A few thoughts on how countries have responded to Coronavirus and learning from those who came before us. Every country that has faced the virus as had to target gov policy along a scale of Containment to Mitigation.
Containment is aimed at identifying and isolating the virus as it comes into a country or community so as to stop its spread. That's what the CDC testing criteria has been aimed at: largely testing those with travel histories, etc.
But no country has been successful in containing the virus and each country has then had to deal with the virus escaping containment efforts and beginning to transmit among the community. That's when countries have to start implementing mitigation policies.
The problem with mitigation policies is that they are disruptive: socially and economically. Things like cancelling large public gatherings (Kurdistan just closed its mosques) or shutting down schools for a month (as Japan did, or Italy just announced).
It's understandable that policymakers are reticent to do things like this! But the whole point of Dr. Messonier's message two weeks ago was: containment in the US would fail, the virus would start to transmit, and large-scale mitigation was inevitable at some point.
Hence her sober, clear-eyed statements about preparing for disruption. But Trump didn't like that! So instead, they've spent a week patting themselves on the back, not testing widely, and talking up a vaccine that won't be ready for 18 months at the earliest!
All of this because Trump very transparently sees this whole thing as a challenge for him politically and he wants the markets to do well and the economy to grow because it will help his re-election. But we are inevitably going to have to undertake mitigation.
And the actual case number is going to spike considerably once we're testing at scale. And I don't think the federal leadership has done ANYTHING to actually prepare people for this.
