Posted on 04/07/2020 6:09:58 AM PDT by untenured
We are now three months in. The CDC is recommending "wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission."
They're not talking about the "N-95" or surgical masks; those are in "short supply," and "must continue to be reserved for healthcare workers and medical first responsers." Just the ordinary, non-surgical, cloth (or heavy paper) masks covering mouth and nose, the ones that cost maybe $0.25 each at wholesale.
As it happens, these are also in short supply. So the CDC has described how we all can make our masks at home.
That's helpful—I've made some for myself, following their instructions—but really: We're three months in. Where the hell are the masks? Why aren't they being handed out on street-corners to anyone who wants one? Fifty or 100 million dollars—chump change—would have gotten us all the masks we need.
We don't have them because the federal government placed its order for 50 million masks—on March 12th.
It's not just masks, or ventilators, or the other PPE that are in critically short supply. There is, as far as I have been able to determine, not a single bottle of ordinary hand santizer, or alcohol-based disinfectant wipes, available for sale within the Washington DC metropolitan area, where I live. Not one. The (many) online retailers I have checked are promising delivery by the middle of May.
I know, I know—many people are hoarding, and others are price-gouging. Well, who could have imagined that?! Hoarding and price-gouging during a national emergency! I'll tell you who could have imagined that: people whose job it is to imagine that (and things like it), and who are competent at their job, and are given appropriate direction and resources to do their job.
If you are not outraged by the incompetence displayed here you have either lost your sense of outrage completely, or you don't have a friend or loved one who is a healthcare provider or first responder.
The failure is so deep that we don't even really know how deep it is. Our testing capability, as is well known, is woefully inadequate for the task, so we really haven't the faintest idea how many people are carrying the virus. Who's got ventilators? How many? Where are they stored? Who is in charge of the decisions about where they get deployed? Is the federal government seizing ventilators and ordering them to be sent somewhere, or not? If so, who's in charge of that? Spend an hour or two trying to figure that out, and you'll get a glimpse of the dismal state of information-gathering and information dissemination that is plaguing this effort.
...
How could the “greatest country in the world” screw things up this badly in comparison to others? Unless we’re talking about prohibiting us from going out. That seems to be being done with at least some competence,
Until this pandemic, I had no idea that the federal government was responsible for providing hospitals and individuals with medical equipment and protective gear.
Liberals succeeded so far with their denial of American exceptionalism, that a great many people with absolutely nothing to recommend them have made it into positions, appointments, etc.-that they would never have achieved, otherwise !!
I call them COVIDIOTS.
Thank you for being a voice of reason on an otherwise, inept screed of nothingness.
This is the greatest country on Earth because we are self-reliant. If you want the government to take care of you, move to China!
Just what governments are doing better? China? Italy?
Lots of lying going on.
Nonetheless, in all its vastness it claims it is responsible, and deserves to be responsible. (It’s called the Centers for Disease Control, for heaven’s sake, and they couldn’t even handle the basic disease-control responsibility of making sure testing was widely available.) If you had asked, say, last year any of Fedzilla’s relevant agencies if they were prepared for a pandemic, they would have certainly said they were.
Government in the US is more corrupt and less willing to accept responsibility for anything it screws up than any other in the democratic world.
Nationalism is rising.
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