During my childhood, my grandmother’s greatest delight was to leave our bungalow in the Hispanic neighborhood of Rosewood to visit the old Spanish settlement centered at Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles. There we would eat enchiladas and tacos, and I learned how to fold tortillas, so that the butter would not run. My grandmother was not wealthy, but she was proud and intelligent. She was a virtual dictionary. When I did something particularly egregious, she would call me a “nincompoop”, a word to which I am endeared to this day. Nincompoop is derived from the Latin phrase, “non compos mentis” meaning “not of right mind”. The “poop” part of nincompoop may be borrowed from the French “poop” meaning “fart”. Thus, the word conveys “not of right mind fart”.
Farts have different qualities, but, in common parlance, the word fart applied to persons means “causing notice, of little substance”. Nincompoops do not read and do not comprehend. Words neither match deeds nor deeds, words. Traditionally, nincompoops were singular, but today often are found in groups called committees and task forces. Were my grandmother alive today, she would find myriad examples of nincompoops in roles of political importance.
I engaged this digression to find words adequate to describe the criminal arrogance evident in US preparation for the coronavirus. America’s “exceptionalism” may soon face an unwelcome test. The corona virus is exceptionally transmissible, persistent, and often deadly. When allowed to run amok, the corona virus can paralyze whole cities and communities for months with disruption to lives and livelihoods. The loss of life and income, interruption of employment and human relations has a long tail. Epidemic contagion is best avoided. Nowhere is this truer than in the US with its individualistic culture and factional authorities.
The experience of China to control the virus provides invaluable lessons to nations that wish to avoid the worst of what China experienced. The results of China’s experience and the lessons learned is documented in the “Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)”.
What distinguishes the nincompoop policies responsible for US lack of preparation to corona virus invasion is that few, if any, recommendations formulated by the WHO mission were followed by US authorities. The lessons and recommendations ought to have been evident early in the history of the virus to the consultants and bureaucrats that populate the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the Department of Health and Human Services, and associated agencies. No doubt it was evident to some, but somehow what ought to have been known and appreciated was subverted into actions and policies which, in retrospect, appear designed to encourage distribution of the coronavirus rather than contain it.
Perhaps the most important first step in the control of the corona virus was to have a reliable test. Even when authorities attempted to “do the right thing” and identify suspected carriers of the coronavirus, the test concocted by the Center of Disease Control (CDC) yielded unacceptable false positive and false negative results, so the test was untrustworthy.
Not only was the test unreliable, but few tests were produced. Even though the CDC had at least six weeks to two months to prepare, only a relative handful of tests were available to states. In California, according to Governor Newsom, only 200 kits were available for testing to test more than 8000 Californians who had suspected contact with the virus. Similar discrepancies exist in every large state. Contrast this with the testing done in Hong Kong, Singapore, and China where literally hundreds of thousands of tests are given to identify carriers numbered in the hundreds.
The CDC dropped the ball. The CDC did not do effective screening. I hope that I am wrong, but I expect a large increase in the distribution and number of corona virus carriers, assuming tests for the virus become available. The jaw-dropping details are found in the ProPublica investigation “Key Missteps at the CDC Have Set Back Its Ability to Detect the Potential Spread of Coronavirus.”
Thank heaven for investigative journalism in an era when truth tellers in the public interest are ignored, bullied, or jailed. I pray the authors, Caroline Chen, Marshall Allen, Lexi Churchill and Isaac Arnsdorf, receive recognition for the service they have performed in bringing to public attention the current status of US preparedness for what is a dire threat to American lives and livelihoods. The gratitude and esteem I feel for these brave investigative reporters heartens me to realize that not all are nincompoops, and that our country has hope.