Do you know why we have an interdependent society where trades and specializations exist, and why we don't just all rough it in the woods all starting from scratch like a Minecraft character? Because specialties allow you to focus on the one thing and do it right, better and faster than anyone else, and when you apply this across an entire civilization, it means we can have all the good shit that an advanced civilization brings us. Clean food grown efficiently and (almost) sustainably, flushing toilets that take the poo away, vaccines, toilet paper since all you fuckers are now single-mindedly obsessed over it...
Reality is not Minecraft. Knowledge doesn't exist in pre-existing build trees and a mindless crafting system, and you can't just make a Rube Goldberg machine to automate all the crap you don't want to do yourself. We're in theory an advanced civilization and we're STILL trying to figure out how to do that, with all those specialized fields hard at work as we speak.
The medical field is far more than hospitals and vaccines. Part of the field also involves tracking and predicting the spread patterns of viruses during an outbreak via computer simulations, accounting for best and worst-case scenarios. When you read about these things in the news, it isn't to fearmonger, but an attempt to figure out how to prevent a worst-case scenario and how to appropriately respond to an outbreak.
In short, this is why we have this effective national shutdown and mass panic happening right now.
For various reasons, the medical industry is being hamstrung during this outbreak, mostly by the Entropy slashing the Center for Disease Control's funding repeatedly to appropriate more money for his dumbass wall that is STILL not built, and what little has been built has gone against basic construction protocol and got destroyed by wind before the materials were allowed to set. But that's another story entirely and not my point here.
The point is, the CDC cannot do their job properly because of cut funding and because the Entropy forbade them from testing initially out of fear that it would hurt him politically, especially in the 2020 election. And even now as the outbreak here in the US is just starting, and it's beyond past due for the CDC to do their job and effectively respond to this crisis (and they're trying), the lies and staggering incompetence by this administration continue to pile to the roof.
As it turns out, we still can't properly test for the Coronavirus because some of the testing kits are flawed and missing vital components, making them completely useless. There's also a lot of lies floating around the internet and news, much of it spread and perpetuated by the Entropy himself, about the number of cases, the mortality rate, who it infects, where it spreads; no lie is too big or too small for the sake of political gain.
More importantly, the damages done to the agencies' response to the outbreak, combined with the long gestation period of the virus itself, means the onus to contain the spread has been knocked increasingly down the heirarchy to local government officials, private businesses, and individuals. Private businesses that aren't in the medical industry don't have the knowledge, much less the infrastructure, to handle a viral outbreak, and the best a local government can do is set up quarantine zones where cases have been confirmed. And you can forget about Gary Bubbadale doing anything to prevent the spread when he barely washes his hands under normal circumstances.
This is why this social distancing has become a thing now, and why various companies like the MLB have suspended activities. The responsibility has been passed on down to us, and this is literally all we non-medicine people and organizations are skilled and equipped to do in an attempt to stop the spread. And because of the nature of the virus and the extremely and continued delayed response by the organization responsible for handling this, there is no way to tell who is a carrier until the symptoms of the disease actually crops up. Whatever cases do pop up we hope to minimize contact with and spread to others to protect the most vulnerable among us: the young, elderly, and those with poor health or compromised immune systems.
This is why it's absolutely vital that the CDC and other people responsible for responding to an outbreak are actually able to respond to an outbreak and not get hamstrung by the government that is supposed to lead them. Right now the jobs of countless Americans are compromised because of the shutdown. Most of this country lives paycheck to paycheck and can't even sustain themselves on that much. The government shutdown over a year ago decimated a huge swath of the country financially, and this is much, MUCH larger, and god knows how long it's going to last.
That's the greater threat to the country right now than the outbreak, is the threat to major parts of our economy, especially on local levels: service, entertainment and tourism. All because the Entropy wanted to perpetuate a lie that made him look like a godking, and even as the truth was revealed, continues to throw down one lie after another to claim the praise for good news that either never happened or happened despite his interference, not because of it, assuage any responsibility for the bad stuff happening and hand it off to anyone he can think of.
And bear in mind that the worst part of this virus is its gestation period. The longer it takes for symptoms to develop, the harder it is to track; a person can make a lot of ground in three weeks. All things considered, this is a pretty mild virus compared to the REALLY bad shit we had to deal with in the past, like Ebola or H1N1, and maybe we should thank our lucky stars for that. If we had to deal with H1N1 during this administration (and given the deregulation done to pork safety, that might be the case coming soon), we'd be fucked.
So I want that to remain in everyone's heads as this year and nationwide quarantine and shutdown lingers on. The Entropy is responsible for allowing this to happen and forcing us to roughneck our own solutions, much to the detriment to our personal lives and plans and the economy as a whole.