7 ms·

If we were halfway rational, we would have started this in January. Failing that, start now.

caymanjim 7y ago
This is pure hindsight. This didn't warrant that kind of response in January, not by a longshot. In January it looked exactly like the other comparatively minor respiratory viruses that pop up every few years. We can't shut down industry and retool factories just in case.
- cycrutchfield 7y ago
  Not sure if you recall, but in January China put large portions of the country under lockdown in a quarantine effort of unprecedented scale. At that point, the writing was on the wall that this was not something that "looked exactly like the other comparatively minor respiratory viruses that pop up every few years".
  - fma 7y ago
    I was literally pounding my desk asking myself why is Trump taking this as a joke. I mean ok if you don't trust China, fine... But South Korea, Japan, Italy, Taiwan, Singapore. Are our allies in on the joke too? The writing was on the wall flashing in bright neon signs.
  - unishark 7y ago
    The timeline is interesting. The lockdown started on Jan 23. At this point they had a few thousand cases and 50 or so deaths, less than many countries have now. The announcement of transmission without symptoms came out on Jan 26. Around this time China also extended restrictions over the whole country. Many countries including the US started announcing travel restrictions on travelers from China in the next few days, to take effect around Feb 1. The WHO and China called it an overreaction.
- gravypod 7y ago
  > This didn't warrant that kind of response in January Could China's mobilization of resources have been a hint to us that this would have made sense? Even early on there were stories breaking of people taking double doses of some meds to lower their temperature to get through fever screening. Shortly after that we found out there was a very long incubation period. Shortly after that there was talk of mild/asymptomatic spread. All the while no one shut down air travel and boarders while China locked down it's country. It's not the time to play the blame game but saying this is entirely hindsight doesn't make sense to me. Many people were talking about stocking and isolating in Jan/Feb. Back then they are just met with misinformed masses "the flu kills..."
- ewoodrich 7y ago
  By late January the Chinese government had already ordered the lockdown in Wuhan. There were plenty of signs that this wasn't an unremarkable minor respiratory virus.
- chii 7y ago
  the correct response should look like an overreaction in hindsight. But it's tough to explain the cost of the overreaction if said overreaction prevented all of these problems. I make the analogy with an engineer receiving accolades for fixing bugs and outages with heroic effort. But the engineer that creates trouble free code, that never has any problems, but takes a long time to create code that's bug free seems to be over-cautious or over-engineering a solution. They get reprimanded for taking too long or using too much resources during development. But they never receive the praise for the non-events like no outages or no errors/issues.
  - wyattpeak 7y ago
    Yes, it probably will look like an overreaction, but that doesn't provide carte-blanche to overreact every time there's a new virus. As GP mentioned, this happens every few years. Most of the time, it fizzles out. We can't transition all production to hospital equipment every few years, even if it is the right call twice a century. I have often reprimanded (and have in turn been reprimanded) for overengineering a solution to a problem which just needed a quick fix, because it's not often appropriate to dedicate a lot of resources to ensuring that there are no possible errors. If it is, I'll ask for that specifically.
    - asdfman123 7y ago
      So, how many lives will justify spending more money? Should we spend $1 billion to save 500,000 people? Less? What's your cutoff for (most probable number of lives saved)*(money per life)?
      - wyattpeak 7y ago
        Why do you assume that lives will be saved by redistributing resources like the ancestor proposed? Once in fifty years it will save lives, certainly. What about the shortage of other manufactured goods the other twenty times a century that you reassign factories to diseases that turn out to be nothing? I think it's a bad idea because it will hurt people, not because I want to save money. EDIT: Removed a political aside.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Xi Jinping enacted severe measures in China on Jan 21. That's not your retool date, but it's a later "take a long hard look at things" date for people doing public health planning at the national level.
- manigandham 7y ago
