Why the U.S. Needs a Formal Reckoning on the COVID Pandemic
In better times, the U.S. has, with some humility, owned up to its failures. Commissions have investigated tragedies such as Pearl Harbor and 9 /11. Presidential blue-ribbon panels bulwarked the Social Security program in 1983 and overhauled NASA's space shuttle program after the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Three years into the COVID pandemic, more than 1.1 million people are dead, and millions more are living with long COVID. How did the nation judged most prepared for an epidemic or pandemic in 2019 suffer a death rate so much worse than peers such as Canada, Germany or Japan? These are historic failures, and with the Biden administration and Congress coming to a rare agreement that the national health emergency should now end, we need an honest examination of this tragedy and what led to it.
How can we prevent another pandemic if we will not ask what happened? We need answers for the millions and counting who have been devastated by this disease.
It's unlikely that you can prevent another pandemic. But many other countries have handled the pandemic better than the USA. Most had the same amount of warnings and info from China.
You can try to blame China, but the US is doing it wrong if it's betting and relying on other countries (especially rival countries) to protect the USA from future pandemics.
If Covid-19 had started in Italy, France, Brazil or Mexico instead of China, would the results in the USA really have been better? It sure doesn't look like many countries would have been significantly faster and better at detecting Covid-19 and preventing its spread.
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