Our response has been drastic because we didn’t respond soon enough in the first place. News of this broke around mid-January … we should have reduced flights from affected areas to drive up the price and discourage non-essential travel, required people coming from affected areas to self-quarantine for 14 days, used IR cameras to check for fever at customs checkpoints, ramped up production of testing kits. Sent the viral RNA sequence to every private and university lab…
We’ve been so busy fighting the last wars (illegal immigration and terrorism) that we’ve gutted our response to the next war (epidemic).
