> Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions”
Based in the UK here, and this is what I find particularly galling.
If governments, including ours, had imposed travel restrictions in January people would have kicked up about it, and the travel industry would have been slammed, but thousands of lives would have been saved, and we would not now be in our deepest economic slump in over 40 years.
Sadly, as with various other countries, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the people at the highest levels of government and civil service here are utterly incompetent[1].
[1] Yes, I know their jobs are incredibly difficult but, as pointed out already, this was an entirely predictable set of circumstances. This is also not a partisan comment: our Conservative government have done an extremely poor job, but the Labour party are so useless they handed the them an easy landslide at the last general election, and the Lib Dems aren't even worth the bother of talking about.
I get that, but that's sort of the point, and in the UK we didn't do anything of substance until the end of March, which was far too late.
On 28th January I organised a DR drill, where everyone in our Cambridge office plus others in tech from other offices worked from home. This ran on 5th February. A week or two later I unofficially asked everyone on my team to stop all travel between offices, and requested key stakeholders not visit us in Cambridge. This was officially confirmed company-wide at the beginning of March. We shut all our offices and required all staff to work from home full-time 10 days before the government mandated lockdown began.
I'm not even holding this up as "we did a great job" because we were far too slow to act ourselves, but it's certainly not just 20/20 hindsight. I hear that trope far too often, and it's tiresome. I jolly well expect everyone in positions of leadership (including me) to have learned lessons from these events and do much better and act much more quickly next time around.
Again, let me reiterate that this situation was entirely predictable, and in fact was predicted by numerous experts, including Bill Gates.
Yeah but that's like the old quote that the stock market successfully predicted nine of the past five recessions. Sometimes, in hindsight, it might have been the right thing to do. But most of the time, when you look back at what people on HN said we needed to action about immediately, it would have been an absolute overreaction. You can't know which of the two situations you're in beforehand.
> Nobody was suggesting travel restrictions in January.
Not true, Trump was one of the first leaders to call for travel restrictions as far back as January, but back then the dominant narrative was that travel restrictions are bad, so he backed off.
Based in the UK here, and this is what I find particularly galling.
If governments, including ours, had imposed travel restrictions in January people would have kicked up about it, and the travel industry would have been slammed, but thousands of lives would have been saved, and we would not now be in our deepest economic slump in over 40 years.
Sadly, as with various other countries, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the people at the highest levels of government and civil service here are utterly incompetent[1].
[1] Yes, I know their jobs are incredibly difficult but, as pointed out already, this was an entirely predictable set of circumstances. This is also not a partisan comment: our Conservative government have done an extremely poor job, but the Labour party are so useless they handed the them an easy landslide at the last general election, and the Lib Dems aren't even worth the bother of talking about.