No, I think the US federal and state governments should have started a whole lot fucking earlier focusing on preparing with test kits and production of other things a society in this situation requires, and instead we got the assbag in the Oval Office downplaying the threat. And that makes me goddamn livid.
Not my point. My point is that the ability to track and contain the epidemic before it becomes a pandemic was botched by a health care system badly unprepared. And let me be crystal clear. I don’t blame medical care providers at all - on the contrary, they’re the only one’s in any position of authority who seemed to take this seriously - I blame the inept policy makers and those directing the resources within the American health care system. They dicked around and now it’s costing lives and will almost certainly cost a whole lot more people their lives, people who deserved better leadership.
To quote another commenter in another thread (adding a sarcasm notice because better safe than sorry)…
Most likely referring to rate of seropositivity in the general adult population, which runs >95%. This indicates exposure to the virus and immunity, but does not indicate actual disease.
I don’t disagree with the asshat part. There should have been better planning. The impact of that has yet to be felt. It will be. Don’t confuse this initial spread (which is unavoidable) to what happens when this really gets going.
But the CDC wasn’t delaying on preparing test kits. It wasn’t dicking around. I was in China when this all started (and got out just in time). I was following what was going on in China and the USA pretty closely. China was barely cooperating with WHO and almost not at all with CDC. No other state or federal organization (unless you want to count military) was in any position to do jack squat. Except plan.
You can say that CDC stumbled getting kits out. But that’s not due to a lack of competence. They made very human, very unfortunate, mistakes.
As far as producing what the situation requires, most of that is done in China. The irony is deadly.
Both WHO and CDC said that containment wasn’t going to work.
NO health care system is prepared for pandemics. None. Didn’t you see in the news those hospitals being built in days in China? Their health care system was unprepared. The construction industry stepped up. You’d be correct in pointing out we aren’t making plans to do the same.
The American health care system isn’t the problem. It’s not even the policy makers in the system. It’s the policy makers outside the system. And we are about see the effect of their poor decisions.
The policy makers are political appointees, and this administration has systematically and consistently appointed incompetent boot-lickers over qualified personnel. There is no way that doesn’t have an impact on decision making. China wasn’t sharing doesn’t cut it. The people released form quarantine in San Antonio were dropped off in a fucking Cheesecake factory for god’s sake.
The extent of how many people die however is not unavoidable. Any fatalism about millions of deaths focused among those with existing health issues is disturbing to say the least.
Yes, the failure to starting making more test kits and allocating resources sooner is already having an effect, and the scope of that effect is a giant question mark. Not felt it yet and not having an impact yet are not the same thing.
You’re confusing the people in the health care system with the people outside it. The US health care system is decidedly NOT run by federal policy makers. That’s the whole reason there is even a debate about having a national health care system.
Exactly my point. But if you look at what was done in China, it wasn’t the health care system that made the difference. It was policies that extended the holiday to minimize travel, closing factories, setting up roadblocks, etc.
How many test kits would have been enough? And when? Short of testing everyone daily for like 2 weeks, you will never have enough test kits. Test kits only prevent spread if you use them on people with no symptoms. That everyone.
What resources? Masks? They come from China. More people studying the disease? You might have a point. But would it accelerate a vaccine? No. Would a new medicine be discovered? No. New therapy? Not until you have sick people to study.
Eh? But I think I know what you mean. My point is that having hundreds or even thousands of people getting sick is pretty routine. Our system can take care of those people reasonably well. There might not be a therapy for this particular disease, but patients can receive palliative care.
No, the impact will be when we have millions of sick people. There won’t be enough resources for palliative care for everyone. That’s true of all health care systems.
No, the only way to stop it is with some pretty draconian stuff. Prevent or delay infection as long as possible by restricting human interaction. That takes planning to be effective without being totalitarian.
Masks are the least of it. We could be facing food and medicine shortages very soon, among other things. The US Federal government has broad power to redirect the allocation of American private industry during an emergency. They should already be using it.
I’m gonna need the receipts for that claim.
I don’t think it would be a good idea to allocate resources to untested measures, but still must point out that you cannot possibly know that. Traditional vaccine and treatment development should be the focus however.
My understanding is that covid-19 has proven unusually resistant to treatment. I’d be thrilled to be wrong about that. While due to under-reporting hopefully the mortality rate is actually lower than the 3.4% estimated so far, this isn’t a routine flu. I see nothing to be accomplished by likening it to common occurrences of hundreds or even thousands of people routinely getting sick.
Are you seriously suggesting that the inability to test all symptomatic patients to the extent that medical care providers are being forced to ration the kits among their own patients has no chance of exacerbating the ultimate spread of the disease? Why even have test kits at all then if they don’t do any good. And if they do (they do), then how is 200 for a state the size of California enough?
That’s my whole point. The Federal government CAN do that. That’s not a power of the American health care system. I think we agree on 90% of stuff. But people complaining about 'Murican health care is stupid. There’s nothing intrinsic about it that is causing the particular problems. The same problems exist in all healthcare systems. However, there are folks outside the healthcare system (in every country) that can have enormous effect.
I’m not. I’m pointing out that we have a health care system that isn’t overwhelmed by hundreds or thousand, but would be by millions. There are decisions by people in power that can affect this.
Yes. This is a disease being spread by asymptomatic people. There are estimates that for every person showing symptoms, there could be 10 not shown symptoms but are infectious. Even if it’s less, testing patients with symptoms is too late. At that point, what are you going to do? Isolate. Geez, you can do that without a test. They may only have the flu or something else infectious, in which case isolation is a pretty good idea anyway.
China didn’t beat this back with test kits. They are not a cure, nor a prevention. They don’t offer a path to therapy.
This isn’t to say the kits are not useful. But for having an effect on the ultimate spread, not so much.
Reading about the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, what’s interesting is how wildly the death rate varied. In certain populations/countries, the death rate was could be ten times the official average due to various factors, including genetic. A single number hides the fact that the effect on different populations is anything but uniform, which complicates things.
A 0.1% fatality rate for flu is only that high at the beginning of the season, when there’s no vaccine. Apparently the fatality rate drops to half that or less when a vaccine is introduced. (Which makes sense - those most vulnerable are most likely to get the vaccine, so more cases are mild.) Flu survives on surfaces for up to two days. There’s some evidence that this coronavirus survives for up to two weeks, (at least enough evidence that the Chinese are burning money in response) and the risk of transmission is definitely higher than the usual flu. So even the best case scenario is a lot more worrying than a seasonal flu.
The 1918 Spanish flu only ever infected about a third of the world population, slightly less than that of the US population. People do manage to avoid things like this.
He simultaneously claims that it’s contained, AND that the death rate is lower than WHO’s 3.4% number.
Here we are with 12 fatalities on 260ish verified cases, yielding a 4.6% rate.
So either the fatality rate is a lot higher than WHO thinks, or we simply haven’t tested enough in the US to have a clue about containment or anything else (ding ding ding! I think we have a winner!).
