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I think this particular story is about the curious talents of a society, and how those talents are wasted if not led.
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She’d gotten used to catcalls. She’d created a rule for herself: when entering a meeting with a certain kind of male, allow a thirty-second recovery period before attempting to convey information upon which that male might need to act. Men judged her by appearance—and were badly deceived.
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The root of the CDC’s behavior was simple: fear. They didn’t want to take any action for which they might later be blamed.
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“When you go into the details of the cases, you see it’s not bad people,” he said. “It’s bad systems. When the systems depend on human vigilance, they will fail.”
Reminds me of the Bezos-ism about good intentions don't work, mechanisms work.http://nickfoy.com/blog/2018/4/7/good-intentions-dont-work
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on January 10, 2020, that he found unsettling. He changed planes again in Guangdong—the province from which the Chinese doctor, the superspreader of SARS, had come. The airport was transformed. There were now lots of security people wearing masks. Passengers were required to step, one by one, inside an acrylic stall and be scanned for fever. “They weren’t fooling around,” said Joe. “I thought, What the hell is going on?” He’d never seen a fever box and, as he stepped inside, he had a feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I thought, These people know something we don’t.”
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Measles had a spectacular R naught of somewhere between 12 and 18—which is to say that each person who got it on average gave it to between a dozen and eighteen others.
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Only later, in August 2020, at the press conference where he announced Angell’s abrupt resignation—without going into why she was resigning so abruptly—would Newsom explain why, in part, she’d been recruited by his administration: her work in righting racial injustice in health care. Charity was later told that she herself had never been a serious candidate. “It was an optics problem,” says a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Charity was too young, too blond, too Barbie. They wanted a person of color.”
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“By then Zimbabwe could test but California could not, because of the CDC,” said Charity. “Zimbabwe!”
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Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force. “He said, ‘Charity, you need to push these things through. You’re the only one who can do this.’ ” She was taken aback by his insistence. “He wasn’t pleading with me to do the right thing. He was yelling at me. He was basically implying that the White House is not going to do the right thing. The White House is not going to protect the country. So California needs to take the lead.”
The computer model gave the governor little choice but to shut down the entire state, and take responsibility for what should have been a national decision, because neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the president of the United States had the nerve to make it.
The absence of federal leadership, combined with the fragmented nature of the American health care system, meant that tests for the virus either weren’t available or were being processed too slowly to be of any use. Joe read stories of people waiting ten days for test results from Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics, two of the country’s biggest private labs. “Sending tests even to the CDC was taking days, not hours,” said Joe.
“Here is the frightening aspect of the global supply chain,” said Joe. “When there is a surge in demand, inventory goes to zero. Just-in-time manufacturing. Great concept! Horrible in a pandemic.”
The pattern continued right through the pandemic: the Trump administration would claim with fanfare that supplies were on their way to the states and leave it to the career civil servants whose job was to interact with state officials to reap the humiliation when those supplies failed to arrive. It would happen again with ventilators, with the drug Remdesivir, and, finally, with vaccines.
A few didn’t even have functioning fax machines, and so the Biohub got into the business of buying and delivering fax machines along with test kits.
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The big takeaways seemed to be what everyone was just then figuring out: the virus was disproportionately attacking poor people of color unable to work from home; and lots of infectious people were walking around without a clue about their condition.
The mutation had allowed the virus to escape the antibodies her immune system had produced during its first battle with COVID-19. A strain of the virus that escaped antibodies might also evade a vaccine. “It’s a change in a single chemical,” said Joe. “And evolution found it.”
“There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped,” Joe would later say. “There’s no one driving the bus.” And the CDC—well, the CDC was its own mystery. “God knows what the hell is wrong with them,”
Local health officers across the country paid with their jobs and more in their attempts to control a disease without the help of the Centers for Disease Control. Sara Cody, the health officer in Santa Clara County, had issued the country’s first stay-at-home order, after finding the country’s first domestic transmission of COVID—and now Sara Cody needed round-the-clock police protection.