Today it is rage overwhelming despair (mostly)

I decided to read an opinion piece by Marc Thiessen, someone  who  has been touted as a "conservative" purveyor of reasonable counter arguments to standard "liberal" bias. I gave him up months ago when he proved to be an apologist for Republicans and the orange idiot.

But the title of this article: "As Taiwan shows, the antidote to the virus is freedom" piqued my interest. I have attached the link here for folks with a way past throttling or pay wall to The Washington Post (WaPo, fondly)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/16/totalitarian-china-unleashed-virus-free-china-has-all-defeated-it/?utm_campaign=wp_opinions&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_opinions

I have few quibbles with what he focused on: the Taiwan response vs China's response.

But I take extreme issue with omitting why the US (ostensibly still free) was denied an effective response (spoiler alert: current national government plus American defaults).

Here are the paragraphs which rang my "Could we really have done this alarm?" 

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"So how did Taiwan succeed where Beijing failed? According to the JAMA study, Taiwan took rapid and specific actions to identify and isolate those who either had the virus or came into contact with those who did.

 

First, Taiwan acted fast. On Dec. 31, while Beijing was still denying the virus was capable of human transmission, Taiwanese officials began boarding planes arriving from Wuhan to identify and isolate passengers with fever or pneumonia before they could deplane. On Jan. 5, they denied entry to any individual who had traveled to Wuhan in the past 14 days and had a fever or respiratory symptoms. On Jan. 30, the government expanded its surveillance system to cover all travelers from China, Hong Kong and Macao. On Feb. 6, all international cruise ships were banned. On Feb. 14, an entry quarantine system was implemented that required all travelers to complete electronic health declarations. Anyone identified as high risk was placed under 14-day home quarantine and monitored electronically through their mobile phones.

 

Second, the government acted with complete transparency. Taiwan’s vice president, who happens to be an epidemiologist, delivered regular press briefings and public service announcements updating people on the mitigation efforts. After the Diamond Princess — the cruise ship that became a hotbed of covid-19 cases — docked near Taipei, the government published a list of 50 locations where passengers who disembarked had visited so those who had contact with them could self-quarantine. The government set up a coronavirus hotline and proactively sought out those with respiratory symptoms. Taiwanese officials also set price limits to prevent the hoarding of masks, and mobilized Taiwan’s military to help increase mask production from 2 million to 15 million a day."
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Illustrative and comforting to my dark humor

 

I know I do not need to elaborate why such actions were not taken at all, taken too late and/or implemented incompetently. In addition perhaps the Taiwanese do not harbor a large population of "my freedoms above all else" population. Also they are not as well armed. 

I will now peruse my photo cache for something related or simply comforting (non intersecting sets in Venn Diagram)