What can we learn from this

[Jim Becker]

Mass use of PVC plumbing was fairly new back then and some manufacturers were having problems with it. There were many lawsuits starting back in the '80's.

I thought that the major issues were with a particular type of supply line product that inherently failed as a feature...it was something popular in mobile/manufactured homes if I recall.

[Edwin Santos]

I thought that the major issues were with a particular type of supply line product that inherently failed as a feature...it was something popular in mobile/manufactured homes if I recall.

I think you might be thinking about Polybutylene plumbing. It was used on a lot more than just mobile/manufactured homes. It was used really extensively in the Southwest and SoCal. Time period was late 70s-early 90's.
Ultimately made a lot of lawyers wealthier.

[Jim Becker]

Yea, that's the stuff...it was a real mess I recall.

[John Makar]

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.

[Rod Sheridan]

We learned the USA and, almost all of the rest of the world, is not prepared for a calamity of this scale. We learned pointing fingers and worrying about what should have been done is a waste of precious time and energy.

I learned regarding virus crisis readiness, it's "difficult" to have all the required equipment in storage, usable, and ready to deploy, at the local, state, or federal government level. For example, NYS Governor Cuomo said today one ventilator costs $25,000 and they need 20,000 of them now. That's a big investment to have sitting in inventory. Would 20,000 ventilators, if in storage for a decade or two, all still be usable?

I learned the media in general is not asking helpful questions. Another example that I haven't seen - how many N95 masks are required? Maybe we can estimate it - if a hospital has 1000 persons/day that needed the masks, and they can only be worn once, and they need to be changed frequently (assume three times an hour), it's some thing like 24,000 masks/day. And the AHA advises there are 6,146 hospitals in the USA. Do we need between 5-30 million a day? Do we have the capacity to supply that many masks from anywhere? Or is the need much, much less?

Maybe we learned we have a lot of zero-risk legal liability speed bumps built into our systems.

We learned really smart people are working on this crisis, and once they get through this one, we will learn that they are planning for the next one.

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.

[Edwin Santos]

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

[Rod Sheridan]

Very well thought out comment Edwin, I agree......Rod