COVID-19 catastrophe imminent in the United States?
“Right now, things are looking really good,” said US President Donald Trump at Sunday’s White House coronavirus briefing.
“We’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Some may say he’s optimistic. Others, might call him delusional.
The United States is now the undisputed epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic. It has recorded 336,830 confirmed cases – more than Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom combined. Its death toll has now passed 10,000.
And experts say, the worst is yet to come.
“This is going to be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly,” said Jerome Adams, Trump administration’s Surgeon General.
“Buckle down,” said the country’s top expert on infectious diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci. “Because it’s going to be a bad week.”
Mr Trump’s overly positive view of the entire situation contradicted what he said less than 24 hours prior, when he admitted there would be “a lot of death”.
America, to put it simply, is in a great amount of trouble.
For months, it failed to prepare for the outbreak, and now its already flawed health system is nowhere near ready to deal with the coming onslaught.
The Washington Post published a detailed report on the Trump administration’s response to the virus, based on interviews with dozens of sources.
According to the report, the government received its first formal notification of the outbreak in China on January 3 – and for 70 “squandered” days after that, did little to prepare.
However, China is to blame, as the country repeatedly covered up the threat of the virus until January 20, when it finally admitted human-to-human transmission was happening and made a move to lockdown Wuhan.
But not even China can be blamed for the way the US government handled the crisis in the early days.
On January 22, the day after the first coronavirus case in the US was discovered, CNBC asked the president whether he was concerned about a pandemic.
“No, not at all,” he said.
“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
That was one of the first comments made which downplayed the severity of the virus.
As the pandemic reached a critical tipping point, shortages restricted America to respond properly.
There weren’t enough ventilators and protective equipment. This is largely due to the Trump administration’s slow response.
A review of federal purchasing contracts by AP shows federal agencies waited until mid-March – not January or February, but March – to start placing bulk orders of N95 masks, ventilators and other equipment needed by frontline health workers.
“We basically wasted two months,” said Kathleen Sebelius, health and human services secretary during the Obama administration.
The lack of federal stockpile has left states competing with each other to secure the limited amount of equipment on the market.
“You now literally will have a company call you up and say, ‘Well, California just outbid you,’” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last week.
“It’s like being on eBay with 50 other states, bidding on a ventilator.”
Trump recently admitted that a death toll of 100,000-240,000 would represent his administration doing a “very good job”. The next week will tell us how achievable that target is.