The CDC developed its own test for the virus rather than employing a German-developed one used by the World Health Organization. But rebuilding public trust in these authorities will still take time. Under President Joe Biden’s administration, government science agencies and health officials have been given renewed respect and independence. This muzzling of the CDC and top government health experts made it hard for them to communicate accurate and lifesaving scientific information to the public.
“The Trump administration really tightly controlled what could put out,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science and Security. When a CDC spokesperson acknowledged in late February that disruptions to daily life could be “severe,” the agency was quickly sidelined-and Trump himself became the government’s main conduit for COVID updates through his daily briefings. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initially told the media that the threat to the American public was low. “That was a real big problem, because if you let the pandemic get out of control and don’t take it seriously, it gets worse.” The U.S. “One thing that shouldn’t have been done is people downplaying the infection,” Perlman says. Trump dismissed it as no worse than the flu and said the pandemic would be over by Easter. During the pandemic’s crucial early days and weeks, then president Donald Trump and other authority figures actively minimized the virus’s threat.
Scientific American interviewed scientists and public health experts about the biggest mistakes in the U.S.’s response, some of the key successes and the lingering questions that still need to be answered.ĭownplaying the danger and sidelining experts.
Yet the tireless efforts of health care workers, along with an unprecedented vaccine push, have saved countless others. “We absolutely can’t say that we had the most robust response to the pandemic, up till this point, because we have had a higher death rate per capita than so many other places,” says Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.Īs the country raced to react to this new and terrifying scourge, mistakes were made that together cost hundreds of thousands of lives. fared worse than most other countries, with more than 29 million cases and nearly 530,000 deaths as of this writing.
#Are we going on lockdown again usa full#
“But I don't think we had a full appreciation about how bad it was.”Īmong the biggest shocks was that the U.S. And we knew that it also was lethal in some percentage of people,” says Stanley Perlman, a virologist at the University of Iowa, who is an expert on coronaviruses, a group that includes SARS-CoV-2. “In the beginning, when this started a year ago, we knew that it was spreading. COVID-though mild for many people-struck down elderly and more vulnerable individuals (and occasionally very healthy ones) with a vengeance, launching a wave of fear, suffering and death unlike any in recent memory. The previously unknown virus, now called SARS-CoV-2, could spread through the air, often before (or, in some cases, possibly without ever) causing any symptoms. Most of the world had no experience dealing with an infectious disease outbreak of this scale. The progression was swift: borders clamped shut, authorities issued stay-at-home orders, and public life ground to a near halt. When the World Health Organization first called COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, few people had any idea what the world was in for.
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