I strongly suspect that just about everybody thinks that the U. S. could have handled the COVID-19 pandemic better. In his most recent Wall Street Journal column William Galston identifies two particular areas he cites as evidence of that, life expectancy:
A report recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics revealed that during the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, life expectancy in the U.S.—the most basic measure of national well-being—declined by a stunning 2.7 years, from 78.8 to 76.1 years, the lowest level since 1996. Put simply, the pandemic erased the effects of a quarter-century of progress in medical innovation and healthier lifestyles.
These losses weren’t distributed evenly across the population. Life expectancy declined by 3.1 years for men but 2.3 years for women. Asian Americans showed the smallest loss (2.1 years), compared with whites (2.4), blacks (4.0), Hispanics (4.2), and Native Americans/Alaska Natives (6.6). For every group, the decline among men was substantially higher than that among women, and the overall difference between men and women widened from 4.8 years to just under 6 years, a gap last seen in the mid-1990s.
Compared with its peers, the U.S. fared poorly during the past two years. In 2020 the U.S. loss of life expectancy was more than three times the average of other advanced nations.
and education:
Public education presents a similar picture. The just-released report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed a historic drop in achievement among fourth-graders. Between 2020 and 2022, overall reading and math scores fell by 5 and 7 points, respectively, to lows not seen in decades. As with life expectancy, groups that lagged behind the national average tended to do the worst. In math achievement, for example, black students lost 13 points and Hispanic students 8 points, compared with 6 points for Asian students and 5 for white students. The differences were even more stark between high- and low-achieving individuals. At the top, NAEP scores in reading and math fell by an average of 2 to 3 points; at the bottom, by 10 to 12 points.
Differences in resources during periods of remote learning accompanied achievement gaps. Students in the top quarter of achievement reported much higher levels of access to computers, high-speed internet, quiet places to work and regular help from teachers than did students in the bottom quarter. Reinforcing these differences, 67% of high-achievers expressed confidence that they could tell when they weren’t understanding a lesson, compared with only 32% of low-achievers. It’s hard to ask for help if you don’t know when you need it.
Here, as with life expectancy, there is evidence emerging that we could have done better. Although overall student-achievement results for our European peers aren’t yet available, a recent academic paper studied Swedish primary school students and found no achievement losses during the pandemic.
Although I agree that we might have done better, I find each of those problematic in different ways and for many reasons. With respect to life expectancy, it was already declining in the U. S. before the pandemic. According to the CDC life expectancy in the U. S. peaked in 2014. I’m not sure how you’d go about disaggregating the declining life expectancy due to whatever led to the peak in 2014 from the declining life expectancy due to COVID-19 from the declining life expectancy due to the policy response to COVID-19.
The situation is slightly different with respect to education. I don’t think comparing the U. S. with Sweden is reasonable for any number of reasons. By comparison Sweden is tiny and highly socially cohesive but, more importantly, Sweden’s policy WRT COVID-19 was quite different from ours and just as importantly quite different from that of Finland, Norway, Denmark, or, for that matter, France.
Like most people I think there are quite a few things we should have done differently. For example, I think that President Trump should have shut down international air travel entering or leaving the United States for at least a couple of months starting in February. I think he should have limited traffic on the interstates early on as well. I think we should have emphasized preventing contagion to those most at risk and that closing schools to in person education was a mistake. Those are local issues not national ones. I also wish that COVID-19 and getting vaccinated against it had not been politicized as it was but I’m honestly not sure how that might have been accomplished.
At that point I’ll throw the matter open to the floor. What could we have done better in dealing with COVID-19?
Seems to me like every effort proposed would only have delayed.
I carry the burden of accepting work in November 2021, infecting my wife the next January leading to her death in February.
But COVID infection rates are as high today.
My grandson lives on a peninsula in NW Washington state so isolated there’s only one road in and out of the area.
They were successful in stopping the spread until this summer when they opened that road and now they have infection.
Unless the virus was lab, I blame no one, it’s relentless.
1) We should have had the PPE supply replenished. We’d just had the 3 best years the US economy has ever seen thanks to the Trump economy. We could have easily afforded restocking. We could not have done this while Obama was president as our economy was awful and totally failed while he was president.
2) Testing. We should have had testing available at least a month sooner, like other countries. We should have had widespread surveillance testing. (Stopping international level travel in February was probably too late, but if you were going to do it you needed to stop it from all countries and not just China. That was stupid.) We should have let private entities develop tests much sooner rather than government keeping control for so long.
3) Never again emphasize looking at current drugs. We wasted hours and lives on BS drugs.
4) I hating they meant well but dont lie to people to try to conserve supplies. Masks work to reduce risk. They should not have said they dont to try to preserve them.
5) Politicians should be banned from recommending specific drugs. That should be an instantly impeachable offense. That contributed in a major way to the politicization.
