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Excellent post!

A heavily bureaucratized CDC simply isn’t - can’t be - up to this sort of black swan epidemic. Most of the time, it excels at routine public heath issues.

There are no cast in concrete procedures for extraordinary events, nor can they be.

Militaries are pretty good at adapting most of the time. It only took some 20 million deaths and 4 years or so to figure out just throwing more troops into trenches wasn’t working...

[semantic]

"this sort of black swan epidemic"

How lucky are we if we just miss impact? (Actually, the economic/social effect was a direct hit.) It's like those educational movies "Scared Straight". We literally experienced how one potential future could unfold. Now we have a fire lit under our collective ass. "Never again", right?

Hey, on that note, I'm tentatively calling it. I'm not one to make bold claims; I'm actually pretty chickenshit, hiding behind lots of qualifiers. But Italy just reported their 35th day from the first CV fatality (as of 3/26), and the pattern is starting to look really flat. To get the line moving upward again at this point would take monster numbers. Not saying it couldn't happen, but it's beginning to look highly unlikely.

CV Mortality
Italy vs US (net NY)
Italy 35 days actual
US 26 days actual, 27-35 projected