The fact that people like Cuomo are now being praised for the way they handled this suggests that we aren't going to learn the lessons we need to.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/bill-de-blasio-andre...
Several Western European nations are seeing far higher per capita case loads and death rates.
Several prominent healthcare systems across Europe have proven wildly incompetent so far, including Spain, Italy and Britain (which is barely doing any testing). The famed French healthcare system is proving barely able to handle what's going on there, thus their very high mortality rate.
A. Doing far more testing
B. Further along the pandemic curve
Give it another week or two and you'll see how bad things are really going to be.
But most of the US didn't really get their act together with testing until this week. We're a little delayed both in transmission and in testing, and the US is not showing any deviance from exponential growth at the moment.
Let me know when the US has six times the per capita cases of Italy, then we'll talk.
Italy currently has a death figure roughly 40 times higher per capita than the US. If you scaled it to the US population, it'd be around 50,000 dead.
Let me know when the US has a per capita death figure 40 times higher than Italy.
Of course nobody wants to look at the disaster going on in the EU. The way the EU has entirely let Italy and Spain down. How Spain is having to beg NATO for supplies because their EU friends are leaving them to fend for themselves. The way China has helped Italy more than the EU. Some more things nobody wants to talk about: the extremely high mortality rates in Italy, Spain, France; the lack of testing in Britain; the lack of basic medical supplies across Western Europe, leaving doctors in Spain and Italy to work with bare hands and without masks; the hyper infection rates among healthcare workers in Western Europe due to poor practices and lack of medical gear; the shift to leaving patients over 60 to die because they can't help them any longer, producing the terrifying death rates in Italy and Spain.
"Spanish army finds care home residents 'dead and abandoned'"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023
Bloomberg: "Spanish Doctors Are Forced to Choose Who to Let Die"
"‘We are collapsing’: Virus pummels medics in Spain and Italy"
https://apnews.com/7ec91dc45d8d7c2ea86b0a97446a303a
"Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60. Dr. Gai Peleg told Israeli television that in northern Italy, the orders are not to allow those over 60 access to respiratory machines."
https://www.jpost.com/International/Israeli-doctor-in-Italy-...
Bloomberg: "Europe’s Desperate Doctors Are Shielded by Trash Bags"
Foreign Policy: "The EU Is Abandoning Italy in Its Hour of Need"
“Old people [in Spain] have been abandoned in an astonishing way,” said Carmen Flores, head of patient rights group Defensor del Paciente.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
You're off by an order of magnitude. The US has 260/million and Italy has 1275/million. That's 4.9 times higher, not 40.
US cases are currently doubling every 4 days. New cases in Italy have dropped, and they are no longer experiencing exponential growth. If that continues, we'll catch them in about a week.
And Italy, where 1 in 10K have already died?
In some respects, China's initial response was poor. The government in Wuhan forced the doctor who was warning about the virus on social media to shut up, and it did not ban large public events quickly enough.
In other respects, China's initial response was excellent. Immediately after the first suspicious cases of pneumonia were reported by local doctors in Wuhan, the Chinese CDC sent a team to Wuhan to investigate. China alerted the WHO just two days later. It then announced the discovery of a new coronavirus about a week after alerting the WHO. It published the genetic sequence of the virus two days after that. Two weeks later, it quarantined Wuhan, a city of over 10 million people. Two weeks may seem like a long time, but compare that to how long it's taken for governments in Western countries to take similarly drastic actions.