I think that you can blame both parties for the overall lack of preparedness, yes, we've had more proactive responses in crisis situations by Democrats - but we've seen several decades of bipartisan cuts to the CDC, and other disaster preparedness agencies for decades.

Terri Gross interviewed Max Brooks yesterday, an author and disaster preparedness expert

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/820601571

"MAX BROOKS: I think there are massive gaps in our systems that are being exposed right now, which - by the way - this is not news to the experts. Anybody who works in these fields could have told you years ago that we were vulnerable to this. It's going to rip through our prisons. It's going to rip through our homeless population. God willing it doesn't rip through our nursing homes.

But what no one is talking about, what terrifies me, what keeps me up at night are the secondary casualties that will occur because of hospital overflow. What I mean is we're only talking about now how many people are going to die if the coronavirus really rips through our country; what is not being talked about enough or what needs to be talked about are the people who are still going to die of cancer, of accidents, of other diseases because they simply can't get into the hospitals because the hospitals are choked with coronavirus patients.

GROSS: So that's a flaw in the system that you think is being revealed.

MAX BROOKS: That is a tremendous flaw in the system right now. And we used to be very good at this. I can tell you that one of the gut-wrenching moments I had years and years ago was during the homeland nuclear disaster scenario called Vibrant Response. And I spoke to someone from the Defense Logistics Agency. And what the DLA does is they're responsible for all the bottled water and bandages and everything that FEMA uses in a crisis - the military as well. They - if there's something out there that we need, that the government needs, they buy it.

What he told me was, up until the end of the Cold War, we had prepositioned stockpiles of emergency supplies all over the country, and that was in case we got nuked, so we could pull from these warehouses. Now, the peacetime dividend was, even though we never got nuked, we still had hurricanes and floods and other disasters, and there they were, ready to go. After the Cold War, somebody got the idea that this was inefficient, it was expensive - get rid of them and buy what you need on Day 1 of a crisis from the big box stores.

Here's the problem - the big box stores don't have warehouses, either, because they know it's inefficient. So these huge stores need to turn over their stock every 24 hours. So what if you have a crisis at the very moment that these stores are reshelving. And I witnessed that firsthand during Superstorm Sandy. We're watching TV here on the West Coast about what's happening to New York. And my wife says to me, you know what? We've always talked about getting a generator. What if we have an earthquake while this is happening? Go get it now. I got in the car. I go to Home Depot - generators gone. FEMA had taken them all.

So we don't have stockpiling anymore on a national level. We're seeing on TV the stockpiles of masks right now that the federal government is distributing; that is nothing compared to what we used to have.

GROSS: I'm even thinking about things that we're supposed to have at home to protect ourselves. Hand sanitizer - OK, local distilleries are starting to make that now. Things like Lysol or Clorox wipes, you can't find them anyplace, at least not as we record this. Vinyl gloves or rubber gloves, those are really hard to find, too. So we're being told to protect ourselves with supplies we can't get access to.

MAX BROOKS: No. And this is the problem, is in this country, we used to have these stockpiles, and it was called civil defense because we knew when the bombs were dropped and the cities were nuked, that we would need all of this, and it was all the lessons of World War II. So if this pandemic, let's say, happened in 1965, there would be no shortages; it would be ready to go. But post-Cold War, it's all become about the bottom line. And that trickles down to us, like you said, the individual citizens.

I see panic buying in LA and I'm shocked because how does everyone in Los Angeles not already have an earthquake kit? Which, by the way, the earthquake kit is supposed to be much more extensive than a pandemic kit because, at least in a pandemic, the lights are on and the water is running. In an earthquake, you're camping out. So why are my fellow Angelenos caught so desperately unprepared?"