6 ms·

And that's in the present. What's more frustrating too is that if we're still debating about the present, there will certainly not be any accountability for the

by xster 7y ago

And that's in the present. What's more frustrating too is that if we're still debating about the present, there will certainly not be any accountability for the lack of preparedness from all levels of government in the past to prepare for health crisis. Compare to these images https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/雁塔_曲江收费站的防疫检查_01.jpg/440px-雁塔_曲江收费站的防疫检查_01.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/雁塔... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Check_for_2019-nCoV_in_Jishuitan_metro_station_%28Beijing%29.jpg/440px-Check_for_2019-nCoV_in_Jishuitan_metro_station_%28Beijing%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Ch... (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_i...) where even the random person checking your temperature at subway entrances and toll stations are armed to the teeth in PPEs in China. And that's coming from a country that wasn't even able to genetically map SARS themselves <20 years ago.

baybal2 7y ago
This is the point I've tried to convey to my peers in the West over, and over, and over for years. I hope this would finally be a rude awakening moment for countries in the West. The decay of essential social institutes in the West has reached the point when issues begin to snowball uncontrollably. I don't like many points of that guy called Neil Fergusson makes, but he is 100% on the spot pointing that the West is loosing the "institutional IQ" after 20 to 30 years of "ultrapopulism" in government. Just look at the level of organisation being exhibited now, and how emergency response was handled few decades ago. Quarantines were not so unheard of in the West even for things like bad flu outbreaks in the 20th century, but, nowadays, some countries can't quarantine even a single city.
- makomk 7y ago
  Institutional IQ or leadership or anything else like that does you no good when your country no longer has the manufacturing infrastructure to make PPE anymore and the countries which can would rather use it to protect their own citizens, and it's mostly the anti-populists which seem to be doubling down on denying that simple fact.
  - jfim 7y ago
    It actually does. For example, for things that cannot be produced locally in sufficient quantities (such as oil prior to the fracking boom), the US did maintain a strategic reserve. Even to this day, it still has a strategic oil reserve. Lack of institutional IQ/leadership manifests in myriad of ways, such as the dismantling of California's emergency medical supply reserve in 2011 [0], defunding of organizations that address the current risks [1], and so on. Addressing potential systemic risks through domestic production is only one potential way that leadership can handle them. Creating reserves and funding preparedness are some of the other ways to handle such risks. [0] https://revealnews.org/article/california-created-a-massive-medical-reserve-with-acute-care-beds-ventilators-and-n95-masks-and-let-it-collapse/ https://revealnews.org/article/california-created-a-massive-... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...
    - makomk 7y ago
      The trouble with stockpiling PPE is that it's bulky, it expires in storage, and you need an awful lot of it to handle a crisis of this size. For anything beyond a short-lived, localized crisis, building out the production capacity to actually be able to make PPE in sufficient quantities seems a lot more feasible than a massive billion-item stockpile. The strategic oil reserve has the advantage that it can just pumping oil into well-selected holes in the ground.
      - rckoepke 7y ago
        Maintaining emergency stockpiles is the only solution to these episodes of commodity shortages, whether they're caused by increased demand or interrupted supply. During normal times, the US may use several million masks per week. During epidemics, we may need more than 2 billion masks per week (1 per citizen per day). We can't financially maintain 1000x production capacity for every potential emergency item. Businesses get screwed when they try to provide surplus capacity for our nation that it doesn't need the other 99% of the time: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if-you-imagine-that-a-local-business-making-surgical-face-masks-is-working-247-guess-again/ https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if-you-i... Even if we could it would be cost wasteful vs. stockpiles. People talk about bringing all the production home, but that may be like getting rid of all your off-site backups and doing all backups onsite. It concentrates risk. What if there's a fire/pandemic/regional event that makes it so you need the emergency supplies, but also knocks out your plants that produce those emergency supplies? At least with some plants here, some plants there...if one country gets sick before the other, the currently-not-sick country can provide some supplies to the now-sick country, and vice versa when the pandemic ends in that place and moves to the other. We probably need at least a 90 day supply of this stuff for the next pandemic. For n95 masks, I guess that's potentially 350 million * 90 days = 31 billion N95 masks. If they expire in 5 years, then we only need to manufacture 500 million per month to keep them up-to-date, and can pay maintainers to keep the supply rotating. We don't have to throw out soon-to-expire masks, we can sell them from the back of the stockpile at a small discount to end-users who need them regularly, like normal hospital or industrial use. > building out the production capacity to actually be able to make PPE in sufficient quantities as you put it, would require us to be able to make 10 billion masks per month (350 million * 30days), instead of just half a billion per month. Thats way more expensive. And those plants would sit idle for decades - who knows if they'd even turn on again? A rotating stockpile can be sold to hospitals for regular use, so we could constantly validate that the goods are good.
