Federal public health officials did many good things in response to Covid-19, like investing in Operation Warp Speed, but they misdiagnosed the nature of the pandemic: They deemed it a complicated problem rather than a complex problem. This error reduced the effectiveness of the country’s pandemic response, and a course correction is necessary to improve the response to future pandemics.
In 2001, I developed a checklist for health care workers to reduce infections from catheters, tubes that are widely used to deliver fluids and critical medicines to people who have been hospitalized. At the time, catheter infections resulted in approximately 31,000 deaths a year in the U.S, putting it in the top 15 leading causes of death.