Yea, that's the stuff...it was a real mess I recall.
--
The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
I have an undergrad in History (et al). A couple of weeks back I was reading Ross Dunn's The Travels of Ibn Battuta. I also as a young lad did several years USN in remote places, and followed that with years as a road warrior consultant, including on foreign lands.
Battuta was a bit of a lying swine, but useful as a barometer in to the Islamic world of the 1300s. It was a pretty grim place, the religion (yes, Islam) was one of the few civilizing elements, and that world was light years ahead of Europe. The last 1/3 of his book he is headed home to Morocco accompanied by the Black Plague (there are actually [at least] two forms of Plague) as it is destroying that world from Samarkand to Timbuktu. It wiped out Central Asia, the Mid-East, and N.Africa long before it got to Italy and S.France. Most of it is still trying to recover.
My own foreign travels have made me internationally tolerant, but very, very glad I am an American in the mid-west. We have too much food, feel outraged at the discovery of corruption or governmental waste (always an appropriate reaction), regularly beat Wyo and BYU, and have it far better than we realize most of the time. Our political leadership may all be mentally difficient, but they do not make pyramids of their opponent's skulls (and yes, that is mostly a good thing).
We will come out of this. We will spend like drunken sailors, scream, and plot, and abuse, but we will come out of this, and probably figure out a way to make our country stronger. That will prove very much not true in a lot of other places.
To hold equipment in stockpile, you would have to rotate it to keep it up to date.
If there was central purchasing for all healthcare, this could be accomplished at very little cost, or no cost if the scale brought prices down.
Sometimes everyone doing their own thing is a detriment to society.
It seems painfully clear that your statement is very accurate in the context of a public health epidemic.
It's a real paradox for many of us that we have a situation where (1) public health is at odds with economic health, (2) public health is at odds with the idea of individual freedom and libertarianism - i.e. minimal government intervention in our lives.
Nothing is more important to most westerners than our freedom and our pocketbooks. Both are under assault.
All the tools normally used by our Federal government(s) are basically ineffective. The virus cannot be shot, bombed, bought off, threatened, negotiated with. It knows no boundaries, plays no favorites, belongs to no political party.
In the absence of a magic pill for treatment or a vaccine, the only solution is to starve the virus of fuel by increased physical distance and isolation. And if we let up off the accelerator too soon, the virus can make a comeback, like what may be happening in some of the Asian countries.
If there was ever a time when the world's nations should work together and adopt a cohesive collective strategy, it would be now but the recent years of separatist national politics has really made the world's nations more disconnected and mistrustful of each other than before.
If there's a hope, I think it's technology. I believe the international scientific community is less dysfunctional than the international political community, so I pray the scientists will work collectively, and armed with today's technology will come up with an effective vaccine.
Edwin
Very well thought out comment Edwin, I agree......Rod