Gestalt #15 – SARS-2 Pandemic

       by monotreme1000 March 19, 2020

Politics

I usually avoid writing about politics.

I assume about half of my readers fall in one political camp and the other half in another. I personally don't make decisions based on ideology or politics. I prefer data and reason.

But I notice that many people see pandemic responses through political filters. I think this gets in the way of understanding what is happening, what works and what does not work. If we assess the current administration's track record objectively (or at least what I think of as objectively), we can conclude that they did some things right, some things too slow and some things wrong.

Limiting travel from China was absolutely the right thing to do. Countries which were slower than the US to do this have paid a terrible price (Italy, Iran). But we would have been much better off had travel restrictions from China and then Europe, had been put in to place even earlier.

The decisions by the Director of the CDC about testing were a full on disaster. No amount of spinning should be allowed to obscure this fact. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

I'm no economist, but the loose fiscal policy that was recently announced seems like a good idea to me. I'm usually on the side of fiscal responsibility, but this is a crisis and lives should trump money. If we are essentially shutting down businesses and asking people to give up their jobs, we have a responsibility to make sure that this does not destroy them. I'm glad that there is bipartisan support for these measures.

Doing the right thing...after everything else has failed

Country after country is closing their borders and enacting draconian travel restrictions.

This is sensible and really, the only tactic that will work at the current time. But these measures took too long to enact. Decision-makers listened to one-world partisans masquerading as public health authorities and business leaders who were penny wise and pound foolish. This mistake was costly in lives and money.

Decision-makers would do well to calculate what would have been the costs to closing their borders earlier versus the current cost to their countries for waiting a few weeks to do the same thing anyway.

Let's not make this mistake again.

Stockpiles and avoiding food waste

Preppers know the importance of stockpiling essential goods before a crisis occurs. Does anyone doubt that we were right about this?

The US has a strategic stockpile of various goods. But it is still probably not enough. The US government is playing catch up in the manufacture of ventilators and masks.

There is talk of moving manufacture of essential goods like pharmaceuticals back to the US. Of course, this is a great idea and should be expedited. But there is one essential product that we produce in great quantities: food.

However, food processing is complex and subject to many potential interruptions. Let's get ahead of the game and make sure that we do not have unnecessary shortages of food later in the year. We should anticipate critical weak points and shore them up if possible. We should also have a plan to preserve food at different steps in their production.

For example, if animals cannot be fed due to some interruption of feed, then we should have plans to slaughter them and preserve the meat. Let's also relax rules on where we can grow stuff. Let a million Victory Gardens bloom!

What's in a name? Xi Jinping Virus

There's a silly controversy about what SARS-2 should be called. Before it got its official name, I called it Wuhan virus which was perfectly descriptive of where it came from.

People object to "Chinese virus" because it stigmatizes the Chinese people.

So, I have a different suggestion. Let's call the virus after the man who is responsible for its spread across China and the world: "Xi Xinping Virus" or "XJ virus" for short. Let's put the blame where it belongs.

Incidentally, most of those diseases are zoonotic in origin.  Glad you finally gave up the bats China.