COVID19: The Impact of the Early Failure to Respond

By: Patricia Salber MD, MBA (@docweighsin)

The well-documented COVID19 chapter Abramson’s book, Proof of Conspiracy, details our early failure to respond. Here’s why it matters.

More than 200,000 Americans have died of COVID. What could have been done differently? (photo source iStock)

This week, we mark a grim milestone. Deaths from the COVID19 topped 200,000. This is more than any other country in the world. It is also more than the number of people who died in the Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars combined.

So, it seems to me that this is exactly the right time to review what is known about the earliest days of the pandemic in an effort to understand how we got to the horrible place that we are now. To do this, I turned to the chapter on COVID19 in Seth Abramson’s masterful piece of curatorial journalism, Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump*.

The Proof Series

This is the third (and Abramson says final) book in his Proof Series. The other two are Proof of Collusion and Proof of Conspiracy. Now, you may be wondering why I would read a book that is based on news that has already been reported by respected news outlets. After all, I have been reading, watching, and listening to the same news non-stop ever since Trump took office.