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Comment by matmann2001 | Hacker News Reader

matmann2001

Can someone translate this from tactical to English?

"We've got bupkis".

We had decades of smart thinking about this, and forsaw the need 3 years ago based on Ebola. Things are now in trial, so if it's 2020 and you're reading this, sorry, the funding is already committed. Better luck next time. Keep your ear to ground and move faster.

I wish I could share your optimism, but after watching the congressional testimony I think we're pretty fucked. I think we should just shut down the CDC and FDA (when this is over), and start from scratch with an agency focused on addressing epidemics and pandemics, as well as quick drug approvals.

The incompetence is pretty obvious and staggering, and as per Fauci's testimony, the CDC is not designed for the crisis we are now experiencing. That is, to unpack this, the Center for Disease Control is not designed for disease control. He's clearly a formidable scientist, but it's also clear that mismanagement at the agencies is pretty rampant.

They were asked point blank several times why we still can't test even the frontline medical staff, and they did not have an answer. This is 100% thoroughly fucked up beyond repair.

It was indeed agonising at the start, but they had a very clear answer by the end.

The CDC makes reagents that are required. But the full test requires taking swabs, going to a lab, going through various steps. It's not self contained like a pregnancy test.

So the CDC spokesperson was uncertain because the CDC is providing the reagents but the labs are literally just coming online.

I am referring to this video. The exchange I am thinking about is roughly 40 minutes in but I couldn't find it quickly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO-_aV-v7IA

Isn't a significant part of why we're fucked the gutting of ... everything, by this administration?

e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/31/us-coronavirus...

Not really. The proposed CDC funding cuts have been overruled by Congress. In fact the CDC gets more funding now than at any point under Obama (who BTW, also tried to cut the budget several times; e.g. 2015 CDC budget is $243M less than 2014), and this year's budget is larger than last year. It's not the lack of funds. It's total mismanagement.

$7B+/yr and we get 70 people tested per day as thousands are being infected, and hundreds are about to die.

IMO their funding should be cut to zero for this, and reallocated to people who know how to do this kind of thing. You can find such people at WHO.

https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104

There's a complete lack of leadership in handling this pandemic in large part because this incompetent administration disbanded the national security team global health security and biodefense directorate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...

Care to explain why there was lack of leadership in 2009 when 57 million Americans got infected with H1N1? Or why Ebola response was also botched? There seems to be a long history of incompetence here. You can't fix incompetence by giving the incompetent more money or keeping them around.

H1N1 was literally just the regular flu. And there were only 4 confirmed Ebola cases in the US.

Neither of those responses were botched, sorry.

And yes, you can in fact fix incompetence by giving the incompetent organization more money. Organizations are made up of people, and those people have varying levels of competence, and the set of people isn't fixed, either. Sometimes you have competent ICs begging for funding and incompetent managers who can't present the case for it. Sometimes you have competent managers who don't have enough budget to hire competent ICs at salaries competitive with industry. Sometimes everyone is competent but too afraid of risking their job to speak out against structures or processes that prevent them from doing their best work. If you think there's corruption, that's a different matter, but if it's just incompetence, throwing more money at the problem sounds like a fantastic plan.

Ah, but you see, the CDC took it upon itself to fight Ebola in Africa. And that part went as well as you'd expect after seeing their current performance: they're still dealing with it, years later.

The office Trump's administration disbanded was formed after the 2014 Ebola outbreak handling was botched, precisely to address the shortcomings you're bringing up.

Edit:

It's being reported on currently:

https://www.newsweek.com/former-head-white-house-pandemic-of...

I don't know, it appears to me that we are running a long in place plan. (Other than troubles with testing kits which can be blamed on a one time case, but there is surely mismanagement in there). We are not panicking, as things prove to be getting worse we are seeing more and more action.

By long in place, I mean first made many years ago and updated regularly as things change. That is the CDC's job.

It is tempting to want instant actions, but they often turn out to be knee jerk and wrong.

Was it part of the plan for the president to talk about hoaxes, a 'foreign' virus, and deny there is a problem?

I'm talking about the execution of what is happening on the ground. The President has a long history of overstating things and otherwise words not matching actions.

>> The President has a long history of overstating things

Also known in negotiation as "anchoring" - you give people a crazy, exaggerated version of what you want, then you tone it down and easily get what you really wanted to begin with. Anyone who ever participated in any kind of a business negotiation would recognize this immediately. But 99.99% of people haven't negotiated anything ever in their lives, so they don't.

People treat Trump as this linear simpleton, and he plays along, but he's not.

well you clearly have an axe to grind eh

We can ask everyone in the country to do a cancer screening and hospitals would get overwhelmed too. Just because you can test and count stuff doesnt mean jack if there is non trivial cures.

Thanks to social/mainstream media's business model deeply based on fear and outrage, leaders that we have these days are pandering to their fan clubs on both sides. We have created conditions where that is their only move, because there is always someone else from both parties, just around the corner pandering even harder.

Stuck in the middle are orgs and institutions whether it's the military one day, intelligence another, cdc or fed a third who will just have take the beating.

Because most of the population hasn't heard of the concept of Bounded Rationality and it's implications, and are most definitely not interested in hearing about it when people start dying.

Orgs over time have understood that and put up a show knowing they just need to outlast a couple news cycles.

There is no question of repairing these orgs without changing the underlying social media/news media reaction-counter-reaction, attention capture biz model.

That process is unfolding thanks to trump's election/Brexit/russia etc but it will take years. In the meantime every crisis is going to sound worse than it actually is.

That's all well and good, but when you're testing 70 specimens a day in a country of 327 million people because you've fucked up the development of the test, and _refused to buy_ a working WHO test, that's pretty inexcusable, no matter how you try to justify it. A hotdog stand operator would do a better job: just buy WHO kits and deploy them. And you only have to buy 71 a day to beat the $7B/yr CDC.

This would be a mistake on par with disbanding the Iraqi military after Iraq was "liberated". Don't do this.

Fix the agency. Don't let smart people disappear into retirement and the private sector. Don't annihilate the remaining expertise that does exist. You will never get them back.

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