Wouldn't it have been cheaper?

SummerMadness · Mar 19, 2020

Wouldn't it have been much cheaper to proactively test the entire population back in January/February and then treat those infected as opposed to the $1 trillion figure being bandied today to bail out a bunch of companies? It seems a lot cheaper than the current quarantine effort, which is grinding everything to a halt.

I can already hear the excuse that others did not do this (not true, e.g., South Korea), but obviously when you disband your pandemic unit, the current ineptness is only inevitable.

Emergency stimulus to soar above $1 trillion

The government’s economic stimulus is ballooning into trillion-dollar territory — the largest rescue in modern American history — as major industries flood the Trump administration and Capitol Hill for aid while huge swaths of the economy stall from the coronavirus crisis.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin met with Senate Republicans behind closed doors Tuesday to present options for aid to airlines, hotels, casinos and small-to-medium-sized businesses. The White House had been discussing a package of more than $800 billion, POLITICO reported Monday. By Tuesday morning, the Treasury Department was preparing to unveil a package of $850 billion including more than $50 billion for the airline industry, $250 billion for small-business support and $500 billion for aid to individuals through direct payments or payroll tax cuts.

The Staggering Rise in Jobless Claims This Week

Numbers released on Thursday by the Labor Department — as well as a preliminary analysis of even more recent data — provide the first hard confirmation that the new coronavirus is bringing the United States economy to a shuddering halt. The government reported that the number of initial unemployment claims rose to 281,000 last week, a sharp rise from 211,000 the previous week. This rise in initial claims of 70,000 is larger than any week-to-week movement that occurred during (or since) the 2008 financial crisis.

dqhall · Mar 19, 2020

SummerMadness said:
Wouldn't it have been much cheaper to proactively test the entire population back in January/February and then treat those infected as opposed to the $1 trillion figure being bandied today to bail out a bunch of companies? It seems a lot cheaper than the current quarantine effort, which is grinding everything to a halt.

I can already hear the excuse that others did not do this (not true, e.g., South Korea), but obviously when you disband your pandemic unit, the current ineptness is only inevitable.

Emergency stimulus to soar above $1 trillion

The Staggering Rise in Jobless Claims This Week

Hindsight is 2020.

Look to the nations who are past peak infections for ideas. More people have died of the virus in Italy than in China.

HTacianas · Mar 19, 2020

SummerMadness said:
Wouldn't it have been much cheaper to proactively test the entire population back in January/February and then treat those infected as opposed to the $1 trillion figure being bandied today to bail out a bunch of companies? It seems a lot cheaper than the current quarantine effort, which is grinding everything to a halt.

I can already hear the excuse that others did not do this (not true, e.g., South Korea), but obviously when you disband your pandemic unit, the current ineptness is only inevitable.

Emergency stimulus to soar above $1 trillion

The Staggering Rise in Jobless Claims This Week

The test wasn't available. Tests for viruses are specific to that virus. Once the virus was discovered a test could be made. After the test is created it then has to manufactured. Times 300 million in the US alone.

What you are proposing is physically impossible.

Ana the Ist · Mar 19, 2020

SummerMadness said:
Wouldn't it have been much cheaper to proactively test the entire population back in January/February and then treat those infected as opposed to the $1 trillion figure being bandied today to bail out a bunch of companies? It seems a lot cheaper than the current quarantine effort, which is grinding everything to a halt.

I can already hear the excuse that others did not do this (not true, e.g., South Korea), but obviously when you disband your pandemic unit, the current ineptness is only inevitable.

Emergency stimulus to soar above $1 trillion

The Staggering Rise in Jobless Claims This Week

A bit pointless without border control.

Always in His Presence · Mar 19, 2020

The virus wasn’t known until December. Curious where would we have found 330,000,000 tests on a new virus, let alone perform them in less than 30 days?

SummerMadness · Mar 19, 2020

Meanwhile in South Korea...

And no, you do not need to test 330 million people. Keep up the hyperbole. This is not a hindsight issue, it's an issue of government incompetence.

SoldierOfTheKing · Mar 19, 2020

I've said it before and I'll say it again: had the President not imposed a travel ban on China on January 31, it would be as bad here as it is in Europe. It seems to have more than offset whatever difficulties we had due to the lack of tests.

Fauci: Trump's Decision To Block Travel From China Halted The Early Spreading

Yes, the travel ban that Biden condemned as "xenophobic".

SummerMadness · Mar 19, 2020

SoldierOfTheKing said:
I've said it before and I'll say it again: had the President not imposed a travel ban on China on January 31, it would be as bad here as it is in Europe. It seems to have more than offset whatever difficulties we had due to the lack of tests.

Fauci: Trump's Decision To Block Travel From China Halted The Early Spreading

Yes, the travel ban that Biden condemned as "xenophobic".

