I can speak for Taiwan. We responded incredibly strongly almost immediately. We had schools closed through almost all of Feburary, testing ramped up, quarantining and testing of travellers, extensive contact-tracing.
Taiwan learned a hard lesson from SARS, it’s the lesson the US is learning right now. The lesson is this: don’t waste time. The Trump Administration wasted six weeks. The first cases in the US and in South Korea happened on exactly the same day. Korea acted, Trump did not.
Now, thousands are dead.
Even if Trump wanted to, the Democrats would have blocked him at every turn, they called him a ‘racist’ when he stopped the flights from China.
Trying to manage this country during a crisis is tantamount to herding cats.
Not so much an issue when your country is relatively small and has a homogenous population.
Good for Taiwan in responding well.
But I wouldn't blame Trump. He inherited a decaying and useless bureaucracy that is even worse than you could imagine - I live in DC and see first hand every day how inept it is and cheer every time I see the tell-tale signs that Trump planted a large boot firmly on some idiots behind.
And, he could not have acted earlier. The Democrats already whined loudly about his racist travel ban, and the FLUBROs here would have called for hanging him from a lamp-post.
You learned from SARS. We didn't.
And a lot of folks here think that tracking, tracing and quarantining someone for carrying a deadly disease is a violation of their constitutional rights. So we had to destroy our economy instead.
Taiwan has a population of 24 million and 14,00 sq miles compared to the USA population of 327 million and 3.80 sq miles.
You are hilarious to compare the two.
Have you thought about your unique ability to see into the past?
What a drama queen.
Blah blah blah
Oh-
And, orange man bad.
Don’t call on the United States when China comes knocking and knocks your frog sticks into the ground.
I know testing and contact tracing were the cornerstone of South Korea’s response. I am not even sure we’re doing the contact tracing now. I hear virtually nothing about it from any public officials and media reports. It seems like they are simply trying to test everyone who shows up asking for a test and praying they don’t run out of tests. They don’t seem to be proactively trying to track down potential carriers who might not know they have it.
The reason our testing wasn’t ramped up is because the CDC made a test verrrry slowly that ended up not working. And meanwhile the FDA kept in place bans on letting any states or private entities make their own tests. The failure of the CDC to make a good test came out of nowhere. Everyone assumed they knew how to do that. But the idea of banning others from making tests at the same time is classic FDA and a classic central planning failure we’re all too familiar with. If we had a system that utilized the states as 50 laboratories all competing with each other to do the best job we could’ve succeeded at making a test.
I think there are major unresolved issues here of what the feds are supposed to do vs. the states in controlling a communicable disease. If there’s even one weak link in the chain, controlling can fail big time, so that would suggest the feds should control it. But as we can see, most of the powers being used now to manage this are being exercised by the states. And the states are claiming they won’t take orders from the feds on any of this.
When it comes to the manpower to deal with people on the ground, the states should be better equipped. But when you’re doing contact-tracing, that can cross state lines. So are you going to have to have two states coordinating to handle it? Or should the feds be running all of the contact tracing?
As it is now, we don’t seem to have hardly any organization and infrastructure in place to handle a pandemic. There is no broad agreement on a plan for how they should be handled. There isn’t any enforcement mechanism for the feds to make a state comply with a consistent plan. And I can only assume there is absolutely no technology in place to handle contact tracing in terms of a database or ability to share this information between the feds and states.