Slow response to COVID haunts US
Politicizing the virus had an impact, with country now exceeding 1 million deaths due to the pandemic
As the United States marked the somber milestone of 1 million people in the country killed by COVID-19, it looked back at what had caused the deaths of more Americans than the two world wars combined, and why it happened despite the US being one of the most developed countries and with first-class healthcare.
About 27 months since the US confirmed its first COVID-19 case, its death toll from the virus crossed 1 million on May 12. Observers said this was a tragedy caused by a failure of governance and a lack of respect for human life.
US President Joe Biden marked the grim milestone in remarks opening the second Global COVID Summit hosted by the White House.
Biden said each of the dead represented “an irreplaceable loss”, leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation “forever changed”. He ordered flags to be flown at half-staff at the White House and all public buildings, grounds, military posts and naval vessels until sunset on May 16 to honor the dead.
The tragic figure is greater than the total number of US citizens killed on the battlefields of World War I, War World II, the Vietnam War and the American War of Independence, and has occurred in a time span shorter than any of those wars.
Diao Daming, an associate professor of US studies at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said the death toll was mainly caused by the failure of governance by the US authorities and the lack of an anti-epidemic policy that puts people first.
The US political system has not effectively pushed forward anti-epidemic efforts in the country, including its public policy on epidemic prevention, and has apparently allowed political considerations to override saving more lives and safeguarding the basic health and well-being of the people.
The country entered the pandemic while Republican president Donald Trump was in office. The World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. At that time, only 36 people in the US had died from the virus.
In February 2020, Trump played down the severity of COVID, saying it was “no worse than the flu” and was going to “disappear”. His words affected the public.
In private, however, Trump was telling people close to him that the virus was “deadly”, according to the book Rage by journalist Bob Woodward, who interviewed the president on his strategy to tackle COVID-19.
Biden promised to take the pandemic more seriously and came into office with a plan to get people vaccinated and show leadership in maskwearing and mitigation efforts.
But these measures — which were endorsed by disease experts — have been turned into a political and legal battle in the US, said Diao at Renmin University of China.
From Washington to the local level, politicians in both parties have repeatedly fought over a series of issues, including nucleic acid testing standards, whether to wear masks, whether to return to work, the distribution of medical supplies and the terms of an aid bill, which delayed implementation of a coordinated and timely response.
“Since last summer, as the epidemic in the US continued to spiral out of control and Biden was eager to boost the economy, the administration has taken a relatively hands-off approach,” Diao said. “It is not a scientific way of dealing with diseases and saving people, but was motivated by political considerations.”
Most of those deaths, around 600,000, happened after Biden took office in January 2021 at the peak of a major wave of the disease, according to a Reuters report.
Diao said that as political factors rather than scientific and peoplecentered considerations had always motivated its anti-epidemic effort, the politically divided US had failed to
make a concerted effort to combat the virus.
“With advanced medical technology and rich medical resources, the enormous number of deaths clearly shows a tremendous violation of ordinary people’s right to life and health,” he said.
Despite the public concern, government officials “are trying to project this nonchalance that we are back to normal”, Gregg Gonsalves, an infectious diseases expert at Yale University, said in an interview with the Politico website.
“It gives the impression that they don’t care and infections don’t matter ... This is all about political expediency and optics more than anything else, and it’s entirely depressing,” Gonsalves said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on May 13 expressed deep condolences over the tragic loss of 1 million lives. He said that the sounding of the mourning bell of the Washington National Cathedral was an act of remembrance, but also a wake-up call.
Dr Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said she believes that politicizing the virus affected the US response to COVID-19 early on in the pandemic. “I think the (Trump) administration did downplay the virus,” Gandhi said.
Several other factors also slowed the country’s initial response to the pandemic, especially a lack of national testing available.
In January 2020, when a Washington state man in his 50s became the first in the US confirmed to have died from COVID-19, tests for the virus were not widely available.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had developed its own test and even turned down tests made by Germany and used by the WHO, but the CDC’s COVID-19 tests turned out to be faulty, further slowing things down.
Another issue was the lack of a unified message from the federal and state governments.
In the US, most decisions on how to handle COVID-19, like lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, were made at the state and local levels. The federal government offered financial assistance. This produced an uneven approach in some largely Democratic states compared with Republican states.
In August 2020, South Dakota, a largely Republican state, allowed a large public gathering, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, to take place. It turned out to be a “super spreader of COVID-19”, according to research by the CDC.
Nearly half a million bikers attended the rally, many of them not wearing masks, as there was no mask mandate. Just two weeks later, the event had led to 463 COVID-19 cases, and 186 of those patients were identified as secondary contacts, meaning there were 649 total cases that could be traced to the event, a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases found in July 2021.
People in the US also did not wear face masks early on to stop COVID-19 from spreading. While people in countries like China and South Korea believed in the benefits of wearing face masks to prevent the spread of illnesses since the 2002-03 SARS outbreak, it was uncommon in the US.
Both the CDC and WHO initially advised against mask wearing at the start of the pandemic, suggesting it was unnecessary. But both organizations soon reversed course.
CDC Director Dr Robert R. Redfield advised in July 2020 that “cloth face coverings are one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus”.
Yet, even after mask mandates were put in place, Republican governors in North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa resisted these moves.
Dr William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, told China Daily, “In Tennessee, the cities have a higher proportion of vaccine accepters than the rural communities.”
Dr Jane Appleby, chief medical officer for Methodist Hospital and Methodist Children’s Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, told ABC News that one of their patients, a 30-year-old man, had attended a “COVID party” hosted by someone diagnosed as having the virus.
Shortly before he died in July 2020, the man told his nurse, “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.”