Having this level of foresight and the guts to risk millions of unemployed workers for a "maybe scenario" is rare. If you were running the country, or were the governor of a coastal state like NY/CA, at what precise date would you have started ramping up ventilator&mask production?
Would you have instituted a statewide lockdown when there were 1-2 cases in California?
Would you be willing to trade certain unemployment and economic unproductivity for 2+ months, in exchange for the possibility that you might end up like Italy instead of Taiwan/South Korea? The last datapoint we had was SARS-Cov-1, which ended up not becoming a huge pandemic. Of course, the disease characteristics for SARS-Cov-2 are different, but without the benefit of hindsight, was the decision really that clear?
Incompetent US administration aside, the financial markets - which can be thought of as an expensive forecasting computer - certainly did not price in what would happen, so I'm not sure we can expect policymakers to arrive at far-superior decision making.
Considering that China is not completely out of the woods yet either, and the US/Italy lags about 1 month behind them in pandemic progression, how would you advise the US act now, with the knowledge of what China is doing?
That type of “wait and see” approach to leadership and government is exactly what this virus exploits.
The U.S. should have started ramping up supply production in the early days, not because they had some guarantee that this particular virus would wreak havoc in America, but because two things should have been readily apparent:
1) The stockpile of essential supplies was apparently abysmally low, both at a state and federal level
2) That if this specific respiratory virus didn’t end up arriving on U.S. shores, it was just a matter of time before one did.
Aggressive production should have begun long ago, with the assumption that supplies may be needed for this outbreak, and if not, it ought have been treated as a wake up call and at least the country would be more prepared for a future outbreak that could happen at any time.
Not only production, but aggressive public messaging about reasonable social distancing, hand washing, etc. should have begun much earlier.
The inaction was, in my view, bizarre and indefensible, and few elected officials exhibited the true qualities of leadership that are needed to foresee the risk and act swiftly to hedge against the risks that were readily apparent early on.
I'm not talking about locking down early, I'm talking about starting a crash program to produce masks and tests, organizing a national system to redirect resources like masks and ventilators, etc. If we had the testing capacity we have now a month ago, we would be in a much better position.
We didn't know how much it was spreading in the US because we weren't testing cases that didn't have a nexus to China/SK. So we had no idea what the spread was like and there was no data to go on to inform decisions to lock down. Seattle only got there early because some local flu researchers disobeyed their own IRB rules and tested cases for the virus without approval.
California seems to have gotten the lockdown about as early as was practical and has done much better than NYC, so they're actually doing well, all things considered.
I'm talking about starting a crash program to produce masks and tests, organizing a national system to redirect resources like masks and ventilators, etc.
Pretend for a second that you're Andrew Cuomo on January 1, 2020. What information would you have to justify this crash program?
Pretend that you're Andrew Cuomo on April 4, 2020. You're aware of what stage China is in. What would you do differently?
We should have started preparing the day we knew a c19 patient was in the US. I think that was late January. Definitely should have had a lockdown by late February at the latest but earlier would have been better and feasible. When the who and cdc said it was almost a pandemic, we should already have been prepared knowing that "almost a pandemic" to those organizations means the shit has hit the fucking fan and it's no longer preventable. Of course, this would have required leadership from the top and that's non-existent.
SARS wasn't able to spread nearly as quickly as the novel coronavirus, possibly because of the incubation period and prevalence of asymptotic carriers in this coronavirus.
That wasn't true of SARS which made people very sick so it was able to be contained (it's possibly that the novel coronavirus is just far more contagious but I don't know that for sure).
By mid to late January we all knew this. It was happening in China in full view of the world. The question was whether it could be contained, we didn't know that at the moment. But without extreme intervention it was just simple math that this would happen, and it did.
Also, the US's lockdown seems liable to be more porous than China's.