There is one graph that has
to do with the coronavirus that blows my mind. It looks like this. This graph shows
coronavirus cases in the United States
versus the European Union. Do you see what happens here? Everyone has a surge
around the same time, but while the European
Union dramatically drops, the United States
plateaus for a little bit and then skyrockets. This is shocking to me because
the United States is perhaps the most prepared country
on earth for a pandemic. The U.S. government has
an actual playbook that tells us what we need to
do in the case of a pandemic. Not to mention, it's like the
richest country in the world, with the best
health institution on earth, the C.D.C., which
literally fights pandemics in other countries and
teaches even our peers how to do epidemiology. And yet, you look at
this graph and you wonder, what happened? I want to piece together
a timeline to find out how this happened. How does the country with
the most money and experts and the C.D.C. and a
literal pandemic playbook end up with so many
deaths, and end up with a graph that
looks like this? [MUSIC PLAYING] “The countries best and worst
prepared for an epidemic, we're rated No. 1
at being prepared.” “Europe has largely
contained the virus.” “Nearly 200,000 Americans
dead from Covid.” “We're doing great. Our country is
doing so great.” [MUSIC PLAYING] As I piece together
this timeline, I'm going to need some help. And for that, I turned
to Nick Kristof. He's a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist. He speaks Mandarin. He's been all
around the world, reporting on and
explaining public health crises for decades. I've always felt that I
come from the country that helped invent public health. And now, my own country,
arguably the most powerful country in the
history of the world, has taken a challenge that we
kind of knew what to do with, and just blowing it
in ways that cost so many lives so needlessly. So if I want to understand
how this all played out and how we got a graph
that looks like this, where do we start? Let's go way back,
before we were paying any attention to this. I figured our timeline
would start somewhere in January of
2020, but Nick told me to go back even
further, way back to 2005. That summer,
President George Bush was on vacation at
his ranch in Texas when he got ahold of this book. It was about the Spanish flu
that killed tens of millions of people back in 1918. This book freaked
George Bush out. He got back to Washington,
and immediately got to work putting together a
plan, a step-by-step guide of what the U.S. should do if a
pandemic came to our country. He called it a playbook
for pandemic response. President Obama developed
a playbook of his own that had very specific
plans in place on what the government should
do in the case of a disease outbreak, including
specifically citing coronaviruses. This pandemic
playbook was then passed on to the
Trump administration. "We left them the detailed
playbook, which specifically cited novel coronaviruses. Short of leaving a
flashing neon sign in the Situation Room saying.
'Watch out for a pandemic,' I'm not sure what more
we could have done. No one knew when the
big pandemic would come, what it would look like. But even still, the
previous two administrations were obsessed with making
sure we were ready. “But if we wait for
a pandemic to appear, it will be too
late to prepare.” So now let's fast forward
to when the big one did hit. And that part of
the story happens on the last day of 2019. On Dec. 31,
2019, a report of 44 people with pneumonia
comes in from a fish market in China. So at this point,
it seems like this is a fairly small deal. It's 40 people with
pneumonia in China. So who in the U.S.
