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The trouble is that people's expectations for what a "competent response" should be able to achieve don't actually seem to have any basis in reality. Pandemic r
by makomk 6y ago
The trouble is that people's expectations for what a "competent response" should be able to achieve don't actually seem to have any basis in reality. Pandemic response plans just fundamentally aren't designed to stop a respiratory pandemic like this one, at best they try to mitigate a little of the damage and even a lot of that is experimental and untested. (We don't even know something as basic as how effective school closures are against flu pandemics!) SARS and MERS had very different characteristics which made contact tracing a lot more effective against them; the UK, US and most other countries tried using the same approach that worked against them and it failed (and started a bazillion conspiracy theories about why the UK abandoned it). People's expectations seem to have more to do with cynical partisan political attempts to exploit the pandemic than reality.
- snowwrestler 6y agoModern pandemic response planning in the U.S. got its start in the Bush 43 administration, focused initially on the emergence of a deadlier-than-normal flu strain, which is of course a respiratory disease. The Obama administration continued this work and applied it to outbreaks of SARS, MERS, and Ebola. The Trump administration failed to staff, fund, and prioritize that work at the same level. There is tremendous leverage at the beginning of a pandemic, but it dissipates quickly. That’s why continuous planning and preparation are so important. By the time the Trump administration got serious about the response, it was too late, they had lost most of that leverage. Most of the things people argue about now—lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, etc.—happened well after that point.