Re:Global real interest rates and the ‘suprasecular’ decline...
by makomk on Friday January 29, 2021 @04:26AM
(#25955570)
The trouble is that people's expectations for what a "competent response" should be able to achieve don't actually seem to have any basis in reality. Pandemic response plans just fundamentally aren't designed to stop a respiratory pandemic like this one, at best they try to mitigate a little of the damage and even a lot of that is experimental and untested. (We don't even know something as basic as how effective school closures are against flu pandemics!) SARS and MERS had very different characteristics which made contact tracing a lot more effective against them; the UK, US and most other countries tried using the same approach that worked against them and it failed (and started a bazillion conspiracy theories about why the UK abandoned it). People's expectations seem to have more to do with cynical partisan political attempts to exploit the pandemic than reality.
Re:Global real interest rates and the ‘suprasecular’ decline...
by snowwrestler on Friday January 29, 2021 @11:09AM
(#25958751)
Modern pandemic response planning in the U.S. got its start in the Bush 43 administration, focused initially on the emergence of a deadlier-than-normal flu strain, which is of course a respiratory disease. The Obama administration continued this work and applied it to outbreaks of SARS, MERS, and Ebola.
The Trump administration failed to staff, fund, and prioritize that work at the same level.
There is tremendous leverage at the beginning of a pandemic, but it dissipates quickly. That’s why continuous planning and preparation are so important.
By the time the Trump administration got serious about the response, it was too late, they had lost most of that leverage. Most of the things people argue about now—lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, etc.—happened well after that point.
Re:Global real interest rates and the ‘suprasecular’ decline...
by atom_arranger on Friday January 29, 2021 @04:44AM
(#25955664)
I hope people 100 years from now have better things to do than judge or condemn their great great grandparents response to a pandemic.
The U.S. Civil War 150 years ago is a good benchmark. We look back now at the level of death with horror, especially deaths among those receiving what passed for medical treatment back then. But of course back then, that was how medicine worked and it was not remarkable that so many people died after surgery.
Or if you want to look back closer to 100 years, look back on the level of death and disease related to World War I or the Spanish Flu.
The benchmark for evaluating our response to COVID-19 will not be some percentage over the death rate we expect today, but the optimum that people 100 years from now think we could have achieved with a competent response. Historians will be in a better position to judge the details than we are (for example, by having full access to the collected archives of various national governments of today).
But it's clear even now that the U.S. could have had far fewer deaths than we did, with a better response. Look at how well we did against SARS and MERS, or how well some other nations did against COVID-19.