Cato’s David Boaz had a good idea. He put together a timeline that shows how the private sector started to act on the virus before the government did. I would like to expand the timeline, particularly to contrast the CDC, the FDA, WHO and officials in New York with the private sector actions. I welcome suggestions.
January 12. WHO: At this stage, there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in the novel coronavirus.
January 16. Tib-Mobiol (Germany) announces diagnostic test, which Roche will license, but Roche will not receive FDA approval for almost two months.
January 17. CDC spokesperson:Based on the information that CDC has today, we believe the current risk from this virus to the general public is low. For a family sitting around the dinner table tonight this is not something that they generally need to worry about.
January 21. WHO now confirms human-to-human transmission.
January 23. WHO decides not to declare a public health emergency of international concern. China institutes lockdown.
January 24. Washington Post. Perspective: Why we should be skeptical of China’s coronavirus quarantine.
January 25. Now have reported cases outside of Asia–in Australia, Canada, the U.S., and Europe.
January 27. HHS Secretary Azar leads first U.S. Coronavirus task force meeting.
January 27. Anthony Fauci: “the American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It’s a very, very low risk to the United States.”
January 29. New York Times. Beware the Pandemic Panic.
January 29. Trade adviser Peter Navarro warns of dangers of virus in a memo which says that in a worst case we could suffer 1 to 2 million deaths.
January 30. WHO declares global health emergency, but not a pandemic.
January 31. Vox: Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.
January 31. Washington Post: the flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus for now. . . Past epidemics prove fighting coronavirus with travel bans is a mistake.
January 31. Washington Post: Perspective: How our brains make coronavirus seem scarier than it is.
January 31. HHS Secretary Azar declares a public health emergency. This has the effect of requiring testing protocols to undergo more scrutiny than if there were no emergency. (source)
January 31. President Trump restricts travel from China to the U.S. but only applies restriction to foreign nationals.
February 3. Washington Post: Why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus.
February 4. Slate: The Panic Over Chinese People Doesn’t Come From Coronavirus.
February 5. New York Times. Who says it’s not safe to travel to China?
February 5. CDC sends out the first test kits approved in the U.S. They prove unworkable.
February 5. Cruise ship Diamond Princess has confirmed cases.
February 7. Vox: The coronavirus exposes the history of racism and “cleanliness”
February 9. New York’s Chinatown celebrates the Chinese New Year, with Mayor de Blasio joining the throngs at the parade.
February 16. FDA rejects Dr. Helen Chu’s request to use not-yet-approved lab to test.
February 24. With the CDC tests still not working, an association of state and local health laboratories asks for a waiver to use their own tests. FDA refuses.
February 24. President Trump: the coronavirus is very much under control
February 25. Mardi Gras in New Orleans goes on as scheduled.
February 25. Dr. Helen Chu defies FDA, goes ahead with unapproved testing.
February 27. Psychology Today. Why then are so many countries implementing quarantine measures, shutting down their borders, schools, and soccer games for something that is less likely to happen to anyone than drowning in a single year, or even being hit by lightning in one’s lifetime?
February 27. CDC: CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to prevent #novelcoronavirus.
February 29. FDA issues an exemption to its requirements for testing. Exemption applies to 5000 out of 260,000 labs.
March 2. Mayor de Blasio: I’m encouraging New Yorkers to get on with your lives + go out on the town despite Coronavirus
March 3. New York Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot: We are encouraging New Yorkers to go about their everyday lives (source)
March 4. New York Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot: There’s no indication that being in a car, being in the subways with someone who’s potentially sick is a risk factor.
March 4. CNN’s Anderson Cooper: So if you’re freaked out at all about the coronavirus, you should be more concerned about the flu.
March 5. New York Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot: New Yorkers without symptoms should not have to quarantine.
March 5. New York Mayor de Blasio: “I’m here on the subway to say to people nothing to fear, go about your lives and we will tell you if you have to change your habits but that’s not now,”
March 5. Facebook recommends that its San Francisco employees work from home.
