> Gov is insurance and I want them to be building resilience into the system.
This is kind of one of those ‘Hindsight is 20-20’ things. During the good times, building resilience means buying extra capacity that you do not need, and answering awkward questions about empty wards and hospital beds.
In good times, the demand from the people is that every dollar is spent well, which is usually defined as meeting demand in the here and now. Real life doesn’t have auto-scalability.
This has been discussed many times, but the united states previously had a highly qualified pandemic response team which could have taken action as early as January based on the intelligence coming out of China. The reality is that thousands of deaths could have been prevented without building extra beds and buildings, but no action was taken because our elected officials do not understand exponential growth.
At the exact same time China and the WHO were lying that this wasn't person-to-person transmissible?
December 30: Dr. Li Wenliang sent a message to a group of other doctors warning them about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), urging them to take protective measures against infection.
December 31: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission declares, “The investigation so far has not found any obvious human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infection.” This is the opposite of the belief of the doctors working on patients in Wuhan, and two doctors were already suspected of contracting the virus.
January 2: One study of patients in Wuhan can only connect 27 of 41 infected patients to exposure to the Huanan seafood market — indicating human-to-human transmission away from the market. A report written later that month concludes, “evidence so far indicates human transmission for 2019-nCoV. We are concerned that 2019-nCoV could have acquired the ability for efficient human transmission.” Also on this day, the Wuhan Institute of Virology completed mapped the genome of the virus. The Chinese government would not announce that breakthrough for another week. [1]
January 3: China’s National Health Commission, ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease, and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. Also on this day, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released another statement, repeating, “As of now, preliminary investigations have shown no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infections.” [2]
January 8: Chinese medical authorities claim and Western media continue to repeat, “there is no evidence that the new virus is readily spread by humans, which would make it particularly dangerous, and it has not been tied to any deaths.” [3]
The US government doesn't rely on Chinese state news. US Intelligence independently tracked the virus and briefed the President on it on January 3rd [0]. It's plausible to assume that there was not even a single case of coronavirus in the United States at that time: and yet the administration waited until the 31st of January to suspend travel from China. Compare this to the previous administration's work on Ebola [1].
That CNN article claims that US intelligence agencies somehow knew about the outbreak before, as far as we know, even the actual doctors on the ground in Wuhan did. All of the known timelines point to doctors there spotting the first cases in December and becoming increasingly alarmed about it at the month wore on; the headline claim in that article is that the US knew about it in November. Small wonder that the intelligence agency in question issued a rare public, on-the-record denial.
This is kind of one of those ‘Hindsight is 20-20’ things. During the good times, building resilience means buying extra capacity that you do not need, and answering awkward questions about empty wards and hospital beds.
In good times, the demand from the people is that every dollar is spent well, which is usually defined as meeting demand in the here and now. Real life doesn’t have auto-scalability.