The Coronavirus Called America's Bluff

#+AUTHOR: Anne Applebaum

- 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 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.