In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle presents the reasons she’s optimistic about the U. S. response to COVID-19:
Our first advantage lies in our health-care system. Yes, you read that right. The United States has gaps in its coverage that other countries don’t have — and I have repeatedly urged Congress and the president to close those gaps for the duration of this emergency. We also don’t have universal mandatory paid sick leave, which means that some workers will be tempted to work while sick.
But, in fact, these aren’t the gaps we most need to worry about; the government can (and should) pass emergency measures to provide paid sick leave, and to pay for coronavirus treatment as well as testing — as well, of course, as working with laboratories and regulators to ramp up our testing capability. That’s an easy problem compared to what Italy is dealing with now: more critical patients than they have ICU beds. Ventilators and trained critical-care staff can’t be mobilized as fast as government funds.
Fortunately, the United States already has a lot of ICU beds relative to its population. Our hospitals love to develop their expensive, intensive capabilities, and we’ve no central regulator who can stop them. Normally, this may be an expensive waste of resources, but right now, it could save a lot of lives.
The United States also has private-lab capacity waiting to be mobilized. And that’s vital, at a time when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration have been tripping over their own feet, as former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb pointed out on Twitter Thursday morning. We are lucky to have a robust private market which can, in cooperation with regulators, scale up to help us identify and isolate carriers, rather than a potential single point of failure.
Finally, Americans have a penchant for self-isolation. This starts at with our individual physical space; we just prefer to stand further from each other than people in many other countries. We don’t like to kiss or hug anyone except close friends and family. Our harassment laws make us leery of touching co-workers.
I wonder if she understands how presumably unintentionally funny that is. Let me restate it. Compared with other countries we’re already behaving as though there were a crisis and we’ve been behaving as though we were self-quarantining for years.
Once again, I don’t think we know enough to ascertain whether we have advantages over other countries in coping with COVID-19, disadvantages, or both. I think our greatest advantage is that we have numerically more medical researchers than anywhere else in the world and, as Samuel Johnson put it, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”.
I understand that columns still need to be written and opinions need to given by those who are paid to give them. But all of this is guessing at this point until we have some idea of the scope and character of the problem here. Just about everything she states has underlying assumptions that we simply don’t have the complete facts for yet.
This is an interesting article I was looking for — a deeper look into why Italy and South Korea had such different outcomes.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/east-vs-west-coronavirus-fight-tests-divergent-strategies-11584110308
Some of it I do not fully agree with. Is it simply due to culture, and previous experience Korea had with SARS, MERS?
What I see is the strategy each country takes to deal with the crisis utilizes the country’s strengths. China on the strengths of authoritarian government. Korea on ethnic/cultural solidarity. What are the strengths of the US?
Add this to your calculations, “Preferred Interpersonal Distances: A Global Comparison”.
As to U. S. strengths I would say that we are very large, very rich, very ingenious, and if there’s a buck to be made from something, people will flock to it. I think that about half of the shortages are being created by profiteers who are selling toilet paper, hand sanitizer, etc. on eBay.