A short but accurate piece on America’s bungled covid19 response.
“”” America's bungled political and social response to the coronavirus exists side-by-side with a record-breaking push to create a vaccine with U.S. companies and scientists at the center.
Why it matters: America's two-sided response serves as an X-ray of the country itself — still capable of world-beating feats at the high end, but increasingly struggling with what should be the simple business of governing itself.
What's happening:
An index published last week by FP Analytics, an independent research division of Foreign Policy, ranked the U.S. 31st out of 36 countries in its assessment of government responses to COVID-19.
That puts it below developed countries like New Zealand and Denmark, and also lower than nations with fewer resources like Ghana, Kenya and South Africa.
The index cited America's limited emergency health care spending, insufficient testing and hospital beds and limited debt relief.
By the numbers: As my Axios colleague Jonathan Swan
pointed out in an interview with President Trump, the U.S. has one of the worst per-capita death rates from COVID-19, at
50.29 per 100,000 population.Yes, but: Work on a COVID-19 vaccine is progressing astonishingly fast, with the Cambridge-based biotech company Moderna and the National Institutes of Health
announcing at the end of July that they had begun Phase 3 of the clinical trial.
Their efforts are part of a
global rush to a vaccine, and while companies in the U.K. and China are jockeying for the lead, U.S. companies and the NIH's resources and expertise have been key to the effort.
Anthony Fauci
has said he expects "tens of millions" of doses to be available by early 2021, a little over a year after the novel coronavirus was discovered.
If that turns out to be the case, "the Covid-19 vaccine could take a place alongside the Apollo missions as one of history’s greatest scientific achievements," epidemiologist Michael Kinch
recently wrote in STAT.So which is the real American response to COVID-19? The
bungled testing policies, the
politically driven rush to reopen, the
tragic racial divide seen in the sick and the dead? Or the
warp-speed work to develop a vaccine in a year when most past efforts took decades?
Be smart: It's both.
The U.S. is a country that has far and away the top elite universities in the world — yet ranks in the middle of the pack internationally when it comes to educating its high school students.
The best U.S. hospitals are the best in the world — yet U.S. life expectancy has plateaued and falls years below comparable countries like the U.K, Canada and Japan.
Peruse a list of the richest people in the world, and you'll find it mostly populated by Americans — yet more than 43 million Americans live in poverty, a number sure to grow as the pandemic rages on.
The bottom line: It can often feel as if there are two Americas, and not even a virus that has spread around the world seems capable of bridging that gap.
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