We do! It's called the United States government. I'll be letting the president know you're interested in him taking over and using his own ideas, instead of this one you seem to be particularly fond of.
Or, if that idea is slightly terrifying for you, perhaps it's a better idea that the states are handling this themselves. Your state conglomeration thing can always decide to use the National Guard to prevent outside travelers.
The National Guard serves a dual role. Most of the time, it’s under the control of individual states, with the state governor acting as commander in chief. However, the president can activate the National Guard and place it under federal control. When this occurs, guard units are used to supplement the regular Army, bolstering its forces with additional combat units. [1]
It's almost like the constitution was written to enable these things to happen, and prevent a corrupt and/or inept leader from forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on the nation!
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
States cannot discriminate against people from other states on the sole reason that they are from some other state.
Now... (I believe) they could use the National Guard to do wellness checks to make sure people don't have a fever, and potentially get them to quarantine, but it would have to be applied without regard to what state their license says. Though, the legality of forcing quarantine varies by state.
Europe, a group of many independent states, trying different approaches to a common problem, with an over-arching bureaucracy to coordinate between them... and the US approach sounds crazy to you?
Edit: not endorsing parent comment
I enjoy that you are making this point from the username "anoncareer0212"
This is kind of like that, but you could die.
In realpolitik terms, I doubt the federal government can stop this. What are they going to do? Send the army to force states to accept potentially infected people? That's basically an order to go kill your countrymen. I'd hope, given such an order, much of the military would defect.
We do, however by design that body does not have authoritarian control over things like 'shelter at home' regulations.
> Under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S. Code § 264), the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States and between states.
Nothing stops them from encouraging states, either. (We did this with speed limits, as an example. Want Federal highway funds? Play ball with the Feds.) Florida's Governor justified not issuing a stay-at-home order based on the White House not having asked him to.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/03/31/ron-desantis...
Perhaps through "encouragement" but that still leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
Centralization requires buy-in, and after at some point it becomes clear that sitting around waiting for other states to play ball can be equally disastrous.
Legally, is this possible in the US?
In Australia for example each state has closed or is controlling their borders with each other, and this seems to largely be a decision for each state (I don't think there's a federal law either way). I could imagine some states choosing to open up while others remain closed. Or if two states made big sacrifices but got the issue under control, while the others lagged behind, those two could open borders between themselves while remaining closed outside.
Great question.
The Constitution is very clear that ultimate authority about Interstate Commerce belongs to Congress. States cannot bar travel from other states.
HOWEVER there is legislation enabling states to impose quarantines on people coming from other states. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/travel/coronavirus-us-tra... has information about such quarantine rules currently in place.
So stop travel, no. Make it difficult, we're going to see a lot of that.
What in the US is legal has changed radically in the last three years.
We're talking about forcibly keeping everyone in the country out of church. It's pretty disturbing to give that power to government, even temporarily. How long before it gets applied to other situations after the pandemic dies down?
What's to stop the president in 2030 from saying: "We're facing an epidemic of terrorism by [whoever] so we're keeping them from gathering in public."
Or: "There's an epidemic of [some crime] that uses the internet. We need to control it."
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/04/coronavirus-colorado-p...
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/08/colorado-coronavirus-v...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/27/trump-ventil...
There is a concrete example of the Federal government seizing PPE, Ventilators ordered by the states. Then only giving them 20% of what they ordered.
Its basically legal theft.
1. Ignored the pandemic response playbook. This document was prepared after the SARS outbreak and contained all the lesson s learned.
2. Reckless public statements. Calling the virus "no worse than a flu" and "a hoax" certainly caused people to not take it seriously and helped it to spread. Pushing the hrdroxocloriquine study before the research was conclusive has gotten people killed.
3. Depriving states of essential resources. Massachusetts not only had their request for masks denied, but also paid for their own masks only to have them seized for the "federal stockpile". In the end the governor had to get masks smuggled in on the New England Patriots private jet.
