Updated on September 9, 2020 at 1:08 am
With the luxury of hindsight:
What if the US had decided to prepare for COVID-19 back when it was first brought to the government’s attention?
And since we know the government was willing to throw trillions of dollars around, let’s go ahead and assume the consensus was, yes, this is indeed a serious threat and we will prepare for it as such. Here’s a trillion dollars to get ready for it to hit the US.
There would be no vaccine in the beginning, but with a portion of a trillion dollars at your disposal, your sure could get a head start on developing one.
And this would NOT be a for profit race by biotech companies to see who could develop one first, this would be a coordinated and cooperative attack on COVID-19.
So now we have our best and brightest doctors and scientist off to war.
In the mean time, we start prepping hospitals with needed equipment and supplies. We know we will need some portion of this because well, there isn’t a vaccine or any identified viable treatment to this point.
We also get the best and brightest in our tech companies to come up with the most efficient and effective contact tracing applications the world has ever seen. I’m fairly certain, a small portion of a trillion dollars could make this happen.
And we hire and train as many contact tracers as possible. Again, we have a trillion dollars to work with here.
Then we set up COVID-19 sites around the country. I’m simply calling them COVID-19 sites because the sites will initially focus on testing anyone who wants a test. After a vaccine is developed and proven to work, those same sites become distribution points for anyone who wants the vaccine.
By the way, this effort will all be tied together with one of the most ambitious data gathering and analysis systems ever.
You know why this type of data analytics can be done, because presidential candidates and their apparatus do it all the time.
At this point, I’m not really sure where we are with the budget but I suspect we still have a few dollars to play with.
Either way, we have a game plan and roadmap if when this happens again.
Instead we got this:
A federal (and some state) government in denial and refusing to spend even a minimal amount of effort on COVID-19. Well, there was that powerpoint deck.
An uncoordinated and unmitigated clusterfuck of a response once COVID-19 showed up at our doors. Hospitals and doctors basically had some left over gauze and Jenga blocks to work with.
And this after the US watched the virus tear through China and then the EU.
About that whole vaccine thing, every biotech company is in a race to get that winning lottery ticket for themselves. And if you have ever watched the biotech industry, more promising drugs fail than succeed.
At this point, the federal government’s MOST ambitious response to this virus has been the massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to banks and corporations.
Yes, people got some pocket change. And where did that money go, back to the corporations after you went on your shopping spree for shoes.
Preparation would have saved the US trillions on the back-end. Not to mention the millions of lives affected by death and economic devastation.
I guess COVID-19 just kinda caught us off guard.
UPDATE: 9/2/20 What could have been addressed with dollars in the beginning to fight the pandemic and help the economy heal faster is now being paid for in lives; 187,000 of them at this point.
Note: No I don’t think COVID-19 caught the US off guard. It’s like the US was the 100th person in line for some event while a guy with a knife went down the line of people stabbing them one by one. When he finally got to us, we were like, WTF?
By the way, I found this interesting, if not depressing COVID-19 timeline. Enjoy.
covid19timeline.net