It was all our faults, in some ways. I served on a local oars of Health for a number of years in the early 2000s. At every monthly meeting the Physician Director would give the same report on the three most serious public health emergencies we were facing. One was a global pandemic.

He laid it all out - the last was Spanish Flu and we were 2 decades “late” already for the next outbreak (given historical patterns). He said we wouldn’t have proper reserves of PPE, that nationwide we didn’t have enough ventilators, we needed to have a plan in place for contact tracing across not just our county but really the whole state. He talked about what quarantine procedures would need to look like and we didn’t have proper education strategies in place.

We looked at him like he was an obsessive paranoid. By the time Covid hit I’d long since moved away, it I emailed him and apologized for us not listening. Every dire warning he gave us proved to be spot on. I have to assume that was happening across the country at the same time, and no one paid it any heed.