How Coronavirus Is Testing The U.S. Federal Government

The Coronavirus is spreading around the world and some countries are taking drastic measures to try to stop its advance. Tonight the Italian

government

shut down the entire country. The central bank has come up with a plan to deep clean China's cash. Governments around the world are now debating how far they should go to stop its spread. While the scope and scale of the virus here in the US continues to grow, the US

federal

government

faces the challenge of containing a widespread outbreak. The burden of preparing to protect ourselves falls on the

federal

government. That's why we have it.

The World Health Organization has reported more than 160 thousand cases of the new

coronavirus

responsible for the disease called COVID-19 worldwide as of March 16. If we look at the curves of the outbreaks, we will see that they reach great peaks and then go down. What we have to do is flatten it. The impact of the

coronavirus

is rippling through the global economy and global stock markets, prompting authorities such as the Federal Reserve to enact emergency measures not seen since the financial crisis. We saw a risk to the economy's prospects and decided to act. More than 80,000 cases of the virus have been reported in China since mid-January.

The Chinese government implemented measures such as mandatory regional quarantines for tens of millions of people to try to prevent it from spreading further. The US government declared a national emergency and imposed mandatory quarantines for the first time in decades, as more than 4,000 people have been exposed to the virus. We haven't had a true federally sponsored quarantine in over 50 years and we are in unprecedented territory. So what can the US government do to contain an outbreak? And what lessons have you learned from past pandemics? Some experts have compared the Corona virus to the 1918 flu pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu.

One reason for this is that both have very high mortality rates. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, mortality rates hovered around 2 percent. That means the disease killed about 2 percent of all infected people. By comparison, normal flu strains today have a mortality rate of about 0.1 percent. Early estimates from the World Health Organization have found the COVID-19 mortality rate to be around 3.4 percent. This is not just the flu. It's probably 10 times more deadly than the flu. These figures have caused some to worry that the coronavirus pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic. The Spanish flu killed more than 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 in the United States.

United States, making it the deadliest flu of the last century. In total, an estimated 500 million people were infected with the virus, a third of the world's population. The Spanish flu occurred in three waves: the spring of 1918, the fall of 1918, and the spring and winter of 1919. And the U.S. government had limited resources to combat it. The country was suffering from a shortage of doctors and nurses after World War I, and an estimated 30 percent of all American doctors were involved in military service. The federal government approved a budget of $1 million in 1918, equivalent to more than $16 million today to hire doctors and nurses.

In 1918, there were no laboratory tests that could detect the virus and no vaccines to help prevent flu infection. So government officials turned largely to so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions. These included measures such as isolation, quarantine and limits on public gatherings. Police patrolled the streets wearing masks, schools were closed and public events were cancelled. Many of these non-pharmaceutical interventions were not instituted at the federal level, but by state and local governments. But despite some of these measures, fear and panic spread throughout the United States. Meanwhile, local officials were not always transparent about the severity of the disease. In Chicago, the hospital mortality rate reached thirty-nine point eight percent in 1918.

However, the city's public health commissioner proclaimed that worry kills more people than the epidemic. This lack of communication and transparency led to distrust and even more panic and serves as an important lesson for future outbreaks. An analysis of the 1918 epidemic by the Institute of Medicine put it this way: When managing any crisis, it is absolutely crucial to maintain credibility. Giving false assurances is the worst thing you can do. Advances have made it much better and will probably help us prevent something like the 1918 flu pandemic from happening to the world again. But we still have to take appropriate steps and there are some common sense things people can do.

Today, the federal government has a chain of systems in place in the event of a pandemic. Here's how that response should play out per standard protocol. The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, leads the way by overseeing a network of other agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health. Health (NIH). The households also manage the Strategic National Stockpile, which is the largest supply of pharmaceuticals, masks and other medical supplies in the country. It's basically like, you might think, a FEMA-led hurricane response.

