12 ms·

I definitely feel the US is constantly behind the curve in this. After trying to downplay it for a while the administration had to accept reality but instead o

I definitely feel the US is constantly behind the curve in this. After trying to downplay it for a while the administration had to accept reality but instead of taking strong measures they still do things only very reluctantly. Then on the other hand they close parks while at the same people are crowding in stores without masks or gloves.

celticninja 7y ago
stores in the UK are limiting the number of people allowed in at any one time, and people queuing outside have the sense to to leave gaps to allow for some social distancing in the queue
- thsowers 7y ago
  It is the same here in many states, though I don't think a occupation limit has been imposed federally
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    I think many people will misunderstand the U.S. effort, since it's something like looking at the whole EU (but with less population density). They look at the central government and they're like "this is not enough!", when often the things they're asking for are deployed to some reasonable degree in every state.
  - celticninja 7y ago
    neither has one been imposed in the UK, it's just using common sense and also protecting their staff
- adventured 7y ago
  And yet the UK is testing at a rate 1/2 that of the US per capita (with a max capacity of only 12,750 per day) [1]. Two weeks ago they were barely testing at all. This is in fact going on across all of Europe, very few nations are doing anything right including on the testing front. That includes supposedly good outcome nations such as Sweden, which has made a terrible mistake of not properly quarantining, and even bragging about this fact [2]; meanwhile their case numbers are surging by the day, tripling in roughly 10-12 days. It's just that people ignorantly like to target the US with abuse because it feels good, while pretending everything is going swimmingly elsewhere (it's not). They count on Americans not following the news of the disaster that's still unfolding across Europe. There are a handful of nations doing kinda-sorta well in Europe and that's it. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-testing/uk-to-speed-up-coronavirus-testing-as-criticism-grows-idUSKBN21J4ET https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britai... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-27/coronavirus-want-to-escape-a-lockdown-try-sweden https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-27/corona... > “I’m deeply concerned,” virology professor Fredrik Elgh told state broadcaster SVT. Epidemiologist Joacim Rocklov told the FT it was “a huge experiment” that could go “crazily” wrong. Mathematician Marcus Carlsson, less politely, said it amounted to “Russian roulette.”
  - nfellaby 7y ago
    Regarding the rate of testing, since the whole country is in lock down the rate of testing isn't actually that helpful. It's more about damage limitation. The UK, and most countries, are no longer in a containment phase that ship has sailed. Now it's more a case of reducing burden on the NHS. So the rate of testing only has a limited use at this point. I gives a guestimate about the total infection rate, and it is probably essential for hospitals to ensure containment of patients, but in terms of testing the general public, not that helpful. The US might get more use out of it at the moment in the remotely located populations such as towns that currently have limited infection rates Then testing is extremely helpful postponing infection. By doing so, it bides time for stock of medical supplies to increase after the significant burden that infected cities will have in the coming months.
- slimginz 7y ago
  Micro Center here in the states has you give them your phone number and they text you when you can come in. The one by me doesn’t even let people queue up and wait there - you have to go somewhere else while waiting.
  - celticninja 7y ago
    that's a great idea even if it just means people can sit in their vehicles outside the store.
    - johannes1234321 7y ago
      And the store owner gets the phone numbers of their customers and ca at least roughly map it to a set of sales from that time frame. If they survive this allows nice marketing in future. But yeah, pragmatic solution.
      - djsumdog 7y ago
        Microcenter is already terrible about sucking up all consumer information they can. When I check out with a credit card it shows an address from three apartments before in another state .. not updating it.
makomk 7y ago
This seems to be a global feeling. People in most countries seem to think that theirs is constantly behind the curve, that they aren't locking down fast enough and their testing is so grossly inadequate compared to the rest of the world that their government is practically trying to kill them.
- loopz 7y ago
  This is just not true. Norway quaranteed people coming from infected areas, and brought up understandable restrictions by a unified front across ministries, sparrowheaded by the Prime Minister. Curve of infected and deaths seem almost linear, and the Gov is considering opening up low-hanging restrictions after Easter. The clue was right responses at right time, correct nation-wide communication, coordination and leadership. With earlier response, maybe this could've been stopped at borders. But effectiveness is doubtful, since most countries have dismantled pandemic and crisis capabilities.
  - 3JPLW 7y ago
    The contrast between Norway and Sweden is particularly stark.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I'm in Canada. We were a bit late to the punch, but I think by and large my government layers (municipal, regional, provincial, and federal) have taken the right actions at the right times given the information available. And they're clearly working in conjunction with experts, so there's that. I definitely have policy beefs with both my premier and PM. I didn't vote for either of them and probably won't the next time either, but I can still be pleased at the degree to which they've stepped up. The contrast with US federal government is especially stark.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Canada missed the boat by not being serious about checking travellers returning to Canada. If the fake followup questionaire that was routinely not asked was asked and had detailed questions, if an assessment of people returning was done, if airports were shutdown earlier, if returning people didn't have to wait for hours in line in close contact with thousands of others returning.. The airports are the weak links. Now they go on tv and yell at people for not doing enough. When two weeks before they downplayed, mocked those who would dare wear masks. The majority of the initial outbreak was spent telling people they were racist for not shopping in Chinatown.
bamboozled 7y ago
The leader of the free world is still coming to terms with the economic damage on the horizon, not to mention there will be nothing left of his personal brand once / if he does the right thing. As with climate change, the solution has been broadsided by petty politics.
