Isto dói porque é tudo verdade

Acima de tudo, muita arrogância, falta de visão e políticas de cortes nos serviços públicos. O pior é que, mesmo com o que sabemos hoje acerca dos efeitos catastróficos dos cortes nos serviços públicos -sobretudo para beneficiar o sector financeiro- eles vão continuar, exactamente pelas mesmas razões: arrogância e falta de visão.

Europe Said It Was Pandemic-Ready. Pride Was Its Undoing.

NYT

The coronavirus exposed countries’ misplaced confidence in faulty models, vaunted health systems and their own wealth.
Europe’s downfall presaged the chaos in the U.S. Now it is grappling with how a continent considered among the most advanced failed so miserably.

LONDON — Prof. Chris Whitty, Britain’s chief medical adviser, stood before an auditorium in a London museum two years ago cataloging deadly epidemics.

From the Black Death of the 14th century to cholera in war-torn Yemen, it was a baleful history. But Professor Whitty, who had spent most of his career fighting infectious diseases in Africa, was reassuring. Britain, he said, had a special protection.

“Being rich,” he explained.

Wealth “massively hardens a society against epidemics,” he argued, and quality of life — food, housing, water and health care — was more effective than any medicine at stopping the diseases that ravaged the developing world.

...

Barely a month later, the continent was overwhelmed. Instead of providing aid to former colonies, Western Europe became an epicenter of the pandemic. Officials once boastful about their preparedness were frantically trying to secure protective gear and materials for tests, as death rates soared in Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Belgium.

Many European leaders felt so secure after the last pandemic — the 2009 swine flu — that they scaled back stockpiles of equipment and faulted medical experts for overreacting.

But that confidence would prove their undoing. Their pandemic plans were built on a litany of miscalculations and false assumptions. European leaders boasted of the superiority of their world-class health systems but had weakened them with a decade of cutbacks. When Covid-19 arrived, those systems were unable to test widely enough to see the peak coming — or to guarantee the safety of health care workers after it hit.

European Union checks of each country’s readiness had become rituals of self-congratulation. Mathematical models used to predict pandemic spreads — and to shape government policy — fed a false sense of security.
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Held in high esteem for its scientific expertise, Europe, especially Britain, has long educated many of the best medical students from Asia, Africa and Latin America. On a visit to South Korea after a 2015 outbreak of the coronavirus MERS, Dame Sally Davies, then England’s chief medical officer, was revered as an expert. Upon her return home, she assured colleagues that such an outbreak could not happen in Britain’s public health system.

Now South Korea, with a death toll below 300, is a paragon of success against the pandemic. Many epidemiologists there are dumbfounded at the mess made by their mentors.

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“They thought they could be more clever than other countries,” said Prof. Devi Sridhar, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh. “They thought they could outsmart the virus.”

Sir David King, a former British chief science officer, said, “The word ‘arrogance’ comes to mind, I am afraid.” He added: “What hubris.”
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Some experts now say Europe learned the wrong lesson from the swine flu.

“It created some kind of complacency,” said Prof. Steven Van Gucht, a virologist involved in the Belgian response. “Oh, a pandemic again? We have a good health system. We can cope with this.”

It also coincided with Europe’s worst economic slump in decades. French legislators were furious at the cost of buying millions of doses of vaccines and faulted the government for needlessly stockpiling more than 1.7 billion protective masks.
To cut costs, France, Britain and other governments shifted more of their stockpiles to “just in time” contracts. Health officials assumed that even in a crisis they could buy what they needed on the international market, typically from China, which manufactures more than half the world’s masks.

By the start of 2020, France’s supply of masks had fallen by more than 90 percent, to just 150 million.

“The idea of a government warehousing medical supplies came to seem outdated,” said Francis Delattre, a French senator who raised alarms about dependence on China. “Our fate was put into the hands of a foreign dictatorship.”

“France has a superiority complex,” Mr. Delattre added, “especially when it comes to the health sector.”

European health officials recognized the vulnerability of national stockpiles. In response, the European Union in 2016 solicited bids to build a continent-wide repository. But the initiative fizzled because Britain, France and other large countries thought they had the situation covered. Belgium later destroyed tens of millions of expired masks from its own stockpile and never replaced them.

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The Doctors’ Association UK, an advocacy group, later said it received more than 1,300 complaints from doctors at more than 260 hospitals about inadequate protective equipment. At least 300 British health workers eventually died after contracting Covid-19.

“We worry that some died because of a lack of personal protective equipment,” said Dr. Rinesh Parmar, the group’s chairman. “It was very shortsighted to think that supply lines would continue to China.”...
In Belgium, a shortage of masks became so desperate that King Philippe personally brokered a donation from the Chinese tech company Alibaba.

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In France, President Emmanuel Macron tacitly acknowledged the depletion of the government’s stockpile at the beginning of March by requisitioning all the masks in the country.

But he still insisted France was ready. “We are not going to stop life in France,” his spokeswoman assured radio listeners. Ten days later, Mr. Macron declared a state of war and ordered a strict lockdown.

The British scientists and officials nonetheless thought they knew better than other countries like China and South Korea.

Much of northern Italy was already locked down.

Testifying that day before a parliamentary committee, Professor Whitty, the chief medical adviser, was steady and comforting. Slightly hunched over a table in a small hearing room, he told lawmakers to place their trust in Britain’s modelers.

They were “the best in the world,” he said. “We will be able to model this out, as it starts to accelerate, with a fair degree of confidence.” ... Mr. Johnson was even more sanguine. “It should be business as usual for the overwhelming majority of people,” he said that day in a television interview.

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Britain, Spain, Belgium, France and Italy have now reported some of the highest per capita death tolls in the world. More than 30,000 people have died in France, and Mr. Macron has admitted his government was unprepared.

“This moment, let’s be honest, has revealed cracks, shortages,” he said.
...After 44,000 coronavirus deaths in Britain, officials continue to defend their actions. ... Several scientific advisers have sought to distance themselves from his policies.

Professor Ferguson said in an interview that the decision not to intervene earlier was made by the government and health officials — not the modelers.

Other scientists say the intensive care reports in early March should have been reason enough to lock down without waiting for more testing or models. But there is another lesson to learn, said Dr. André, who spent years fighting epidemics in Africa before advising Belgium on the coronavirus.

“They keep on telling countries what they should do, very clearly. But all these experts, when it happens in your own countries? There’s nothing,” he said.

“One lesson to learn is humility.”