Americas Invisible Killer
The United States has now endured a full year of economic decline from a foreign virus. An organism thousands and thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand has swept through the world’s most powerful country leaving America with 400,000 people dead and in an economic recession the likes of which we have never seen since the Great Depression.
In December of 2019, a new strain of the Coronavirus was discovered in Wuhan, China. SARS-CoV-2 swept through neighboring provinces in China and found its way to different countries. America found its first case of COVID-19 a month later in January of 2020. Now… a year later the coronavirus leaves us with a staggering statistic. Despite the prior warnings given by the WHO and CDC about the severity of the virus the United States still makes up about 4% of the world’s population and since 2020 the US makes up ¼ of the world’s coronavirus cases.
In June of 2009 during The Great Recession the unemployment rate peaked at approximately 9.5%, but in the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in the US the unemployment rate skyrocketed from an ordinary 3.68% to a peak of 14.7% before returning to an elevated 6.7%. A pandemic that was fueled by ineptitude completely crippled the economy, a nation… unprepared, but like anything the US has learned an incredibly difficult and painful lesson about how truly delicate our economy is.
Even once the pandemic had started to spread rapidly through the US, the tested system implemented during the summer was terrible. The late development of a testing kit and the limited amount distributed to the public made it difficult to take a test. Facilities like nursing homes weren’t provided with proper PPE and testing kits.
The US can’t excuse itself for its failure to limit the spread of this pandemic. In fact we have experienced similar events before but with proper precautions we can easily limit or even stop the spread of a disease. In 2018 the Trump Administration disbanded a pandemic response that was established by the Obama Administration in response to the Ebola outbreak in west Africa. In 2018 articles written by the Atlantic were published bringing light to possible warnings that a future pandemic could be upon us, they asked whether or not America would be ready.
There are multiple ways a country as big as the United States of America can limit a spread of a virus. One way could be by banning travel which seems intuitive but in practice is ineffective because people can lie about symptoms or take a 3rd part route through a foreign country. Another way to stop a pandemic is by not allowing the pandemic to start anyway or by being able to limit the spread to which it is unable to infect a larger population. Due to the fact that 1 in every 20 bats can and or could be infected with a virus it seems as if the first option is impossible but that leaves us with the second option.
To take action to stop the spread of a new disease, as a leader you can gain knowledge about the disease with the information you have, with the knowledge you have, you would be more prepared to face the disease once it reached your soil. In our case scientists made the discovery that the virus could have arrived much earlier than January and could have stayed dormant until it was ready to awaken and unleash its deadly capabilities. But if we were prepared as a country we could have identified the possible threat of coronavirus and once it was discovered here we could have isolated the place of origin, city, or even state. This method has been tested before on other more deadly and contagious diseases like Ebola, SARS and H1N1.
Sick patients should have entered hospitals with a pandemic plan, an excess amount of PPE, and state of the are medical technology, but alas it entered hospitals on the brink of collapse because there were no more ICU beds available instead using parking garages and waiting rooms to treat badly ill patients. In 2014 during the Ebola outbreak, due to quick response, hospitals created specific treatment units. Unfortunately these rooms would not work for a highly contagious disease like coronavirus. But with proper preparation, hospitals could have used similar techniques with coronavirus like they did with diseases like Ebola.
A key part to stopping the spread of a pandemic is to rally people together, tell the truth and speak consistently and clearly to the people you represent. During this pandemic, President Trump has contradicted himself, as well as public health experts. He spread lies telling the public, “nobody ever thought a thing like this could happen”.
This pandemic is an assault on the American public but it has also taught us how truly delicate the country is and how seriously we need to take these life changing events. A pandemic like this shows what is truly at stake and what can be done to stop events like this from ever happening again. In the future, instead of profiting from sickness we should strive to prevent it. We should strive to build a better health-care system instead of investing into ineffective border walls. Recovering from an event like this is possible, but not without radical introspection.
