Posted on Apr 12, 2020
What lessons learned can be determined from how the Federal government has responded in protecting the nation from the coronavirus pandemic?
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Blaming the current pandemic on previous administrations is nothing more than passing the buck. The USA currently leads all other nations in the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus. That does not give any confidence in our ability to counter this threat and looking at conspiracies is a blame game.
For up to date statistics on where the USA stands, see the link:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
For up to date statistics on where the USA stands, see the link:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Posted in these groups: 
Coronavirus COVID19
Leadership
Coronavirus COVID19 Leadership
Posted 5 y ago
Responses: 7
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Lessons learned?
We as a nation cannot fight this pandemic effectively without leadership at the federal level. We have not had that.
We as a nation cannot fight this pandemic effectively without leadership at the federal level. We have not had that.
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There are a lot of good responses on this topic. One thing I don't think has been mentioned is that in the past the CDC has played a leadership role in global control and prevention of diseases, including novel diseases like COVID-19.
One thing that happened as part of "America First" is we pulled back from those efforts. Globally, what the US had done to help control diseases like COVID-19 didn't happen. Not only did we not control it over here, we didn't help control it in other countries and so it spilled over here in much more serious quantities. Helping control diseases in other countries is in our national interest. It helps us control it here. It was a failure across the board.
One thing that happened as part of "America First" is we pulled back from those efforts. Globally, what the US had done to help control diseases like COVID-19 didn't happen. Not only did we not control it over here, we didn't help control it in other countries and so it spilled over here in much more serious quantities. Helping control diseases in other countries is in our national interest. It helps us control it here. It was a failure across the board.
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Personally, I don't think we know anywhere near enough with any certainty to begin assessing it holistically. One thing that does seem to be blatantly clear is that we're drowning in low-quality information, and suffer from a resultant "trust deficit". Imagine going on an operation with NCOs and officers you couldn't trust, making decisions on information even they couldn't trust, towards an objective not even the planners knew for certain they could trust. Trust is what binds any group of humans together, and once it's gone... it can be nearly impossible to restore it. If I were to hazard some very rough guesses, I'd suggest that moving forward, we need to step back from "details" (such as which states are doing what vs. others) and look at the "Big Picture". Data needs to be rigorously vetted and segregated. For example; if you're going to report the daily "death toll", then those numbers needs to come from a central source, reflect complete accuracy in terms of age, cause of death, location, prior morbidity factors, etc... and then be compared to known metrics such as "annual averages" across the same data sets. If 1,600 people die, but 1,000 of them fit within "common" identifiers... then we have to address the 600 "uncommon" as something entirely separate. If it can be critically confirmed that 300 of them would've died within roughly the same time frame regardless of COVID-19... that too needs to be taken into account. Frankly, I think those at the "top" sometimes get trapped by "Mustdosomethingnowitus", only to end up having to reverse their positions, or alter decisions... ultimately wasting more time and resources.
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MSgt Neil Greenfield
Thank you. I agree with everything you just stated. At the moment, everyone seems to be concerned with blaming China, previous administrations, etc. I don't really care about the blame as these items are just "low hanging fruit". It's a way for deflecting away from what needs to be done now. This is a national issue and not a state's issue. More to the point, this is a national security issue. It's not being treated this way. But this is the way the pandemic is being handled. I don't care what was or wasn't done in previous administrations, except if that knowledge contributes to lessons learned. In a lot of ways, we're the "United *But Separate* States of America". Leaving the response to the state's responsibility is a very haphazard approach and threatens the stability of the entire country. The White House - present day administration - should be leading the response nationally and internationally. Unfortunately, people do not know the difference between assigning blame, which is rarely a valuable thing to do, versus learning from what was or wasn't done during this pandemic.
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LCDR Joshua Gillespie
MSgt Neil Greenfield - In general, I agree also... but where we may differ is in how we view the "national security" and "state's rights" aspect of this crisis in detail. I don't feel there's much benefit in casting allegations either... but I do think the full story on China has yet to be told, and needs to be critically examined. At best, they put the world at risk from poor practices... and worst, they retaliated against economic and political pressure by releasing a targeted weapon of mass destruction. The truth is very likely somewhere "in between", and we ignore that at our continued peril. As regards the states; true-this is a national emergency requiring national coordination. However, the known facts appear to indicate that there's a very different thing going on in places like Utah and Arkansas... than there is in Washington state or New York. Going even deeper, there appears to be significant differences within the states themselves; New York City vs. upstate New York, for example. We really can't have a "one size fits all" approach, and achieve balance in terms of the economic impact (and I don't think that's what you're suggesting at any rate). The best people to come up with those individual solutions "should" be the state and municipal governments (that's why our system is set up that way). Where they fail to, the Federal Government has to walk a fine line between getting them "on track", and running roughshod over the very nature of the Union. For me personally, even great dangers such as these do not justify casting this balance aside.
