I would suggest cutting people some slack in both directions.
(It wasn't that long ago when our government was being criticized as moving too fast and xenophobically shutting the borders before it was justified. Moving back and forth between "too far ahead" and "too far behind" is also a thing that will continue to happen.)
At the time, it was a "Chinese problem". It's hard to "close your borders to China" without being accused of "xenophobia" in the modern era. What's your/their concrete counterproposal for the time? Leave them open? That certainly appears to have been the implicit counterproposal being made by the accusers; what else could they possibly mean? In hindsight, how has that fared?
Or perhaps close the borders with Brazil and other countries, just to avoid singling out China, even though at the time, the disease was only in China?
The accusation of xenophobia can only float in an environment where the accusers aren't actually responsible for making concrete policy proposals. Once you have to manifest the accusation in concrete proposals, then you're playing the "are you going to be ahead or behind?" game just like everybody else, and will lose in one direction or the other, just like everybody else.
(One of the privileges of being the minority party is the ability to take shots at the majority party without having to actually propose anything concrete that would allow counteranalysis. This seems to be a non-trivial component of how the parties tend to oscillate back & forth. I phrase it as the "minority party" precisely because it isn't an accusation I'm slinging at a specific party. I've seen the cycle several times now on both sides.)
Most of the criticism I've seen covers two factors:
1. It only made perhaps a little dent, as it'd spread far past China already. Trump is dramatically exaggerating its effectiveness in an attempt to distract from how feckless the overall response was.
2. It was implemented in a rather silly fashion. Instead of actually banning travel from China, we permitted US citizens to come back with minimal screening to spread it here.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...
Compare their numbers now.
The US is actually one of the least flattened curves. Orange line: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Epidemic...
Where are the drivethru testing centers, where anyone who wants a test can get one? Those were promised weeks ago.
Tests are still being heavily rationed.
The "correct" response is an exponentially small target. Right now in the fog of war we don't even know what it would be. It would fit the evidence that the coronavirus fatality rate really is sub-.5%, if you count all the asymptomatic cases that may exist, and that we're badly overreacting. It would fit the evidence that coronavirus is still, if anything, downplayed, that there is no reserve of asymptomatic cases, and that even if it doesn't kill you there will be a generation of people crippled by it just like there was by polio. The nastier end of the rumors I'm hearing are really nasty [1]. It will only be visible in hindsight.
[1]: Can the virus kill the part of the brain responsible for determining whether or not you have enough oxygen in your blood, and then also kill your lungs, so that you think you're recovered and doing well and everything's fine even as your blood oxygen level sinks until you just keel over dead? Is that what the videos of people literally keeling over dead in the streets of China were? Dunno. Won't know for a while yet. But if it can do stuff like that, it could be a scar on us for the rest of our lives. Or that could be something else entirely, up to and including some intelligence agency's way of fearmongering. Heck if I know. Maybe it is ultimately just a bad cold that tends to cause pneumonia and everything else is just the Internet doing its echo-y thing. Zoonoses (diseases that jump the species barrier) have a history of that sort of thing.
I haven't been out in over a week, but have we actually gotten to the point where everybody now wears a mask in public?
The shutdowns were partly necessitated by an utter failure to produce and distribute PPE (whether by market or by fiat), which made it impossible for most people to just take reasonable precautions and then continue about (most of) their daily lives. Until the supply catches up until everybody who wants a mask has one, and front line grocery store workers have them provided by their employers, I would say we're most definitely still "behind".
Certainly not in the bay area. I just got back from shopping (first time I've been out in about a week and a half). I couldn't find a mask in stock online, so I cut up and old shirt and some coffee filters and sewed my own. No one looked at me funny, but I was a bit surprised to find that maybe 1/3 of the people in the store had any kind of mask on. Most people seemed to be making very little effort to keep their distance either. Lots of good the little markers for the checkout lines are going to do when people are still walking past each other barely a foot apart in the aisles.
1 week late and you end up with 100 times the deaths as other countries
That's the future-history perspective, too, where we assume that we can already count them as having successfully contained the disease; in the here-and-now perspective, there's plenty of time for it to develop that they in fact didn't do enough either and will explode in disease in the next two weeks or something. Or months. Or, in the worst scenario, years. (See Spanish Flu history, as you've probably seen cited; what we know of as the "Spanish Flu" was not the original outbreak, but a later one.)
