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#+TITLE: The Coronavirus Called America's Bluff
#+AUTHOR: Anne Applebaum

- tags :: [[id:5b96a053-eb86-486c-989c-8b3b1f4e4f17][Covid-19]] [[id:a4691fdf-7422-4275-9a4d-96c02e7e3088][Outbreaks]]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-showed-america-wasnt-task/608023/

- Is Covid-19 the US equivalent of Perry's armada changing the scrip ton Japan's dominance?

- The secrecy and mania for control inside the Communist Party lost the
  government many days during which it could have put a better plan into place.
  *But many of those recounting China’s missteps have become just a little bit
  too smug.*

- Vietnam, a poor country, has tested more people than the United States. During
  congressional testimony on Thursday, Anthony Fauci, the most distinguished
  infectious-disease doctor in the nation, described the American testing system
  as “failing.”

- Helen Y. Chu, realized that she had a way to monitor its presence. She had
  been collecting nasal swabs from people in and around Seattle as part of a flu
  study, and proposed checking them for the new virus. *State and federal
  officials rejected that idea*, citing privacy concerns and throwing up
  bureaucratic obstacles related to lab licenses.

- Preparedness delayed, all because too many people feared that it might damage
  the political prospects of the leader.

- I am writing this so that Americans understand that our government is
  producing some of the same outcomes as Chinese communism.

- When human life is in peril, we are not as good as Singapore, as South Korea,
  as Germany. *And the problem is not that we are behind technologically, as the
  Japanese were in 1853. The problem is that American bureaucracies, and the
  antiquated, hidebound, unloved federal government of which they are part, are
  no longer up to the job of coping with the kinds of challenges that face us in
  the 21st century.*

- But in recent years, the subjects fell out of the news. Senators, among them
  the vaunted Republican moderate Susan Collins of Maine, knocked “pandemic
  preparedness” out of spending bills. See [[id:3aadf88a-5c99-4a85-9d13-7b8ec4969bf1][Flu Fighters]]

- This [Japan's emergence as a modern nation] massive change, known as the Meiji
  Restoration, is what brought Japan, for better or for worse, into the modern
  world. Naturally, the old samurai-warrior class fought back against it,
  bitterly and angrily.