would even care or have this on their
radar in the first place? `Epidemiologists
were on top of this immediately in early
January, about the risk this might be something serious. The World Health Organization
was communicating with the C.D.C., the
C.D.C. was communicating with the administration. And indeed, it appears to
have entered the president's daily brief in early January. “We're going to begin
here with the outbreak of a mystery virus in China
that now has the World Health Organization on edge.” I heard that China was
concealing information. And didn't that stop
American experts from getting a full picture
on what was happening? Yes, absolutely. China behaved
irresponsibly and was concealing information. But we had channels
into China, into the World
Health Organization. We were getting feedback about
what was really happening. It's the middle of
January, and coronavirus is potentially a
thing of concern. Didn't President Trump get
on a call with President Xi Jinping? Yeah, they did. They had an important
phone conversation then. But what they talked
about was trade. But it just doesn't get any
bigger than this, not only in terms of a deal. Tell President Xi, I
said, President, go out, have a round of golf. This was a huge, huge
missed opportunity. OK, so we miss these
first two opportunities of taking those early
reports really seriously and that call with Xi
Jinping, which potentially could have been a
health collaboration to stop the virus. But it was still early on. The coronavirus hadn't
even been detected in the United States yet. “Gwen Stefani and Blake
Shelton not quite yet engaged, right? Definitely not married.” So while the United
States was preparing for the Grammys
and the Super Bowl, the coronavirus quietly
came into our country. The first case is
reported around Seattle on Jan. 21. At this point, Trump
has been hearing more and more warnings from
his intelligence briefings, as well as from the C.D.C. And as the news breaks of
the first case in the U.S., Trump is on his
way to Switzerland to speak at the World
Economic Forum, where he talks a lot about
China, but just not about the virus. “Our relationship with China
right now has probably never been better.” Man, just like
imagine what could have happened at this moment. End of January, the
president reads his briefing. He's like, oh,
whoa, this is real. This is spreading globally. We need to get
serious about this. He calls Xi Jinping
back, and he's like, hey, Xi Jinping, I know we've been
talking a lot about trade, but why don't we talk about
this virus that's coming from your country to mine? What do we need
to do to solve it? And Xi Jinping is like, yeah,
you're right, let's do it. Trump gets up to tell the
nation a pandemic is coming and that we've got
to be ready for it, but don't worry because
we're super prepared. We have all the plans. We have a literal
pandemic playbook. We have money. We have experts. We can squash this. “Have you been
briefed by the C.D.C.?" “I have.” “Are there words about a
pandemic at this point?” “No, not at all, and we have
it totally under control. It's one person
coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine.” There was some hope that
we could have actually eliminated it in early January
and avoided this catastrophe for the world. Instead, our leaders,
and our citizens, were completely focused
on other things. “The Grammy Awards
are finally here.” “CNN breaking news.” “Kobe Bryant— Has been killed in
a helicopter crash.” “Special coverage of
the impeachment trial.” “Did nothing wrong. Did nothing wrong.” [CHEERING AND APPLAUSE] So by the end of
January, the virus has now arrived to
the United States. There are reported cases here. We are now aware
that it is a problem. I guess I'm wondering,
like, what is the response? What should the U.S. have
done in that moment? The first step in response
to a disease like this is to find out
where it is, which means you develop a test. “We have 12 cases— 11 cases. And many of them are
in good shape now, so.” The United States
and South Korea had their first reported case
of Covid-19 on the same day. A month later, South
Korea, who, by the way, has like a fifth
the number of people that the United States has,
had tested 13,000 people. Here in the U.S., we
had tested 3,000. “I'm not afraid of
the coronavirus, and no one else should
be that afraid, either.” A reminder that
all of these steps, the testing was
not a new idea. This was in the old playbooks. Testing and surveillance
of where the virus is is like a fundamental step
in responding to a pandemic. “It's mind-blowing
that because you can't get the
federal government to improve the testing
because they just want to say how great it is.” “And the testing is not going
to be a problem at all.” “So this struggle
to develop a test, wasn't this more
of like an issue with the F.D.A. and
the C.D.C. and H.H.S. sort of feuding with
