We can’t watch the pandemic unfolding in real-time. Coronavirus starts with one person, then spreads exponentially, but we can’t witness the individual catching or spreading it. We don’t even know it has happened until critically ill patients start hitting the hospital. It takes days for a person to become symptomatic, days more to feel sick enough to go to the hospital, then weeks to recover, or to die. It takes several more weeks for hospitals to be overwhelmed and months for the death toll to reach the kind of numbers that make a nation weep. But every single day over the course of those months, individual tragedies are unfolding. We just can’t see them until after the fact.
The people running our government made stupid decisions at the beginning of the pandemic because they couldn’t understand the arc of the future, not even after having seen it happen elsewhere. They are making stupid decisions today for the same reason. Their thoughts, when they finally have them, are too little and their actions too late. All of us, but especially our leaders, must come to terms with the lag time inherent to a pandemic and learn to think weeks, months, and years in advance.