From the president down to the people, there's a fundamental problem in the US society in how people view this as a 'non-issue'
Individualism breaks down when you have to do something more for everyone else than yourself.
When the pandemic first got started in China and my Chinese friends started buying particle filter masks en masse, it did not feel like they were doing it for the benefit of others. Same with individual municipalities setting up road blocks or requiring quarantine for travelers from other parts of the country. They were just selfishly trying to keep the virus away.
In contrast to that, once the pandemic reached Germany, I assumed the government would handle it somehow. Turns out a large part of the government response is just telling people to behave as if they were trying really hard not to get infected.
A lot of the things the Chinese government did was only possible because they're not a democracy which has to answer to the courts
Lol, what a crock of shit. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generou...
The issue is not individualism, it’s that a significant portion of the country literally thinks COVID is overblown and that we are shutting down for “a bad flu”. I’m extremely individualist but I take covid seriously and don’t spread it to others.
Individualist != selfish.
While it's true USA'ians are probably more individualistic than many other cultures and that may translate some way even to selfishness, the above quote is a gross, incorrect and offensive description, and I'm a brit.
Please don't broadbrush entire cultures.
Such is how U.S.A. political issues tend to be decided.
Pelosi was encouraging people to go out and visit Chinatown in February, while Trump was talking about shutting down travel from China in January.
Which one of those approaches sounds like containment to you?
And it's curious that you focus on Chinatown in February instead of 300 days of minimising mask wearing and calling for LIBERATING states from coronavirus restrictions.
And if you think that one set of containment measures is better than another (masks vs shutting down travel vs closing down public places), then that's a separate discussion to OP's comment who clearly stated that one political party tried to contain it while the other one did not, which is complete tribal nonsense.
PS - you should apologize for the racism comment.
Shutting down flights from China was for show. The virus was already spreading inside the US, and infected people continued to fly in from Europe. Trump's brand is being tough on borders, so he shut down travel from China, declared victory, and then did nothing.
Months later, after nearly 300k confirmed deaths, Trump still boasts about closing down travel from China - one minimally impactful measure he took early on.
Here's what real containment would have been in late January and early February: ramping up testing and contact tracing as quickly as possible, maybe even locking down cities and grounding flights. That might have been politically impossible back then, but Trump wasn't pushing in that direction at all. He was worried about reassuring the markets.
I'm not saying the US doesn't have the worst numbers, but just that there's still a lot of mismanagement and denial in the rest of the world too.