>>>whats your "ideal world" view on how this should have been handled (ignoring initially stopping it in Wuhan).
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>The only "ideal world" theorizing I've seen is from those who insist that modeling is science.
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>IMHO a good scientific principle when a confusing/obfuscated picture is presented of a potentially lethal new virus, is to slow it down enough that you can mobilize resources and gather the facts.
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>It helps (or should help) to live on an island with borders you can close while urgent preparations and investigations proceed. Continental nations can expect a far more difficult time of it, especially once the virus has a foothold. I suspect the popular concept of open borders will need review once we get past all this.
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>There's also the time-honored practice of "quarantine", isolating at risk or infectious arrivals until they are no longer a threat. Entire shiploads used to be quarantined during various world upheavals or in the smallpox and TB days when it seemed to work well.
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>If borders are too porous or supply lines too global to contemplate this, you can do as Florida did to protect at-risk elderly communities.
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>Whereas it seems disastrous to leave border open until the virus is definitely loose, then shut down the whole of society at the cost of decades of economic prosperity. Who on earth came up with that unscientific mess?
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>FWIW, NZ currently has one active case and no new cases for well over a week. The cost of this was almost entirely closed borders after the virus was already arrived and weeks of level 4 lockdown for all of society with huge unemployment and effectively an extra mortgage for every citizen to pay for it. But the question now is- what next? Some say we are the little boy with his finger in the dyke celebrating prevention of the flood with no real plan of how to pull the finger out.

I'm struck by how brittle our economic model is. Business now operates on a very lean model . No cash in hand, no fat to tide them over a problem. So the minute there is a big issue they collapse. Individuals are effectively living on credit so the minute they can't service that there is a problem. Mortgages on houses, car loans on the latest must have model. I want to a camping show a couple of years ago . I was looking at some of the expensive camper vans (tbh thinking I an't afford these new. how do people buy them) then I watched people buying where signing up to credit schemes.

This type of pandemic will happen again and I don't think we'll be any better prepared.