I point this out to suggest that your expectation might be a little unfair. If such an order had gone out one month ago it would have been controversial. But if you want to say that the administration is a month behind in their reactions it would be more fair.
You seem to have observed that a giant beauracracy is reacting weeks behind a crisis and this seems to upset you.
However 2 months ago this was the message from the White House: 'When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.'
That un-fucking-believable 'head in the sand' moment happened at peak infection in China; 80K people infected. This administration isn't a month behind; they simply don't deal with things unless they are forced to.
The US stockpiles ventilators for emergencies like this for a reason. Someone was asleep at the switch in our Federal Government and the reaction is to lie about how well they are doing and blame everyone else.
I'm fed up, aren't you?
I don't want to defend the current US political powers. I'm highly discouraged about a lot of things. But it doesn't help to make unfair accusations based on bad facts. If your criticisms are based on fiction they get tossed out.
Just rebase on truth and you might have some much more supportable criticism. There's plenty to legitimately criticize. When you drown out legitimate criticism with baseless criticism, the noise to signal suppresses real criticism. It is unclear whether this is intentional.
I disagree. Anyone paying attention knew, in the first weeks of January, that something very dangerous was happening. Moreover, we cannot equate the US government to a common person. They have the most expensive intelligence apparatus in the world. And we have an expensive government exactly to protect the population against real threats like this.
AOC is right, it's time to make stock trading flat-out illegal for members of congress. They hold index funds or nothing.
The current administration in the white house, however, is.
A lot of factors came together, hampering the response. Trump has fired lots of experts, many others left for other reasons and Trump has problems hiring Replacements. He disbanded that office in the White House. On top of that he didn't take the issue seriously at all.
I would say that in early January it wasn't yet clear this would become a serious respiratory pandemic. Maybe not even to US intelligence services or the Chinese government. But late January and early February it dawned on most people (including me).
> Three months ago there were rumors that there was something brewing in some part of China most people had never heard of.
Three months ago was January 30th. The number of cases on that date was 7,711 and the number had been increasing at roughly 50% every day for WEEKS at that point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_coro...
"On 29 December 2019, a hospital in Wuhan admitted four individuals with pneumonia and recognized that all four had worked in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which sells live poultry, aquatic products, and several kinds of wild animals to the public."
http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e3c63ca9-dedb-4fb6-9...
Please please please don't make me defend people I don't want to defend.
I am going to edit the post to permanently enshrine my inability to do basic math. :)
Ventilators, generally, may be "well known", but the design and operation of a modern ventilator is probably not something that is "well known".
Doing this kind of stuff is much more complex than our ability to scramble. The key is to think about this kind of crap before it becomes necessary. Without that, we won't have what we need on time. Things like this are just not solvable by throwing money at it after the fact.