Hyderabad: Despite strong assurances from the US' top brass to contain COVID-19, the skyrocketing fatalities and infections have exposed the country's fragile strategies to tackle the pandemic.
The US – a world giant far from the coronavirus origin city of Wuhan – has surpassed China and registered the highest deaths (6,088) and infections (2,45,184).
The nation is battling hard to curb the virus spread due to its poor contact tracing, testing fewer people and ignoring early measures.
Conducting massive tests in the initial stage of the virus spread is a crucial move to curb its spread as has been done in South Korea.
When the coronavirus started spreading in the US, the administration failed to conduct adequate tests, and by the time it actually became severity the virus exploded among communities.
Going by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, government labs in the critical month of February had processed only 352 COVID-19 tests — an average of only a dozen tests per day. This is bewildering considering the fact that the virus had already taken its roots in most parts of the US.
In early March, US President Donald Trump assured Americans that the COVID-19 test developed by the CDC is “perfect” and that “anyone who wants a test can get a test".
Massive testing blunders have also undermined Washington's response to defeat the pandemic. Two federal health officials with direct knowledge of the situation said that CDC experts don't know why many of the agency’s test kits failed to reliably detect the virus.
The US failed in contact tracing despite training more than 3,600 disease detectives who are skilled in identifying those infected, tracing their history of contacts, and mitigating the wider risk to the community. But they have been unable to do their jobs, owing largely to early testing failures.
Trump had rated his administration’s response to the crisis as a perfect 10. However, Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the CDC's system wasn't designed to track a widespread outbreak, which he characterised as "a failing".
The Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC, has begun an internal review to assess its own mistakes. But outside observers and federal health officials have pointed to four primary issues that together hampered the national response — the early decision not to use the test adopted by the World Health Organization, flaws with the more complex test developed by the CDC, government guidelines restricting who could be tested and delays in engaging the private sector to ramp up testing capacity.
With such lackadaisical approach to counter the pandemic and widespread failings it would be hard to find that the world's most powerful nation would be “all-powerful” once again.
