Written: March 20, 2020.
I do not cite sources. Nor do I list timestamps. The story is roughly in order, but that's not as important as the message.
COVID19: Extreme incompetence
It didn't help that the Wuhan government lied and hid the initial outbreak. However, as the Chinese realized how bad the disease was, they shut down the city and most of China. Their efforts to curb the outbreak were successful, but too much time from the initial infections had passed and they had to wait a long time for the city to get under control.
The World Health Organization, WHO, declared a world wide outbreak too late, but was ignored by most countries. Only Asian countries with significant number of infections reacted early. The rest of the world played the "wait and see" game, and some still are. This shows that the WHO reacts only after the fact, and has no role in preventing pandemics whatsoever.
No one trained for this. There are no experts in handling world wide plagues. There are no manuals or procedures in place to deal with this. The people who learned from the 1918 epidemic are all in their graves now. What we have today is extreme incompetence.
We have "experts" in different countries, who are free to ignore recommendations by WHO. The only recourse the rest of the world has in this case is to put strict travel restrictions in place in and out of these countries.
Ineffective quarantine measures will take longer, and cost more, than if people just do what China and Asian countries are doing. Not applying quarantine measures is condemning a lot of people to death. I'm looking at you Sweden.
Testing
Some people are acting like the numbers from test kits are absolute. No SARS-CoV-2 test kit is 100% reliable. There are always some false positives and false negatives.
False negatives mean that apparently healthy people who test negative can still be infectious.
False positives mean that people with or without symptoms, maybe be inaccurately diagnosed with COVID19.
Joe Public
What we have seen of Joe Public, and how he behaves in the face of a disaster is this: invisible threat like a virus is not real. Tangible threat like running out of food and toiler paper is real.
No matter how people have been warned, they have not stayed away from public gatherings. Only enforced quarantine measures have been effective at curbing this behavior.
Because people's first thought is to deal with the tangible threat, they put themselves in risk of a viral infection to deal with it. This manifests in crowded supermarkets and mass gatherings for government handouts.
Only strict enforcement of social distances such as by police and/or military will control this behavior.
In the face of a viral threat, particularly when infected people show no symptoms, Joe Public does not display self protective behavior. We've seen this all around the world.
