I don't doubt it. There are 14 suspected cases in the county where I live.
The travel restrictions were not applied earlier enough. The WHO is complicit with Chinese cover up. The CDC didn't want to return the infected people from the cruise ship in Japan but they were over ridden by state department. Trump was furious. It was probably too late by then.
The CDC gets plenty of money.
Examples of waste.
https://www.mrc.org/articles/hey-journalists-15-ways-nih-and-cdc-wasted-taxpayer-money
The problem is what do you test for? Is there are general corono virus test? There hasn't been enough time to back a special Wuhan virus test let a lone a vaccine.
The death rate will be much higher than 3.4% if you figure the deaths to deaths and recovered ratio. There was an earlier post that said this method over estimates the mortality rate because people die faster than they recover. This is true but eventually at steady state ratio will be achieved after about a month or so after infection because either you die or recover by then.
So Baal going to make "no wiping your hands on the TT table" one of his rules?
A test is not the same thing as a vaccine. Developing a reliable and sensitive test for a virus is easy. This is not the first coronavirus known to medicine! By contrast, developing a vaccine is not easy. Part of what is making this hard to control is that a lot of people seem to have symptoms so mild that they barely notice and yet still have the virus and can transmit it. How many? Hard to know when you don't have a reliable test. But if you make estimates based on testing in other countries, it drives death rates down a lot, not up. It will end up being less than 1.5%. BUT, higher for older people, especially if they have other health issues. And of course being seriously ill with pneumonia is no joke even if you don't die.
All government agencies have inefficiencies CDC included, but again, in the world we live in, that is not the agencies you want to be cutting corners. And they sure as hell are cutting corners now. Also, attacking the titles of grant proposals without looking at the science within them is something "fiscal hawks" have been doing for many decades. Those "bilions" of dollars "wasted" are really trivial amounts in the context of US government spending in general. Those same "fiscal hawks" don't care about deficits when, as is usually the case, they generate them by waging chronic war against all government agencies and cut taxes for very wealthy people.
And as someone who has received government funding (for 30 years), and also funding from drug companies (and I consult for pharma companies), I can tell you that in terms of the way money is spent on research, we are orders of magnitude more efficient than when the same kinds of things are done in the private sector. (This is also true for researchers working within NIH, who function pretty much like academia except they get paid less). Sometimes what I see of how drug companies operate labs just makes me shake my head. Moreover, most of the ideas that lead to drugs are developed by NIH-funded academic researchers (and our equivalents in other many parts of the world). Small and Big Pharma takes those ideas and develops them into drugs and therapies. That's fine, it's kind of the way it's supposed to work actually. But without academic researchers, the pharma people go nowhere. They are benefiting greatly from US tax dollar expenditures. (That is not reflected in the prices they charge the people here, though, which are laughably high).
The CDC is a different thing. Kind of like FEMA, they are supposed to be
ahead of the curve. The fact is that thousands of people are being tested for this virus in Korea, and right now that simply isn't possible in the US!! WTF!!!!!! And for that you can thank CDC and its current leadership. Given previous MERS and SARS events, they should have had contingency plans in place for the next animal-human coronavirus event. Who else was going to do it? Pfizer? The Army? Fox News?
That's the end of my rant. Wash your hands. Don't go to work if you're sick!