March 6. SXSW canceled
March 7. (from the WSJ) Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook sends a company email encouraging staff in California and areas around the world with a high concentration of infections to work from home if possible over the coming week. The note represented an escalation in the company’s caution to staff. It last week had encouraged its 25,000 workers across Silicon Valley to work from home.
March 9. Dr. Fauci: I think if you’re a healthy, young person, that there is no reason, if you want to go on a cruise ship, to go on a cruise ship.
March 10. Ivy League basketball tournament canceled.
March 11. NBA suspends season.
March 11. Cato cancels live events.
March 11. WHO declares Covid-19 a pandemic.
March 12. I explain our self-quarantine decision.
March 12. NCAA basketball tournament canceled.
March 12. Cato Institute and Brookings Institution shift to mandatory telework.
March 13. Masters Golf tournament and Boston Marathon canceled.
March 13. President Trump declares national emergency.
March 13. FDA finally approves Roche test (see January 16).
March 15. CDC recommends canceling events involving more than 50 people.
March 16. Kentucky Derby canceled.
March 16. FDA allows any commercial laboratory to implement a test.
March 16. Six county governments in the San Francisco Bay Area order residents to shelter in place.
March 17. Mayor de Blasio: announced that the city was considering a similar shelter-in-place order within the next 48 hours.
March 17. Governor Mario Cuommo: No city in the state can quarantine itself without state approval. And I have no interest whatsoever and no plan whatsoever to quarantine any city
March 19. California becomes the first state to issue a stay-at-home order.
March 20. New York Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot: masks should only be used by people who are showing symptoms
March 20. Mayor de Blasio: We have to go to a shelter-in-place model
March 20. Governor Cuomo: announced the statewide stay-at-home order
March 21. FDA prohibits companies from offering in-home diagnostic tests, which some had announced three days earlier.
March 24. My post Scarves Now, Masks Later.
April 3. CDC: recommends the use of cloth face coverings.
April 13. MIT health economist Jeffrey Harris: the NYC subway was “a major disseminator – if not the principal transmission vehicle – of coronavirus infection during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic”
April 15. Governor Cuomo: signed an executive order requiring all New York State residents to wear face masks or coverings in public places.
The Cato article was excellent. Thanks for that.
Since you are inviting suggestions for an expanded timeline contrasting government and private positions, how about including a few of Trump’s greatest hits in trivializing the crisis on a daily basis. They would seem relevant to this exercise. The timeline above shows exactly one case of mainstream media doing that after the first week in February.
It seems likely we are headed towards a huge natural experiment where we will eventually get to see a lot more clearly whether or not it is the virus or the policy actions taken in response to it that are really killing the economy.
Different states are reacting very differently. The laboratories of democracy will become laboratories of the spread of a virus that doesn’t care about political boundaries.
Carlos Osweda on Twitter has made a chronology of Trumps
‘s responses so far:
https://mobile.twitter.com/cosweda/status/1242894868445159424
[Sorry, these comments are off topic–ed.]
I think adding a link to your scarves/masks post on March 24 is a good idea. This was the first place I really read and considered that approach, and it was when I resolved to wear a face mask whenever I went out in public.
Arnold, I applaud you for your selections. Adding more Trump stuff would weaken the thrust of your point. Your list is a good start at showing that the the failures of the official sector — government — were clearly bi partisan (a claim not many following the mainstream media would get, since, well Trump). Also, it exposes the explainers — the media, academia, and science — as having been equally caught with their pants down or shooting at the wrong target and generally not having been able to explain much of anything until it was obvious and just before it was false.
Yes, there were bi-partisan failures to predict the future course of the disease and plenty of them. That doesn’t mean they fell anything like “equally” on both sides of any partisan or disciplinary divide.
Before mid-February it was reasonable to hope and even expect that this would be more like SARS, MERS, Ebola, and West Nile Virus and be contained well short of what we are looking at now. After that it became clear with astonishing speed that we were facing something that was growing exponentially and had escaped our ability to contain it.
When considering the role of government it certainly seems relevant to consider the guy with the most powerful job in government, the guy claiming “ultimate authority” and continuing to trivialize the problem at length on TV every day.
