Any person or organization can make mistakes, including governmental organizations and the state itself. And, as the popular saying goes, it’s easy to criticize. The problem, however, is that governmental mistakes have much worse consequences than any individual error. It appears that the US government, just like the Chinese government, totally botched the initial response to the coronavirus epidemic, albeit in different ways.
It is now admitted that the repeated failure of the federal government to provide testing kits or (due to stifling regulations) let private laboratories manufacture them has played a major role in the skyrocketing of infections and deaths in America. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports (“America Needed Coronavirus Tests. The Government Failed,” March 19, 2010):
While the virus was quietly spreading within the U.S., the CDC had told state and local officials its “testing capacity is more than adequate to meet current testing demands,” according to a Feb. 26 agency email viewed by The Wall Street Journal, part of a cache of agency communications reviewed by the Journal that sheds light on the early response. …
CDC officials botched an initial test kit developed in an agency lab, retracting many tests. They resisted calls from state officials and medical providers to broaden testing, and health officials failed to coordinate with outside companies to ensure needed test-kit supplies, such as nasal swabs and chemical reagents, would be available, according to suppliers and health officials.
A Wall Street Journal story of a week ago already described the hairy disorganization and false promises of the federal response (“Trump Administration Confronts New Coronavirus Testing Woes,” March 13, 2020):
Administration officials including Vice President Mike Pence said millions of tests would be available, and Mr. Trump said last week that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.”
“Last week” was in early March. Fortunately, Americans, contrary to the Chinese, have a free press. The Journal reveals an interesting bit:
Some White House aides learned of complaints about the availability of testing from the media, not the public-health officials in their own government, an administration official familiar with the matter said.
In other words, we are witnessing a humongous “government failure,” as public-choice economists say. Most other national governments also failed but, as far as wide and timely testing is concerned, the US government may be the worst failure. Trump now sees himself as “a wartime president”—after failing to be a nasal-swab president.
Having tragically failed in what would seem to be relatively simple public-health measures that can be justified by a standard public-good argument (such as rapidly offering free testing to individuals who want it), American governments are now imposing or threatening to impose coercive measures. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is thinking of quarantining residents in their homes. President Trump invoked the Korean-War-era Defense Production Act, which would allow him to force private companies to do what they would naturally do if their incentives were not stifled by current regulation or by future federal price controls. California Governor Gavin Newsom toyed with the idea of declaring martial law in California but is “not feeling at this moment that it is a necessity” (“‘Martial law’ Not Needed to Combat Coronavirus in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom Says,” Sacramento Bee, March 15, 2020).
His feelings changed slightly. As I am ready to schedule this post, a “Breaking News” from the Wall Street Journal says that Newsom just ordered Californians to say home except for essential activities. It is an open question whether or not, and under which conditions, a public-good argument justifies such an extreme measure. One general problem is whether, like in the case of 9/11, we will still be under some of today’s temporary measures in 20 years. What reasons do we have to trust the state in that regard?
Moreover, governments in America, like elsewhere in the world, have mandated or encouraged business closings that can’t last much longer without generating a recession and poverty worse than we have ever seen. Yesterday night’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal (“Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown,” March 19, 2020) contains some good ideas. One point is important to understand: if nothing (or much less) is produced, governments can issue all the checks they want, the federal government can add a trillion dollars or two to its current annual deficit of one trillion, and it will mainly produce inflation.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Mar 20 2020 at 9:18am
There is enough blame to go around and for me it’s pointless to engage in what ifs right now. The issue is similar to how to turn around a fully loaded oil tanker that’s headed for a passenger or cargo ship. Clearly, manufacturing of protective supplies for health care workers has to be job one right now. Repurposing unused living quarters for quarantine is right up there. One of the reasons that New York University closed the dorms was to do just that. Most of the buildings are proximate to several NYC hospitals and can be used to house mild cases of COVID-19.
In the semi-distant past I consulted with various government and non-government organizations on biological weapons issues and natural occurring pandemics are not all that different. Table top exercises have been conducted within the US government at regular intervals but the big question about why preparedness was so lacking is a huge question. One hopes that whatever the eventual outcome of COVID-19 (I am hoping it will come in on the mild side once we know the real number of background infections), the lessons learned will be readily applied rather than relegated to a history book(s).
