BY CHRIS Paul Otaigbe
With over half-a-million infected persons and nearly 19,000 deaths, the United States could is well on track to overtake Italy and Spain as the country with the highest number of deaths from Coronavirus infections, especially after reaching the world’s peak daily death.
The Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker showed a Friday U.S. death toll of 2,108 people. This was the first time any nation suffered such loss in 24 hours. Yet more woes could be ahead.
Though with the US seemingly turning the rampaging fratality curve, the world greatest power is still expected to suffer further woes before the situation improves.
This could push the death toll way higher than the Europeans which currently stand at 143,626 in Italy and 152,446 in Spain.
Had the United States government responded from the outset with the extreme measures slowly adopted, perhaps America would not be in pains, while the world would have been spared the pummeling force of a pandemic that has infected over 1.5 million with deaths climbing rapidly to the 100,000 mark.
The European region is reeling under the weight of more than 799,696 of its citizens as confirmed cases and moaning the loss of over 61,516 people to the pandemic.
Of these, Spain’s share ranges between 152,446 infected and 15,238 deaths, while Italy has over 143,626 cases and 18,281 deaths, Germany has over 113,525 with the lowest death rate at a little over 2,373, France has over 85,351 cases and 12,192 deaths, United Kingdom has 65, 081 confirmed cases with over 7,978 deaths and counting.
Between December and early January, Europeans initially viewed the coronavirus outbreak in Asia with detached fascination. In the last week of January, however, the story became very real as cases were confirmed in various European countries.
France was the first, on Friday 24 January; by the end of the month, Germany, Spain, the UK and Italy got a slice.
UK’s first two cases were confirmed on 31st January. Both were members of a family of Chinese nationals staying in a hotel in York. They were taken to specialist facilities in Newcastle. Afterwards, several confirmed cases were detected across the country.
The UK government implemented preventive measures to curb the spread of infections which included contact tracing, isolation and testing, some of which were related to the Italian clusters. The National Health Service (NHS) set up drive-through screening centers at several hospitals to test members of the public showing symptoms.
This effort was later replaced with screening focused on diagnosing patients in secondary care.
On March 2, Ministers approved the Department of Health and Social Care coronavirus action plan, which sets out actions to date, future measures, cooperation between devolved political and health authorities and the level of preparedness of the country’s four National Health Services.
It outlined the government’s objectives to deploy phased actions to contain, delay, and mitigate any outbreak, using research to inform policy development.
Over three weeks later, on March 25, the UK Parliament legislated to provide the government and authorities with emergency powers to handle the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, such as the power to restrict public gatherings, order businesses to close, and the ability to detain those suspected of having the virus.
The Coronavirus Act 2020 received Royal Assent on 25 March and came into force on the same day.
On April 5, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital after testing positive to coronavirus 10 days earlier. He moved into intensive care the following night, when his symptoms further worsened.
As of April 9, the total of confirmed cases was 65,077; the total of recorded deaths was over 7,978.
Spain had her first confirmed case on January 31, in the Canary Island of La Gomera. A tourist from Germany tested positive and was admitted to University Hospital of the Nuestra Señora de Candelaria.
Close to three weeks later, on February 19, 2,500 soccer fans from Valencia attended a Champions League game in Bergamo, the hot spot of the outbreak in Italy.
February 24, a medical doctor from Lombardy, Italy, vacationing in Tenerife, tested positive at the University Hospital of the Nuestra Señora de Candelaria in Spain. Afterwards, multiple cases were detected in Tenerife involving people who had come in contact with the doctor.
Other cases involving individuals who visited Italy were also discovered on Spanish mainland.
Saturday March 14, the Spanish government imposed a nationwide quarantine, banned all trips that are not necessary and announced that companies may be prevailed upon to guarantee supplies.
However, with universities and schools closed earlier that week, bars and parks were full, and due to slow enactment part of the population of Madrid and other cities had dispersed across the country.
As of March 17, 2020, there had been 11,826 confirmed cases with 1,028 recoveries and 533 deaths in Spain.