I am getting so tired of this. Along with useful information is the stupid (and inaccurate) statement that Trump “continu[es] to trivialize the problem at length on TV every day.” Maybe it feels good to say it but it suggests that you hate Trump so much that your judgment regarding anything he does won’t be trustworthy.
(I’m starting to think that half the world feels that you show what a good person you are by how much you hate–and put down–the people you disagree with.)
I am also getting so tired of this.
“That doesn’t mean they fell anything like “equally” on both sides of any partisan or disciplinary divide.” No, of course. The parties and ideologies who own a few “unequally wealthy” urban centers, reap the benefits and virtue signalling of the global trade in goods and services, but fail to anticipate and manage what they now claim is an existential risk (because they were prioritizing risks that an economist would deem to be orthogonal to the risks they should have been managing) failed their people and their fly-by-neighbors way more.
Roger,
Just last night, on national TV, Trump claimed that the United States has “the most advanced and robust testing anywhere in the world.”
Is that not trivializing the many failures we have had with testing or do you actually believe that is true?
His statement is factually untrue. There are so many real things to criticize him on. I just think that’s what should be criticized, not some exaggerated, universalizing statement like, he is “continuing to trivialize the problem at length on TV every day.”
March 11 – NBA player Rudy Gobert diagnosed with Coronavirus after previously mocking
March 12 – NBA suspends season
March 9 – Rudy Gobert touches every microphone in front of him at press event, joking about coronavirus
Yes, I think this was important in so quickly shutting down the NBA and March Madness — not just risk aversion, but a sense of shame.
April 10:
Agent plants story, now widely disseminated, that “Relationship between Rudy Gobert and teammate Donovan Mitchell cannot be repaired.”
Microcosm of “Covid framing” (taking current crisis and using it to try to get what you were trying to get beforehand) eg Pelosi
1. Mitchell blames Gobert for giving him virus (though team officials say unclear who gave it to whom)
2. Mitchell would like to play in an NBA city that is not Salt Lake City (like NYC)
3. So convenient opportunity, not to be wasted, to achieve that goal with “Covid framing”
Sorry. Tags, how do they work?
Oh, no, include Trump. Cuomo and DeBlasio’s changes of view are incorporated, and they are useful and instructive reminders, and Trump’s should be also. But you need to use some restraint on what to include otherwise the timeline will be All About Him.
If you’re interested in adding Tobias to the timeline, here are a few additional data points:
3/10 Let’s sequester the 60+ cohort and those with underlying health conditions. Adopt reasonable social distancing and other reasonable protocols for the rest of the population, but let a significant portion of the economy continue as usual.
4/14 Let’s sequester the 60+ cohort and those with underlying health conditions. Adopt reasonable social distancing and other reasonable protocols for the rest of the population, but let a significant portion of the economy continue as usual.
4/15 Oh sh-t, this is what Sweden is already doing. I wasn’t suck a complete weirdo after all.
4/16 Hard to run the counterfactuals, but at least one country decided to take another route.
Kevin Drum (Apr 13) takes on tge travel ban. Airlines had already ceased service before the ban.
These writings would be a lot more credible if they didn’t contain statements like, “Trump spent the next six weeks insisting that the coronavirus was no big deal and would miraculously disappear in no time.” Of course, he said no such thing–and it suggests that the writer hates Trump so much that he can’t be fair.
FEB 24
“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. … Stock market starting to look very good to me”
— Donald Trump
FEB 26
“And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
— Donald Trump
FEB 28
“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
— Donald Trump
The Cleveland Browns will win a Super Bowl. One day, it’s like a miracle, they’ll win it all.”
If anyone thinks that statement is actually about a miracle, they are foolish. Anyone who thinks Trump was talking about actual miracles is equally foolish. To characterize him as believing the coronavirus would “miraculously disappear” is just plain wrong.
And it takes away from the valid point that Trump was wrong about how serious the virus would be. It turns a boring honest criticism into, “Look what an asshole Donald Trump is.”
You went from he didnt say that to he didnt believe that.
