Regardless of how we got here, this is how you act as a world leader and only further legitimizes China’s authoritarian structure as capable of managing disasters of national or global scale.

Our political structure is massively failing to keep the population safe. There are so many more real cases than what have been identified that at our current rate we are going to suffer a lot of unnecessary pain at a personal, social, and economic level for an extended period of time because we waited to act decisively until it was too late to avoid pain.

But maybe we need that as a society. The last notions of American exceptionalism as a nation will also be a victim of the coronavirus.