  We cancelled international travel plans in mid-January because of the expanding virus within China and the first cases in other countries. It was clear by then that there was no containment and the spread was underway. The federal govt has even more insight than average people watching the news and should've acted aggressively in closing borders and improving capacity. US (and EU) have reacted terribly late to all of this.
  - matheweis 7y ago
    > The federal govt has even more insight than average people watching the news We'd like to believe this, but are we sure it is true? The internet and social media have given us realtime global connectivity. Sans filtering out disinformation and accessing truly classified information, we have it all at our fingertips. > ... and should've acted aggressively in closing borders and improving capacity. I was laying in bed in January, laid up with the flu, and all I was reading about was this virus and what it was doing to China. I didn't call my representatives to warn them, did you? I think that we Americans should take more responsibility for our self-government than we currently do.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Yes, we have very capable intelligence services with plenty of resources. I guarantee they knew of the first cases within days back in November. I don't need to call the government to tell them to do their job.
- adrr 7y ago
  SARS happened less than 20 years ago. We should have been well aware what happens with these types of coronaviruses.
- kiba 7y ago
  We should already have the ventilator in stock beforehand.
- cm2012 7y ago
  Tell that to South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan who mobilized immediately (South Korea had their first case on the same day we did, Jan 8) Also, for H1N1 (which ended up being much less deadly) Obama had a million tests made in the first 2 weeks from the first US case. We're now 2 months from the first US case with less than 20k tests done.
  - danenania 7y ago
    Amazing. It shows us that the power law is at work in government effectiveness. A capable executive branch can get orders of magnitude more accomplished in a given timeframe than an inept one. It’s likely that thousands will die who didn’t have to because many American voters forgot the importance of a baseline level of administrative competence. Hopefully this will remind them.
    - cheese4242 7y ago
      I'm not convinced things would have played out much differently under any other administration to be honest. Note that many other western countries are struggling as well.
      - empath75 7y ago
        I have a metaphysical certainly that Obama would have handled this better are you kidding me. Even Bush would have.
      - danenania 7y ago
        It seems indisputable that if we had manufactured a million tests in the first two weeks after cases started showing up, we’d be a lot better off right now. And realistically, “a lot” is probably a massive understatement. Rare as they are in politics, we have a case where two presidential administrations faced almost directly analogous challenges. The results would appear to speak for themselves.
        cheese4242 7y ago
- noelsusman 7y ago
  On January 23rd China quarantined an entire city of 11 million people. Nobody does that for a minor respiratory virus.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  It's pure understanding of middle school math and exponential growth.
- throwaway894345 7y ago
  We didn’t know this virus was going to be this bad, but we knew that we were overdue for one and there had been recent epidemics that targeted respiratory systems. Our respirator stockpile was in the tens of thousands—several orders of magnitude lower than would be necessary in a national emergency.
- fma 7y ago
  Maybe if your only source of news was Fox News.
diafygi 7y ago
A common catchphrase: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.
jsight 7y ago
To be fair, if we had started back then there is almost zero chance that we'd need to pull in additional factories like this. Although arguably there might not be much need now either. The companies that make these have said that production can be increased.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  In fairness, this is a discussion of hypotheticals at this point. We're likely to need the ventilators. Other nations are likely to need the ventilators. We have to get as many companies as is reasonable making them to meet the need. Detroit certainly has the engineering and manufacturing expertise to retool in a hurry. It's the sort of thing they do a lot of, so that sounds like a reasonable place to look for additional capacity. As for the rest of the discussion? I mean, yeah, I suppose if Lincoln had not been shot, we might have never needed Martin Luther King. But, Lincoln was killed. So we did get MLK. Which is fine, no real reason to harp on how dumb it was to kill Lincoln. Should've, would've, could've is less than useful when you're still at "need to". Save the shoulda woulda coulda for the post-mortem.