each other about who was going to do the test? At one level, the way we
fumbled the development of testing in
the United States was a result of
bureaucratic infighting. But if President Trump
had shown the same passion for getting a test that he
showed for building a wall or for backing
hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus,
we would have had a test all ready to go
and all around the country by the end of January or
beginning of February. “Hydroxychloroquine,
we're just hearing really
positive stories. I happen to be taking it. I think it's good. I've heard a lot
of good stories.” Sierra Leone in West
Africa had an effective test before the United States did. And so as a result, we didn't
know where the virus was. We were blind. “They're working hard. Looks like, by April,
you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer,
it miraculously goes away. Hope that's true.” And then, Americans
started to die. [MUSIC PLAYING] It started with
just one in February. But soon one became
10 became 100, and soon it was 100 per
day, and then 200 per day, and 500 per day. And now, we're
in the thousands. And then the month
of April was here. And in one month, 57,000
Americans died from Covid-19. So was there a moment
for you when you realized that this was spiraling
out of control? I visited a couple of
emergency rooms and I.C.U.s early in the crisis. And this was when
people are still talking about how the
coronavirus is like the flu. And meanwhile, these emergency
rooms are just swamped. The doctors and nurses
are traumatized. “I need a vent. I need a vent.” “I need a ventilator.” And the strength
of those doctors contrasted with just
the fecklessness of our political leadership. “And again, I said last night,
we did an interview on Fox last night — You have to be calm. It'll go away.” [BEEPING] “Many of the places are
really in great shape. They really have
done a fantastic job. We have to open our country. We cannot let the cure
be worse than the problem itself. We're not going to
let the cure be worse than the problem. We have to be calm. It'll go away.” I've seen a lot
of grim diseases, but the combination in Covid
of such large numbers dying, all alone because their loved
ones can't go with them, saddens me, but it
also just enrages me because this was
so unnecessary. OK, so let's
realize where we are. It's April, and we really
didn't get the early response down. We didn't get
testing figured out. But now, we're in the
thick of a crisis. People are dying. There is a crisis in
the United States. So the big question
here is, what do you do once you're actually in
the thick of this crisis? And in my conversations
with Nick, and in all of these
playbooks, there's this one theme that
just keeps coming up, which is health
communications. Which sort of just
sounds like a boring P.S.A. from the government. “Larry, you know
this simple exercise can help you stay healthy.” I didn't even know what
that meant to begin with. But as I looked
into it, I started to realize that there
was something there. In fact, the Bush playbook
says that the need for timely,
accurate, credible and consistent information
that is tailored to specific audiences cannot
be overstated. So it turns out that, when
a country is devolving into pandemic chaos, one of
the most important things, if not the most important
thing, a government can do is communicate to its citizens
how important and risky this is. “And the 15, within
a couple of days, is going to be down
to close to zero.” ”Staying at home
leads to death also.” “Are you telling
the Americans not to change any of
their behaviors?” “No, I think you
have to always— look, I do it a lot anyway,
as you probably heard, wash your hands, stay clean. You don't have to necessarily
grab every handrail, unless you have to. You know, you do
certain things that you do when
you have the flu. I mean, view this
the same as the flu.” “The C.D.C. is
recommending that Americans wear a basic cloth
or fabric mask. This is voluntary.” "It's easy to focus just on
the failures of President Trump, but look, there
is plenty of failure to go around, and it involves
blue states as well as red ones. New York was
particularly hard hit, in part because New York
leaders initially did not take this seriously enough. Mayor Bill de Blasio
tweeted that people should get on with their
lives and go out on the town. It would be difficult
to think of any signal that a leader
could possibly send that was more wrong and
more lethal than that one. “Tonight, FEMA is bringing
in hundreds of ambulances to help with record-breaking
911 calls in New York. This morning, as an
emergency field hospital is being built in
iconic Central Park —” “All of those
beds, all 20,000, will have to be turned
into intensive care beds to focus on Covid-19 patients
who are really, really sick.” We simply blew it. And the result was
that Americans did not take the virus as seriously as
they did in other countries. OK, so the U.S.
