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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

"Justen Noakes: So when did we start looking at the coronavirus? Probably the second week in January, when it started popping up in China as an issue. We’ve got interests in the global sourcing world, and we started getting reports on how it was impacting things in China, so we started watching it closely at that point. We decided to take a harder look at how to implement the plan we developed in 2009 into a tabletop exercise. On February 2, we dusted it off and compared the plan we had versus what we were seeing in China, and started working on step one pretty heavily."

Read the article. It is rage-inducing how much better a single grocer did than the federal government with all of its resources. January. Talking with counterparts in China. Executing on existing disaster plans (federal response had one, but ignored it https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-n...).

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The failure goes well beyond just the federal government too.

One example being NYC leaders and even health officials encouraging New Yorkers go participate in parades and other large gatherings through Feb and even into March, with messages of defiance against Coronavirus concerns:

https://mobile.twitter.com/wesyang/status/124303311804449997...

Edit: Removed ventilator comment as that specific claim seems to be misleading, and it's not something particular to NY. Many governments weren't prepared for a surge.

The U.S. as a whole had plenty of advanced warning about ventilator[1] and pandemic preparedness[2].

1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/disaster-medicine-an...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI

The Health Commissioner on Feb 9 was still pretty early. That's 8 weeks ago, ancient history in this pandemic.

On Feb 25, over 2 weeks CDC said covid-19 was detected in the US (from travelers back from Wuhan) and wasn't a risk for spreading among the general public.

The flu is here every year but we don't cancel parades.

De Blasio on Mar 2 was a lot later.

> New York was warned years ago that they didn't have enough ventilators and had the opportunity to stock up, but chose not to.

That's misleading.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/25/donald-tru...:

> A 2015 New York state report said that in the case of a “severe” pandemic, the state would be short about 16,000 ventilators during the peak week. But the report did not recommend buying 16,000 ventilators [emphasis mine], and did not indicate whether the state was at a fiscal position to purchase them.

> The state did not plan to increase its ventilator stockpile because it anticipated that in the event of a severe crisis, there would be shortage of trained staff to operate them and demand would outweigh any emergency stockpile.

> The report said the state had to balance the likely ventilator shortage with the need for adequate funding for current and ongoing health care expenses.

And even if New York had bought them, they'd still be significantly short. Apparently current projections say they'll need 30,000 (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/24/gov-cuomo-says-new-york-need...).

I'm sure there are 16,000 people that would be thankful that you were 14,000 ventilators short instead of 30,000.

> I'm sure there are 16,000 people that would be thankful that you were 14,000 ventilators short instead of 30,000.

Yeah, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. And ultimately, the idea that NY should have bought those ventilators back then is a deeply political cheap shot indented to distract people from the current administration's own lack of preparedness.

The competence of private companies in the U.S. shouldn't enrage you, that's one of the U.S.'s strengths.

> The competence of private companies in the U.S. shouldn't enrage you, that's one of the U.S.'s strengths.

That's a misleading and false generalization. You can't cherrypick one of the better prepared companies to make a statement about companies in general. Especially when there's nonsense all over the news about other companies like GameStop and Guitar Center claiming to be essential retail against all reason: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/coronavirus-esse....

This is interesting because the GP, I think, didn't intend to say "private" to mean "privately held", but I think it's worthwhile to note that GameStop and Guitar Center are publicly traded while H-E-B is still family owned.

H-E-B does a lot of things that are more benevolent than the kind of behavior that we're used to seeing from publicly-traded organizations and I can't help but wonder if the private ownership (truly private, as opposed to publicly-traded) has something to do with that.

H-E-B is one of the things I will really miss if I ever have to leave Texas. They're always there any time there is any kind of disaster, to provide relief. I've even heard that they treat their software engineers well (they bought Favor). They're really a one-of-a-kind company. I hope they never IPO.

> H-E-B does a lot of things that are more benevolent than the kind of behavior that we're used to seeing from publicly-traded organizations and I can't help but wonder if the private ownership (truly private, as opposed to publicly-traded) has something to do with that.

I think I tentatively agree with you. I work for a company that was once privately held by a small number of owners who were primarily invested in that company. The impression I got from the old-timers was that management was a lot more generous back then. However, once they sold to a publicly traded firm, the squeeze started and it's never really stopped.

Sometimes an individual person can be satisfied with their wealth and position and focus on other things, and individuals can be influenced by moral and ethical ideas. The market, on the other hand, is like an amoral monster that's always eating but never satisfied.

