Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This board doesn't like politics but frankly it is the administration. They fired the CDC's pandemic response teams a couple years ago because they didn't want to fund it. They don't like admitting there's a crisis because it looks bad for them, they want to sweep the whole thing under the rug. That has translated into the administration stopping the CDC from doing their jobs, whether implicitly ("if you make this into a big deal, we'll find someone else who is more willing to align with the administrations positions") or explicitly (stuff like cutting the funding for the CDC pandemic response teams).

It's basically the same thing as when Trump drew the hurricane on the map to an area where it wasn't going, and then fired all the people at the NWS who corrected him. Sticking your neck out and stating the emperor has no clothes is a fast track to getting replaced by someone who will play ball. Trump is exceptionally petty and has some paranoia that there is a “deep state” trying to undercut him. He doesn’t accept that these are professionals trying to do their jobs, because he is a moron who thinks he knows everything, better than the experts, and they are just trying to undermine him and make him look bad.

Trump is a uniquely stupid and incurious president, and he has absolutely no interest in listening to experts. The only people he allows to be around him are yes-men. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, and he doesn’t particularly care insofar as it makes him look bad, and tanks the stock market (makes him look bad).

Even Boris fucking Johnson is astonished by how bad the administration’s response has been.

In short - we elected a narcissistic, incurious, anti-intellectual, paranoid con man to be president, he is now facing a real, serious crisis, and he’s busy purging the career professionals that we need to be solving this crisis. He is that boss who can’t stand not being “the smartest guy in the room” even when he has no idea what he’s talking about, and he’s in charge of managing our response to basically Spanish Flu 2: Electric Boogaloo.

I think at this point it’s more helpful to think about what individuals and private organizations can do rather than look to a central government organization to solve all of our problems. See Gates Foundation decision(s) over past few days. I also know plenty of people in state orgs and can say I have a lot of confidence in them as well as the many healthcare orgs. I’m not downvoting this despite the obvious political nature in the hopes that by not turning on each other we might instead use HN to educate and drive awareness of what is being done and how we can help.

Establishing a completely parallel privatized set of epidemic response infrastructure, from scratch, with no official capacity/color of law/official powers, in the middle of an ongoing crisis isn't exactly a plausible suggestion.

Reality is there's effectively no containing it at this point, we're well past that stage of things. Get a vaccine going ASAP, sure, but it's already sweeping through the population. Official numbers are low because we don't have any meaningful quantity of testing in place. Wherever you test, you find that it's already there.

I'm not saying that to be hysterical, it's just a statement of fact. Just like my statements about how the administration has neglected and in some cases actively worsened the crisis.

It just is what it is.

You maybe could have significantly reduced it six or eight weeks ago, but back then we were in the "coronavirus is fake news by deep-state CDC to tank the economy" stage of things. Now, I guess you have mass quarantine, which Trump will also not do because that would tank the economy for real. People won't do it willingly because they need that money to pay rent and buy food, and you need to formulate a strategy for that too. Maybe Bill Gates can pay everyone's rent and grocery bills for a few months?

Best thing at this point is to do everything you can on a personal basis to prevent spread (wash your hands), protect specific vulnerable individuals (seniors, basically) from getting infected, and hope that vaccine comes real quick.

It just is what it is.

> Reality is there's effectively no containing it at this point

Strong measures will still have an effect on the epidemic curve. Cancel the fucking St. Patrick's Day parade in Chicago, as an example.

This is all correct, and it's going to be downvoted because tribalism is more important than not getting a potentially fatal disease.

The post itself seems tribalist.

>This board doesn't like politics but frankly it is the administration. They fired the CDC's pandemic response teams a couple years ago because they didn't want to fund it.

There's a reason the Snopes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/ piece that calls this claim "true" is based on a Twitter thread. If you actually read the NBC News and Washington Post articles the Snopes piece cites later, they describe the action as part of moving people to related departments as part of the new National Security Advisor's desire to have his own hierarchy, and the head of the dedicated team resigning after not getting his desire to keep the team the way it was.

COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else.

You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com