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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

What more couldve been done? Not a rhetorical question. It's just that I dont see how the governement could stop the initial spread since little to nothing was known in the really early phases of the epidemic. Even the early mortality rates were probably... not honestly reported by China.

If you compare it to a country like Italy that oddly enough seems to be getting praised for it's handling of the pandemic, what more should the US have done? Especially considering how much more lethal it is in Italy and just how crazily fast it spread there. Still, as a non american, it seems to me like everyone talks about how incompetent the US is when they are doing the same or better than their peers?

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Here's a few things that could have (and reasonably should have) been done:

* Getting testing kits distributed earlier.

* Not downplaying the severity and contagiousness of the virus.

* Not presenting the virus as a Democratic hoax.

* Putting industry experts in charge of the response rather than politicians.

* Having a fully staffed CDC.

There have been multiple statements by the administration to correct or rectify earlier statements by the same administration. The response has been confusing, contradictory, and in its partisan nature (see bullet point 3 and 4), untrustworthy.

I won't disagree with anything you said when it comes to what the governement did/didn't do but that's the thing, I think the sheer element of luck and numbers that comes with pandemics makes most of that irrelevant. Infected people came from Europe, Iran, China, etc. I don't think any adequate response could've dealt with that. Consider Italy, in which we just didn't know the extent of the disease's spread.

Would it have been wise to test people that travelled there? What if Italy was doing just fine but Sweden had an unknown huge infection number? Would checking every single traveller make sense then, because it could've been anywhere? And from the point when it was already inside the US and highly contagious, does Trumps incompetence really matter?

I mean we are at that point where it's definitely not stoppable. if the situation worsens in terms of mortality and infection numbers become unmanageable then yeah I think that would be something else. But right now the US is actually doing better than the average

If you want an example of how to competently handle this crisis, just look at South Korea.

The US had a whole month to get prepared for this, and instead did pretty much nothing, and even refused to import test kits and prepare itself for large-scale testing the way SK did.

The US has absolutely been incompetent, and while it hasn't been the only incompetent country (Spain is probably another one), it's easily the most visible because of its size and economic power and status as a superpower.

Wouldn't Italy be a worst example than Spain?

I'm honestly not sure. Italy has some conditions that made it more vulnerable, like a larger portion of its population being older.

So what? Whataboutism proves nothing and is a distraction from the main issue (that the Trump administration bungled its response).

I'm not trying to make any "whataboutist" argument, it's just that the best way to judge the performance of the US or any country is to compare it to their peers. I'm not even arguing about who's better here, I'm saying that even with an incompetent administration the US seems to fare okay, which seems to indicate it's a lot more complex to deal with or to prevent than people seem to think?

Especially since comments and news about this seem to always highlight how bad the US is dealing with this and how efficient and proactive the EU is when facts prove the opposite? There is a lot of things the rest of the world can blame the US gov for, but this?

> everyone talks about how incompetent the US is when they are doing the same or better than their peers?

This has to do with who is currently POTUS. The media in this country are far left leaning, to the point that most at the national level panicked when he was elected. If a person's only source of information is the big 3 or 4 outlets, they will never hear anything positive about the current administration.

Ah yes, the monolithic "media" run by liberal, capitalist organizations are "far-left"

The idea that the "media" is far left leaning is factually incorrect. The most popular news network in America is highly supportive of Trump: https://www.foxnews.com/media/highest-viewership-network-his...

The other four are not.

This has to do with specific criticisms of what the current POTUS does or doesn't do.

The idea that people "just" hate him is a pernicious excuse for avoiding discussion of those specific criticisms.

The idea that "nothing more could have been done" by the government is a laughable farce, the US federal government continues to incompetently bumble and lots of people are going to die as a result. They are sticking to their guns on cutting CDC funding for crying out loud.

I agree on a lot of what you say but my main point here is that it seems like European countries, even with affordable/free healthcare, better funded governement orgs and a lot less ground to cover have empirically worst results. So isn't it just a lot of... Luck? More than competence or lack thereof?

One major difference here to keep in mind is that Europe as a whole generally has much, much higher population density than most of the US, as well as far less distance between population centers. Accidental spread between towns and cities is much easier there just by pure geography.

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