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Comment by iask | Hacker News Reader

Well, sadly, the damage is done. And it has certainly exposed our unpreparedness, broken/outdated protocols among agencies and exposed deep divisions in these United States. Just imagine if this is a test case, we’ve really exposed ourselves. I am quite certain our adversaries are watching and learning.

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If this was a dress rehearsal for a WW2 repeat it certainly doesn't look good. In 1941 the US had enough societal fabric to conscript every fighting age man and send everyone else to the factories to make munitions for 4 years. Today, the US can't even get people to agree on using face masks and staying 6 ft away from each other for a few months.

As a percentage of the population more Americans have died from covid than the Vietnam war. The wartime comparison is apt.

No, sorry. The US was prepared, we just have an administration that failed us and an entire political party that cares more about short-term politics than protecting its citizens. We have to reform our system because it should not be possible that someone like Trump is head of the executive or Mitch McConnell is head of the Senate. Arguing counter factuals is hard, but I entirely believe we could have whipped this thing had we competent, good faith governance.

Yeah we've been tracking it and preparing for it since 1918. There's a whole industry built up over the years around preparing for this, but it still requires leadership involvement to put it into action. The leadership we have now believes in ideologies, conspiracy theories and blame. All they had to do was stand on the shoulders of science and let it work, as many previous administrations have done to prevent pandemics from becoming catastrophes.

USA and UK both reportedly took actions to stop funding pandemic response infrastructure, removing stockpiles and failing to fix known failures.

The chances of both countries doing this just before a global pandemic seem similar to the chances that there's a virus lab in a Chinese mega-city that saw some of the first cases.

So, it's proven Trump and Johnson are secretly Chinese operatives working as part of a covert group hellbent on destroying Capitalism with engineered viruses!!1one /s

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