What, exactly, is a virus? About one-thousandth the size of a bacterium, a virus cannot survive or reproduce on its own. To live, it must enter, attach to and parasitize a living cell. Viruses like SARS, and COVID-19 have been doing this for thousands of years – entering living bodies and dying when the host body either kills them with its immune system, or when the body dies itself. This happens because the immune system’s battle with viruses also kills normal cells, and if too much of that happens, the host body can perish, taking the virus with it. In this fight to the death, both sides can lose. It’s why the elderly and people with underlying medical conditions have a higher mortality rate.
Our politicians should have been better prepared. A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. It’s been screamed from the rooftops. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility, and the calamitous effects. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen that we are unprepared.
To contain such a pathogen as COV-19, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what was done in South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Their containment is a reality. It is what the United States did not.
As the cases spiral, cooperation has given way to competition; some worried hospitals have bought out large quantities of supplies, in the way that panicked consumers have bought out toilet paper. The idea of sharing is lost when heads of state are spooked.
The testing disaster was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single biggest error that undermined every other countermeasure. If the US could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, protecting themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases. That did not happen. In addition, the CDC’s first test was ineffective which meant an entire month was lost. An entire month when planes were flying to and fro, carrying passengers who became carriers and spreaders. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the country.
The 3M crisis will be a defining moment in Trump’s campaign. His idea of “when there is a lot take a little, and when there’s a little take it all” will come back to haunt him. 3M uses materials from Canadian manufactures. Say nothing of the Windsor nurses who cross the border every day to work in nearby American hospitals.
More to come…