THE coronavirus outbreak is a once-in-a-century event-and it seems the US has spent the past 100 years unwittingly weakening its defences.In fact, the US is probably the developed economy with the worst type of healthcare system to tackle covid-19. Many economic and healthcare policies it has enacted don't prioritise public health, and it is finding out firsthand how dangerous that can be.The impact of this has been seen in the past month or so in the lack of testing -as of 23 March, the US has done 238,632 tests compared with 338,036 in South Korea, a far smaller country."We don't have enough resources to do the testing quickly enough, and have been slow to measure the epidemic and reduce its spread," says Ben Sommers, a health economist and physician at Harvard University.
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