[lettergram]

> we're about to enter an unprecedented public health crisis.

this is where you lose me... it’s not unprecedented, quite the opposite. Throughout all human history this has been common. Recently (since WWII), we’ve been able to limit the lethality of most diseases and/or reduce transmissions.

But this should have been prepared for. They (the government) even had a playbook for it, they had evidence it could even be from this family of viruses.

This is a massive mistake by hundreds of our leaders.

[Digory]

While it's obviously not unpredictable, it was a widespread failure, across a range of political systems - EU, China, and US. We've seen success at scale in SK, which is a smaller, homogenous, high-conformity democracy.

In theory, a free-market democracy would solve the misallocations caused by these blunders more efficiently than the other systems. But the US doesn't have a free-market healthcare system -- or even a free-market mask manufacturing system. As this thread indicates, we're about to see a lot of people die from red tape in Western countries.