Local health departments are chronically understaffed. For every 6,000 people in rural areas, there’s one public health nurse — who often works part-time, one analysis found.
“State and local public health departments are decimated resource-wise,” said Lurie, who is now an executive director at an international organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. “You can’t expect them to do the job if you only resource them once there’s a crisis.”
Another explanation is a lack of urgency because the virus hasn’t severely harmed anyone in the country this year. “If hundreds of workers had died, we’d be more forceful about monitoring workers,” Chessher said. “But a handful of mild symptoms don’t warrant a heavy-handed response.”
You get what you pay for.
a massively fatal pandemic in recent memory seems to have effected close to zero real change in public health funding/policy/etc
John Olivier (of Last Week Tonight) has an interesting video showing how those checks automatically sent out did some active harm in some cases.
Mind you, this is after government was defunded for decades, thus offering strong “who killed hannibal” vibes.
hmm, is this a change of topic?
The video topic overall is thus, but within that is mention of how the “massively fatal pandemic in recent memory” has affected change, in the sense of doing some harm to people on disability, and thereby pointing to how some very foundational issues need to be worked out in order to even begin to make “real change in public health funding/policy/etc”. In particular, there would need to be some stability in terms of governance. Which the end of that video actually points to quite a success story in terms of reaching that, especially illuminating how stagnation != stability, yet that can be accounted for and dealt with by lawmakers if they so choose.
The graphic was to forestall an objection as to why “bUt MuH gOvErNmEnT” is non-functional: it is non-functional b/c it was literally designed to be that way. Two examples that readily spring to mind are how the post office used to deliver mail in 3 days time, while now it can be weeks if your letter ever arrives at the destination at all, and how horrific taxes are to have to be filled out and filed - despite how the government mostly seems to know how much you owe regardless - due to heavy lobbying by the tax preparation software industry.
hmm, is this a change of topic?
