I'm going to post this again. I highly recommend reading it. Or listening to it (it is very long).
bluepenquin From reading this article - Ed Young clearly has a liberal political agenda unrelated to COVID and frames pretty much everything in this article through that liberal view. Much of the facts are correct - while the causes and implications are open for interpretation. I will respond to several - it will be long.
<<Diagnostic tests are easy to make, so the U.S. failing to create one seemed inconceivable. Worse, it had no Plan B.
Private labs were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Sabeti’s lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to colleagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. “We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states,” she told me.>>
This is a major market problem with our system. Austrians (economists) have long considered the FDA to end up killing more people than lives saved. This is an example of Government intervention that cost lives. Now I recognize that my interpretation is highly political in a different direction. Nonetheless - Young mentions the FDA being a problem with early testing - and that problem was going to exist whether Obama or Trump were president. That said - conservatives are/were more likely to want to cut the FDA bureaucracy than liberals.
<<In response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects made structures more energy-efficient by sealing them off from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates. Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, “ushering in the era of ‘sick buildings>>
Wow - I agree totally that the US dependence on indoor air conditioning has played a MAJOR part in the US problem. The advanced technology and wealth allowed the US to air condition homes way more than just about any other country. In the process - a large number of lives have been saved over the past 40 years. Now we are paying the price. I don't know that this is caused by political problems - but I do think it had a huge impact. This is one of great irony.
<<The hardest-hit buildings were those that had been jammed with people for decades: prisons. Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough-on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, America’s incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million.>>
I agree with this - Austrians were among the first to be opposed to the War on Drugs. Conservatives go a different direction. Dems have had opportunities to improve this. Trump did work with the Dems on passing sentencing reform which was a good thing.
<<Other densely packed facilities were also besieged. America’s nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its coronavirus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and staff have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. These grim figures are a reflection not just of the greater harms that COVID 19 inflicts upon elderly physiology, but also of the care the elderly receive. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. The Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers>>
I don't support Trump on immigration. I doubt that reduction in influx of immigrants is a major cause of the problem. Notice - not reducing the number of immigrants, but reducing the influx. I don't know if that is literally true, but if it is - then there should be just as many immigrant workers for these facilities as before, just not at the increased rate? Anyway - odd to lay this at the feet of Trump and not some Governors like Mario Cuomo who made horrible decisions early on related to nursing homes.
<<American hospitals operate on a just-in-time economy. They acquire the goods they need in the moment through labyrinthine supply chains that wrap around the world in tangled lines, from countries with cheap labor to richer nations like the U.S. The lines are invisible until they snap. About half of the world’s face masks, for example, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply shriveled just as global demand spiked. The Trump administration turned to a larder of medical supplies called the Strategic National Stockpile, only to find that the 100 million respirators and masks that had been dispersed during the 2009 flu pandemic were never replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left.>>
The first part of this is the how free market work well (keeping in mind that the health industry in this country is far from being a free market). The complications of getting inventory just in time is extraordinarily efficient and less costly than a command economy. Invisible lines through markets that cannot be produced through central command. The market is going to more quickly be able find new sources in the supply chain - and those that were most successful became more profitable. A command system would have delayed figuring out how to fix the broken supply chain.
Now the crux of the problem mentioned was the National Stockpile. And who is/was responsible for the depleted Stockpile? According to this - the depletion occurred in 2009. Why wasn't it restocked and who was responsible - that is the unanswered question here...
<<The federal government could have mitigated those problems by buying supplies at economies of scale and distributing them according to need. Instead, in March, Trump told America’s governors to “try getting it yourselves.” As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neighbors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies.>>
The 'Capitalism' was mostly responsible for the relatively quick correction in the form of Venerators and PPE's - despite China's 'bad faith' actions. It was the mostly eliminated stockpile that was the issue. And then - 'rich' hospitals in NY bought their way out at the expense of the poor. There are no good answers when allocating limited resources - but if some NY hospitals were able to 'compete' - then this is in part on Cuomo (who just always seems to get a pass). He had the power to allocate the limited resources how he saw fit. NY has the buying power far greater than most countries in the world.
<<As of early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID 19—a rate more than twice that of white Americans. That figure is both tragic and wholly expected given the mountain of medical disadvantages that Black people face. Compared with white people, they die three years younger. Three times as many Black mothers die during pregnancy. Black people have higher rates of chronic illnesses that predispose them to fatal cases of COVID 19. When they go to hospitals, they’re less likely to be treated. The care they do receive tends to be poorer. Aware of these biases, Black people are hesitant to seek aid for COVID 19 symptoms and then show up at hospitals in sicker states.>>
Do researchers every study this in terms of all factors? How much of this is because of the economic status and how much is due to being black? Is the rate of a poor black person different than a poor white person? Do they look at personal choice on health? There could be a thousand factors that is leading to this that are completely unrelated to racism. It seems like we too often want to attach different outcomes by race as evidence of racism. Anyway - Young wants to attach Trump as being racist evidenced by Blacks having a higher death rate in COVID than Whites. That would be like saying Trump actively discriminates with old people since they are dying at a much higher rate.