Once the threat was clear, the government of China acted much more alacrity and decisiveness than any Western country, which have had months of advance notice.
They were correct in threatening a doctor who reported what he saw (facts) to retract his statements as being _false_?
The local government didn't want to believe in the threat and wanted very much to keep any negative news hushed out of fear of looking bad to the central government.
So there you have it, a country governed by fear where people prefer to hide issues instead of quickly seeking help.
They could have done it through internal channels, without the public knowing but no, they crushed the messengers and tried to hide the facts until it was too late.
The central government admitted it itself: https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1506445-20200203.h...
That's for sure but there's a useful middle ground between mindless panic and total complacency, and these Chinese officials were way too far on the complacency side for quite some time.
They wouldn't threaten and silence numerous doctors that tried to warn everyone.
They wouldn't blockade access to one of the world's largest cities, to prevent outside health inspectors from assessing what was really going on. It wasn't until the first week of February that they were willing to let a major contingent of outside experts in, including from the US. That was two months into the outbreak and a point where things had already gotten very bad.
If this had started in France and the US asked to send experts in to help, France would not deny that request, they wouldn't blockade Paris off from all foreign access to hide what was really happening (how bad it was, and what they were doing to people).
And the tech press mocked "no handshakes" until less than a month ago.
Stupid knows no political party.
Sure our president is really downplaying it, but how do you even fight something that makes some people sick, and not others. There could be 1000s of carriers of COVID-19 who don't even know it.
It's a spectrum of stupid. Moscow Mitch is holding up financial relief because it's a good opportunity to stick it to Planned Parenthood.
"Nationalism is an ideology and movement that promotes the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people) especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity,[2] and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power (popular sovereignty)."
They did squash discussion of it.
Once the national government found out, they fired the local officials and lauded the doctor as a hero.
I'll admit, though, that I wouldn't trade my right to vote for a cure for the common cold, coronavirus, or anything else.
Look, this is a dangerous meme in more ways than one. Italy and Spain managed to lock down entire cities, and those are countries with a strong tradition of democracy. Emergency powers, martial law etc. are a thing, and there's even quite a bit of precedent for using them to deal w/ disease outbreaks. Even in the US.
In constitutional monarchy the monarch is Head of State, a figurehead role with no real personal power. Because monarchs are born not elected this figurehead has no semblance of democratic legitimacy, it's obvious to everyone that they shouldn't get any power, yet as a symbol they are long-lived and emphasise continuity even as political change happens around them.
Elected Politicians on the other hand actually run the legislature and executive government.
That is, the laws you obey are made by people you elected to make them, but at times of crisis the living symbol of your country isn't some politician roughly half the country doesn't like.
This works so much better than the US system that Americans charged with trying to make new countries or fix broken ones (after "regime change" for example) do not follow the US model for many decades. If you're an optimist, the US model worked once and maybe they got lucky. If you're a pessimist we're just waiting for the cracks to get bad enough that it falls apart.
You can't support that claim. Historically - all of recorded history - there are less than half a dozen examples that can be argued to be comparable to or to have systems that are more stable than the US over two centuries of time.
Go ahead and list all the constitutional + democratic systems that have lasted for more than two centuries. The European region barely had any democracies as recently as WW1. Here is what that looks like:
https://i.imgur.com/fnJNjIn.png
Now go back to 1850 or 1900. How many were there? So where do you plan to get your data from, to support your premise on stability?
There is long-term instability inherent in all functioning monarchy systems: the source of that instability is that people frequently don't like them, which is why nations have spent the last few hundred years gradually abandoning or neutering monarchy systems. Most of what remains is a cultural trinket. It's why the monarchy in the UK is little more than a facade, a figurehead; it has no real governing power or position, it is of relatively little political consequence and probably never will be again. Even including the UK in this, is a questionable data point because of that. What does the Queen do? Answer: not much, she is nothing more than a quaint cultural nod to the past at this point.
In fact the US has the opposite problem. Its system of government tends to produce too much stability and not enough dynamism (which is what the argument for many political parties is arguing in favor of). That stability often means the US moves slower on reforms and its system is highly resistant to change. Those are the trade-offs inherent in having greater stability.
Plenty of countries especially in Latin America copied this choice and it didn't work for them. I think the evidence supports the conclusion that's because it's a bad choice.
The danger was sufficiently known, sufficiently early.
Those sounding the alarm were silenced.
In the early stages in Wuhan the virus only existed in Wuhan. A severe lockdown that eliminated the virus there would have eliminated it completely. Full stop. It would have been gone forever.