- kubanczyk 7y ago
  Niall Ferguson (spelling)
- throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  Hold on! 'The west' is a broad collection of democratic systems. Maybe you mean the US, but the US isn't the US it was say 4 years ago. And what, precisely, are the "essential social institutes" to which you refer?
- a_t48 7y ago
  Can you elaborate on what 'ultrapopulism' is?
  - pixl97 7y ago
    https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-road-to-ultrapopulism/article6558114.ece https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-road-to-ultrapopul... is my guess, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16668268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16668268
- nerdponx 7y ago
  The decay of essential social institutes It's not "decay". Call it like it is -- it's deliberate and directed erosion, backed by propaganda.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    Exactly. The playbook is cynical and vile, but very effective. You first starve the government, then when government inevitably fails at its job, you point to that failure as a reason to starve it even further, on the basis that the private sector can obviously handle things better.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  What I've noticed is the political system seems to increasing lack coherence. Unable to decide on a course of action and wield power accordingly. Totally unable to resist pressure put upon them by powerful domestic and especial foreign actors. And this feeling that actions that were once unremarkable now seem impossible.
- strken 7y ago
  The US is not the entirety of the west and its political, social, academic, journalistic, health, regulatory, and administrative systems are not identical to those of the rest of the west. The breakdown of trust and the resulting inefficiency that exist in US systems aren't happening everywhere.
  - ajross 7y ago
    They are to some extent. The US has some... unique problems[1] in this area, sure. But general bureaucratic decay is everywhere. France and Germany are seeing the same PPE shortages, the same hospital equipment snafus, and pretty much no one in the world outside the Korean peninsula has figured out how to do enough testing to contain this thing. Again, it's true that the US has fallen farther (consider the federal coordination of industry in WWII and compare to the disaster today). But no one is doing "well" here. [1] I despise that I have to euphemize that here on HN, but those seem to be the rules the community enforces.
    - notechback 7y ago
      Asian countries had practice and were prepared due to SARS outbreaks just 10 years ago. Not an excuse but an explanation. Germany is apparently doing 500k tests a week, not that shabby especially if they keep increasing that number.
- worik 7y ago
  It is not all of the west. Here in Aotearoa things are not going too badly. The state institutions seem to have functioned well and people cooperating. I fear it is a fluke, but whatever, I'd rather be good, but I will take lucky.
  - Fronzie 7y ago
    Zero new cases, according to https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest. That's leading, together with Taiwan. From the news I gathered that your prime minister has mandated early and effective lock-down. Are there other noteworthy measures taken by your government that explain the success?
    - worik 7y ago
      Being a island nation?
- roenxi 7y ago
  The article mentions the DHS which was created in November 2002 in response to 9/11 and is the youngest U.S. cabinet department [0]. The other thread of the creeping problems in the West - that it is growth of government rather than decay of government - has some evidence to show here. Institutional IQ isn't the issue. The DHS was never clever and the FBI has been a corrupt mess for a long time. See also J. Edgar Hoover and imagine him as a current president. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ho...
  - sailfast 7y ago
    DHS is one thing, but make no mistake most government agencies outside DoD have seen resources cut and leadership with explicit tasks to water down, remove, and erode the performance of duties. See: DoE, the EPA (where leaders wanted the agency shut down) and number of “acting” leaders right now as a percentage. This is explicit and has happened rapidly since 2017.
- gumby 7y ago
  > I don't like many points of that guy called Neil Fergusson makes, but he is 100% on the spot pointing that the West is loosing the "institutional IQ" after 20 to 30 years of "ultrapopulism" in government. By the way Neil Ferguson is a mathematical biologist at Imperial College, London who was instrumental in getting the UK government to change directions. Niall Ferguson (also from the UK though currently at Harvard) is a historian. He is an excellent and insightful observer (especially his earlier work) but like you I often find he ends up drawing the wrong conclusions. I think the West's democratic model of loosely fitting parts (yes, even in a country like France) permits greater resilience against various threats....but permits is not the same as guarantees!