No. He neither said nor believed there would be an actual miracle. No more than the Cleveland Browns winning a Super Bowl would be an actual miracle–though a lot of Cleveland fans probably believe that 🙂
Good to know. More shameless re-writing of history. Is this somehow the optimum in that the crowd, in their wisdom, want this type of leadership?
Great minds think alike, I had been working on my own timeline list. But publish or perish. I’ll add some things I’ve got. There’s a lot of Taiwan stuff here, but that’s important and fair, even if it kind of undermines the “USG-fail” libertarian point. Wouldn’t it be nice to read this announcement today, which Taiwanese people get to? “No new cases today, no deaths for a few days, minimal restrictions on normal activities. Plenty of masks available.”
The ones before that Jan 12 WHO statement really add some context to why that “no evidence” statement was reckless.
Dec. 31, 2019 — Chinese authorities inform WHO’s China office of pneumonia cases in Wuhan City, Hubei province, China, with unknown cause.
Dec. 31, 2019 – Taiwan CDC implements onboard quarantine of all flights from Wuhan, writes email to WHO, “News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, China. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not to be SARS, however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment. I would greatly appreciate if you have relevant information to share with us.” The ‘however’ bit is Taiwan’s delicate – because of their diplomatically sensitive position – way of saying, “Oh crap, this could be another SARS, we can’t exclude human-to-human contagiousness, given that the Chinese know more than they’re saying, and inferring from those isolation measures.”
Jan 2 – At a regular meeting, Taiwan CDC experts recommended that in addition to the existing measure of onboard quarantine inspection, all healthcare facilities should reinforce case reporting of clinically severe cases of pneumonia among people who arrive in Taiwan from Wuhan, and all healthcare workers should strictly adhere to standard precautions for preventing nosocomial infection, wearing N95 respirators as required while performing invasive medical procedures such as intubation and tracheostomy.
Jan. 3 — China reports a total of 44 suspected patients with the mystery disease.
Jan 6 – Taiwan CDC message for travelers from China, “if symptoms such as fever or acute respiratory tract symptoms develop within 10 days after returning to Taiwan, please call the Communicable Disease Reporting and Consultation Hotline at 1922 to report the symptoms to the competent authority, put on a surgical mask and seek immediate medical attention. Moreover, please inform the physician of any history of travel, occupation, contact, and cluster (TOCC) to facilitate timely diagnosis, prompt case-reporting, and comprehensive treatment.
Jan. 7 — China identifies new coronavirus as cause of the outbreak. Both SARS and MERS – human to human pandemics – were caused by a coronavirus.
Jan. 9 — China reports first death linked to the new coronavirus.
Jan. 12 — China shares the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus, helping countries in testing. It is 86% genetically identical to SARS.
Jan 14 – Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO’s emerging diseases unit, said human-to-human transmission was possible, but confidently asserted it wasn’t spreading. “From the information that we have it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families, but it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human to-human transmission.” Oof.
Jan 14 – Japan has a case, a Chinese national living near Tokyo. Health ministry official Eiji Hinoshita, “At this point, we feel it is unlikely this will lead to a dramatic outbreak,” adding that the patient was no longer suffering a fever and was recuperating at home.
Jan 14 – Taiwan sends two senior, medical expert officials to visit Wuhan to investigate for themselves. Health expert Hung Min-nan reported, “It may be difficult to rule out the possibility of human-to-human transmission within families. We always had our suspicions, but we are much more confident now that human-to human transmission is occurring.”
Jan. 15 — China reports second death linked to 2019-nCoV.
Jan. 18-20 — Chinese authorities report a third death and a spike in cases, including first in Shenzhen and Beijing, bringing the total to 204 confirmed cases. Cases confirmed in Japan, South Korea, the USA, and Thailand.
Jan. 21 — WHO confirms human-to-human transmission of the virus. Total cases now 222 and a fourth death.
Jan 22 – WHO convenes emergency committee to decide whether this constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.
