From CEPR
It's fair to say that the U.S. performance in dealing with the pandemic has been disastrous. With the effort led by Donald Trump, this is not surprising. His main, if not only, concern was keeping up appearances. Preventing the spread of the pandemic, and needless death, was obviously not part of his agenda.
Unfortunately, many other wealthy countries, like France, Belgium, and Sweden, have not done much better. They don't have the excuse of having a saboteur in charge who was actively trying to prevent the relevant government agencies from doing their jobs.
Anyhow, I thought it would be worth throwing out a few points about how we should have approached the pandemic. While some of this is 20-20 hindsight, I was making most of these points many months ago. I should add, I claim zero expertise in public health, but I do have some common sense, in spite of my training in economics. Of course, if anyone with expertise in public health wants to correct or expand on any points here, I welcome the opportunity to be educated.
I will break down the discussion into three key areas:
- Measures to reduce spread;
- Efforts to develop effective testing, vaccines, and treatments;
- The distribution of vaccines
The United States has failed horribly in all three areas, but many other countries have not done much better.
Containing the Spread
When I look back at what I have been wrong about since the pandemic started, my biggest mistake was in thinking that we could get the pandemic under control after a two- or three-month shutdown. (I also expected that we would make more progress in treatment. Unfortunately, the ratio of deaths to infections has not changed much since the summer.)
The idea that the shutdowns, followed by effective containment measures, could control the spread should not seem far-fetched. Several European countries did get their infection rates down to very manageable levels after their shutdowns. For example, Denmark, a country with a population of a bit less than 6 million people, had their daily infections below 20 in the summer. At this level, it is possible to do effective contact tracing and arranging for those who have been exposed to be quarantined and/or tested. Several countries in East Asia, such as Japan and South Korea, did even better.
Unfortunately, Denmark, like other European countries, allowed its people to travel freely over the summer. This resulted in many people becoming infected, and then spreading the virus when they returned.
Anyhow, the idea that we would have shutdowns (which can be much better targeted with what we now know) and then have containment measures and testing in place to prevent large-scale spread is clearly a possibility. We completely failed in this effort in the United States, both because we did not implement containment policies and also because we had grossly inadequate testing.
As far as containment, this would require the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and other agencies giving clear guidance and ideally being able to enforce their rules. This mostly did not happen because the Trump administration did not want it to happen. The most important example here was when the CDC tried to produce rules for safe school re-openings, which Trump administration officials then rewrote because they complained that they required too much work.
In a similar vein, OSHA produced guidance for safe practices in meatpacking plants only after widespread reports of infections and deaths in a number of facilities. Incredibly, it was only last week that OSHA issued general guidance for workplace safety in dealing with the pandemic.
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