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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
by 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 agoAmazing. 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 agoI'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 agoI have a metaphysical certainly that Obama would have handled this better are you kidding me. Even Bush would have.
- danenania 7y agoIt 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"directly analogous challenges"? I don't buy it. This is unprecedented.
- danenania 7y agoThe need to rapidly scale up testing for a dangerous new pathogen clearly is not unprecedented, considering it happened during the previous administration. It seems pretty analogous to me, apart from the stakes turning out to be much higher this time around :-/
- BurningFrog 7y agoBut did South Korea or Taiwan start cranking out ventilators?
- cm2012 7y agoThey don't need to because their hospital systems never got overwhelmed.
- xyzzyz 7y agoThey weren't overwhelmed in the US in January either.
- BurningFrog 7y agoI really doubt that was clear beforehand!
- triceratops 7y agoI only learned there was an H1N1 epidemic in 2009 after this whole thing blew up. And I was definitely old enough to have remembered it, and I followed the news back then. I guess that's a reflection on how competently it was handled.
- xyzzyz 7y agoI guess that's a reflection on how competently it was handled. There were 60 million people in the US infected by H1N1 in 2009, and 12 000 of them died. It wasn't handled any better than COVID-19, the only difference between then and now is that COVID-19 is much, much, much worse than H1N1. We just got lucky in 2009.