Good detail about the early days, when there wasn’t any obvious problem. More evidence that the US has and had systems, people and institutions that are designed for this situation, but that have not been deployed intelligently.
In the US, I discovered, the public health system for historical reasons is a bottom-up organization, where the authority lies with local and state departments. The Federal public health institutions, while being the best-funded, have no authority, they can only recommend. Hence the great disparity in how all this has gone down over the past few months.