blew it when it came to health
communications, whereas Europe and many countries around
the world got it right. I want to know what the
actual proof is that that's the key to fixing it. Is it just because
the playbook said it or because Nick said it? Well, I got my hands on
some data that really helped me understand this. Google collected data from
a bunch of people's phones to track before the pandemic
and during the pandemic how people's movement changed. If you assemble that
data onto a map, you see something
really interesting. If you look over here, you
can see these dark blue areas, which represent
countries that shut down by up to 80 to 100 percent. This means they weren't going
out, they weren't shopping, they weren't going to cinemas. They were staying home like
the government implored them to. Austria shut down by 64 percent,
France by 80 percent, Ireland by 83 percent. All of this movement
shut down in the name of beating the virus. Meanwhile, over here
in the United States, we're at about 39 percent on this
same day in late April. We never really shut down. One of the basic things
about this pandemic is that, if people really
do take it seriously, and for four
weeks or six weeks do adhere to stay-at-home
orders in the way Europe did, with 90 percent of the
travel shut down, then the virus is
stopped in its tracks. Other countries did it,
one after the other. The U.S. was never
able to do that. We fought the virus,
and the virus won. Again, I can't help
but think of what could have happened if our
president got up and said — “My fellow Americans —” This is going to
be very difficult. We have to shut down
our entire country. Not just the urban spots,
the entire country. It's going to be
painful, but it will help us reopen
our economy quicker and it will help
save American lives. But that didn't happen. I remember looking
at the graphs in April and watching daily
deaths climb so rapidly, just skyrocketing. The natural response
would've been to say, whoa, slow down, we need
to really tighten things up and learn from other countries
that have done better. But instead, the
very next day — The president, remarkably,
attacks stay-at-home orders in states around the country
and encouraged supporters to liberate states
like Michigan. This was an obliviousness
to science and public health advice, a lack of empathy
for those who were dying. I don't know what
to call that failure except an example of
extraordinary incompetence. I find that truly
heartbreaking. This is where the graph
starts to blow my mind, and really starts
to get to the heart of my big question of
why these lines look so different. Watch how the Covid cases
sort of plateau in the U.S., but in Europe, cases
start to look like this. Our peers buckled down
and did the hard work to get ahead of the virus
by following basic pandemic measures articulated
in all of the plans, including our own playbooks. They saw the results of that. The U.S., on the other
hand, plateaus for a bit, and by mid-June, starts
to skyrocket again. “In the nation's three
most populous states, things are going
from bad to worse.” “California, Texas and
Florida are in crisis.” “Today, reporting
more than 5,000 Covid-related
hospitalizations.” And even though Europe
is having an uptick now, you need to look at this gap. This gap represents a lot
of unnecessary suffering, and the death of tens of
thousands of Americans. I understand that we're
going to make mistakes. This is hard stuff. Lots of countries
made mistakes. But what has troubled
me is that we just didn't learn from them. We weren't self-correcting. Instead, we doubled
down on mistakes. And then, we just gave up. OK, so I now
feel like I have a much better understanding of
why our graph looks like this compared to other countries. It has a little bit to do
with those early mistakes and whatever, but those
are sort of forgivable. Instead, it's what happened
once the pandemic was here and raging and
killing Americans. Instead of having
leaders who told us what we needed
to do to make it through this risky
and uncertain time, we had leaders that
denied that this was even a big deal, and then
who eventually just gave up on the whole thing. The death certificates of
more than 150,000 Americans will say something
like Covid-19. In a larger sense, what should
be written on those death certificates as the cause
of death is "incompetence."
There isn't even an attempt to analyze or provide backstory here. The segment about failed testing, they just mentioned infighting among different agencies, said testing could have been better had Trump pushed harder, then moved on. Where's the substance? This is like a high schooler's attempt at journalism.
Ah yes, an opinion piece in a documentary sub Reddit...
The mods got to shut this down until after the election.
Even fucking Facebook stopped taking money to do political ads because of this crap
Askreddit has stopped us biden/Trump discussions.
And this is clearly brigading.
What does everyone expect? These are voted in politicians. If you expect ANYTHING from them you have grossly inflated expectations. The system is broke, cut it's head off....
His response verges on malicious. It just feels like we were so prepared, had a playbook, and experts giving advice, yet he continued to go against it all. It's disturbing.
This isn't a documentary... even the picture clearly has OPINION on it. Or will the mods let the rules continue to be broken as long as it fits their political agendas?
Lame low hanging fruit of an opinion.
Fauci’s testimony to the contrary
America didn't bungle shit. The administration and its republican enablers fucked us.