Exercises conducted by the government in 2019 showed: The US is not ready for the plague. Nothing has been done since then – Corona

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The respiratory tract virus is bursting in China and spreading rapidly around the world. The first patient in the United States is discovered in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization announces a global epidemic. But the announcement comes too late – 110 million Americans have fallen ill, about 7.7 million need hospitalization and about 586,000 die.

This was the scenario the US Department of Health conducted in a series of exercises conducted between January and August 2019, under the name “Crimson Spread.” He found a cure.

Many of the alleged fatal consequences of the failure to correct these deficiencies are now being expressed in real terms across the US. This was not the first warning received by heads of state. Over the past four years, the US administration has dealt with detailed scenarios of a possible epidemic three times and of deficiencies. In some cases, recommendations for specific improvement actions were also received.

In 2016, the Barack Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on lessons learned from the fight against Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing government officials conducted an extensive exercise in response to the plague, involving senior incoming President Donald Trump’s administration.

Disinfection staff in New York

Disinfection staff in New YorkPhoto: Mary Altaffer / IP

The full story of the Trump administration’s deal with the Corona virus has yet to end. Government officials, medical professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back at the vague messages and missed opportunities over the past three months. During this period, the president underwent a contempt for the virus, which he said would lead to individual cases of “control”, and to his contradictory message last week when he said he constantly knew there was an epidemic on the way.

The White House said in response that last year, a presidential decree was passed to improve the availability and quality of flu vaccines, and that the administration worked earlier this year to increase funding for a Department of Health program focused on the threat of a global epidemic. “Any suggestion that the president did not take the Corona threat seriously is completely false,” said Judd Deer, one of the administration’s spokesmen.

However, office holders declined to say why the administration dragged its feet to conduct extensive patient diagnostic tests and did not act faster to announce the closure of educational institutions and guidance on applying social remoteness policies – though all simulations showed that this should work. When asked last Thursday about the degree of readiness for the administration, Trump responded that “no one knew there was an epidemic of that magnitude. Nobody had seen anything like this before.”

But the work done over the past five years proves that the administration had significant information about the dangers of an epidemic – which accurately predicted the same issues that Trump was struggling with late. The exercise last year in Washington, DC and in 12 states, including New York and Illinois, proves that federal agencies during the Trump era continued the effort that began during the Obama era to prepare for the epidemic. But the planning and thinking was done at junior levels. It seems that the knowledge and sense of emergency about the danger have never received enough attention at the most senior levels of the executive branch or Congress. Thus, there was no change in the state of budget gaps, equipment shortages and much confusion within and between different arms at all levels of government.

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El Paso Main Street, on the U.S.-Mexico border, todayPhoto: AFP

Lessons learned – and forgotten

Already during the George W. Bush administration, senior officials at the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Health focused on the big gaps in response to biological attacks and the danger of an epidemic. The first test came in April 2009, just months after President Obama’s first term began. A 10-year-old girl from California has been diagnosed with an infectious disease, later referred to as swine flu (H1N1) – the first flu epidemic in more than 40 years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that there were 60.8 million swine flu patients in the United States – 274,000 of whom were hospitalized and more than 12,000 dead. The data showed that the virus was less deadly than initially thought. But it was a warning call and government officials Obama said they took this seriously and initiated a plan that was expanded in early 2014, with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa raising concerns that the plague could spread to the United States.

The Ebola virus was less contagious than the flu, but much more deadly. He killed 11,000 people in Africa. But the results could have been much worse. The United States has sent nearly 3,000 troops to Africa to help prevent the spread of the disease. While the effort to stop it is considered a success, White House officials believe the US has been lucky, and its response has revealed deficiencies in preparedness.

Christopher Kirchhoff, an aide to the Obama administration’s National Security Council, was transferred from the Pentagon to the White House to address the Ebola crisis. He was entrusted with the preparation of a report containing lessons learned from the various arms of the government. The weaknesses that Kirchhoff identified were early warning signs of what had developed over the past three months as the corona virus spread.

While the United States has quickly developed measures to identify patients arriving on overseas flights – based on intelligence tools developed after the September 11 attacks to track suspected terrorists – Kirchhoff has detected deficiencies even in measuring the spread of the virus. The author also found some positive things. Among them, establishing a task force to fight Ebola even before one patient was discovered on U.S. soil – and a $ 5.4 billion emergency funding allocation by Congress to treat the disease and ways to prevent it in the U.S. and West Africa.

What is noticeable in reading Kirchhoff’s report today is that only a few of the major deficiencies he found have been fixed, despite the plethora of recommendations addressed to all executive branch divisions. However, the report gave rise to a major change – within the National Security Council, an office was set up to coordinate government actions and provide early warning.

After Trump’s election, Lisa Monaco, Obama’s Homeland Security Advisor, conducted a comprehensive exercise for incoming seniors, including Foreign Minister Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State John Kelly and Energy Minister Rick Perry. The three were instructed on how to respond to a deadly outbreak of influenza. Monaco was impressed by the seriousness that Tom Bosart was replacing with the threat, as well as the response from 30 incoming government officials who participated in the exercise. However, when the current crisis broke out, almost all the senior executives at the table, including Tillerson, Kelly and Perry, were fired or quit.

Full article by David Sanger, Eric Lipton, Eileen Sliven and Michael Carroll in the New York Times