As the world tries to find an end to the lockdowns,
it's important to go back to the beginning.
President Trump did take steps to keep the virus out.
When I learned about the gravity of it,
was sometime just prior to closing the country to China.
But there were holes in his travel bans.
And it took six weeks before he ended travel from Europe,
the other hotspot.
It's going to disappear.
One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear.
During this time the virus spread largely undetected within America's borders.
Why wasn't more done to stop it?
Let's start by looking at the big picture.
The main strategy for mitigating spread
has been to lock down communities.
China did it in Wuhan and then the whole of Hubei province.
Then we saw Italy do it in the North and soon the whole of the country.
Some have compared response times
in relation to first cases or first deaths.
But to factor in population size,
we actually want to find the date when a country
had one death per million residents due to Covid-19.
And those points were reached at different times in various countries.
We can compare how quickly countries reacted
by putting those dates as Day 1 on the timeline.
Germany, France and the UK locked down within days,
learning their lessons from Italy,
which took six days to lock down the entire country.
The US, however, still hasn't declared a national lockdown
more than 45 days later.
So if you look at what's going on in this country,
I just don't understand why we're not doing that.
We really shouldn't be.
So why didn't the US act sooner?
In the end, most states did issue stay-at-home orders,
covering 92% of the US population.
But as this chart shows,
some states took action much faster than others.
We'll look at that in more detail in a moment.
There are practical reasons for the different approaches.
It's a big country, with some places hit much harder
by the outbreak than others.
Plus, power is not as centralized in the US.
So a national lockdown is not as easy to do.
But the main reason why the US missed an opportunity
to get ahead of the virus was a lack of information
on how bad the outbreak really was.
On January 20th and 21st, South Korea in the US confirmed their first case.
We have a totally under control.
It's one person coming in from China,
and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine.
Four days later, the CDC had developed a test kit and sought FDA approval,
while South Korea was already shipping its kits to labs across country.
12 days after that, the CDC finally followed suit,
while South Korea was already developing a faster test and deploying that.
Looks like by April, you know, in theory when it gets a little warmer,
it miraculously goes away. I hope that's true.
Two days later, the CDC acknowledged that its tests were flawed,
and labs had to send results back to Atlanta.
When you have 15 people,
and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be
down to close to zero.
That's a pretty good job we've done.
By late February, nearly three of the more than 100 public labs
had a working CDC test.
They're there. They have the tests and the tests are beautiful.
Anybody that needs a test gets a test.
By early March, and six weeks since the first case was detected,
just 3,000 Americans have been tested.
One in 100,000 residents, compared to 342 in South Korea.
I call it the unseen, the unseen enemy, you call it...
there's a thousand different terms for it.
But what it snuck up on us.
In mid March, the US had tested 31 people per 100,000 residents.
And while the US caught up and
surpassed South Korea's rate of testing on April 15,
those initial delays combined with a message coming from the President
had serious consequences for the US response.
Without good data from testing, US states were essentially flying blind
throughout February and early March.
If I get corona, I get corona.
At the end of the day, I'm not gonna let it stop me from partying.
As life went on largely as normal.
The virus was spreading throughout the US.
We're in very good shape.
People think that goes away in April.
People are getting better.
We're going down not up.
And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.
You have the flu you recuperate.
35,000 people on average die each year from the flu.
Maybe we have to step up our work on the flu
because when you lose that many people. That's something.
Having regularly down-played the threat,
President Trump declared a national emergency on March 13th.
We are urging every state to set up emergency operation centers effective immediately.
Three days later, the White House issued its social distancing guidelines.
On March 22nd, New York reported 100 deaths due to Covid.
So how did US states respond to the worsening situation here?
Using the one death in a million measure again,
so we can compare states with different populations,
you can see that New York, the epicenter of the outbreak,
shut down after four days.
New Jersey could see what was happening to its neighbour
and brought in restrictions after two days.
Louisana, a hot spot thanks to Mardi Gras, took six days.
These states reacted quickly,
going into lockdown several days before reaching that grim milestone.
in a bid to contain the outbreak.
There are other areas that just aren't affected or they're affected very little.
And why would we close down 100% of the country?
Yet these Southern states did have deaths from Covid-19
and still waited much longer to order statewide shutdowns.
It took Georgia and South Carolina two full weeks
before they ordered residents to stay at home.
While Democratic governors shut their states down within 2.5 days
after seeing their first in 1 million deaths.
Republican governors waited more than a week longer.
Nowhere in the world has responded perfectly to this pandemic.
But other countries have succeeded in keeping their death tolls down.
In contrast more often Americans have died from Covid-19
than were killed in the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined.
In those early weeks, the US missed opportunities
to contain the spread and save more lives.