It started already in the beginning, when the virus was spreading rapidly in China. Reports about the failing Chinese authority were all over the place, but nobody seemed to worry that when the virus would eventually reach Europe, we would be in trouble as well. After all how could we, with our superior health system and our governments that would react quickly and rationally on such a trivial threat as this.
When the virus had reached Europe, it had already reached South Korea and Taiwan as well. These countries had learned from the earlier SARS outbreak how to deal with it and thoroughly tested everyone that could possibly have the virus, symptoms or not. The reaction I saw in the media was mostly about the breach in privacy that these measures brought. Surely this was not something that we, as enlightened Western societies, would want. And anyway, what were we frightened of. This virus could never spread so fast in Europe as it did in China, because .. Well because of what actually.
Now that the pandemic has wrecked havoc in the entire Western world and most people are realising that a strategy of first constraining the virus (like in Wuhan) and then testing everybody to contain in (like in South Korea) is the only realistic way to deal with it, one might think that a bit of humbleness towards Asia would be in place. Think again. What we're seeing more and more instead is denial. Investigations are started if the Covid virus was manifactured in a laboratory in Wuhan for instance.
I think it’s simply because it has been a while since disease and pestilence was a worry for the average Western country so the average citizen (and therefore the leaders) are complacent in a sort of “It can’t happen here” way. There have been outbreaks such as the AIDS epidemic or swine flu but nothing as impactful, infectious, and at the scale of COVID.
Whereas Asian countries have grappled with issues of SARS, Malaria, AIDS, Polio, and many more in the not so distant past and have learned the importance of taking public health seriously. The experience of the outcome of mismanaging a response to a previous epidemic is still “fresh” so to say in many of these countries. I think a good example of this is how South Korea dealt with SARS and evolved their response to COVID based on the learnings from that.
Lastly I wonder if the prevalence of more communal societies in Asian cultures make a difference. I can imagine it could make the problem worse but it could also be beneficial in the sense of providing strong societal pressures to quarantine/hand wash/social distance/etc.
Edit: And of course the misguided leaders in particular Western countries are not helping. Maybe the US this particular time is just a statistical outlier due to some mismanagement and there is nothing more to read into further than that?
I agree that this is the main factor. Consequently I proposed the concept of the "civilization immune system" to explain how it works: https://www.sonyasupposedly.com/civilizational-immune-system...
> Three Chinese citizen journalists have also gone missing after they uploaded videos showing a critical view of the situation in Wuhan to YouTube and Twitter.
https://qz.com/1816219/chinese-internet-rallied-to-save-a-ce...
> Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project.
https://qz.com/1846277/china-arrests-users-behind-github-cor...
CPP propaganda strategically concentrates blame for any kind of domestic problem on local officials in order make the central authorities seem trustworthy and competent by comparison. While the local Wuhan officials definitely had an independent hand in the mismanagement, the central government had its role, too.
It's also arguable that the central government is responsible for the coverup activities by the Wuhan officials, because they're the ones who've created and sustained the system those local officials operate in.
I like this line of thinking, I think it better reflects reality then the often heard knee-jerk reaction assuming that China is an evil monolith.
I wonder sometimes why I bristle at the comments painting China as an evil monolith. They probably do the same to us. Both systems have their own ways of enriching and defending those in power.
Perhaps it is because I don't like to blame others for our problems? The US bungled tests, was late to quarantine, the feds were contradicting states, states were contradicting cities, hospitals muzzled health care workers, etc. None of that really has anything to do with China. It comes across to me as propaganda to blame them for all that!
GP is right, that you hardly hear it in the news.
Either Asian countries are lying because they are extremely advanced in their population centers and also authoritarian, which would be the only way for it to be news.
or
Asian countries are lying because they have the exact same organizational dysfunction as every country in 'the west', and also authoritarian, in which case it isn't news.
so which is it folks, superior technology cohesive culture and leadership, or organizational dysfunction no different from the west.
Unfortunately this article is in Russian, I'll provide google translate link, but it probably will be translated with errors.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3...
Indian airports were doing thermal checks on passengers (using tech that had been installed during the Zika virus scare a few years back, I believe). The newspapers also had info about how anyone found with elevated temperatures were being asked to self quarantine, and the police was also following up.
The US had, absolutely nothing. Nada. Before the flight I was afraid that entering the US would be difficult, but it was clear (and it remained this way for over a month), that if anything, entering India, if not difficult, would actually involve checks, something that was non existent in US ports.