How is finding an anecdote a invalidate a generalization? The majority of the most powerful global corporations are US companies. They don’t (in general) get that way by being incompetent.

You can't support a point about private companies in the US in general with a point solely about powerful global corporations that are US companies.

I'd argue that once you reach a certain level of size, it's very easy to fail upwards.

See: Amazon. They are incompetent in many aspects of their business, but due to their sheer size that incompetence is shielded by their other investments.

I don't think the GP is enraged that there are competent private sector actors. I'd guess they're enraged that this competence can't be transferred to the places where it could matter 10x or 100x more. I feel kind of similarly.

An obvious example is that the president could have picked a highly competent, non-partisan manager as the head of his coronavirus team. Regardless of his competence, Vice President Pence is clearly a polarizing figure without a track record of dealing with crises of this scale.

This crisis could really benefit from a highly competent manager who could bust heads and sweep away bureaucratic hurdles. But that person would need to be someone honestly trusted by all stakeholders. We're seeing lots of actors maneuvering to gain ideological advantage even in the midst of these terrible events (shame on them). I don't even know if such a person exists any more but their non-existence would mean the US is in for serious trouble.

The public sector also has a fixed pay scale for seniority that tops out around 160k a year salary.

We could pay government employees more, but then voters would complain.

Dr. Fauci is pretty popular as a choice like that right now

I'm obviously enraged by the incompetence of the federal response, not the strength of H-E-B's.

You get what you pay for, basically. If governments were to pay top dollar and actually fire incompetent people, I'm sure our world would be a much better place.

> The competence of private companies shouldn't enrage you, that's one of the their strengths.

When you have to compete, you have to develop competence to survive. Only those that don't have to compete (monopolies) or those that survive despite incompetence (bailouts) are the exceptions.

This seems like a bit of an odd concession, considering the businesses that are being impacted the most by the coronavirus are smaller, local businesses which run on thin margins. These local businesses are also often the most competitive because of having to compete with both other local businesses and larger ones.

The competence of private companies only really applies to a very narrow subset of corporations.

need to throw the federal bureaucracy into the 'don't have to compete to survive bucket'

They fall under the category of monopolies.

that is quite the leap from a single corporation's actions.

If it’s any comfort few governments have shown the same amount of forethought and attention to detail.

Singapore has done well, but besides them there have been lots of missteps all over.

South Korea, Germany and Taiwan have done well. Most other countries really mishandled it. Denial until the last minute with no preparedness even when neighbour countries were already in dire situations.

South Korea, Taiwan and ... uh, China have done relatively well. They each have the virus under relative control.

I don't see Germany doing anything well except testing. IE, they haven't controlled infecting, which is increasing exponentially[1]. Germany originally had an ideal seeming death rate of only 0.2%.

But that was a rather illusory achievement that could be explained by finding all the infection but not stopping them (they're at 0.6% now, a significant increase and this will naturally continue increasing). By Tomas Pueyo's important calculation, one death implies up to 800 infections (1% death rate plus three weeks of doubling from when the patient contradicted the disease)[2]. So if you did find all those infections, you can see a very low apparent death rate but you wouldn't have reduced the actual death rate or the infection rate and you'd still be hurdling towards the situation of having so many cases your health system is overwhelmed and your death rate shoots up.

Angel Merkel said 30-70% of the country might catch the virus, which is pretty much poisonous "herd immunity" Koolaid that Boris Johnson spouted (now that fatalities have spiked in the UK, he's singing a different tune and I hope Merkel will also).

[1] https://cv19info.live/germany/ [2] https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

There's absolutely zero evidence to support that China did well.

What are their real case and death numbers? We'll never know, because they've lied about everything from day one. They have been the exact opposite of transparent about anything.

China only had ~82,000 cases, but Italy, Germany and Spain are all going to surpass that? Yeah right. Inflate China's numbers by 10x and you might be close. In late January / early February they magically changed which cases they were counting toward their official figures, intentionally excluding mild cases that tested positive. That's what produced the instant tapering you see in their case numbers from that date in time forward. It's also why their case growth graph looks so unique - bizarre - compared to everyone else that has had a bad outbreak.

> There's absolutely zero evidence to support that China did well.

There's supply chain evidence that things are going back to normal on China side. They wouldn't be able to hide all these deaths that would happen if they just told the sick people to go back to work.

Meanwhile, there's very little evidence that would suggest their numbers are lies. Sure, they weren't exactly forthcoming at the beginning - but then again, until few days ago, US government was lying even more than they did, and yet we don't assume this means today's numbers are bullshit (as opposed to being limited by still-lacking testing capability).

