Do not agree. Government everywhere makes mistakes under emergencies. Just look at past responses to hurricanes in the US and the current wildfire in Australia. Maybe you could say every government is incompetent. But the fact is that China reported the cases very early to WHO, get the genes mapped very quickly, and decisively locked down Hebei. So I would say so far China has shown competence and resolve, against a tough virus.

Mistakes can happen but wittingly suppressing news is not accidental nor a mistake.

I was born in Wuhan and half of my family are currently holed up there. A few days before the Wuhan lockdown was ordered, coronavirus already made it to the headline in CNN and NYT, but there was not any headline news about the coronavirus within China. Heck my dad wasn't even wearing a mask on his 1hr metro commute to work until the day before lockdown happened.

In early January, government officials and news outlets were reporting: "There are false rumors about Wuhan having a SARS like virus. This is an unknown virus that's _probably not_ transmittable from human to human. There are only 45 confirmed cases. There is no need to panic. "

One of the officials even organized a thousand people CNY dinner as part of the CNY celebration a few days before the lockdown.

They had a thousand opportunities to curb the disease and alert the people, but the Chinese bureaucracy and leadership's imcompetence directly caused the coronavirus disaster.

Edit: January 21 news article on the thousand people dinner from a Chinese source. About 40k people participated, this neighbourhood is about 10 minutes away from the epicenter: https://news.163.com/20/0121/15/F3E3UTKI0001899N.html

Did you miss the part when they arrested doctors who reported the virus because they didn't want to deal with the virus during a local government meeting and banquet?

Is it confirmed? I see just some YouTube videos; that + the description upthread triggers my conspiracy theory alarm.

The FT article has

>Piecing together the events in Wuhan shows that for at least three weeks before the banquet, city authorities had been informed about the virus spreading in their midst but issued orders to suppress the news. (https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06... linked above)

This is at least related. Dunno if he was arrested, but the police expressed displeasure. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/03/asia/coronavirus-doctor-whist...

Xinhua reporting on the Chinese Supreme Court's stance on the issue includes a section on the 8 people who were punished for spreading rumors and whether that punishment was reasonable:

http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-01/28/c_1125508460.ht...

Google Translated: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

Here is the news from Jan 1 in Chinese.

https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2020_01_01_530191.shtml?s=zw...

Reading the translation, this sounds like what police would say in a parody, yet this is real. Thank you for sharing it and I hope your family and we all make it through this in good health.

Here in Australia the general sentiment is that the response has been good relative to the magnitude of the fires. At some point nature overwhelms any government.

Did the Australian government lie to the world and their own people about how bad the fires were and arrest people who posted on social media about them?

Well no arrests but the govt is investigating the fake coronavirus health department press releases made by some racist folks and which spread like wildfire on social media prompting the communications minister to step in.

As for the govt lying about the bushfires, yes most definitely, we had tourism chiefs out there on the offensive claiming Australia was fine to visit when most of the East Coast had the worse air quality on Earth for months.

We had a tourism minister standing on a half burnt Kangaroo Island which was still in lockdown from the fire telling people it's the best time to visit.

Govts lie all the time for self interest. And strangely many of the public totally support them doing so when it's their team or for personal benefit.

They were very late even in informing the people in Wuhan or Hubei. Even after everyone in the West knew about this new SARS-like virus, people there were still going around with no face masks or anything, no precautions at all. Disgraceful and a total failure.

Face masks likely don't help much: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/01/29/8005317...

WHO says they can, but only if used very right, and only alongside other measures: https://www.who.int/publications-detail/advice-on-the-use-of...

They don't have to be foolproof, it's enough if they're better than wearing no mask at all.

His point is that their #1 priority was keep this under wraps instead of fixing it as soon as possible, even if it meant more people had to learn about it to protect themselves and not have the virus spread.

Coronavirus has disrupted many businesses in China, and I think the government knew this would happen if more people found out about it. So their priority was not getting a big economic hit, not solving the issue.

This is a good post on what happened, but there are others like it if you want to dig deeper on how they tried to cover it up:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/coronavirus-dis...