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    I just saw on Twitter that hospital in NY is already "double respirating" people, meaning two people share one respirator, so it seems the time to act was well before yesterday. I don't see how people can read that and not say "Holy crap, let's not let people suffocate to death on their own phlegm" if it just means spending a few billion dollars.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      Obviously the time to act was yesterday. But we've got a chance to act today, so let's get the details of these devices shipped to Detroit in a hurry and get the retooling process started. We should also be asking China what their capacity is? I do know they've been supplying Italy with extra ventilators, but we should see if they are able to make even more. I mean, we just need to find ways to get the requisite medical equipment into the field on a global scale. That's PPE's, that's masks, that's ventilators, that's the diagnostics, etc. Between China and the US, there is no reason that shouldn't be able to be done. We can only start from where we are is what I'm saying. Yes, we're unprepared. Yes, we should have been prepared. Now that all that's been conceded, let's hurry up and get prepared.
JunkDNA 7y ago
Have you ever been in an executive leadership position that required you to make tough decisions? As someone who recently has entered this realm, let me tell you: most of the decisions in front of you are essentially choices between a whole bunch of options that all have one thing in common: they totally suck. You learn quickly that you are going to make harmful decisions because sometimes a good option isn’t in the hand life has dealt you. It’s the nature of the gig. A true executive leader makes a decision quickly and moves on. When they recognize they have made a bad decision (often with more data now available), they change their mind. Most bad leaders are incapable of doing this last bit. They dig in and hold their ground. The good ones just switch. They won’t even admit it because of ego (Steve Jobs is a great example outside politics of someone with this behavior). If the US had gone into lockdown in January, the ACLU might have sued the government in court (or another civil liberties org). The UAW would have fought GM on shutting down the plants (let alone the shareholders!). College students would be protesting encroachment on civil liberties. Businesses would have been screaming. The stock market would have gone into a tailspin. People in a free society would have flouted the orders out of civil disobedience. For all this stuff to actually work in a free country, a significant percentage of the population has to believe the threat and cooperate. I’m a highly educated person with a degree in molecular biology. I know all about viral illness and epidemics. Even I did not come around on the severity of this until last week (Despite reading all the articles!). It just pattern matched against all the other pandemics that were a big deal in Asia and elsewhere, but didn’t really impact daily life in the US.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
  Fair enough. But you move towards the target by having leadership that says "This is serious. We need to start doing this now. I am not going to invoke war-like power to force us all to do this (yet), but we've got to understand the seriousness of the risk and start social distancing now while there's still time". Instead, we got 2 months of "it's nothing". One of the roles of leadership is to persuade a significant percentage of the population that threats are real and cooperate. The current US leadership utterly failed at this.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  A lockdown in January was not the only option. The fact of the matter is that the USA was in the extremely luxurious position of seeing this crisis coming from a mile away. First China, then South Korea, then Italy acting as the canary in the European coal mine, then several other European nations... every expert was raising the alarm and screaming at the top of their lungs that the USA was going to be next. Did the administration start preparing then? Nope. Instead, the guy in charge called it a "hoax" and did everything he could to first ignore it completely, then downplay it as much as possible, then telling people it will all pass soon... all the while flatly refusing to take any responsibility whatsoever and having the audacity to rate his administrations response as a 10 out of 10. That's not "leadership". It's sheer, unadulterated idiocy.
miked85 7y ago
In retrospect sure, but as late as mid-January the WHO was saying there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?ref_src=t...