4. When New York projected it would run out of ventilators in 6 days, their request was denied on the grounds that Trump felt 30k ventilators was too big a number.
5. The emergency production act (or whatever it's called) could have been invoked at any time to address the ppe shortage. Afaik it hasn't been.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/13/832797592/a-month-after-emerg...
Early in office, Trump got rid of the department created by Obama to respond to pandemics.
Early in this epidemic, we bungled getting testing out. Got it out in broken form. Had to get it out again. All the while we turned down an effective test advocated by the WHO. And when testing existed, had rules that tested so little that they missed the existence of community spread until it was well established.
Blocked private labs from developing and conducting tests. (Community spread was demonstrated by one who broke the federal rules. The reaction of the Trump administration was to come down on them for having conducted unauthorized tests.)
Well after it was clear that this was a pandemic that was not under control, Trump was spinning a narrative of this being no big deal.
Failed to declare a federal emergency and social distancing restrictions at a national level. Which caused a patchwork of inconsistent responses at the state level. California was in lockdown while COVID-19 was happily spreading among tourists on crowded Florida beaches.
I could go on. But right now the USA has 1/4 of all deaths worldwide from COVID-19. We are stilly dying faster, and didn't get there by accident.
The USA shipped out tests after other countries, and with a faulty reagent that caused false positives. Causing labs that should have been able to do their own tests to have to ship samples to an overwhelmed CDC. See https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/05/905484/why-the-c... for verification.
The CDC promised new tests, but they took weeks to arrive. In the meantime federal bureaucracy roadblocked the development of independent tests. Finally the Seattle Flu study went and ahead and tested...only to find that COVID-19 had community spread for several weeks in that testing vacuum. You can verify that at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de....
As far as disbanding the Pandemic team, it's not really true, there was a shuffling of who was in charge of it. It was finally transferred to the Vice President.
Let's go for a fuller version: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-trump-fired-pan...
Long story short, a number of people were let go, what was left was moved around in the bureaucracy, the political leadership left in charge claims that it still works, but the people left and other politicians claim that it was hamstrung.
Given that the US response has been so weak, it it questionable whether it operated at all effectively.
As far as I can tell, the FDA approved an emergency policy to Help Expedite the Availability of Diagnostics on Feb 19th.
Yes, at which point they created a bureaucratic nightmare for the approval process. As the NY Times article outlines, the lab that actually found community spread was NOT able to get through the approval process.
The US probably has more contact with China due to trade/travel than most other countries. I don't believe the numbers from China, they are sure to be way higher than they report.
Yes, the USA has a lot of travel. You are far from alone in not believing China. However there is no reason to believe that they are lying about having effectively shut down the virus. (Even the social distancing we are doing here seems to be working, and China was a lot more extreme.)
I don't think the Federal Government really has the ability to shut down a states beaches that aren't Federally managed.
Never underestimate the reach of the Commerce Clause. The President's ability to declare quarantines and apply them to whomever for whatever reason is extreme.
I don't know the limits for sure. But I doubt that he would have had less ability to act than various governors have had.
The unwillingness to call for a nationwide lockdown is also a big one that has angered a lot of governors. And just today Trump tweeted that he has the authority to end lockdowns, which is a blatant lie.
So yeah, the response hasn't been great.
This is as opposed to ordering one of the several companies in the US who already make medical ventilators to simply make more ventilators.
The US federal government waited until mid-March to order N95 respirators: https://apnews.com/090600c299a8cf07f5b44d92534856bc
Other governments acted much more quickly, for example Australia started doing so on February 7: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
The US government, in particular Trump, is responsible for this delayed response.
May be its posturing or may be its not.
I think the interests of White House and Governors are more in line than not.
Time will tell.
If that centralized and coordinated leadership is incompetent and/or corrupt, there is no Plan B.
I'm arguing letting the central federal government handle everything.
If only we had some sort of united group of all the States, where the response could be coordinated and centralized for maximum effectiveness.