Basically I don't expect the west to be able to react to this any better if it gets big. Their populations are uncontrollable (for mostly good reason) but in this particular case that feature will turn out to be bug.
Look at Italy right now.
> Or will instead, in the interest of "the economy" (ie, money) keep too light a hand on things.
Sure, but this has nothing to do with authoritarian states vs democracy. You'll find a ton of authoritarian states doing exactly the same. It's just a matter of who's the ruling class, and in most places in the world (100% of liberal democracies but also most authoritarian states), it's the business owners, so of course they will try and save their business before their people.
> Basically I don't expect the west to be able to react to this any better if it gets big. Their populations are uncontrollable (for mostly good reason) but in this particular case that feature will turn out to be bug.
Western people aren't uncontrollable. The one who are, are the one who are pissed of by their plutocratic governments and have lost all faith in them. I'm pretty convinced that Switzerland will be fine, and I'm not surprised Italy is in the same kind of shit than Iran.
I'm French, and we've been lucky so far, but I expect chaos when it's going to start. The government has long lost all political legitimity here, and people absolutely distrust them, so I don't think they will not peacefully comply to government attempt to limit the propagation.
When or if this hits the US or elsewhere in Europe, and it becomes obvious that despite the quarantine in Italy, the virus still continued to spread, they will question the measures being taken. As time goes on, the West will become critical of government response and may be difficult to control.
In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.
Here is the other thing with Italy: differently from other neighbor countries, they have been testing people without symptoms.
Numbers: until February the 24th, Italy performed ~8500 tests (mostly on people without symptoms, but that were in contact with confirmed SARS-CoV-2-infected patients), while UK did ~6500 (focused on people with influenza-like symptoms), Germany ~1000 and France ~500.
This is better from a safety point of view (you get to discover all problematic patients earlier and you can quarantine them before they spread the infection even more). But is makes "your stats look worse" (cit. The wire) because now you look like the epicenter of the infection.
Guess what? The testing method has now been changed ("aligned") to what the other countries are doing, so that the numbers do not look that much worse.
Source: https://www.ilpost.it/2020/02/25/tamponi-coronavirus-italia-...
How is this relevant? For all we know, they might have only tested 200 people by 22nd, when the panic (quarantine, news) first started.
Sigh, this is so cliché… I don't know where you're from, but the “west” as the unified entity you describe doesn't exist. When it comes to authority and how people comply with the rules, France and Germany are more different than China and the US.
This is a different matter, people will comply for their own safety. If goverments or other agencies send the right message things could be okay imo.
How so?
> in England, everything which is not forbidden is allowed, in France, everything is allowed even if it is forbidden
Can speak of Hamburg for about 15 years now, and since maybe about 10 years i have the feeling that at least 50% of traffic participants are absolutely insane, again no matter which mode.
Isn't slowing it the best we can hope for? I mean, I'd rather the pandemic slowly take its course so that there's maximum chance a ventilator will be available if I need one when I get it in six months time. If everyone gets it on the same day.....
If containment slows the virus then it might be wise to slow the virus if any of the following is true:
1. You expect to develop some treatment for it.
2. You think a slowly growing group of infected will allow you to study the infected and possibly discover a treatment (related to 1 but not exactly the same)
3. The virus is not expected to be a problem in the summer.
4. A slowly spreading virus means that you can better ramp up your facilities to take care of the infected. (related to 1 and 2)
Work on SARS resulted in cadidate vaccines, but was abonded before human trials because of succsefull containment.
Work on MERS resulted in a vaccine that is currently showing succsess in humans.
Work on SARS-COVID-2 is starting from those, and already has canditate vaccines based on modifying ones we know showed signs of success against other corona virus.
Maybe this will turn out to be another HIV, where a virus proves ellusive, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that.
There's a bit of a description there about why this approach is different.
<sarc />I guess that's how we in the USA managed to reject the TSA full-body scanners and pat-downs.
It seems to me that most of us complained a lot, the government ignored us, and we knuckled under and complied.
this is immensely racist btw
No, they do not. Chinas propaganda machine just tells you they do. That is why china- even with all its measures couldnt clamp down. Behind the waver thin authoritarian theater presented lurks the same chaos as in africa and india.
Didn't make them right about what?
>The fact that millions of people are still racists nowadays doesn't mean we should accept that either.
You do have to share a country with them, and may rely on them some day to save your skin, so it would probably be a good idea for you to treat them like equals, unless you're looking for a civil war.