Jan 22 – Taiwan CDC CECC tells public that there are plenty of masks and to remain calm and not rush to buy them. Distribution to the logistic centers for convenience stores begins. One million surgical masks will be released from storage for sale on both January 22 and 23. The plan is for an additional million masks to be released every week, embarks on crash program to maximize domestic mask production with goal of several million per day, within a week’s time.
Jan. 23 — WHO’s director-general decides to not declare a public health emergency of international concern. Cases confirmed in Singapore and Vietnam. China begins lockdown.
Jan. 25 — New cases reported in Australia, Canada, the USA, and Europe. 1975 cases now in China. Hong Kong raises readiness to highest state, suspends all flights to and from Wuhan.
Jan. 26 — 769 new confirmed cases in China, total 2,801. The CDC holds Sunday teleconference for the media to provide an update. There are five known cases in the United States. The CDC lab in Atlanta was still the only one able to test for the virus, and badly backlogged. CDC explanation said it was a quality issue. “We hold ourselves to an incredibly high standard of precision in terms of laboratory testing,” Messonnier said. “We wouldn’t want to inadvertently make a mistake in patient care.”
Jan. 27 — South Korean recruits 20 medical companies to work on a diagnostic testing project. China already has numerous approved and accurate tests at this point.
Jan 27 – Azar leads first White House Coronavirus Task Force meeting.
Jan 29 – Trade adviser Peter Navarro memo warning that, “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil” and claiming that a worst-case scenario of 1-2 million deaths is possible.
Jan. 30 — 9632 cases confirmed in China, with 213 deaths. WHO declares a public health emergency of international concern.
Jan 31 – Taiwan now producing and releasing for rationed sale 4 million masks per day, enough for the entire population to get a new one every week, tells anyone with symptoms, or in crowded places with poor ventilation, to mask up.
Jan 31 — President Trump issues Proclamation 9984, suspending entry for foreign nationals who had traveled in mainland China in the past two weeks. US Citizens and residents are allowed to travel freely, and are not tracked upon their reentry to the US.
Feb. 3 — One week after the meeting, South Korean CDC approves one company’s diagnostic test. Several days later, more tests are approved.
Feb. 4 — FDA grants Emergency Use Approvals to CDC-qualified laboratories to use test kits developed by the CDC, limited to patients who meet criteria for testing.
Feb. 5 — CDC starts to send test kits to state labs. A week later, on the 12th, it is determined that all of these test kits are faulty. There is no backup test.
Feb 5 – Diamond Princess confirmed cases. Taiwan imposes strict border controls, bars docking of any cruise ships having visited infected areas.
Feb 10 – Taiwan suspends most flights from China, or which transited-through, and imposes 14 day home quarantine of passengers. All air travelers now required to report health declarations including travel history.
Mar 5 – Taiwan mask production up to 8.2 million per day, ten times more than two months prior. Adults authorized 3 per week, children get five masks per week, one for every school day.
thanks, I incorporated some of these into the timeline
Can we just nominate the Taiwan CDC to completely supplant the WHO ?
It would be interesting to see some kind of fair ranking of country performance. It helps being an island (or island-ish, like Singapore), but then again, UK. Taiwan would be #1, but consider these cv19-attributed death rates per million population in big or wealthy developed countries with trusted data (still not entirely fair, different demographics, and different time since outbreak threat began locally – though that matters less each day).
Taiwan: 0.25
Japan: 1.4
Singapore: 1.7
New Zealand: 1.8
Australia: 2.5
South Korea: 4.6
Poland: 8.3
Israel: 16
Norway: 28
Canada: 32
Germany: 47
US: 105
Sweden: 132
Switzerland: 150
Netherlands: 195
UK: 203
France: 275
Italy: 370
Spain: 410
Belgium: 420
It’s impossible to trust numbers coming out of China, however, the highest plausibly-argued estimate I’ve seen so far is 50K, which would put them at around 36, near Canada.
Northeast Asian countries are outliers of effectiveness. Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe” are outliers of debacle.
Partisans can’t let it go, it appears.
