28 March 2020 — 1254 mdt

Politicians, public health officials, and hospitals failed us —
now we will pay with our lives for their fecklessness

Women across our nation are sewing jerry rigged surgical masks in a heroic effort to supply hospitals with the masks that should have been stockpiled but were not. Their stepping-up is America at its best trying to compensate for America at its worst.

We knew a pandemic was coming because pandemics are not rare events. In 1918, the Spanish Flu (which probably originated in China or Manchuria) killed tens of millions. Millions more died in the 1957 Asian Flu, the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, and the 2009 Swine Flu epidemics.

We watched with horror and fear as the 2014 Ebola pandemic burned through West Africa, killing every other victim, and even momentarily made its was to the United States.

We knew another bad bug would come. We knew we needed to be ready. We knew what equipment we needed to stockpile. And we know that our lead institutions, the CDC, NIH, and FDA, would have to be nimble, and quick to react.

We knew — and then we sat on our hands with our thumbs stuck where the Moon don’t shine.

• Did we stockpile enough face masks, standard PPE, medical supplies, ventilators, and rapidly deployable portable hospitals? No. We drew down and did not replenish stocks. In California, hospitals sold spare ventilators to overseas customers to help the bottom line. Now hospitals are begging private citizens to surrender their own PPE because doctors and nurses need it more than Joe and Jill Citizen.


• Did we have in place a single nationwide system for reporting coronavirus tests and outcomes to a central aggregating and analyzing authority? No. We had, and still have, an uneven patchwork of state and local practices that amounts to data anarchy.


• Did we have in place a process for rapidly developing and deploying tests for determining who had the virus? No. But we had a foot dragging bureaucracy that made the perfect an enemy of the good, and took its own sweet time, and more time yet, to get cracking. This cost many lives and still is costing lives.


• Did we have competent leadership at the highest level to convey a sense of urgency, and to respond full speed ahead, all hands on deck, from the gitgo? No. Our president is the science denying, always lying, Donald Trump whose goal is getting everyone back to work by Easter so they can be infected by May, dead by June, and buried in mass graves by July.

Where should we locate the mass graves? On Trump’s golf courses.