>Hopefully, Nazis will be defeated in the long run, but it looks quite far ahead of us unfortunately.
What does that even mean? There are no Nazis today. There's a tiny smattering of people that go around playing dress-up, probably mostly undercover government agents or informants, but the NSDAP is a defunct political organization.
Interestingly enough, this argument works equally well for immigrants. Some fascists have no problem with the idea of a civil war in that context though…
> You do have to share a country with them, and may rely on them some day to save your skin, so it would probably be a good idea for you to treat them like equals, unless you're looking for a civil war.
See I actually think that it's a good thing to call for, say , "stamp out racism". Cause I don't think it's real healthy for a population to just accept racism because, well, you gotta share a country with them.
Would you say this if you believed there was an actual possibility that, one day the target of their racism would be you?
Just imagine that you're living in your country, born there etc, but the brewing racist population happens to not include your particular ethnic group, and it may not be right now, but there is really no reason why they would not continue being racists, well you know, they per definition don't like sharing a country with anyone.
Everywhere in the world and history where such a situation occurred, it happened with some amount of tension and suffering (ranging from economic inequality to holocaust).
I can only imagine someone saying "well they may be racist but you gotta share a country with them" if they were certain to expect to come out on top, given such tensions.
There will also be groups that come out on the bottom, badly. But apparently it doesn't matter if you treat them as equals and share a country with them?
> There are no Nazis today. There's a tiny smattering of people that go around playing dress-up, probably mostly undercover government agents or informants, but the NSDAP is a defunct political organization.
While you are technically correct about the NSDAP ...
I think you're underestimating the amount of neonazis today. Not all of them are quite as on-the-nose with their logo as these guys, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(political_party)#...
#/media/File:Meandros_flag.svg){kind=link}
These are not just people playing dress-up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(political_party)#...
Does stamping out racism to you involve preventing people from freely and equally participating in the political process? By which I mean being able to utilize the same means to advocate for their interests and political beliefs as any other law-abiding group would be - able to gather in public spaces without fear of physical retaliation, able to utilize the services of major companies that provide electronic resources like payment processing and social media communication and other internet services, and things of that nature.
>Would you say this if you believed there was an actual possibility that, one day the target of their racism would be you?
Yes, I would still say what I have said.
>Just imagine that you're living in your country, born there etc, but the brewing racist population happens to not include your particular ethnic group
Certainly I would not want to share a country with people that thought that way about me. You must be able to rely on your countrymen in times of serious crisis, and obviously I could not rely on those people. I would advocate for physically removing them if I believed that they posed an existential threat to people of my ethnicity and if I believed that such a removal would be feasible. If it was not feasible due to their numbers or influence or whatever I would get out of there for my own safety.
What I would not want under any circumstances is for them to remain in my country but be prevented from advocating for their perceived interests in the same way that everyone else is able, or in other words for them to see that the interests of others are being openly and plainly put ahead of their own perceived interests - if they are not themselves able to advocate for their perceived interests, why should they trust anyone else to further their interests for them, least of all people that are preventing them from advocating for those interests? That is a recipe for civil war, and that is the outcome I would most seek to avoid if I believed they were too powerful to be physically removed.
>but there is really no reason why they would not continue being racists
How many people are you talking about? Enough to influence the outcomes of a democratic government?
>Everywhere in the world and history where such a situation occurred, it happened with some amount of tension and suffering (ranging from economic inequality to holocaust).
What do you think that telling certain people that they can't advocate for their interests using the same means as everyone else is going to do to tensions?
>I think you're underestimating the amount of neonazis today. Not all of them are quite as on-the-nose with their logo as these guys, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(political_party)#....
A neo-nazi is not a Nazi, and only the dress-up types actually call themselves neo-nazis.
Neither fascists nor Muslim terrorists deserve those rights. And if you say it's not comparable, please reminds that for the past 12 months, there has been more terror attacks committed by white racists than Muslim jihadists in Western countries.
Some manifestations of it are in some jurisdictions. How is that an issue with my reasoning?
>You're talking about freedom, but for good reason you wouldn't give the jihadists the rights you're claiming. Neither fascists nor Muslim terrorists deserve those rights.
Do you want a civil war against these "fascists"?
>And if you say it's not comparable, please reminds that for the past 12 months, there has been more terror attacks committed by white racists than Muslim jihadists in Western countries.
How many white racists do you think there are in Western countries?
Ideally, we put ourselves into a situation where it's not a matter of 'giving rights', but removing the ability to remove the ability for people to communicate from people.