- kick 7y ago
  "The Leader of the Free World" is such an unnecessary term. It started out as propaganda and hasn't gotten more true since about any POTUS.
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    I would interpret the GP as I treat any reference of such a title and Trump: As satiric. Some predecessors might have tried to fill such a title and living up to it. For Trump it is a non-goal.
    - kick 7y ago
      It's not just Trump. If you're interpreting their comment as satirical solely because of the reference to Trump, you're missing the point of my own. No one in charge of the United States has ever deserved that title, nor tried to live up to it. It was never anything but well-aimed propaganda. That it's lived past the Cold War (and, do note, was coined in reference to someone far more damaging to freedom than Trump) is ridiculous.
jerf 7y ago
One of the characteristics of an exponential spread is that you will be either behind or ahead. If it seems like nobody is at "just right", it's because "just right" is an exponentially small target. I would suggest cutting people some slack in both directions. (It wasn't that long ago when our government was being criticized as moving too fast and xenophobically shutting the borders before it was justified. Moving back and forth between "too far ahead" and "too far behind" is also a thing that will continue to happen.)
- kkylin 7y ago
  Quite agree, and your comment reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control
- shock-value 7y ago
  In this situation most would agree it's better to be ahead; the criticism is justified.
  - jerf 7y ago
    Would they? First of all, the criticism I mentioned was when the governent was "ahead"; experience indicates people were not "agreeing it was good to be ahead". "Ahead" in this case may be shutting down the economy far more than is justified. While it may be fun to talk about "the rich" and stuff, remember that "the economy" is what feeds all of us, clothes us, houses us, and keeps us in electricity and clean water. It is even now not necessarily clear that we aren't "ahead", once you put aside the partisan political sniping, and doing ourselves much greater damage than is actually justified. Thousands of deaths are bad, but a 30% employment rate (and presumably growing) is going to be bad too. I am not implicitly claiming one is worse than the other... I'm saying right here, right now, we don't actually know. The "correct" response is an exponentially small target. Right now in the fog of war we don't even know what it would be. It would fit the evidence that the coronavirus fatality rate really is sub-.5%, if you count all the asymptomatic cases that may exist, and that we're badly overreacting. It would fit the evidence that coronavirus is still, if anything, downplayed, that there is no reserve of asymptomatic cases, and that even if it doesn't kill you there will be a generation of people crippled by it just like there was by polio. The nastier end of the rumors I'm hearing are really nasty [1]. It will only be visible in hindsight. [1]: Can the virus kill the part of the brain responsible for determining whether or not you have enough oxygen in your blood, and then also kill your lungs, so that you think you're recovered and doing well and everything's fine even as your blood oxygen level sinks until you just keel over dead? Is that what the videos of people literally keeling over dead in the streets of China were? Dunno. Won't know for a while yet. But if it can do stuff like that, it could be a scar on us for the rest of our lives. Or that could be something else entirely, up to and including some intelligence agency's way of fearmongering. Heck if I know. Maybe it is ultimately just a bad cold that tends to cause pneumonia and everything else is just the Internet doing its echo-y thing. Zoonoses (diseases that jump the species barrier) have a history of that sort of thing.
op03 7y ago
Well given the polarized climate/full of mistrust, top down "strong measures" will run into all kinds of issues. Local leadership, preparation, measurement and imagination at the state and county level is what is going to decide how things play out. National leadership in all countries has been a gigantic kabuki performance for the media and political fan clubs.
news_hacker 7y ago
It's common in times of crisis to dwell on "what could we have done to prevent this?" or "what could we do better"? There are many positive actions also taking place. Not to mention brave front-liners who are helping managing this to the best of their abilities. No one could have predicted the magnitude of this. The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago. The next best time is now.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > No one could have predicted the magnitude of this. Public health experts all over the world have predicted the magnitude of this sort of thing for decades, and this particular virus for months. We have plenty of historical examples of pandemics to reference. Hell, Bill Gates himself gave a TED talk in 2015 about exactly this: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/bill-gates-warned-us-covid-19-like-pandemic-watch-ted-talk-2015/ https://www.geekwire.com/2020/bill-gates-warned-us-covid-19-... > “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” Gates said during the Ted Talk. “Not missiles, but microbes.”
  - TearsInTheRain 7y ago
    > Public health experts all over the world have predicted the magnitude of this sort of thing for decades That reminds me of all of the finance experts that have been predicting a major asset bubble pop for the last 7 years.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- beamatronic 7y ago
  It is not true that “no one could have predicted this” since myself and other have been discussing exactly this since mid January.
- Invictus0 7y ago
  Lots of people predicted this and the tools we needed to prevent it were in place just a few years ago: not to mention we had over a month of warning by just observing the situation in China. We should definitely dwell on why we were so unprepared for this.
vsareto 7y ago
They are and the only saving grace I can think of is that they just didn't want to shut down the entire economy based on China's/WHO's data alone. Our economy is a tad more important than many other countries and unfortunately that has to mean we're among the last to turn the lights off.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  At least Trump and Kudlow shouldn’t have said that this is well contained and no problem. That was based on zero facts and just made up. I don’t envy political leaders in this situation having to choose between very bad options but at least don’t make stuff up. It’s ok to say that you don’t know. They also seem to be more concerned about blaming others instead of taking charge.
tim333 7y ago
A Paul Graham tweet on the reason for that https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1244995102818304000 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1244995102818304000

