On the contrary, setbacks for globalization may very well leave us better off...after all, globalization is one of the main factors why we're experiencing this deadly pandemic now, and have vast swathes of our supply chain for essential pharmaceuticals and medical equipment farmed out to evil, duplicitous regimes like the Chinese state.

Very one-sided take on globalization. Unless every country would completely close their borders the virus would have eventually spread everywhere anyway. While medical equipment is temporarily out of stock in some countries, globalization also guarantees that eventually each country will have access to the necessary equipment. Imagine living without global trade and expecting Afghanistan to create an industry for ventilators in a couple of months.

You're taking the other extreme and doing what you accuse the other person of doing: a one sided take.

Backpedaling on globalization doesn't necessarily have to mean going back to no globalization. It just means now being away for the drawbacks and accounting for them. No every country doesn't need to produce their own medical equipment, but enough will that consider it important to do so and have the internal demand to support it and that will create supply-chain optionality for those that don't produce their own supplies.

Every country that doesn't manufacturer their own equipment and supplies will be far better off when they have several countries they can source from.

> after all, globalization is one of the main factors why we're experiencing this deadly pandemic now

Not so. Pandemics travelled around the world before globalization. The black death, smallpox in the americas, syphllis.

This just increases the speed.

Speed is, however, an important factor in the severity of the impact.

In a given area, yes. But with globalization we also got forewarning, and information from those in earlier areas.

Under a less intertwined system, this likely would have spread heavily within each area, and that area would have little info form outside on what to do. Every place a potential Wuhan.

I'm not sure modern travel and globalization are the same thing. It only took a few travelers to spread to every state in the union. That doesn't have anything to do with global supply chians.

syphilis was also caused by globalization!

i hope many travel restrictions become permanent. ban cruises, make tourism difficult and expensive, cut off travel totally between the hemispheres. nature is being completely destroyed by human activity, this is an opportunity to reverse it.

If you're worried about the environment you can just add a carbon recapture tax to gas.

Banning travel between large areas is ridiculous and wouldn't happen. Especially when a policy of quarantine during outbreaks would be equally effective with a vastly smaller cost.

Quarantine completely failed to prevent what was a highly localized disease globally in 2 months. We need to accept it’s simply ineffective across international borders unless draconian measures are applied before they seem required. We might get through this with 100,000 people dying globally or 100,000,000 it’s completely unknown at this point. But, should the second happen expect some significant changes to happen for years if not decades.

PS: China’s case fatality rate broke 4%, though they likely undercounted cases by ~50% if not more.

What country even quarantined everyone coming in on a plane?

I might have been unclear, but I was suggesting quarantine for everyone coming in, as an alternative to banning travel forever.

Quarantine set up once you already have an outbreak is uh, a different matter.

Internal travel was suspended between several countries, though far to late to make a significant difference. A partial list: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/coronavirus-travel-bans/i...

Saying they waited to long is true, but simply means it fails due to politics.

Edit: NM, misunderstood what you where referring to.

Yeah, far too late. I mean the equivalent of locking things down in January, not March.

A total travel ban would also fail due to politics, so that's not a really helpful criteria.

I think the list of things that people believe are 'ridiculous and would never happen' has greatly reduced in size in the last few weeks.

Also, there's a lot more to environmental destruction than excess carbon.

Outside of fuel and labor, the resources spent to enable travel are quite minor. I don't think trying to stop carbon-neutral travel helps the environment in a meaningful way.

Us = the world/humanity, not the USA. China's economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, and it would not have happened without globalization.

Lifted millions out of poverty at the expense of millions of middle class American jobs. I believe globalization largely did not end up in the best interest of most Americans because the transfer of technology and manufacturing did not result in a new American ally, but rather a strategic competitor. For over a decade now we've seen a rift in the interests of the common people and the elites in the United States, which is why we've seen the resurgence of populism.

>China's economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty

Starting from the point of the great leap forward, yes there has been an improvement.

> our supply chain for essential pharmaceuticals and medical equipment farmed out to evil, duplicitous regimes like the Chinese state.

There's a legitimate discussion to be had about medical equipment supply chains, but describing China this way does a huge disservice to that discussion.

> They ... probably killed the doctors who blew the whistle on the cover-up. These are facts, not conjecture.

That's literally an example of conjecture.

The doctor who blew the whistle on the virus is dead now.

He's dead from the virus. Nobody murdered him.

He might very well still be alive if the Chinese government hadn't lied about and covered up the existence of the virus.

That's not killing. It's negligent and reprehensible, just like the trivialization of the disease's seriousness by the US president was negligent and reprehensible.

There will be many unnecessary deaths as a result of both leaders' inaction. That doesn't make it murder on either of their parts.

In the US at least, the dismantling of the public health systems in the name of efficiency is something that occurred in several previous administrations of both parties, backed by a public who supported those cuts in order to receive greater investment returns and lower taxes.

And what if POTUS was listening to the WHO experts who were parroting the lies of the CCP that human transmission wasn't happening, and then that even if it was an epidemic it wasn't a pandemic?

Furthermore in what way was the US public health system dismantled? The US was best suited to take on Coronavirus because of its significant number of ICU beds and the number of ventilators compared to the rest of the West. The unfortunate fact is that CDC's tests failed and that left the US flat-footed when it was otherwise better positioned to tackle the crisis than most.

It wasn't that he was listening to the WHO, it was that he was outright denying the severity and spreading misinformation implying the imminent availability of a vaccine. He's hasn't been a benign pass-through in the development of the situation:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/timeline-trump-covid19-res...

Okay, some local Wuhan officials covered up the initial reports, and they have been held accountable and fired since.

Saying China covered up the virus is like saying US is poisoning its people because some Flint officials were incompetent.

Remember, China is a big country, and its political system is not a simple extension of an authoritarian leader like what media tend to portray.