[Farm93]

How are Italy and Spain and Greece keeping the lid on this while the US isn't? None of those countries have public health care systems better than the US, let alone anything close to the CDC. They aren't exactly cultures famed for compliance with authority. They don't have anything close to our financial might. 

They, along with the rest of Europe, had the determination from their government to attack this thing and defeat it. We had a populist anti-science moron, like Bolsonaro, running our response, dividing his nation and actively making things worse by discouraging masks and seemingly trying to slow testing roll out.

My position had to do with responses during the January-March time frame, and I'll stick with that. This was during the time period when clinical information was developing. I think the gating factor was knowledge, not politics. I invite anyone to check the timelines for themselves. No one did.

HOWEVER, by mid-March, the pattern was known, the need for social distancing,  and lately, masking. Trump has been a disaster.

I challenged your timelines.   I didn't know I changed my user name to no one, but I guess I did.   

I recall mentioning the cruise ship news was all over the place by late February President Trump even was stating publicly that he didn't want those cruise ship passengers to count against our (HIS) numbers, so by mid-February POTUS was aware enough IMHO.

Generally move mid-March to mid-February and I think you are OK.  I even noted that in So Cal I had people dropping out of youth sports in February for fear of Coronavirus and asking for refunds.   I kind of hope your average soccer mom does not have better info than our Federal government.  Though I will concede that your average SoCal soccer mom may have read more about coronavirus in February than POTUS.   ;)

It doesn't matter really.  Best in class took control early with testing and tracing (Thailand, Singapore, S. Korea), but even those that waited have pushed their rate of new infections close to zero in ~90 days even after they had scary outbreaks.   Even mid-March was 90 days ago now, and the USA is certainly not just a few days away from just a few deaths per day.

Italy did very little for the first several weeks of their outbreak.   Italy has awful health care.   Modern Italy has been a unified country for less time than the USA.   I think many of us can agree there are loads of other reasons why the USA should outperform Italy, but the USA lacked at least two things.

1) We lacked a federal government committed to the tough tasks needed to beating the virus down once the citizens started dying.
2) We also lacked those awesome town and city mayors roaming the streets telling people that they were selfish and/or idiots if they felt inconvenienced by the stay-at-home orders. 

The USA does have at least ONE Italian-American leader, but he was only responsible for NY.   NYers actually did drop their curve to near zero like Europe.   Maybe getting control after COVID kills thousands is an Italian thing or a Southern European thing.   Can we get Melania to take it on?

[Farm93]

How are Italy and Spain and Greece keeping the lid on this while the US isn't? None of those countries have public health care systems better than the US, let alone anything close to the CDC. They aren't exactly cultures famed for compliance with authority. They don't have anything close to our financial might. 

They, along with the rest of Europe, had the determination from their government to attack this thing and defeat it. We had a populist anti-science moron, like Bolsonaro, running our response, dividing his nation and actively making things worse by discouraging masks and seemingly trying to slow testing roll out.

My position had to do with responses during the January-March time frame, and I'll stick with that. This was during the time period when clinical information was developing. I think the gating factor was knowledge, not politics. I invite anyone to check the timelines for themselves. No one did.

HOWEVER, by mid-March, the pattern was known, the need for social distancing,  and lately, masking. Trump has been a disaster.

I challenged your timelines.   I didn't know I changed my user name to no one, but I guess I did.   

I recall mentioning the cruise ship news was all over the place by late February President Trump even was stating publicly that he didn't want those cruise ship passengers to count against our (HIS) numbers, so by mid-February POTUS was aware enough IMHO.

Generally move mid-March to mid-February and I think you are OK.  I even noted that in So Cal I had people dropping out of youth sports in February for fear of Coronavirus and asking for refunds.   I kind of hope your average soccer mom does not have better info than our Federal government.  Though I will concede that your average SoCal soccer mom may have read more about coronavirus in February than POTUS.   ;)

It doesn't matter really.  Best in class took control early with testing and tracing (Thailand, Singapore, S. Korea), but even those that waited have pushed their rate of new infections close to zero in ~90 days even after they had scary outbreaks.   Even mid-March was 90 days ago now, and the USA is certainly not just a few days away from just a few deaths per day.

Italy did very little for the first several weeks of their outbreak.   Italy has awful health care.   Modern Italy has been a unified country for less time than the USA.   I think many of us can agree there are loads of other reasons why the USA should outperform Italy, but the USA lacked at least two things.

1) We lacked a federal government committed to the tough tasks needed to beating the virus down once the citizens started dying.
2) We also lacked those awesome town and city mayors roaming the streets telling people that they were selfish and/or idiots if they felt inconvenienced by the stay-at-home orders. 

The USA does have at least ONE Italian-American leader, but he was only responsible for NY.   NYers actually did drop their curve to near zero like Europe.   Maybe getting control after COVID kills thousands is an Italian thing or a Southern European thing.   Can we get Melania to take it on?