The original sin of America's COVID response

Mask ordinances and social distancing (and, now, vaccines) have almost surely saved many thousands of lives. But before any of these remedies came about, America’s inability to track the virus allowed it to establish a base of infection and an exponential trajectory. The testing fiasco was uniquely responsible for launching the U.S. into the national nightmare of an unchecked explosion in cases. More than any other policy failure, it turned what might have been an acute national horror into a tragedy that took more lives than either world war.

America’s testing failure was not a single missed opportunity or bad decision. It was a cavalcade of unpreparedness and hubris that doomed the U.S. to disaster. The federal government neither quickly developed its own working test nor quickly approved effective tests developed by American scientists outside government; it declined to request a diagnostic test from the World Health Organization; it ignored the benefits of cheap “rapid tests”; and it failed to communicate to the public how mass testing would maintain a shred of normalcy by making visible a pathogen whose spooky invisibility had triggered the shutdown of the economy.