Time and again throughout the coronavirus pandemic, public health authorities and state and local elected officials blew off doubts and objections about how they are handling the crisis while the numbers of U.S. deaths and cases keep rising.
Here are 5 U.S. covid-19 pandemic villains and what they got fatally wrong.
Once President Trump’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci is touted as the truth sayer for the coronavirus pandemic, but there was a time when he told the public not to be too worried about covid-19.
During a January 2020 episode of The CATS Roundtable radio show, Fauci said, “The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It’s a very, very low risk to the U.S. It isn’t something that the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about.”
Fauci downplayed the COVID-19 impact on other occasions.
When 380 Americans aboard a cruise ship in Japan were quarantined in February because of a virus outbreak, Fauci said, “There is no circulating sustained transmission of coronavirus in the U.S. We have 15 cases that have been identified, isolated, and their contacts have been traced.”
Fauci insisted that the public should be more worried about the flu.
Did Fauci aid in the government’s delayed response to the pandemic? Some experts say yes.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo admitted that the state made “a lot of mistakes” in its battle against coronavirus. For months, New York was the U.S. epicenter of the virus while the rest of the country watched, horrified, as the pandemic raged through the metro area.
The first New York coronavirus case was confirmed on March 1 but the shutdown was delayed until nearly three weeks later on March 20.
Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio told New Yorkers things were under control. On March 2, de Blasio tweeted that people should go see a movie, Wall Street Journal reported.
“The numbers just exploded on us,” Cuomo said, according to the New York Post.
Healthcare professionals identified some of the mistakes:
New York has reported 472,943 coronavirus cases since March 1 — the fourth highest in the U.S — but by far the highest death rate of 33,100.
On March 7, the director of the leading U.S. public health institute, the Centers For Disease Control & Prevention, helped Florida’s tourism industry prolong its money-making objectives despite growing concern over the threat posed by coronavirus to the state’s economy.
At the time, there were eight coronavirus cases in Florida. By contrast, China — then the epicenter for the epidemic — had reported 80,651 coronavirus cases and 3,070 deaths, according to a World Health Organization timeline.
“I would not encourage anyone to change their plans at this point based on what the epidemiology is here in Florida,” Dr. Robert Redfield said during a visit to Fort Lauderdale. “They should enjoy Disneyland, they should enjoy the rest of Florida.”
To make him appear legit, Redfield was surrounded by Vice President Mike Pence, the acting secretary for Homeland Security; U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Six months later, Florida has the third-highest number of cases in the U.S. by state, reporting 650,092 coronavirus cases and 11,919 deaths.
With 6,500,962 reported coronavirus cases and 193,805 deaths, the U.S. accounts for almost a quarter of the world’s total pandemic numbers.
An estimated 17.8 million people in the U.S. are out of work due to the virus. Thirty-three metro areas have a jobless rate greater than 15 percent.
The level of economic and public health pain that U.S. Americans are now experiencing was not inevitable, but rather the consequence of a series of policy failures that started well before the coronavirus outbreak, according to the Center For American Progress. “The Trump administration’s past actions weakened the United States’ ability to respond to the pandemic, and its current actions continue to exacerbate the dual public health and economic crises,” Associate Director Ryan Zamarripa wrote. “Although Congress was able to pass a series of stimulus measures that have blunted the economic pain for families, this relief happened in spite of the Trump administration, not because of it.”
Throughout his term, Trump has worked to get rid of the social safety net, proposing budgets that gutted housing assistance, food stamps and health insurance for the poorest Americans, Newsbreak reported. When Congress rejected those cuts, the Trump administration made it harder to access federal benefits by enacting rules such as requiring recipients to work.
Here are five ways Trump’s failures worsened the pandemic in the U.S.
Along with other administration officials, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams advised against wearing masks in the early days of the pandemic as hospitals faced shortages of personal protective equipment.
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“Masks do not work for the general public and preventing them from getting coronavirus,” Adams said. By mid-July, Adams had done an about-face, urging people to wear masks when out in public.
“We’re trying to correct that messaging,” Adams said on “Face the Nation”. “But it’s very hard to do.”
By July 12, Adams predicted the U.S. could end the outbreak within weeks if the public wore masks.
On July 12, the U.S. had reported 3.2 million diagnosed cases and at least 135,155 deaths.
“We can turn this thing around in two to three weeks if we can get a critical mass of people wearing face coverings, practicing at least six feet of social distancing, doing the things that we know are effective,” Adams said, adding that the American people “have the power to slow the spread.”
Less than two months later, as of this writing, the U.S. has reported 6,514,603 cases and 194,064 deaths.
