Personally, I believe that the USA got caught with it's pants down. I can understand the empathy behind Americans caught on a cruise ship and bringing them home, but it appears that the quarantine around them was lacking. Look at where all the eruptions of new infections is the highest in the USA. They should have all been taken to someplace remote at least until the people in charge understood what they were dealing with. And under no circumstances within the continental USA.
China completely isolated a city with 11 million residents and tanked their economy over this. They obviously KNEW something important about this. America just ignored that big red flag, and continued along, business as usual. By the time flights to and from China were blocked, many other countries already had cases, yet they were not being blocked as well. Was even any effort made to track down anyone coming from China within the past 14 days before the lockdown? Wouldn't that have been a logical move?
Even by February 29th, Americans were only "urged" to not go to Italy and South Korea. It wasn't until this week that an actual ban was imposed, LONG after the virus was putting Italy in dire straits. And long after there have been enough people carrying the contagion have already entered the USA and contagion spreading out of control. Did the USA know that asymptomatic victims can spread this disease or not? If not, why not? I knew it, and I certainly don't have the resources that they should for information of this nature.
And then there is the CDC. I couldn't have written a more bumbling idiot script for them any better than they wrote for themselves. Testing could have prevented many infections if people knew they were infected and reacted appropriately. But even long after the virus had spread outside of China, they insisted that tests would only be done to people (1) showing symptoms,
and (2) either been to China or in contact from someone who had been in China in the past 14 days. Then they announced that the tests were inconclusive and defective. Then tests required several levels of hoops to jump through for anyone to be tested. And most people had no clue what those hoops were or where. Then I heard that a critical reagent needed for the tests to work was suddenly unavailable. As far as I know, tests are still limited and difficult to be obtained. And who knows what the hoops are now to qualify for testing?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/...avirus/607999/
For the money that we pay for the CDC out of our taxes, exactly what are we getting for our money? Obviously it wasn't spent to be prepared for an event of this nature, so what have they been doing with all that money?
How will America look when this is in our rear-view mirror? Well in my opinion, I hope the CDC should all be in the unemployment lines. Or worse.
And those people tasked with our protection and well being, well, they just need to get their head out of their ass. I'm just a nobody and a know-nothing, but even I could see what was coming LONG before it was impossible to do the right things to, if not stop it, at least contain it with minimal spread. Yeah, it would have been hard decisions to have to make, but sometimes those decisions MUST be made by the people put into positions to make them.
IMHO.