You aren't implying anything racist are you?
BTW I way less worried about thugs than about antivax mums and other fakemeds enthusiasts believing about conspiracy theory involving “big pharma”.
Many of mine were also flagged, despite me being extremely polite.
Where do you get that? All I suggested was you express your opinion clearly, rather than euphemistically.
If people in some society like the way their society is, more or less, why should they want to import a whole bunch of people that think very differently from them, who will make their society very different in a way that they are not interested in it becoming? How would that benefit them?
I don't know if you're using this argument to convince the 'normies', and actually you don't like brown people because they frighten you, or if you actually believe it. People often believe in self-contradictory things, but then again, people with unwarranted self-regard often think they can convince other people with obvious nonsense. Perhaps a bit of both?
That doesn't mean you have to want people who happen to think very differently to come in. You can like the fact that people in your country are free to think how they like, and also like the fact that most of them happen to like to think certain ways.
>people with unwarranted self-regard often think they can convince other people with obvious nonsense.
Projecting?
You really have no choice but to phrase yourself in a way that's only recognizable to the in-crowd. Even here, with the polite expression, he is catching flak.
Personally, I don't discuss politics in real life anymore. Risks are too great. Just the Internet, where on some forums (not this one), you can be honest about what you think.
The first few weeks of an outbreak are absolutely crucial, and the Chinese authorities actively obstructed efforts to address the issue in that period precisely because of their authoritarian system.
So what country gave China info from the start? Japan and SK had a lot more info with regard to the disease (human to human transmission, asymptotic transmission, 14 days incubation period, hell even the RNA sequence was done on the virus) than what China had at the beginning.
Having more info once contaminated people got reported doesn't change the fact that weeks went by with potential carriers spreading everywhere unchecked.
The situation for other countries is completely different. Someone could fly into Japan right now from anywhere in the world carrying the contagion at any time. It was brought into Japan by multiple carriers at different times and different places. You can contain one incoming source, and three more will spring up. It's a completely different problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/26/the-re...
What?
The great circle distance between Koltsovo Airport (USSS) and Wuhan Tianhe International Airport (ZHHH) is 5000km:
* http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?&DU=km&P=USSS-ZHHH
And here I thought you were serious... until I looked at a map.
Why do you think it comes from Koltsovo, in Russia?
Why are conspiracy theories so irresistible to so many people?
There's also evidence that people with lower levels of schooling particularly like conspiracy because it allows them to make sense of a chaotic world. Instead of feeling powerless and hopeless, they have a truth not even the smart and powerful have.
It is of course not true, but therein lies the appeal.
He tells you that he knows people in the chines government and other stuff.
You know what the problem here is? You just don't know who is posting.
Koltsevo-Harbin route was used regularly by tourists.
>Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls?
So Yes.
I'd guess the UK government have told them not to report quarantine in order to keep the UK population calmer.
You are poorly informed. The Italian government did precisely that this weekend.
This will be hard for the average person to understand, and people think much more critically in the West.
Historically they haven't been proven particularly tough to lock down, stir up by authoritarians (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc), be surveilled, sold lies, and so on...
As for those "obedient" Chinese, they got this authoritarian party they have today by doing a whole revolution thing first...
>people think much more critically in the West.
That's what uncritical westerners are told...
People are actually eager to be told to stay home and not go to work. They don't have to be forced. Especially if it's for their safety.
From what I've seen, the majority of the people anywhere don't think very critically.
I'm not sure if you just haven't heard of these things or if you're intentionally ignoring them to make a point.
Wearing masks, avoiding crowded places, maintaining good hygiene, staggering work hours, working from home and stocking up on supplies.
I mean, where does this idea come from that people need a dictator or they’re completely lost and as you’re saying, freedom in this case is a bug?
You might find because people have access to free information and good services means they can look after themselves and they just might ?
this is childish. "the economy" is the thing that makes everything you have, and the food you eat and medicines you need. there's very good reason to not just turn it all off.
I guess a lot of "what if it started in another country" scenarios can be debated, ranging from "another government wouldn't cover up the real situation so the virus would be quickly contained" to "western governments wouldn't have the balls to quickly enact proper quarantine measures so the virus would spread much more quickly" but is it really productive? At this point these debates are pure speculation.
Honestly my main concern in the United States is the complete and utter panic that will be caused by something that is only marginally less dangerous than getting in one's car to go to work each morning.