On March 28, the Spanish government tightened up its national lockdown, ordering all non essential workers to stay at home for the next two weeks. Nearly 900,000 workers lost their jobs in Spain since it went into lockdown in mid-March 2020.
The first two cases, in Italy, were confirmed in Rome on January 31 by two Chinese tourists, who arrived in Milan on 23rd January via Milan Malpensa Airport.
They had travelled to Rome on a tourist bus, tested positive for and were hospitalized in Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases.
Almost to two weeks later, on February 6, one of the Italians repatriated from Wuhan, China tested positive, bringing the total number of cases in Italy to three.
On 22nd February, the repatriated Italian recovered and was discharged from the hospital.
Between February 22 and 26, the two Chinese tourists hospitalized in Rome tested negative.
Over a week later on 21st February, a cluster of cases was detected starting with 16 confirmed cases in Lombardy, with additional 60 cases on February 22 and Italy’s first deaths reported on the same day.
As of late February, Italy had been hit harder than anywhere else in the EU by the COVID-19 outbreak.
By March 17, 2020, there have been 2,503 deaths and 31,506 confirmed cases.
In the early hours of Sunday, March 8, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte signed a decree enacting forced quarantine for the region of Lombardy, home to more than 10 million people and the financial capital, Milan including multiple other provinces, totaling around 16 million residents.
The lockdown decree included the power to impose fines on anyone caught entering or leaving Lombardy, the worst affected region, until 3rd of April.
In the evening of the next day, on March 9, the lockdown orders were extended to the whole of Italy, effectively quarantining more than 60 million people.
On January 24, the first case in Europe was confirmed in Bordeaux with two more cases were confirmed in Paris by the end of the day and all of them originated from China.
A cluster of infections was discovered in Haute-Savoie which originated from a British national who had visited Singapore.
A week later, from 31st January to 9th February, nearly 550 people were repatriated from Wuhan on a series of evacuation flights arriving at Creil Air Base in Oise and Istres-Le Tubé Air Base in Istres.
On a day that would have been celebrated a Lovers’ day (Valentine day) 14th February, an 80-year-old Chinese tourist died in Bichat–Claude Bernard Hospital, Paris, marking it the first death from COVID-19 in Europe and France.
According to Jean Rottner, regional council President, the starting point for the first intense wave in Alsace was the Fasting Meeting of the Protestant Free Church of La Porte Ouverte in Mulhouse, with more than 2500 visitors, in mid February.
March 12, French President Emmanuel Macron announced on national television that all schools and all universities would close from Monday 16 March until further notice. The next day, the prime minister Édouard Philippe banned gatherings of more than 100 people, not including public transportation.
The following day, the prime minister ordered the closure of all nonessential public places, including restaurants, cafés, cinemas, and discothèques, effective at midnight.
As of 14th March, there had been 4,499 confirmed cases (a near-four-fold increase over the number five days previously), and 91 deaths in France.
As of March 20, the number of confirmed cases had risen to 12,612, while the number of deaths reached 450.
As of March 30, more than six hundred doctors and other medical workers are suing the former Minister of Health and the Prime Minister for “culpable negligence” in failing to prepare for the epidemic.
According to the New York Times edition of April 8, 2020 New research indicated that the plague began to circulate in the New York area by mid February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that it was brought to the region mainly by travelers from Europe, not Asia.
According to the report, research revealed a previously hidden spread of the virus that might have been detected if aggressive testing programs had been put in place.
On Jan. 31, President Trump barred foreign nationals from entering the country who may have been in China during the previous two weeks.
Response to the outbreak of the virus in their various countries by leaders across Europe and the United States have been woefully reactive rather than proactive and the consequence was the soaring number of deaths and confirmed cases of the infected.
Like his major ally, UK, the US government acted far too late into the pandemic scourge.
Across the two continents, the health sector has been overwhelmed with healthcare facilities overstretched beyond limit.
Health care officials risking their Lives in the United States have been complaining about shortage of urgently needed personal protective equipment (PPE) such as face masks and hand gloves.
The scarcity of the PPEs has seen most infected as some have lost their Lives.
The hospitals are desperately in search of ventilators and other life-saving gadgets.
