How the United States became the new center of the covid-19 pandemic

The USA has already outnumbered China, where the outbreak originated.

A day after the United States confirmed its first case of coronavirus, last January, President Donald Trump assured everyone from the Davos Forum that the situation was under control.

“He is just a person who came from China and we have him under control. Everything will be fine,” he said in an interview on CNBC.

Days passed, and despite complaints of inaction by experts and government critics, Trump insisted that the virus was going to “disappear” as if it were a miracle.

“The risk to Americans is still very low. When you have 15 people ... in a couple of days it will go down and get close to zero. It is a very good job that we have done,” Trump defended on January 26.

A month and a half had not passed since the first world power had already become the new world epicenter of the covid-19 pandemic.

And this Tuesday, with more than 3,600, the United States outnumbered the number of deaths attributed to the new coronavirus in China, the country where the pandemic began and which a few days ago had been overtaken by Italy and Spain in the number of reported fatalities.

The White House itself now estimates that the new virus could cause between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths in the country.

If so, for Trump his government will have done “a good job.”

What happened?

In late January, Trump commissioned Vice President Mike Pence to lead a task force to manage the epidemic, and on February 2, the government took its first major measure when it enacted a ban on entry into the United States of foreigners who had visited China in the previous 14 days.

The President boasts that by this decision he saved numerous lives but that the experts, while appreciating it, criticize that it has not been accompanied by other measures to prepare the country.

“It took a long time for political leaders and federal officials to realize that this was a serious problem that they had to deal with,” says Jeremy Youde, global health policy specialist and dean of the Minnesota Duruh University School of Humanities.

“And time played against everything the United States did,” Youde said.

Trump has been downplaying the risk of the coronavirus in the country from the start.

On March 12, the president addressed the nation from the Oval Office in a prepared speech in which he went on to say that all travel from Europe and even commercial exchanges were suspended, something that they then had to rush to correct from the government: the measure was only for non-resident foreigners.

The statements of the president during this pandemic have generated confusion with his tendency to minimize the risk to the country and the fact that on numerous occasions he contradicted the information transferred by other members of its team or the World Health Organization (WHO).

A brief chronology of Trump’s comments collected by the American press attest to this:

“We have it fully under control” - January 22, a few days after the first case was confirmed in Washington state.

“Many people think that it will go away in April with the heat. As the heat arrives. Normally, it will go away in April” - February 10, with 11 confirmed cases.

The United States is “rapidly developing a vaccine” against the coronavirus - February 26. Soon after, the director of the government's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that it will take more than a year to be ready.

“We will open [the country] relatively soon ... I would like the country to open with energy for Easter” - March 25, after issuing the containment directive to all Americans.

[We will] already be “on the road to recovery” by June March 30, after extending the recommendation to Americans until the end of April.

In addition to the lack of clear leadership, one of the great failings of the USA in this crisis has been the failure of the initial system to detect new cases in the country, recognized by the authorities and that BBC Mundo journalist Lioman Lima analyzed in depth in this report.

“Much of the blame for the situation is due to delayed testing in the United States. We were on the sidelines, watching the pandemic unfold, with no ability to test and identify cases before. And that resulted in the massive spread of covid-19 across the United States,” says Thomas Tsai, a surgeon and health policy researcher at Harvard.

Defective tests that had to be changed or limited access to tests are among the problems highlighted by the specialists, problems that delayed the response of the first world power to the advance of the disease. (BBC)