Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

But we are nowhere near that point. Issue some Fiat money to businesses most heavily impacted. Reduce the spread of the virus. Save lives. Worry about the money later.

Slippery slope fallacy. We are nowhere near that point.

Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

This is just one guy thinking that government know what they are doing and that they are "fine". I have read other delusional thinking on Reddit along the lines of "Trump seems to be so confidant, this must be a bio-attack on China/Iran and somehow the virus is not going to spread in the USA". This was before the virus spreading to Italy and Iran/China being the only countries with breakouts.

This kind of delusional thinking is not very different from religion and believing in God. People who believe in God, when they are found in hard situations, will think that somehow god (the savior) will come for their rescue. Apparently, people who do not believe in God will think that somehow the universe/government or whatever will come to their rescue.

The issue is that people holding power/government seems to be, eh, usual folks. They are still operating with a normal brain which when confronted with abnormal situations that it can't handle will just imagine that stuff is going to return to normal.

Bill Gates has already warned about something close to the Coronavirus and that we are very far from being ready. Nobody was listening and my guess is the change is going to happen through natural selection.

Let's start with one fundamental assertion that I feel is missing in many of the discussions in this thread: There is no "the government". In most countries "government" is a collection of agencies, staffed by individuals, not completely in sync on all levels (micro, meso, macro).

You see that playing out when measures on one level (most prominently medical advise) are not in line with broader approaches to managing events, groups, tourism and travel. We all notice the disconnect, and some might think of 'dark conspiracies'. There are none (rule of the most kind interpretation). It's the dispersion of institutions in action.

Another one is my assertion, as a former public servant with friends in places that /should know/, that there is no structured economic analysis of possible outcomes of various scenarios of intervention. There are no models, there is no time, there is not enough collaboration between agencies. On the one hand you have the medical staff and agencies doing what they can where they can on a medical level, on the other hand you have bureaucrats making decisions with limited information and way more limited understanding. Politicians probably get in the way more than they support.

My thought: Governments are acting. They are just not acting in a way that we, the public, can understand is internally consistent. That's because the acts aren't internally consistent. That is due to the fact that governement is made up of institutions with different levels of understanding, information, scope and time to act.

In a pandemic, this is all very unfortunate and a more singlehanded style of governement could help. China got it quite right after an initial denial. Nobody in the West is equipped to both think about and act on China-style measures. In normal situation our distributed model of application of knowledge (Hayek) is more efficient. Most we can hope for is rapid learning in our institutions and the fact that a whole lot of capital, both human and monetary, is available for solving this crisis.

I'm quite in a shock (my province is in partial quarantine) with what's happening, but if the world economy proofs resiliant to this shock on a say 2-yr horizon, I'm quite bullish on how strong and adaptable our institutions are and see more hope for f.e. tackling climate change than before.