What's spooking people isn't the virus, or even the knowledge that coronavirus's can kill, it's that there's no cure. I'm sure that collective anxiety halves the moment a cure/ vaccine is made available (assuming or hoping it doesn't fall into Donald Trump's hands)
Ultimately this is going to be solved by people in white coats with petri dishes. I honestly for the life of me can't understand why there has been a global response in this direction. America's leadership in particular has been appalling. Both defaulted to their natural instincts in crisis management. Trump tried to bribe the Germans, and Pence tried to pray to God
Here's the thing. The research scientists tend to be attached to universities or employed by big pharma. Rather than working collaboratively, they tend to work under the veil of commercial secrecy in the race to get a drug developed and the all important patent. X might know something different to Y, and it could be Z who has the missing the link that makes both of X and Y's work significant, but they don't share or co-operate
It's quite telling that Trump, Macron, and to lesser extent that clown Johnson, have all been invoking warfare in their increasingly embarrassing attempts to convince they know what they're doing. Well let me remind them of something that comes straight from the 1940's formbook. When the allies wanted a bomb to win a war, they set up the Manhattan Project. They pooled all the resource and expertise they could from our top physicists and it worked
It honestly isn't a huge jump to make. They could have begun this process in early February. It wasn't a difficult policy decision to spot. If someone put you in charge of co-ordinating the Covid response (and remember these politicians are really quite amateur) the first thing you would do is quickly recognise you can't solve it. When you can't solve it, you find people who can
It doesn't require much imagination and insight to recognise that medical challenges are solved by scientists
Instead we've got Trump telling the world its a "hoax" or trying to convince us that he "really gets this" on some tenuous link to his Uncle John working at MIT. He even told us that "it's going to disappear, one day, it's like a miracle". We know Trump isn't religious, so I can only assume this was Pence's briefing. Johnson for his part has tried to tell us that 60% of the population need to contract it, and that means a lot of us will die. Then he changes his mind when he somehow struggles to understand that this might not be politically palatable. Credit the ever obedient BBC apologist called Laura Kuensberg incidentally for saying "the science changed". LoL. No it didn't, the science was the same as it was 48 hours earlier. The only thing that changed was the mind of that guy you're forever bidding on behalf of
Amateurs
