This Is What Happens When the Federal Government Abandons You
The federal government’s stockpile of medical supplies, gloves, and masks is nearly exhausted, President Donald Trump admitted at a White House briefing on Wednesday. Meanwhile, individual states are scrambling, bidding against one another for the equipment they need.
“The coronavirus pandemic is a damning indictment of this country’s health-care system,” Joseph Kantor, the assistant state health officer for the Louisiana Department of Health, told me. “The richest country in the world is scrounging around for ventilators” and personal protective equipment.
[Read: Why America is uniquely unsuited to dealing with the coronavirus]
Kantor is one of a dozen health professionals across the country with whom I spoke this week. Taken together, those conversations reveal a federal government that has failed to protect, supply, and prepare the country and its cities. These health-care workers are looking with horror at the chaos in New York City as evidence of what can happen to a vibrant city in the absence of national strategy and preparedness. As they struggle to avoid a similar crisis, they’re losing faith in the federal government, and resorting to their own improvised solutions.
Louisiana, Kantor warned me when we spoke on March 30, is “in the exact situation, per capita, as New York City” and the state has witnessed one of the sharpest increases in coronavirus cases in the country.
This is an “absurd situation where every state and every hospital is competing with each other to buy supplies from the private market and the government,” Kantor
