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Comment by khawkins | Hacker News Reader

We're behind them on the timeline because the president restricted travel from the epicenter back at the end of January [1], and the US is the best prepared country in the world for an epidemic [2]. Italy got its 3rd coronavirus case on Feb. 6 [3], and now its totals are at 10k.

Take a look at the cases/country chart on [4] and sort by cases/population. The US is many orders of magnitude better than European countries. It's absolutely worth comparing for specifically the reasons mentioning in OP's post, that being ahead of this makes all the difference in the world.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/business/china-travel-cor... [2] https://www.statista.com/chart/20629/ability-to-respond-to-a... [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-italy/third-... [4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

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And then we proceeded to waste all of that lead time and did nothing with it. We didn't even have a working test until recently.

Meanwhile, we're gonna be at 1,000 confirmed cases in the US in another day or so and the exponential increase is continuing. We're not doing better than European countries by any stretch; what's happening there is going to be happening here in a month's time.

And being "best prepared for an epidemic" may have been true back in 2016, but it's certainly not true under Trump. He fired the highly successful crack epidemiologist team that was initially assembled to fight ebola, and the administration's response to the crisis so far has been largely incoherent, focusing more on the stock market than actually preventing the spread of the disease, and with officials continually contradicting each other and downplaying the serious of the pandemic. Pence, the man in charge of the response, is notable for having presided over an HIV epidemic in his home state. We simply don't have the right people at all in charge to manage this, and that matters greatly. And we still have way too many people not making a livable wage, who aren't guaranteed paid sick days and can't afford to not work.

The US is not testing sufficiently to make any claim about having less cases than European countries.

I'm not a Trump fan, but he made the right choice by shutting down China travel. However, preparedness -- what does that mean? Does that mean we can usually successfully contain illnesses before they break out? That's great, but it's not going to help us anymore. It's already here.

What we need are hospital beds and ventilators. Are we doing ANYTHING to prepare those? Anything at all? Or will we wake up when people are literally dying in the streets, like as is certainly happening in other places in the world?

This column by a conservative columnist does a good job of explaining how the extra time gained by that decision was unfortunately completely wasted: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/opinion/coronavirus-trump...

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