PBS Coronavirus Pandemic Documentary Review PDF

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Documentary review on the Coronavirus...

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Eric Alonzo POLS 2305

Documentary Review of the Frontline: Coronavirus Pandemic Episode

1/9/2021

Title: Documentary Review of the Frontline: Coronavirus Pandemic Episode The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted many political and infrastructure weaknesses in the United States. Although the US has several institutions tasked with national public health initiatives, in the past 100 years, the public health responses have largely consisted of localized responses, with the CDC augmenting state and county resources such as the recent cases of Ebola transmission that occurred in 2018 domestically in Texas. Under the Ebola outbreak circumstances, the seriousness of the disease was never in question and the response was rapid and decisive, resulting in successful and quick control. The coronavirus pandemic response has evolved in sharp contrast to other public health measures and has highlighted the lack of coordination and preparedness of federal, state, and local public health entities. The PBS Frontline documentary entitled “Coronavirus Pandemic” traces political and ideological friction between state governors and the President of the United States. This friction and miscommunication caused a host of problems for states on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. The drastic differences between the public messaging and responses of federal government officials versus state government leadership, especially Washington State, is delineated. Tensions between the individual states also escalated as they attempted to poach the limited medical resources available domestically from each other in an effort to mount an urgent response to the burgeoning pandemic. The Frontline Coronavirus Pandemic documentary outlines the timeline of contributing factors in the early days of the pandemic. On January 15th of 2020, the first known infected victim flew into Seattle, Washington. The next day, this patient was admitted to Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, WA and was quarantined for observation by the CDC after it was confirmed he was indeed infected with coronavirus. Although the level of contagiousness for

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Eric Alonzo POLS 2305

Documentary Review of the Frontline: Coronavirus Pandemic Episode

1/9/2021

the virus was well known based on reports from Europe and China, President Trump and his administration denied any risk to the rest of the country. To determine the severity of the situation in the Seattle area, the CDC required a rapidly distributable self-contained testing kit in order to remove the need for a laboratory. Controversially, they decided not to use an imported model of such a kit, believing that relying on a foreign supply would cause unacceptable delays in deployment. However, the kit the CDC decided to produce and distribute proved to be faulty; many of the trials conducted with this kit provided inconclusive results. Following this failure, the FDA tightened up regulations on newly proposed coronavirus testing kits, impeding an already non-existent supply line. Organizations with the capability to develop testing kits of their own were unable to use them due to the mandatory screening processes imposed by the FDA. In the following months, the virus would spread out of Seattle and into the rest of Washington, as well as the surrounding states. Many states implemented quarantine and public lockdown procedures hoping to slow the spread. West coast hospitals found themselves completely overrun by coronavirus patients, consuming copious amounts of protective gear and medical supplies. As the stockpile of these critical items ran dry, many health care workers were forced to reuse old equipment or construct jury-rigged personal protective equipment to include masks. Despite pleas from the state governors, the Trump administration was initially very reluctant to implement a mobilization of the American industrial force to meet demand. Many states began putting in orders for ventilators from the national stockpile, in amounts totaling tens of thousands of units. At best, they would receive a couple thousand of the units requested, as the national stockpile was never configured to support the magnitude of the requests. In addition, the federal government remained distant when it was clear these pandemic frontline states would

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Eric Alonzo POLS 2305

Documentary Review of the Frontline: Coronavirus Pandemic Episode

1/9/2021

need aid in the construction of field hospitals as well as shelters for those who were made homeless by the crisis. One of the primary take-aways of the documentary was in order to effectively combat the coronavirus expeditiously, the United States would have required much stronger centralized leadership than it received at the time. Without industrial mobilization to produce medical gear, the amount of testing and contact tracing that could be performed was severely limited in the early days of the quarantine. Many of the officials interviewed in the documentary agreed that mass testing was the most effective weapon available against the virus. In addition, the Trump administration was noticeably clear on its stance that there would be no federal mandate to enforce mask-wearing or social distancing, which was instead left up to the states. In Texas, where there is no strong centralized state health department, this was delegated even further down to a county-by-county basis. County judges were put in the position of implementing public health measures, often in rural areas where no public health officials are available for consultation. This created a patchwork of public health policy with inconsistent implementation and enforcement. In a perfect political scenario where all the counties have their own well prepared and staffed health departments, this would be an optimal set-up: each area could make its own informed decisions based on the local severity. In reality, most counties are massively uninformed, leading to irrational policies which leads to public mistrust. Another important take-away highlighted by the documentary are the missteps and miscommunications of the national medical community such as the CDC, the NIH, and the HHS. During the events, the documentary describes, many people expressed mistrust in these previously well-respected entities, and expressed loss of trust in the United States medical community at large. The CDC made several revisions to their advisement on mask-wearing and

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Eric Alonzo POLS 2305

Documentary Review of the Frontline: Coronavirus Pandemic Episode

1/9/2021

social distancing, and the testing kit they produced and shipped out was not robust. Similarly, the drug remdesivir, a drug initially developed to treat Ebola, and convalescent plasma treatment both received emergency use authorization from the FDA on a compassionate care basis as potential treatment options for critical coronavirus patients. It was believed that the recovery of US “Patient One” was due, at least in part, to the use of remdesivir in his treatment. However, further study of the outcomes on thousands of treated patients has indicated that neither of these treatments can be proven with statistical significance to be effective and evidence based. In other words, neither treatment is proven to actually work to combat the virus in a mathematically meaningful way, the patient may have recovered on their own as comparisons of treatment and non-treatment retrospective analysis has shown. On the television, people hear their governors speak about trusting the science and how locking down the state and cutting off many people’s sources of income is the only way to combat the virus. Those individuals in low- income brackets typically live week-to-week or even day-to-day, unable to economically survive months long quarantine events. The first coronavirus stimulus package did not arrive until late March, and the months ahead were still projected to be under the effect of strict social distancing policy. Despite all the warning signs sitting in front of them, the governors of the states appeared to be shocked by the numerous protests demanding more lenient lockdown policies, which continue to this day. Indeed, some of the outrage against social distancing policy can be attributed to the President’s emotionally charged social media messaging, however, it is likely that the protests were inevitable given the uncompromising nature of the policies. Political tension between Democrats and Republicans infiltrated this aspect of American life as well, where those who were starved of emergency funds and in need of a source of income found themselves under ridicule from those who advocated for the

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Eric Alonzo POLS 2305

Documentary Review of the Frontline: Coronavirus Pandemic Episode

1/9/2021

lockdowns. The Trump administration and many Republicans took the side of those who wanted to re-open, using the mantra “the cure can’t be worse than the disease” while the Democratic strongholds (especially New York and California) wanted to impose even stricter policies to forbid even the right to assemble for protest. The documentary often goes off on unrelated side tangents into the lives of inconsequential patients when the focus of the presentation should be the friction between the states and the federal government. In the sections where the aforementioned is being discussed, the documentary makes it clear that there were several cascading failures across the federal government which continued into April, when the documentary was published. These failures in turn impacted the state governments and their capability, or lack of thereof to respond to the escalating healthcare crisis. The documentary does provide an effective chronicle of the early days of the pandemic, and retraces the treatment of the initial patient, and the medical personnel involved in his treatment, as well as the recollections of a host of other health experts and political leaders in the Seattle area. It was interesting seeing the “butterfly effect” ripple out from the CDC’s decision to use its own testing kits to the accusations of inciting domestic violence by Washington state governor Jay Inslee against President Trump.

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