celticninja 7y ago

stores in the UK are limiting the number of people allowed in at any one time, and people queuing outside have the sense to to leave gaps to allow for some social distancing in the queue

thsowers 7y ago
It is the same here in many states, though I don't think a occupation limit has been imposed federally
- microcolonel 7y ago
  I think many people will misunderstand the U.S. effort, since it's something like looking at the whole EU (but with less population density). They look at the central government and they're like "this is not enough!", when often the things they're asking for are deployed to some reasonable degree in every state.
- celticninja 7y ago
  neither has one been imposed in the UK, it's just using common sense and also protecting their staff
adventured 7y ago
And yet the UK is testing at a rate 1/2 that of the US per capita (with a max capacity of only 12,750 per day) [1]. Two weeks ago they were barely testing at all. This is in fact going on across all of Europe, very few nations are doing anything right including on the testing front. That includes supposedly good outcome nations such as Sweden, which has made a terrible mistake of not properly quarantining, and even bragging about this fact [2]; meanwhile their case numbers are surging by the day, tripling in roughly 10-12 days. It's just that people ignorantly like to target the US with abuse because it feels good, while pretending everything is going swimmingly elsewhere (it's not). They count on Americans not following the news of the disaster that's still unfolding across Europe. There are a handful of nations doing kinda-sorta well in Europe and that's it. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-testing/uk-to-speed-up-coronavirus-testing-as-criticism-grows-idUSKBN21J4ET https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britai... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-27/coronavirus-want-to-escape-a-lockdown-try-sweden https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-27/corona... > “I’m deeply concerned,” virology professor Fredrik Elgh told state broadcaster SVT. Epidemiologist Joacim Rocklov told the FT it was “a huge experiment” that could go “crazily” wrong. Mathematician Marcus Carlsson, less politely, said it amounted to “Russian roulette.”
- nfellaby 7y ago
  Regarding the rate of testing, since the whole country is in lock down the rate of testing isn't actually that helpful. It's more about damage limitation. The UK, and most countries, are no longer in a containment phase that ship has sailed. Now it's more a case of reducing burden on the NHS. So the rate of testing only has a limited use at this point. I gives a guestimate about the total infection rate, and it is probably essential for hospitals to ensure containment of patients, but in terms of testing the general public, not that helpful. The US might get more use out of it at the moment in the remotely located populations such as towns that currently have limited infection rates Then testing is extremely helpful postponing infection. By doing so, it bides time for stock of medical supplies to increase after the significant burden that infected cities will have in the coming months.
slimginz 7y ago
Micro Center here in the states has you give them your phone number and they text you when you can come in. The one by me doesn’t even let people queue up and wait there - you have to go somewhere else while waiting.
- celticninja 7y ago
  that's a great idea even if it just means people can sit in their vehicles outside the store.
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    And the store owner gets the phone numbers of their customers and ca at least roughly map it to a set of sales from that time frame. If they survive this allows nice marketing in future. But yeah, pragmatic solution.
    - djsumdog 7y ago
      Microcenter is already terrible about sucking up all consumer information they can. When I check out with a credit card it shows an address from three apartments before in another state .. not updating it.

