Column: The U.S. isn't merely failing to deal with the coronavirus. We're moving backward

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

One day recently I caught up with Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, a veteran public health expert whom I had last interviewed in April about an article he had published setting forth a program to "crush" the coronavirus in 10 weeks.

I asked him how he thought the U.S. had fared in the intervening three months.

"Those were the days," he sighed. "You could just put today's date on the article and reprint it."

'People walked into the first lockdown with some trust that this would matter and their actions would make a difference. That proved not to be the case.'

David Eisenman, UCLA

That's an indication of not only how little progress we've made against the pandemic, but how much time we have squandered.

Fineberg, who served as president of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) and dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is now president of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, acknowledged that the U.S. had improved on a few fronts — testing is more widely available today, for instance, though shortages remain.

But in the categories where consistent leadership is needed — Fineberg had called for a unified command of the war against the pandemic, contact tracing and isolation of infected people, and inspiring and mobilizing the public in an "all-out effort" — he says "these have never been taken up in the U.S. and we're living with the consequences."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/column-u-isnt-merely-failing-120048213.html