Look, Trump’s positions, are directly reflected by the FDA and CDC recommendations, whether he was the source of theme or not. Additionally, Kling did include the most significant Trump downplaying of the virus- the February 24 statement. Also, it includes Trump’s reversal position.
For Greg G- the media continued to downplay the virus right up until early March- Kling probably didn’t include more because the point was made. Basically everyone started taking it seriously at the same time- around March 10th.
>—-“Basically everyone started taking it seriously at the same time- around March 10th.”
Actually, not “everyone.”
It was exactly two weeks after that that Trump was still predicting that things would be close enough to normal so soon that we should expect the churches to be full on Easter. Two weeks is a really long time in a period when it was clear that the number of cases was doubling every few days. And he has been a fountain of misinformation on the status of testing all along.
“My friend Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution says that both a viral surge and a continued lockdown are unacceptable, and the only alternative is to vastly increase testing-which will also not be easy.”
– from the Boaz piece.
Much is made of the USA failure to test, trace, and track, but in reality there was no, and still isn’t, infrastructure in place to do any of that. And we don’t have anyplace to quarantine people outside their homes. As Cowen points out, Medicare reimbursements at $40 a pop is in no way a sufficient incentive or source of capital to really get mass testing under way. He suggests $200 a test but would that actually be cost effective? And as others have pointed out mass random testing would have to be frequently repeated at local levels to produce useful information. An unimpressed Ann Althouse provides useful commentary on Massachusetts’ track and trace start-up program, the first in the nation: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/04/contact-tracing-has-helped-asian.html?m=1. and also a later post on how household infections struck the Cuomo family.
Testing appears pretty much pointless and red herring. A far better use of resources would be to heed Steve Sailer’s repeated calls for the federal government to put some money into domestic mask manufacturing the long term need for which is indisputable.
Mass testing the population is impractical given the accuracy of the tests, the method of sampling the individual person, and the fact that the RT-PCR test is nothing but a snapshot in time and has to be repeated within days. None of this mass testing was ever going to happen. All of the tests being given to the general population are a wasted of resources- it should all have been devoted to medical personnel/staff, hospital patients, and nursing home residents/staff. That is where your deaths are coming from- the elderly/sick who don’t have the option of isolating themselves from COVID-19 carriers.
Test 8 billion people, get a result instantly, repeat often, do it affordably.
There ought to be an expression that’s more persuasive than “devil is in the details”.
It’s hard to compete against the words “moonshot” and “Manhattan Project”. I guess “how?” is the suitable reply and then you listen while they struggle and then slip in another “how?” and then do it yet again. Then you get accused of negativity.
May be the best reply is “I want a raise”.
Then Tabarrok and Cowen say “gladly, we love price gougers”.
It would also be good to add a heterodox polymaths timeline. Hanson, Cochran, Sailer, Alexander, Yudkowsky, Less Wrongers, etc.
Tierney’s article in City Journal gets to the FDA tip of the iceberg, but doesn’t include the dates. I’ll try to supplment
https://www.city-journal.org/fda-bureaucracy-hindering-covid-19-fight
On Jan 16, German company Tib-Molbiol announces diagnostic test, shipped over two million by end of February. FDA didn’t approve of Roche’s licensed version of that test until March 13 – two months later.
Feb 16, FDA rejects Dr Helen Chu’s (Seattle Flu Study) request to start testing for cv19. “… because the lab was not certified as a clinical laboratory under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.” “We felt like we were sitting, waiting for the pandemic to emerge,” Dr. Chu said. “We could help. We couldn’t do anything.” On Feb 25 she does it anyway.
March 12 – After weeks of complaints that obtaining NOISH approval of new mask manufacturing facilities takes up to three months, just to get started, FDA relays the encouraging message that they, “may consider expedited review” of their plans if they submit the right information. That ‘may consider’ is in the running for most pointless and illusory phrase in our language, but it is still the message on the FDA website.
March 16 – FDA issues emergency use authorization guidance for diagnostic tests.
March 18 – Several companies including Everlywell announce they will be shipping at-home, self-administered kits based on approved tests, within days.