makomk 7y ago

This seems to be a global feeling. People in most countries seem to think that theirs is constantly behind the curve, that they aren't locking down fast enough and their testing is so grossly inadequate compared to the rest of the world that their government is practically trying to kill them.

loopz 7y ago
This is just not true. Norway quaranteed people coming from infected areas, and brought up understandable restrictions by a unified front across ministries, sparrowheaded by the Prime Minister. Curve of infected and deaths seem almost linear, and the Gov is considering opening up low-hanging restrictions after Easter. The clue was right responses at right time, correct nation-wide communication, coordination and leadership. With earlier response, maybe this could've been stopped at borders. But effectiveness is doubtful, since most countries have dismantled pandemic and crisis capabilities.
- 3JPLW 7y ago
  The contrast between Norway and Sweden is particularly stark.
mikepurvis 7y ago
I'm in Canada. We were a bit late to the punch, but I think by and large my government layers (municipal, regional, provincial, and federal) have taken the right actions at the right times given the information available. And they're clearly working in conjunction with experts, so there's that. I definitely have policy beefs with both my premier and PM. I didn't vote for either of them and probably won't the next time either, but I can still be pleased at the degree to which they've stepped up. The contrast with US federal government is especially stark.
- wolco 7y ago
  Canada missed the boat by not being serious about checking travellers returning to Canada. If the fake followup questionaire that was routinely not asked was asked and had detailed questions, if an assessment of people returning was done, if airports were shutdown earlier, if returning people didn't have to wait for hours in line in close contact with thousands of others returning.. The airports are the weak links. Now they go on tv and yell at people for not doing enough. When two weeks before they downplayed, mocked those who would dare wear masks. The majority of the initial outbreak was spent telling people they were racist for not shopping in Chinatown.

bamboozled 7y ago

The leader of the free world is still coming to terms with the economic damage on the horizon, not to mention there will be nothing left of his personal brand once / if he does the right thing. As with climate change, the solution has been broadsided by petty politics.

kick 7y ago
"The Leader of the Free World" is such an unnecessary term. It started out as propaganda and hasn't gotten more true since about any POTUS.
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  I would interpret the GP as I treat any reference of such a title and Trump: As satiric. Some predecessors might have tried to fill such a title and living up to it. For Trump it is a non-goal.
  - kick 7y ago
    It's not just Trump. If you're interpreting their comment as satirical solely because of the reference to Trump, you're missing the point of my own. No one in charge of the United States has ever deserved that title, nor tried to live up to it. It was never anything but well-aimed propaganda. That it's lived past the Cold War (and, do note, was coined in reference to someone far more damaging to freedom than Trump) is ridiculous.

jerf 7y ago

One of the characteristics of an exponential spread is that you will be either behind or ahead. If it seems like nobody is at "just right", it's because "just right" is an exponentially small target. I would suggest cutting people some slack in both directions. (It wasn't that long ago when our government was being criticized as moving too fast and xenophobically shutting the borders before it was justified. Moving back and forth between "too far ahead" and "too far behind" is also a thing that will continue to happen.)

