[reese_john]

> What would author suggest in March last year? What would be a better option?

    The technocratic apparatus might have been deployed toward a strategy of creative mitigation — say, mass manufacturing of N95 masks, test kits mailed to every American, testing at a large-enough scale to isolate only the actually infected instead of everyone. Instead, our leaders decided to indefinitely maintain crippling restrictions on individuals, schools, businesses, and social gatherings and take a Hail Mary pass at a vaccine, a gamble that paid off faster than we could have hoped and slower than we could bear.

[the_dune_13]

"mass manufacturing of N95 masks"

How? The shortage in March was one of the reasons why they did not recommend masks. Besides, the point made was tailored toward the negative attitude towards science in emarging crisis scenario - "The “science” [..] rarely resembles the centuries-old process of making informed guesses, testing hypotheses"

Did we have any superior alternatives?

[dTal]

Any mask recommendation would have been an improvement, while production ramped up. The knowing bait-and-switch of "masks don't work" for the cynical reason of preserving supplies destroyed many people's trust in the integrity of the apparatus.

And now, we're a year in and still we don't have actual N95 filtering masks everywhere. Most people are still wearing cloth.

[Exmoor]

And I have yet to see anyone in the US government recommend an actual filtering mask, which somewhat boggles my mind. Real FDA-approved KN95 masks have been available fairly cheaply for 6+ months, although ensuring you're not getting counterfeits can be an issue. I switched several months ago and couldn't believe how much better they were. It was obvious that air was actually going through the mask rather than around the sides and I had fewer issues with my glasses fogging and humidity buildup. Add to that the fact that it's actually filtering out 95% of any harmful particles and it's a no-brainer.

[carlivar]

America should have done the South Korea playbook. Technology based, aggressive testing and contact tracing via an intense public-private partnership.

[yokaze]

That was only theoretically possible. After the avian flu outbreak, South Korea had implemented and trained the system you have observed. Just the year before they did an exercise on a hypothetical coronavirus outbreak. So, the US could not catch up years of preparation in matter of weeks.

[akhilcacharya]

The post office wanted to send everyone masks, but this was nixed by the admin.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-scrapped-usp...

[masonic]

The USPS had the transportation infrastructure to do this... but it had no PPE inventory to distribute.

The previous administration had done nothing to maintain or replace the ample PPE inventory that the preceding administration had left it (in thoughtful response to SARS and H5N1).

[bob_roberts]

> our leaders

In the United States at least, that's a bit of a cop out. Lockdowns were applied at the local level and were originally meant to buy time and prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The Federal government could have then stepped in with mass manufacturing of masks and wide-scale testing. But Trump was reluctant to use the Defense Production Act, and Jared Kushner was put in charge of coordinating PPE supplies, and we saw how that worked out.

[barney54]

Trump did use the Defense Production Act for ventilators. But ventilators didn’t turn out to be effective.

[bob_roberts]

True - but arguably Trump was too slow to invoke it and it wasn't broad enough. And states had to bid against each other to get PPE, only to have the Feds then seize confiscate some of them.

My main point was we should have had a coordinated response. Framing it as "leaders decided to indefinitely maintain crippling restrictions" is misleading. Lockdowns were necessary at the local level because there wasn't a coherent strategy at the national level. (Again, speaking only of the U.S.)