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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEd Yong: The Pandemic's Legacy Is Already Clear
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/covid-pandemic-exposes-americas-failing-systems-future-epidemics/671608/No paywall
https://archive.ph/1o5ly
Recently, after a week in which 2,789 Americans died of COVID-19, President Joe Biden proclaimed that the pandemic is over. Anthony Fauci described the controversy around the proclamation as a matter of semantics, but the facts we are living with can speak for themselves. COVID still kills roughly as many Americans every week as died on 9/11. It is on track to kill at least 100,000 a yeartriple the typical toll of the flu. Despite gross undercounting, more than 50,000 infections are being recorded every day. The CDC estimates that 19 million adults have long COVID. Things have undoubtedly improved since the peak of the crisis, but calling the pandemic over is like calling a fight finished because your opponent is punching you in the ribs instead of the face.
American leaders and pundits have been trying to call an end to the pandemic since its beginning, only to be faced with new surges or variants. This mindset not only compromises the nations ability to manage COVID, but also leaves it vulnerable to other outbreaks. Future pandemics arent hypothetical; theyre inevitable and imminent. New infectious diseases have regularly emerged throughout recent decades, and climate change is quickening the pace of such events. As rising temperatures force animals to relocate, species that have never coexisted will meet, allowing the viruses within them to find new hostshumans included. Dealing with all of this again is a matter of when, not if.
In 2018, I wrote an article in The Atlantic warning that the U.S. was not prepared for a pandemic. That diagnosis remains unchanged; if anything, I was too optimistic. America was ranked as the worlds most prepared country in 2019and, bafflingly, again in 2021but accounts for 16 percent of global COVID deaths despite having just 4 percent of the global population. It spends more on medical care than any other wealthy country, but its hospitals were nonetheless overwhelmed. It helped create vaccines in record time, but is 67th in the world in full vaccinations. (This trend cannot solely be attributed to political division; even the most heavily vaccinated blue stateRhode Islandstill lags behind 21 nations.) America experienced the largest life-expectancy decline of any wealthy country in 2020 and, unlike its peers, continued declining in 2021. If it had fared as well as just the average peer nation, 1.1 million people who died last yeara third of all American deathswould still be alive.
Americas superlatively poor performance cannot solely be blamed on either the Trump or Biden administrations, although both have made egregious errors. Rather, the new coronavirus exploited the countrys many failing systems: its overstuffed prisons and understaffed nursing homes; its chronically underfunded public-health system; its reliance on convoluted supply chains and a just-in-time economy; its for-profit health-care system, whose workers were already burned out; its decades-long project of unweaving social safety nets; and its legacy of racism and segregation that had already left Black and Indigenous communities and other communities of color disproportionately burdened with health problems. Even in the pre-COVID years, the U.S. was still losing about 626,000 people more than expected for a nation of its size and resources. COVID simply toppled an edifice whose foundations were already rotten.
*snip*
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Ed Yong: The Pandemic's Legacy Is Already Clear (Original Post)
Nevilledog
Sep 2022
OP
Genki Hikari
(1,766 posts)1. And this is why I'm still masking up
Even when I'm picking up groceries curbside.
And why I'm still not going out in public. Anywhere.
I'm in the high risk group, and can't afford to get sick or have long-term COVID.