CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

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I'm going to give a very cynical response to this, but I believe all of these factors are relevant. I'm also going to be going against the grain of the political leaning of this forum. I hope that we can discuss the points where we agree and avoid getting stuck at the first point of disagreement.

Factors:

1. Typically, people who wish to be in power are not the people who really want to use power for some greater good. Police make great examples because their abuses of power are often made visible, but this issue goes all the way up to the top. To give an example from right this moment, that I'm sure withstands bipartisan scrutiny, just look at how much political posturing and hot air has stalled the Covid-19 stimulus that is currently being negotiated. [1]The last proposal from the dems included identity politics and various climate provisions. Whether you agree with the policies or not doesn't really matter in this case, what sense does it make to fight for these policies right now in this bill?

2. Our political system centralizes all decision-making power into two parties. Each party has massive influence and control, even to the point of 'rigging' their own internal election processes. As such, the average American has substantially less ability to influencer outcomes at the upper tiers of government as they often think they do. This is the reason there was such distrust of parties by the founding fathers. The solution to this is to either have unlimited parties (requires a different voting system, of which there are several viable options) or to have no parties at all. Then there is a need to institute concepts like a public veto/vote for when things go haywire (think Brexit, but ideally without the intentional political incompetence).

3. Removing those in power is a scary affair. If your government decides to do heinous (or criminally stupid) things and there's no 'political will' at the top to change course, the people must intervene. How much peaceful recourse is there? There are finite 'legal' moves to be made, and they all take time. Once you run out of those options or time, the only remaining choices are 'illegal' and thus risky to individuals - and therefore require large groups of people to organize.

This is a problem understood by our founders, evident in their writings. It's also been commonly addressed since the 1800s in sayings like: [2]"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."

4. Both parties in the United States, despite their protestations to the contrary, have proven to have corruption up to their highest levels. [3]Both Democrats and Republicans dumped stock running up to the current crisis - after they were briefed about the risks. There's also intense 'fighting' over entirely manufactured issues. [4]One example I use often is "assault weapons," which are used to commit murder less than half as often as people's fists. It's hard to even imagine how much progress could be made if the same political energy were expended on more impactful social issues. (Targeting poverty which leads to desperation and organized crime might be a good start).

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pelosi-schumer-contagion-11...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty

[3]https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/coronavirus-trading...

[4]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Which of those things do you think would help in this particular instance? Respond to a lack of tests by suspending habeus corpus? And Trump did exercise his powers to issue a travel ban; that was a good move that bought the US a week or so. Not enough to make up for the lack of tests. A comparable action to those you've listed would be to suspend the FDA and/or the CDC for a few months. That is the sort of decisive, broad-brush move that the executive can pull quickly. It probably would have made the situation even worse.

Technically speaking, if you wrote a timeline down and then passed it back to someone important back in January or early February someone could have easily done something. But there is a real fog of war where up until around the 6th of February the message would have been "everything is OK" and then the scale of the disaster would only have become apparent on about the 10th. Then about two weeks later testing starts to ramp up. A debacle, but a predictable one given that everything was being run in serial.

If the response was going to succeed, it should have been 5 different Biomed companies hear about COVID and start making tests independently, then the CDC ratifies one on the 6th Feb. It turns out to fail, so they move to the next supplier and the rollout proceeds on the 10th. The companies have their own logistics teams that have started making preparations for testing supplies and distribution before hand. Maybe a company president knows Trump as a golfing buddy and rings him up asking for a fast track approval. Maybe a New York Mayor screams loudly enough that a test gets approved even earlier. Greasy, ugly, political and much more effective than what actually happened.

The moment the decision was taken that the CDC was going to develop the first response test kit was the moment that the system failed. Everything that happened after that is mostly uncontrolled good or bad luck.

AFAICT "panic buying toilet paper" is mostly constructed bullcrap arising from the facts that:

* Essentially everyone needs toilet paper * Places don't stock that much so it sells out quickly when people pull forward their next week or two of purchases * toilet paper is extremely bulky so it makes for good pictures of loaded people (even when they just have one jumbo multipack) and empty aisles

In most of the pictures I've seen claiming to show "panic buying toilet paper" showed each party with similar or less toilet paper than I purchase at ordinary times (e.g. the big costco pack) for almost everyone in the frame.

Worse, the net effect of circulating these sorts of things shames people for taking the actions they need to take to avoid continually going out.

Thanks for being that guy because now I just learned about something awesome I’d not heard of.