The health system, considered one of the strongest in the world, failed the very first test in the fight against coronavirus, predetermining the catastrophic scale of the epidemic in the United States.
About this writes the publication The New York Times.
For the United States, everything was decided at the beginning of February, when thousands of Americans returned from China. Considering that they could be carriers of the deadly virus, local and state officials persistently tried to do everything to send citizens for compulsory observation.
The media emphasized that this was “one of the earliest tests of whether the public health system in the United States could contain infection.” Then the answer was received. All efforts went down the drain. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collected information about arriving at airports, but the data was incomplete, and the phone numbers and addresses were incorrect. For several weeks, officials tried in vain to find arrivals according to the Centers.
“It was crazy,” Sharon Balter, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health, comments.
For many skeptics, this failure was a “revelation,” the article says. Confidence in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – a system that has long been considered the world’s leading healthcare agency – collapsed.
Only in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic did obsolete technologies and an inoperative public health reporting system emerge. This caused the Centers to not even be able to keep statistics on the spread of infection. The leadership of the department was slow and barely noticeable in the era of the coronavirus. At the same time, the publication emphasized that it was the Centers that should have been at the forefront of the fight against a deadly disease. Instead, the federal agency “made mistakes that undermined America’s reaction,” NYT said.
The United States has become the world leader in the spread of coronavirus infection COVID-19. Today, almost 1.9 million infected and 108 thousand deaths have been recorded there.