COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 30/03/2020
Jon Allsop
Yesterday morning, the homepage of the New York Times made for grim reading. “NYC’s 911 system is overwhelmed,” one headline read. “Who should be saved first?” another asked, “Experts offer ethical guidance.” Amid the coverage of the present, horrifying state of things, one prominent story looked back in time, at the period between late January and early March. It did not offer readers any respite; rather, it traced the current problems to a “lost month” during which officials’ failure to test widely for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, “blinded the US” to its advance. Six reporters—Michael D. Shear, Abby Goodnough, Sheila Kaplan, Sheri Fink, Katie Thomas, and Noah Weiland—interviewed more than 50 experts and officials, who attributed the testing failure to “technical flaws, regulatory hurdles, business-as-usual bureaucracies, and lack of leadership at multiple levels.” As Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, of Boston University, told the Times, “Testing is the crack that split apart the rest of the response, when it should have tied everything together.”