LESSONS FROM THE COVID WAR

A hard look at widespread failed governance during a global pandemic.

The Trump administration’s dismal response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been reported in numerous books and articles. The findings presented in this riveting analysis synthesize and go far beyond that material. The 34 members of the Covid Crisis Group, directed by Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and including prominent scientists, scholars, physicians, and public health experts, conducted 195 listening sessions with more than 270 participants, representing a broad range of expertise. Also drawing on their own background research, they offer an authoritative assessment of “the world war” against Covid-19, particularly in America. “No country’s performance,” they have found, “is more disappointing than that of the United States.” Although they agree that Trump “was a comorbidity” in the fight, his incompetence was not the only obstacle. The nation, they assert, “faced a twenty-first-century challenge with a system designed for nineteenth-century threats.” At the federal level, “confusion and friction” in myriad departments obscured “who was in charge of what problems.” Action plans emerged as “a jargon laden catalog of problems” and “statements of goals,” with “little in it about what people would actually do.” When the Trump administration threw responsibility to the states, it fell onto “a patchwork quilt of decentralized, detached, autonomous, and often contradictory operation plans and policies.” The nation sorely lacked a network of biomedical surveillance, which would have tracked the progress of the outbreak, testing results, and treatment protocols. Compared with Germany and South Korea, the U.S. evinced “splintered crisis management.” As the contributors clearly show, “what the Covid war exposed, what every recent crisis has exposed—even in Iraq and Afghanistan—is the erosion of operational capabilities in much of American civilian governance.” Crafting a system of national health security is crucial, where executive leadership is “aided by a much stronger core of trained, deployable public health regulars.”

An urgent, meticulously documented argument for better preparedness in future crises.