by xster 7y ago

baybal2 7y ago

This is the point I've tried to convey to my peers in the West over, and over, and over for years. I hope this would finally be a rude awakening moment for countries in the West. The decay of essential social institutes in the West has reached the point when issues begin to snowball uncontrollably. I don't like many points of that guy called Neil Fergusson makes, but he is 100% on the spot pointing that the West is loosing the "institutional IQ" after 20 to 30 years of "ultrapopulism" in government. Just look at the level of organisation being exhibited now, and how emergency response was handled few decades ago. Quarantines were not so unheard of in the West even for things like bad flu outbreaks in the 20th century, but, nowadays, some countries can't quarantine even a single city.

makomk 7y ago
Institutional IQ or leadership or anything else like that does you no good when your country no longer has the manufacturing infrastructure to make PPE anymore and the countries which can would rather use it to protect their own citizens, and it's mostly the anti-populists which seem to be doubling down on denying that simple fact.
- jfim 7y ago
  It actually does. For example, for things that cannot be produced locally in sufficient quantities (such as oil prior to the fracking boom), the US did maintain a strategic reserve. Even to this day, it still has a strategic oil reserve. Lack of institutional IQ/leadership manifests in myriad of ways, such as the dismantling of California's emergency medical supply reserve in 2011 [0], defunding of organizations that address the current risks [1], and so on. Addressing potential systemic risks through domestic production is only one potential way that leadership can handle them. Creating reserves and funding preparedness are some of the other ways to handle such risks. [0] https://revealnews.org/article/california-created-a-massive-medical-reserve-with-acute-care-beds-ventilators-and-n95-masks-and-let-it-collapse/ https://revealnews.org/article/california-created-a-massive-... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...
  - makomk 7y ago
    The trouble with stockpiling PPE is that it's bulky, it expires in storage, and you need an awful lot of it to handle a crisis of this size. For anything beyond a short-lived, localized crisis, building out the production capacity to actually be able to make PPE in sufficient quantities seems a lot more feasible than a massive billion-item stockpile. The strategic oil reserve has the advantage that it can just pumping oil into well-selected holes in the ground.
    - rckoepke 7y ago
      Maintaining emergency stockpiles is the only solution to these episodes of commodity shortages, whether they're caused by increased demand or interrupted supply. During normal times, the US may use several million masks per week. During epidemics, we may need more than 2 billion masks per week (1 per citizen per day). We can't financially maintain 1000x production capacity for every potential emergency item. Businesses get screwed when they try to provide surplus capacity for our nation that it doesn't need the other 99% of the time: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if-you-imagine-that-a-local-business-making-surgical-face-masks-is-working-247-guess-again/ https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if-you-i... Even if we could it would be cost wasteful vs. stockpiles. People talk about bringing all the production home, but that may be like getting rid of all your off-site backups and doing all backups onsite. It concentrates risk. What if there's a fire/pandemic/regional event that makes it so you need the emergency supplies, but also knocks out your plants that produce those emergency supplies? At least with some plants here, some plants there...if one country gets sick before the other, the currently-not-sick country can provide some supplies to the now-sick country, and vice versa when the pandemic ends in that place and moves to the other. We probably need at least a 90 day supply of this stuff for the next pandemic. For n95 masks, I guess that's potentially 350 million * 90 days = 31 billion N95 masks. If they expire in 5 years, then we only need to manufacture 500 million per month to keep them up-to-date, and can pay maintainers to keep the supply rotating. We don't have to throw out soon-to-expire masks, we can sell them from the back of the stockpile at a small discount to end-users who need them regularly, like normal hospital or industrial use. > building out the production capacity to actually be able to make PPE in sufficient quantities as you put it, would require us to be able to make 10 billion masks per month (350 million * 30days), instead of just half a billion per month. Thats way more expensive. And those plants would sit idle for decades - who knows if they'd even turn on again? A rotating stockpile can be sold to hospitals for regular use, so we could constantly validate that the goods are good.
kubanczyk 7y ago