March 21 – FDA updates guidance to clarify that at-home testing is not covered and thus prohibited, most tests will not ship to individuals, and any specimens that had been sent it would be destroyed with no results.
March 2 – FDA allows stocks of existing “industrial” N95 masks to be used by health care workers. However, manufacturers could still be liable if they sell industrial-line products to medical providers. It takes nearly three weeks for Congress to pass a law which on March 20 removes that liability.
March 28 – The FDA authorizes Ohio-based Battelle to sterilize re-usable N95 masks using it’s hydrogen peroxide vapor technology, which could significantly alleviate mask shortages. However, FDA also imposes an arbitrary cap of 10,000 per day. But Battelle had capacity for eight times that much, and no one understands or can explain the cap. Typical question, “If it works, why a cap? If it doesn’t work, why any?” Governor DeWine calls up Trump directly, cap removed the next day.
March 24 – FDA finally allows imports of masks compliant with health use specifications of Australia, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico. Does not allow KN95 masks from China.
April 3 – FDA allows KN95s.
CNN and the Washington Post have some new coverage of the CDC test issues, apparently they didn’t follow their own rules and their manufacturing process was contaminated.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/18/politics/cdc-coronavirus-testing-contamination/index.html
HHS OIG is looking at the whole issue, and expects to issue its findings in fiscal year 2021.
Of course the list is ridiculously cherry picking on data and there were lots of NYT and LAT on what coronavirus was doing:
Maybe include Sean Hannity quotes in there as well. He has the number cable show on TV so it is media source.
The simplest and direct explanation why Pacific Rim acted so much quicker is US and Europe. Because they have experience with new deadly diseases from China and the US was not effected much by past pandemic scares.
And isn’t some of Mardi Gras occurring the private sector as well? Sure the Governor could have shut it down but it is not like motels and restaurants closed either. (Note the private companies on the list who acted the quickest were also the ones that were less threatened by community shutdowns.)
And also note Washington and California were already shutting things down before March 19th like schools and such. Most California districts shut down March 12th.
And yes it was social conservatives that were ringing the bell on this disease the earliest and loudest and the Progressives were two weeks behind.
However, most economic conservatives along with Trump were whining about it in early March.
In the comments on a recent and related Slate Star Codex post, various commenters point out that a fuller (i.e. more comprehensive) timeline for the media organizations you mention is much more flattering.
Here’s one example by Kelsey Piper at Vox, published February 6th: Coronavirus worry is no reason to scold people – Vox
Kelsey’s been a part of many of the same online circles as Scott Alexander, for a long time, so this wasn’t surprising to me.
But apparently similar articles or posts have been published by The Washington Post and The New York Times as well.
Mar 16 – Six county governments in the San Francisco Bay Area order residents to shelter in place.
This call was the most impactful decision made any government agency and they forced Newome had later that week.
The time-line should include the statements of nationally prominent Democratic politicians (other than the widely disliked Mayor De Blasio, who can be dismissed by the Left as a fringe crank and outlier). Particularly Pelosi, who I think was also encouraging attendance at the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade in February.
If, as some on the Left point out, air connections to China had already been voluntarily terminated when Trump instituted his ban – why was Trump’s measure attacked for supposedly being xenophobic and racist? Also, if the connections were truly unavailable at that point, were the exceptions to the policy (for US nationals and of course the all-important principle of “family unification”) dead letters?
It is easy to pick out stupid things Trump has said throughout the crisis (as he says stupid things on every issue from time to time), but have any of the stupid things he has said impacted policy? The man clearly is more interested in putting on performances for his true-believers than pushing policy, on any issue, in any particular direction.
Given (1) that the mistakes that led up to this situation (both in medical preparedness and in making the Chinese Communist government our “partner”) go back decades and implicate both parties and the relevant administrative agencies, (2) that the failure to recognize this particular virus as an incipient major crisis in the US was shared by politicians of both parties, the relevant permanent bureaucracies and experts, and the supposedly serious news media, and (3) that this crisis is affecting nearly every peer country in a roughly similar way, the attempt to pin this disaster on the Trump administration exclusively (with the implication that a Pantsuit administration would have done much better) sounds like so much partisan propaganda, with about as much truth value as Trump’s incessant self-praise.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/pelosi-encouraged-public-gatherings-in-late-february-weeks-after-trumps-china-travel-ban
Video of Pelosi walking through Chinatown in SF, not social distancing, encouraging people to come and shop.
