The New York Times attempts to answer that question in a recent peice describing the results of its “review of thousands of emails and interviews with more than 100 state and federal officials, public health experts, C.D.C. employees and medical workers.” It’s a damning endictment of the agency and its handling of the crisis, and it illustrates why so many people have lost confidence in experts and the institutions they run.
As one would expect, the Times makes a half-hearted attempt to lay some of the blame on President Trump, but, overall, it’s clear that the CDC’s failures are the result of endemic problems. Here are a few examples:
Americans returning from China landed at U.S. airports by the thousands in early February, potential carriers of a deadly virus who had been diverted to a handful of cities for screening by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Their arrival prompted a frantic scramble by local and state officials to press the travelers to self-quarantine, and to monitor whether anyone fell ill. It was one of the earliest tests of whether the public health system in the United States could contain the contagion.
But the effort was frustrated as the C.D.C.’s decades-old notification system delivered information collected at the airports that was riddled with duplicative records, bad phone numbers and incomplete addresses. For weeks, officials tried to track passengers using lists sent by the C.D.C., scouring information about each flight in separate spreadsheets.
“It was insane,” said Dr. Sharon Balter, a director at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. When the system went offline in mid-February, briefly halting the flow of passenger data, local officials listened in disbelief on a conference call as the C.D.C. responded to the possibility that infected travelers might slip away.
“Just let them go,” two of the health officials recall being told. …
The C.D.C.’s most fabled experts are the disease detectives of its Epidemic Intelligence Service, rapid responders who investigate outbreaks. But more broadly, according to current and former employees and others who worked closely with the agency, the C.D.C. is risk-averse, perfectionist and ill suited to improvising in a quickly evolving crisis — particularly one that shuts down the country and paralyzes the economy.
“It’s not our culture to intervene,” said Dr. George Schmid, who worked at the agency off and on for nearly four decades. He described it as increasingly bureaucratic, weighed down by “indescribable, burdensome hierarchy.” …
The C.D.C. quickly developed a successful test in January designed to be highly precise, but it was more complicated to use and turned out to be no better than versions produced overseas. And in manufacturing test kits to send to the states, the C.D.C. contaminated many of them through sloppy lab practices. That, along with the administration’s failure to quickly ramp up commercial and academic labs, delayed the rollout of tests and limited their availability for months. …
After an initial round of tests, the agency imposed restrictive testing standards. When doctors in Washington State and elsewhere forwarded the names of about 650 people in January who might have been infected — they had contact with a confirmed patient, had been admitted to a hospital or had other risk factors — the C.D.C. agreed to test only 256. …
In mid-February, C.D.C. officials announced plans for a national surveillance effort — by testing samples from people with flulike symptoms — to determine whether the virus was spreading undetected. The effort was to begin in Seattle, New York and three other cities, but after disagreements over how to proceed, it did not start.
Later that month, public health officials across the country were increasingly concerned about visitors streaming into the United States from South Korea, Japan, Italy and other European countries engulfed by the virus.
On phone calls with the C.D.C., worried state officials kept asking: “Are there plans to expand the travel monitoring?” The response, according to a participant from New York, was always the same: “We’re still actively considering that.” …
Inside Building 21, the C.D.C.’s gleaming 12-story headquarters, nothing has been more critical than getting fast, accurate information on how the virus is spreading, who is getting sick, how best to treat them and how quickly the country can reopen.
But that has proved difficult for the agency’s antiquated data systems, many of which rely on information assembled by or shared with local health officials through phone calls, faxes and thousands of spreadsheets attached to emails. The data is not integrated, comprehensive or robust enough, with some exceptions, to depend on in real time. …
Some staff members were mortified when a Seattle teenager managed to compile coronavirus data faster than the agency itself, creating a website that attracted millions of daily visitors. “If a high schooler can do it, someone at C.D.C. should be able to do it,” said one longtime employee. …
At Margaret Mary Community Hospital in rural Batesville, Ind., doctors and nurses got sick after following C.D.C. guidance in mid-March that masks were necessary only when treating patients with respiratory symptoms or fever. The first patients who tested positive for Covid-19 there instead showed up with headaches, fatigue, nausea and diarrhea.
“This virus made it halfway around the world without us having a heads-up to our providers that this is how the disease can present,” said Tim Putnam, the hospital’s chief executive. “Over two months after the disease surfaced, I would have expected better.”
There’s lots more in the report, so you should read the whole thing. However, you shouldn’t accept everything the Times has to say. In addition to attempting to divert some of the blame onto the President, the Times also makes the predictable claim that part of the problem was that the CDC didn’t have enough money. Don’t believe it. The CDC’s budget has increased faster than the overall rate of federal spending in recent years, and the agency currently spends over a billion dollars a year and employs over 10,000 people. Clearly, the problem wasn’t lack of funds or lack of staff.
The President has annouced his intention to cut off funding to the World Health Organization until it finds a way to improve its performance. Maybe he should do the same thing for the CDC!