A draconian lockdown right now in e.g. the UK, or even a few weeks ago, might have eliminated the virus in the UK, but then it would just come back in again. We can’t seal the entire country permanently.
Even in Wuhan, they are easing the lockdown so soon the virus will get back into Wuhan again. It’s just a matter of time before they have another outbreak. It’s simply impossible that it won’t happen.
Lockdowns are important tools to slow the spread of the virus, they are a vital part of our response, but they can only slow it down. They cannot stop it or eliminate it. Also lockdowns are most effective the first time you do them, and then they’re the most effective in the first few weeks.
Impose a heavy lockdown too soon, and it’s like using up your most powerful ammunition before the enemy is in effective range of your weapons. Letting the enemy get closer might mean accepting casualties early on, but fewer casualties overall and a better chance of victory. It’s a hard, painful choice to have to take.
Besides Italy did start to apply lockdown measures to specific towns, and closed schools when they had 20 cases. It was insufficient but at least it was an attempt. The US has had clusters out of control in Washington state for almost as long and the federal agencies were actually trying to silence them. And another in NYC, which is basically the economic powerhouse of the United States.
And it should've been clear with all the data we had that it would be. Don't get me wrong, I don't think any of the other western countries does it right. Italy got unlucky because it was the first country where shit hit the fan. Might as well have been Germany if they wouldn't have gotten lucky in stopping the spread from their Bavaria case. But I fully stand by my point anyways that no country in the west did a good job, and points like yours are weak excuses at best, since it basically boils down to "well we're delaying taking down our economy a bit and make sure the rest of Europe suffers too, so we're not as ducked in comparison to them." There's certainly some logic to that, but it shows how shallow our advanced civilized world really is.
FWIW I totally agree.
> Might as well have been Germany if they wouldn't have gotten lucky in stopping the spread from their Bavaria case.
Yes, that's what Italy was hoping to do. They didn't realize how contagious this thing is.
Uh, China dropped the ball for a full 3 months since the first reports of a novel respiratory disease started back in November. First denying it, then jailing the doctors who tried to raise the alarm. Not to mention not enforcing their own laws regarding food hygiene put in place after SARS which would have prevented the transmission in the first place.
Yeah, they're now showing containment measures that work. But they could have stopped this in its tracks before going global, or prevented it entirely.
Too little, too late.
The Doctor wasn't jailed ...
The virus was spread at the market. It didn't start at the market.
Until we know where it started we don't know if it would have stopped the virus or not.
Talking about the origin of this virus, this paper of 2015 is quite interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 . In this paper, the wuhan P4 institute people basically described how they produced a prototype of the 2019 wuhan virus.
He is/was also a member of the CCP.
Without information about how this letter was prepared and signed among these people in detail, my hypothesis stands.
The virus came from bats. The "wildlife market" in question sold raw bat meat. How else would it have gotten there?
They eat lots of animals but bats are not one of them. (I'm sure there is a village in China where they do eat bats. It is a big country.)
The photos you see online of Chinese people eating bats are Tourist in the Pacific.
But this particular part of China does. It's more a subculture derived from one of the minority groups in that province, but it's there.
The original hypothesis was that some other animal sold at the market acted as an intermediate host between bat and human, just like the case in 2003 SARS, but this is also not proven.
Any delays by other 1st world countries after 31st Dec are largely their own fault.
If you have 3 people and one slips on a patch of ice and falls you could argue they should understand how ice works and should have been more careful, but if you have 2 other people see that person fall and they blithely walk across the ice and also fall, who should you judge more harshly?
For me personally, I'm going with the people who saw the result of the first event and then followed the same path.
Let’s put it this way, other countries have had a full 2 months of warning and preparation time and they are also dropping the ball.
Chinese Economy? Is the gain worth all the environmental damage and pollution everywhere?
If CCP gov is like the other political entity, would it when having a SARS outbreak in 2003, make an even bigger one like wuhan virus outbreak and do even worse cover up to spread it around the world?
It happened on the 31st of Jan. I think that was before Taiwan stop, but I'm not 100% sure.
China dropped the ball for a full 10 days back when the disease was nicely contained to a small part of Wuhan, and then largely to Wuhan itself and Hubei - they didn't let the population know about the danger, so for quite some time no one was thinking about protecting themselves by wearing masks, social distancing etc. But the trouble is, Italy then made the exact same mistake by being late with containment measures, and now the UK and US are doing the same. So there's nothing to roll one's eyes or raise eyebrows about.