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Good systems would obviously be desirable, but this is basic executive competence. A US response to a potential pandemic brewing in China should have been a top White House priority since early January. When there are coordination problems, it's the responsibility of the person at the top to sort it out. They didn't even try and fail to fix the problem, they identified an entirely different concern: the threat to the stock market, which is where the response concentrated.

The Trump administration has responded quite slowly compared to the Obama administration's response to H1N1. The CDC commenced emergency operations a week after the first H1N1 case was detected, and advised school closings less than a week after that [0]. It seems likely that Trump's unfavorable comparison of the Obama H1N1 response to his COVID-19 response will come back to haunt him [1]. We'd be extremely lucky to get away with only 12,000 US deaths, this time.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-pandemic-tim...

[1] https://www.countable.us/articles/42948-tale-2-pandemics-gov...

I'm curious about why this is being downvoted.

You're comparing the Trump and Obama administrations handling of different diseases and it looks like you are making a partisan point.

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.

Interesting perspective. Thanks.

You're underestimating how much more leeway the executive branch gets when given emergency power. In recent history alone state of emergencies have been used to: bypass Congressional war declaration powers in the form of at least one "war", ban entire countries from entering the United States with the recent travel ban, and bypass Congressional power of the purse with the border wall. Not to mention emergency powers were used to suspend habeus corpus for almost two years until Congress could meet during the Civil War and pass a bill making it official, in direct defiance of a circuit court ruling written by a Supreme court judge.

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.

Which of those things do you think would help in this particular instance? Respond to a lack of tests by suspending habeus corpus? And Trump did exercise his powers to issue a travel ban; that was a good move that bought the US a week or so. Not enough to make up for the lack of tests. A comparable action to those you've listed would be to suspend the FDA and/or the CDC for a few months. That is the sort of decisive, broad-brush move that the executive can pull quickly. It probably would have made the situation even worse.

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.

> 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.

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.

> The administration let the country down enormously.

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.

I think so, I've emigrated up to Canada and comparing the parliamentary government up here to the system in the US has been interesting. Canada has had some majorly extreme parties over the years (including the PPC[1]) but there is room in the system for these parties to grow outside of the centrist parties. Currently in Canada the dominant party is the Liberal party it's a rather centrist but socially liberal party that's about equivalent of America's corporate Democrat types like Clinton and Pelosi - but in recent elections a more left leaning party has gained some ground and is challenging them from the outside.

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Party_of_Canada

I think Leslie Groves or Admiral Rickover would have figured it out with a few phone calls.