It was reported on July 6 that on June 27, the website of Atlantic published a report entitled "the United States is sliding into the long-term failure of the epidemic", written by ED young. The article points out that in the United States, there is a lack of trust. Therefore, although the United States has a lot of resources, it performed poorly during the epidemic. This problem is becoming more and more serious. The full text is excerpted as follows:
The United States is now firmly in an era of "you can deal with it yourself" COVID-19.
Prevention and control measures have almost disappeared
Almost all government efforts to contain novel coronavirus have dissipated across the country. The mandatory mask order in public transport was cancelled. Conservative MPs obstruct the actions that the public health sector can take in an emergency. COVID-19 funding is still on hold in Congress, endangering testing, treatment and vaccine supplies. The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) described COVID-19 as a problem that requires individual action - but when the number of cases and hospitalizations are underestimated, many testing sites are closed, and overly optimistic CDC guidelines dilute the uncontrolled spread of novel coronavirus, action is difficult.
Many policymakers have changed their attitudes. "We are about to enter the mid-term election, and I think they really want to show that they believe this problem has been solved," said Celine gonder, an infectious disease expert and senior public health editor of Kaiser health news
However, the COVID-19 is far from resolved. Novel coronavirus is still mutating. Even in one of the countries with the lowest mortality rate of the epidemic, novel coronavirus is still killing hundreds of Americans every day, causing more than twice the death toll of car accidents. Millions of patients with covid-19 sequelae, people with low immune function, workers who still face unsafe working conditions, and black, Latino and indigenous Americans are still disproportionately bearing the cost of the epidemic. Kirsten bibbins Domingo, an epidemiologist and doctor at the University of California, San Francisco, who works in low-income, black and Latino communities in the bay area, told me that those people are not concerned with returning to normal, but "how to ensure their own safety".
For any disease, there are moral reasons against ignoring the most vulnerable. For more than a year, the United States has been focusing on the use of vaccines and drugs to avoid serious diseases and deaths, while ignoring other means of preventing infection, such as wearing masks and ventilation. To some extent, this strategy is working: the number of cases and hospitalizations has surged again recently, but the number of hospitalizations in the intensive care unit has increased only slightly, and the number of deaths has remained stable. However, the problem of infection remains important and is affecting the entire American society, including those who have been vaccinated.
Novel coronavirus periodically makes waves of educators and medical workers unable to work; The entire medical system is now always overburdened and unable to provide the previous standards of medical services. People are still disabled by long-term COVID-19 and are usually never hospitalized. Uncontrolled infection is a gift to novel coronavirus, which continues to produce new variants, which may prolong the current level of crisis or push it back to a more serious level of destruction.
The lack of trust is getting worse
In the current political climate, many wise policies (such as the requirement that people must wear masks in grocery stores, public transportation and other important places with high community transmission rate) seem unlikely. So, what else is on the table?
"I feel like I'm screaming in the wind," said martinfaza herachiwayo Davies, the health director of St. Louis But when others could simply say "we're finished", and then turn around and leave, she said, "I have to work hard and find a way." Find a way to deal with it by yourself. It's true.
In the research results of 177 countries, people's trust in the government, especially the trust between each other, predicts the novel coronavirus infection rate and vaccination. In the United States, there is a lack of trust, so although the United States has a lot of resources, it performed poorly during the epidemic. This problem is becoming more and more serious: the poll results in January found that only 44% of respondents trusted the CDC's statement on COVID-19, up from 55% in 2020. This decline spans the political level.
As this epidemic has revealed, even powerful biomedical tools such as vaccines will fail in practice if vulnerable groups cannot obtain them or people who do not trust them refuse to use them.
The mistake that the United States has repeatedly made is to create such technological remediation tools at an extremely fast speed, while ignoring the systems that actually deploy these tools. These systems - the country's social infrastructure - are so flawed that a large number of smaller projects are needed to fix every loophole. Once lost, it is difficult to restore trust on a large scale. But it can be rebuilt slowly.
The "you can deal with it yourself" phase of the epidemic will be as chaotic as the previous phase. Lindsay Willie, a health law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that in the absence of "even slightly similar things with the national coordinated response", local officials can do little.
Davis said that the city of St. Louis has the right to resume the mandatory mask order, but if the surrounding counties are not willing, it will be difficult to exercise this power - if they try, they may face prosecution by the state attorney general. "Being prosecuted like that is exhausting. Our country is full of health officials who have been dealing with lawyers and judges for many years, which has a chilling effect," Willie said