Betrayal and the Virus

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I feel betrayed by our government's failure to use reason and science and experience to help set policy and to be proactive in this pandemic.  We have had years to improve our medical system in general, and years to improve our system's response to an unspecified pandemic.  We knew that a pandemic was a risk, possibly even an increasing risk, based on history and a number of factors (international air travel being only the most obvious).

But specifically we lost 2.5 months at the beginning of this pandemic when we knew we had a respiratory illness on our hands.  Training health care workers in this specialty and possibly increasing the number of respirators in hospitals are two obvious things that could benefit from those 2.5 months.  Another, mentioned so many times in the press, is the issue of testing.  You need testing to know what is going on or you are flying blind.

The point is, we pay our government and its elites to deal with a number of very difficult problems.  Many of those problems include uncertain risk.  Classic examples are the risk of nuclear war, the risk of earthquakes, and so forth.  We spend a lot of money preparing for these disasters even if we dont know that they will happen for sure and when.  To make decisions about these things requires a lot skill, expertise and judgment.

I am going to give an example of this.  Los Angeles is not known for planning for the future and yet they have spent a fair amount of money preparing for an event which is sometimes called the 50 year flood and the 100 year flood.  These are events where there is so much precipitation that the normal water management capability is overwhelmed.  I can point you to many examples of infrastructure hidden in plain site where the city has prepared emergency water diversion infrastructure to accept a huge amount of water overflow until the normal system can process it.  And this is Los Angeles where corruption and failure to deal with important known issues is infamous.

I propose to you that our federal government has been given ample warning of various pandemics and could have done a better job preparing for this threat.  Thats their job.

The Sepulveda Dam in the San Fernando Valley is one of the City (or County?) of LA's emergency water diversion sites.