You might feel like this coronavirus pandemic came out of nowhere,
closing down countries one by one.
But there have actually been warning signs for a long time.
This is something that many of us
believe was overdue and was imminent.
We're going to look at how previous virus outbreaks impacted the world
and ask whether the U.S. learned lessons from them.
The immediate response to a pandemic has a huge
impact on how the illness spreads.
Here are a few examples of where it went really wrong.
Take the 1918 Spanish flu.
It hit the U.S. during the final months of World War I.
It was actually misnamed the "Spanish flu"
because it was first reported in that country’s press,
which was free of the censorship rules that
prevented news coverage in the countries at war.
Officials didn’t want to lower morale during wartime.
So as the illness spread across the U.S., they said it was just the regular flu
and that there was nothing to worry about.
People stopped trusting authorities as
they saw friends and family die gruesome deaths.
Lack of trust led to further panic and fear,
and around 675,000 people died in the U.S.
The 1918 flu isn't the only outbreak that the U.S. failed to learn from.
I don’t want Americans to think AIDS
simply affects only certain groups.
AIDS affects all of us.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Regan was criticized
for his handling of the HIV outbreak in the U.S.
His administration was slow to announce the discovery of the virus.
Research into HIV treatments was not prioritized or adequately funded.
The disease was originally known as GRID -
gay-related-immune-deficiency - as it first surfaced among gay men.
A study which shows that the
lifestyle of some male
homosexuals has triggered an
epidemic of a rare form of cancer.
It also disproportionately affected racial and ethnic minorities.
Reagan didn’t even publicly say the word “AIDS” until 1985.
It will amount to over
half a billion dollars
that we have provided for
research on AIDS.
By then, over 12,000 Americans had died.
The death toll continued to climb for a decade until 1996.
And that year is significant because that's when life-changing antiretroviral therapies
first became widely available.
What brought about a transformation
in the response was technology
and political will and money.
But it was a long time between 1981 and 1996,
and HIV rose to be the third largest killer in American society.
Over 675,000 people have died from AIDS-related illnesses in the U.S.
since the outbreak began.
Some have compared these slow responses
to the United States’ response to COVID-19.
The HIV epidemic was characterized
by early inaction, then
a prompt reversal that led to the the development of antivirals and
other types of strategies.
Early inaction leads to more cases
and that's exactly the same,
the same principle.
And then you have the United States
playing catch-up to the virus
because of that.
Past experiences show that a fast, clear and direct approach
is the best way to tackle a health crisis.
But what happens when false information starts spreading alongside the virus?
So the U.S. hasn't learned from its own mistakes.
And it could also have picked up tips from other countries'
past mistakes in its handling of COVID-19.
In 2002, a new respiratory illness appeared
in the Chinese region of Guangdong.
SARS -
severe acute respiratory syndrome.
- Coming up with plans
to ease economic blows
from the killer virus SARS.
Now, initially, the Chinese government concealed
its existence globally and domestically.
The lack of transparency meant the virus spread freely.
History shows that during an outbreak,
it's vital to listen to science and focus on the facts.
It seems like that hasn’t really registered during this pandemic.
When I see the disinfectant,
where it knocks it out in a minute.
One minute. And is there a way
we can do something like that?
By injection inside or
almost a cleaning.
I was at a hospital the other night
where I think there were a few -
there were actually a few coronavirus
patients and I shook
hands with everybody.
This old problem around transparency is heightened
now that pretty much everyone has internet access.
A so-called “infodemic” of information overload is spreading on social media.
There's a lot of disinformation.
There's a lot of confusion, and a lot
of political competition around who's
who's to blame
and who's right and who's wrong that confuses the public health response
and complicates the ability to get
quality science and
quality public health knowledge
to the Americans who need that.
Researchers looking at health crises over the last few decades
raised the alarm for a potential global pandemic.
But was the U.S. listening?
We believed, I think, when we thought
about these threats, we thought
of them as ones that
could be contained outside our borders.
We didn't think that this was
something that was going to sweep into
our country with the speed that it has.
Take neighboring Canada, The 2003 SARS outbreak
affected the country relatively badly.
At least 43 of the global deaths were Canadians,
many of whom were health workers.
This prompted reports recommending more stringent advanced preparation
and stockpiles of protective equipment for health workers.
And on U.S. soil?
The Obama administration decided more prep was needed
as the Ebola outbreak rapidly developed in West Africa in 2014.
We have to put in place
an infrastructure,
not just here at home, but globally,
that allows us to see it quickly,
isolate it quickly,
respond to it quickly.
Sounds like a good idea, right?
But these changes hadn’t been implemented by
the time COVID-19 came around.
I think we were shocked to realize how
fragile and confused our supply lines are.
Protective gear, the testing kits, the reagents, the ventilators,
that all of these critical elements - we didn't have a system.
We weren't built with a system to
organize and direct those commodities
in any orderly fashion.
We left it to the market.
We left it to the states and the mayors
to organize, and it's been chaos.
But there is one thing that is crucial in preventing
a virus from spreading out of control.
Past health crises have taught us that tracking
the spread of disease is essential to containing it.
One of the things that really is a lesson
of any infectious disease outbreak
is the need for diagnostic testing.
Being able to quickly identify cases is really key to being able to actually know
that there's an outbreak occurring,
and being able to
intervene very early.
Back in 2016, the Obama administration reported that
the Ebola crisis could have been greatly reduced
if testing had been better earlier on.
But some countries have learned from their mistakes.
Case in point: South Korea.
South Korea’s biotech industry sprung into action
as soon as China released the sequence to COVID-19.
Their scientist-led companies invested in testing early on.
That meant they could quickly confirm who had the virus.
South Korea is one of the few countries that has
brought the COVID-19 outbreak under relative control.
A couple of years ago, they had
an explosive outbreak of Middle East
respiratory syndrome,
another coronavirus
that was really not handled
the best back then.
And they learned lessons from that, and they weren't going to allow that
to repeat with the new coronavirus.
And I think that's paid off for them.
And how exactly did South Korea make sure they were ready
the next time an outbreak came around?
They came to the conclusion that they
needed a national program
that would be supported by the public,
that would build very fast
detection and surveillance, that would
build basic health infrastructure,
that would be able to do the
isolation, quarantining, the contact tracing that's needed.
They had made the investments in their budgets over multiple years
and built up those. And it was
motivated by the shock experience
that they had with SARS and with MERS.
On the flip side, countries such as the U.S. have come under fire
for not having testing kits available quickly enough.
It’s pretty clear that some countries took on the lessons
from history to use in the COVID-19 outbreak,
and others didn't.
With over one and a half million cases
and over 90,000 of global deaths,
will this be the health crisis that teaches the U.S. how to prepare?
It's painful to see such huge mortality
and huge suffering and dislocation,
and to see our economy crashed
as a side injury to all of this.
And this will be a defining moment for our -
for this generation.
I think this is really quite historic,
and it's quite epic in its impacts, and it is going to change us.