It's amazing how - for example - almost every country's press is managing to treat a global shortage of every single thing needed to test for coronavirus caused by massively increased demand as a unique political failing of their country's government that is literally killing people.
Treating it as a 'unique political failing' might be silly, but highlighting the problems of our JIT economies, and criticizing our governments about that, is in itself a good thing.
From cursory reading it seems many experts have been beating the drum about these types of events (global 'catastrophes') and instead of 'wasting' a bit of money to keep stockpiles up, or implement other types of policies 'just in case', many of our governments have led us here in the name of optimization, efficiency, etc. I think it's fair enough for the media to bring that up.
One of the things that amazes me is that the US press has also managed to take their government's attempts to prepare for a scenario like this and twist them around to attack the government. For example, it turns out the US government had a really long-term, forward-thinking program to develop and stockpile cheap, mass-producable ventilators for exactly this scenario - and we're talking really long-term, with the design contract signed in 2014, FDA licensing last year, and delivery in the next presidential term. This is how ProPublica titled their article about this program: "A Company Promised Cheap Ventilators to the Government, Never Delivered and Is Now Charging Quadruple the Price for New Ones". [1] They literally took the existence of this long-term, forward thinking program and used it - together with a more normally-priced rush order of less cost optimised ventilators - to create a narrative of corporate and government malfeasance.
Well look how the countries with decent healthcare are fairing, like Germany. Not many deaths per infected people. And the nordic countries.
Look how Spain, Italy and France are fucking up after spending year after year cutting funding to healthcare ever since the 2007 recession.
So yes it is their failure too. Maybe not totally as nobody could have prepared for this, but governments have been seeing healthcare as an 'indivual's problem' rather than a 'community problem' for far too long.