Did it have to get to this? Did the US or the world have to suffer this fatalities and humongous number of infected before world powers would respond appropriately?
America has always had its place in history as the front line leader, leading the world through crisis.
The absence of US leadership is what critics believe had led to the ongoing decimation of Americans and the world at large.
In 2019, when Ebola devastated West Africa, in one of the deadliest pandemic outbreaks that killed thousands, it was the Pentagon that was sent to rescue the region.
The objective was not just to save the West African people from the growing pandemic but to prevent it from spreading beyond the region to the rest of the world and by extension, United States of America.
The Pentagon was reported to have pulled out all but 100 of the 2,800 troops sent to assist the authorities in the affected West African countries, and health officials are hoping to identify and isolate all remaining cases in the region before the rainy season began in June of last year.
Messaging and dissemination of information about Ebola may seem today a bit overstated, but it was what needed to be employed at the time to give the virus the attention it deserved.
To get the required congressional support to battle the virus which had infected closed to 1.5 million people, former President Barak Obama had requested for six billion dollars to fund the war he was waging against the disease.
The worst Ebola outbreak in history, it had killed five times more people than all previous Ebola epidemics combined.
Through massive awareness campaign, aggressive isolation and treatment of the infected and helped by more than 10,000 volunteers from around the world, the US was able to arrest the spread of the Ebola epidemic.
In a report published in the May 16, 2019 edition of the Week Staff, an online publication, titled How we beat the Ebola epidemic
The Pentagon was reported to have forbidden its Troops from working directly with patients as troops sent to Liberia focused on building treatment centers.
But by the time they finished the first U.S.-supported clinic in November, infection rates were already in significant decline.
In total, the 11 clinics they built treated just 28 Ebola patients; nine centers never had a single case.
That was a global endemic disease nipped in the bud before it had a chance to transform into the kind of pandemic the world has on its hands today.
US leadership has never been one to speculate or shy away from its readiness to take responsibility to save the world from a crisis be it military or medical intervention.
To get the attention of the Congress on a disease continents away from America, Obama described Ebola to the Congress, as a “national security priority.”
Like a password, US global interventions had always been and will always be driven by this ultimate objective- the national security of America.
However, with coronavirus, the case seems to have assume a different turn.
One which has seen the United States scattered with individual response and feeble Federal action that is coming late in the day.
Today, Americans and the world would wish America responded to covid-19 the way she ferociously eviscerated Ebola.
Even when she came under attack at Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 twin Plane bomb attack, America responded by taking the war to the enemy.
This was so she would not have to find herself defending her citizens and homeland infrastructure from missiles attempting to land on her soil.
When it comes to threats to the security of the homeland, America is a refuge and a fortress.
This must have informed the decision to keep the spread of the virus at bay through travel restrictions, hoping to bolster the health care sector to hold its ground in the event of a surge.
Now, for the first time in generations, the home front has become the battleground, in this case for the fight against an invisible foe undaunted by borders and oceans and America’s traditional defenses.
Quickly, US has now become the home to one of the world’s worst outbreaks of the virus and has, sadly, discovered that she is not really wired for the all-of-society struggle that is needed to fight the coronavirus.
America has many obvious strengths in this war: a wealthy nation, a hub for technological and scientific innovation, a democratic society with free flowing information, and a leader in handling global health crises.
Relative to other democracies being confronted with the same virus attack, US did far little to flatten her curve.
In the march 25 edition of the Atlantic, titled Why America Is Uniquely Unsuited to Dealing with the Coronavirus, the Writer, Uri Friedman, stated that the virus has struck a highly polarized, fragmented, and individualistic society, in the United States. One not haunted and transformed, according to him, by a previous epidemic the way other societies have been. Uri believes these factors, along with the Trump administration’s failures to take the threat of the virus seriously when it first emerged, placed the United States squarely on the back foot in its battle against COVID-19.
One of the lessons from the various ways, countries have responded to the covid 19 pandemic is that swift, inventive, and aggressive testing and social distancing measures are crucial to success.
According to him, another lesson, however, as captured in Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous remark about the conflict in Iraq, you go to war against this virus ‘with the country you have, not the country you might wish you had.’
