Re:Open letter from Italy to the international scientific co...
by nullc on Sunday March 15, 2020 @12:55AM
(#22581385)
As disappointed as I am with much of the response in the US, it could still be a lot worse.
The potential for this kind of pandemic is something that the government was aware of and at least somewhat prepared for. It can be hard to imagine, but if all we had were the concerns of joe-everyman this would have caught us significantly more off-guard than it has.
Where I think we've faltered is in rapidly the hard decisions to trade-off short term economic impact vs long term health and economic impact. But there is still time to do a lot of good, and the level of our response seems to now-- finally-- be increasing exponentially along with the infection.
When Coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, I tended to the opinion that it would self-limiting in one fashion or another or that is would not be worse than the flu. Only people arguing with me and me investigating the facts changed that. And, yeah, changing your opinion is hard and imagining a force that will upend the world is hard so it's easy to imagine how people stay in their positions.
That said, we have a representative government with the aim of electing people who will think ahead and protect from purely reflex based views. And clearly that control has failed.