While I agree that it will take longer (and wind up different looking) to full recovery, having governments and business plan for the next pandemic will not happen. Short sighted people do not waste time on long term thinking.
Gov is insurance and I want them to be building resilience into the system. That is done with proper unemployment systems that can help people get back to work, but also are ready to go in cases like this or recessions. The delay to pay people is crazy. The EU and Canadian unemployment systems are designed for this more than the American system and it is showing.
The true problem here is the so called Risk "experts" do not understand Risk, and that is the core problem.
Prominent people call this a black swan just to deflect responsibility, and perhaps to get a bit of bailout money on the side.
There have been much more serious pandemics in the past, way too many to even list here. I'll briefly mention two because we know them well in the western canon -- the 1918 flu epidemic and the black death.
Everybody forgets that part (which sort of proves the point, eh?)
Yes respirators and masks, I know, but the previous administration had gone through the same thing on a smaller scale and stockpiles were not replenished possibly because experts said it won't happen again for a while (I am giving the previous administration the benefit of the doubt here.. I don't know why they didn't replace those items).
The point here is, there's not that much that even had all information been available, and masks, and respirators, the world could have done. It's literally a force of nature that humans have a limited ability to deal with instantly.
I am not defending any political or public policy department past or present. I am just stating the obvious. Everything else is 20/20 hindsight aimed at the margins of effectiveness, so why go there ?
even ... c.f. California.
These are all jurisdictions that took early, effective, widespread action that have resulted in dramatically lower rates of cases and deaths.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-cases-traject...
If you look at who has the LEAST per million (absolute number of cases are worse than useless and what most statisitic sites are showing) it's not nations usually associated with good governance, ahem...
So what's going on.
It's traffic. Flights into a nation, and especially flights from China. The nations with the best per capita numbers are low-air-traffic nations, per capita, so Belize, South Africa, Thailand, Andorra places like that.
So mystery solved. The difference between the US and Germany, the best of the "developed" nations, is not that big at all. For a long time, weeks and weeks, it's been mid 700s for BOTH nations. I am not sure where the very latest data is getting we're at 100 per million now, but still they're comparable in the larger scheme of things.
Without supporting an alternative theory, this sounds doubtful to me. Do you think, for instance, that the difference between West Virginia and New York is a result of the superior containment measures in the former? WV has a lower death rate so far than even South Korea.
The virus started in China. The virus spread from China because of of the Communist Chinese Party's denial and lack of response.
Those are, in turn intimately connected to the fact that China is a one-party dictatorship that murdered the doctors who first tried to bring their attention to COVID-19 in the early days of the virus, lest the world forget.
Currently, Chinese epidemological numbers cannot be trusted because the Chinese Communist Party, on top of being a murderer of its own truth-telling scientists, is a pathological liar and manipulator of information, like all Communist regimes.
That's all I said about China; maybe someone said something more, so talk to them.
How many people die, the death rate from COVID-19, is about the same in most nations and mostly a function of age and previously existing health issues.
Aside from these facts, I don't even know what in my post you could be reacting to.
I was looking at a chart of the trajectory of the epidemic in different countries, and it was interesting because there were at least three qualitatively different types of curves.
South Korea and China are notable for nearly completely flattening out after a certain point. The former might tend to undermine conspiracy theories about China, I don't know. On the other hand, why have no other countries had the same experience? Could it be the response, or characteristics of data gathering and reporting?
Japan and Singapore have risen much more slowly than the US and hard-hit European countries, but do not seem to be flattening which is surprising and seems ominous.
The western countries that have a lot of cases seem to have a characteristic sort of gradual curve, that rose faster early on, gradually is leveling out, but not completely (yet). The US looks similar to the others, except it is larger and continuing to suggest a higher peak.
I am wondering if Japan, and maybe the US states that are not initially seeing a lot of cases, will end up being a second wave after things seem to be under control in a lot of places.
The problem isn’t risk experts; the problem is that government representatives elected have no domain expertise nor leadership fortitude to put domain experts into the driver’s seat when the situation dictates.
China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STEM and less lawyers and politicians.
Furthermore, I seriously doubt that there is anything close to a “populist” war on expertise. The US public has had a somewhat adversarial relationship with Science throughout its history (possibly because College is not considered mandatory, but that’s me speculating). The lack of education and the unrelenting advertisement infrastructure around climate denial is probably what has painted scientists especially in a bad light.
Um, what? Look no further than the manufactured controversy over climate science, or evolution.
That's not getting it right, it's a different type of shit show.
My point is that they reacted the second half of January, after trying to cover up the outbreak for weeks/months. If the local and regional officials had acted effectively in late December, there might not be a global pandemic.
Can we please stop parroting that distortion of the facts?
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/dems-misconstrue-trump-bud...
> China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STEM and less lawyers and politicians.
You don't know anything about China's leadership. They're all politicians. Not a decision gets made without it being vetted ideologically -- ideology always comes first. And we should look at the timelines from China before saying they "got it right."[1]
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devas...
