U.S. coronavirus response 'failed worse than I ever could have imagined,' infectious disease expert says

Criticism of the United States' response to the coronavirus pandemic at every level is nothing new at this point, but some of the country's failures have gone beyond the worst case scenario in the eyes of infectious disease experts, Ed Yong reports for The Atlantic.

Nearly every country has had to grapple with the coronavirus. While those efforts have been challenging, many have curbed the virus through decisive action. Experts largely don't count the U.S. in that group, though. "The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined," Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told The Atlantic.

Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Caitlin Rivers noted that governments and humanity at large have "moved mountains" to roll back contagious pathogens like the coronavirus throughout history, and she said "it's appalling that we in the U.S. have not summoned that energy around COVID-19."

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And that doesn't bode well for the future when even more severe pandemics could occur, Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina told Yong. How will the U.S. fare, she asked, when "we can't even deal with a starter pandemic?" Read more at The Atlantic.