Crisis experts: Lack of preparedness, coordination fueled unraveling of pandemic response

A coalition of experts in a newly published report found that the U.S. health care system was uniquely disadvantaged when it came to handling the COVID-19 pandemic, concluding the system was too divided, outdated and disorganized to efficiently take on the crisis.

The Covid Crisis Group, an organization formed in 2021 to map the landscape of the pandemic, published its report “Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report” this week, laying out a retrospective analysis of the outbreak.

In the report, the members of the Covid Crisis Group identified 10 lessons to take away from the pandemic as the U.S. approaches the end of its national public health emergency. Among these lessons were systemic issues that hampered the national response to what the group referred to as the “Covid war.”

While acknowledging “wondrous scientific knowledge” that was available to stakeholders, the group determined that “bad governance” stood in the way of applying said knowledge.

As noted in the report, the federal government’s Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) ran several exercises testing for pandemic preparedness about a year before the pandemic. The tests were called Crimson Contagion.

The exercises, however, did not account for asymptomatic spread and assumed that medicines to treat the outbreak would be immediately available, the group found.

On top of a lack of preparedness, experts from the group said that the U.S. had a 19th-century health care infrastructure that was not enough to address 21st-century problems like SARS-CoV-2.

“The CDC lives and breathes inside the old bones of the original 19th-century design. It was not ready to manage a national health emergency. It was never built to do that. It has neither the authority nor the readiness to play such a role,” they said in a statement.

The “patchwork” quilt of the U.S. health care landscape, with private and public health organizations lacking clear communication, also caused guidance on the pandemic to lag, according to the report.

These issues that affected the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic predated the Trump administration, the nonpartisan organization determined.

“Contrary to media stories, the federal government had no real playbook for how to contain the pandemic. It had ‘programs.’ It did not have preparedness,” they wrote. “It had, for example, no readiness to partner with private industry to make tests, no strategy for how to use the tests it had, and no structure to bring the FDA on board with what strategy it had.”

The organization’s final lesson learned from the pandemic was that preparation is key and the U.S. “must do better next time. Because there will be a next time.”

“The pandemic has been one of the major mass traumas suffered by humanity during the last one hundred years. Yet there remains a significant gap between the size of the crisis and the scale of the reforms. None of the reforms enacted thus far would have made a difference had they been in place in 2019. This report hopes to change that.”