This article is from an informed guy who has been on the case since covid was just a slope problem in some Chinese city where people ate bats:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-coronavirus-end/608719/
this one is hyperlinked to that one:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-are-sick-lost-february/608521/
Quoting from both, mixed, bolding mine:
==The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure.
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" A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the
18 million viewers of his TED Talk. In 2018,
I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come.
In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security war-gamed what might happen if a new coronavirus swept the globe. -
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When Wuhan began burning with infections in December, the U.S. government took only illogical, inadequate actions to stop the virus’s spread
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“I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, - -
“The way no one expected how this response would fail in the U.S. is the testing,” Nahid Bhadelia, the medical director of the Special Pathogen Unit at Boston University School of Medicine, told us - - -
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Instead,
the CDC botched its own test development. - -
the Food and Drug Administration held up independent labs - - -
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Every six days that the country did not test, every six days that it did not act, the number of infected Americans doubled.
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“If you don’t know where the disease is early in the epidemic, you have no hope of containing it,” Bhadelia said.
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Almost every city and state in America had a pandemic-preparedness plan,
King County, in which Seattle and Kirkland sit,
had a plan, of course. The last revision, dated October 2013, forecast the consequences of a pandemic flu in now-eerie detail.- - -
- - So many of the steps that then seemed unthinkable to regular people—closing schools for months, social distancing, curfews, and more—were not only contemplated but gamed out. - - -
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Except for one thing. The plan took as a given that a functional testing apparatus would catch diseases on the way in, or at least before the fire started raging. Under its “Planning Assumptions” section, the second bullet point - - -
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For every contingency that was considered,
every difficulty and problem was assumed to be downstream of the high-quality information that would flow from the testing system.
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When Japan had nearly as many confirmed cases,
it closed every school in the country. But because of the testing backlog, the United States remained unaware of its infection rate - -
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In late January- -
“We have it totally under control,” President Donald Trump
said at Davos. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
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In late February, the president voiced his hopes that “the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along.”
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Trump - - “Within a couple of days,” he said, the number of cases “is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
Bedford now estimates that roughly 7,640 people in the United States were already infected.
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One day after Bedford published his warning, the CDC announced that it would stop reporting how many people in the United States had been tested for the coronavirus.
{That's a field mark of fascism, rather than normal screwed up "conservative" thinking}
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Donald Trump shared his views on Fox News the following night. “A lot of people will have this, and it’s very mild,” he said. “They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor.”
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On March 6, Trump said that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.”
That was (and still is) untrue, and his own officials were quick to correct him. Regardless, anxious people still flooded into hospitals, seeking tests that did not exist. - - - “It really stressed the health-care system,” Popescu says.
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- - On March 10, CDC Director Robert Redfield described his agency’s strategy to
The New York Times. “It’s going to take rigorous, aggressive public health—what I like to say, block and tackle, block and tackle, block and tackle, block and tackle,” he said. “That means if you find a new case, you isolate it.”
Redfield’s advice would have sounded reasonable back on Planet A, where the U.S. surveillance apparatus had not failed so spectacularly, but it was almost nonsensical on Planet B, where we all now live. Almost no one was getting tested, so how could anyone find a new case? - -
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Without strong federal leadership, each state has been going after its own solutions and running its own show,
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Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”
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A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care. There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients.
- - {Italian} doctors have
been forced into the unthinkable: rationing care to patients who are most likely to survive, while letting others die. The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy.
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One could easily conceive of a world in which most of the nation believes that America defeated COVID-19. Despite his many lapses, Trump’s approval rating has surged. Imagine that he succeeds in diverting blame for the crisis to China, casting it as the villain and America as the resilient hero.
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One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A
communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic.
==
