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Kitchen Table Kibitzing~ 2/25/23: A national reckoning on COVID-19 is already long overdue [1]

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Date: 2023-02-25  

As I have once again been beset by family commitments this week and (most notably) continued parental health issues that will take too much time to describe tonight, and don’t have much time to prepare anything to post here, I simply recommend this article authored by the editors of Scientific American, published on Friday, titled “Why the U.S. Needs a Formal Reckoning on the COVID Pandemic.”

The authors begin by noting that in the wake of several past major national tragedies, such as the 9/11 attacks and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, Congress has seen fit to hold a formal inquiry and investigation into determining what (if anything) went wrong, with a view toward hopefully not allowing history to repeat itself. It is well past time, they argue, for a similar inquiry into this nation’s disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some excerpts follow:

As the authors note, the list of patent failures that have never been seriously addressed or examined is quite long:

The failure to hold such an inquiry allows the opportunity for another pandemic — potentially a far more severe one — to wreak havoc on our nation.

The editorial somewhat plaintively — or archly, as you may interpret it — points out that the 9/11 Commission was responding to tragedy that claimed but a tiny fraction of the number of those who perished from this single virus and its variants.

The last truly successful national commission, the 9/11 Commission, was a bipartisan investigation into how nearly 3,000 people died on one awful day. Three years into the pandemic, more Americans now die every week from COVID on average than were lost because of the attack on 9/11. That’s more than 15,000 people gone in January alone, a still-brutal count that shows little sign of ending.

The authors conclude with a simple, rhetorical question: “If one death is a tragedy, what are more than one million dead?”

Most of us have over the past three years have been hit by COVID-19 personally, whether being infected themselves (some of us multiple times) or having to deal with the stress of a family member getting sick. Some of us are forced to be coping with it right now. There is no excuse — political or otherwise — for the government we ourselves as a nation have elected to ignore this country’s failure to address the past missteps in handling an issue of this magnitude, one that will doubtlessly hold a place in our memory for the rest of our lives. We certainly owe that much at least to future generations.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/25/2154857/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-2-25-23-A-national-reckoning-on-COVID-19-is-already-long-overdue

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