[cadlin]

Good systems would obviously be desirable, but this is basic executive competence. A US response to a potential pandemic brewing in China should have been a top White House priority since early January. When there are coordination problems, it's the responsibility of the person at the top to sort it out. They didn't even try and fail to fix the problem, they identified an entirely different concern: the threat to the stock market, which is where the response concentrated.

[AlexCoventry]

The Trump administration has responded quite slowly compared to the Obama administration's response to H1N1. The CDC commenced emergency operations a week after the first H1N1 case was detected, and advised school closings less than a week after that [0]. It seems likely that Trump's unfavorable comparison of the Obama H1N1 response to his COVID-19 response will come back to haunt him [1]. We'd be extremely lucky to get away with only 12,000 US deaths, this time.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-pandemic-tim...

[1] https://www.countable.us/articles/42948-tale-2-pandemics-gov...

[AlexCoventry]

I'm curious about why this is being downvoted.