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Originally Posted by Obadno
The USA still has very low per captia infections and deaths and a low death rate.
The US has already mobilized to a degree unseen ever in history between the lock downs, the trillions in stimulus, the amount of testing etc etc. We are already doing what you think we should be doing.
We have the defense production act in place something we haven't needed since ww2. You have companies all over the country switching to "wartime" production including Phoenix's own Brooklyn bedding.
You want to argue on hindsight, and unknowable assumptions. Pandemics are ALWAYS a risk, there is no way that Trump or anyone could have known this was "the one" until it was. So Bill Gates has been talking about Cornaviruses for a long time, so have many others. There was a big Hollywood film about one in 2011 called Contagion. What is that supposed to mean? We all should have known that Bill Gates warnings years ago should have been specifically and arbitrarily heeded compared to any other? More reaching for blame.
There are all sorts of things that we know CAN happen. Super Volcanoes, Asteroid Strikes, Solar Flares, Tsunamis.
Do we as a society need to be 100% ready for any of these things that WILL (given time) occur eventually?
I understand that you wish some things maybe should have been prepared in hindsight, but you cant live like that, there is no way to reasonably prepare for this kind of stuff more than we already do. I mean shit dude even with budget cuts we fund the CDC more than any other country could hope too (6.5 billion in 2020). We fund the WHO more than anyone else by an order of magnitude.
So again. "we should have been more prepared" How can you be "more prepared" for Pandemics than having the CDC with a 6.5 BILLION dollar budget??? Its a permanent institution for these very problems.
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OK, now we get to the crux of it. I have outlined what could have been done better (not funding the CDC less, keeping the pandemic team going instead of disbanding it, better messaging from the bully pulpit, better coordination of supplies).
There are a number of institutions that characterize the threats out there (including things like asteroid strikes, etc.). When I was at Sandia Labs (I worked in nuclear nonproliferation and infrastructure surety), the group that helped us game this out was the Advanced Concepts Group. It might be a different group now, but that's who it was decades ago. We ran simulations about consequences and likelihood of particular situations. The collapse of oil prices, cascading blackouts, etc. The biggest nightmare is climate change, because of the interdependencies and cascading problems. We did work with the DoD, because they are the ones who will ultimately need to address many of the symptoms (global unrest, etc.). The second nightmare scenario back then was an attack on our natural gas infrastructure, because we had only a few bottlenecks, which would then result in rolling blackouts, which would hit things like hospitals, etc. This group helped any administration explore potential problems, and then prioritize resources based on these. We didn't do bio stuff back then (I think they do now, since they were beginning to hire loads and loads of those folks). I'm pointing at those things because it's the easiest way to avoid waste and taking our eye off of likely problems.
It's not about pointing at a sum of money and saying "IT'S A GIANT PILE OF MONEY." It's about organizing your administration to coordinate and prioritize before it hits, so that you are more ready when it hits. All of the "Deep State" weird rhetoric and trade-war stuff has made it hard to coordinate the response between elected political leadership and the governmental workers who carry it out, and the other countries who we need to be on the same page. Time will tell how well we do with this, and what went wrong, but all I've been saying is that it seems that some things might have gone better, and that it's too soon to tell how this will all go.
BTW, duh that Los Alamos does different things now. So does the military. Both are good at what they did then, and good at what they do now. That doesn't invalidate my question about why you hate on people who do things you and I couldn't. They work in this area now, and they are damn good at it.