The U.S. and U.K. Were the Two Best Prepared Nations to Tackle a Pandemic—What Went Wrong?
By Gavin Yamey and Clare Wenham July 1, 2020 6:00 AM EDT Yamey is a physician and professor of global health and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health. Wenham is an assistant professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics, where she directs the master of science degree program in global health policy. On Oct. 24, 2019—45 days before the world’s first suspected case of COVID-19 was announced—a new “scorecard” was published called the Global Health Security Index. The scorecard ranked countries on how prepared they were to tackle a serious outbreak, based on a range of measures, including how quickly a country was likely to respond and how well its health care system would “treat the sick and protect health workers.” The U.S. was ranked first out of 195 nations, and the U.K. was ranked second.…