That decision was already too late. Especially when cases in Italy were spiking. The key to containment was identifying possible sources and their contacts. But I guess hindsight is 2020, "Maybe we shouldn't have gotten rid of our pandemic response team..."

SummerMadness · Mar 19, 2020

Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded

The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.

The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.

Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.

In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.

Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”

The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.

Always in His Presence · Mar 19, 2020

Confused - first you said

SummerMadness said:
Wouldn't it have been much cheaper to proactively test the entire population back in January/February

Then I asked:

hislegacy said:
The virus wasn’t known until December. Curious where would we have found 330,000,000 tests on a new virus, let alone perform them in less than 30 days?

Now you are saying

SummerMadness said:
And no, you do not need to test 330 million people. Keep up the hyperbole. This is not a hindsight issue, it's an issue of government incompetence.

Not seeing the hyperbole.

Always in His Presence · Mar 19, 2020

SoldierOfTheKing · Mar 19, 2020

SummerMadness said:
That decision was already too late.

They said then it was "racist" and "xenophobic". Now they accuse the President of underreacting. They can't even keep their story straight.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said:
I don't think it's going to be that worst because I think what we're doing is going to have an effect. And -- and, for example, the president's decision to essentially have a major blocking of travel from China, that already had an effect of not seeding the way, in Europe -- Italy didn't do that. And my -- I feel so badly because I have so many friends there. They're getting hit hard.

What we're doing now with the other travel restrictions -- so you block infections from coming in. And then within is when you have containment and mitigation. And that's the reason why the kinds of things we're doing that may seem like an over-reaction will keep us away from that worst-case scenario.

Dr. Fauci has been head of the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and the data from other countries has already shown how much worse this could be, so it seems that he does know what he's talking about.

grasping the after wind · Mar 19, 2020

SummerMadness said:
Wouldn't it have been much cheaper to proactively test the entire population back in January/February and then treat those infected as opposed to the $1 trillion figure being bandied today to bail out a bunch of companies? It seems a lot cheaper than the current quarantine effort, which is grinding everything to a halt.

I can already hear the excuse that others did not do this (not true, e.g., South Korea), but obviously when you disband your pandemic unit, the current ineptness is only inevitable.

Emergency stimulus to soar above $1 trillion

The Staggering Rise in Jobless Claims This Week

As there is no cure for the virus, knowing that X amount of people have it and X don't have it on a particular day in January would not stop the spread so not be of much use in saving money. Completely Closing the border in December might have helped but even that is iffy due to the porousness of the US border and Trudeau's unwillingness to do anything until only recently to stop people from coming to Canada from wherever they pleased.

Halbhh · Mar 19, 2020

SummerMadness said:
Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded

Bingo

cow451 · Mar 19, 2020

dqhall said:
Hindsight is 2020.

Did you just make a funny?

iluvatar5150 · Mar 19, 2020

SummerMadness said:
Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded

Fixed the link:
Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded

Ana the Ist · Mar 20, 2020

grasping the after wind said:
As there is no cure for the virus, knowing that X amount of people have it and X don't have it on a particular day in January would not stop the spread so not be of much use in saving money. Completely Closing the border in December might have helped but even that is iffy due to the porousness of the US border and Trudeau's unwillingness to do anything until only recently to stop people from coming to Canada from wherever they pleased.

Agreed. It's a bit silly for the people who argue that anyone should be able to cross the border whenever they want to complain about "containing" the virus...

Mexico Is Frighteningly Unprepared for the Coronavirus

Especially since Mexico seems determined to do as little as possible to fight it. It's not an issue we can hope to address after the crisis starts....you have to control your borders first.

Allandavid · Mar 20, 2020

HTacianas said:
The test wasn't available. Tests for viruses are specific to that virus. Once the virus was discovered a test could be made. After the test is created it then has to manufactured. Times 300 million in the US alone.

What you are proposing is physically impossible.

The test was available. The Trump administration refused the offer...

Allandavid · Mar 20, 2020

SoldierOfTheKing said:
I've said it before and I'll say it again: had the President not imposed a travel ban on China on January 31, it would be as bad here as it is in Europe. It seems to have more than offset whatever difficulties we had due to the lack of tests.

Fauci: Trump's Decision To Block Travel From China Halted The Early Spreading

Yes, the travel ban that Biden condemned as "xenophobic".

Says the person who claims the death toll won’t reach 3 figures.......as the total passes 200...

HTacianas · Mar 20, 2020

Allandavid said:
The test was available. The Trump administration refused the offer...

That's something Joe Biden said. Falsely of course. The man doesn't know what year it is but people are spreading his senile statements all around the internet.

Biden Falsely Blames Trump Administration For Rejecting WHO Coronavirus Test Kits (That Were Never Offered)

Wouldn't it have been cheaper?

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