Let's start with one fundamental assertion that I feel is missing in many of the discussions in this thread: There is no "the government". In most countries "go

Let's start with one fundamental assertion that I feel is missing in many of the discussions in this thread: There is no "the government". In most countries "government" is a collection of agencies, staffed by individuals, not completely in sync on all levels (micro, meso, macro). You see that playing out when measures on one level (most prominently medical advise) are not in line with broader approaches to managing events, groups, tourism and travel. We all notice the disconnect, and some might think of 'dark conspiracies'. There are none (rule of the most kind interpretation). It's the dispersion of institutions in action. Another one is my assertion, as a former public servant with friends in places that /should know/, that there is no structured economic analysis of possible outcomes of various scenarios of intervention. There are no models, there is no time, there is not enough collaboration between agencies. On the one hand you have the medical staff and agencies doing what they can where they can on a medical level, on the other hand you have bureaucrats making decisions with limited information and way more limited understanding. Politicians probably get in the way more than they support. My thought: Governments are acting. They are just not acting in a way that we, the public, can understand is internally consistent. That's because the acts aren't internally consistent. That is due to the fact that governement is made up of institutions with different levels of understanding, information, scope and time to act. In a pandemic, this is all very unfortunate and a more singlehanded style of governement could help. China got it quite right after an initial denial. Nobody in the West is equipped to both think about and act on China-style measures. In normal situation our distributed model of application of knowledge (Hayek) is more efficient. Most we can hope for is rapid learning in our institutions and the fact that a whole lot of capital, both human and monetary, is available for solving this crisis. I'm quite in a shock (my province is in partial quarantine) with what's happening, but if the world economy proofs resiliant to this shock on a say 2-yr horizon, I'm quite bullish on how strong and adaptable our institutions are and see more hope for f.e. tackling climate change than before.