The video was taken on Feb. 24.
It might be worthwhile to include some of the racial elements. Like Chinese officials calling the US “racist” after the travel ban. Or WHO telling us early on that stigma is worse than the virus.
This isn’t to downplay the racism that has emerged, which has been terrible. But we can distinguish between an actually dangerous disease, which had nothing to do with race, and the racist idiots who irrationally blame all people of Asian descendant (dumb people will latch onto anything). These considerations should not have been such a high priority for WHO. Saving lives should have been. And that’s way more important than the media pieces of the same theme in the timeline.
ASK – may need add a few more from your previous posts:
3/17 “I suspect that the first-best strategy is a total, nationwide lockdown for two weeks, enforced militarily.”
3/25 Crisis and Leviathan is “recommended for the times”
(Still cannot believe you advocated for a MILITARILY enforced lockdown and then started complaining a week later when obvious implications of this came to fruition. )
February 6. San Francisco officials urge public to attend Lunar New Year celebration, say there’s no coronavirus threat. “Norman Yee, president of the city’s Board of Supervisors … condemned incidents of racism and xenophobia sparked by fear and misunderstanding of the virus that have target[ed] the Asian American community in recent weeks.”
We need an Accountability Index.
Look at that timeline. There is a lot of stuff which looks pretty bad given what we know today, but can still be forgiven as reasonable given what was known at the time.
But unfortunately there is also plenty of unforgivable stuff. Perhaps one might want to discourage people from doing that unforgivable stuff, which means there has to be a way to quickly hold them to account, in ways strong enough to deter. “Accountability is a tax on irresponsibility” is a generalization of “betting is a tax on BS”.
The question is, what happened or is likely to happen to any of those people? Anything? It looks like nothing.
Maybe that’s the right answer when you solve for equilibrium. But before getting into that question or different possible normative answers, it would be nice to know at least where we stand, in particular sectors, like media or the bureaucracy, and maybe for our society as a whole.
What’s America’s Accountability Score look like right now?
If it’s your job to pay attention to this stuff (FDA, CDC, WHO), to pay attention to “news” and question authority (journalists), or to run the country (politicians) then you really ought to have been worried about this by early February. We can forgive ordinary people for not being aware at that time, but these people should have. At a minimum, they shouldn’t have been downplaying and calling people racist.
Look, you don’t need science. You need ONE FACT. China, which doesn’t give a shit about human life in the slightest, did a complete lockdown that destroyed their whole economy starting on January 23rd. Forget debating the nature of the virus. Forget everything. If this wasn’t a BIG DEAL that wouldn’t happen. The PRC put up a giant sign on their country saying “we are scared shitless of this and will do absolutely anything to stop it no matter the cost.”
I didn’t know about this on January 23rd, I’m just a normal schmuck going about his day. I don’t watch the news. When I found out about it though I knew immediately something had to be up if the PRC did that. If it’s your job to do that sort of thing, at that point it was your duty to take it seriously. Maybe nothing will come of it, but you take it seriously and you don’t waste time calling people racist or some other bullshit.
Don’t tell me that the CDC, WHO, FDA, etc downplayed it so “what could I do, I have to trust *the experts*”. Did the press trust the experts during Vietnam? The whole point of the press is to question the experts. To check evidence. To use common sense. To investigate. If all journalists do is retweet some government agency what is the purpose of their existence?
So either they are lazy/incompetent…or like Matt Yglesias he’s buying masks in secret in February while not warning his readers who supposedly has a duty too.
Small point. WHO tweeted on 1/14, not 1/12, that “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #ChinaFlag of China.” Source:
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
Heres one. If anyone is still reading.
https://www.justsecurity.org/69650/timeline-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-u-s-response/
Via Barry Ritholz