That expensive course of action should have been used to regroup and implement a sensible containment plan. Instead that time was basically wasted, which is need the real tragedy.
> I'm not surprised many americans are against stupidly cheap ways to slow spread to any degree
I've got to ask specifically why would you expect this? I mean I see the general ignorance and deference to expensive centralized solutions. But I would have thought that a pan-partisan shared threat like a pandemic would have put more people on the same page.