Handling the coronavirus crisis

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America had no trouble hitting the appalling milestone of 20 million coronavirus cases, but reaching the federal government’s own target of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020 proved a huge problem. Just under three million Americans were vaccinated by the time the crystal-encrusted ball dropped in New York’s almost-deserted Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve to mark the end of a hellish year. Now US distribution of the vaccine is being routinely described as “chaos”, with criticism that inept officials are “botching” efforts.

More than 10,000 people died in the US in the last three days of 2020 alone, to bring the national death toll close to 350,000 so far, including the worst 24-hour toll of the whole pandemic when more than 3,700 people died last Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University data. So vaccines are the big hope for fighting the outbreak. But experts are warning that hundreds of thousands more deaths are possible if the inoculation process doesn’t get quickly and solidly on track.

Public health in the US is chronically under-funded. Local and state officials had long warned federal authorities that they required more than $8bn in additional money to build an infrastructure to get shots into arms. Instead, the White House gave states just $340m for vaccination preparations. For months, some Congressional legislators chafed at providing more money for vaccine distribution. It wasn’t until last Sunday, when the delayed new coronavirus aid bill was signed by Trump, that an additional $8bn in funding came through, STAT News explained.

More money to states won’t fully solve the problem, however. Experts said that a unified, national plan is necessary to address logistical snags. “Not enough doses have been produced and distributed,” said Lee, who is also executive director of public health informatics, computational and operations research at CUNY. “Of the doses that have been distributed, the majority have not been administered. They’re either getting [caught] up in the supply chain ... or not getting administered, which is not too surprising, because there hasn’t been a clear, coordinated national plan.”

Hundreds of thousands more US Covid deaths possible amid vaccine chaos | Coronavirus | The Guardian

• The usual suspects, they simply are not up to the task (or basically any task, for that matter)..
  
• See here for a look behind the curtains at how political Trump appointee's kneecap professional services like the Dept. of HHS.