I'll just copy these 2 paragraphs here to address your "China responded quickly" comment:

> To be sure, at first glance, China’s government has appeared to be more forthcoming about the latest outbreak. But, although the first case was reported on December 8, the Wuhan municipal health commission didn’t issue an official notice until several weeks later. And, since then, Wuhan officials have downplayed the seriousness of the disease and deliberately sought to suppress news coverage.

That notice maintained that there was no evidence that the new illness could be transmitted among humans, and claimed that no health-care workers had been infected. The commission repeated these claims on January 5, though 59 cases had been confirmed by then. Even after the first death was reported on January 11, the commission continued to insist that there was no evidence that it could be transmitted among humans or that health-care workers had been affected.

You broke the site guidelines badly with this comment. We ban accounts that do that, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.

HN is a highly international community. Someone having an opposing view to your own is evidence merely that the community is divided. People here need to assume good faith in the absence of some objective reason not to. Merely disliking what someone else says doesn't come close to an objective reason.

I've written a great deal about this if you or anyone want more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys what this site is supposed to exist for, so please don't do that.

> 'People here need to assume good faith in the absence of some objective reason not to. Merely disliking what someone else says doesn't come close to an objective reason.'

All this sounds good in theory, yet here I am on my second account after the first one 6 weeks ago was shadowbanned in less than 15 posts, simply for expressing my honestly held and well researched opinions.

Meanwhile I'm all the time seeing you on here busting various people's balls for the most ridiculous and trivial of things.

The person you replied to just now, while it's true that I don't agree with their comment (obviously they're wrong) they certainly ought to have the right to express their opinion. And the community as a whole has a right to see that opinion be expressed, to see the opinion itself and see the responses to it, so they can judge for themselves what is or is not the truth, without having a Nanny State/Government picking apart and criticizing every word someone writes.

You really need to lay off the bondage-and-discipline mod mentality. You're driving away good people from this site. Who the hell wants to stay in a place where they are constantly being nagged and harassed and even shadowbanned (one of the cruelest things that can be done to an online forum member) simply for having opinions? What is it about you personally that makes you so qualified to treat people this way?

Please don't do this here.

Internet users are far too quick to assume that someone who disagrees with them can't possibly be holding their views in good faith, and thus far too quick to reach for sinister explanations like communist propaganda. This projection mechanism is destructive of the discourse we want here, so there's a rule in the site guidelines that explicitly ask you not to do it. Please read them and please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

More explanation upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276554

Chinese government definitely doesn't have it easy on the internet. Whole host of conspiracy theorists were saying: wtf couple hundred infected why are they locking down cities and closing provinces - they must know something we don't. And now you get people saying they didn't do enough.

In this thread people are still sharing articles about how there akshually 10s thousands of dead and how the virus was intentionally released from a government lab. And at the same time surprised that the government arrested people spreading panic on social media.

It took them a month to recognize atypical viral pneumonia and report it to WHO. Another ~10 days to isolate the virus (no mean feat, read the paper) and sequence it. Here in the Netherlands people would be just sent home on paracetamol - I had a pneumonia couple years back so I speak from experience.

Did you forget about what they are doing to ethnic minorities right now? They are running literal concentration camps. Of course they don't have it easy on the internet.

For those interested in knowing more about this, from people that have lived in China for a long time, had families there, and have daily contact with others that still live there, I recommend these videos:

“Coronavirus: the lies and the truths” (29th of January) “Let’s look at a timeline of what’s happened to see how slowly it has been dealt with, and how the information was actively suppressed.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSIt496d82s&t=1m2s

“Coronavirus - Doctors arrested for revealing the truth” (31st of January) “So by now you’ve undoubtedly heard that, right in the beginning, a number of people were arrested for spreading rumors when they first tried to discuss the fact that there was a new virus going around in China. Turns out these people were all doctors.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=0m12s

Winston, the author of the second video, is in fact married to a Chinese doctor, and they keep in touch with their doctor friends in China. He also worked for years organizing training sessions for doctors all around China, so they both have direct knowledge about how those things work there and direct communication with people currently dealing with the situation on the ground.

