So what went wrong, Mike? Why did the Duck do such a horrible job? Put another way, could the Duck have done a worse job? Wouldn't any other American Prez, have done a better job?

Where there is no vision, the people perish Prov 29:18

(T)he Trump administration largely delegated responsibility for controlling the virus and reopening the economy to 50 governors, fracturing the nation’s response. Interviews with more than 100 health, political and community leaders around the country and a review of emails and other state government records offer a fuller picture of all that went wrong:

■ The severity of the current outbreak can be traced to the rush to reopen last spring. Many governors moved quickly, sometimes acting over the objections of their advisers. The reopenings nationally led to a surge of new infections that grew over time: Never again would the country’s average drop below 20,000 new cases a day.

■ Science was sidelined at every level of government. More than 100 state and local health officials have been fired or have resigned since the beginning of the pandemic. In Florida, leading scientists offered their expertise to the governor’s office but were marginalized, while Gov. Ron DeSantis turned to Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a Trump adviser, and others whose views were embraced in conservative circles but rejected by scores of scientists.

■ The president publicly downplayed the need for masks. Records show that at least 26 states ignored recommendations from the White House on masks and other health issues. In South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem, boasted to political allies about not requiring masks even as her state was in the midst of an outbreak that became one of the worst in the nation.

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado said states had faced difficult choices in balancing the virus — often hearing competing voices on how to do it best — and said Mr. Trump had left them without the political support they needed as they urged the public to accept masks and social distancing. “The single biggest thing that would have made a difference was the clarity of message from the person at the top,” Mr. Polis said in an interview.

Without a national strategy from the White House, it is unlikely that any state could have fully stopped the pandemic’s spread.

But ​the majority of deaths in the United States have come since the strategies needed to contain it were clear to state leaders, who had a range of options, from mask orders to targeted shutdowns and increased testing. Disparities have emerged between states that took restrictions seriously and those that did not.

America now makes up 4 percent of the world’s population but accounts for about 20 percent of global deaths. While Australia, Japan and South Korea showed it was possible to keep deaths low, the United States — armed with wealth, scientific prowess and global power — became the world leader: it now has one of the highest concentrations of deaths, with nearly twice as many reported fatalities as any other country.

There had been many early missteps. The United States failed to create a vast testing and contact tracing network in January and February, which could have identified the earliest cases and perhaps held back the crisis.

By mid-April, most states had resorted to historic stay-at-home orders to avoid the horror seen in the Northeast. At the time, about 30,000 people had died, and the worst of the outbreak was still concentrated in the Northeast.

It was during this period that experts say the country had an opportunity to get a handle on the crisis — had it invested in testing and contact tracing and endured a prolonged, if painful, shutdown until cases had been identified and controlled. At the time, the United States was doing only about one-third of the testing researchers thought was necessary.

But the White House balked at enforcing its own guidelines, and Mr. Trump was openly encouraging states to open up. He turned over control to governors on April 16. “You’re going to call your own shots,” he told them.

Looking back, public health experts trace the bulk of the nation’s cases, now reflected in a record death toll, back to this turning point in late April.

“That was the critical time,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious-disease expert at Columbia University. “That was the opportune moment that was lost.”

In their hurry to get back to business, many governors moved swiftly to reopen and balked at ordering new closures, sometimes ignoring the pleas of local health boards and mayors, according to interviews with health officials and a review of thousands of records obtained under public records law by The New York Times and other groups, such as Accountable.US and the Documenting Covid-19 public record project.

In Colorado, a local health official warned that his state’s reopening plan risked upending the gains made during painful shutdowns. In South Carolina, health officials failed to persuade the governor to delay opening indoor dining and the state epidemiologist, Dr. Linda Bell, suggested in emails, first reported by The State newspaper, that health officials needed to step forward and provide different messages to the public.

Perhaps nowhere were the consequences of reopening more clear than in Texas.

With 29 million residents and a conservative identity built upon being friendly for business, Texas was among the states that were later in enacting stay-at-home orders. Within two weeks, protesters were clamoring outside the governor’s mansion, waving flags emblazed with the motto “Don’t Tread on Me” and demanding to be able to go back to work.

Gov. Greg Abbott was quickly pivoting toward reopening. One day after Mr. Trump’s call handing authority to governors, Mr. Abbott announced a “strike force to open Texas.” More than half of its members had donated to Mr. Abbott’s campaigns, including the real estate developer Ross Perot Jr. and Drayton McLane Jr., a former owner of the Houston Astros.

In a series of phone calls and meetings over the course of several weeks, the strike force hashed out ideas. The Texas Restaurant Association submitted a plan to reopen restaurants. Each step of the way, the ideas were funneled through a panel of four medical experts, who were empowered to veto ideas.