Niall Ferguson (spelling)
throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
Hold on! 'The west' is a broad collection of democratic systems. Maybe you mean the US, but the US isn't the US it was say 4 years ago. And what, precisely, are the "essential social institutes" to which you refer?
a_t48 7y ago
Can you elaborate on what 'ultrapopulism' is?
- pixl97 7y ago
  https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-road-to-ultrapopulism/article6558114.ece https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-road-to-ultrapopul... is my guess, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16668268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16668268
nerdponx 7y ago
The decay of essential social institutes It's not "decay". Call it like it is -- it's deliberate and directed erosion, backed by propaganda.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  Exactly. The playbook is cynical and vile, but very effective. You first starve the government, then when government inevitably fails at its job, you point to that failure as a reason to starve it even further, on the basis that the private sector can obviously handle things better.
Gibbon1 7y ago
What I've noticed is the political system seems to increasing lack coherence. Unable to decide on a course of action and wield power accordingly. Totally unable to resist pressure put upon them by powerful domestic and especial foreign actors. And this feeling that actions that were once unremarkable now seem impossible.
strken 7y ago
The US is not the entirety of the west and its political, social, academic, journalistic, health, regulatory, and administrative systems are not identical to those of the rest of the west. The breakdown of trust and the resulting inefficiency that exist in US systems aren't happening everywhere.
- ajross 7y ago
  They are to some extent. The US has some... unique problems[1] in this area, sure. But general bureaucratic decay is everywhere. France and Germany are seeing the same PPE shortages, the same hospital equipment snafus, and pretty much no one in the world outside the Korean peninsula has figured out how to do enough testing to contain this thing. Again, it's true that the US has fallen farther (consider the federal coordination of industry in WWII and compare to the disaster today). But no one is doing "well" here. [1] I despise that I have to euphemize that here on HN, but those seem to be the rules the community enforces.
  - notechback 7y ago
    Asian countries had practice and were prepared due to SARS outbreaks just 10 years ago. Not an excuse but an explanation. Germany is apparently doing 500k tests a week, not that shabby especially if they keep increasing that number.
worik 7y ago
It is not all of the west. Here in Aotearoa things are not going too badly. The state institutions seem to have functioned well and people cooperating. I fear it is a fluke, but whatever, I'd rather be good, but I will take lucky.
- Fronzie 7y ago
  Zero new cases, according to https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest. That's leading, together with Taiwan. From the news I gathered that your prime minister has mandated early and effective lock-down. Are there other noteworthy measures taken by your government that explain the success?
  - worik 7y ago
    Being a island nation?
roenxi 7y ago
The article mentions the DHS which was created in November 2002 in response to 9/11 and is the youngest U.S. cabinet department [0]. The other thread of the creeping problems in the West - that it is growth of government rather than decay of government - has some evidence to show here. Institutional IQ isn't the issue. The DHS was never clever and the FBI has been a corrupt mess for a long time. See also J. Edgar Hoover and imagine him as a current president. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ho...
- sailfast 7y ago
  DHS is one thing, but make no mistake most government agencies outside DoD have seen resources cut and leadership with explicit tasks to water down, remove, and erode the performance of duties. See: DoE, the EPA (where leaders wanted the agency shut down) and number of “acting” leaders right now as a percentage. This is explicit and has happened rapidly since 2017.
gumby 7y ago
> I don't like many points of that guy called Neil Fergusson makes, but he is 100% on the spot pointing that the West is loosing the "institutional IQ" after 20 to 30 years of "ultrapopulism" in government. By the way Neil Ferguson is a mathematical biologist at Imperial College, London who was instrumental in getting the UK government to change directions. Niall Ferguson (also from the UK though currently at Harvard) is a historian. He is an excellent and insightful observer (especially his earlier work) but like you I often find he ends up drawing the wrong conclusions. I think the West's democratic model of loosely fitting parts (yes, even in a country like France) permits greater resilience against various threats....but permits is not the same as guarantees!