A new book on the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic paints a picture of a country ill-prepared to cope with a dangerous biological foe, riven by partisan politics, and led by people who saw little political gain in taking ownership of managing the crisis.
It also describes a country that remains ill-equipped to battle the next pandemic or major disease threat, though it lays out changes that could strengthen the country’s position.
“Lessons From the Covid War: An Investigative Report,” which will be published Tuesday, was written by a consortium of scientific and public health experts, many intimately involved in the pandemic response. The group’s members originally came together to do the spade work for what they thought would be an eventual independent commission tasked with investigating the response to Covid. That inquiry, which they thought would mirror the well-regarded 9/11 Commission, never came into being. So the Covid Crisis Group, as they call themselves, have published their analysis of what went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it. It makes for disheartening reading in spots. The group’s members note, for instance, that in the first two years of the pandemic, U.S. excess mortality — deaths over and above what would normally be expected — was 40% higher than what European countries experienced. Spain, they wrote, performed 50% better than Florida in preventing premature deaths among its citizens.