A government concerned with "not screwing up" can at times take drastic "emergency" measures with an overly cautious basis (at best) and with malintent (at worst), and we should be skeptical and continue to push for reasons for any actions. I don't see how this turns out to be a bug. They can have more impact on peoples actions with a press conference presenting skewed data than with any sort of attempt at straight-up bans or enforced quarantines.
If the fatality rate of COVID-19 is 2% as feared, that is dramatically more dangerous than getting in your car every morning.
The flu kills somewhere around 20-30k Americans every year. The common flu has a fatality rate of around .1%. So for something that is potentially 20 times as deadly, we're looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. By contrast, car accidents only kill around 35k Americans per year.
I'm really hoping we get more data on this so we can figure out what's happening. With the lack of testing / confirmation and light symptoms it must be impossible for our science community to track things right now.
> [..] played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.
Diverting a sensitive topic to a false-equivalence seems to be a go-to tactic of those in favor of China (Chinese government to be precise, the actual Chinese people are the biggest victims here).
I would have had to go to a convention/trade show in Paris next week, but luckily it got postponed for two months. So far people are getting more cautious.
Between the two standard criticisms "too little, too late" and "unnecessary panic" there is very little margin, especially in public opinion.
Here in Germany, people are starting to stock up on supplies, which is reasonable unless they completely plunder the supermarkets. Otherwise, it's all wait-and-see over here. Of course it doesn't help that Europe is also in the midst of flu season...
Institutions in developed countries are far better equipped to deal with this level of crisis than China has been. Australia, where I'm from, has had infections since mid Jan but has been able to effectively quarantine people and prevent community transmission thus far.
I'm scared that it will become a lot worse than that. The pandemic gives them a real-life stress test and lessons to harden the surveillance state and further improve technical controls and tweak the technology to become more effective. It's another step on the road to integrating and normalizing intrusive and outrageous ideas for government to retain control. (-> both in China and the West!)
From the videos I watched from Chinese pigs (aka LE) in uniforms beating old people not wearing a mask and welding the doors shut of giant apartment blocks where people live like ants (or slaves), I tell myself this will not happen in the West. Then I look at our current research and Europe's own ambition to create a central biometrics database (along with tweets from the UK LE which ask you to report anything people see online that may look like terror and all I think is "STASI!" neighborhood watch. These days I see a uniform and my first reaction is disgust mixed with fear, the sort of claustrophobic feeling normally only Orwell brings up in me.
I get that quarantine laws (locking people in their homes, issuing a curfew, rations etc) can be harsh but important to combat a deadly problem. But looking at the authorities in charge in the West I wouldn't trust them for a second and think it's also a play with fire. There are lots of edge-cases everywhere for this to be a massive human rights violation (elderly care facilities, prisons, migrants, the homeless, and more power to the rigged justice systems and corrupt EU institutions and generally everyone already wielding lots of power)
The CDC and WHO have utterly failed. Why are there no hand-outs of free face-masks and other PPE - oh because there are no stocks! - instead the problem is downplayed (by both WHO and the dear leaders). Why is there no transparency (constant news) about how many people an individual country is testing? Oh because we don't have adequate testing right now. Instead medical professionals were arguing on France24 yesterday whether the game between Juventus/Lyon should go ahead and they felt that they're not qualified to make a statement on a complex subject like this. Instead Italy and other countries are reminding us not to press the panic button just yet and media should be "more responsible in their reporting".
CDC and WHO are probably not perfect but saying they "utterly failed" because you're angry over not getting a free face mask is a bit disrespectful toward the many people their working their asses off in times like these.
my partner is a health care professional and there aren't enough masks for them (this is central Europe btw). but yeah tell me about how hard they work and how I don't appreciate them.
Having said that, I don't think it's the responsibility of the WHO to distribute masks to health professionals like your partner.
Whether they should or not is a different story.
So it looks like perhaps they have stockpiled. Until there's no recommendation to wear masks, any shortages are just private businesses that have run out. No failure of govt or WHO.
it's the CDC's who acts on advise and recommendations made by the WHO. The WHO has in 2018 warned about a disease X[1], so the CDC and local health ministries would have had 2 years to prioritize and make sure there are enough stocks for PPE in the country. It's not only about the masks for a theoretical pandemic that may or may not play out. There are shortages in other areas as well on a daily basis which are more complex and require structural cahnges. Take Germany as an example that hires Eastern Europeans as health-care workers (mostly for disabled people and elderly facilities) with salaries of ~€600-€800/month where they are placed on contracts from Slovenia and Poland to avoid paying the local insurance. (so some of the people working in healthcare can be put on crazy shifts under what is for EU standards a slave-labor condition). I won't even mention the health-care facilities in Croatia, Romania, Slovenia where elderly facilities buy drugs illegally because they want to pocket the difference, or where somebody who is hired as a nurse has actually never had any training as a nurse.
