flwyd | (Reply)

From:

On the other hand, the kind of government intervention that is appropriate for a pandemic is I suppose of a very different flavor from the kind of government intervention that occurs during a physical disaster.

I think this is an important observation. In a physical disaster, people on the ground have a lot of salient information (like "how structurally sound is this particular building?") and central coordinating authorities are often trying to make decisions without access to all that information. In a pandemic, aggregated information is crucial for making decisions and allocating resources. And what's worse, people can walk around causing infections without realizing they're contagious. Nobody in 1871 Chicago was on fire but didn't realize it.

Sometimes I imagine what would have happened if we'd had this thing happen under a president Dick Cheney. What I imagine is a soldier with a rifle on every street corner, enforcing curfews, and that these soldiers would be unlikely to go away when the pandemic ended. I still think that would have been worse than what we have now.

I think that's kinda what Wuhan looked like in late January and February. China is remarkably efficient at deploying large of numbers of people to do a big task, and they've got a legal and social structure that results in high levels of compliance with government requirements. But I think even China would've had trouble deploying that response nationwide: there are only so many people in the military plus the police force.

The U.S. has about 2 million military personnel (including reserves and national guard) and close to 1 million sworn law enforcement officers. If they were all deployed to U.S. cities, working in 12-hour shifts, there would be one armed order-keeper per roughly 150 people. While that's probably enough of a ratio to protect specific areas (e.g. public gathering places), it seems like it would be hard-pressed to enforce pandemic hygiene.