The Trump Administration got hit with SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 pandemic issues when China declared a National Pandemic Emergency on January 21, 2020. This announcement was posted through the World Health Organization. It triggered the national variants of the Seven Pillars response system automatically for these 15 Asian Pacific Rim countries.
Through March 2021 they had held total lethality from COVID to 30 deaths per million. Then April 2021 has been a very bad month and total lethality has risen to 40 deaths per million. Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines were hardest hit. Total deaths rose to 88,149. In contrast the United States continued with no national quarantine or tracking systems, no integrated warning systems, some 574,000 total deaths, and 1,740 deaths per million population.
Australia
China
Indonesia
Japan
Malaysia
Mongolia
Myanmar
Nepal
New Zealand
Papua New Guinea
Philippines
Singapore
South Korea
Thailand
Vietnam
2,300,000,000 people = 88,149 COVID deaths
Note that Australia and New Zealand copied this Seven Pillars system from their Asian health care counterparts decades ago. Both of them have published the basics and issued public service announcements. The region also sees dengue and plague outbreaks, so no one seriously questions whether civil defense is necessary.
Updates for the SARS-1 coronavirus from 2002-03 became widely available in English in 2006. They knew exactly what to do.
Immediately after that the MERS Middle East virus appeared. It killed hundreds and alerted public health operations throughout the region.
The United States is not the only democracy to find itself lacking a coherent national policy. And certainly both Brazil and India understate their numbers.
It’s not that the Seven Pillars tasks are all that difficult. The United States could get people trained in a month. Getting to where antivirals are administered on exposure, not just with symptoms — that is critical to reduce mortality.
A few of the steps are coercive, obviously. Seizing tourist hotels to house incoming quarantine groups might could raise a few eyebrows. But on the evidence with dengue and plague and SARS-1 we know that these measures work immediately:
1. Border controls at every entry point with immediate quarantine for travelers coming from WHO identified at-risk areas.
2. Exposure detection including widespread tracking from known cases. Supported with full-population testing for Hotspots.
3. Three-A-Day Support protocol for all individuals in quarantine locations. Check temperature, blood oxygen. Administer preventive antivirals where exposure is suspected. Provide meals, general stores. Rapid isolation at hospitals as cases worsen in quarantine locations.
(Interferon Alpha 2B is in common use for prevention of SARS pneumonia. That is due in part to ease of storage with minimal refrigeration. Can be administered as nasal spray. Nebulizer preferred.)
4. Intensive hygiene promotion focused to masks and hand sanitizers. Masks are used to restrict coughs and sneezes.
(Pinch your nose and muffle the cough with the palm of your hand. Hand sanitizer dispensers are made available in public settings.)
5. Physical distancing takes two forms. Maintaining 2-meter separation during social interactions. Plus Lockdowns that include school and workplace closures, movement and travel restrictions, and measures to reduce contact in public spaces.
6. Coordinate communications. Inform the public about pandemic control resources and such as the Silent Carrier problem.
7. Issue Warnings for Hotspot high-risk locations -- typically neighborhoods -- so the public can avoid contamination. Standard signs are posted. Internet, television and radio are utilized.
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Plainly these tasks involve doing a great deal of work. The manpower requirement is observed in a range as high as 1% of the country’s population. That is New Zealand where 50,000 manned their tracking corps and other COVID “Pillars” projects. Population = 5 million
China got by with approximately 2 million workers repurposed to protect a population of 1,395 million.
In the United States the White House part of the system had been removed entirely — expert manpower, quarantine plans, liaison structures — back in 2018. The observed threat, then, was Ebola. According to John Bolton, Trump ordered Bolton to get rid of White House pandemic response. And the coward did it. Experts dispersed, computer files deleted, liaison positions eliminated throughout the federal government.
Copies of the planning documents do exist. Just not at the White House. If the Biden Administration decides to move on past its Vaccines Plus Masks strategy, they will have to start from scratch to upgrade each of the seven projects that constitute Seven Pillars.
Two addenda: Worst Case is a COVID variant that defeats today’s vaccines and also minimizes lethality during infection stages 1 & 2: nasopharyngeal cavity/throat and lungs. Then this variant kills at stage 3: bloodstream / septicemic infection. The woefully misnamed “long haul COVID.” We would be overwhelmed.
And finally, measures are needed to prohibit extremist media from sabotaging Seven Pillars public information. Similar to wartime censorship. Enough is more than enough. This is about more than whining about cloth masks.
Hope for the best. Plan to survive the worst.