This is pure hindsight. This didn't warrant that kind of response in January, not by a longshot. In January it looked exactly like the other comparatively minor respiratory viruses that pop up every few years. We can't shut down industry and retool factories just in case.

cycrutchfield 7y ago
Not sure if you recall, but in January China put large portions of the country under lockdown in a quarantine effort of unprecedented scale. At that point, the writing was on the wall that this was not something that "looked exactly like the other comparatively minor respiratory viruses that pop up every few years".
- fma 7y ago
  I was literally pounding my desk asking myself why is Trump taking this as a joke. I mean ok if you don't trust China, fine... But South Korea, Japan, Italy, Taiwan, Singapore. Are our allies in on the joke too? The writing was on the wall flashing in bright neon signs.
- unishark 7y ago
  The timeline is interesting. The lockdown started on Jan 23. At this point they had a few thousand cases and 50 or so deaths, less than many countries have now. The announcement of transmission without symptoms came out on Jan 26. Around this time China also extended restrictions over the whole country. Many countries including the US started announcing travel restrictions on travelers from China in the next few days, to take effect around Feb 1. The WHO and China called it an overreaction.
gravypod 7y ago
> This didn't warrant that kind of response in January Could China's mobilization of resources have been a hint to us that this would have made sense? Even early on there were stories breaking of people taking double doses of some meds to lower their temperature to get through fever screening. Shortly after that we found out there was a very long incubation period. Shortly after that there was talk of mild/asymptomatic spread. All the while no one shut down air travel and boarders while China locked down it's country. It's not the time to play the blame game but saying this is entirely hindsight doesn't make sense to me. Many people were talking about stocking and isolating in Jan/Feb. Back then they are just met with misinformed masses "the flu kills..."
ewoodrich 7y ago
By late January the Chinese government had already ordered the lockdown in Wuhan. There were plenty of signs that this wasn't an unremarkable minor respiratory virus.
chii 7y ago
the correct response should look like an overreaction in hindsight. But it's tough to explain the cost of the overreaction if said overreaction prevented all of these problems. I make the analogy with an engineer receiving accolades for fixing bugs and outages with heroic effort. But the engineer that creates trouble free code, that never has any problems, but takes a long time to create code that's bug free seems to be over-cautious or over-engineering a solution. They get reprimanded for taking too long or using too much resources during development. But they never receive the praise for the non-events like no outages or no errors/issues.
- wyattpeak 7y ago
  Yes, it probably will look like an overreaction, but that doesn't provide carte-blanche to overreact every time there's a new virus. As GP mentioned, this happens every few years. Most of the time, it fizzles out. We can't transition all production to hospital equipment every few years, even if it is the right call twice a century. I have often reprimanded (and have in turn been reprimanded) for overengineering a solution to a problem which just needed a quick fix, because it's not often appropriate to dedicate a lot of resources to ensuring that there are no possible errors. If it is, I'll ask for that specifically.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    So, how many lives will justify spending more money? Should we spend $1 billion to save 500,000 people? Less? What's your cutoff for (most probable number of lives saved)*(money per life)?
    - wyattpeak 7y ago
      Why do you assume that lives will be saved by redistributing resources like the ancestor proposed? Once in fifty years it will save lives, certainly. What about the shortage of other manufactured goods the other twenty times a century that you reassign factories to diseases that turn out to be nothing? I think it's a bad idea because it will hurt people, not because I want to save money. EDIT: Removed a political aside.
maxerickson 7y ago
Xi Jinping enacted severe measures in China on Jan 21. That's not your retool date, but it's a later "take a long hard look at things" date for people doing public health planning at the national level.
manigandham 7y ago
We cancelled international travel plans in mid-January because of the expanding virus within China and the first cases in other countries. It was clear by then that there was no containment and the spread was underway. The federal govt has even more insight than average people watching the news and should've acted aggressively in closing borders and improving capacity. US (and EU) have reacted terribly late to all of this.
- matheweis 7y ago
  > The federal govt has even more insight than average people watching the news We'd like to believe this, but are we sure it is true? The internet and social media have given us realtime global connectivity. Sans filtering out disinformation and accessing truly classified information, we have it all at our fingertips. > ... and should've acted aggressively in closing borders and improving capacity. I was laying in bed in January, laid up with the flu, and all I was reading about was this virus and what it was doing to China. I didn't call my representatives to warn them, did you? I think that we Americans should take more responsibility for our self-government than we currently do.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Yes, we have very capable intelligence services with plenty of resources. I guarantee they knew of the first cases within days back in November. I don't need to call the government to tell them to do their job.
adrr 7y ago
SARS happened less than 20 years ago. We should have been well aware what happens with these types of coronaviruses.
kiba 7y ago
We should already have the ventilator in stock beforehand.
cm2012 7y ago
Tell that to South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan who mobilized immediately (South Korea had their first case on the same day we did, Jan 8) Also, for H1N1 (which ended up being much less deadly) Obama had a million tests made in the first 2 weeks from the first US case. We're now 2 months from the first US case with less than 20k tests done.
- danenania 7y ago
  Amazing. It shows us that the power law is at work in government effectiveness. A capable executive branch can get orders of magnitude more accomplished in a given timeframe than an inept one. It’s likely that thousands will die who didn’t have to because many American voters forgot the importance of a baseline level of administrative competence. Hopefully this will remind them.
  - cheese4242 7y ago
    I'm not convinced things would have played out much differently under any other administration to be honest. Note that many other western countries are struggling as well.
    - empath75 7y ago
      I have a metaphysical certainly that Obama would have handled this better are you kidding me. Even Bush would have.
    - danenania 7y ago
      It seems indisputable that if we had manufactured a million tests in the first two weeks after cases started showing up, we’d be a lot better off right now. And realistically, “a lot” is probably a massive understatement. Rare as they are in politics, we have a case where two presidential administrations faced almost directly analogous challenges. The results would appear to speak for themselves.
      - cheese4242 7y ago
noelsusman 7y ago
On January 23rd China quarantined an entire city of 11 million people. Nobody does that for a minor respiratory virus.
asdfman123 7y ago
It's pure understanding of middle school math and exponential growth.
throwaway894345 7y ago
We didn’t know this virus was going to be this bad, but we knew that we were overdue for one and there had been recent epidemics that targeted respiratory systems. Our respirator stockpile was in the tens of thousands—several orders of magnitude lower than would be necessary in a national emergency.
fma 7y ago
Maybe if your only source of news was Fox News.

diafygi 7y ago

A common catchphrase: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.