Must mention India in some sense too.

Given the scale of difficulty, the country has moved swiftly.

It is yet to be seen if it is even possible to organize a shutdown the solve this problem, at India's scale. But, even the naysayers have acknowledged that in this case Modi made good decisions.

Na, they're reacting too late. Given India's size and lack of healthcare infrastructure, they should have shutdown international travel and tested exhaustively early on. They let it get out of control and now are imposing a haphazard shutdown. The shutdown is needed, but there are too many reports of poor people going hungry for days.

The US has what is generally considered the worst COVID-19 response among developed nations.

I don’t think the US as a whole, NY seems to have its finger out. Testing really well too.

Good response now but slow to pull the trigger on the lockdown. People seem to have forgotten that already! Precious days were wasted before Cuomo finally called a lockdown.

Yep. Just a week ago Cuomo was shut down the idea of shelter in place when de Blasio (who had been dragging his feet as well) was suggesting it[1]. This was a day after the Bay Area health officers announced a shelter in place order. He only relented when things really spun out of control.

The fact that people like Cuomo are now being praised for the way they handled this suggests that we aren't going to learn the lessons we need to.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/bill-de-blasio-andre...

Try winding down a city of 8 million in one day without instilling fear, panic, a run on groceries, etc. Taking three days to slowly get everyone working from home is sound especially when you're just starting to get a grip on the situation. I'm biased though, living in Queens.

What about Bill de Blasio refused to shutdown restaurants and pubs over St Patrick's day, because "He wasn't there yet"

NY has done more widespread testing than most states, but lost a lot of time ramping up its hospital capacity (beds, staffing, and equipment). Cuomo issued an order to do that only on Feburary 26. I could imagine not wanting to preemptively take stronger measures like turning convention centers into makeshift hospitals, but not clear why they weren't at least increasing stocks of PPE and generally getting better prepared for a possible influx of cases.

The rate of infectivity here is also reported to be far higher than elsewhere with really fast doubling rates, and early on we had no idea how much it had already spread because of the underdiagnosis and lack of tests. I think Cuomo just had no idea it was actually that bad.

Italy and Spain have had far worse responses. Italy's mortality rate is over 10% right now, Spain's is at 7.5% and France's is at 5.7%. These are atrocious outcomes.

Several Western European nations are seeing far higher per capita case loads and death rates.

Several prominent healthcare systems across Europe have proven wildly incompetent so far, including Spain, Italy and Britain (which is barely doing any testing). The famed French healthcare system is proving barely able to handle what's going on there, thus their very high mortality rate.

On a per capita basis, the US is at 20% of where Italy is.

Great visualization and one is a population normalized graph:

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

So like a week or two behind. Exponential growth is fast and idk how well we're doing at stopping it

Italy is also

A. Doing far more testing

B. Further along the pandemic curve

Give it another week or two and you'll see how bad things are really going to be.

That's a few more doubling periods away.

Generally considered among who? Epidemiologists? Public health officials? Anonymous commenters on message boards?

I'm going with "everyone" now that the USA is #1 at something as of today: The most diagnosed cases of any country in the world, even China.

Italy and Spain are not developed countries?

The US is going to blow past Italy and Spain in a couple of days.

The US passed Italy (and China) today. And Spain previously. Although only for cases, not deaths.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

By "worst" I am assuming per-capita figures. Obviously the US has a larger population than Spain and Italy, so comparing the raw number of cases isn't a fair comparison. On a per capita basis, we're not quite up there with some of Europe yet, but we will be.

But most of the US didn't really get their act together with testing until this week. We're a little delayed both in transmission and in testing, and the US is not showing any deviance from exponential growth at the moment.

Number of deaths are delayed I assume. We'll see in a week or 2 if it catches up to Italy and Spain.

Italy has a per capita figure six times higher than the US. Spain is five times higher. Switzerland is four to five times higher. France and Germany have per capita rates about twice as high (the French figure is much higher in reality, they're not testing anywhere near as well as Germany).

Let me know when the US has six times the per capita cases of Italy, then we'll talk.

Italy currently has a death figure roughly 40 times higher per capita than the US. If you scaled it to the US population, it'd be around 50,000 dead.

Let me know when the US has a per capita death figure 40 times higher than Italy.

