By now, it is obvious to everyone seeking to understand the United States’ response to the novel coronavirus (officially SARS-CoV-2) that there were massive failures of judgment and inaction in January, February, and even March of this year. While mistakes are inevitable in the face of such a massive and rapidly evolving domestic and global challenge, our federal government’s response compares unfavorably to a number of other countries, many of whom faced the virus before we did.
Although we will undoubtedly soon find ways to overcome our missteps, it will take years to fully reckon with the failures that contributed to our poor response. No doubt, sometime in 2020 or 2021, Congress will create a well-funded government commission to undertake an investigation similar to the 9-11 Commission or the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Such an investigation will need to grapple with insufficient preparation and capacity, poor leadership and coordination, slowness, and regulatory failures, among many other factors. In doing so, it ought to focus especially on those systemic failures that can be corrected so that they are much less likely to recur in the certain event of future pandemics, whether naturally occurring or deliberately caused.
A number of long-form journalistic pieces offer narrative accounts of what went wrong (including excellent pieces in the New York Times, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic). Here, we attempt to present an initial record of the federal government’s important official actions and communications over the past months, with a particular emphasis on the rules, regulation, and guidance related to the public health challenge. We do not claim comprehensiveness—rather, we seek to document new and notable developments and actions during the critical early period of the worldwide spread of the virus. Nor do we attempt to track the extensive actions meant to cope with the economic fallout of the virus. Following the timeline, we briefly outline four phases of crisis response and highlight some of the most important apparent failures.
