I'd be surprised if they were spoiled as most of the western countries. Nowdays, there's no discipline and even less, self-discipline. You could have anybody leading the nation but if the people won't bother to follow the orders or recommendations, it comes down more to the people and their actions. I don't say Trump is doing great job with this, nobody really knows what's best way to do it since it's the first time in the history of our existence that we're facing something like this, or maybe not the first time but considering the amount of people we have, considering the raised life expectancy, raised quality of life, the information via social media etc, it's a completely new situation and i ain't gonna blame any person, goverment or anybody for handling situation in whatever they saw the best. Even Trump is taking the notes from WHO like he should, but i seriously can't but laugh at the people when they act like there's a one person who makes the decisions in every country instead of seeking for all the possible help from the experts of every possible area, which could help the situation.
People in many Asian countries were used to wearing masks before Covid, it's not because they are less spoiled. I know that we tend to pay too much attention to videos of crazy people refusing to wear masks in stores but these people are not representing the whole country or even the party the resistance against wearing masks or conforming to the social distancing recommendations are attributed to. In fact, the rate of adoption of masks in the US between the beginning and end of April was comparable to Singapore's, much higher than every other Western country. This is a novel situation for sure but 1) it was novel for pretty much every country, and 2) the US had much more time compared to Asian and European countries, so there are reliable grounds for holding the administration accountable for mistakes that were avoidable. Testing and contact tracing distinguished some of the Asian countries from the rest of the world (and especially the US) in the way the problem was approached and tackled. Again, the US had more time and resources than any other country and yet this is the situation we are in. In situations like these, people are often conforming to the recommendations -there are differences for sure, but the effect of the executive handling of the problem is much greater than the effect of these individual differences. There was a large research using the GPS location data in dominantly democratic vs conservative areas and no substantial difference was found in how people conformed to social distancing guidelines (even when those guidelines were not mandatory). The US lost a lot of time in the beginning to implement reliable testing and contact tracing mechanisms, and you can reasonably blame the government for it.
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no need to write a novel, everybody knows the quarantine and isolation protocols have been put into place to stay below max hospital capacity
He's not referring to any past policies. He's saying that even at this point, it's naive to think herd immunity is achievable in the short term. Moving in that direction doesn't help because it takes time and it will cost lives (and not only and necessarily lives of those who will die of Covid).
Also, trying to achieve herd immunity is and has been a popular thesis since the beginning of the pandemic.
point is that with a quicker reaction in Feb/Mar other methods might have been just as successful, without wrecking millions of jobs
What would this quicker reaction entail? In the hindsight, what do you think should have been done?
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Yes. I don't know what else. And they might be wrong. From the beginning, many things have been proposed, recommended, negated, changed, reframed, etc, and we should still trust them.