The POTUS was still publicly pushing the coronavirus = flu comparison in early March even after we saw what happened in Iran and Italy. Remember, he said on February 28 that being worried about the coronavirus was “their new hoax” from the media and his political opponents, so he himself recognized his political opponents were pointing out the severity by late February.

Edit: i don’t want to get too deep in the politics with this, I do agree with your ultimate point that most won’t learn from this and will simply return to their team’s side regardless of who got this one more right.

Now you're splitting hairs. You know who the first politician in the USA who was banging the drums in alarm about Wuhan and the coronavirus? Tom Cotton. Republican Senator. Do you support him now? Does his early conviction of the severity of this event put you behind him and everyone who echoed his concerns? Are you likewise now opposed to the people who were ridiculing him as a conspiracy theorist and fear-monger?

I think that’s great, I don’t agree with all their politics but they didn’t let themselves be blinded by optimism and looked at what was actually going on here. And the theory that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab where they were studying bat coronaviruses always seemed credible to me (Reminder, the 1977 flu likely escaped from a Russian or Chinese lab but this was never admitted either).

The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought (Hannity, etc.) Edit: again, he was calling it “their new hoax” so you really can’t deny that he was behind on this one :-)

How did you come to that conclusion? What about the Democrats in New York, which is the epicenter of the virus outbreak right now (certainly the US and probably the world)? I remember hearing someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close.

This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. Without those programs, many students have little to eat at home. It's a little disingenuous to represent it in another light. If anything, it highlights yet another weakness in our society.

But did people die because of that decision? Probably. Maybe a lot.

Tough calls. It comes down to who made those tough calls earlier. And that's not a partisan thing, or a smart/dumb thing.

Plenty of bad decisions to go around, but we probably shouldn't lay the blame to thick anywhere. Because it's chaos and people are adapting and changing in real time.

Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people and he has to shut down the state to slow down the virus. I guarantee he's going to be a different person in 12 months.

“The next minute” is off by something more than 6 orders of magnitude.

You kind of skipped over ~4.2 million minutes he spent as Lieutenant Governor between those jobs.

California schools pretty much immediately set up daily meal pickup when they closed (often, for anyone under 18 at any school site.) And this was already happening when they said that.

Now WaPo seems to be admitting that we should at least consider the possibility that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://archive.vn/UP6dx#selection-1801.148-1801.176

(To be clear, Tom Cotton himself says the bio-weapon thing was just a hypothesis[1].)

[1] https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126

On the other hand the fact that they were researching bat coronaviruses in the lab in the city where the outbreak began certainly is suggestive of a possible lab accident. I doubt we’ll ever find certainty of this though just like the 1977 outbreak of H1N1. Not impossible it’s just a coincidence either (after all SARS and MERS jumped to humans without any help).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-...

However, I will note that a colleague of mine saw the virology institute's location change on Google Maps around this time. Free software legend Eric S Raymond mentioned this on his blog as well [4].

I'm pretty sure the Google Maps thing is a sign that the Chinese leadership heard these bioweapon rumors, and figured the best way to combat them was to require Google to lie about the institute's reported location.

There are plenty of ridiculous rumors on the Internet, why would the Chinese government react so strongly to this particular one?

It could be because the Chinese leadership has something they're trying to hide. But in China things are often censored all over the place with little rhyme or reason as well. "We know this rumor's false and ridiculous, any serious scientist knows it came from some country bumpkin eating an improperly cooked bat, but this rumor could potentially be destabilizing, so let's force Google to tell this lie for us" is certainly a way the Chinese government might think.

Is it created in a lab?

The Google maps thing is pretty weak evidence. It could be explained by the "oh crap people are catching on, we'd better make Google help with the coverup" hypothesis, but it's equally well explained by the "we know it's false, but we'll censor things willy-nilly because we're China and that's what we do" hypothesis.

I don't know enough about mol bio to really understand the genetic sequences.

To summarize: The evidence seems to be inconclusive, but certainly consistent with the possibility the virus is a Chinese bio-weapon. "Coronavirus is a Chinese bio-weapon that somehow accidentally escaped" is a possibly true hypothesis. There's not nearly enough evidence to say for sure. But it's a reasonable possibility, not tin-foil hat territory.

