The Covid 19 outbreak became a nationwide health crisis promoting striking responses. Quick and unthinkable approaches have been applied to flatten the curve and prevent overpowering American health facilities. Without a coordinated national response towards the outbreak, the pandemic has underscored the promise and limits of the tenth amendment. The local and state governments have fought to use policies to safeguard their people and reduce cases of death. The outcome has been a mixture of advisories plus orders that disclose regional disparities and certain surprising inconsistencies. The dependency on local and regional authorities has generated lots of innovative programs and great trials at regional coordination but has also resulted in direct competition among levels of power as they vie for desperately required resources. During the early days of the covid-19 pandemic in America, the preparedness and response policy was based on different levels of power, the national level, state level and local government level, which later transformed into a cooperative level.
The degree of urgency was never shared by the key actors in the national government. During Trump’s reign, this pandemic emerged; the President was very slow to acknowledge the pandemic’s threat. He continuously downplayed the threats and convinced the nation that the virus was contained and would escape one day. Trump did not declare a national emergency until March 13th, 2020, turning out to be two and half months after the initial case getting reported (Knauer, 23). The federal government announced the social distance guidelines on March 15th, minimizing social meetings to less than fifty individuals. This was imposed after the state and local authorities had enacted the policies in their regions (Knauer, 26). The federal government was supposed to play a core role in this national response since a pandemic, by its own nature, is a crisis that demands quick and robust federal actions.
In the wake of the pandemic, many states released a number of executive orders in response to the coronavirus. Some orders came before the state national emergency declaration, as early as February 2020. The first was the stay-at-home order, which was issued by around forty-three states. The states as well declared legislation session suspensions and school and court closures. Another order was the release of the prison inmates, of which only twenty-one states had released their inmates (Ballotpedia, 2). All these approaches were intended to flatten the curve on a state level.
Ten of thousands of local authorities declared policy changes in response to the covid 19 outbreak. The Local government sounded the alarm early though they did not have enough resources to respond to the pandemic (Cigler, 1). This is because the local actors did not get help of the federal government, leave alone forging a coordinated federal response where the state, local and federal work together by mixing resources, programs and power (Ginsberg et al., 76). The coordinated response later came into force after the federal government declared a state of national emergency. The local governments could now easily announce the closure of schools, offices and services. They also banned gatherings for the safety of the local American people by getting a good support from the national government.
In conclusion, during the early months of the coronavirus outbreak, the state and local authorities had been crucial players and early adopters of the guidelines like social distancing through, limitation on non-essential services, lockdown orders, and school and court closings alongside the release of prison inmates. All of these measures were designed to reduce the spread of the virus. The federal government later emerged in support of thwarting the spread of the pandemic, thus making the whole government work together to curb the pandemic.
Works Cited
Ballotpedia. “State Government Responses to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic, 2020.”Ballotpedia. Web.
Cigler, Beverly A. “Fighting COVID-19 in the United States With Federalism and Other Constitutional and Statutory Authority.”Publius: The Journal of Federalism, vol. 51, no. 4, Oxford UP (OUP), 2021, pp. 673–92. Web.
Ginsberg, Benjamin, et al. We The People. Essentials Thirteenth, W. W. Norton and Company, 2021.
Knauer, Nancy J. “The COVID-19 pandemic and federalism: Who decides?.” NYUJ Legis. & Pub. Pol’y 23 (2020): 1.