Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[Pemalite]

JRPGfan said:
I'm appalled by how badly prepaired the western world was for this, in terms of PPE.
Its one thing you dont have laboratory capacity, and evne you hestiate to go into shutdown and isolate+track people for infection spread.
However the apparent lack of PPE so many places, is crazy to me.

Australia isn't doing to bad... We already had minimal PPE supplies thanks to the national bushfire crisis, so P2 masks were already low in stock.

Things like Hand Sanitizer we have hundreds of barrels worth... But the containers that we bottle it into is... *drumroll* made in China.

It doesn't help that Trump downplayed the entire thing from the very start, so the USA probably didn't see fit to start preparing hard and early.

Soundwave said:

Countries don't decide shit for where products are made. Does Japan tell Nintendo or Sony (or US gov't to Microsoft) they can't make their game systems in China? No, they don't, and they won't be able to.

All that will happen after this is countries will ensure in an emergency situation they have contingency plans to rapidly speed up manufacture of a few select items ... hospital gowns/masks, ventilators, and testing equipment.

But that's a tiny fraction of things to manufacture in the grand scheme of things, how many ventilators can you manufacture a year from now when this has passed, it will be pointless and nationalized factories for that sort of thing will just be shut down. Everything else will just continue on being made where it was.

I have worked in the health industry and now work in the emergency services.

You are correct they don't control where shit gets produced... HOWEVER. Any competent organization/agency that deals with the welfare of human beings to any extent tends to have substantial strategically located caches of supplies to perform their primary functions.

It seems the United States hasn't done this to the same extent as other nations... Which I find ironic, because they have large fuel reserves locally in order to mitigate issues in procuring fuel supplies but not PPE?

That is just blatant incompetence.