AggieAuditor said:
bigtruckguy3500 said:
AggieAuditor said:
Why in the name of all that is holy didn't we have plans in place for this? Every expert and his cousin was screaming that the winter would see a huge spike. Shouldn't there have been convention centers set up with beds, tents set up with beds, ships set up with beds, etc.?
Well, during the initial spikes early on in places like New York, there were some field hospitals set up that ended up seeing only a handful of patients. While useful exercises, there were massive outcries about government waste and unneeded capacity, etc.
Hindsight is always 20/20, and in the fog of war that was New York's massive surge, I don't blame anyone in setting up those hospitals that went unutilized. That being said, again, with everything trending down people lowered their guard. If a month ago someone were to say we need to start standing up field hospitals they would've been laughed at, fiscal conservatives would've pointed to the massive unused capacity in the spring and called any plan to increase hospital capacity crazy.
I see the logic in your post but to me this all boils down to a numbers game. You have X number of beds and the (updated) predictions are Y number of cases. I think most experts agreed that the Y was going to be a big number in the winter. I'm not a big mask guy (I do comply, though) and I don't believe you can stop humans from being humans via lockdowns and Karen-shaming, but I was sure hoping our experts would have taken human nature into consideration and then prepared the hospitals and facilities accordingly. However, as my grandpa told me, s*#t in one hand and hope in the other and see which one fills up first.
Just look around this forum. Many of the predictions of higher case loads, more deaths, etc. are treated as either the liberal scientists trying to make this look worse than it is, or the media making it look worse than it is.
It is rare in this country for scientists to make and execute policy on their own. It's far more common for politicians to do it, sometimes with scientist input, sometimes not.
Also, most people under age 30 and/or without a health condition or someone they love that is vulnerable, has pretty much stopped caring about infection control and wants life to go back to normal. It's hard to promote a policy that people no longer care about.