Read on Twitter
Thread: it is always tempting to claim that things could& #39;ve been better weren& #39;t it for the incompetent people in charge. But the right course of action is usually clear only in retrospect.
Consider that we get pandemic scares every couple of years: SARS, MERS, West Nile, Zika, Ebola, swine flu, avian flu. Some of them, such as SARS, actually seem more frightening than COVID-19 - but then, usually just fizzle out in the developed world.
There is probably no approach that prevents us from grossly overreacting to 90% of such scares, but still permits us to act swiftly and decisively enough to make a major difference in a situation such as COVID-19.
So yes, in retrospect, there& #39;s plenty of blame to go around. For Mr. Trump and for Democratic officials alike - including the NYC health commissioner who, back in Feb, urged residents to attend events and "not change any plans due to misinformation spreading about coronavirus".
It& #39;s also easy to be upset with outlets such as Vox, many of which proclaiming that the pandemic is not coming and labeling the concerns as xenophobia-fueled "fake news". But then - if COVID-19 followed the pattern of SARS, we would all be touting their level-leaded leadership.
This is not a defense of Mr. Trump or anybody else - there are plenty of valid criticisms to make. But the reality is that there might be no "right" way to handle the situation we& #39;re in right now - that is, until we one day look back in retrospect.
In particular, there is no clear end game for curfews, and it& #39;s entirely possible that all we& #39;re doing is setting ourselves up for a devastating second wave once the toll of curfews is severe enough to make them politically untenable: https://medium.com/@wpegden/a-call-to-honesty-in-pandemic-modeling-5c156686a64b">https://medium.com/@wpegden/...
Now, that& #39;s not to say I& #39;m advocating for serenity. There are two things I am sad about, because I think they were easily avoidable - but the blame for them doesn& #39;t rest with any single political party.
The first is the misallocation of billions in federal emergency preparedness grants that apparently did not go toward stockpiling basic essentials, such as PPE - even though we always knew that another major respiratory pandemic is only a matter of time.
The other is the "noble lie" that pundits - including health authorities - repeated for weeks about the merits of face masks. These self-contradictory and condescending arguments undermined their credibility and probably made things worse for all of us.
