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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

The US on a federal level 'has done nothing and is all out of ideas' as the memes go, except perhaps suppressing states to do their own testing. This is in a way inverse of what happened in China and arguably worse because in China when the federal-level authority caught wind of the scale of the problem they dropped the hammer so hard the whole world is still ringing. The US on the other hand knows there's an epidemic in progress and the CDC flip-flops from 'haven't been to china, won't get tested' to 'the virus is endemic, won't get tested' in 48h.

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One of the biggest advantages of the US system is that power is spread out between the federal, state, and local governments, and corporations, and private individuals. Rampant incompetence at one level of the system can be fixed by other levels.

Can be fixed, but wont necessarily be fixed. In fact, it means that multiple levels can be incompetent or even actively malicious, increasing the dysfunction past what a central authority is capable of. Each "check and balance" can be used to force an otherwise working system into deadlock, which can have very destructive to whomever or whatever depends on that system.

You can see this in our easily manipulated and poorly deployed voting system, our poor response to the current pandemic, our limited and overly expensive healthcare, on and on.

Because awareness and testing has been poor, who's to say that some deaths attributed to pulmonary fibrosis in the last quarter of 2019, was actually due to Covid-19?

Well the admin was very quick to shut down travel from China.

And the Trump did order masks from 3M early on.

I don't deny that there has been a display of incompetence to date be careful not to let partisanship blind you into denying credit where it is due.

ha, no worries :) i'm sitting across the pond with my own share of incompetencies and complacencies abound. it's just hard to ignore what the US is (not) doing because it looks to be on a whole another level.

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