美国号称具有世界上最丰富的医疗资源和医疗护理能力，应对新冠肺炎疫情却一片混乱，成为世界上确诊人数和死亡人数最多的国家。
The United States claimed to be most abundant in medical resources and healthcare capacity, yet its response to the COVID-19 pandemic was chaotic, causing it to lead the world in the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and related deaths.
应对疫情不力造成惨重后果。根据美国约翰斯·霍普金斯大学统计的数据，截至2021年2月底，美国新冠肺炎确诊病例总数已超过2800万例，死亡病例总数超过50万例。美国人口不足世界总人口的5%，其新冠肺炎确诊病例数却超过全球总数的25%，死亡病例数占全球总数的近20%。美国有线电视新闻网2020年12月20日报道，仅加利福尼亚州就已经报告了184.5万例新冠肺炎确诊病例和22599例死亡病例，相当于每10万人中就有4669人确诊、57人死亡，这还不包括许多未得到诊断的轻症或无症状感染病例。如果美国能够科学应对，事情本不必如此。美国流行病学家、疾病控制与预防中心原负责人威廉·福格认为，“这是一场屠杀”。
Incompetent pandemic response led to dire consequences. A tally by Johns Hopkins University showed that as of the end of February 2021, the United States has registered more than 28 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, with related deaths exceeding 500,000. With a population of less than 5 percent of the world’s total, the United States accounted for more than 25 percent of all the confirmed cases and nearly 20 percent of the deaths. On Dec. 20, 2020, CNN reported that the state of California alone had reported 1.845 million COVID-19 cases and 22,599 deaths, which translates to roughly 4,669 known cases and 57 deaths for every 100,000 residents. Even these numbers don’t give the whole picture of the state, because many cases, including mild or asymptomatic infections, had not been diagnosed. Had the American authorities taken science-based measures to contain the pandemic, this could have been avoided. But since they had not, the pandemic, as epidemiologist and former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) William Foege had put it, is “a slaughter” to the United States.
领导人无视科学警告刻意淡化疫情风险。根据《纽约时报》《华盛顿邮报》等媒体复盘的美国疫情时间线，美国特朗普政府一再忽视疫情警告。白宫国家安全委员会在2020年1月初就收到情报，预测病毒将在美国蔓延。时任白宫贸易与制造业政策办公室主任彼得·纳瓦罗在1月29日撰写的一份备忘录中，详细列举了疫情暴发的潜在风险：可能会有多达50万人死亡，并造成数万亿美元的经济损失。时任美国卫生与公众服务部部长亚历克斯·阿扎等卫生官员和医学专家也多次警告疫情在美国暴发的危险。但美国特朗普政府不仅对各种警告置之不理，反而专注于控制信息传播，甚至发布虚假信息误导民众，称新冠肺炎病毒是“大号流感”，感染病毒的风险和死亡率“非常低”，疫情会很快“奇迹般地消失”，导致防控疫情的“黄金窗口期”被白白浪费。《纽约时报》网站2020年4月13日报道指出，时任美国政府领导人宁肯相信自己的直觉也不相信科学，错失时机，断送了大量无辜的生命。
National leaders ignored warnings from experts and downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic. According to the timeline of COVID-19 pandemic in the United States released by media outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post, the Trump administration had repeatedly ignored alarms regarding the risks of the pandemic. In early January 2020, a National Security Council office had already received intelligence reports predicting the spread of the virus to the United States. In a Jan. 29, 2020 memo, then White House trade adviser Peter Navarro projected that a coronavirus pandemic might lead to as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses. A number of health officials, including then Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and medical experts also warned of the possibility of a pandemic in the United States. None of the aforementioned warnings brought the imminent pandemic to the Trump administration’s attention. Instead, the administration focused on controlling the message, and released misleading signals to the public by claiming “the risk of the virus to most Americans was very low,” suggesting that the coronavirus is no worse than the common flu, and stating the virus will “miraculously go away” when the weather gets warmer. Thus, the country lost crucial weeks for pandemic prevention and control. An article published on the website of The New York Times on April 13, 2020 commented that, then American leader’s “preference for following his gut rather than the data cost time, and perhaps lives.”
政府选择不作为导致疫情失控。在美国新冠肺炎死亡病例超过30万人后，加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校医学教授戴维·哈耶斯-鲍提斯塔指出，美国其实不应死那么多人，是政府选择了不作为导致悲剧的发生。（注2）哥伦比亚大学疾病研究人员通过模型分析显示，如果美国政府2020年3月13日发布的疫情防控措施能够提前两星期，那么约83%的死亡是可以避免的。（注3）英国医学期刊《柳叶刀》2020年5月17日罕有地发表社论指出，美国政府总是“着迷于”找到快速结束疫情的方式——疫苗、新药，甚至指望病毒会就这么消失了，但事实是只有依赖病毒检测、感染追踪及隔离等基本的公共卫生准则，才可能终结疫情。即便疫情已经在美国大范围蔓延，确诊病例和死亡病例已升至全球第一的情况下，特朗普政府出于政治私利，依然急于重启经济。沃克斯新闻网2020年8月11日评论称，一些州在4、5月份就忙于重启，使得病毒传播的重灾区从最初的纽约地区向南部、西部扩散，并最终扩散到全国其他地区。尽管许多医学研究已经证实佩戴口罩可以有效防止感染病毒，但时任美国政府领导人和一些州政府官员却长期拒绝实施强制口罩令。
Government inaction led to uncontrolled pandemic spread. “There’s no need for that many to have died. We chose, as a country, to take our foot off the gas pedal. We chose to, and that's the tragedy.” So commented David Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, after the pandemic death toll hit 300,000 in the United States. Disease modelers with the Columbia University also estimated that, if the United States had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, 2020, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, about 83 percent of the nation’s pandemic-related deaths would have been avoided. An editorial from the website of medical journal The Lancet, published on May 17, 2020, commented that the U.S. government was obsessed with magic bullets -- vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. At the same time, it noted that only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like testing, tracing, and isolation, would see the emergency brought to an end. Even when the pandemic is spreading in a vast area in the United States, the administration was hasty to restart the economy due to political concerns. According to news website Vox on Aug. 11, 2020, in April and May last year, several states rushed to reopen and caused the virus to shift to the South, West and eventually the rest of the United States. In addition, despite that experts had recommended people wear masks in public, the then American leader and some state officials had been extremely reluctant to issue any decree to make wearing masks mandatory.