re: America can't deal with a pandemic...

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What could this administration have done over the past 2 months to quell the spread and prepare for kids to go back to school?

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What specific things could they have they put in place in February, March, and April to ***actually*** slow the spread the past 2 months without the cooperative participation of state governments?

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From my vantage point it seems they've just thrown their hands in the air and walked away from it, leaving it to the states to deal with.

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It is almost like public health is the constitutional prerogative of the individual states...

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Now I don't disagree that the states should be doing a lot of the daily heavy lifting in it, but I also think there should be a strong federal backstop for them to rely on,

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Oh, specifically define what this "backstop" would even mean? If you mean simply an enormous amount of money and the resources of the US military, then I'm not sure what else you wanted.

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several governors have come out and said that has not been there from the start.

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Well I must say one thing. If we are critiquing the federal response, we should 100% blindly accept the statements of other politicians who have a vested interest in deflecting blame from their own terrible decisions.

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People don't want this to be real

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That would be because it isn't. The virus is real, of course, and so are the numbers of infected and deceased. However, the over-hyped threat to the average human is not real. Covid-19 simply is not dangerous enough to fundamentally alter our way of life as a society.

That does not mean that we would not alter our lives significantly if there were an actual threat. But this virus is NOT that threat. That is really what this all boils down to. Most of the population does not feel like this is a threat to them, and so they are unwilling to forego their livelihoods, habits, entertainment, or really anything else.

The media and the Beltway expert community has unfortunately decided that, to counter this apathy, they will treat Covid as if it is smallpox. Predictably, no one believes politicans or reporters, and so you have the current "hoax vs. end-of-the-world-contagion" dichotomy.

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I remember when we were tracking this in November in China;

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No you don’t.

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No you don’t.

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I do. Why wouldn't he?

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We discussed it then, our country could not deal with a big epidemic as efficiently as they could. Our population, any free populace, would not tolerate the steps required to isolate something.

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South Korea and Japan beg to differ...it's not the "free" part that is as important, it's cultural. The thing that makes the West, and the US particularly, an economic and creative engine is also what results in a bad coronavirus response. Our spirit of "frick you" to authority and conformity, our individualism, is great until you need massive collective action to fight an unseen virus. But I do believe, that in this particular moment, it's worse due to the politicization of everything, the rampant conspiracism that has polluted the populace and a complete and total failure of leadership from top to bottom.

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I do. Why wouldn't he?

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Every timeline suggest the world was first alerted late December. I find it difficult to believe you remember dealing with this in November

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Dec. 31, 2019: WHO says mysterious pneumonia sickening dozens in China Health authorities in China confirm that dozens of people in Wuhan, China, are being treated for pneumonia from an unknown source. Many of those sickened had visited a live animal market in Wuhan, but authorities say there is no evidence of the virus spreading from person to person.

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Probably, but it likely would have been much more efficient than what we had.

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Like what, precisely? You just keep saying that it could have been better.

How would you have viewed a 50 million dollar surplus of degrading and expired surgical masks whenever no pandemic occured? How do you propose that the federal government go about procuring, paying for, storing, or maintaining a national stockpile of medical equipment to respond to a virus it was unaware of?

Why exactly is that issue not more aptly handled at the state and local level?

And, ultimately, why (if the feds had this responsibility--because it would be necessary in a pandemic and they are effective, right?) were these systems and stockpiles not already in place? It is so clear and obvious, correct?

I kept my example simple to avoid getting into the weeds of all the what-if scenarios you want to bring to the table. I don't have the time nor inclination to go through every what-if scenario you care to dredge up. My overall point remains that there are systems that could have been implemented on the federal level to ease the burdens on each state. Those systems have been used in countless other crises under nearly every other president in my lifetime. They weren't in this crisis for whatever reason, and here we are 7 months into this with no clear indication we're turning a corner like multiple other advanced nations have.

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People don't want this to be real, because if you believe it is, you have to give up some things you don't want to. You'd have to make some sacrifices, and we don't want to sacrifice.

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I’ve had it, and until it’s proven I can get it again or carry it why should I wear a mask?