【英文】美国抗疫报告：彻头彻尾的大灾难（253页）

英文研究报告 2022年02月18日 08:45 管理员

The pages to follow chronicle the path of the COVID-19 pandemic from January 2020 to January 2021. The narrative that unfolds will follow the month-by-month and week-by-week experience of the United States and the American people as they lived (and in too many instances died) during the unfolding of a public health crisis that as the year progressed became a truly unmitigated disaster. The first chapters set the stage for this narrative. The nature of the new virus and its emergence as a pandemic of historic proportions will be explained. An assessment of American efforts to enhance its preparedness for pandemic threats will be provided to give some context for evaluating the American 2020 response to COVID-19. The cultural and political contexts that would influence the American response, and not for the better, will be discussed as well. The details of the American response during 2020 will be shown to have constituted the story of a great failure, perhaps the greatest and most deadly failure in the nation’s history.

To be fair, nearly every country struggled to contain the spread of COVID-19, and they all made mistakes along the way. But one country, the United States, stood alone as the only affluent nation to have suffered severe and sustained outbreaks for the entire year in 2020. Two general factors, one cultural and the other political, account for America’s great failure. On the cultural side, the United States has a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government policy action and guidance. This tradition is one of the primary reasons the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes (e.g., higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy) than in most other wealthy countries. In other words, Americans do not work well together. They have a deep distrust toward government and a go-it-alone mentality that eschews social cooperation.