6) Closing schools was a very good idea early. They should have been opened again sooner. However, that was largely under local control and I do generally favor letting individual communities determine the risk level they want to bear as long as it doesnt affect everyone else.
7) The initial release of the vaccines was chaotic as there was little planning. We knew for months ahead of time the vaccine was coming so we should have planned better.
8) I think we should have done something about disinformation but I ma not sure what we should do as I do favor free speech. We do tolerate a lot fo lying and grifting for money by medical experts, Dr Oz probably being the current doctor most famous for doing that. If we arent going to censure an Oz for lying about treatments how do we justify censuring others for also lying, especially to make money? (If you bothered to look, few did, the people selling Ivermectin, HCQ and the other treatments had a high percentage of doctors who had been in trouble with their state medical boards for other ethical issues.)
We have so much online now and most people dont know how to judge the quality of the info. I think it was fine for people to advocate for treatments when we were not sure about them yet, most facilities used those iffy drugs at first since we were shotgunning everything we could, but once the good studies were in and we knew those BS drugs dont work we need a way to control that or at least mark it as untrue.
9) Long term we should acknowledge pandemics are inevitable. We need to maintain preparation. This wont be popular and when we go 20 years without a pandemic the temptation will be to eliminate the offices and expertise to handle pandemics as we sort of did, but lets not do that again.
Steve
I don’t think the life expectancy “change” means much of anything due to how it’s estimated. I’ve always thought it was a dubious metric.
For education, the learning loss is real and significant and will probably persist in some communities for a long time.
1) Collecting data. It is pretty evident the Government (Federal, State, Local) doesn’t know how to collect data (epidemiological data, vaccination data)
2) FDA approval process. Arguably took too long to approve vaccines, didn’t do any follow-up studies post-approval for vaccines or drugs (which caused FDA to miss issues such as waning vaccine effectiveness against infection and COVID rebounds). Also at-home tests, etc
3) CDC — the screwups in the first month of COVID-19 involving testing. Lying about masks.
4) Policy support. The government overdid it in economic “relief”; as a point of reference, the Federal Reserve should have stopped QE the day the stock market made a new high (Mid August 2020).
5) Granted too broad of emergency powers to the executive branch and left it in place for too long
For learning loss — the loss is generational and probably similar to what happened to China during the cultural revolution when schools were closed for a couple of years. 50 years on, that generation affected is still distinctive due to learning loss.
The PPE is usually replenished by those who have diluted the supply. Individual states should have kept their roving hospitals, ventilator supplies maintained instead of falling into disrepair.
An all hands and minds on deck should have been encouraged rather than repressed and censored. Repurposed, FDA approved drugs – one’s that were being successfully used in the early treatment of COVID – should have been welcomed, in order to increase the diversity of available treatments. Instead, they were repudiated, opening up a pathway for EUA approval of only one way to treat COVID – the experimental, expensive mRNA jabs.
Politics, media bias, social media manipulation should have been condemned. Conventional public health practices and standards should have been adhered to – including taking into consideration the mental, emotional, economic health of the country. This meant limiting business closures. Keeping schools open, especially after witnessing other countries demonstrate how non-infectious this virus was in young people. Sick people only should have been quarantined, worn masks and practiced social distancing, rather than grouping all people into the same type of confining circumstances. Churches should have remained open as a spiritual support system for people. Routine check-ups, surgeries should have gone on as usual.
Listen to floor nurses more, especially those directly involved with patient care.
Fauci and Birx should have been fired – early on – and replaced by physicians with more hands on medical experience, and no conflict of interest- such as lucrative roles in a Bill Gates enterprise.
The CDC should have had more oversight as to their erratic and misleading data dumps. The early modeling for the lethality was totally off, as were the case numbers taken from so many false positive results of the highly flawed and misused PSA tests. Basically fear was the driving force for this pandemic, as well as the stifling of voices who were better versed in treating this virus without destroying people’s families, businesses and lives.
In reading Steve’s prescription, however, for dealing with future pandemics, his is simply rinse and repeat most everything done in the prior government-approved COVID crisis, with probably the same results. That’s insane.
“By comparison Sweden is tiny and highly socially cohesive….”
Not sure if you are looking at trend during covid, or in general. Sweden is socially cohesive, and doesn’t have the travesty of family destruction.. Underappreciated, they take the teaching profession seriously.
Just out of curiosity, who has roving hospitals? I spent some time on a hospital ship, worked for a year in an ATH but have never heard of roving hospitals.
“Listen to floor nurses more, especially those directly involved with patient care.”
CO- I think that there were a lot of studies on the vaccines after they were released. Many, many more than we have on most drugs post release.
You have no idea how clueless that is do you? Floor nurses were involved in everything.
Steve
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavirus-california-mobile-hospitals-ventilators
Ahh, mobile. Mostly semantics but having worked in a mobile hospital no one would ever think of it as roving.
Steve