But in this case, HHS leads and everyone else in the department is there to support HHS in responding to the country's public health and medical needs. Normally, the first thing HHS would do is declare a public health emergency. This frees up some public funding for health emergencies. The department may also issue travel guidelines. Experts call this first phase containment. HHS did this with the coronavirus in January, when it was gaining momentum in mainland China. The Corona virus presents a public health emergency in the United States. Containment action one. So we try to make sure that anyone who has a disease doesn't infect anyone else and, if possible, we try to keep the disease out of the U.S.

The next phase is called mitigation. That's where the CDC takes center stage in setting guidelines for hospitals, schools and businesses across the country. The agency works with state and local health departments by sending test kits and explaining procedures to identify infected patients. In mid-March, the CDC recommended that people and organizations cancel events with 50 or more people due to the Corona virus pandemic. Congress could also authorize funding to states for public health emergencies. Ultimately, the state and local people are the front line. And they've gotten funding over the years from the federal government, over $600 million a year to help them prepare in case this kind of thing happens.

State and local officials must decide whether to take the most extreme measure when it comes to combating an epidemic. Impose a quarantine. The federal government has the authority to impose quarantines as part of the Constitution, but this primarily extends to people entering through U.S. borders or traveling between states. Ultimately, decisions about things like quarantines and school closures, business closures, will be a state and local decision, not a decision made in Washington. So we can look at recent epidemics like smallpox, SARS, or Ebola to get a glimpse of the different federal government responses today. First, let's think about the smallpox outbreak of the 1950s and 1960s.

Warning: These images showing the cost of the disease are graphic. It killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone. The last time the U.S. government issued a federally sponsored quarantine was to help contain smallpox. Quarantines were used as part of a broader global effort to combat the disease. Mass vaccination campaigns were crucial to the fight, and eventually the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1980. We did it with smallpox through vaccines. We just covered and covered the world with vaccines until we got all the cases. Then came SARS in the early 2000s. The disease spread rapidly throughout Asia, infecting more than 8,000 people with a mortality rate of 9.6 percent.

The Chinese government issued a large-scale quarantine to try to contain the virus, but it didn't exactly work. In China, during the SARS epidemic, when the government announced a quarantine zone, 250,000 people fled. Well, that doesn't help the epidemic. Instead, what worked to contain SARS was a combination of travel warnings, detailed reporting of new cases, and close collaboration between laboratories and scientists around the world. More recently, there was the Ebola epidemic from 2014 to 2016. The virus that began in Africa highlighted the need for US government officials to work with international partners to combat the disease at its source. More than 2,000 CDC staff were deployed to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone during the epidemic.

President Barack Obama appointed Ron Klain to oversee the government's response to Ebola in 2014. In the fight against Ebola, we had 11 federal agencies involved in a major way, 17 involved in some way that included all of our agencies on the international side , the state of defense, USAID. fight the disease abroad and included many efforts at home. The US government's response to the coronavirus pandemic has been controversial. Some have criticized the Trump administration for reacting slowly and failing to communicate the measures it is taking to contain the outbreak. White House officials are increasingly frustrated by what they see as President Trump's persistent attempts to downplay the threat posed by the outbreak.

In March, Congress authorized an $8.3 billion spending package to combat the coronavirus. It included billions of dollars for vaccine research and preparation efforts. The CDC has faced criticism for distributing faulty test kits and slowing down local efforts to test for the virus. Meanwhile, health officials are still trying to understand exactly how it spreads. Companies have encouraged workers to stay home and limit travel, while some states have even banned large public gatherings. The idea behind social distancing is that we sort of give up on the fact that we're just going to stop this disease, but we try to slow it down, we try to slow it down.

In some ways it gives us time before we can receive a specific treatment for COVID-19 and ultimately a vaccine. Experts agree that clear communication from the federal government and social distancing measures are key to containing this outbreak. To help prevent the spread of COVID-19, the CDC recommends taking common sense measures such as washing your hands, avoiding touching your eyes, nose, or mouth frequently, staying home when you are sick, and covering your coughs or sneezes. What are my ethical and social responsibilities to my family, my neighbors, my community and my nation? And we need to recover that sense of the common good.