@tstewart3 wrote:
There are roughly 102 people killed daily in the United States in auto accidents, 1770 die daily from heart disease and 1668 from cancer for prospective.
Hindsight is 20/20 but even shutting down the economy on March 1st would have been deemed alarmist.
As for testing, a big portion of the tests were manufactured in China and they didn't work. Countries worldwide reported that the tests were ineffective. To find fault for anyone not doing testing comes under the title of "wasting money to do 'something'".
On January 21st China's Wuhan Institute of virology filed for a patent for commercial use of Remdesivir in China. There were at least 5 trials studying the use of this vaccine at that time. Whether the virus was released from the lab by accident or otherwise, it could have been contained in the region and not become a pandemic had China disclosed the truth.
Didn't know the cancer and heart disease statistics, tstewart. Interesting. And thanks for sharing!
I think one difference is infectiousness. A person with cancer or heart disease cannot infect another. So, dealing with those things don't require social distancing, mask wearing, etc. With auto accidents, it's important to remember that the deaths are after we've instituted safety protocols. Counterfactually, they could be a lot worse if we just let people drive any which way they wanted to.
Maybe there's no perfect parallel with those other deaths, but just wanted to note those differences.
I agree much could damage could have been prevented had China not tried to hide things. I do think they are the worst actor in all of this. I wish the world would hold them accountable.
Having said that, I think the U.S. may have been negligent too. It's hard to imagine we did not see what was coming. The CIA in January was able to pinpoint assassinate the top Iranian general, Soleimani, in a precision drone strike. It has hunted down people like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in their obscure hiding. They know all sorts of stuff and carry out covert attacks and defenses on behalf of American interests and national security. With all of that high tech surveillance capability, it's still hard for me to believe they did not know the scale of the Wuhan outbreak when it was occurring in China.
At the very least, Peter Navarro warned Trump in January and February in multiple memos of a possible pandemic:
[
www.nytimes.com]
@ wrote:
“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Mr. Navarro’s memo said. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” . . .
In one worst-case scenario cited in the memo, more than a half-million Americans could die.
A second memo that Mr. Navarro wrote, dated Feb. 23, warned of an “increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”
So, there was at least some early warnings of the scale of hospitalizations and deaths that could occur if we did not shut down international travel and implement some sort of domestic prevention. The U.S. had time to see how other countries were reacting as well (with places in Singapore and South Korea taking aggressive measures to the slack response of an Italy or Great Britain).
On February 25th, National Economic Council Director, Larry Kudlow, said:
[
www.cnbc.com]
@ wrote:
“We have contained this. I won’t say [it’s] airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight,” Kudlow told CNBC’s Kelly Evans on “The Exchange.” He added that, while the outbreak is a “human tragedy,” it will likely not be an “economic tragedy.”
This could possibly go down as the most clueless prediction ever on the virus. My question is why the U.S. didn't see what was coming and better prepare for it? IF:
i.) We knew the true scale of the Wuhan outbreak.
ii) We knew there were international flights in and out of Wuhan (and China) to the rest of the world up through the peak of the Chinese crisis in January.
iii.) We knew the virus spread asymptomatically and would lead to exponential growth if left unchecked.
iv.) We knew in the U.S. there was not effective, nor mass testing of people and there were no domestic preventative protocols in place.
THEN, why would the U.S. not experience one of those Peter Navarro or other viral epidemiologist disaster scenarios? Would it not have been simple logic that to let this virus spread unchecked here would lead to mass infections and deaths?
That's my main question in all of this. Even in March, many people were joking practically about how the virus was overblown. But with a long incubation period (up to two weeks), exponential growth, and no preventative measures, it was only a matter of time before it would logically explode in the U.S.
How could the U.S. not see this logic? Is the U.S. not, at least, somewhat culpable?
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/2020 10:02PM by shoptastic.