
Coronavirus Brings American Decline Out in the Open - harambae
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-brings-american-decline-open-123041932.html
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giardini
Typical horseshit FTFA:

> _" This utter failure to suppress a disease that most other countries
> managed to contain..."_<

Almost _no_ country has done acceptably. Only Taiwan contained it and only b/c
they were recently burned by flu and had set up contingency plans complete
with government buy-in, corporate help, production facilities and storage
stockpiles.

As for "decline": organized science has to take the blame for this monstrous
f/u. We now know that Science the Emperor has no clothes. What's more, our
pandemic response hasn't improved since the Middle Ages.

As for technology:

Masks - No valid scientific studies exist,

"Simple distancing" \- No valid scientific studies exist,

"Social distancing"\- No valid scientific studies exist,

Vaccine development - Nothing, Nada, Zip,

Treatment - Nothing except HCQ+Zinc _early_ , but half the population won't
admit it b/c politics intervened,

Antivirals - Nothing (remdesivir doesn't work),

ICU Treatment - Turn-of-century state of art (oxygen),

Epidemiology - Ouija Board math. (Where _are_ the good math modelers?)

This isn't an American decline, it's a failure of _all_ of Western
Civilization from the top all the way down to the 3rd world: we thought we
knew what we were doing, we certainly were paying for a lot more than we got,
but we got very little from science and technology. We put men on the moon but
forgot to do scientific studies on the efficacy of face masks!

We should slaughter the experts' jobs, shit-can entire organizations and start
again building new versions of the CDC, WHO, and FDA. And that's just for
starters.

[at least we have a spell-checker on HN than allows me to correct "shitcan" to
"shit-can" \- that's the kind of hefty progress we can count on in this
century.]

...returns to his cellar where he grinds chinchona bark and stockpiles zinc
tablets in preparation for the worst.

~~~
boublepop
You seems to want to set the bar so high that you can claim every country is
failing as bad as the US. But it seems fair to say that a very long list of
countries did significantly better.
[https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries](https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries)

~~~
harambae
Some of those countries are massively lower population density than urban
United States (Mongolia), some are naturally isolated from other nations (New
Zealand), at least a few are probably lying (Cuba) and other situations.

Of course there's also a level of irresponsibility in the United States and
strong independent/anti-authoritarian views that make it hard in a pandemic.

