The people who do not see this as a failure of leadership seem to have a few rationales (I don’t agree with any of them and think that they are all easily rebutted):
(1) this is being overhyped to hurt Trump (throw the rest of the conspiracy theorists (incuding the ones that think this is a man-made virus) into this category
(2) all the criticism is monday morning quarterbacking and 20/20 hindsight. There is no way anyone could have known or done better. (throw in the folks who somehow think that China lying to us somehow excuses our negligence)
(3) Trump is actually doing a fine job. After all he restricted travel with China back in January and that’s all you need to know and the death toll is only going to be like 100K.
(4) this is actually Obama’s fault for some reason (and besides people died during the swine flue pandemic of 2009 under Obama)
(5) the response was a delicate balance between lives and the economy, the cure would have been worse than the disease if he acted more proactively.
(6) rationales that otherwise display a significant lack of understanding of the facts, math, science or both.
On the other hand I know quite a few conservatives who are very disillusioned with Trump and are ready to trade him in for Pence.
Trump’s inability to react during a crisis will cost us lives and treasure.
This was his 3 am call and he hit the snooze button for 2 months.
Yes. Most other countries are not experiencing this level of infection.
There are over 200 countries with at least one confirmed case.
We have 144 cases per 1,000,000. This gives us the 19th highest number of cases per million out of those countries (worst 10%).
We are 14th in number of deaths (worst 10%) with 54 deaths/million (it’s gonna get worse for us but its gonna get worse for a lot of people).
Many other countries reacted sooner and implemented things like social distancing and masks a lot earlier. they didn’t have to shut down their economy to contain this thing.
The people who do not see this as a failure of leadership seem to have a few rationales (I don’t agree with any of them and think that they are all easily rebutted):
(1) this is being overhyped to hurt Trump (throw the rest of the conspiracy theorists (incuding the ones that think this is a man-made virus) into this category
(2) all the criticism is monday morning quarterbacking and 20/20 hindsight. There is no way anyone could have known or done better. (throw in the folks who somehow think that China lying to us somehow excuses our negligence)
(3) Trump is actually doing a fine job. After all he restricted travel with China back in January and that’s all you need to know and the death toll is only going to be like 100K.
(4) this is actually Obama’s fault for some reason (and besides people died during the swine flue pandemic of 2009 under Obama)
(5) the response was a delicate balance between lives and the economy, the cure would have been worse than the disease if he acted more proactively.
(6) rationales that otherwise display a significant lack of understanding of the facts, math, science or both.
On the other hand I know quite a few conservatives who are very disillusioned with Trump and are ready to trade him in for Pence.
Trump’s inability to react during a crisis will cost us lives and treasure.
This was his 3 am call and he hit the snooze button for 2 months.
Hell, even here in the US, it’s highly variable by state. Some states/localities have not handled it well- New Orleans/Louisiana, New York, Detroit, etc… have all dropped the ball pretty hard in some fashion.
Others seem to have done a much better job - California, Texas, etc… and it seems to track pretty closely from what I can tell with how early the local governments implemented mandatory social distancing, shut down businesses, and mandated stay-home policies.
One thing to keep in mind is that just because some countries aren’t reporting a lot of infections, it doesn’t mean they’re not experiencing them. I mean, do we really think that Mexico as a nation has 1/3 the cases that Texas does, despite having four times the population and a much more impoverished populace and worse access to healthcare?
What I think this is going to do is threefold. One chunk of the population is going to realize that leaders’ personal ability to lead is important. Another is going to latch on to some aspect of the failure unrelated to leadership- say… lack of UHC and perseverate on that, even that isn’t the cause. And a third chunk is going to basically make excuses and/or blame anything except leadership failures for whatever happens. Or they’re going to default to selfishness and basically put their own prosperity ahead of others’ lives, and blame local leaders for locking stuff down.
The fact that NZ is led by a female is evidence that it’s a forward thinking society that sees the value in effective governance. We, by contrast, believe that a penis is a prerequisite to being commander in chief. Moreover, we are hopelessly cynical and keep feeding a self-fulfilling prophesy of electing morons, which only further convinces us that government is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent without seeing the link between our own attitudes, voting behaviors, and outcomes.
You can’t just look at numbers at say that New York, New Orleans, and Detroit “dropped the ball.” They didn’t even realize they had outbreaks until it was too late. The real onus is on the federal government, particularly the White House but also the intelligence committees, that failed to alert people to the fact that there was a growing global threat of a pandemic.