I know of some elderly care facilities in Croatia which are run by a lovely Albanian couple that branched out into this (their other businesses is bars/cafes). The wife of the entrepreneur/owner drives a fat Mercedes and goes on holidays to Paris, but the residents are lying in their own shit and swallow counterfeit drugs - also their employees are paid cash because they are usually elderly women themselves who have a lot of private debt - so this is the only way for them to survive.
This isn't whataboutism but an example of the places which won't stand a chance when this disease really hits. They aren't rare either, we just don't see them because it's disgusting and easier to look away.
As you said the price of masks has increased (in my experience by a factor of 10x !!) because people see an opportunity.
That there are no facemasks available to the general public is a result of people plundering the stocks of private businesses.
European disease control agencies aren't even recommending that people wear masks. Until they do and they can't provide any I don't see any failures on their part.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use...
Yes, but given the incubation period and so on, how do you know you don't have the virus?
I'm not going to wear a mask in Central Europe (at least not yet) but I probably would in Asia just in order to not be selfish.
They aren't perfect because you still need proper technique when removing them and they "leak" along the sides etc. Still better than nothing, especially in crowded places.
They may help you to minimize the spread if you are already sick, sneezing and coughing. Droplets are big enough to be stopped by mask. This is actually the reason why surgeons are wearing masks in the first place - not to contaminate the patient.
Unless we are talking about something more advanced. Like above mentioned N95.
The key insight, though, is that water droplets carry viruses; viruses can travel through masks, but they can't travel by themselves without hitching a ride on a water droplet.
This is why flu season is during the cold winter, when there isn't enough heat to instantly evaporate the moisture in the air. And this is why even a regular surgical mask can offer some protection for a healthy wearer.
I have asthma, and even a few hours of wearing a procedural mask, let alone an N95 mask are very taxing. Maybe for brief periods in public... But sweat transmitted by hand onto a surface is enough. Sewage in a building is enough to infect residents that don't otherwise encounter each other.
While this may not be beautiful and might be slightly less effective than a standard surgical mask, it should be good enough unless one is spending significant time inside with infected, coughing folks. In which case one should be doing more than just wearing a face mask. My 2c.
(Source: Family member who worked in the operating theater for 30+ years.)
That's a pretty bold statement. As someone who grew up in a less-well-off part of the world where medical supplies were not always available I have personally seen makeshift masks made and used by both doctors (rarely) and visiting relatives (more frequently).
The key problem with homemade masks is durability -- they do fail much quicker than a professional surgical mask that lasts many hours. But then, unless you are a medical professional, you do not need to wear them for hours. Wearing one in the open air environment is almost always an overkill.
First link that comes for me (below), when Googling for evidence, seems to indicate that homemade masks in some small trial were worse than professional but still pretty decent (1 hour with homemade ~ 3 hours with professional mask), although I barely skimmed it and might have misunderstood the results.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t...
This sort of editorializing immediately makes your whole opinion moot.
If this is how you talk about people you don’t know it’s unlikely your opinion is valid or even remotely unbiased in any other regard.
Additionally using epithets and dehumanization of any group no matter what they've done is a road to more hate and violence and will never resolve anything. I find it pretty ironic that some on the left are ok with insults and dehumanization as long as it's of the right group of people that they've deemed "undesirable" even if that group of people really should stop what they're doing, using insults and animal comparisons is a road that takes you right back to what they claim to be fighting.
This got kinda long winded and preachy...
tl;dr calling cops "pigs" is a slur like any other and will only cause more problems.
... is also the kind of editorialising we don't need, when describing political views that don't align yours.
Shall we stop, or what?
The other pigs I met were happy to take bribes and one (in Ireland) even bragged about how much he loved to use his pepper spray every time he gets a chance (he rarely does).
fwiw, pigs in colloquial english is not just a slur but silly slang, unless you are bold enough to call a whole class of blue-collar people (who hate pigs) problematic. Maybe read Orwell (Animal Farm) or the later Irvine Welsh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filth_(novel)
Never ever trust a uniform whatever country you're in. Btw I also do consulting for LE and the "sane" ones usually don't deny that they have a problem with racism. I'm not even talking about the videos from China where people get beaten with sticks or dogs get clubbed to death by men in blue while their colleagues are laughing before they move on to terrifying citizens.
