Keegan99 said:
This tweet was January 14th.
Patient zero in Washington arrived on January 15th, and was diagnosed on January 19th.
By that point, community spread in Washington was underway.
Probably the foremost example of an organization wholly failing its primary purpose in our lifetimes.
People keep railing about the slow response regarding testing, but to really be on top of this to the point we could have actually contained it, we would to have taken drastic steps several weeks before the WHO was still saying no evidence of human to human transmission in China, to be ready to produce tests, shut down our borders to international travel, and begin testing, contact tracing, and quarantining. I think anyone who's honest with themselves would have said that going on that type of war footing in late Dec or early Jan would have been viewed as a gross overreaction fueled by paranoia and xenophobia.
Even if you believe the administration was moving too slowly in late Jan and early Feb, I don't think that would have changed the game. That was already too late to insulate ourselves from this. Moving more quickly during that time period might have bought us a few more weeks, but the horse was out of the barn at that point.
The only way we could have hoped to really stretch out and greatly reduce the severity would have been if we had straight info in early to mid-Dec, reacted quickly to the info, and didn't misstep along the way (like with the test manufacturing snafu).
But, given the significant % of false results from every mass-produced version of the test except for the test the CDV tried to produce, even testing wouldn't have been enough. We would have had to have all incoming travelers self-quarantine. But even that likely wouldn't have been enough given our society's free and independent streak, so we probably would have had to go to enforced quarantining or shutting off all travel, period.