What our COVID response says about public management
The New York Times had an interesting report last week questioning the idea that more coronavirus testing was a cure-all for dealing with our pandemic crisis. The "more testing" mantra has been a common theme of the administration’s version of events, with suggestions that the U.S. leads the world in testing.
While “leads the world” is an exaggeration, it is indeed true that compared to other areas of our response we are doing less badly on testing.
However, the Times article makes some simple but nonetheless important points. The purpose of testing is mostly to provide information that we can use to initiate other activities that will allow us actually to slow the disease. The most obvious of these is to isolate those who test positive. Also we could do contact tracing of those testing positive to locate others who may be spreading the disease.
Our problem has been that the U.S. done precious little of either of these things. So we should not be surprised that the slew of testing hasn’t done much to slow the spread.
This highlights a chronic problem with public management in our country. We often get new initiatives off the ground, but have trouble following through. That takes time and slogging, but too often we opt for quick hits. It is easier to proclaim a new initiative to improve cybersecurity or reduce payment errors in programs than to stick with it after the headlines. Too often we behave like with New Year’s resolutions, or diets, announced with fanfare but abandoned before anything happens.
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