Although I agree, I can understand why no administration prepared for this no matter who was President or which party held the house, senate or both.
Nothing like this has happened since 1918/1919 with the Spanish flu. I can understand why, starting a few decades later, nobody would think it would be necessary.
Even experts that thought a pandemic was possible never envisioned a disease that could be very serious and deadly for a small, but significant percentage of patients but also have extremely mild symptoms (or no symptoms) in a large percentage and, at the same time, be highly contagious. It is a truly unprecedented situation.
Yep. For those that deal with safety basically this disease nailed the “Swiss cheese model” of pandemic viruses. For those not involved in Root Cause Analysis and safety evaluations, basically the “Swiss cheese model” is when there are many safeguards in place to prevent an event from occurring but everything has to line up just perfectly for that outcome to happen or if using Swiss cheese slices, fall through the holes in cheese slices to get to the bottom.
This virus beat every safeguard.
1.) Asymptomatic spread - Not only allows transmission without killing the host, but also allows people to be go about their daily lives thinking they are healthy when in fact they are infecting others.
2.) Long incubation period - Allows host to spread disease for long periods of time without symptoms
3.) Human to Human transmission - This is obviously vital to continue the epidemic otherwise if you eliminate the source you stop new infections. Many forget back in Jan. This was still believed to be a disease only found in people who visited the Wuhan wet market.
4.) Droplet transmission - Unlike HIV which is sexually transmitted or Hep A which requires touching a contaminated surface you only need be in vicinity of someone with this to catch it.
5.) Low death rate - While 1 percent isn’t great it is still relatively low in the grand scheme of things. The deadlier something is, the harder it is for the host to transmit as they die before transmitting it to anyone. Hence Part of the reason MERS and Ebola had such a hard time taking off.
6.) Not température dependent - Given outbreaks in warm humid climates, Such as New Orleans, FL, HK, and Philippines it’s safe to say this doesn’t follow a flu seasonal pattern despite everyone at the beginning saying this would be done once spring and summer hit. This allows it to spread unopposed at all times of the year without a break.
Every single safeguard we had against this virus landed on the wrong side of the coin.... and here we are. In a worldwide war against an invisible enemy.
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