Analysis and Critique of a Major Event

Overview of the Event 

The event selected for this report is the current global pandemic associated with the coronavirus, otherwise referred to as Covid-19. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a global pandemic attributed to the high number of people that had been affected by the virus and the public health crisis that it was causing (Carroll, 2020). The virus, which began in the city of Wuhan, China, has spread to 160 countries around the world, affecting over half a million people out of whom 25,000 have died as a direct result of complications. Although it began in China, the United States is currently leading with the highest number of the infected recorded, which is a little over 92,000 and more than 1,300 deaths. The virus has impacted the country in a significant way leading to the decision to impose a lockdown as a way of controlling its spread across the United States.

The spread of the virus shows a significant failure of the United States government in terms of its emergency response; thus, resulting in a high number of people being exposed to the condition. The crisis reveals that although the United States is among some of the top-rated countries in terms of its economic development, it faces a key challenge regarding its emergency preparedness (Tufekci, 2020). The rate at which the virus is spreading shows that the country was ill-prepared to deal with an emergency of this magnitude. Additionally, the crisis also exposes a deep-rooted dysfunctional and reckless administration that is not able to handle such pandemics in an expected manner. The focus of this critique is to examine the event focusing on all phases of emergency management to provide recommendations for improvement in some of the lacking areas.

Mitigation 

As part of its mitigation efforts for Covid-19, the United States federal government, under the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS), embarked on a campaign aimed at educating the public on some of the ways to reduce risks of exposure. The campaigns focused on promoting the need for people to embrace social distancing, which means that people should be at least one meter apart, engage in handwashing or use of sanitizers, and avoid touching one's face (Carroll, 2020). The campaigns were adopted as part of the mitigation efforts taking into account how the virus spread from one person to another. Another key strategic effort that the federal government took involved testing and quarantining persons that were coming into the country at all entry and border points of including airports, ports, and borders. The expectation was that this would help minimize the possibility of the virus gaining entry into the country and reduce its rate of spreading from one person to another.

Preparedness 

The United States also undertook several steps to build on its emergency preparedness focusing on Covid-19 as a notable health crisis that the country is facing. The first step involved releasing emergency preparedness funds for each state to enhance their capacity to prepare for a possible spread of the virus. That included ensuring that hospitals were well equipped with an adequate number of beds to accommodate the high number of people that would be anticipated. The second step taken as part of the preparedness involved the formation of a committee, which has a key responsibility to review the country's approach to dealing with the virus and recommending possible steps to take (Milman, 2020). The committee has been rather proactive in providing relevant steps that the country ought to consider during the crisis, including the idea of imposing a ban on international travelers coming into the country.

The committee, which was set up by the federal government, has been working closely with health teams in different states to ensure that the measures each state is taking focus on the overall objective to deal with the pandemic. The third step that the federal government took as part of its preparedness involved the training of health workers, who would be of great importance in dealing with the pandemic (Milman, 2020). WHO provided governments with guidelines on areas that health workers need to prepare as a way of improving their capacity to deal with the pandemic much more effectively. The United States government used these guidelines to create training and development programs for health workers across multiple states. The guidelines focused on areas such as isolation of patients, testing and diagnosis, and effective management measures for the condition.

Response 

When evaluating the response by the United States towards Covid-19, it can be argued that indeed it has failed to result in a situation where the country finds itself reeling with negative effects arising from the disease. Tufekci (2020) indicates that one of the key reasons why the United States has failed in terms of its response to Covid-19 is because the government did not understand the complexity of the problem while it was affecting China. Before the crisis, President Donald Trump’s administration had cut down funding in some of the essential health services and research, which exposes the country to serious health effects. The administration downplayed the severity of the virus and its implications for the thousands of people that it had affected in China. Consequently, this affected the government’s response to the pandemic exposing its health system to the negative effects of a pandemic of this magnitude.

Another key aspect to consider when evaluating the response by the United States government is the fact that for the entire month of February, it failed to engage in dialogue with China on the implication that the virus is likely to have on its population. On January 29, the Chinese government shifted from a deny-and-censor strategy to an open communication strategy aimed at highlighting the impacts of the virus (Bryant, 2020). China admitted that it was facing a crisis due to Covid-19, which had a significant impact on its health system. On its part, the United States failed to consider the idea of having to engage with the Chinese government to get a clear understanding of the disease. Instead, the government remained firm on the fact that this was a disease that would not affect the country, as it was well-prepared to deal with any outcomes. However, the current situation shows that indeed the government’s response paved the way for its failure in mitigating this health issue.

Recovery 

An evaluation of recovery efforts that have been put in place, one of the key aspects to note is that the United States has invoked a state of emergency in the country, which gives authority to the federal and state governments to take proactive steps to help deal with the crisis. Some of the state governments have focused much of their attention towards imposing a lockdown aimed at limiting interactions between people arguing that this is one of the key steps to dealing with Covid-19 (McCann, 2020). Imposing a lockdown means that people are expected to remain at home to avoid instances where the virus is spread from one person to another. In some states, governors have only focused on partial lockdown, which has been viewed as being noneffective because many of the people are exposed to Covid-19 through close contact with those affected by the virus. The best possible recovery step that the government may take involves placing all states under a lockdown to help increase effectiveness in promoting social distancing among the people. Although this would help reduce the number of people infected by the virus, it may have a serious economic impact considering that all companies and industries will have to shut down temporarily.

Recommendations 

A review of the phases discussed above exposes several areas that the federal government needs to consider as part of improving its capacity in dealing with the health issues currently. The first area of improvement involves funding for essential health services and research. The analysis shows that the government lacks in the area of funding, considering that it does not consider health service delivery and research as an area of priority (Bryant, 2020). The implication that this has had is that it has created a situation where the government found itself reeling from negative effects of an epidemic that it would have prevented way in advance. In the future, the government needs to consider health as one of the key priority areas, which would be of great value towards ensuring that it avails adequate funding to improve on its capacity to deal with such epidemics.

The second area of improvement is inter-government communication and integration as a way of improving the overall capacity to deal with issues beforehand. In this case, the United States government failed to build on its relationship with China as a way of trying to get a clear understanding of the virus before it had spread (McCann, 2020). Consequently, this resulted in a situation where the virus spread rapidly irrespective of the United States downplaying its overall implications to the country. The outcome is that the government showed laxity in how it handled any information that it received regarding the virus. The last area of improvement is in general emergency preparedness. The Covid-19 epidemic has exposed a serious lack of effectiveness in emergency management and preparedness attributed to the high number of people that have been exposed to the virus. The government may need to reevaluate its emergency preparedness plan as a way of ensuring that it maintains its effectiveness in dealing with emergencies and disasters.

References 

Bryant, N. (2020). Coronavirus: What this crisis reveals about US- and its president. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52012049

Carroll, A. E. (2020). This Is How We Can Beat the Coronavirus. The Atlantic . https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/how-we-beat-coronavirus/608389/

McCann, A. (2020). U.S. Lags in Coronavirus Testing After Slow Response to Outbreak. New York Times . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/us/coronavirus-testing-data.html

Milman, O. (2020). Coronavirus in America: why the US has struggled to tackle a growing crisis. The Guardian . https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/24/coronavirus-america-donald-trump-crisis

Tufekci, Z. (2020). It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong. The Atlantic . https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-really-doomed-americas-coronavirus-response/608596/