COVID-19 Was Preventable In The United States

Retrospective: because hindsight is 20/20.

Ambient Reads presents 20/20 Retrospective: a series which will look at numerous times in history when society doubled-down in ignorance even when faced with the truth.

The year was 2020 — a year many of us are still trying to delete from our memory.

It started off with the first confirmed case in January after a patient from Washington returned from Wuhan, China. A month later, dozen of cases began cropping up.

As the virus continued spreading, it was understandably downplayed at first. Trump, other politicians and even doctors urged American’s not to panic. After all, the US was faced similar scares e.g. Ebola, Avian Influenza (H7N9), H1N1, etc.

But Sars-Cov-2 had proved to be much more potent than previous viruses.

Birthday bashes, lavish weddings, gender reveals, travel arrangements, and sporting events were cancelled — just when Vince McMahon was so close to getting the green light for WrestleMania to proceed in Tampa, Florida.

COVID-19 stripped away a lot from the world. But for all the things we lost — COVID-19 has delivered a grim death toll: over 440,000 Americans have died. Its ripped away our family, friends, lovers, and colleagues and it’s worsened our mental health.

Millions are jobless (with many businesses and jobs never returning) and thousands are fighting off eviction. Gig workers and contractual employees and others who are unemployed feel help will arrive too little, too late.

Biden’s campaign was largely based on nailing the point home of getting a competent President back in office who would work to put an end to this pandemic. He’s promised to put American’s a path to containing the virus and providing vaccines for the US. It was important he chose that fight since some experts believe the virus won’t ever go away.

But what went wrong with our approach to in the first place?

We knew what to do when to prepare for the COVID pandemic but ignored it

This point needs to be hammered home, because main stream publications don’t say it at all: we knew a pandemic was on the horizon.

It wasn’t a matter of it, but when as we’ve had pandemics before and experts warned us for years.

It didn’t matter if it was SARS-CoV-2 or another disease — former President Donald Trump and his administration pretended it “came out of nowhere.” And history will remember COVID-19 as his greatest failure. People called other pandemics sensationalism, but it’s better to be cautious and over-prepared than needlessly lose hundreds of thousands of American lives.

Underestimating the opponent

The first rule of war was broken at the onset of COVID-19. Donald Trump, other politicians, and even New York’s then-health commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot tried to reassure commuters in February saying, “this [COVID-19] is not something that you’re going to contract in the subway or on the bus.”

The system that is capitalism had displayed a lot of ignorance and hubris by brushing off past public health scares. The system was so sure of itself but those words would come back to haunt people like Oxiris and CEO of American Airlines who said, “I don’t think we’re ever going to lose money again,” and, “We have an industry that’s going to be profitable in good and bad times.” To be fair to Doug Parker, he couldn’t have possibly known a pandemic would grip the U.S., but it’s the arrogance of capitalism. Revenue dropped 73% in the three months ended Sept. 30 2020 to $3.17 billion from $11.9 billion a year earlier.

No nationwide lockdown put a lot of faith in too many people

Top U.S. virologist Dr. Anthony Fauci didn’t outright dismiss the idea of a nationwide lockdown, but he made it clear it wasn’t the most favorable path.

Last year, in November in an interview with Sinclair’s Jan Jeffcoat, Fauci said, “[I] would like to not see us have to resort to a lockdown.” He continued,

“You can get a lot done without necessarily locking down if you adhere to the fundamental principles that many of us, myself included, have been talking about for quite a while now,”

Fauci also reiterated the same mantra as he had always done: always maintain physical distances of 6ft or more, avoid congregate settings, avoid crowds, do things outside instead of indoors, and regularly wash your hands. Sound enough.

And there were other good reasons for being opposed to a lockdown such as its adverse effects on vulnerable groups such as refugees and others in poor socio-economic positions. There were also questions of how the government could not only implement a lockdown across all states but also how it would support businesses and people through a lockdown. And there was a lot uncertainty about its effectiveness and legality.

But the point is as a nation — we did nothing at first. Regardless of restrictions or lockdowns; we weren’t prepared at all in a coordinated and precise effort to limit the spread. Flattening the curve was all the rage but that certainly wasn’t in the cards due to…

“Give me liberty or give me death (by Covid)!”

Anti-lockdown protests came ahead in mid-April of 2020.

“Pandemic fatigue” set in. People were tired of wearing masks, social distancing, and having limited traveling options. And there was speculation that it would get worse by the end of the year especially in wintry conditions which drives people. closer.

The U.S. wasn’t interested in replicating New Zealand’s lockdown measures which was successful (in spite of a community case and a possible new variant). And that’s understandable: there’s a lot of limitations that just couldn’t work for the U.S. especially since we’re not an island of 5 million people.

But a majority of U.S. citizens hate ANY measures remotely related to any other country’s especially if it infringes on their rights. Fauci could talk about mask wearing all day and you couldn’t convince people to do it and do it properly at that.

People demanded a right to party; they refused to wear masks, social distance, and stay at home. And Florida completely disregarded COVID-19 itself. U.S. citizens weren’t going to follow any health measures — no matter how many times Dr. Fauci made the same [health] recommendations. 420,000 deaths later and no plans to rollout vaccines (which we might have a shortage of). We might have to worry about anti-vaxxers. Sites such as YouTube is a breeding ground for conspiracies since people in that bubble tend to get more conspiracy recommendations.

We could be seeing 1,000,000 deaths by summer.