This is a crises in which are elites are disproportionately at risk, and disproportionately have access to care. Politicians, international businessmen, and celebrities are in the news as "testing positive" for the virus. That makes the average person think that "someone they know" has it. But you don't really know those people. The magic of mass-media just makes you think you do. While the elites test positive, we can't even get a test!
Notice how in smaller nations, with less entrenched bureaucracies, the known effective treatment gets to patients much more quickly. It isn't like hydroxychloroquine is a new drug, we've known the risks associated with it for decades when fighting other maladies. In tiny Bahrain, it took five days for them to go from "discovery that it is effective" to "administer to patients". Here, even though our Chief Executive has known and publicly touted its efficacy in treating Coronavirus, he can't seem to get past his own government's built-in hurdles to get it to the public quickly. Localism protects people better than large centralized governments.
This has been a recurring theme of mine- localism is security. We pay for insurance, we pay for setting up firewalls in computer systems and office buildings. Think of the costs of forsaking the "efficiency" of globalization as insurance. And we now see that "efficiency" comes with hidden costs. Not only is mass global commerce risky as far as spreading pathogens goes, but the vast bureaucracy which grows around a central state is actually an impediment to effective treatments reaching the general public in a timely fashion. And in a pandemic, time matters.
That doesn't even include the long-term damage our ruling class is doing to the economy in an effort to stop short-term damage now.
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