
It’s because we’ve thoroughly tripped over ourselves with bureaucratic bumbles, manufacturing messes, and of course, Trump’s twitter tirades.
It’s inconceivable to me that as the course of a pandemic could drastically change with a difference between a few days in intervention the FDA took weeks to approve of licenses for private labs to create tests for the coronavirus. Sometimes, these private labs had already successfully tested for coronavirus patients and still were made to wait several weeks. Recognizing this failure in government, some labs proceeded knowing fully well they were breaking laws and saving lives.
This delay which most definitely will cost lives in the future, wouldn’t have been so bad if not for another reason; the supply chains for testing kits were crippled because of the pandemic. Since we’d outsourced many resources related to the production of testing kits, we were left vulnerable to the inevitable shortage of them in a crisis. This, again, is a failure on the part of the government because they know fully well not to outsource all the military supplies in case of a potential war. Why would the US outsource all of its pandemic preparation resources then?
Usually, when the US has missed all of its safeguards for a crisis, it’s the duty of the sitting President to act decisively with their given executive power to direct the country back a correct path and reassure the public with the truth. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, President Trump has failed on epic proportions in this regard by touting harmful myths/falsehoods including that the flu is worse than the coronavirus(the worst-case for coronavirus deaths is 200,000 – 1.7 million deaths while the flu killed 22,000 – 55,000 in the last flu season), the coronavirus will go away by the summer(likely to come back in the fall), a vaccine will be ready in 7 months(at least 1 year). His dismissive attitude towards the coronavirus has reverberated within his entire administration’s treatment of this crisis. It is known that White House officials suppressed efforts from private labs to develop testing kits and infighting between the FDA, CDC, and DHH which further squandered the precious few weeks when the virus could’ve been controlled as it has been in China and South Korea.
Here’s an Atlantic article that goes into greater depth about our procrastination into an unstoppable crisis.
But wait. There’s an even worse example of procrastination. As I was surfing through YouTube, its algorithm decided to play a cruel joke on me and recommended this Ted Talk: “Bill Gates: The next outbreak? We’re not ready.” It’s not from 2020 or even 2019, it was released 5 years ago in 2015 right after the Ebola outbreak was successfully contained.
Once again, Bill Gates proved himself too Big Brain for the small brain world around him.
All kidding aside, this Ted Talks shows that the US government and the world procrastinated for at least 5 years.
His words are eerily indicative of the unpreparedness we’ve experienced in the past few weeks. He pointed out that the world was lucky for Ebola not to have caused as much havoc as it did because people who were contagious already were bedridden with severe symptoms. He ominously asked about the scenario when a person who was contagious still felt fine enough to hop on an airplane and socialize normally. Also, Ebola thankfully didn’t spread through the air which reduced transmission significantly. What if the next crisis was a respiratory virus that did? Bill Gates raised all of these possible future scenarios and more, many of which describe COVID-19’s characteristics.
Keep in mind that I’m not even mentioning the SARS outbreak in 2003 which illustrated how ill-equipped countries were for a flu-like pandemic. Of course, I understand that these global catastrophes are few and far between and so don’t garner the same resources of prevention as do more pressing matters such as poverty and the economy. It’s obvious though that COVID-19 has affected both and upended life for billions of people around the world. I couldn’t agree more with Bill Gates: disease is the most pressing danger facing humanity in the present and for the future. So, it’s imperative that we stop procrastinating now by implementing social distancing and in the future by developing an adequate response to the next inevitable pandemic.
If we don’t, we’ll end up in Italy’s situation in about 10 days.
Update:
This was written in the wee morning hours of 3/17. Later that day, the US surpassed 100 deaths from COVID-19.
Further Reading
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/608113/italy-coronavirus/
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191