We all know about the testing debacle in the US and I’ll not dwell on that. I will point to a huge opportunity that was lost in vaccine development. The outbreak of Zika virus spurred a lot of work on both traditional and non-traditional vaccine research. However, early clinical evaluation of novel approaches was not followed up as the disease waned. We are now shooting blind with the rapid development of mRNA and DNA vaccine approaches. These technologies could have been piloted in modest clinical trials over the past two years to assess safety and clinical potency. Don’t underestimate the safety aspects of a vaccine that potentially will be deployed world wide on a huge population base. The 1978 swine flu vaccine ‘experiment’ in the US should be a warning in this regard. This was all lost time (to paraphrase Proust) that might have helped cut down vaccine development by half.
I’ll conclude by noting that I’m following the development of all the clinical trials for drugs and vaccines. Maybe something ends up working, it’s too early to tell. Newspaper anecdotes of a handful of patients being cured by one doctor or another are not helpful.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 20 2020 at 11:01am
@Goldhammer: You write,
You may be right, let’s hope you are right, but, as you say, that’s a hope. There was already the Ebola crisis in 2014, Zika in 2015–6, and the recent outbreaks of SARS, swine flu, and bird flu. One interesting thing is that the state usually remembers (in the sense of “set up new institutions”) those events that challenge or increase its power. The incentives to focus on that are built into state power, including democratic power.
John Fembup
Mar 20 2020 at 3:48pm
“the US government may be the worst failure”
After China, Italy, Iran, and Spain, I assume you mean.
Brian
Mar 21 2020 at 11:09am
Pierre,
The only government failure I can see is the gross overreaction of shutting everything down. Killing the economy, even temporarily, will cause far more damage than anything COVID-19 will do. The government (federal, state, and local) should simply have asked everyone to wear masks/covers on their mouths and gloves on their hands, but otherwise go about their daily business. Businesses that make mouth covers impossible, like restaurants, and ones that involve a lot of body contact, like sports, were right to close down, but everything else has been over the top.
anon
Mar 22 2020 at 4:23am
I would agree with you, except we don’t have the masks for your scenario. So maybe the reaction hasn’t been as over the top as you think. I personally think that if we do a short and effective quarantine that actually works, it will be more or less fine in the end, as do many people on Wall Street. But it looks to not be very coordinated at this point in time.
Warren Platts
Mar 22 2020 at 5:09am
Sorry, but this is just Monday morning quarterbacking. On February 26, there were a grand total of 60 known cases of the China virus in the USA. There were zero deaths. If you plotted the growth in the number of cases on a semi-log chart, the slope was flat, indicating that the RO (the number of people an infected person was infecting) was equal to 1, meaning that at least the number of cases were not growing much at all.
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
There was also in place what many people considered at the time a draconian travel ban from China in place. So at the time, things did look more or less under control.
And what were you doing on February 26, Pierre? Oh yeah, you were writing your piece for February 27 where you were complaining about the dirigiste government throwing its weight around. It just goes to show that no matter what President Trump does, people will find a reason to complain about it.
As for testing, the people who need to be tested are getting tested. Not everybody in the country needs tested. These sorts of shortages are nothing new. When the West Nile virus first hit Colorado when I was out there, I was 99% sure I had the fever. I called to see if I could get tested, and they said if you are young and healthy pretty sure you are not about to die, you do not need to get tested. Just ride it out like any other flu. It the same with coronavirus.
Moreover, more testing is not a substitute for taking proper non-pharmaceutical interventions–social distancing, etc.–to flatten the curve and buy us a little time to develop some treatments and eventually a vaccine.
And there are some very promising treatments on the near horizon, especially, imho, a hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin combination. In a French study, 6 patients were given that treatment. At day 3, 5 out of the 6 were virus-free, and by day 5, the last patient was virus-free. (And that Dr. Tony Fauci who contradicted President Trump by saying that study was uncontrolled was wrong: the study was small, but it was well designed and they did in fact have a control group.)
What we don’t want is a repeat of that situation in Italy where their health system was completely overwhelmed and doctors were forced into a triage situation where there was one respirator to go around for 3 people that needed one.
That’s the thing about exponential growth. You people are used to dealing with single digit interest rates where it typically takes several years for something to double. What we are dealing with a virus, that if left uncontrolled, will double the number of infections every 2 days. At that rate, it would take about 2 months to infect the entire planet. It is very serious.
Comments are closed.