The rest of the “fault” lies in the collective failure to develop a plan of nationwide preparedness, and then there’s the complete and total disastrously inefficient patchwork employer-based access to healthcare, which has probably discouraged untold numbers of people from using the health system until it’s too late.
States that were hit hardest earliest implemented social distancing pretty quickly. Washington and Metro Seattle has probably had the most robust, effective response, despite having among the higher death tolls.
No one is in charge and everyone is making it up as they go along. Two important lessons for everyone.
There is no way to know which nations have done a great job and which have done a horrible job. We will not know until this is all over and even then it will be hard to know. The two countries that were hit hardest first, China and Iran, are totally untrustworthy and the threat didn’t really become clear until what happened to Italy. There were so many unknowns, and still are, that all decisions had to be made in the dark with people just hoping they were right.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, a stable genius, or an epidemiologist to determine what an individual needs to do to keep themselves and their families safe.
There are numerous people around the world that are just stupid and take undue risks. Yes the government has an obligation to keep people informed and insure that our healthcare system isn’t overburdened. But I’m not putting my own personal safety in the hands of any government leader.
Well, yes, sort of. I do think very few people really knows what to do, but that really doesn’t have to with incompetence or stupidity. It has to do with the fact that we still, legitimately, do not know a lot about this virus. There’s still a lot of guess work to the point that our model results have been pretty out of whack. Fortunately it appears we overestimated in some ways but it could have gone the other way around. If our model results are out of whack, how can we really know what to do? We have no visibility into this past august. We don’t know if it’s going to go away in the summer, we don’t know if it will mutate, whether it will be yearly like the flu, hell, we don’t know exactly all the ways it can spread.
My thoughts, based probably off movies, was that we were much more medically and technologically advanced in than we really are. We look back at plague doctors like they were morons, but people will probably be looking back at us the same.
More people are more stupid than you think. Last I heard, only about a third of people save for retirement at any rate like usefulness. 40% of people think that the planet is 10,000 years old. 45% believe in ghosts and demons.
It’s good be a person who does not need government, but government is there to protect the stupid people who do need a person to watch out for them. And the smart people set up the government to do that, so that someone is ensuring that the stupid people are pulling the rest of us down to the smallest amount possible.
Or to be nice and charitable. Certainly, that’s the reason most people would give to others and themselves.
Uh, what? Without epidemiologists and medical researchers, how will you know what the mode of transmission is, and how to protect yourself from it? How will you know fresh produce and drinking water are safe? How do you know whether to stay 30 feet away from other people, or if 6 feet is enough?
Also, without government action, how will you convince your employer to let you stay home and still keep your job?
Is this virus making people realize 'oh shit, nobody is in charge and nobody knows what to do’
I dearly hope so. The problem is less that no one is in charge than the people in charge are incompetent. Their only demonstrable skill is getting put in charge of things, but you’ll find incredibly often they don’t actually know how to do anything else. This is not just about who is running the country, it’s about who is doing everything.
How on earth are hospitals out of masks? You will find that they had plans for epidemic situations and had spent millions in preparation only to have no idea how many masks they would need, or buy the wrong kind, or get ones with elastic bands that would degrade over time and the stock of masks wasn’t being rotated to prevent that. Hospitals aren’t exactly businesses though, so take a look at the next few months as one business after another begins to fold, even though they have laid off their employees and cut the majority of their operating costs they won’t know what to do in order to re-open because so many business are run by people who did not build the companies. It is alarming how many people running businesses do not have the qualifications to perform any other job in that company.
No, the problem is that the decision-making structure is deeply flawed. Despite real advances in the degrees to which it can be described as “democratic”, it’s still seriously concentrated at the top and hierarchical. So let’s review the problems with hierarchical.
At the top you’re expected to solve everything. Buck stops here. You never have enough info to go on, not even enough info to know what the fuck is happening, yet you get all the blame. You also get frustrated with the middle level folks who report to you because of their infighting, and because they’re more interested in advancing themselves as their colleagues’ expense than doing what you rely on them to do.
In the middle, you never have enough authority to do a goddam thing because the people above you won’t let you wipe your own ass without permission and keep directing you to do things you know are absolutely wrong. Below you, the people you’re in charge of see you as the immediate oppressor, resent your intrusion and the fact that they need your acquiescence at every turn, but fucking hell YOU didn’t set it up that way, and OH but when they NEED you they get pissed off if you don’t solve their issue — for which they aren’t remotely grateful, they act like they were entitled to it, paid for it, and you had it shrinkwrapped to hand to them the minute they asked for it.
