Part two of a two-part series.
For anyone tracking the growing number of COVID-19 cases, both in the U.S. and worldwide, it’s easy to focus on the negatives, but there are plenty of positives, beyond the economic factors we’ve mentioned.
COVID-19 cases by continent.
Greater healthcare awareness. Because of the pandemic, Americans have greater awareness about healthcare. Hopefully, this increased awareness will continue even after the pandemic.
Last year, only 37.1% of Americans received flu shots, even though the shot is covered by health insurance and shots are readily available at pharmacies as well as doctors’ offices. No one wants to be susceptible to both COVID-19 and the flu. Will more Americans have flu vaccines this year?
During the pandemic, most of us have practiced better hygiene. We don’t just wash our hands. We wash them frequently, scrubbing them for at least 20 seconds. We use hand sanitizers. We sneeze into our elbows.
We look forward to no longer having to wear a mask in public, but hopefully other positive healthcare trends will continue even when the pandemic ends.
Greater wariness of China. The pandemic has highlighted yet another reason to be wary of China, where lying, stealing technology, hacking and other offenses have made the country a disreputable business partner.
President Trump has banned the use of some Chinese technology, imposed tariffs and sanctions, and taken other steps to improve China’s behavior. But Democratic challenger Joe Biden has also acknowledged that, “The United States does need to get tough on China.”
“Whoever wins the presidential election, one thing is clear,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “The U.S. has turned a corner in its relations with China and is likely to maintain a harder line.”
Japan, Australia and India are also taking a harder line on China, and China’s relations with the European Union have also soured.
American government, as well as American businesses, are likely to be more cautious — and hopefully more self-sufficient — in the coming years.
Better preparation for the next crisis. We’ve lived through other crises. The Cuban missile crisis brought us to the brink of nuclear war. The assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were times of despair. The Iranian hostage crisis, 9/11, the Great Recession and Hurricane Katrina were difficult to bear.
We’d had other pandemics and healthcare crises, including those caused by AIDS, SARS, H1N1, Ebola and Legionnaires disease.
In many cases, we’ve learned from these crises. The 2002 SARS outbreak led, for example, to the crisis standards of care (CSC) initially developed by the Institute of Medicine in 2009.
Hopefully, we’ll learn from this crisis as well and, as a result, be better prepared for the next one. Among the changes we can expect — and this may be wishful thinking — a more cohesive plan, a Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) that will be well-stocked and an update to information systems used by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to respond to pandemics.
Before the pandemic, there were plenty of plans in place throughout the government to handle a crisis. But the COVID-19 response is divided among more than 2,000 government agencies at the federal, state and local level, according to the Cato Institute. The system needs to be streamlined, so that instead of “dozens” of plans, there’s one fully integrated plan.
The shortage of masks, ventilators and other medical supplies was due to the depletion of the SNS, which was created under President Bill Clinton, because of concerns about bioterrorism. Initially used to stockpile antitoxins and vaccines, President George W. Bush added medical equipment in 2003 and ensured that medicine in the stockpile was kept up to date.
“Unfortunately, the H1N1 epidemic depleted the SNS’s inventory of masks and other equipment,” according to the Cato Institute, “and neither President Obama nor President Trump expended the political capital needed to obtain sufficient funds to replenish it.”
The CDC, which has primary responsibility for responding to pandemics, was “not up to the task” when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, according to the Cato Institute. Its “decades‐old notification system” could not handle the information needed to screen Americans returning from China, according to The New York Times.
Somehow, we’ve survived our share of crises. And thrived. Given the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can only hope that the lessons learned make future crises less burdensome.