@Simon and @newsheep: that's the problem with government though. There is no such thing as a smart government action, it's too big and slow to do anything effective so it sucks at everything.
There's also a bunch of finger pointing, hospitals are rationing use of PPE because they fear they don't have enough in case of major swell in cases, they blame the government for not giving them free ones, the government blames the hospitals for not being ready or able to give the population free care. Nurses are pointing at their leadership for not giving them enough masks, leadership is pointing at onerous OSHA legislation that made it so they got used to using dozens of masks per day, even if medically unnecessary, the unions are saying not-for-profit hospitals are money-grubbing oligarchs that don't care about their staff.
The hospital ship in NYC is pretty much empty (yesterday it had 8 patients, it can take thousands) so they blame NY for not sending people there, DeBlasio and Cuomo blame the military for being too strict about testing patients.
And when it comes to supply, if the Federal government giveth, then the states will never lift a finger. JFK created a ton of federal mental health institutions because states were complaining about shortages. As a result, state-ran institutions closed because it was now the federal government's problem. A few decades later this snowballs into basically those systems that JFK had funded being the only remaining mental health facilities in the US. And this story plays out again and again.
Big government is never the solution. People want to use this situation to expand government and give more free stuff. People are now talking about making the $2T stimulus package a permanent monthly expense for the Feds (Universal Basic Income), right after a crisis that was partially exacerbated by a government too big to respond coherently - in every interview in January across both aisles, interviews with FDA officials, CDC officials, even Fauci himself, more time was spent on impeachment instead of how people were dying in China. The CDC and FDA that couldn't legally do anything for a full month because it hadn't put the right forms through the system, and every meeting that they had in the first month was torpedoed by officials arguing about how doing anything (closing borders, warning hospitals) was a power grab by the president. You want this government to grow and provide everyone with income?