The virus has landed in a diverse array of countries with remarkably similar force.
What has made the difference is the countervailing force that each nation has brought to bear.
For Uri, US slow and lackluster interventions in the war against the virus, may not be a function of a lapse in government.
In other words, the US government, as an entity and institution may not be the problem.
The problem of America, in this corona virus era, is Donald Trump, President of the United States of America.
Not a few Americans including Experts believe anyone including Mike Pence, Trump’s Vice President, would have taken up the fight against the pandemic appropriately and as expected.
For instance, The United States and South Korea each confirmed their first coronavirus case within one day of each other in late January.
But South Korea sprinted far ahead of the U.S. in testing its population for COVID-19 and was able to contain the spread.
As infections in the United States soared, South Korea reported its lowest number of new coronavirus cases since a peak on February 29, emerging as the world leader in coronavirus diagnostics.
This she did in a bid to save herself from making the same mistake previous administrations made in their response to the spread of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2015.
The country’s outbreak of MERS, the largest outside the Middle East, engineered a traumatic transmission manacle through the nation’s hospitals killing over 30 people.
It also motivated authorities to refine their systems for testing suspected cases, tracing and isolating infected patients and their contacts.
The government had to introduce new laws granting the government powers to collect anonymized personal data from people who test positive so their movements and contacts could be identified.
The treatment Taiwan applied to defeat the SARS menace was also profound.
Its outbreak was ingrained in the psyche of the Taiwanese so the disease could be managed.
There were particularly distressing scenes such as the quarantining of an entire hospital for weeks in 2003. Seventy-three people died.
In its aftermath, the government created a National Health Command Center which like South Korea, empowered authorities to track people and control the production of vital medical supplies during an epidemic.
Activated on January 20, 2020, even before the first coronavirus case in Taiwan was confirmed, the command center, which can be described as a contraption housing 100 people in a bunker, is the base through which continuous coordination and information dissemination flow from central and local governments.
The Taiwanese had already started boarding Planes and checking Passengers on direct flights from the city for pneumonia symptoms, at the end of December.
This was at a time when the World Health Organization was still looking into a mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan, China.
Taiwan, which also confirmed its first coronavirus case within a day of America’s, currently has more than 200 confirmed cases, compared with more than 480,000 in the U.S.
Eighty one miles away from the coast of Mainland China, Taiwan should naturally have become the country with second largest cases and deaths from the virus because of its closeness to China and the sheer volume of flight traffic between both countries.
When the US should have gotten the hints that the virus was a brutal pandemic mutating to take over the world was when China began confining many millions of people to their homes in January.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration acted far less expeditiously, making US to lose six clear weeks due to the President’s flip flops.
Those weeks would have been used to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize her Intensive Care Units (ICUs), get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that her economy would not decline as drastic as it did.
For most Americans fighting for their Lives and loved ones in the hospitals and Isolation centers, Trump bears direct responsibility for America’s unpreparedness and failed response to the epidemic.
Since Trump came into office, they said he has systematically taken apart America’s protective public health system.
The pandemic unit at the National Security Council was dismantled in 2018 under his watch.
He slashed the CDC’s epidemic control teams in 39 countries, including China.
When the pandemic hit, Trump ignored it, downplayed it, and made repeated false claims.
But for the public health experts who said his threat to open the country for Easter, was going to make the pandemic persist for far longer, Trump would have thrown the little gains made thus far, into reverse.
If Trump’s evident incompetence had deprived America of the leadership the world desperately needed, should Europe also be missing in action?
Long before Trump touted himself as a ‘war President’, Emmanuel Macron of France had told his nation that this was war.
Even Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, who was recently warned by Experts that Britain may lose tens of thousands of her citizens to covid-19, has joined the emerging club of ‘war-time’ heads of State as he recently declared himself head of a ‘war time government.’
They are all correct in the description of their current status and assertion of the present state of play against the ravaging pandemic.
Unfortunately, the monster has made a mess of their health sector and other infrastructural preparations or defense system.
They now look to the US for her usual robust leadership in a war that is threatening to shut down humanity.
