President Trump has won glowing plaudits for changing the tone of his press conferences from completely unhinged to partially hinged, and reducing his rate of massive Orwellian lies to one or two per appearance. But as the president manages to stumble over a bar set at ground level in his televised communications, the government’s actual performance is a different matter altogether. Even catastrophically failed government enterprises usually manage to project an air of competence. And a growing body of reporting suggests the government has done shockingly little to prepare for the coming public-health crisis.
The most efficient first step would have been to prevent the coronavirus pandemic from spreading in the first place. As many reports have widely documented, that first step never took place because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed to deploy an effective coronavirus test. “This is such a rapidly moving infection that losing a few days is bad, and losing a couple of weeks is terrible,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, tells Bloomberg News. “Losing 2 months is close to disastrous, and that’s what we did.”
Third_Party_
Article URL : https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/coronavirus-surge-hospitals-trump-beds-respirators-ventilators-fema-cdc.html