kkylin 7y ago
Quite agree, and your comment reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control
shock-value 7y ago
In this situation most would agree it's better to be ahead; the criticism is justified.
- jerf 7y ago
  Would they? First of all, the criticism I mentioned was when the governent was "ahead"; experience indicates people were not "agreeing it was good to be ahead". "Ahead" in this case may be shutting down the economy far more than is justified. While it may be fun to talk about "the rich" and stuff, remember that "the economy" is what feeds all of us, clothes us, houses us, and keeps us in electricity and clean water. It is even now not necessarily clear that we aren't "ahead", once you put aside the partisan political sniping, and doing ourselves much greater damage than is actually justified. Thousands of deaths are bad, but a 30% employment rate (and presumably growing) is going to be bad too. I am not implicitly claiming one is worse than the other... I'm saying right here, right now, we don't actually know. The "correct" response is an exponentially small target. Right now in the fog of war we don't even know what it would be. It would fit the evidence that the coronavirus fatality rate really is sub-.5%, if you count all the asymptomatic cases that may exist, and that we're badly overreacting. It would fit the evidence that coronavirus is still, if anything, downplayed, that there is no reserve of asymptomatic cases, and that even if it doesn't kill you there will be a generation of people crippled by it just like there was by polio. The nastier end of the rumors I'm hearing are really nasty [1]. It will only be visible in hindsight. [1]: Can the virus kill the part of the brain responsible for determining whether or not you have enough oxygen in your blood, and then also kill your lungs, so that you think you're recovered and doing well and everything's fine even as your blood oxygen level sinks until you just keel over dead? Is that what the videos of people literally keeling over dead in the streets of China were? Dunno. Won't know for a while yet. But if it can do stuff like that, it could be a scar on us for the rest of our lives. Or that could be something else entirely, up to and including some intelligence agency's way of fearmongering. Heck if I know. Maybe it is ultimately just a bad cold that tends to cause pneumonia and everything else is just the Internet doing its echo-y thing. Zoonoses (diseases that jump the species barrier) have a history of that sort of thing.

op03 7y ago

Well given the polarized climate/full of mistrust, top down "strong measures" will run into all kinds of issues. Local leadership, preparation, measurement and imagination at the state and county level is what is going to decide how things play out. National leadership in all countries has been a gigantic kabuki performance for the media and political fan clubs.

news_hacker 7y ago

It's common in times of crisis to dwell on "what could we have done to prevent this?" or "what could we do better"? There are many positive actions also taking place. Not to mention brave front-liners who are helping managing this to the best of their abilities. No one could have predicted the magnitude of this. The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago. The next best time is now.

ceejayoz 7y ago
> No one could have predicted the magnitude of this. Public health experts all over the world have predicted the magnitude of this sort of thing for decades, and this particular virus for months. We have plenty of historical examples of pandemics to reference. Hell, Bill Gates himself gave a TED talk in 2015 about exactly this: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/bill-gates-warned-us-covid-19-like-pandemic-watch-ted-talk-2015/ https://www.geekwire.com/2020/bill-gates-warned-us-covid-19-... > “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” Gates said during the Ted Talk. “Not missiles, but microbes.”
- TearsInTheRain 7y ago
  > Public health experts all over the world have predicted the magnitude of this sort of thing for decades That reminds me of all of the finance experts that have been predicting a major asset bubble pop for the last 7 years.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
beamatronic 7y ago
It is not true that “no one could have predicted this” since myself and other have been discussing exactly this since mid January.
Invictus0 7y ago
Lots of people predicted this and the tools we needed to prevent it were in place just a few years ago: not to mention we had over a month of warning by just observing the situation in China. We should definitely dwell on why we were so unprepared for this.

vsareto 7y ago

They are and the only saving grace I can think of is that they just didn't want to shut down the entire economy based on China's/WHO's data alone. Our economy is a tad more important than many other countries and unfortunately that has to mean we're among the last to turn the lights off.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
At least Trump and Kudlow shouldn’t have said that this is well contained and no problem. That was based on zero facts and just made up. I don’t envy political leaders in this situation having to choose between very bad options but at least don’t make stuff up. It’s ok to say that you don’t know. They also seem to be more concerned about blaming others instead of taking charge.

tim333 7y ago

A Paul Graham tweet on the reason for that https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1244995102818304000 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1244995102818304000