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We probably lead the world in number of confirmed cases because people feel entitled to their test. Testing negative today does not mean you will not get it later and testing positive with no symptoms gives us nothing to treat but it does raise the cases for people to blame.
There is nothing to learn here except for people to understand people do not want to pay for something they may never need and when the shit hits the fan, they want to blame someone else for their lack of desire in the first place to pay for it. I was just reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and at the start of WWI, the British had a national scandal because they did not have enough munitions, the French were hit in a similar scandal for not having enough munitions and boots. How many lives could have been saved in the Philippines in 1942 if we had a standing army to send re-enforcements? We took a 15 million person military in 1945 to one million in 1946, how many lives did we lose not being prepared in 1950 when the North Koreans came South? Same stories, same complaints over 100 years ago as today and a large majority of people today would not have wanted 40,000 ventilators and 20,000 nurses sitting around being paid doing nothing. How would you like it if we said we were going to raise your taxes by $1500 to pay for a ventilator you may never need?
The Defense Health Agency wants to cut 18,000 medical staff from the military and when it passed, people were fine with it. The last 60 days might change that but for how long? People can blame Trump, Obama, Truman, or even Roosevelt but will this lack of preparedness ever really change? I have been in healthcare long enough to remember when many of our supplies were tossed by how it looked, not by an expiration date. Wanna know why I think the expiration dates came about for many supplies? They came about because of $$$. Does a bandaid or kerlex in an unopened package need to be replaced in five years? Not if it looks good and is used to cover a dirty wound but we now do that. Folks simply need to grasp today that in three months most will not care how many ventilators are available for the next pandemic because they do not need them now. If people want real change to preparedness, they need to be willing to pay the $$$.
There is nothing to learn here except for people to understand people do not want to pay for something they may never need and when the shit hits the fan, they want to blame someone else for their lack of desire in the first place to pay for it. I was just reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and at the start of WWI, the British had a national scandal because they did not have enough munitions, the French were hit in a similar scandal for not having enough munitions and boots. How many lives could have been saved in the Philippines in 1942 if we had a standing army to send re-enforcements? We took a 15 million person military in 1945 to one million in 1946, how many lives did we lose not being prepared in 1950 when the North Koreans came South? Same stories, same complaints over 100 years ago as today and a large majority of people today would not have wanted 40,000 ventilators and 20,000 nurses sitting around being paid doing nothing. How would you like it if we said we were going to raise your taxes by $1500 to pay for a ventilator you may never need?
The Defense Health Agency wants to cut 18,000 medical staff from the military and when it passed, people were fine with it. The last 60 days might change that but for how long? People can blame Trump, Obama, Truman, or even Roosevelt but will this lack of preparedness ever really change? I have been in healthcare long enough to remember when many of our supplies were tossed by how it looked, not by an expiration date. Wanna know why I think the expiration dates came about for many supplies? They came about because of $$$. Does a bandaid or kerlex in an unopened package need to be replaced in five years? Not if it looks good and is used to cover a dirty wound but we now do that. Folks simply need to grasp today that in three months most will not care how many ventilators are available for the next pandemic because they do not need them now. If people want real change to preparedness, they need to be willing to pay the $$$.
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MSgt Neil Greenfield
A similar analogy is with the use of information security/cybersecurity tools and techniques in the commercial world. For many years, the groups/departments in many if not most organizations were seen as cost centers, not deserving of investments, or very little investment. Software development efforts always looked at security controls as something to take care of after the product was finished instead of building security controls during the development lifecycle (think Zoom as a recent example).
Now threats and vulnerabilities come from all sorts of attack vectors due to the interconnected devices we all have at our fingertips.
Companies now have to perform their due diligence and report to their boards on the state of security controls or risk the wrath of regulators and/or customers if their products are vulnerable to hackers.
Consider security controls as a type of insurance policy.
A lot of companies have some sort of pandemic response plan as part of their business continuity and disaster response planning, and have money allocated just in case.
Unfortunately, politicians don’t think that way.
Now threats and vulnerabilities come from all sorts of attack vectors due to the interconnected devices we all have at our fingertips.
Companies now have to perform their due diligence and report to their boards on the state of security controls or risk the wrath of regulators and/or customers if their products are vulnerable to hackers.
Consider security controls as a type of insurance policy.
A lot of companies have some sort of pandemic response plan as part of their business continuity and disaster response planning, and have money allocated just in case.
Unfortunately, politicians don’t think that way.
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MAJ Byron Oyler
Companies are focused on profits, politicians on keeping their jobs. If GOV Cuomo of NY spend $80K on vents last AUG and nothing happened, it would have been off with his head.
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We should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
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It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.
One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.
One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.
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