Keynote Presentation: The American Response to COVID-19: what went right, what went wrong

The United States has had the worst response to COVID-19 among any country in the world. We are approaching nearly 200K deaths and more than 6 million known infections. The US government’s response to the pandemic from early on was a mixture of denial and incompetence. This includes a failure to set up an effective testing infrastructure to let the nation identity who was infected and who was not; downplaying the seriousness of the infection like comparing it with the flu when everyone knew it was far more deadly; the large campaign of misinformation through platforms like Facebook and much of the misinformation being augmented by our federal political leaders has led to a dramatically uneven response across the nation. As we look towards the fall and winter, despite progress on therapeutics and vaccines on the horizon, we will need a coordinated and effective federal response if we are to avoid hundreds of thousands of people dying from this disease.

Learning Objectives:

1. To understand the role of the US federal government in testing and other disease containment strategies

2. To understand how US federalism led to a diversity of responses and outcomes in this pandemic