At the bottom, you don’t get to decide shit. Constantly being ordered around, your lives reordered at will by people above you. You get lied to all day, coerced by the prospect of starvation or jail into behaving a certain way that at least a third of the time subsequently gets branded a bad behavior for which you get blamed. You can see everything’s all fucked up. You tend to blame the people above you, because you and your brothers & sisters sure as hell didn’t set this mess up!
The structure of decision-making could be improved. I don’t know if 100% anarchic democracy could ever be attained but we should think of it as the ideal goal and then impose hierarchy only where needed and with the notion that we should continue to seek to have less of it. Oddly enough, perhaps, even conservative Republican types feel this way about authoritarian hierarchy —as do grassroots liberals — although the John Birch types tend to think as middle managers about being free to make policy that people under them have to obey and the grassroots liberals tend to dream of putting the middle managers’ and rulers’ heads on a pike.
I don’t think there will be big changes. I expect commissions to be launched in each country (since many countries don’t care what the WHO thinks) and, provided there is stable leadership, the commission will say “we screwed up in ways X, Y, and Z” and then governments will try to fix the problems.
Even if the US (as an example) had rational leadership that hadn’t gotten rid of its pandemic experts, they would still have run into trouble. There are barely enough hospital beds at the best of times. Necessary equipment wasn’t available. I expect millions (literally) of N95 masks to be warehoused somewhere “for next time”. I expect there will be a lot of “excess” ventilators. I expect resistance from local governments and hospitals on expanding the hospitals because that’s expensive and it’s “doubtful” this will happen again soon.
Governments will try to save money because paying for this massive stimulus is expensive. Right now Canada has over one million people on unemployment insurance, which honestly shocks me as a low figure, most gaining more than they otherwise would have qualified for for a “normal” layoff. Indeed, many qualify for the new benefit but not the regular benefit at all, such as the self-employed. I wonder if Norway is using their sovereign fund to cover their own costs.
In my opinion, if Clinton had won, Dr. Fauci would be in charge of the response and things would have turned out better than they did in out timeline. Yes, New York City would likely still have had a significant outbreak, but probably not as bad as the actual one we’re having.
On the other hand, if Clinton had won, no matter how well she had ended up dealing with the pandemic, Republicans would be up in arms and highly motivated to vote her out this fall. She would likely be on track for a major loss this fall. So basically, again in my opinion, the problem is twofold. Trump is not a capable leader is one prong. The other is that the Republican base seems to not want capable leadership, having rejected Romney and McCain style Republicanism for Trump.
People think that “government” or “big business” or “The Media” or whoever are single monolithic entities, controlled by some figurehead or council of learned elders or whatever. Theoretically as long as you put someone smart enough in charge, they will make correct decisions.
That’s not really how anything works.
I’m pretty close to the epicenter of the outbreak and, aside from all the precautions everyone is taking, society is pretty much moving forward as you would expect. Grocery stores have food. Restaurants are serving take out and delivery. Mail and packages get delivered. The internet, water and electricity works. Police, and fire services are still active. My kid’s school at least is trying to teach remotely.
Maybe the response could have been handled much better, but I don’t see society collapsing anytime soon.
It also helps that Jacinda Ardern is clearly listening to her public health advisers first instead of gauging her response based upon polling numbers, the stock market indicies, or the number of people winging about how this will interfere with their Easter vacation plans.
California has done okay, although for a state that is on its own the world’s sixth largest economy it could have done more to prepare both its industries and the public for the epidemic once it was apparent that the contagion was not contained. The problem is that California is not on its own; it shares borders and logistics with many other states which did not take this as seriously, and even if it gets the epidemic under control back infection will still come in waves, especially if other states prematurely lift their isolation measures. As a substantial hub of biotech research, I would expect California to be on the forefront of developing and deploying testing, and in that measure it has been deficient. But Governor Newsom, to his credit, didn’t waste any words trying to blame someone else or deflect the problem; he accepted the blame and pledged to do better, which is honestly the most impressive thing I’ve seen pretty much any official do. We could and should do better, but the state is head and shoulders above many states that did nothing to prepare and failed to act even after the extent of the epidemic was known.
My takeaway from this crisis is it’s a demonstration of why anarchic democracy would be a horrible system of government. Do you honestly believe that we could have convinced a majority of people back in January how serious the approaching epidemic was going to be and got them to institute the pre-emptive action that was called for?