I certainly don’t take polite discussion as adversarial.
I’ve had some experience long ago with a secondary MOS as an NBC NCO, some time working in areas tangential to infectious/communicable disease control (kind of like yours I’d guess) and believe it or not lots of experience in poultry, Caprine, and K9 management. Epidemiology at some level is epidemiology.
I’m no where near an expert, but have some related expertise and I’ma pretty practical fellow.
It’s my belief we should have done the following:
Reduced travel from Asia earlier
Quarantine the ill as best possible
Offer accommodations to those at elevated risk to allow them to modify thier routines/work location/schedules to minimize risk of exposure.
Treat the ill appropriately. I couldn’t believe that they were venting people so readily. Then they acted like it was some kind of revelation when the Italians “discovered” that you get a better outcome when you put a patient with respiratory problems on their stomach, not the back.
OK, It sucks to be laid up on your stomach, but it beats the hell out of a vent or death.
HCQ was credibly promoted both as a preventive and a treatment early on, but was pushed away for other than medical reasons. Ivermectin was found to be likely to be helpful later, but was again suppressed. As were increased susceptibility due to nutritional deficiencies. All traditional and reasonable treatments were rejected out of hand.
When you “Flatten the curve’ as they so famously asked of us, you do not reduce the area under the curve (infections) all you do is stretch out the duration of the event.
Honestly, by January the cat was likely out of the bag anyway. A (fairly traditional) response as outlined above would have still sucked, but would have minimized casualties and we’d be done by now, without having created a fiscal, moral, and constitutional train wreck.
Interestingly enough, the most restrictive states fared the worst. probably due to cloistering people indoors, and forcing mask compliance, while the least restrictive states did best even when taking population size, and, and climate into account.
I’d love to know what your Doc thinks of my opinion on this.