I think there was a "hoping for the best" - but they missed on "Plan for the worst"
go back to the beginning of this thread and get a feel for the urgency of the situation.
it reflects what i saw/heard from many people. quoting numbers from H1N1, and
TB (TB killed 1.5M worldwide in 2018 - so what, imagine how many it would kill if there wasn't a vaccine?,)
like this is no big deal - even some of the health care people i know made the same assumptions.
Sometime back in September 2018, i bet only 200,000 people had the flu - and 6 months later it ended up at 60M.
if i do the math, H1N1 probably doubled every 2 weeks. Before mitigation, CV19 was doubling every 3-4 days.
Resolving in a week, not 3.
It wasn't until the stories out of Italy that it started to hit. Even then we were slow to mobilize.
i don't think this was avoidable. There would be no way to lock down without the media
covering packed hospitals, and death. The miss was that there could have been more prep.
Equipment for hospitals/people, alternate bed space, protocol, testing readiness.
And the description of how this "could go"