The spread of Covid-19 from China to Western Europe has so far centred on Italy, but now looks set to spread and exponentially grow in France, Spain and Germany. These countries all have free healthcare systems, statutory sick pay and, most importantly of all, they have implemented plans for free testing.
According to the World Health Organization, France and Italy have the best healthcare systems in the world. But due to its prohibitively high cost, the US ranks behind Costa Rica and Dominica at number 37. Around 30m people in US have no healthcare insurance whatsoever and are therefore likely to be less willing to pay for a test or take time off work to do so.
That means the US is probably behind the curve compared to rest of the developed world, a situation that could so easily have been avoided had the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided not to create its own faulty testing kit and then adopt an awkward procedure for patients to qualify for a test.
Problems in the US could well be exacerbated by the differing approaches taken by each state and a potential shortage of key healthcare workers.
According to Johns Hopkins University, the impact of a Covid-19 pandemic on US hospitals is expected to be severe in the best of circumstances. Currently, US hospitals routinely operate at or near full capacity and have limited ability to rapidly increase services.
There are currently shortages of healthcare workers of all kinds. Emergency departments are overcrowded and often have to divert patients to other hospitals. There has also been a reduction in the overall number of hospitals, hospital beds and emergency rooms in the US.
The US Department of Health and Human Services has released official planning assumptions for pandemic influenza, ranging from a moderate pandemic to severe. Under the moderate scenario, 200,000 patients would need intensive care, four times the number of beds available and about double the number that could be used in a crisis.
“Based on such calculations, it would seem that preparing for a pandemic of even moderate severity is a difficult challenge,” according to the Johns Hopkins report written on February 27, entitled What US hospitals should do now to prepare for a Covid-19 pandemic.
But, crucially, at this stage it is the lack of testing and accurate data that poses the single most critical issue facing the US.
If China is anything to go by, the official diagnosed rate of infection lags the actual rate by a factor of up to 15. This information only became apparent after collating the mortality rate and working backwards to hypothesise the rate of infection.
The severity of this situation has hit the the US stock market, resulting in a collapse of the Dow Jones index from its 29,500 peak to 21,500 where it now stands.
But, as news of the epidemic unfolds in the US, it seems fair to assume that further big falls are in store — for when the largest economy in the world sneezes, it is certain that everyone in the world will catch cold.