Further, and I don’t know if this is mentioned, the flight into India involved the cabin crew spraying some sort of pest control spray in the cabins before we landed. They mentioned it was due to regulations. Considering SARS-COV-2 has been found to have been easily killed (within minutes) of exposure to common disinfectants, could this spray have greatly minimized the virus entering the country, on baggage’s and clothing, etc?
When I landed at Heathrow, not even immigration folks had masks
People in India took it seriously in the beginning
ref. https://www.cdc.gov/features/pesticides-aircraft/index.html
That is why bed bugs have become resistant to it
India's lockdown started the day after the UK, and whilst undoubtedly the government has taken some strong measures to make the lockdown viable, it also faced unique challenges like significant parts of the urban poor population attempting to return home to families in their villages. Of course, despite being later than Western lockdowns chronologically, India's lockdown was earlier with respect to the known spread of the disease, but that in itself is a phenomena worthy of explanation.
When UK went in to lockdown, it had 6700 cases. (23rd March) [2]
When India went in to lockdown, it had 657 cases. (25th March) [2]
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/20/politics/new-york-workfor... [2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
It sure feels like there are something not well understood about this virus from infection/death stats alone.
NYC at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 1000, and the UK at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 10,000.
So even if we assume that the US and UK were not undercounting, and that India was undercounting by a factor of 100 (!), India was about half as infected as the UK and an order of magnitude less infected than NYC when it entered lockdown.
True. I'd argue that there are other factors such as demographics, time elapsed since first cases, etc. But I guess it's hard not to. Specially for media needing to fill column inches or otherwise capture our attention :-) It should be possible to simply look at numbers and draw any conclusions but it seems to be very difficult for human beings to do that. We feel the need create a narrative around and find an explanation for our observations.
Added to that, apart from major cities, international travelers are minuscule in the general population. Consequently, the largest group of exposed citizens are from Mumbai & Delhi. Other cities are relatively less exposed.
The reality is probably that it's a combination of doing the lockdown well and the disease being far less deadly than initially thought due to very high asymptomatic infection rates. The latter is an emerging fact that the media here are in denial over. Therefore, they think India must be undercounting or something else. Awful and insulting.
BTW, in regards to US, the lockdowns here worked. NYC was the only place in the entire country that ended up getting hit bad. The rest of the nation has not been hit anywhere approaching what was predicted by models which took into account lockdowns. Outside of NYC, US statistics match Germany.
NYC: 1.07‰
New Orleans: 0.65‰
Detroit: 0.60‰
Boston: 0.44‰
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/corona...
NYC: 0.107%
New Orleans: 0.065%
Detroit: 0.060%
Boston: 0.044%
Just want to point out that you didn't call that out explicitly. 99% (note that it's a percent) of people who saw your comment would see it and view it as a percent. I did, and I work with data all day every day.
It's unintentionally misleading to use notation like that without calling it out.
Just type "per mille" next time.
So I'm absolutely sure that Kazakhstan is doing better than many European countries and for sure better than US. May be our government is not the most democratic one out there, but they care about citizens and their tight grip over country allows them to make an unpopular but effective decisions.
Some western people just think that they are strictly superior everywhere to the developing countries. That might be true in a lot of areas, but it's not an universal truth.
The so-called western people, I'd argue, have the right mindset. I agree governments capable of draconian measures tend to do well when such behaviour control is desirable at a nationwide scale. That doesn't mean it is the only solution or even the best one.
I personally would pretty much prefer prevention, absent which, a measured, well thought-out, least disruptive policy around epidemics (I am looking at you South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam). Curtailing liberties, harsher restrictions, oppressive policing, regressive policies don't really fill me up with any sort of confidence. In fact, I worry that the citizens that are not just in acceptance of such a response, but in appraisal of it, are in for a grim reality-check when another unrest, epidemic or otherwise, rears its ugly head.
Considering behaviour of American population to the lax government measures, I guess strong laws/measures are the way to go.
1. https://www.lawfareblog.com/lessons-america-how-south-korean...
I have my fingers crossed for everyone going through this, but only after the fact are we going to get a good idea of what happened (and that goes for Western countries too).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
So many keystrokes and clicked bait on something nobody has any concrete insight into.
Source: https://www.covid19india.org/
FWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indians watched UK and US struggle through a denial and late response in disbelief, like watching a car crash in slow motion.