America Wasn't Ready for Coranavirus

Early takeaways from the country's response to a pandemic.

- By Ronald Bailey, Damon Root, Boehm, Nick Gillespie, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, and Scott Shackford

Red Tape Stymied Testing and Made the Coronavirus Pandemic Worse

RONALD BAILEY

THE UNITED STATES is home to the most innovative biotech companies and university research laboratories in the world. That should have provided us with a huge advantage with respect to detecting and monitoring emerging cases of COVID-19 caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Public health officials had the opportunity to slow, if not contain, the outbreak: By tracing the contacts of diagnosed people and quarantining those who in turn tested positive, they could have severed the person-to-person chains of disease transmission.

South Korea demonstrates that such a campaign can work. While both countries detected their first cases of COVID-19 on January 20, the trajectories in the U.S. and South Korea have since sharply diverged. By the beginning of March, South Korea had “flattened the curve”—that is, substantially reduced the number of people being diagnosed each day with coronavirus infections—whereas the United States was still struggling to do so when this article went to press six weeks later.