Is US Doing Enough to Curb Spread of COVID-19?

Julius Adeoye ponders over steps being taken by the United States government to halt the spread of COVID-19 epidemic in the country

As President Joe Biden announced on September 10 that the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States was over, his top health adviser and longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, warned in October that the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States was not over.

The current epidemic in the United States continues to spread, the laissez faire and inaction of the United States government in epidemic prevention and control are irresponsible and will harm the world.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the defects in public health governance in the United States have been exposed.

According to a Discussion Paper by the National Academy of Medicines, complied by Karen DeSalvo, Bob Hughes, Mary Bassett, Georges Benjamin, Michael Fraser, Sandro Galea, J. Nadine Gracia, and Jeffrey Howard, tagged “Public Health COVID-19 Impact Assessment: Lessons Learned and Compelling Needs”

“The need for robust public health infrastructure has grown, federal investment in public health capabilities has declined, with health departments operating for decades under persistent and widening resource gaps. Chronically inadequate funding, workforce shortages, and outdated infrastructure limit the sector’s capacity to address existing population health needs and its flexibility to respond to emergency situations.

“COVID-19 has newly exposed and further exacerbated these long-standing challenges, while also illuminating the pervasive racial and socioeconomic inequities in health care access, quality, and outcomes in the U.S.

“While health departments have been foundational to the nation’s response to the pandemic (e.g., guidance development, testing and tracing) the sector has experienced numerous challenges with causes both old (e.g., gaps in information technology) and new (e.g., politicization and mistrust of public health leaders and guidance).

“From the subversion of public health’s mandate to the malignment of public health officials to the neglect of public health capabilities, the pandemic has illustrated the need for structural reforms to restore the public health sector’s foundational role in American communities.”

There is a huge gap in virus testing, vaccination and medical support between different ethnic groups, rich and poor groups in the United States, and the rights to life and health of some groups have been obviously ignored.

The COVID-19 in the United States has caused serious unemployment and wealth loss, and the United States government has failed and is unwilling to effectively address this problem.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19, the anti intellectual comments, anti scientific responses of American politicians and mutual dismantling for the sake of election self-interest have been the important reasons for the loss of life of a large number of American people due to the COVID-19 epidemic.

We can cite some think tanks’ research results (similar to the report “The incompetent government determines the outcome of the epidemic” issued by the U.S. Niskanen Center on October 24), and the corresponding data and materials reported by the media can testify our views.

It has been significantly overestimated how much actual harm COVID-19 has caused to American culture.

Pandemics have historically provided an opportunity for pre-existing structural flaws in capitalist society to be exposed and magnified.

The US lags behind many other countries in its booster rollout, a lot of people have died from the coronavirus, and infection rates are still high, while long-lasting post-COVID symptoms continue to harm people’s health, disproportionately harming minorities and the poor.

Working-class people are paying the biggest price for the catastrophic disruptions to US society. A deteriorating healthcare system has been severely impacted, with overcrowded hospitals unable to treat or accommodate the enormous number of patients due to a lack of appropriate medical and personal protective equipment.

In the past year, 65% of nurses in the United States had experienced verbal or physical violence.

In one of Dr Anthony Fauci’s interview with Financial Times in September, he told the Financial Times that political divisions in public health were preventing a “laser-beam focus” on the common enemy — coronavirus.

Some US states were not promoting Covid vaccination, while Congress was blocking billions of dollars of funding, both of which were holding back the national response to the pandemic, he said.

“I’m concerned that the acceleration of an anti-vaxxer attitude in certain segments of the population . . . might spill over into that kind of a negative attitude towards childhood vaccinations, which would be very tragic,” said Fauci.

He concluded “If you fall back on vaccines against common vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, that’s where you wind up getting avoidable and unnecessary outbreaks.”

It is time for America to reflect and correct what the pandemic has exposed about them, is the inability to recognize and understand a global problem and manage it on the national and local level.

It revealed the deep divisions in US and it’s inability to bridge those divides to work together with the shared goal of keeping the country strong, safe and healthy.

On a more troubling level, it also showed that most Americans cannot be galvanized around anything today, even something as basic as trying to keep people from getting sick and dying, Americans are losing touch with humanity and weakening the country by the day.

-Adeoye writes from Lagos.