Why do you think America’s response has been poor?
Simple -- and as usual, a stream of consciousness writing, Timmy style.
Its poor only when you start comparing with other countries. Its like SATs, MCATs you need to have a standard of comparison with others.
Here you look at the total number of cases, the fatality rates and others like the number of tests per capita etc
It has 5 times the number of cases than the 2nd most country. Remember, on the 1st of March there were only 72 reported cases and today's its nearly 1.6million reported cases. Its like 39th in the world for test per capita so that means there isn't enough data to go around to be able to tell what the real situation is. So when you test more, the real numbers will raise too.
Three times the number of deaths compared to the 2nd country, the UK (which Trump said was a disaster a month ago. And he was right to a degree as BoJo was a buffoon and ignored it, didn't take it seriously till Mid March.)
The fatality rate is the only shining star.
But if the numbers add up the healthcare system will be overwhelmed and then the healthcare workers will have to do triage decisions on patients -- to choose who lives and who will be sent to palliative. You are not there YET.
But you have to remember the problem with the pesky covid virus and patients is that they seem to land up staying in hospitals a lot longer than other epidemics. If they land up in the ICU, they are in there for the long haul -- instead of a normal 4-5 day stint, many COVID ICU patients are in there for 10-14 days. (And if I am not mistaken, 1/4 of them will leave in a box.)
What were the obvious mistakes?
1) If I had known about this epidemic back in January (I didn't post it in the 1st or 2nd week of January because I didn't think anyone would be interested... yet) But if I had known about it then one would assume the specialist/experts' surveillance alarm bells would have gone off way before I even heard about it. So you give the CDC the benefit of the doubt. Its their primary reason to exist.
So how come the playbook/measures were not taken back then to start prepping the nation? Its not the first time epidemics has happened. They seem to happen every ten years. Why more and more frequently, that's another discussion.
2) The well was poisoned politically very early.
Politics in many ways is about shifting blame or setting the other person to look bad. You don't poison the well right at the start of an epidemic. The standard protocol for most pandemic management playbook is to start with containment first -- keep the numbers small and do the measures to buy time.
Operationally, it means you shut off the source ie the flights -- and here the WH did a political thing. They shut off the flights from China because politically it has some cache -- but not Europe or at least it was way too late. (The virus in NY/NJ came from Europe.)
I also talked about containment strategy being the cheaper and more sustainable approach rather than going straight into mitigation like lockdown and bumping up of healthcare capacities.) You track, trace. map (the clusters) and then isolate the primary and secondary contacts. Some of the push back on this within the forum was that its just too big a country to do this. To which I said that the USA is the richest country in the world, with resources no other country in the world could dream of. And yet it was never mobilised. Everything was siloed. The military were never integrated into the efforts. As Boy Wonder said, Federal's stockpile is the Federal Gov't's. This is just dumb.
In parallel to this containment strategy is the communication strategy. You need to get people to take up personal responsibility. You can try different hot buttons. What they use here is saving the elderly/your parents (since its an ageing nation where 23% of the population is over 60y.o) Americans love the patriotic button -- could have approached like a war footing -- fight for the nation.
People could have been encouraged to download the tracing app. Its anonymised and yet everyone knee jerks and start talking about Big Brother when if the communications was done properly, people would overcome the fear -- its like seat belts, you do it for a reason now. But when first introduced, were there push back on the government telling you what to do? Probably but that's the flip side of the American Exceptionalism coin.
3) Bottom line from my perspective is that there didn't seem to be a pandemic playbook in play. No institutional domain knowledge nor memory.
The whole thing should be driven centrally and by the experts. Why on earth is Trump answering medical questions and leading to him confusing the populace with his (recreational drug-induced?) ideas?
The resultant is that the country is divided, confused and has gone back to its knee jerk response to anything difficult -- from mass shooting to wars. The Flag, Freedom, Constitutional Rights etc.
If this was done differently, I would have used the message of community -- saving your friends, neighbours, parents, grandparents. That what America is all about. The people around you.
Not those stupid people walking around with AR-15s with drug-induced hard-ons wanting to tell everyone about their freedom whilst the same time intimidating people. Whats that all about?
It could have been done better -- there are scores of countries in the world with their own constitution. There are scores of countries with a federated system. Why did Merkel approach this different when Germany is a country smack in the middle of Europe with open borders to the rest fo Europe? She is technically trained. She appreciates procedures in deriving solutions. And not quickly jump and market the hell out some silver/magic bullet solution.
The US has more resources at hand to fight any pandemic than ANY other country in the world And yet it has very very poor result. A doctor friend of mine in the frontline once said --
it looks like the Americans don't know how to manage a pandemic very well. (And this was two months ago!)
The only conclusion is its an issue of poor management and its diabolical leadership.