While there is a need to acknowledge the point that this is the first time many US residents would be experiencing such a traumatic pandemic that is overwhelming public health emergency, it is, equally, noteworthy to appreciate the fact that the United States has dealt with numerous disease outbreaks abroad in recent years, including SARS, Zika, and Ebola.
What is making the situation unforgivable for the Trump administration is the fact that America had been given several warnings against the monster that has made a landfall on her soil today.
Uri in his earlier piece titled We Were Warned published in the March 18, 2020 edition of the Atlantic, state that when the inevitable inquiry into the government’s response to COVID-19 happens, it will conclude that signs of a coming crisis were everywhere.
The government was warned in 2015, according to Uri and one week before inauguration day, in 2017, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco met with Donald Trump’s incoming national security officials and conducted an exercise modeled on the administration’s experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. It was a warning.
The simulation, Uri stated, explored how the U.S. government should respond to a flu pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systems, all with a vaccine many months from materializing.
Monaco had told him that the nightmare scenario for the government officials at the time and frankly to any public health expert that one would talk to, was that there has always been a new strain of flu or a respiratory illness because of how much easier it is to spread relative to other pandemic diseases that are not airborne.
Trump’s administration was also warned in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 to 100 million people around the world.
The, then director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, Luciana Borio, informed a symposium that the threat of pandemic flu is America’s number one health security concern.
As one serving under a president who has vowed to wall off the United States, she noted that such a threat could not be stopped at the border.
Perhaps embarrassed that one of his staff would dare crack the invincibility of his wall-mongering vision, one of Trump’s Aides, National Security Adviser John Bolton had shuttered the NSC’s unit for preparing and responding to pandemics, of which Borio was a part.
This happened the next day. Since then the White House official in charge of spearheading such a response to infectious threats departed as well and had not been replaced till date.
America’s healthcare infrastructure and that of the world, at large have been overwhelmed today, by the ravaging covid-19 pandemic because US government downplayed the seriousness of the spread and impact of the virus.
A more prepared America would have immediately begun bracing for the imminent arrival of the plague, by strengthening hospitals, helping state and local governments implement the social distancing and other mitigation measures they are now scrambling to put in place.
Unfortunately, as one of the Experts explained to Uri, it would have been much “easier to do those things with more time than we have now,” he explained.
According to him the irony is that this is all occurring in a country, the United States, that for decades “has been a leader in pandemic preparedness” he said.
Although, the US President may be on and off in his assessment of the pandemic, the various State Governors, especially the New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo has shown the leadership and initiatives desperately needed to see the State and perhaps lead America through the crisis.
It is expected that Cuomo consistent and compassionate management of the New York crisis as watched by millions on Live television would generate the platform for the rest of his colleagues in the other States to form a harmonized approach to attack the virus.
Unfortunately, however, a situation where the President has left each State to fend for themselves as they outbid and out price each other for the purchase of ventilators and other healthcare facilities urgently sought after to save Lives in the various States.
What all expected America to have done, however, and as it is the tradition of intervention by the world’s greatest power, was to take the war to the source of the pandemic, Wuhan, China.
This would have once again resonated the words of Winston Churchill, when he said “the great defense against aerial menace is to attack the enemy’s aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.”
But America never gives up, they don’t quit as Obama said to the Congress during one of his State of the Union Speeches.
No matter how late it may come, the US leadership in the battle against the corona virus will soon emerge because it is the necessary torch that will also empower her European allies, with whom, she has traditionally joined forces to defeat a common foe.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, whose expertise has seen the Trump-led administration apply certain measures, especially the social distancing, said the short-term solutions have been slowly flattening the curve.
However, in a situation where not all the States in America are observing the social distancing rule among other lock down directives, the curve may never completely flatten.
Secondly, as long as Trump remains reluctant to fully invoke the Defense Production Act to prevail on the Private sector to mass produce all the healthcare needs of the country’s war against the pandemic, the plateau may never last.
Thirdly, Trump must listen more to Dr. Fauci if the little progress made must be sustained.
Otherwise, the road to this Eldorado may be, but a mirage.
