Trump held up a map showing the US is the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic, but only for the rich, influential, and fully insured

Associated Press

President Donald Trump, with members of the President's Coronavirus Task Force, holds a paper about countries best and least prepared to deal with a pandemic, during a news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Wednesday.

• President Trump held up a map Wednesday night that ranks the US world-best in epidemic preparedness.
• The map comes from the 2019 "Global Health Security Index" ranking, which measures how well-prepared 195 countries are to tackle a major infectious disease outbreak, like COVID-19.
• The US scored well on measures including "biosecurity" and "emergency preparedness," but was near the bottom of the list when it came to "healthcare access."
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President Trump wants the world to know that the US is number one, even when it comes to fighting off the novel coronavirus.

"We're rated number one for being prepared," the president said at the White House on Wednesday, as he announced he was putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the administration's coronavirus response.

"Johns Hopkins, I guess, is a highly respected, great place," Trump continued. "They did a study, comprehensive, 'The countries best and worst prepared for an epidemic,' and the United States is now, we're rated number one."

The study that Trump was referring to is a first of its kind global ranking called the Global Health Security Index, which came out last October. The work was a collaborative project, between the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, and The Economist Intelligence Unit.

And yes, it is true that those experts put the US in first place, overall, among 195 countries, when it comes to combating a major infectious disease epidemic, like the new COVID-19 outbreak:

Global Health Security Index

But the experts who made this map, and ranked the US in first place, are quick to add caveats to America's number one status.

"Even though the US does rank at the top for the index, there are areas where there is room for improvement," Priya Bapat, a consultant with the Economist Intelligence Unit, told Business Insider, shortly before President Trump spoke on Wednesday.

The US scored extremely well on measures like emergency preparedness, risk communication, a culture of responsible science, biosafety and biosecurity.

"At the national level, the US has a lot of really good plans and policies in place," Bapat said. "And more importantly, we make that information publicly available."

But Bapat also pointed out that one of the US's greatest weaknesses (and lowest scores) is in a category called "healthcare access."

"And I think we all kind of know why," she said.

The US isn't ready for COVID-19 because Americans have terrible healthcare access

According to the Global Health Security Index ranking, the US comes in 175th out of 195 countries, when it comes to Americans' access to healthcare.

The US does not provide universal health coverage to its citizens, which means that more than 8% of Americans go completely uninsured, with no private insurance, and no government sponsored medicare or medicaid, either.

This is different from how things are run in every other rich country around the globe.

"That is a real vulnerability for the US, in terms of just the amount of money that we have to pay out of pocket," Bapat said.

Take the case of one Miami man who thought he had the coronavirus after returning from China, went to the hospital to get tested, and is now being served a $1,400 bill, his uninsured portion of a hospital visit that ended up totaling more than $3,000.

"How can they expect normal citizens to contribute to eliminating the potential risk of person-to-person spread if hospitals are waiting to charge us $3,270 for a simple blood test and a nasal swab?" Osmel Martinez Azcue asked the Miami Herald.

America's Health Insurance Plans, the trade association of health insurance companies in the US, says that insurance providers will cover any "reasonable, medically necessary healthcare costs related to infectious diseases and medical conditions, including COVID 19," but like a lot of insurance claims, it's hard to know exactly how that might play out in an individual, real-world scenario. Healthcare bills are, after all, still the number one most common reason Americans file for bankruptcy protection.

"You should never, ever have to say, 'I can't afford this medical treatment I need,'" British doctor-turned comedian and writer Adam Kay recently told Insider.

The overwhelming and often prohibitively expensive cost of medical care isn't the only health metric where the US lags behind, when it comes to being ready for COVID-19.

The US also lags far behind in its ability to test for new cases of COVID-19, a major pitfall

Issues with US healthcare stretch beyond patient exam rooms, and into the labs.

As Business Insider's Aria Bendix recently reported, the US COVID-19 testing system already lags far behind that of other countries.

"As of Wednesday, the US has only tested 445 people for the virus, compared to around 35,000 people who have been tested in South Korea, Bendix reported on Wednesday. "Switzerland, whose population is 38 times smaller than that of the US, said it's capable of conducting around 1,000 tests per day."

Medical workers at UC Davis, who suspect they may have just detected the first case of community-spread coronavirus in the US, said in internal memos that they had already asked the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to test their suspected case of COVID-19 one week prior, but were initially denied that test, since the sick person didn't meet the CDC's criteria for testing. (They hadn't been to China, or come in contact with anyone else who had COVID-19.)

Other labs in states around the country are still waiting to ramp up their own COVID-19 testing labs, after testing kits the CDC sent out initially for the novel coronavirus turned out rotten. Currently, only 12 labs outside CDC headquarters in Atlanta are up and running, ready to test for the new coronavirus.

According to Bapat, that's a serious issue, which could threaten the most vital aspect of the country's preparedness strategy for COVID-19.

"I would say that detection and reporting is probably the biggest priority right now, being able to identify if and when the disease is within your country," she said.

"Because once you're able to detect it early, it's much easier to contain the spread of the outbreak within a particular country, and be able to have your experts make a plan."

• Read more:
• 13 bogus claims about the coronavirus, including a fake coconut-oil cure and a false link to imported packages
• More coronavirus cases are being diagnosed outside China than in - another indication the virus is nearing pandemic status
• The rest of the world is 'simply not ready' for the coronavirus, according to a WHO envoy who just returned from China
• Experts say the cruise ship quarantine was unjustified and violated human rights, letting the coronavirus 'literally pick them off one by one'

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