He saw a pandemic response team as vestigial or redundant and canned it. In business cutting waste or unused/underutilized departments is good practice. You don’t keep people around getting paid to have them around “Just in case”. In gubmint, it turns out its bad. Redundancy is only redundant till you need it.
No reserve on necessary/emergency supplies. Another business thing. Businesses (at least as long as I’ve known) don’t keep extras or spend money renewing supplies of rarely used consumables.
So he did what any business person would do and cut what looked like fat. Not saying that was the right thing to do, but it is something that should be completely expected from somebody who cuts waste without knowing what it is, does, means, or is used for.
Good question. He would have to answer himself, but if you put more resources into the medical system and buy/build a whole bunch of ventilators then you could be prepared for it. By contrast, in Canada we might have a lot of ICUs but hospitals are already overcrowded, Ottawa’s population has tripled since the last hospital was built here.
It’s not a good situation one way or another, but which is worse? And also as the doctor here says, slowing the spread could just mean delaying the inevitable and the virus could be going around for several more years. Are we going to shut everything down for 2-3 years?
I think it definitely warrants further investigation because if it is true then this situation might not need to be handled in the way that it currently is.
Remember that the study was on the UK, perhaps NYC and Italy weren’t exposed to it at the same rates or maybe there are lower rates of immunity to it there for some yet unknown reason.
Erring on the side of caution is one thing, but over here we have over 1 million people who have applied for employment insurance since this started, out of a population of 37 million. And stricter measures just came into place as of today. We need to figure out how to get out of this situation because it can’t go on for long without very serious problems.
Yeah, the fact that he wanted to ban people from certain Muslim countries from entering the US while he is friends with the Saudis, who actually sponsor Islamic extremism around the world, is extremely hypocritical.
This is another thing I have been wondering, millions were infected too but why no global lockdown then? This virus seems to spread more easily but the death rate is lower too.
I’m seriously wondering why the response to this and H1N1 are so different. Something doesn’t add up here. Also we had an economic crash and bailouts in the H1N1 days, this will be worse.
I mean build them right now. Stop typing dumb shit. Nobody could have anticipated this, we need an appropriate response and more ventilators is a large part of it.
Yeah, because in Whoville we just turn the crank on the machine-o-matic and it starts pumping and honking.
Then out pops machines!
Unfortunately, in the real world precision medical devices are built to incredibly high standards of precision and accuracy by Very Highly Skilled workers.
Since we had no idea this would happen, stop looking at what could have been done and instead look at what we can do right now to minimize the death toll and economic damage. Like build ventilators for one.
People who think that worrying about the economy is just being greedy don’t realize why places like Somalia or Haiti don’t have the same level of healthcare as North America or Europe. No money = no healthcare
You have a less than kindergarten view of manufacturing, let alone laboratory quality manufacturing facilities that produce precision medical/life support devices.