Suggesting it was let out on purpose probably does get pretty close to tin-foil hat territory; it seems hard to figure out a sane and reasonable motive for unleashing this on the world, without also requiring some much bigger, more complex conspiracy (which greatly weakens the prior probability of the hypothesis).

If it is lab-created, it probably escaped by a mistake, or someone not following the rules (e.g. the janitor who's supposed to burn the dead infected research bats sold them to a market instead to make an extra buck).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146446

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22147320

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22147369

[4] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8587

They react to all kinds of irrelevant bullshit strongly all the time. It's a gigantic unimaginative bureaucracy. It could very well be some peon 18 levels down doing something done 200 times prior, in response to some news article some other peon has classified as western propaganda.

Are they going to come out and admit that?

The epicenter in the United States in in New York.

This is what was happening in NY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uNKatrJgw&feature=emb_logo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyNXZ8v8sY&feature=emb_logo

Bill Gates, for example, is held up as someone who saw this coming. However, if you read what he wrote at the end of February about what needs to be done to stop the Coronavirus, you'll he didn't raise any issues about the way it was being handled within the United States, and viewed the main problem being the difficulties that poor countries would have handling it. Even a few days ago there were almost no leaders calling for mass use of face coverings. And there still seem to be very few (if any) calling for an implementation of measures like those that are successfully combating the virus in South Korea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFCzoXhNM6c

Also, we should be careful about how much we eviscerate people on both sides politically during this time. If our leaders are too afraid of repercussions to make difficult decisions, they may make bad decisions instead.

I'm calling for moratorium on partisan finger-pointing. I think we're all in this together, and that's the only way we're getting out of it.

At least that's been my observation, but I don't watch TV news; I just read about what's on it. I've been getting my news from WaPo and WSJ, both of which took the virus seriously from the beginning.

George W Bush laid out a major pandemic strategy, for instance: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/homeland/pandemi...

Too bad it fell apart in subsequent administrations.

I wonder what it was that convinced him when many of the people he deals with day-to-day were of the complete opposite view?

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlsons-monologue-prom...

Here a similar one from Begamo, Italy https://youtu.be/lcK2mzuO6MU

And now, where is the truth? I would like not to be infected. I try to avoid being infected by flu as well. But maybe we really are overreacting. We don't have immune system trained for this - that is problematic. Elderly people and people with health conditions should be isolated. But that's probably it. Once the population has enough people with trained immune system, it will be "like a flu" or won't it? Who to trust?

One guy's being wrong becomes another guy's "not that big of a deal".

By what metric will you measure "being wrong" for this COVID-19 pandemic? A super cut of video clips showing a reluctance to believe uncertain information coming out of China? Death rate compared to other OECD countries? Whether or not the great Hydroxychloroquine efficacy debate goes one way or another? Whether or not the ban of flights to/from China were effective?

it's an ideal, not a metaphysical necessity. But we need to enforce the ideal because otherwise the powerful use their power to their interest and against their detractors. It is absolutely essential to hold them responsible for their decision making process if we value life in a liberal democracy or a classical republic. They cannot get every decision right, but they must at least get them wrong for a fair reason.

Otherwise it's just "personal responsibility for the many, riches and fiefdoms for the few"

The other part, is that we shouldn't expect consensus in something like this. Why? Because data is evolving and changing. This is in contrast to something like Climate Change where we have a large amount of post hoc data/analysis. Here the analysis is being done in situ and that is much more difficult. It should be unsurprising that opinions change as information changes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/knutmwittkowski

This is approximately the time that the first patient tested positive in the U.S. The video that OP references goes into February and March, so I don't think these are equivalent.

It's also true that both sides presume the worst intentions when they say the other side was wrong.

I can't get over the fact, however, that only one side was (and still is) in a position to do something about it. Moreover that one side had access to better intelligence about the severity of the situation, and that one side sowed the seeds of their awful response over the past three years with the various cuts they made.