> Is the contention that if these early tests had worked, they actually would have been sufficient to protect the entire nation?
The contention in the article is that there were multiple, compounding layers of fuck-ups.
The contention in the article is that there were multiple, compounding layers of fuck-ups.
true
> there were multiple, compounding layers of fuck-ups.
also true
All of it is completely true. And the issue is that both of these were blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention to the situation. The CDC was struggling to develop the test, and the FDA regulates who can create tests under normal circumstances. The larger question is why the heck didn't the administration seeing what was going, on step in, and say this is an emergency situation, allow private testing! That's your role as head of the executive branch. Observe the individual government agencies and plan and coordinate a response. It would take 5 mins to call the FDA and say "due to this emergency situation, change your rules to allow private testing".
Why did the admin just sit there this whole time? Everyone saw the CDC couldn't scale up in time. Everyone knew the FDA regulation only allowed the CDC to create a test. Why do nothing for weeks watching this train wreck?
In any emergency or sudden crisis situation, shit happens - things don't go to plan. The point of leadership is to analyze what's going on and take decisive action to rectify it. Not just stand there. Put in place a damn contingency plan.
If you have a livesite issue and one of your main services to diagnose goes down, You look to see how long it will take to get it back up - and if it's not fast enough you find a mitigation. You don't just stand there and say "Well, we'll just sit and wait however long it takes to get fixed while letting this thing spiral out of control. And do essentially nothing else to solve this."
wondering why this regulation exists and are there any guidelines for extreme situations.
People who believe that central control is good. Which is a much larger discussion.
The testing shortage is a grand fuck-up, to be sure. But it's not as bad as waiting to tell everyone to stop congregating and start washing their hands more.
People should have already been doing this themselves from basic common sense. You shouldn't need the government to tell you to take obvious precautions.
Those regulations (and most bureaucracy to be honest) is to provide guidance and constraint during normal times - these are extreme times and it's perfectly rationale to restrict burdensome regulations that hurt the public good right now.
No way that is possibly true. People realised they didn't have tests. A bunch of people of a liberterian bent or systems thinkers would have picked the FDA as the problem very quickly. But for most people diagnosing and rectifying that sort of snarl in a complex bureaucratic process would have taken about as long as it did. This happened at blinding speed for a bureaucracy fixing up its own problems.
There were compounding failures that required a government body to put their hand up and say "I have too much power" or "lets take a risk on letting some non-government actors take key roles". It wasn't going to work unless the executive happened by amazing luck of have an infectious disease specialist in a key role (maybe president or VP) who was already sweating at night about asymptomatic infections.
The problem is the legislative framework where first response in a crisis was to centralise the response on a single point of failure. It barely matters who the actors were, superhuman effort by one or two people can't reliably overcome a bad system. This should never have been a situation where the CDC making a mistake delayed the crisis response by months and nobody but the CDC/FDA had the power to fix that.
You didn't need a "libertarian bent" or special"systems thinking" to figure that out. The CDC was testing at most 50 people a day IIRC. Can 50 tests across an entire country get you detailed info? No. You need labs to run tests, CDC has limited lab space for testing. South Korea was capable of doing thousands of tests per day. No rational person though 50 was sufficient. They simply sat and waited for the CDC doing nothing.
Who has labs? Universities, sure start there? Who does the testing for the population in general? Quest & LabCorp, have them run the test.
> It wasn't going to work unless the executive happened by amazing luck of have an infectious disease specialist in a key role
It doesn't require having "amazing luck" to see what was happening. Everyone on the internet looking at it did. Like the task force they killed? This is utter incompetence by the executive branch. In January, how do you see 700 million people on some form of lock down in China and not immediately spin up a task force to evaluate risks to the US? It's astounding levels of negligence.
The administration let the country down enormously. And a lot of people are going to suffer because of it.
Is this a failing of current democratic system. Are there no check and balances for this sort of let down by the administration. How can we design a system that has nothing to check it if its making mistakes. Is that the job of the opposition or does opposition lack intelligence to find out in time.
There is a lot of party loyalty in Canada, but since the political field isn't purely divided between Liberal and Conservative there's significantly more freedom when it comes to elections, the election system is still first past the post but most voters can vote their conscience rather than strategically.
I think the failure of the democratic system is reducing elections to a binary vote, and I think that that reduction is impossible to avoid with direct election of the executive branch instead of being driven by the composition of the congress - additionally America's system is very vulnerable to having a minority party executive and while minority governments in parliamentary systems is a thing, it tends to be less damaging by still ensuring/requiring that a minority government is able to form a coalition government initially.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-pandemic-tim...
[1] https://www.countable.us/articles/42948-tale-2-pandemics-gov...
This is the early phase of a crisis. Now is the time to call on leaders to do things; not to politic about whether something could have happened a bit earlier or not. Trump is still going to be held responsible for the administration's performance; but now isn't the time.
Nobody is going to bother going back to compare this to the Obama Administration's H1N1 response. The H1N1 response is not a useful guide for how to deal with the piles of dead bodies that are about to start appearing outside hospitals.
The act of declaring a national emergency is enough to give the President substantial powers that can be used immediately in the form of executive orders. Judges would be very hesitant to approve any injunctions in a real crisis.
Technically speaking, if you wrote a timeline down and then passed it back to someone important back in January or early February someone could have easily done something. But there is a real fog of war where up until around the 6th of February the message would have been "everything is OK" and then the scale of the disaster would only have become apparent on about the 10th. Then about two weeks later testing starts to ramp up. A debacle, but a predictable one given that everything was being run in serial.
If the response was going to succeed, it should have been 5 different Biomed companies hear about COVID and start making tests independently, then the CDC ratifies one on the 6th Feb. It turns out to fail, so they move to the next supplier and the rollout proceeds on the 10th. The companies have their own logistics teams that have started making preparations for testing supplies and distribution before hand. Maybe a company president knows Trump as a golfing buddy and rings him up asking for a fast track approval. Maybe a New York Mayor screams loudly enough that a test gets approved even earlier. Greasy, ugly, political and much more effective than what actually happened.
The moment the decision was taken that the CDC was going to develop the first response test kit was the moment that the system failed. Everything that happened after that is mostly uncontrolled good or bad luck.
We’re almost to the crash site, just a few more weeks to go. Please make every attempt to stay safe and healthy.
The Swiss cheese model is a perfect storm of unlikely failures that leads to a negative outcome, a failure that slips through multiple safety nets and checks. A real “Swiss cheese failure” reads like a bizarre set of coincidences within a highly rational system of disaster prevention controls, with a unique outcome that never gets repeated again - like some plane accidents where every level of check/balance has had a miss.
Other countries have not failed (Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, China) which shows that rational actions could prevent this.
Many other countries have failed (Italy, Spain, US, Iran, etc) which shows this isn’t a Swiss cheese model.