The US now is catching up fairly well as the country started playing on its strengths, such as the extremely strong industrial base, financial power and, for better or worse, international leverage.
Regarding the more centralized system, it has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of Germany's central coordination is that it made generally good decisions from the get go, so the country was able to move quicker. The US had a confused central response and the states were able to implement local fixes that prevented the entire system from falling apart.
So I think the US model has the advantage of offering a second layer of defense from poor central planning, which perhaps wouldn't be as easy in Germany (I'm speculating here, I don't know much about Germany democratic guards against bad central decisions).
A key difference though is that most of German healthcare is public; there are very few private clinics and those play no major role in the pandemic response.
Insurance is mandatory but cheap (and independent of employment). Healthcare is accessible no matter your budget and maybe in the pandemic nearly as important, everyone has the right to sick leave. You get s doctor's certificate and can stay home for a week or two or three, if needed. You also won't be fired for it as labour protections are strong.
This was a problem in Germany as well. End of January, the German minister of health still said that Corona is not as bad as the yearly Influenza.
> until relatively late in the process, and our testing ramp up was also very slow.
Ramping up testing was also very slow in the beginning and highly chaotic.
> Forced to suspend the launch of a nationwide detection program for the coronavirus for a month, the C.D.C. lost credibility as the nation’s leading public health agency and the country lost ground in ways that continue to haunt grieving families, the sick and the worried well from one state to the next.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/cdc-coronavirus-la...
Why base your opinion on a second order result rather than first hand outcomes? If we had not tested at all, and still had this _drastically better than predicted_ result, might you still be unhappy about it?
And the NYT... They are not just a news orginization. Still run by the BBC's Mark Thompson I see.
I think that the big issue that was exposed was not lack of centralization but too much of it with the wrong organizations. A nation of 330 odd million is much harder to govern especially in a centralized manner.
an additional question I have is what do you think has been so awful about the United States response? From a pure numbers perspective I feel like the US isn't really doing badly from a per capita basis.
Nobody has run out of ventilators yet. Infection rates are below the 95% confidence interval of the original models. Just curious as to your perspective. Do you think that these numbers are due to bad models and luck or due to the fact that the population has largely adhered to social distancing?