(08-08-2020, 01:26 AM)jeffster Wrote: The one issue with this covid-19 was the early messages from out 'top of the class' doctors.
Yes, that was weird.
I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but I think our experts don’t know how to be experts. It seems to me they should have said the current state of knowledge, which was that we at the time didn’t know exactly how much masks would help; and if they wanted to add something about please not using them up when medical staff are likely to need them more, that would be a good thing to add.
But there is also the question of why the medical establishment didn’t have plenty of PPE stockpiled. I don’t just mean in some government warehouse somewhere; shouldn’t every hospital have a 6 month supply in storage rooms?
And don’t get me started on the failure to impose a border quarantine early on. We flew a few people out of China, as I recall, and quarantined them on a military base, but we didn’t do anything serious about people flying into the country from all over the world. To be fair, a mandatory 2-week quarantine on the border would have looked draconian at the time, but it would have been nothing compared to what actually happened.
If nothing else comes out of this, I hope we at least get our international borders and related policies set up so that next time we have the ability and the will to do border quarantines. We should also have the ability to re-configure transborder trucking so that the cab portions hand off at the border and return to their original country so that we don’t have truckers crossing the border — only their cargos. This doesn’t need to be done all the time but should become mandatory when a pandemic event is declared.
Most importantly, we need to realize that some measures will be mandatory, and everybody must comply whether they like it or not. We’re rightly skeptical of being told what to do by the government in a democracy, but in some areas individual decision making is not possible.