They have more recent videos, but those two are the first ones I recommend watching. Their channels are: - laowhy86: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChvithwOECK5g_19TjldMKw - serpentza: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl7mAGnY4jh4Ps8rhhh8XZg - ADVChina (their joint channel): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNPa8fSXzzAZuT9859GVhg

Edit: a brief take on this from the BBC (4th of February): “... well, we know that some warnings were ignored or silenced. Let’s focus on this doctor, he was working at Wuhan central hospital and noticed seven cases that he thought looked like SARS (that’s a virus that led to a global epidemic in 2003) and in December he posted a warning about a potential outbreak in a chat group with fellow medics. Shortly afterwards he was summoned by Police and accused of making false statements, and being told he’d severely disturbed the social order. He was then given this document to sign. [...] «We solemny warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice - is that understood?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRggIb5Je_w&t=4m0s

This just in: that doctor that raised the first alarm and was silenced back in December has died from it:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178792.shtml

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1225440373880782848

Neither of those links are working for me right now... first one is “not found” and second one is “doesn’t exist”

Yes, both GlobalTimes and WHO just pulled those links, instead of posting a correction, after the authorities decided to plug him to an ECMO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen...) machine to defuse the massive uproar in China about his death, then had to declare him dead again.

Others like The Guardian updated their articles, keeping the URL, as the situation changed. After the announcement that he was being kept alive, they added a paragraph at the top of the article explaining that, and later when he was finally confirmed dead updated that note to simply say “Early reports of death of Li Wenliang were retracted, only for doctor to succumb to disease later in day”: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/whistleblower-...

Here's the actual news from Jan 1 reporting on the 8 "rumor spreaders". They kept emphasizing that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. It's pathetic to look at now. (sorry the article is in Chinese)

https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2020_01_01_530191.shtml?s=zw...

Todays FT also has a good article "Coronavirus: the cost of China’s public health cover-up" https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...

It's not a single "they". Yes, Wuhan/Hubei provincial authorities did the usual Chinese thing of covering up bad news so the Eye of Sauron over in Beijing wouldn't hear about it, and there's a great/depressing read about why over at [1] (TL;DR: big Communist Party summit). But once Xi/Sauron did catch on, their response -- total lockdown, building new hospitals, etc -- was both draconian and massive on a scale unimaginable in most democracies. Compare with (say) the shambolic response to Hurricane Katrina, where pretty much the opposite happened: pleas by local authorities were basically ignored by the central gov't until their hand was forced.

[1] http://chinamediaproject.org/2020/01/27/dramatic-actions/

I mean, if one is being reckless with fire and accidentally burned their own house down, but they managed to put it out before spreading to the neighbors. Can people really hail that person as a hero?

Where in my response am I hailing anybody as a hero?

My main point is that HN (including the original poster) seems to assume that the CCP is some all-seeing, perfectly coordinated entity, when it's actually 100 million people (!) and even party apparatchiks have wildly differing agendas and levels of competence.

Not sure if I am the original poster—but if I am—I don't see the CCP as some all-seeing, perfectly coordinated entity.

And I also agree with you—that you are on balance pretty fair.

Like you said—the response from Beijing was "draconian" and the provincial authorities couldn't stand to report the fact that "something was rotten in the state of Wuhan/Hubei."

Why? Because there are however some characteristics to this entity—which is basic disregard for humans as individuals and community and a desperate desire for sycophancy.

Alarmingly—the CCP disregard for individuals and community is spreading—and it's too often excused by people—like the poster below me who says "Event the US government the hurricane response wrong."

By casting a wide net—and lower our standard as humans. For example...

The Trump administration was wrong on purpose for the hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico because they have similar CCP-like viewpoints and motivations. In New Orleans, for Katrina—you had Ray Nagin as governor who has been convicted on several counts of fraud. These are all people who don't care to shoulder community and build it up—however slow and difficult it might be to reconcile. We need to raise the bar.

The place with the most antibodies to this kind of thinking are some places in Europe which try to appeal to our human instincts as opposed to fueling our "Animal Instincts" (and yes, I am referring to that mid-2000s book on US Stock Market people).

Nagin was mayor, not governor (although Blanco’s storm response was questioned by Bush too, to say nothing of her racist ads against Bobby Jindal)