The reason why tens of millions of Americans are staying at home, watching their retirement accounts drop if they’re lucky enough to have one, is that the United States was woefully unprepared to conduct proper disease surveillance in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. If we had had sufficient testing early enough, we could have identified and isolated the infected. Because we didn’t–and because we still lack testing capacity even now, months into the outbreak–we have to isolate the healthy in order to drag out the spread of the infection so a surge in new cases doesn’t overwhelm our healthcare system, and hopefully for long enough that effective vaccines and/or antivirals can be developed and brought to market.
Our underfunded disease surveillance system predated Donald Trump’s presidency, but his leaderless regime aggravated the problems by disbanding the NSC’s pandemic team and cutting funding for the CDC and other relevant agencies.
And he is directly and personally responsible for spending weeks downplaying the severity of the outbreak instead of ordering ramped-up production of testing equipment, masks, etc. Even today, Trump claims to be a “wartime president” but he refuses to act like one… Continue reading.