boatgeek
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Not necessarily. I was a part of the planning. We started early. Once we knew the scale of this thing, we started planning and quickly acknowledged that we did not have the facilities and the US is way to massive and rural to implement the SKM. The US was trying to slow down the virus to get the better screening. It is right now coming online and it was expedited. Much of the politicians were either trying to capitalize on a tragedy or calming the public to avoid panic. In general, I wish our public and politicians would start listening to experts and stay indoors for a few weeks.
May I ask when that planning started? The reason is that we had our first confirmed case in WA (a traveler from China) in late January. After that, our first positive tests were in late February. In that time, the Seattle Flu Study had several cases that they thought looked like COVID, but CDC told them not to give the test because they had no known connections to China. They eventually ignored CDC guidance, found a likely subject, and gave the test anyway. That was how we found out we had community spread. The Life Care deaths started coming in at about the same time.
I'm not an epidemiologist, but that certainly looks like CDC had their head in the sand for a solid month. I would be glad to be wrong. One also can't help but notice the during the critical early days of the epidemic, senior leadership was saying that it was no big deal and would blow over soon.
Finally, I disagree regarding having the resources to fight this early. The $150B to implement testing on the SKM is a drop in the bucket compared to the $2T in relief we just authorized. Sure, there's some hindsight in there, but everybody knew this was going to be massive in late January, where was the actual action? [edit] We also have a massive biotech industry in this country, which doesn't seem to have been mobilized to aid in testing until quite recently.