No one who knows how national pandemic response works agrees with you. They know that trying to suppress testing, and criminal lack of executive management of the testing capacity was a known and must-be-fixed quantity 6 weeks ago. They know that hundreds of millions of PPE supplies should have been ordered under federal pandemic authorities 8 weeks ago. They know that emergency powers for production of ventilators should have been invoked 6-8 weeks ago, and still haven't been. It's bungled beyond belief and the only thing that will prevent something near a worst-case run of this pandemic will be some luck.

Since you seem knowledgeable, I guess my question is: While large scale testing seems a reasonable thing to do on it's face - since we already know this thing spreads like wildfire - isn't the best play to just have everyone self-quarantine regardless of health status? Why spend resources on mass testing and preparing for mass-scale treatment when it seems that a total lock-down could nip the transmission in the bud? If you're a non-severe case they tell you that you're supposed to stay away from people if you test positive. So if you're doing that already - what's the difference? Especially considering the logistics of performing large scale testing to identify non-critical cases could expose the people performing the tests if they mess up on their safety protocols. And then there's the issue of false-positives and false-negatives.

I guess I just don't see the benefit of mass testing everybody when we have the option of just shutting down everything now.

This is a good question, I hear it a lot. So here's an inarticulate stab at an answer.

[TLDR: After quarantine the population is still at risk and the virus will start its exponential growth again, just a few weeks down the line]

No matter how effective your mass quarantine may be, we will never "nip transmission in the bud". This thing is endemic and may well be chronic.

The purpose today of mass quarantine is just to slow down the exponential growth of the epidemic. It's only worth doing if you have something to stop the growth from starting again at the end since shutting down the economy isn't sustainable and is enormously damaging even in the short term.

What's that something? Wide-spread, universal testing. Rapid follow-up on positive tests to trace contacts and isolate them. This way you cut down the number of people each person can infect so that the growth rate is less than 1.

You have to keep this regime going until a sufficiently large proportion (in this case, 60%-70%) is immune either because they have recovered from infection or they have been vaccinated.

So, barring getting really lucky with some kind of seasonal disappearance of the virus, we will have to maintain this surveillance-tracing-isolation three legged stool until a vaccine is available.

If we had done this from the beginning we would not now have to be shutting down and destroying the economy to prevent a worst-case disaster, which is estimated that it would peak at about 40,000+ deaths per day in the US, sometime in late May, if left unchecked.

If we had done wide-scale test-trace-isolate from the beginning we could just be going about our business, albiet with this new factor in our lives. Since the criminals bungled, and are still bungling the response, we instead will have many many deaths and serious illnesses w/lifetime consequences and unprecedented economic damage.

Direct cash stimulus is one thing I'm definitely looking forward to. The other big one is the various cash infusions into key pillars of business (e.g. airlines).

I don't think it's been an abject failure, but I think the U.S. response to the pandemic has been at best middling and full of whiplash in both rhetoric and policy pointing to a reactionary plan rather than any sort of proactive attempt to get out ahead of the curve. We didn't learn a lot of the lessons we could've from South Korea and Singapore (and at the very least why couldn't we have imported their testing).

And quite frankly a real smart leader would have started testing the fuck out every person with a pulse. More understanding of how many people have it is important.

At a practical level on the hoarding - what can the president do, declare martial law? There aren't enough police/solidiers to enforce it anyway. Far better to get to work on the source of the panic, especially if you believe it can be contained if you prioritize that.

It's clear we're behind on testing - and definitely the FDA is owed some blame. But at the same time, if the tests don't exist in quantity, they don't exist. That takes time - and be all accounts, they seem to be working hard on getting there.

It doesn’t take more than a few very visible examples to clamp down on that kind of behavior.

It is absolutely the job of a president, at least a good one anyway, to ask the populace to chill the fuck out and stop hoarding toilet paper and medial supplies.

If you have been paying attention for a while, the way the USA has handled this is horrifying.

Compare the outcomes in Italy to those in South Korea to see what good handling of this crisis looks like.

Even though we had the example of Italy weeks ago, we waited and waited and waited until now. Our outcomes will be similar to Italy's in a great deal of the USA.

The worst thing was the terrible, terrible failures in testing. We will never know exactly how many lives could have been saved if we ramped up testing the way South Korea did. We will be able to make some rough guesses after we get the final body count.

Trump also did enormous damage by continuously, repeatedly dismissing the new Coronavirus as no worse than the flu. Foot dragging and denial are natural anyway; having the president constantly dismiss the worst epidemic since 1918 as alarmism from whiners delayed action at the state and local levels, never mind all the action that wasn't being taken at the national level. There are still many people--maybe a majority in my area--who think this is all overblown panicking over nothing.

Here's the best I can say. The travel ban was a good idea and would have saved lives if we had not chosen to throw away the extra lead time it gave us. And most of Europe handled this just as poorly as we did, if that seems justifying to you (it does to some people).