Barcelona: A boy rides his bicycle beside his father as they walk past a Covid-19 graffiti.—AFP

WASHINGTON: As coronavirus cases in the United States come close to a million on Sunday, Americans are trying to understand why the world’s superpower failed to curb the outbreak.

US health agencies monitoring the outbreak of this deadly respiratory disease reported that by Sunday afternoon the virus had infected almost 975,000 people in this country and killed almost 55,500.

An official study, unveiled at the White House earlier this week, claimed that the summer heat and humidity might kill the virus. But other health experts warned they had no specific data to determine how Covid-19 will react to higher temperatures.

Monitoring agencies warned that actual numbers could be much higher than reported due to testing shortages.

“We are living in a failed state,” declared the prestigious Atlantic magazine. “When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly.”

The magazine also blamed “a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy and a divided and distracted public” for America’s failure to curb the outbreak.

The Politico, a news outlet devoted to American politics, blamed decades of lethargy and unwillingness to spend on public health for this failure.

“When the pandemic finally came, the team that had prepared their careers for it were working for a president unwilling and unready to act,” The Politico commented.

The report claimed that officials who briefed President Donald Trump on the outbreak, “found that the president and his political aides didn’t share (their) urgency and even interpreted (their) views as alarmist.”

The article concluded that “there were flaws in the US response, even as the administration publicly touted its success.”

The Washington Post recalled that in January, when coronavirus cases were first reported, President Trump dismissed the threat as “one person coming in from China” and declared that he had “it totally under control.”

The newspaper claimed that the president’s intelligence community had been warning him for weeks about the coming threat but he ignored their warnings.

“The consequences of this deadly state of denial have been catastrophic for pandemic victims and the US economy,” the Post concluded.

Looking at the reasons behind this failure, The New York Times noted that President Trump’s response to the virus was “colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the ‘Deep State’” — medical experts and health officials whose expertise “might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.”

The newspaper claimed that decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China.

“The virus at first took a back seat to a desire not to upset Beijing during trade talks, but later the impulse to score points against Beijing left the world’s two leading powers further divided as they confronted one of the first truly global threats of the 21st century,” NYT commented.

Published in Dawn, April 27th, 2020