This is exactly why we can't have the government move like molasses. We had several months, needed to react with urgency and failed.
Besides, isn't one of the core tenants of Capitalism that those who are able to adapt and overcome will prosper?
Why should we continue to prop up and bail out companies who have clearly mismanaged their finances?
What exactly is wrong with bailouts? Moral hazard is the main one. I don't think my neighborhood coffee shop will take its payout as a license to start breeding bats.
Inefficiency can be a concern. Maybe the economy would perform better if all the real estate and capital equipment made its way to smarter managers, who would not make such stupid mistakes as... business models that involve physical presence in any way?
The survival of the fittest thing is about competition. Capitalism is pretty quiet on the issue of shocks that hit all the competitors equally. That's why we've had monetary and fiscal policy for a while now. This would be a hell of a time to give them up.
“The proposed budget also cut the CDC's discretionary budget authority by $1.3 billion in fiscal 2021 compared with fiscal 2020 -- a 19% cut -- including $25 million from public health preparedness and response outlays.”
So I'm not sure we'd want them to move faster. Perhaps make them move better, or at least abstain from moving so badly, first?
That's a rewrite of the actual history that occurred and what people understood along the way.
They had a realistic four to six weeks max to start production of ventilators. A herculean feat in fact. Even less time if you were going to judge it based on understanding the severity and particular intensive-care heavy effects of the virus.
It was not a certainty to the outside world that it was human to human transmissable until the end of January. There was a lot of confusion due to the total lack of access to China and its data.
From February 1st (China's reported numbers begin to spike here) to the point where you understand it's a high global risk, capable of a large scale outbreak that could threaten the US, it's another 1-2 weeks minimum based on the rate of expansion in China's reported numbers and their inability to contain it properly (and better yet, with China you watch what they do more than what they say; during that first and second week of February, China took what seemed like wild action domestically while playing down the danger of SARS-CoV-2 to the rest of the world, including regarding travel restrictions).
Taking the decision to push billions of dollars in spending to jumpstart very early production of PPE and ventilators, is a big decision that you better be right about when you make it. You were going against the behavior of the entire developed world by producing ventilators in February, so now you need to be prepared to look like a paranoid lunatic, along with being called a racist and xenophobe while you restrict travel and close borders.
It's February 7th and you need to coordinate with domestic industry, local governments, international agencies, and companies around the world.
It's February 14th and you've got your first partnership together, they've agreed to produce ventilators.
It's March 7-14th by the time they are able to produce their first ventilator after preparing a factory for it, preparing any necessary design changes to accomodate rapid scale production, and putting together a supply chain that can scale for the hundreds of specific parts in a ventilator.
You need to build a scheme that can produce more ventilators than the present total global annual supply.
It's mid to late April before they have consequential volume of production. Assuming things go well.
Having closely followed all the ventilator efforts around the world, please show me a faster timeline that is realistic. You're only going to beat our present timeline by a matter of weeks, and that's if you aggressively jump out in front of prevailing 'wisdom' at the time.
It's an extraordinary short amount of time to accomplish the ramping up of producing ventilators.
The big failure was preparation rather than reaction with urgency to produce (that part is exceptionally difficult to do in such a short amount of time, it's setting yourself up for failure, as we've seen in most industrial nations).
Throw into the mix the fact that the world's biggest manufacturer of PPE gear was the center of the pandemic. Meaning they needed all of their own supply and would not be able to export properly so the rest of the world could build up their own supplies. So you're on your own to make your gear (something many nations around the world have had to suffer miserably through; most nations are screwed in this situation, they simply can't make such gear quickly under any scenario). This rapidly broke global supply chains, something never before experienced during the post 1970 high globalization era where supply chains became very complex, more fragile and global.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have had more ventilators in stock - we should have. An extra tens of thousands of ventilators in our stockpile would not have been unreasonable. That's another preparation failure spanning decades into the past.
For example by legalising 'hoarding' and 'profiteering'. Then some enterprising speculators could have bid for the PPE in the hopes of selling them for higher prices later.
Singapore started screening incoming travelers Jan 3, based on the pneumonia cluster in Wuhan growing in size.
Xi found out about it and took aggressive measures ~Jan 21.
It was an obvious risk on Jan 3. Maybe not a high probability risk, but obvious enough for a country to make sure they had the first couple of steps of their response at least figured out. Human to human spread was pretty clearly the case when the Chinese government started taking aggressive lockdown measures.
So your timeline is pretty friendly.
And then the focus on ventilators is odd. How about masks and other PPE and testing and so on?
What? The US intelligence community was watching before the first person was infected? Man, they've gotten a little too good.
> "As a matter of practice the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters. However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists," the statement said.
It doesn't seem likely that they were watching in mid-November when according to
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/first-covid-19...
China "may" have retroactively found the first patient to be some guy on Nov. 17. That part could be entirely made up as well, I don't trust anything they say.
It would be absurd to ramp up production of ventilators early on because if you're taking action that early, you're taking completely different action.
There is one example of a nation that did what South Korea specifically did, and it's South Korea. They had several attributes unique in combination to South Korea that enabled the speed, cultural response, tech, testing, tracing and manufacturing to come together so well.
Nearly every country on the planet similarly failed to follow precisely what South Korea did. For good reason: they couldn't under any circumstances, realistically, because there are few countries like South Korea.
There are only about a handful of nations that can, for example, rapidly do the testing (tech, scale, manufacturing, distribution, results, reaction) that South Korea pulled off and so quickly. A mere ~4-6 out of 195 nations can do that on the timeline they did it (and that's in a good scenario).
It would have been an extraordinary accomplishment indeed to have such amazing forward-sight to know exactly what was going to happen and to pick the one country to copy the behavior of - and then to move at a lightning speed of manufacturing and cultural behavior the US hasn't seen since the 1940s, based on 20k-40k cases of an infection in China that we didn't know much about.
South Korea has a far more nimble system and society than the US does, for all sorts of reasons. The US is a lumbering goliath, South Korea is a faster start-up. It would be impossible for the US to do what they did, on their timeline, at scale. The best you were likely to get out of the US, is much higher scale testing earlier on, we could have done that.
However it's brought about, reducing transmission and flattening the curve is key. Every country had a variety of means to do so--South Korea's wasn't the only one. The regions that did so early and aggressively were successful at massively reducing the body count in comparison to countries like the U.S. that slow-rolled any and all measures for six weeks--thus, the U.S. will have, at best, 60k deaths instead of the 5k it would have had if it had enacted the measures it did eventually take just two weeks earlier.
That’s exactly what Taiwan did for instance - maxed out their own factories and ordered more machines to make PPE in January.
Meanwhile, in mid-February, the largest American factory for making surgical masks was running at less than full capacity as the owner complained to the media that no one would make a long-term contract with him and he and his employees were burned last time he ramped up production for H1N1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavir...
> “ In an interview, Bowen said he could make 1 million masks a day if he ran his machines around the clock, a huge quantity for his firm but an amount that would barely make a dent in global demand. He’s hesitant, however, to ramp up production at the facility [. . .]“