The truth is that the really big failure has already happened. This week Trump acknowledged the potential scale of this, though characteristically tried to take credit by claiming that modelling that "we commissioned" showed that without action 2.2 million Americans could die (in fact the model was from the Imperial College study, funded by UK medical and international development research bodies and a Saudi medical and educational foundation, and not commissioned by the US government at all). But the fact is that the IC team presented that model to the US Covid-19 taskforce on March 6th, almost a month earlier. And that is the real failure: allowing the virus to become endemic and embedded before they actually acted. This is just one illustration, and it largely caught my attention because of the attempt to take credit for something I knew they had not only not done themselves but had failed to act on when it was presented to them. It's not as if this was the first indication they had of the seriousness either. But it is that delay that is the key failure that all of the others merely exacerbate.
And while Trump has quoted that figure from the IC study now, he still seems to have trouble with the main conclusion of the paper. The important conclusion was that critical care capacity would be overwhelmed (many times over) in the absence of a strong and sustained suppression policy (and the fatality estimates in the model did not include the consequences of this). Although most states have now got round to instituting at least advisory orders, far too many waited until infections are clearly widespread and rapidly rising before acting. Some still haven't, even though they only have to look at neighbouring states to see what the result of that is. So there are two levels of failure here: failure by many State governments to act in time, and failure by the federal Government to step in when it's clear that some States are failing in their responsibilities.
Of course this whole business also acts as a speeded-up illustration of a much bigger problem. So many have preferred to protect "business as usual" until the problem became so large that it could not be ignored, by which time it is too late to avoid catastrophic consequences (because the administration now expect a death toll which any rational person would call catastrophic). This is a mirror of the response of most governments to the climate crisis, and this current crisis is small change by comparison (and I say that as someone who has a very vulnerable mother in a care home during this pandemic, so am not at all detatched from the potential consequences of this one). I don't expect Trump to learn that lesson, but hope that others will see what they are doing.
