What the US did wrong...

 From the desk of Dr. Gupta
Tuesday 06.23.20

I recently had the chance to talk to Dr. Zeke Emanuel, who was an adviser to President Barack Obama. We talked about what he would say to President Trump if he had the chance. What he said was really interesting, in part because he told me he did advise President Trump toward the end of February.

Here’s a bit of what Dr. Emanuel told me: “I did say to the President that you've got to do what Lyndon Johnson would have done or Franklin Roosevelt would have done -- is you create a tornado of activity. So you've got a task force that deals with testing, a task force that deals with PPE, and a task force that deals with ventilators and contact tracing. And they created a small task force that was supposed to do all of that. That was totally inadequate, and I think it would have made a huge difference.”

What Dr. Emanuel made clear was the feeling this administration came nowhere close to understanding the scope of the challenge.

What that means is we’re now in a place we shouldn’t be. For example, if you look at South Korea, they never went into a lockdown phase. Yet fewer than 300 people died there. Why is that? Because they did exactly what Emanuel talked about: They brought in a biotech company to figure out the best way to test and contract trace, and they took the virus seriously.

In the United States, we’re now faced with the challenge of having to play catch-up, with the hope that we can somehow stem the number of cases and keep the death toll from climbing as best we can.
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I do not believe that it is possible for us to catch up until there is a substantial policy change.  And there likely won't be a policy change unless there is a regime change.

Half the problem is that each state in the US is like a little independent country and runs to it's own policy, which would be fine if they each had border controls, but they don't. If a way could be found that the whole of the US sang from the same songsheet then perhaps they could get on top of it, but frankly, they would need a new president as Trump is very anti anything that will disrupt the economy.