China reacted late and is responsible for this entire pandemic. But when they did finally react, they had an authoritarian crackdown that worked. South Korea, Singapore, etc. reacted exactly how you would hope a government and their citizenry would.
Italy? France? Spain? A masterclass on what not to do. Unfortunately, the United States is tracking closer to those countries because of initial efforts to downplay the threat by elected officials, not enough proactive testing, etc. We missed the window to be South Korea.
Saw some stats on MSM and a few different takes from docs talking about per capita impacts, rate of travel (to China by country), etc., and the US was not looking so terrible all things considered. Most of the stats we see are pure numbers (not per capita), and also lack the needed testing input data. I think it's pretty early to draw any clear conclusion.
The bungle with testing is by far my biggest issue. Had the FDA cut regs and allowed private industry to move forward and quicker, things wouldn't have been near as F'd up. That's not the only issues though. Some said lack of access (for researchers) to the virus itself was as big of a factor as the FDA red tape. The FDA has been a complete shit show for decades, so if anything positive comes out of this situation, I hope it's a complete overhaul top to bottom. South Korea does a great job of partnering with the private sector with much less FDA type barriers, and we need to take some clues from them.
One thing we did do right is closing travel from China early on. Americans by far have the most travel to China of all the western countries. Things could have been much much worse. As far as playing things down, while I agree to an extent, early on I saw folks from the WHO, CDC, and folks from all over the political spectrum play things down. And many of the folks playing it up early, weren't really doing so based on scientific data. Hell, even now after all we know, our woke young college goers are packing beaches around the US.
