Poor communication and a refusal to adapt to evolving scientific evidence led to unnecessary school closures and the restriction of outdoor activity during the Covid outbreak, contributing to the “pandemic chaos” that plagued the country for more than two years, a scathing report published Monday revealed.
The report, “Pandemic lessons for the 2024 presidential election,” was published in the British Medical Journal and draws on a breadth of scientific studies to assess the policy failures that led to significantly higher death rates in the U.S. than in other developed countries.
“During the devastating global covid-19 pandemic, one nation stood out: the United States saw ‘eye wateringly high’ death rates compared with its peer nations. The 1.16 million Americans killed by covid-19 represent 16% of global deaths in a nation with 4% of the world’s population,” wrote the authors, Duke University professor Gavin Yamey and Drexel University professor Ana Roux.
Roux and Yamey blame poor communication at the federal level, as well as structural factors inherent to the American system of government, for many of the policy failures, and specifically call out “overreach” at the state level for compounding the hardship of the pandemic.
“The absence of timely evidence and delayed or incomplete communication of what was known also led to overreach, which itself had harmful consequences,” Roux and Yamey write. “For example, even after studies had shown that fomite transmission was rare and transmission outdoors was much less common than indoors, some municipalities and states kept parks, playgrounds, and beaches closed. Even after research had shown that schools could be reopened safely with basic public health measures, too many jurisdictions kept teaching online only.”
Many blue states kept schools closed for months after data from other countries demonstrated conclusively that schools were not effective vectors for transmission, given the natural resistance of children to the virus. Several liberal jurisdictions also required that masks be worn even when gathering outdoors, in keeping with the CDC’s recommendation, which was not dropped until April 2021, when the agency acknowledged that outdoor transmission was exceptionally rare.
Before the CDC acknowledged the rarity of outdoor transmission, many state and local governments had kept their parks, playgrounds, and beaches closed despite the extensive research showing that gathering in such settings did not pose a threat.
The U.S. saw record rates of obesity and diabetes after the pandemic, a Gallup survey found, as well as a drastic increase in mental-health problems among teens.
The authors also argue that the nation’s pre-existing health-care inequalities, including social inequality and systemic racism, made the pandemic worse for Americans. According to both doctors, the pandemic’s impact was also exacerbated by the health-care industry’s budget cuts in the previous decade.
Between 2010 and 2019, the budget and public health emergency preparedness activities for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were slashed. Additionally, between 2010 and 2020, per capita spending on state public health departments fell by 16 percent and local health departments dropped by 18 percent.
To prevent further failures on the federal level if a pandemic happens to arise in the future, Yamey and Roux are calling for the 2024 presidential candidates to include “crucial systemic reforms” as a central part of their manifestos.
“The aim of the series is not to assign blame — there is plenty to go around — but to look to the future and lay out the critical steps to transform US public health and preparedness, and improve population health more broadly,” they concluded.