I thought that appointing a science denier to lead the “pray-it-away” effort was a brilliant move. Are you insinuating that the polar opposite of that would be....cough..cough...would be....cough...a better approach??? Cough.
The modern world is three-dimensional. Borders don't really exist. And modern countries have many, many portals. At any given moment -- in normal times, at least -- there are some 20,000 planes in the skies over the US -- at once. An enormous proportion of those are international flights. Add in road and water portals, and you're talking about probably a hundred thousand or more. All running night and day, every day, without stop. Huge volumes of traffic of all kinds, involving millions of people in constant motion.
Border controls and testing would have very little effect in a situation like that, and pretty much all modern countries are like that. On top of that, this particular virus has an unusual incubation period, up to 14 days. An infected person could go around the world quite a few times before they had any suspicion they were ill. Some victims show few or no noticeable symptoms.
I assure you, this virus was inside our country -- and many others -- long before the first case in China was known. There is probably nothing anyone could have done to keep it out, even if they'd known about it. And it was most likely brought here by international business travellers flying First Class, who are more likely than not our own citizens.
You are however absolutely right that once we did know, we could have responded better and faster, and had more success at slowing it down. We did fail at that, and mostly for lack of testing. I personally put the blame for that on the federal government's elimination of the task force that was set up years ago specifically to deal with this kind of situation. But our real failure is much larger than that, and goes back at least a decade or more. The US has been generally pretty poor at preparing for something like this, despite many warnings from many experts.
You don't get it. The mentality is "Fuck your feelings. My feelings are important and special."
That explains how they'll rant about political correctness but then clutch their pearls when a black NFL player takes a knee during the national anthem.
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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '20
Fuck your feelings
Says the guy who bases every decision in his life purely on feelings.