> Cultural changes? How would you build those? The government doesn't control the culture. How would you make it unacceptable? Bureaucrats don't have direct control over that. Also, a bunch of "we need"s about the ideal situation don't do much.
We have a federal government. A federal government can spend money, including on marketing. Remember WWII propaganda, some of which people can still recite to this day, like "loose lips sink ships"?
A federal government can pass laws that require workplaces to take certain actions (temperature checks for employees, WFH for jobs that are capable of doing so). A federal government can pass regulations requiring public gatherings to take certain security actions such as taking visitors' temperatures with a contactless thermometer. A federal government can spend money to have factories produce a very large number of face masks and contactless thermometers, and can coordinate with states to distribute them to population centers.
> The reason the China contained it is because she is an authoritarian state
Yes, thanks for stating the obvious. If you notice I didn't suggest we restrict travel between states and cities, or that we lock people inside their homes, or that we should register every location that a person goes to so that we can quickly identify who they've been in contact with should they test positive for covid-19. These are the more authoritarian actions that China has taken.
In fact, lacking the authoritarian actions, we need to try even harder at the non-authoritarian stuff. Which we aren't doing.
We have a federal government. A federal government can spend money, including on marketing. Remember WWII propaganda, some of which people can still recite to this day, like "loose lips sink ships"?
A federal government can pass laws that require workplaces to take certain actions (temperature checks for employees, WFH for jobs that are capable of doing so). A federal government can pass regulations requiring public gatherings to take certain security actions such as taking visitors' temperatures with a contactless thermometer. A federal government can spend money to have factories produce a very large number of face masks and contactless thermometers, and can coordinate with states to distribute them to population centers.
> The reason the China contained it is because she is an authoritarian state
Yes, thanks for stating the obvious. If you notice I didn't suggest we restrict travel between states and cities, or that we lock people inside their homes, or that we should register every location that a person goes to so that we can quickly identify who they've been in contact with should they test positive for covid-19. These are the more authoritarian actions that China has taken.
In fact, lacking the authoritarian actions, we need to try even harder at the non-authoritarian stuff. Which we aren't doing.