The United States has more confirmed coronavirus cases than anyone in the world. Here's how we got here: vox.com/2020/3/26/2119…
One of the biggest questions I grappled with in this piece: we know how our govt could have done better. more testing, less lying, better preparation, learning from other countries. They failed us.
But how could the rest of us have done better?
But how could the rest of us have done better?
It is very obvious in hindsight that the CDC requirements for testing -- which are public and online -- made it impossible to tell whether the virus was spreading in the US. What if they'd been challenged more on that?
One thing I've struggled with personally - I told my family in early February that we should expect the virus to hit here and should buy what we'd need and plan to soon stop leaving our home. I wasn't that direct in a public article for three more weeks. Why not?
I didn't want to sound alarmist. I didn't want to step out ahead of public health officials, who were still telling us that the risk was low. I wanted to tell readers what scientists were saying, and they too were trying not to sound alarmist. I don't want to imply I was silent.
I argued that we shouldn't scold people who were worried about the coronavirus. I said we were underprepared for pandemics. I said there'd be a bad one someday, even if this wasn't it.
In early Feb I said covid-19 probably wouldn't kill tens of millions, and in late Feb I issued a correction in Future Perfect's newsletter. It absolutely might kill tens of millions, I said.
But despite getting some calls right pretty early, @zeynep's criticism here felt pretty true to me:
We desperately needed some institution that would seriously pursue the hypothesis our government was incompetent and wrong or lying. We desperately needed more skepticism brought to bear on every published procedure or number.
I thought I was a cynic and I was not cynical enough to guess the scope of the mistakes we were making here, not in time to write anything that would've changed them.
And I deeply regret not telling my readers sooner what I told my family. I have no idea if you would have believed me, but you deserved to know, and I wish that when the government dropped this ball more people had been there to pick it up.
Man, my original plan for this tweet thread was a joke about America's status as #1 for coronavirus cases and how, as the president promised, I'm tired of winning. But it's hard for even very morbid humor to survive a straight look back at the last two months.
