Which We Squandered – Walter S.Topp

In the upcoming election, you can vote for whoever you want. But as a certified emergency manager and a former county emergency management agency director, I want to share with you my perspective on the US response to COVID-19.

In emergency management we work side by side with the public health community. We plan together, we train together, we exercise together. When I was a county director, our agency and the county public health department managed a joint response to the Ebola event. We were very lucky then, but sadly, we have not been lucky with COVID-19.

The tragic thing about the US response to COVID is that the United States was actually well-prepared. In fact, no nation was better prepared. Even under the current president, the plans, the pharmaceutical and medical equipment stockpiles, the training, and the preparation for an effective response which had been carefully developed under previous administrations of both parties, remained in place. Plus, we had two months actual warning! Two months! If there is a gift from God in this whole sorry spectacle, it was that priceless warning.

Which we squandered.

Because it was inconvenient for the president’s re-election narrative, the federal government took no action. Worse, the president actually took steps to hinder the response of state and local governments. The measures that worked in June to halt the exponential spread of the virus – testing, social distancing, masks, personal hygiene, travel restrictions, self-quarantine, isolation of infected persons, bans on large gatherings – would have worked in February to greatly reduce the spread. They would work today, too, to reduce the level of infections to a point where we could avoid a disastrous cold weather spike and lay the groundwork for a sustained economic recovery. But we didn’t do those things effectively in the spring and we aren’t going to do them now, because it remains inconvenient for the president’s re-election effort.

We hear a lot about Mr. Trump’s travel ban. Here’s the deal on that. The bogus ban was ten days too late and full of holes. It did virtually nothing. By the time it was enacted, community transmission was already occurring in the United States, so the ban was too late to prevent the spread of the virus. By exempting US passport holders and not requiring arriving travelers to quarantine, the ban was rendered almost totally ineffective. 40,000 people flew from China to the US after the so-called ban was enacted. Virtually none of them were actually quarantined. Most weren’t monitored by public health agencies.

And that farcical ban, we are told by the president, saved “millions of lives.”

Under the National Response Framework, the primary responsibility for emergency management resides at the local government level. State governments and the federal government stand ready to assist as needed.

But pandemics have always been recognized as events that would far exceed the capacity of local, or even state governments, to manage. Only the federal government has the resources to organize and conduct an effective nationwide response to a global pandemic. That’s why the federal government maintains the strategic national stockpile. That’s why federal agencies (the CDC, FEMA, the Public Health Service, HHS, and others) plan, train, exercise, and equip their staffs to respond to pandemics. And everybody involved in planning for pandemic response understands the critical requirement to act fast, before cases and deaths begin to rise exponentially. That’s why plans are written in advance; drugs, ventilators, masks and other items are stockpiled; and all those other preparations are made.

But this administration refused to act. It’s going to go away, they said. Nothing to see here. Their latest hoax. And now 210,000 Americans are dead.

Many thousands – if not millions – of Americans in the medical community, public health, first responders, emergency management, and other fields have worked heroically to save lives. And many have lost their own lives in the effort.

But the reality is that an honest and effective response in the beginning, bolstered by a commitment from the administration to prioritize the health and well-being of Americans over the re-election campaign of the president, would have saved many, many thousands of lives.

COVID-19 is a very difficult public health problem. Unknown before the end of last year, highly contagious, no known treatment or vaccine, the virus was going to kill a lot of Americans no matter how quickly or aggressively we acted. But the failure of the administration to act in a timely manner – when everything they needed was already in place – is perhaps the most egregious failure of government in the history of the United States.

It is not Trump Derangement Syndrome or partisan tomfoolery to look at what happened and say the president is responsible. And denying that reality is a disservice to the Americans who have struggled so mightily against this virus, and especially to those who have lost their lives.

October 12, 2020