I don't think getting upset about what is "natural language" in blue collar surrounding is going to do any good. I know the pigs are OK with it. (watch out for those who are not though)
Great.
There are some indications of officials playing down the threat and lying, but this was also reversed quickly by higher levels of the same authoritarian government. Did this lying have a significant impact, more so than presumably-less lying in South Korea and Italy, that resulted in the same order-of-magnitude in explosion of cases, even though the world media was already on high alert?
Don't be so overconfident at fitting world events and a few selected media stories into your prejudicial ideological convictions.
The quarantine came in too little too late to control the situation in Wuhan, and only helped to contain the virus in other provinces of China, not fully contain it.
The people infected in Hubei are at about 60k or so now. Actually slightly lower. Were you trying to say something else??
60k is pretty impressive considering all the other apocalyptic "worse case" scenarios being published in various academic journals a few weeks ago based on "conservative models".
And 60k is not pretty impressive considering that many people already died without a proper diagnosis and was not included in the official counts. There is no trust that the reported numbers are reflective of the situation on the ground - in fact it is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
> There is no trust that the reported numbers are reflective of the situation on the ground - in fact it is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
The numbers are confirmed test cases, which will always be an underestimate of the true situation regardless of the government supplying the numbers. There's no indication to suggest that it's the "tip of the iceberg" especially since the "current case" numbers have been consistently decreasing for the past several weeks.
It rather seems that you've been so convinced by the sheer amount of anti-Chinese-government-propaganda, that even positive facts can't change your prejudice that everything they do is negative.
That's not to say other countries will fare much better. But China had by far the best chance at containment, and they blew it. And the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout.
I explained in my comment - the sudden increase in cases in Wuhan in January, was not that much worse that what we're seeing in S Korea, Iran and Italy right now. These latter countries are also less dense than Wuhan, and also had plenty of warning time. Nobody was imprisoned in Italy, yet despite that we still have several hundred cases today. This suggests that this single imprisonment didn't have a huge effect on the epidemic in Wuhan.
> by far the best chance at containment
What does it mean to have a "chance" at containment, and what makes one "chance" "better" than another "chance"??
> the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout
If you acknowledge there's a possibility that no "other countries will fare much better", why maintain such an accusatory tone? No government can control where an epidemic starts.
By your logic, if the epidemic had started in the US, the government would be at fault if it prevented the epidemic from spreading to any other countries? Is that what you're saying? That's an extremely high bar, probably unrealistic.
This doesn’t address the commenter’s claim that China did the best job of completely shutting their infrastructure down and quarantining the virus effectively. They did make their bed, but they also laid in it as well.
The lesson from WW2 should have been that people are all the same when pushed to extremes. This includes the people who make up the communist party leadership in China and every moral philosoher in the west as well.
My armchair belief is that China has ended up absorbing at a global scale, all of capitalism’s externalities. It is an integral part of the world that gives us many things we take for granted like cheap iphones and many others. We do NOT have the convenience to look away and scapegoat one aspect without taking into consideration the whole.
This ended up kinda ranty but every time coronavirus is used to bring up something whose purpose is to draw an “us vs them” line between the world and China I want to throw something.
A couple of my friends kid me about it, but I meditate almost every day for world peace and the reduction of suffering in the world. It can’t hurt and it makes me feel more connected to the world at large. I live in a small town, volunteering at the local food bank is one of my favorite activities, but I tend to think too much about just local life. I have a difficult time getting too excited about national/global politics, etc. Meditation on peace is the most effort I put into the global situation.
Look at any government institution in the US - despite not having a profit motive, there are still plenty of incentives to grow the budget - increased influence in the government, funding pet projects,etc.
And not to mention shutting down a hospital likely means lost wages for a lot of people.
Yes, I'd expect them to be overridden in times of emergency, but nonetheless - do Japanese hospitals really have scope to spend at will without constraints?
But in this case we'll see. China's problems don't end if they successfully contain the outbreak to Wuhan. Eventually everyone else will get sick too and re-infect the chinese via other roads.
The time when Chinese doctors screamed there is something wrong but instead being helped were downplayed or even threatened would be enough to prevent it from snowballing it to the size we face today.
It may well seem that way in retrospect. When it does, just remember that those same authoritarian governments are the ones who played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.