[Goose]

Maybe, but i don't think there was one government in the world that reacted with the alacrity required. You need social awareness as well as political will, and neither was there.

Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong to name four.

Not really BC. For them it was pretty much business as usual. They had a good contact tracing and epidemic response phase 1 team ready to go. They just let them continue to do their thing. No real down side in doing that, so an easy decision. If it wasn't working, or if their teams said they were overwhelmed, then a decision would have been required. Didn't happen, so no decision was required.

There was plenty of political will to impose a Chinese travel ban on February 2.  The problem was that the virus was out of the proverbial barn, so to speak, and Trump didn't take the steps required to prepare for the possibility that there was community transmission and making sure the appropriate agencies (CDC, FDA) were equipping us with the means we needed to test broadly.  That was a failure, full stop.  And by being blind to local transmission until it was too late, the administration precluded a strategy of test, isolate, and trace that might have stemmed the more draconian measures now in place.  If nothing else, it would have bought time and enabled socialization of harsher measures earlier.
BC

I think you are correct that the virus was in the community. I don't think it was ever a viable option for us to even try why Taiwan and friends did. We didn't have the trained people in place to do it, or a plan to do it, really. Certainly we have no experience doing anything like that on a national level.  We also needed to do it Feb 2, not March 1 for it to matter. The necessary people were neither available nor trained. The USPHS has about 6000 officers, some fraction of whom could be deployed. That would have be a drop in the bucket, and would have taken weeks to organize, at best. Unfortunately, it appears that they still aren't necessary people available at any level, which is different issue. I think there was a failure alright, and that failure has been ongoing for many years. No decision made in Washington on Feb 2 would have changed anything.

  Once upon a time, we had a President who knew where the buck stopped.
BC

Yes, and that President virtually destroyed the Navy and got us into the Korean war, for which we were totally unprepared. I point this out not to single out Truman as a bad president, but rather to show that Presidents with the best of intentions often have bad outcomes in many areas. In some areas he arguably took the wrong advice.

No doubt, but at least he didn't pretend like it was someone else's fault.
BC

True. He defended his actions as best he could. He never said it was anybody else's fault, because he never admitted that the actions he took were mistakes. It is interesting that in his firing of MacArthur he said "I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals.".  A smart reporter might have asked why the president allowed a dumb son of a bitch to command his army in Japan and Korea  for years. My point is that sometimes decisions are made that don't work out. Easy to say it was a mistake in hindsight. It is also easy to recommend actions that simply can't be executed and hypothesize a different outcome.

[Goose]

Maybe, but i don't think there was one government in the world that reacted with the alacrity required. You need social awareness as well as political will, and neither was there.

Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong to name four.

Not really BC. For them it was pretty much business as usual. They had a good contact tracing and epidemic response phase 1 team ready to go. They just let them continue to do their thing. No real down side in doing that, so an easy decision. If it wasn't working, or if their teams said they were overwhelmed, then a decision would have been required. Didn't happen, so no decision was required.

There was plenty of political will to impose a Chinese travel ban on February 2.  The problem was that the virus was out of the proverbial barn, so to speak, and Trump didn't take the steps required to prepare for the possibility that there was community transmission and making sure the appropriate agencies (CDC, FDA) were equipping us with the means we needed to test broadly.  That was a failure, full stop.  And by being blind to local transmission until it was too late, the administration precluded a strategy of test, isolate, and trace that might have stemmed the more draconian measures now in place.  If nothing else, it would have bought time and enabled socialization of harsher measures earlier.
BC

I think you are correct that the virus was in the community. I don't think it was ever a viable option for us to even try why Taiwan and friends did. We didn't have the trained people in place to do it, or a plan to do it, really. Certainly we have no experience doing anything like that on a national level.  We also needed to do it Feb 2, not March 1 for it to matter. The necessary people were neither available nor trained. The USPHS has about 6000 officers, some fraction of whom could be deployed. That would have be a drop in the bucket, and would have taken weeks to organize, at best. Unfortunately, it appears that they still aren't necessary people available at any level, which is different issue. I think there was a failure alright, and that failure has been ongoing for many years. No decision made in Washington on Feb 2 would have changed anything.

  Once upon a time, we had a President who knew where the buck stopped.
BC

Yes, and that President virtually destroyed the Navy and got us into the Korean war, for which we were totally unprepared. I point this out not to single out Truman as a bad president, but rather to show that Presidents with the best of intentions often have bad outcomes in many areas. In some areas he arguably took the wrong advice.

No doubt, but at least he didn't pretend like it was someone else's fault.
BC

True. He defended his actions as best he could. He never said it was anybody else's fault, because he never admitted that the actions he took were mistakes. It is interesting that in his firing of MacArthur he said "I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals.".  A smart reporter might have asked why the president allowed a dumb son of a bitch to command his army in Japan and Korea  for years. My point is that sometimes decisions are made that don't work out. Easy to say it was a mistake in hindsight. It is also easy to recommend actions that simply can't be executed and hypothesize a different outcome.