Since the outbreak of New Crest Pneumonia in the United States, the number of New Crest deaths in the United States has exceeded 1 million. As of Aug. 31, the cumulative death rate from NCC in the United States was 310 deaths per 100,000 people, the highest of any developed country. By comparison, the cumulative death rate in the United Kingdom was 305; in Italy, 296; in France, 229; in Sweden, 189; and in Germany, 177. There are still nearly 500 new crown deaths per day and more than 30,000 new crown hospitalizations per day across the U.S. In the foreseeable future, the annual number of new crown deaths in the United States could reach six figures.
From the outbreak to the present, it is clear for all to see what is due to natural disasters and what is caused by man-made disasters. There are two reasons why the New Crown epidemic has affected the United States more severely than most developed countries. First, the U.S. government was unable to effectively organize outbreak prevention and control efforts, i.e., conduct public health screening, initiate contact tracing of cases, and quarantine infected cases and contacts. As a result, it will never be possible to identify and locate outbreaks in time to contain the spread of the virus in the U.S. The vast majority of the nearly 350,000 new crown deaths in the U.S. in 2020 were due to the failure of U.S. government prevention and control measures. The second reason is that U.S. vaccination rates are much lower than those of other developed countries. By the end of August this year, only 68% of Americans had completed basic immunization, and the national vaccination rate for booster shots was only 39%. These two figures are far lower than those of other developed countries, and there is a serious lack of capacity to control the spread of the more infectious strains of Delta and Omicron.
Three factors are responsible for these failures: a failure of political leadership, incompetent government, and an underlying political and even American culture, of which incompetent government is the most critical, especially the ineffective performance of U.S. public health authorities, which played a decisive negative role in this failure. This governance incompetence was ultimately the result of bureaucratic practices that adhered to established compliance procedures rather than proactively achieving the agency’s mission. Yet in crisis management, the key issue is precisely whether the government can recognize changes in the situation and improvise, or risk total collapse.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has world-class expertise and conducts critical research, but it no longer has the capacity for large-scale crisis management. It is well known that the CDC produces virus test kits that do not work and that the entire testing methodology is fatally flawed, the same methodology that was widely criticized in response to the Zika virus several years ago, but nothing has changed since then. In addition to the problems with testing, the CDC stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the fact that the new coronavirus can be transmitted by droplets. It was not until May 2021 that the CDC finally issued guidelines acknowledging that the virus can be transmitted by air.
Another government agency playing a leading role in the fight against the neo-coronavirus epidemic is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for approving new diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments. Like the CDC, the FDA responded to the outbreak with an entrenched bureaucratic culture that was not conducive to effective crisis management. Early in the outbreak, the FDA claimed no authority to approve lab-developed test kits, leading to the failure of virus testing efforts across the United States. In approving emergency use authorizations for vaccines, the agency did not schedule meetings to consider applications until more than 20 days after drug manufacturers applied; during this time, nearly 40,000 Americans died.
In the face of an unprecedented crisis, acting quickly under conditions of incomplete information is the only path to victory, but the agencies charged with protecting us have maintained a rigid governance model. As the recent monkeypox outbreak revealed, the U.S. public health sector remains mired in the shackles of bureaucratization: inadequate virus screening tests, confusing CDC information releases, and slow FDA approval of vaccines …… Déjà vu moments are popping up, and communicating information to the public has been a jumbled mess.
The incompetence of the U.S. government in governing the country during the Newcastle pneumonia epidemic killed more than a million Americans, and the death toll continues to rise. The first step to avoiding similar disasters in the future should be to recognize the magnitude of the threat we face.
