Tony's Diary Package — page 219

No time for American exceptionalism Even as the coronavirus situation began to worsen across the winter, Trump administration leaders repeatedly touted the U.S. health system as an advantage that other nations lacked -- and, as independent experts acknowledged, for good reason. A scorecard issued by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Healthy Security in October 2019 ranked the United States the mostprepared nation to face a pandemic, citing ample investments in infectious disease detection and response, led by organizations like the Centers for Disease Control. Meanwhile, Italy ranked 31st in preparedness, falling behind nations like Estonia and Indonesia. But the all-encompassing faith in the U.S. infrastructure turned out to be misplaced, exemplified by the CDC's early failure on testing, which contributed to coronavirus' silent spread. Trump's own vows in February and March that the virus would simply "disappear" put the United States out of step with other developed nations. "How much of that was America knows best, America can handle this... that was certainly part of the decision-making," said Kates of the Kaiser Family Foundation. "That turned out to be the wrong call." Meanwhile, the administration's aggressive, isolationist posture -- with Trump bashing global health experts and threatening to yank the United States' funding from the World Health Organization -- has done little to help coordination. And nations like Italy, which provide universal health care access to citizens, simplified residents' efforts to get tested and treated. The insular thinking in the United States has alarmed global health experts, who said that opportunities to learn from other nations were missed. "There was no sound reason to think that a virus capable of overwhelming the health systems of China and Italy would prove any less dangerous in the United States," Konyndyk of the Center for Global Development wrote in Foreign Affairs this month. "But leaders across American society imagined that somehow the United States would be spared the ravages of the disease." A push to reopen If the United States had waited just a few more weeks to lift lockdowns -- or more rigorously imposed them in the first place -- that could've driven cases down much further, experts agree. "We know that a one-week delay in imposing lockdowns, given the exponential nature of transmission, could have reduced cases by 50 percent," said