jsight 7y ago

To be fair, if we had started back then there is almost zero chance that we'd need to pull in additional factories like this. Although arguably there might not be much need now either. The companies that make these have said that production can be increased.

bilbo0s 7y ago
In fairness, this is a discussion of hypotheticals at this point. We're likely to need the ventilators. Other nations are likely to need the ventilators. We have to get as many companies as is reasonable making them to meet the need. Detroit certainly has the engineering and manufacturing expertise to retool in a hurry. It's the sort of thing they do a lot of, so that sounds like a reasonable place to look for additional capacity. As for the rest of the discussion? I mean, yeah, I suppose if Lincoln had not been shot, we might have never needed Martin Luther King. But, Lincoln was killed. So we did get MLK. Which is fine, no real reason to harp on how dumb it was to kill Lincoln. Should've, would've, could've is less than useful when you're still at "need to". Save the shoulda woulda coulda for the post-mortem.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  I just saw on Twitter that hospital in NY is already "double respirating" people, meaning two people share one respirator, so it seems the time to act was well before yesterday. I don't see how people can read that and not say "Holy crap, let's not let people suffocate to death on their own phlegm" if it just means spending a few billion dollars.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    Obviously the time to act was yesterday. But we've got a chance to act today, so let's get the details of these devices shipped to Detroit in a hurry and get the retooling process started. We should also be asking China what their capacity is? I do know they've been supplying Italy with extra ventilators, but we should see if they are able to make even more. I mean, we just need to find ways to get the requisite medical equipment into the field on a global scale. That's PPE's, that's masks, that's ventilators, that's the diagnostics, etc. Between China and the US, there is no reason that shouldn't be able to be done. We can only start from where we are is what I'm saying. Yes, we're unprepared. Yes, we should have been prepared. Now that all that's been conceded, let's hurry up and get prepared.

JunkDNA 7y ago

Have you ever been in an executive leadership position that required you to make tough decisions? As someone who recently has entered this realm, let me tell you: most of the decisions in front of you are essentially choices between a whole bunch of options that all have one thing in common: they totally suck. You learn quickly that you are going to make harmful decisions because sometimes a good option isn’t in the hand life has dealt you. It’s the nature of the gig. A true executive leader makes a decision quickly and moves on. When they recognize they have made a bad decision (often with more data now available), they change their mind. Most bad leaders are incapable of doing this last bit. They dig in and hold their ground. The good ones just switch. They won’t even admit it because of ego (Steve Jobs is a great example outside politics of someone with this behavior). If the US had gone into lockdown in January, the ACLU might have sued the government in court (or another civil liberties org). The UAW would have fought GM on shutting down the plants (let alone the shareholders!). College students would be protesting encroachment on civil liberties. Businesses would have been screaming. The stock market would have gone into a tailspin. People in a free society would have flouted the orders out of civil disobedience. For all this stuff to actually work in a free country, a significant percentage of the population has to believe the threat and cooperate. I’m a highly educated person with a degree in molecular biology. I know all about viral illness and epidemics. Even I did not come around on the severity of this until last week (Despite reading all the articles!). It just pattern matched against all the other pandemics that were a big deal in Asia and elsewhere, but didn’t really impact daily life in the US.

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
Fair enough. But you move towards the target by having leadership that says "This is serious. We need to start doing this now. I am not going to invoke war-like power to force us all to do this (yet), but we've got to understand the seriousness of the risk and start social distancing now while there's still time". Instead, we got 2 months of "it's nothing". One of the roles of leadership is to persuade a significant percentage of the population that threats are real and cooperate. The current US leadership utterly failed at this.
enraged_camel 7y ago
A lockdown in January was not the only option. The fact of the matter is that the USA was in the extremely luxurious position of seeing this crisis coming from a mile away. First China, then South Korea, then Italy acting as the canary in the European coal mine, then several other European nations... every expert was raising the alarm and screaming at the top of their lungs that the USA was going to be next. Did the administration start preparing then? Nope. Instead, the guy in charge called it a "hoax" and did everything he could to first ignore it completely, then downplay it as much as possible, then telling people it will all pass soon... all the while flatly refusing to take any responsibility whatsoever and having the audacity to rate his administrations response as a 10 out of 10. That's not "leadership". It's sheer, unadulterated idiocy.

miked85 7y ago

In retrospect sure, but as late as mid-January the WHO was saying there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?ref_src=t...