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Comment by earthtourist | Hacker News Reader

No question it's been suboptimal but "insanely incompetent" seems a stretch. The most logical comparison would be to other similar countries. The U.S. handling seems to have been much better than UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Iran. Similar to Denmark, Austria, Germany, etc.

South Korea and China seem to be doing well but if they don't achieve herd immunity, and other states do, they might end up prolonging their pain significantly. Although they'll probably be better off because they'll have time to prepare and benefit from medical advances.

It's hard to judge while we're in the middle of this. The demographics and cultural habits probably play a big role. The reports generated after this is all over will tell us who did what well. I predict the U.S. response will be shown to have been much too slow, lacking in sufficent preparation, but not insanely incompetent when compared globally.

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The handling in the UK was bungled as well. But most of the countries we are doing better than had community spread much earlier than us and we had the giant advantage of seeing what happened in Italy and preparing.

I think if community spread had started as early as in the U.S. as those countries I think we'd be in a much worse spot than many of them.

Everyone knew what was happening in China. The starting line was the same for all countries. I became 100% sure we were in for a hospital-overrunning pandemic by mid-January. I can tell because that's when I started emailing friends/family telling them to stock up for a quarantine.

If you assume everyone had the same starting line then that makes the u.s. look even worse because we still haven't locked down as hard as necessary to slow down the virus.

What make you think that US's handling has been better than most European countries?

The situation looks worse to me.

> The situation looks worse to me.

What matters is numbers, not how things "look".

And US numbers look really, really bad compared to Europe.

To be fair, compare US to 1/2 of Europe. So we won't know until first wave breaks.

Do they? Take the 5 major countries in western Europe - UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Together they have ~325M people, which is about the size of the US.

Both total cases and total deaths are higher than US. Total deaths is 4x worse. What numbers are you looking at?

All the numbers will double every 3.5 days if not properly controlled.

Give it a week and see how close the US is to overtaking Europe.

Yes, and if I look at the numbers it does look worse to me.

New York has a population of 20 million and it currently has a number of dead comparable to the UK with a population of 67 million, for example. New Jersey seems to fare worse than Switzerland with a comparable population, for another example.

By that metric, California is doing 10x better than Switzerland with 4x the population. And 10x better than the UK with 0.6x the population.

There are so many variables involved that it's hard to know how to rationally compare different regions. How much is demographics, population density, and other variables vs competence.

Europe is ahead of the US in this pandemic so it's not currently possible to say that somewhere in the US is doing better than a comparable location in Europe based on the raw numbers (for that one would need to look at stats relative to e.g. time since n cases).

On the other hand, it is possible to say if they seem to be doing worse.

Unless the spread was much faster in some areas than others due to population density, for instance. Back to the confounding variables question...

It's a bit tricky to compare regions because they test differently, and they count death differently.

Most of the threads comparing death across countries don't say how each of those countries is counting the deaths.

I have a lot of friends across the planet and everyone seems to think they are handling it better than others, when provided with proof otherwise they have a toolkit of responses to murky the waters.

The US response has been utterly terrible. For a government that spends far more per person on healthcare it's absolutely shocking. This isn't including private/insurance payments.

Completely dropped the ball and the whole world is watching you do it.

Here's a nice quick map to view how it's playing out across the planet: https://google.com/covid19-map/?hl=en

Once you come to understand that the federal US response has nothing to do with health or saving lives and everything to do with various people lining their pockets it makes more sense.

At least California (and more specifically, the Bay Area) seem to be on top of it.

>Here's a nice quick map to view how it's playing out across the planet: https://google.com/covid19-map/?hl=en

I found this map breaks down the case numbers with a higher level of detail https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

I'm basing my comments on data: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

In what way did the U.S. "completely drop the ball"?

As far as I can tell there are two things that could have been done better:

1. Much more funding for the National Stockpile of PPE and ventilators.

2. An early attempt to do a lock down.

Testing could have been done faster, but given that no attempt was made at containment, this likely would not have made any difference. It may have made things worse in some cases.

How many other countries even have a National Stock pile with PPE and ventilators? How many have cargo planes flying supplies? Hospital ships sent to hot spots? Field hospitals like the ones designed by U.S. Army Corp of Engineers? An organization with the capabilities of the CDC? The rapid-testing from Abbot Labs?

The U.S. has done a reasonably competent job as far as I can tell. The U.S. has a very good expert leading the federal response, in Dr. Fauci. How many countries have such an expert in charge of their response?

> Testing could have been done faster

Testing could have been done at all, period. Until ~two weeks ago, US hasn't been doing any meaningful testing; courtesy of a) FDA/CDC bureaucracy boondoggle, and b) both state and federal governments still thinking "it's just a flu".

> no attempt was made at containment

And why is that?

> would not have made any difference

Monitoring hotspots as they develop would vastly improve the ability to control the spread. Perhaps social distancing measures would've started earlier.

> How many other countries even have a National Stock pile with PPE and ventilators?

You mean the one that's being made by seizing PPEs earmarked for hospitals?

> How many have cargo planes flying supplies?

Everyone who has a cargo plane or can charter one.

> Hospital ships sent to hot spots?

It's just a moving hospital.

> Field hospitals like the ones designed by U.S. Army Corp of Engineers?

Everyone has their version of a field hospital.

> An organization with the capabilities of the CDC?

CDC was even more impotent in this case than WHO.

> The rapid-testing from Abbot Labs?

Strangely not used when it mattered.

The rest of the world has been watching US response for almost two months now. It's hard to see it as anything but the worst in the entire Western world.

1. Early mass testing might have have flooded hospitals with scared people, the same way it seem to in Italy. Whether it was incompetence or reluctance, it may have been a positive thing that there wasn't mass testing.

2. Containment wasn't seen as a viable strategy among virtually any free and democratic country. Locking citizens up in apartment buildings wasn't considered an option. What free country has achieved containment? Maybe South Korea?

3. The U.S. national stock pile had millions of PPE and 12,000+ ventilators. The U.S. miltary also supplied thousands of ventilators. I'll ask again: which other countries had comparable national stockpiles?

4. Commercial cargo is extremely expensive currently which means demand is high and supply is constrained. I'll ask again: which countries have their own fleet of global-reach cargo planes?

5. Okay it's "just a floating hospital" so how many other countries have fully equipped hospitals they can float into port within days?

6. Is everyone's version of a field hospital up to the specifications of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers? I doubt the U.S. field hospitals are inferior to any country's.

7. The FDA and CDC has been working with drug and testing companies quite competently, as far as I can tell. Other countries will almost certainly benefit from the work the U.S. FDA/CDC are doing.

8. The Abbot Labs test is in use, and it matters now. Again, who else had such sophisticated tests so quickly?

You (and many others) seem to be watching a lot of news media that is designed to entertain you, so you keep watching. It's not a bad thing that the U.S. is held to a higher standard but you shouldn't be ignorant that you're holding it to a higher standard. And you should keep your facts straight. Otherwise you risk buying into a narrative that, while entertaining or appealing to your biases, may be largely false.

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