But the task before them was clear: how to get Texas’s $1.8 trillion economy up and running again.

By late April, Mr. Abbott was considering opening up the economy in phases.

“My advice was to go a bit slower,” said one member of the governor’s team, Dr. Mark McClellan, a former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He worried that the state was not allowing time between phases to measure any upticks in infection before progressing through further reopenings, and he feared a surge in new infections.

But on May 1, Texas opened back up, starting with restaurants, stores and movie theaters. By Memorial Day, Texas was effectively up and running.

A spokesman for Mr. Abbott pointed to states like California and New York, which kept restrictions in place for longer but have recently seen resurgences of the virus, as evidence that “lockdowns for months after months” do not work. He said Mr. Abbott had balanced “saving lives, while preserving livelihoods.”

From late May to late July, new infections in Texas soared tenfold, from around 1,000 new cases a day to as many as 10,000.

“It was like a wildfire in brush,” said Dr. Jose Vazquez, who served as the health authority in Starr County, Texas, and who contracted the virus himself as the state’s Southern border region was hard hit over the summer.

By late June, Mr. Abbott called another meeting of his medical advisers. Reversing course, he shut down bars. Days later, he issued a mask order, which was credited with saving lives in the months to come.

Deaths continued to soar into August, and for weeks this summer, Dr. Vazquez watched as helicopters swooped into Starr County to pick up patients, taking them to hospitals as far away as Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Few returned alive.

By fall, Mr. Trump’s own coronavirus diagnosis was dominating headlines, and he was still insisting that the country was “rounding the corner” in the pandemic and that the virus would soon “disappear.”

But inside the White House, health officials knew more was needed to control the crisis.

In a series of unpublicized weekly memos tailored to each state, the White House’s coronavirus task force had been privately pressuring states to do more. The reports recommended that states like Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming embrace face masks. States like Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi were advised to put more stringent limits on indoor dining.

But those states and others — at least 26 in all — ignored the urgings of the White House, even when new cases were ticking upward.

For Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, the laissez-faire approach was a point of pride. More than perhaps any other state, South Dakota had kept its doors open, hosting Mr. Trump for an event at Mount Rushmore and committing $5 million in federal coronavirus relief funds to enticing tourists.

In the fall, Ms. Noem traveled the country with the help of a former Trump campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, eager to showcase that her brand of liberty governance was the right one.

In New Hampshire, she told a group of Republicans that one of her strategies was that she “never talked about the number of cases of Covid-19 that we have.”

In Maine, Ms. Noem criticized the state’s restrictions while claiming that her state’s death rate was among the lowest. “Leadership has consequences, and you are all living under some very poor leadership out of your governor’s office,” Ms. Noem told the crowd.

In fact, new cases and deaths have been climbing in South Dakota. A rally that drew hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists to Sturgis, S.D., over the summer is believed to have contributed, in addition to colder weather that pushed many indoors. Ms. Noem also continued to resist a mask order despite urging from the White House.

South Dakota ended the year with one of the highest death rates in the nation — four times Maine’s — though it also mounted one of the nation’s most successful vaccination efforts.

In recent days, the virus has been accelerating in nearly every state, and deaths were climbing from Arizona to Connecticut. Even New York, which became a national model for virus restrictions and testing after its spring crisis, is seeing a resurgence.

Winter was always the season in which the virus posed the biggest threat, but in many states, residents have also fallen victim to pandemic fatigue, rendering existing controls less effective.

That has been the case in California, which is now experiencing one of the worst outbreaks in the nation.

The arrival of vaccines could slow the spread, but the lack of a unified national strategy has resurfaced again as a fundamental flaw. The federal government has pushed the responsibility for administering vaccines to state and local governments, who are strapped for funding and still dealing with daunting virus caseloads. Some states have struggled to deliver the vaccine swiftly, and rules vary widely from state to state.

Mr. Biden, who takes office this week, said he would call on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to establish 100 federally supported vaccination centers around the country and would also push for thousands of community and mobile vaccination sites.

But tight supplies will limit how quickly any such plans can be rolled out, and already there are political divisions over whether to trust the vaccine and what social groups should get it first.

Dr. Marissa J. Levine, the director of the Center for Leadership in Public Health Practice at the University of South Florida, said that a failure of leadership — first from the White House, and later from the states — had polarized the entire response to the pandemic and given the virus an extended life. “The toll points to a colossal failure at every level of government,” she said.

The top five worst days for new deaths in the United States have come in January. As the calendar page turned for a new year, the virus was worse than it had ever been.

Courtesy NYT


[Post edited by Lazarus at 01/18/2021 06:19AM]