Of course nobody wants to look at the disaster going on in the EU. The way the EU has entirely let Italy and Spain down. How Spain is having to beg NATO for supplies because their EU friends are leaving them to fend for themselves. The way China has helped Italy more than the EU. Some more things nobody wants to talk about: the extremely high mortality rates in Italy, Spain, France; the lack of testing in Britain; the lack of basic medical supplies across Western Europe, leaving doctors in Spain and Italy to work with bare hands and without masks; the hyper infection rates among healthcare workers in Western Europe due to poor practices and lack of medical gear; the shift to leaving patients over 60 to die because they can't help them any longer, producing the terrifying death rates in Italy and Spain.

"Spanish army finds care home residents 'dead and abandoned'"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023

Bloomberg: "Spanish Doctors Are Forced to Choose Who to Let Die"

http://archive.is/Caj7r

"‘We are collapsing’: Virus pummels medics in Spain and Italy"

https://apnews.com/7ec91dc45d8d7c2ea86b0a97446a303a

"Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60. Dr. Gai Peleg told Israeli television that in northern Italy, the orders are not to allow those over 60 access to respiratory machines."

https://www.jpost.com/International/Israeli-doctor-in-Italy-...

Bloomberg: "Europe’s Desperate Doctors Are Shielded by Trash Bags"

http://archive.is/IRwpy

Foreign Policy: "The EU Is Abandoning Italy in Its Hour of Need"

http://archive.is/LXzxB

“Old people [in Spain] have been abandoned in an astonishing way,” said Carmen Flores, head of patient rights group Defensor del Paciente.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...

> Italy currently has a death figure roughly 40 times higher per capita than the US.

You're off by an order of magnitude. The US has 260/million and Italy has 1275/million. That's 4.9 times higher, not 40.

US cases are currently doubling every 4 days. New cases in Italy have dropped, and they are no longer experiencing exponential growth. If that continues, we'll catch them in about a week.

Even compared to China Communist Party who tried to suppress their own doctor's evidence of it and let it spread to the whole world

And Italy, where 1 in 10K have already died?

China let it spread to the whole world?

In some respects, China's initial response was poor. The government in Wuhan forced the doctor who was warning about the virus on social media to shut up, and it did not ban large public events quickly enough.

In other respects, China's initial response was excellent. Immediately after the first suspicious cases of pneumonia were reported by local doctors in Wuhan, the Chinese CDC sent a team to Wuhan to investigate. China alerted the WHO just two days later. It then announced the discovery of a new coronavirus about a week after alerting the WHO. It published the genetic sequence of the virus two days after that. Two weeks later, it quarantined Wuhan, a city of over 10 million people. Two weeks may seem like a long time, but compare that to how long it's taken for governments in Western countries to take similarly drastic actions.

Singapore is tiny. It's an area 6 times the size of San Francisco with a border with passport control.

Sure, Singapore is small, but that’s not the main reason they’ve done so well.

Singapore experienced SARS, which also took the lives of doctors and nurses in addition to their patients. That country’s healthcare system has been stress-tested in a way that most haven’t.

It's like praising Iceland for being able to turn on a dime.

The U.S. Federal government's response is better characterized as willful incompetence bordering on maliciousness, than a misstep. NY Governor Cuomo and NYC Mayor De Blasio deserve special mention for cynically playing a game of chicken with each other, together with Trump, and the three of them with COVID-19; the losers are the poor people of NYC.

I think the San Francisco Bay Area counties did a pretty decent job (not S. Korea or Singapore, but that's a high bar) and I'm optimistic that they've significantly bent the curve (that's what I see plotting the data), but can't be very confident until after this weekend.

Cuomo's doing fine. He didn't have the data to know how bad it was because the CDC test crapped out, but once it became clear his leadership has been pretty good. No clue what deblasio is smoking though, going to the gym the day before quarantine etc. Never thought the governor would be more popular than the mayor in this state, especially governor Cuomo, but he's stepped up to the challenge

A grocer is a dictatorship.

I make sense of inexplicable government slowness as: avoiding panic (worse than a pandemic), yet OTOH most people needing tangible evidence before they'll take it seriously.

Yeah, people don't get this fundamental aspect of governments vs. companies.

China is a company who's CEO is Xi Jingpin and it has 1.4 billion employees.

US Government (and all other democratic governments) have to show and to convince the rest of the Congress that we need to shut America down. Not saying that US gov did stellar in this pandemic, but its harder than it seems. It is also unfair to compare governments to private companies with 5-10 magnitude of order difference in every aspect from finances to number of people.

I'm glad they took this seriously. I live in San Antonio and there are few options other that H-E-B for groceries so if they hadn't prepared this city would be in a world of hurt.

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