The response to this has been disasterous on all levels, including Federal.
I agree.
It is something no one saw coming. Even those that were paid to plan for the unseen. But overall it is not as if we are at war and our infrastructure has been destroyed.
It is tragedy for those that lost loved ones, and those that lost their businesses, and those that lost their jobs (all that goes with those things). But America is still strong, and Americans will respond liked they have after every emergency. They will roll up their sleeves and get back to work.
The people who are paid to plan for this stuff planned accordingly. It wasn’t the planners that sucked. It was all of the bureaucratic fools who would look at their budget requests and slash them. It was the hospital administrators who dug into their PPE stocks during the flu season, thinking they could get it replaced “next quarter.” Oops.
Do we blame the people responsible for preparing when their bosses dismissed them as “dramatic?”
Early on in this I had drinks with some former colleagues in the Emergency Prep field. It was bittersweet—lots of smirking at the managers and administrators who rejected our recommendations, but also a frustration as we saw people in the middle of the mess getting sick and seeing the nursing homes get ravaged.
In America it pretty much boils down to the bottom line. No one wants to spend money on “events” that have less than a 1% chance of happening. Who is to blame for that.