I'm not a fan of fact-checker battles but Snopes says "Claim: The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs. True."
One would think reading only the Snopes article, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired.
Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council (not CDC, contrary to what toomuchtodo claims) hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.
COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things.
You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.
PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
PPS - Trump was not acquitted in the Senate until February 5. Thought experiment: What do you think would have happened if he had implemented the only thing that would have 100% kept COVID19 out of the US, completely shut down all borders (including with Canada) before January 15, the day "patient zero" entered Seattle from Wuhan? (The WHO was still stating that person-to-person contact for COVID19 did not seem to be occurring.)
Further, the entire culture he created — don’t speak truth to power, or you will be fired - is also responsible for the late actions and poor preparedness of the administration.
Although given a long enough timeline a pandemic is all but guaranteed, on a annual or election cycle it scores pretty low on the probability scale. Our gauge of the severity may have been misrepresented due to the once-in-a-century nature of this event.
Juxtapose that with issues that people face in the immediate term like budget shortfalls, service disruptions creating disgruntled electorates, etc. I think it's easy for powers-to-be to convince themselves to gut preparations for a pandemic in favor of more 'guaranteed-to-happen' short term crises. Combining poor risk assessments with a recency bias can incentivize these kinds of decisions.
You can't prepare for specific black swans, but you can generally structure things to be more or less resilient. It's not even impossible for small businesses to gain during this time - my local wing spot is doing crazy good business because they've converted to to-go orders amazingly intelligently (curbside delivery, easy to get orders, high order accuracy, and delivery area is well managed by multiple employees).
I'd argue that the poor government response to pandemic planning led those companies to conclude that whatever length of time this event was to last, there weren't strong signs that national management would mitigate that. They probably read those leaves correctly.
It's not just about the businesses.
(I say all this as someone who got laid off and has some savings but can't last as long as I would've 5 years ago...)
Low interest rates and an abundance of cheap money looking for yield distort the environment. Your debt-free, slow growth company will be wiped out by some bilion $ valued cash-burning startup.
This is kind of one of those ‘Hindsight is 20-20’ things. During the good times, building resilience means buying extra capacity that you do not need, and answering awkward questions about empty wards and hospital beds.
In good times, the demand from the people is that every dollar is spent well, which is usually defined as meeting demand in the here and now. Real life doesn’t have auto-scalability.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/world/europe/coronavirus-...
Normally I don't link NYT, but there is no paywall for Coronavirus coverage.
People talk about efficiency, but efficiency also means fragile because there is no slack or fat in the system.
At the exact same time China and the WHO were lying that this wasn't person-to-person transmissible?
December 30: Dr. Li Wenliang sent a message to a group of other doctors warning them about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), urging them to take protective measures against infection.
December 31: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission declares, “The investigation so far has not found any obvious human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infection.” This is the opposite of the belief of the doctors working on patients in Wuhan, and two doctors were already suspected of contracting the virus.
January 2: One study of patients in Wuhan can only connect 27 of 41 infected patients to exposure to the Huanan seafood market — indicating human-to-human transmission away from the market. A report written later that month concludes, “evidence so far indicates human transmission for 2019-nCoV. We are concerned that 2019-nCoV could have acquired the ability for efficient human transmission.” Also on this day, the Wuhan Institute of Virology completed mapped the genome of the virus. The Chinese government would not announce that breakthrough for another week. [1]
January 3: China’s National Health Commission, ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease, and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. Also on this day, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released another statement, repeating, “As of now, preliminary investigations have shown no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infections.” [2]
January 8: Chinese medical authorities claim and Western media continue to repeat, “there is no evidence that the new virus is readily spread by humans, which would make it particularly dangerous, and it has not been tied to any deaths.” [3]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-it-all-started-chinas-early... [2] https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou...
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/politics/intel-agencies-covid...
Though, what the government wants right now is more than direct losses paid. The purpose of covering business payrolls is to keep money velocity up.
It is astounding that the US can’t even seem to get helicopter money right.
A business is not a household.
Yet people buy insurance for that.
Pandemic insurance could exist, and a massive fund could be built up over many decades to pay out when a pandemic does occur.
It would be expensive though. If a pandemic occurs every 100 years, and cuts revenue to zero for 6 months, that means the average cost is 0.5% of revenue...
On the other hand, the very nature of a pandemic is that all insured businesses will make their claims at the same time. It's impossible to actually make it work.
Pandemic insurance does exist:
https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/breaking-news/w...
"Meanwhile The Times as well as The Guardian reported the estimated payout for the cancelation to be in excess of £100 million (around $123.7 million). AELTC is said to be in the process of putting together the claim."
... unless there is profit to be made!
What financial instruments could be made to give massive payouts in case of a future pandemic? If enough of those instruments existed, there would be financial skin-in-the-game for preventing pandemics.