It sounds as if you're conceding that controlling borders is an effective means of restricting undesirable items, people and activities from entering our population. Sure, but you can't "restrict" a self-replicating nanomachine unless you ~hermetically seal the border. Once it's in it's in, and preventing MORE from getting in buys you ~days worth of time.
(exponentials...)
And it's worth nothing if that time is squandered. You just get killed a little later. Hooray!
And yes, the spike in reported cases was expected, as testing limitations early caused known underreporting. It would be more informative to shift the early data points up to match the less-inaccurate trend line now that it's being resolved. Obviously the trend line will always be somewhat below the actual cases due to inevitable lag. Any change in spread rate must be gauged against a relatively steady-state rate of testing. The virus doesn't care about testing. It's been doubling and doubling and doubling in the background all along. The testing rate has been so low in the US that our "known-cases" numbers are likely to be multiple orders of magnitude away from the actual number of infected... That means those that are particularly vulnerable to the virus are much closer to someone who's infected than those known-case numbers would suggest. My state has ~45 cases or so. Meanwhile, there are TWO people that I know of at work, who sit within 50 feet of me, who have come down with symptoms in the last week. (Doctors say don't bother trying to get a test.)
In other words, it's probably on your doorstep, right now.
I get the feeling that you think testing is now "on track, full steam ahead"... It's not. It's starting to ramp, but we're still far behind where we need to be.
One request. Please provide evidence that no preparations were being made after the exceptional step of restricting travel from China was taken. Huh? I never said that. I guess I've said "we've done nothing [substantial]" to stop the spread, until recently. You can go all lawyerly on me and die on the quote "nothing" hill if you want, I'm not going to bite on that hook any more.
I can't show you what we haven't done. I can only point to the apparently unconstrained spread of the virus. Look at the data. We're about to pass Spain. What has the federal government done, beside restricting travel from China? State Of Emergency... And? What's been done with that? Created a "task force?" BFD. Put Mike Pence in charge? Doesn't look like Mike Pence hogging the microphone every day... What's been done by the WH? ("It's classified" AMIRITE?)
States/Hospitals have been screaming that we need to go into war-production mode to manufacture the respirators and protective gear that's going to be necessary to handle the coming patient-load... We haven't done that.
And meanwhile, the Senate is dicking around instead of helping to deal with the personal economic impact of the containment steps that are REQUIRED to save millions of lives. It seems they'd rather (shocker) give benefits to corporations than actual people.
It would seem unlikely to me that no consideration was given to next steps at that point. Oh, they've been very busy. Selling stock (Burr, Loeffler)... Scoring cheap political hits ("Democrat Hoax!" "It's Obama's fault!")... Talking about a non-existent Google website... Pooh pooh'ing the threat ("It's just the flu" "like a miracle, it will just disappear")... Bonding with the nationalists ("I'm a Wartime President (tm) fighting a 'Chinese virus' <wink>")... Putting all the responsibility on the states ("I take no responsibility at all" "I'm not a shipping clerk")
You tell me... What "next steps" have you seen? The s**t is going to start hitting the fan within DAYS.
Regardless, our response has been massively more open and transparent than that of China. The early information available out of China was massively distorted, to the point of being nearly useless. Italy, through close ties with China on the Belt and Road initiative seems to be the most grievously wounded (potentially exceeded by Iran). Of those 3, the data from Italy is the only set that I wouldn't necessarily take with an Uluru-sized grain of salt, even today.
I don't know <wink> why you're talking about China China China... It's irrelevant, it's scapegoating, it's diversionary. Who gives a s**t? The virus is right here, right now and it's going to slap us right back to the great recession and then some if we don't start acting, as a nation, like this s**t is real. And I mean REALLY real.
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