Bleeding Edge

Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged:

“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

It is clear now that when the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently.

It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.

On the very same day, 5,000 miles away in Asia, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in South Korea.

Timing was uncanny, and indeed the confluence of same viral infections being uncovered n the two countries at the same time was striking, but that is where all the similarities had ended, because from then on, the US failed to act quickly, and to this day it remains seriously behind South Korea, which has conducted more than five times as many Covid-19 tests per capita, and has acted accordingly and thus managed to curtail the new infections and place the virus under control.

By contrast that United States, has remained blissfully unaware of the extent of the epidemic thus giving time for this beast of a disease to grow wings and ravage our population as it spreads from one undiagnosed, uncared for and un-isolated person, to another — and that not only makes the US death rates go up drastically, as it causes a run to the hospitals when these people are about to die and are found critically ill, but it also makes predicting where the next hotspot will pop up, after Seattle, New York, San Francisco, New Orleans etc, rather impossible…

In the two months since that fateful day of January 20th, the variance between the responses to coronavirus as displayed by the United States, and the response to the virus as exhibited by the Herculean labors of South Korea, have been exact polar opposites.

Because South Korea took proper leadership steps and acted stoutly, swiftly and aggressively, in order to test, detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so as of today — we can claim that South Korea first amongst all countries, it has largely contained the crisis.

Contrast that to the lack of any vigorous response by the leader of the Federal government of the United States, President Trump who has made light of the epidemic, joked about it, dithered, procrastinated, and eventually became mired in chaos and confusion.

Indeed the whole of America was distracted by the individual whims of our supreme leader, and thus we are now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions that is breaking both the health Care system and the Country as a whole.

Looking at this epidemic through unfettered eyes, we see clearly that South Korea acted strongly within the week of its first confirmed case, because South Korea’s disease control agency immediately summoned the Top 20 private companies and coerced them to participate in the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit, where they were told to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed.

A week after that, the first South Korean diagnostic tests were approved and were sent into battle against the disease, helping the front line fighter, the diligent Korean Medical professionals by identifying most all of the infected individuals who could then be quarantined, in order to halt the advance of the disease in the rest of the Korean population…

Within that time frame of US inactivity, the South Koreans performed 357,896 tests, and they have succeeded so far, that we are now forced to acknowledge that this progressive and forward thinking country, has more or less won the coronavirus war.

True to that, this past Friday, there were only 91 new cases reported in this country of more than 50 million people, and their health care system is alive and well, without any of their hospitals being overwhelmed, and certainly no clinic rural or urban, reporting that they were lacking protective equipment, ventilators, or medical staff, and thus were unable to cope with the disease…

Contrast that to the US response of these past weeks, and you start seeing a completely different picture.

Because just two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

Nothing more happened under the command of the White House then…

A week after that, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by two former top health policy officials within the Trump administration under the headline “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic” where Ms Luciana Borio and Mr Scott Gottlieb laid out a simple practical menu of actions that had to be undertaken by the US authorities instantly, if we were to avert a massive health disaster in our country, the likes of which we haven’t seen in ages immemorial.

Top of these Health Experts’ list was the South Korean response, and specifically, that the United States Federal Government had to work with private industry in order to develop an “easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic test.”

In other words, both Ms Luciana Borio and Mr Scott Gottlieb laid out a simple plan and that plan was to do just what South Korea was already doing, because apparently it seemed to be working well at the time.

And they were correct…

Yet, it took a long time for our prevaricating President to wake up from his slumber, and thus it was not until the 29th of February — more than a month after the Journal article and about six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed inside these United States — that the Trump administration even thought about starting to put that practical & fairly benign scientific advice into practice.

Only after much public outcry, and helpful intervention by the World Health Organization and many others — the CDC relented and ordered that State Public Laboratories and certain research hospitals were finally to be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests in order to unclog the bottleneck and thus speed up the process.

And from what we now know — we still do not have an adequate supply of tests to this very day of March 28th, at the end of the third month since the first reported case in the US, and yet as of today, we have discovered through limited testing (estimate is that is only one fifth of the actual cases), upwards of 86,012 cases of Wuhan Coronavirus infections that have been confirmed within these Untied States — that are now pushing our nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus epidemic, above even China, where this virus escaped from the Wuhan Virological Institute, in late November of this past year 2019.

Yet the next year, that of 2020 proved the handicap of our ineffective Health Care system — the most expensive system in the world, as we are unable to effectively deal with this Humanitarian Existential crisis in our exceptionally successful nation…

The six weeks that the US delayed any meaningful action, shows a complete lack of leadership, followed by the consequent lack of vigorous preparations, massive derelictions of duty, desertion of leadership and complete absence of any stout defense, against the Wuhan Coronavirus and the deadly Covid-19 illness that it brings upon us all.

Indeed this anemic response from our leaders, will be notched in the annals of History right in there, with prime Minister Chamberlain and his merry band of the appeasing “Men of Munich” who specialized in the appeasement of the vulgar NAZI enemy during the Second World War, instead of opening up their eyes to the reality of the attack against our Democracies, and choosing to FIGHT and if necessary DIE in order to earn their wreath of honor…

Instead they chose to appease the enemy and thus ear their place of infamy and dishonor for ever and ever, same like Donald Trump is now earning, due to this disastrous delay of action and dereliction of duty while in command.

Because this viral epidemic as it unfolds now in the United States — is likely to go down in history as a cautionary tale of the potentially devastating consequences of failed political leadership.

And since as of today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed through the erroneously suppressed bottleneck of the intentionally limited testing across the US, we have to assume a far more grim statistical number of cases that are pushing our American nation of these United States to the top of the world’s coronavirus epidemic.

Sadly folks, we are at this point far above China’s epidemic in real numbers, even though we have only a fifth of the population of China and her territories and dependencies.

Think about that for a moment…

As more and more cases are uncovered each and every day — more than a quarter of Covid-19 cases within the US are to be found in New York City, which is now the official global center of the coronavirus infections and thus the sad center of this global Pandemic.

Indeed as of today upwards of 1,301 people have died within the US and many more are soon to follow because we failed to properly respond to this epidemic for six weeks and that makes all the difference between Life and Death for people that we all know, and for our Health Care System that proved to be unable to cope…

Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the effective testing and treatment “plateau” that has spared South Korea from becoming a basket case of a ruined Health Care system, like the US is threatening to become…

Yours,
Dr Churchill

PS:

Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014, told a Georgetown university panel recently: “The US response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort. What’s happened in Washington DC, has been a fiasco of incredible proportions as far as leadership is concerned…”

Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at US-Aid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”

In Konyndyk’s analysis, the White House had all the information it needed by the end of January to act decisively.

Instead, President Trump repeatedly played down the severity of the threat, blaming China for what he called the “Chinese virus” and insisting falsely that his partial travel bans on China and Europe were all it would take to contain the crisis.

He doubled down on that sentiment by claiming later, that the social isolation and personal distancing will all go away, quickly, so that all Americans will celebrate Easter together in the packed churches after all this is over…

Methinks, we need better leadership than that…