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Comment by pacala | Hacker News Reader

I'm not even sure who are the "mission-focused bureaucrats" and who are the "administration loyalists" in that thread. But for the love of God, can we please stop politicizing this issue? Can we please have a moratorium on blaming the other side for whatever measures should / should not be taken?

Frankly, nobody knows what to do. Here we are, pondering what to do with the kids.

* The school district is open for business in spite of being the ground zero of USA outbreak. Because no kid has tested positive yet. Meanwhile, the testing scale is tiny [thousands, in a nation of 300M] and the latency is horrendous [5 days]. Most likely the virus is already endemic in the kid population.

* OK, so let's keep the kids at home, as SPS will eventually have to face the obvious and close the schools. For how long? A week? A month? Until summer? Until next year? Send them to school and pray for the best once everybody in the family eventually gets the disease?

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> But for the love of God, can we please stop politicizing this issue? Can we please have a moratorium on blaming the other side for whatever measures should / should not be taken?

Hard to do, when the correct thing for the administration to do is to stand back and hand decision making authority and control of resources to the bureaucracy. As long as the administration keeps interfering in the response, anything about the issue can't avoid being political.

There's actually a really good test of your claim: the botched CDC rollout of testing kits. The CDC went about developing and producing the kits just like they would for any other disease under any other administration, free from meddling and micro-management, and they botched the rollout. The issue was immediately politicized. Mainstream publications made it a point of saying that it was the "Trump administration" that butched the rollout, blamed the lack of micro-management, and there's an endless wave of conspiracy theories everywhere about this being a deliberate cover-up by Trump.

The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

The "U.S. pandemic response team" that article is talking about were White House staff, part of the Trump administration rather than the non-partisan bureaucracy. The actual, on-the-ground organisations and bureaucracy involved in pandemic response - the stuff most people would probably think of as the pandemic response team and that the comment I'm replying to seems to suggest should be in charge - is still there. The staff it's talking about were also all part of the national security side of the administration rather than the health side, and of course it's the health side which is in charge of the CDC and the FDA.

So you're saying that the administration which refuses to admit Coronavirus is a problem, which a year ago let go its entire pandemic coordination staff, which has proposed a 16% cut to CDC funding, and which today ordered immigration judges to remove CDC posters aimed at slowing the outbreak has nothing to do with the terrible response, and it should all instead be blamed on the officials at the CDC?

The executive and administrative branches together respond to a crisis like this - for example by coordinating actions, providing more funding for health services or in extremis ordering quarantine in affected areas. None of that has been done. I don't think you can effectively separate the two responses, nor do I think this outbreak is somehow Trump's fault, but he and his administration are responding remarkably badly to it.

The administration has put the vice president in charge. What is said publicly does not match actions - as is typical for this administration (or any other administration though this is more blatant about it)

Are you saying we should stop blaming the other side because you think the other side isn’t to blame? What if there’s reasonable ways to explain how the other side is to blame? Or are you making an epistemological claim that the other side is never to blame? Or are you claiming that, even if the other side is to blame, we shouldn’t focus on that until we solve the problem?

>>even if the other side is to blame, we shouldn’t focus on that until we solve the problem?

Exactly! That is what is meant by not letting polarized politics drive the issue. We shouldn't care what 'side' is doing what, we should be focused on preventing an epidemic. Personally, IDGAF about assigning blame to any side, I'd rather that the petty bickering is dropped and effective measures are taken.

I realize the climate in the US isn't conducive to this, but assigning blame doesn't fix anything. Rather than blaming people, effective steps need to be taken. Focusing on assigning blame just puts the other side on the defensive; which is counterproductive to the kind of cooperation that will be needed to effectively respond to this crisis.

How do you start taking measures if one side does't think there is a problem?

It’s almost like climate change sped up 100x.

No, the other side is most definitely to blame.

The problem is that this holds true regardless of who you consider to be “the other side.”

Here in Oregon, our governor is politically on the opposite end of the spectrum from the US president. Yet the messaging from both has been nearly identical: everything is fine, carry on, wash your hands.

Making this into a political issue in either case just creates conflict, and causes the target to dig in their heels. It does very little towards a more effective response.

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