'A perfect storm of failures': 3 ways the US government bungled its coronavirus response in the first crucial weeks
- In the first crucial weeks of addressing the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made three crucial failures, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing interviews with officials and government emails.
- The CDC botched its development of coronavirus test kits, ignored requests for expanded testing, and didn't provide adequate medical supplies to the private sector, the report says.
- "This was kind of a perfect storm of three separate failures," Tom Frieden, director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, said.
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The United States government's response to the coronavirus epidemic in the past few weeks has been plagued by delayed testing kits and a government slow response in asking people to isolate themselves from one another.
The most damaging part of the government response may have been from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which bungled several early attempts to contain the pandemic.
CDC officials made three separate, broad errors to ramp up its pandemic response, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, which cites interviews with health officials and others.
- The CDC failed to develop adequate test kits for the coronavirus, retracting many of them even after they had already been sent to testing labs, according to the Journal.
- Health providers and state authorities implored the CDC, which is the government's top public-health agency, to expand testing capabilities. Those requests were also ignored, according to the Journal.
- Health authorities did not work closely with the private sector to guarantee the supply of medical items like chemical compounds and nasal swabs, the Journal reported.
Together, the failures have severely impeded the containment of the virus. There are 10,755 cases nationwide, including 154 deaths, at the time of writing - and infections are expected to keep surging.
"This was kind of a perfect storm of three separate failures," Tom Frieden, director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told the Wall Street Journal.
This "perfect storm" has hindered the government's containment efforts. According to the CDC, 32,000 people have been tested for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. The COVID Tracking Project, an independent tracker, estimates that 79,000 people have been tested.
Still, that figure lags far behind other countries that are in the throes of the pandemic. South Korea, for example, is testing 20,000 each day.
"If we would have had a true understanding of the extent of disease several weeks ago, implementation of social-distancing measures could have prevented the escalation of the disease," Dr. Neil Fishman, a disease expert and the chief medical officer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, told the Wall Street Journal.
Read the full Wall Street Journal report here.
- Read more:
- 'It is unclear why quality control did not detect this issue': Early CDC tests couldn't distinguish between coronavirus and water
- The first COVID-19 case originated on November 17, according to Chinese officials searching for 'patient zero'
- The US is severely under-testing for coronavirus as death toll and new cases rise
- Taiwan has only 77 coronavirus cases. Its response to the crisis shows that swift action and widespread healthcare can prevent an outbreak.