There's a lot to be said about WH-level leaders with the authority to corral and force action down the chain. It's bad enough that the CDC and FDA screwed up, but there was no urgency from the top-down that solutions had to be rolled out in a timely matter or alternatives had to be explored even in parallel. You see the difference now, when there's a sense of urgency, and we are willing to break rules, engage lots of different groups to work on efforts in parallel, etc. None of that happens without urgency from the top.

And the lateral side. Even right now, Congress is bickering about a relief bill, stuffing it with unrelated pork while people die.

There is plenty of blame (and some praise, too) to go around.

Yeah, for me the inflection point was NOAA and hurricane Dorian. Only so many people can put their careers on the line before something breaks in an organization.

Rather, the previous administration was just more successful bringing the full weight of the media machine on turning down news of the previous H1N1 pandemic which had 2 orders of magnitudes more cases and deaths so far. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-sars...

This current pandemic just happened to have happened outside the US so it couldn't keep the lid on the news.

According to your source

> The coronavirus outbreak is more severe than the 2009 outbreak of H1N1, or swine flu. That illness infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people worldwide but only had a mortality rate of 0.02%.

1.4 billion worldwide, not just in the United States.

The mortality rate is much worse for coronavirus and it hasn't been around since 2009 so we've yet to see how many cases and deaths occur.

Just an FYI: the mortality rate of swine flu is based on estimate of total people infected (around 60 million cdc estimate) while the mortality rate of covid is from confirmed cases as we don't have estimates of total infection with some speculating that it's 10x of confirmed cases

We know from the cruise ships that mortality is in the 0.1% - 1% ballpark. With a broken down healthcare system it may go a bit beyond 1%, but not a lot. Data from Italy shows many people who get a ventilator die anyway, so running out of them wont make the figure jump.