<
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/america-prepared-next-pandemic/620238/>
"A year after the United States bombed its pandemic performance in front of the
world, the Delta variant opened the stage for a face-saving encore. If the U.S.
had learned from its mishandling of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, it would
have been better prepared for the variant that was already ravaging India.
Instead, after a quiet spring, President Joe Biden all but declared victory
against SARS-CoV-2. The CDC ended indoor masking for vaccinated people, pitting
two of the most effective interventions against each other. As cases fell,
Abbott Laboratories, which makes a rapid COVID-19 test, discarded inventory,
canceled contracts, and laid off workers, The New York Times reported. Florida
and Georgia scaled back on reporting COVID-19 data, according to Kaiser Health
News. Models failed to predict Delta’s early arrival. The variant then ripped
through the U.S.’s half-vaccinated populace and once again pushed hospitals and
health-care workers to the brink. Delta’s extreme transmissibility would have
challenged any nation, but the U.S. nonetheless set itself up for failure.
Delta was an audition for the next pandemic, and one that America flubbed. How
can a country hope to stay 10 steps ahead of tomorrow’s viruses when it can’t
stay one step ahead of today’s?
America’s frustrating inability to learn from the recent past shouldn’t be
surprising to anyone familiar with the history of public health. Almost 20
years ago, the historians of medicine Elizabeth Fee and Theodore Brown lamented
that the U.S. had “failed to sustain progress in any coherent manner” in its
capacity to handle infectious diseases. With every new pathogen—cholera in the
1830s, HIV in the 1980s—Americans rediscover the weaknesses in the country’s
health system, briefly attempt to address the problem, and then “let our
interest lapse when the immediate crisis seems to be over,” Fee and Brown
wrote. The result is a Sisyphean cycle of panic and neglect that is now
spinning in its third century. Progress is always undone; promise, always
unfulfilled. Fee died in 2018, two years before SARS-CoV-2 arose. But in
documenting America’s past, she foresaw its pandemic present—and its likely
future."
Via Ed Yong on Twitter, who wrote "This is the same panic-neglect cycle that
dooms us to a perpetual state of pandemic unpreparedness. It's truly amazing to
watch it unfold
in the middle of a pandemic." and Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
