@JP There are always going to be experts that ‘foresee’ the need for medical equipment decades in advance. There will always be an emergency that some experts have warned us about could or will happen. The problem is that those things happen once every 100-150 years or so and there are always other things that at the moment are more critical.
In the 1970’s scientists foresaw an ice age by the year 2000’s. Global cooling was a real problem. Some foresaw the reliance on middle eastern oil as a problem, but pumping locally would’ve cost way more over all those decades. Someone has always seen a disaster coming, but a broken clock is right twice too.
The Netherlands saw a rising ocean and frequent storms. Not until their entire country was under water did they build levees and is now one of the largest storm water control systems. If they can build a levee so their country can remain several centimeters under sea level, any major country could do this. Even so, “experts” have adjusted their models from several meters in worst case scenario global warming to less than a meter.
As far as global warming (or as they now call it, climate change, as it is neither warming nor cooling appreciatively fast enough to satisfy the models), the US has been leading the world in reducing greenhouse emissions over the last 2-3 years, our greenhouse gasses went down whereas Europe’s and the rest of the world continued to go up. The effects of change are never taken into account in models. Like the COVID-19, the US is not going to see 2-3% death rates, because they did something good and early.
Sure thing the government could’ve done more, but the government is bad at everything and no other nation in the world has done any better. This just goes to show that we shouldn’t be relying on big government and that a small federal government with minimal regulation (it took FDA over a month to approve research and drug protocols, primarily due to extensive bureaucracy) and (as Trump has done correctly) let local/state governments deal with a localized response. China claims to have done really well, but RadioFreeAsia just reported that Wuhan has been under reporting by an order of 20x and calculated that based on the number of deaths per funeral home, they’re underreporting at least 50,000 deaths in the province.
