While I think that's a valid point to make. My perspective on that is that, given contradicting reports and initial confusion, you can't fault any organization or person not picking out the correct response in the total state space. Hindsight and all that.
I think a much more powerful complaint is pointing out that, despite numerous warnings, studies, SARS, and having successfully isolated the root cause of the SARS outbreak (Civets). Only four months later these animals were back on the menu. The government made a rational choice to allow the conditions for the current situation to exist. The whole world is paying the price for this rational, prolonged and often pointed out mistake. That, I think, is a complaint we can lay wholly on the government.
As an American, I was really disappointed in the CDC response. Even in the initial confusion, it's their fundamental job to prepare for and monitor these crises. Despite SARS and MURS, they still weren't prepared on a basic level to confront a respiratory disease (no meaningful stockpile of N95 masks or ventilators nor plans for ramping up production of the same) and then the whole debacle with the CDC vs WHO tests. The experts seem to be saying that tests are the most important aspect of the response and we botched that royally; only recently has our testing capacity begun to trend toward adequate (failing to address this sooner means the loss of life is exponentially greater). Note that these failures are independent of whatever initial confusion there may have been about this particular disease.
And I don't think this is a simple case of hindsight: we've had several respiratory epidemics in the last couple of decades and we were still caught unprepared.
I'm no expert and perhaps there is a reasonable explanation for all of this, but I suspect it was really negligence to the tune of thousands of American lives and who knows how much economic damage.
The maddening part is that we had the capability to deal with this and the systematically destroyed it.
There was a stockpile, but it was allowed to be depleted. There was a pandemic response team, but they got laid off. Hell, the Obama-Trump transition teams even wargamed thisexactscenario but it wasn't taken seriously.
>My perspective on that is that, given contradicting reports and initial confusion, you can't fault any organization or person not picking out the correct response
You can fault an authoritarian, oppressive regime for covering up the virus and suppressing whistleblowers. Now the world is paying for the CCP's SOP.
I think a much more powerful complaint is pointing out that, despite numerous warnings, studies, SARS, and having successfully isolated the root cause of the SARS outbreak (Civets). Only four months later these animals were back on the menu. The government made a rational choice to allow the conditions for the current situation to exist. The whole world is paying the price for this rational, prolonged and often pointed out mistake. That, I think, is a complaint we can lay wholly on the government.