Taking control and centralizing all testing? Still barely happening. Isolating infected people? We've got thousands of non-critical COVID-19 patients and we are sending them home to infect their families. Anyone thought to use the hundreds of thousands of vacant hotel rooms for something? But there's no self-starters here. The option of least resistance is to just tell everyone "stay home it will be fine" and hope for the best.
I expected some failures in leadership but this is far beyond what I could've imagined. It's not Republican or Democrat, it's failures all down the line. No one is bringing anything to the table.
So we need to stay at home until we're able to test on a much larger scale.
Well, maybe, but also (some) states have delayed the income tax deadline to June along with the Feds, which is also a problem for cashflow.
We are looking at an economic collapse that rivals late 80's Japan. People are viewing the "economy" as money. They need to rethink their smugness. Japanese salarymen work harder and longer hours than any American yet their salaries and purchasing power are half that of equivalent positions in America. The Nikkei has still not recovered from the crash 30 years ago.
That is our future if we just keep staying locked in houses. Also this "remote work" revolution people are cheering on should be rethought pretty damn fast. If this truly is the new normal, people are not going to hire Americans for $25/hr with benefits if we never meet them. Managers will just hire Indonesians for $4/hr since it's all the same to them.
At some point we need to let businesses reopen and ues temperature tracking + mandatory face occlusion. This isn't perfect, or even that good, but widespread testing won't happen anytime soon (it's not cheap and our government agencies are completely incompetent at large project design), so we just need to accept some risk.
But since no one thinks in a probabilistic way - since we are afraid to - it's gonna be shelter in place for a few months while the governors just cover their asses instead of actually searching for an 80% good solution, and blame Trump for not figuring it out either.
There is no leadership in our government, you are right. State, federal, local. Embarrassing.
Because it is the state governments' responsibility.
The fact of the matter is, there’s too many people in America invested in a cynical notion that we should expect the government to “fail,” which makes it easier to keep everything underfunded, which almost guarantees failure (random acts of heroism not withstanding). THAT, more than any single person, is what’s killing America. And that’s a bipartisan cancer.
Denmark - shutdown everything march 14th, same week that the US started shutting down, not sure what we could emulate there except more trust in government? I live in a large very liberal city that has voted blue for the last 40 years and we still have our mayor pleading daily with ppl to follow SIP orders.
Norway - See Denmark. They have a slightly stronger federal government then the US and thus were able to use that power in ways that our Fed could not.
Singapore - Whatever they were trying before it all failed and they are now doing a lock down that's actually stricter than ours, also the stuff they implemented initially was draconian and would never fly here, and didn't work there in any case.
New Zealand - An island the size of New Jersey with almost half as many people (5 million), they still have 1000 cases. Not a lot the US could emulate from there. Only reason NJ has so many cases now is because of its proximity to NY and a certain demographic that still refuses to listen to SIP orders (See Bnei Brak for another ex., I'm pretty ashamed).
Taiwan - If you looked at what they were doing to contain this you would know why it's not practical here. 1) they have a national citizen db. 2) That db can be cross referenced with their national healthcare system, 3) which is also cross referenced with everyone at every point of entry. 4) They also used cell phone data to track people's whereabouts. Not a single one of those things is remotely possible in the US. Some are outright unconstitutional others would require bills to be passed and 3-5 years of preparation. If you think the patriot act is wrong... well the fed being able to unilaterally cross-ref different db's and track law-abiding citizens wouldn't pass muster either.
This pandemic is a world-wide A/B test on the difference between competence and incompetence, and we here in NYC now have to suffer because of votes we did not cast. Indeed, in spite of millions of votes we cast, that simply did not count.
The callous, purposeless, senseless disease came to us first, the lack of coordinated federal response harms us the most, but the contagion marches exponentially along — indifferently laying waste to grand life projects, solid small businesses, and urban vibrancy — and soon, it will come for us all.
I have a different idea of what the federal government should be doing than you. I want the government to be as limited as possible and focus on fundamental issues like national defense. The federal government continually fails - see Hurricane Katrina, Iraq / Afghanistan (Obama made the situation worse!), the Great Recession - these are caused because a centralized all-knowing all-powerful actor can’t fix every problem. It’s my philosophical belief.
How will the pandemic be solved? The individual actions of millions people making their own localized choices. That’s how everything ultimately gets solved.
You can dream of a perfect president who could wave his hands and make everything better. But it’s simply not possible.
Nobody thinks this, they just disagree with you about what constitutes competence.