This Umair article is way off base. Let me explain.
Our family home furnace has not been working well this winter. It is still working and keeping us from freezing, but something is wrong. I’ve had four visits from repair technicians. And sometimes machines are puzzling, even to the experts. Our latest attempt is to replace a $200 part. The technician has ordered it, and I’m confident that we are going to get it. But the minute we take that part off the warehouse shelf, there won’t be another part coming back on. I suspect that factory is shut down. So in a few months, someone else will need that part, but it won’t be there. They will have to go without a furnace. Supply lines are being lost daily because people are not working. As time goes by, it will be less and less comfortable to stay at home — even if the government finds a way to pay us.
Covid-19 is definitely not good news. Despite the mainstream media and political rhetoric about “flattening the curve”, everyone of us is going to be exposed to this virus eventually. Some of us chase the virus out; some of us will absorb it but not have any symptoms; some of us will get a little sick, some of us will get really sick, and a few of us will die. Get used to this outcome! There is nothing that can be done.
True it is that the world should have been better prepared for this pandemic, but wasn’t. Umair likes to laud the social democracy of Canada — and perhaps Mr. Trudeau is handling this situation better than Mr. Trump. But so far our death rate is 1/10 the American death rate, which is what we should expect from 1/10 of the population. So far, social democracy has not proven to put Canada significantly ahead of the USA in fighting this disease.
This morning I watched a CNN newscast of Governor Cuomo reprimanding Mr. Trump for not finding another 3000 ventilators. Maybe I’m not up on my American constitution as I should, but wouldn’t stocking hospitals be under the jurisdiction of state governments? In other words, if anyone screwed up, it was the state of New York, not the White House.
And where is Mr. TRump supposed to get these ventilators? I’m sure they are not sitting in a storage room in the White House or Trump Towers. Is Mr. Trump supposed to confiscate them from Oklahoma hospitals? Or invade Cuba to loot Cuban ventilators to save American lives?
What we really need is a plan for the next pandemic. Maybe Canada was better prepared for the USA: at least our politicians have put away their boxing gloves and are working together. But that is not stopping the advance of Covid-19. Should we buy more equipment for the next flu-like pandemic — and find a big warehouse to store it? That might be a good solution. But western democracy — including the social democracies Umair likes to laud — have proven that they too cannot formulate these kinds of plans.
We need a better forum to make these kinds of plans.