[1]https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel... [2]https://www.statesman.com/news/20200330/fact-check-did-biden...
Local leadership, preparation, measurement and imagination at the state and county level is what is going to decide how things play out.
National leadership in all countries has been a gigantic kabuki performance for the media and political fan clubs.
As with climate change, the solution has been broadsided by petty politics.
I definitely have policy beefs with both my premier and PM. I didn't vote for either of them and probably won't the next time either, but I can still be pleased at the degree to which they've stepped up. The contrast with US federal government is especially stark.
While I have a lot of issues with the messaging (in that it could be blunter and clearer [1]), it appears to be an issue in all Western countries, so I guess I give them a pass for that.
I also have some issues with the CERB (I would have personally preferred a simple universal benefit over something you need explainers for [2][3])
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/fmlg1y/communic...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/fpz6g6/update_2_ce...
[3] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lOJn7XS6ETIkbLRodYk681M_2dx...
Now they go on tv and yell at people for not doing enough. When two weeks before they downplayed, mocked those who would dare wear masks. The majority of the initial outbreak was spent telling people they were racist for not shopping in Chinatown.
The clue was right responses at right time, correct nation-wide communication, coordination and leadership. With earlier response, maybe this could've been stopped at borders. But effectiveness is doubtful, since most countries have dismantled pandemic and crisis capabilities.
Admittedly, it is a small country (~4 million people) but we've been doing this since we had ~50 cases. If anything, people were arguing that we took drastic measures a bit too soon, but we're able to pin point individual clusters thanks to a quick response.
On a side note, one company anniversary party is responsible for about 17.5% of confirmed cases so far, so please stay the fuck home.
But yeah, pragmatic solution.
They look at the central government and they're like "this is not enough!", when often the things they're asking for are deployed to some reasonable degree in every state.
This is in fact going on across all of Europe, very few nations are doing anything right including on the testing front. That includes supposedly good outcome nations such as Sweden, which has made a terrible mistake of not properly quarantining, and even bragging about this fact [2]; meanwhile their case numbers are surging by the day, tripling in roughly 10-12 days.
It's just that people ignorantly like to target the US with abuse because it feels good, while pretending everything is going swimmingly elsewhere (it's not). They count on Americans not following the news of the disaster that's still unfolding across Europe.
There are a handful of nations doing kinda-sorta well in Europe and that's it.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britai...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-27/corona...
> “I’m deeply concerned,” virology professor Fredrik Elgh told state broadcaster SVT. Epidemiologist Joacim Rocklov told the FT it was “a huge experiment” that could go “crazily” wrong. Mathematician Marcus Carlsson, less politely, said it amounted to “Russian roulette.”
The US might get more use out of it at the moment in the remotely located populations such as towns that currently have limited infection rates Then testing is extremely helpful postponing infection. By doing so, it bides time for stock of medical supplies to increase after the significant burden that infected cities will have in the coming months.
There are many positive actions also taking place. Not to mention brave front-liners who are helping managing this to the best of their abilities.
No one could have predicted the magnitude of this.
The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago. The next best time is now.
Public health experts all over the world have predicted the magnitude of this sort of thing for decades, and this particular virus for months.
We have plenty of historical examples of pandemics to reference.
Hell, Bill Gates himself gave a TED talk in 2015 about exactly this: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/bill-gates-warned-us-covid-19-...
> “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” Gates said during the Ted Talk. “Not missiles, but microbes.”
That reminds me of all of the finance experts that have been predicting a major asset bubble pop for the last 7 years.
Anyone who was paying attention to what was going on at ground-level in China in January could see this coming. It's the lack of testing at that time up through February that caused us (speaking as someone from the U.S.) to follow Italy's trajectory (or worse) rather than South Korea's.
And no one is disparaging those at the front lines who are doing their best to mitigate this very very bad situation.
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6824-2019-10-key-fin...
> In the exercise scenario, forcasting gives a 90% change that the pandemic will be of very high severity, with 110 million forecasted illnesses, 7.7 million forecasted hospitalizations, and 586,000 deaths in the U.S. alone.
> During the exercise, a significant topic of concern centered around the inadequaces of existing executive branch and statutory authorities to provide HHS with the requisite mechanisms to serve successfully as the lead federal agency in response to an influenza pandemic.
People did predict the magnitude of this, and it was ignored, repeatedly, which is why it got out of control in the first place.