If they do that with sources in a relatively easy and popular language, I cannot imagine what they do with complex Asian ones.

I think a more fair take would be that most countries did not take COVID19(in particular, the early variants which were much more dangerous) seriously enough until there was a major source of infections in their country, at which point it was obviously too late.

There are some exceptions(in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign), but I think in general it is a true statement.

> in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign

NZ and Australia largely benefited from their geographical and economic periphery to achieve the level of safety that they did. By the time the virus got there in critical numbers, it had already been taken seriously in the anglosphere as a whole because of the UK debacle. I'm not saying their lockdowns didn't help (they very much did), but it's easier to enforce controls on entrance in far-flung corners of the world rather than around the backbone of the world economy.

Several Italian doctors criticised the Italian guidelines (in particular about giving corticosteroids) but they were silenced.

We also don't know the real numbers of Asian countries, do you trust the numbers given by the CCP?

No less, or more than for the USA.

For example, Italy was reporting zero cases when the US and UK weren't, and exponential growth is really slow at the start - you don'tt just go from zero cases to hospital collapse in an instant. The only way this makes sense is if Italy was failing to test people hospitalized with Covid symptoms even more totally and completely than even the US, which had an official policy of not doing so for patients without travel from China yet still managed to pick up unlinked cases at a much earlier stage. Which means the information on how Italy ended up this way was useless and not applicable to other countries, and all the hospitalisation and death rates were worthless too - and remember, no other country in the world had Covid spread from China result in the kind of outbreak that Italy experienced, their major outbreaks all seem to have come from Italy. So other countries had no way of knowing whether to expect something more like Italy's experiences or their own prior experiences and also no way of knowing what if anything could prevent this.

The information on how to treat Covid patients from Italy also seems to have been hot garbage. Like, their information and treatment policies around stuff like intubation and ventilators which every other country based their policies on likely outright killed a bunch of people. On the other hand, the UK found the first effective treatment for patients with Covid that was actually confirmed to substantially reduce their risk of dying - yet somehow, you don't hear the press arguing that other countries whose outbreaks happened after the UK's should've been able to do better because they had the UK to learn from like they do with Italy. What they have been doing is comparing the total number of deaths with other European countries (rather than per-capita figures) to falsely make it look like Covid was more deadly here than everywhere else.

A guy in charge of the job safety for national police was demoted because he decided to buy and give masks to policeman.

Media affiliated with the government was actively trying to ridicule everyone, calling people alarmists, fascists or whatever insult they came up with. That includes science divulgators, medical personnel, etc. Pretty ugly.

Then, suddenly, the 9th of March we had a very worrysome situation and yadda yadda.

Not to mention the mask thing.

I mean, how in the hell are you going to trust any of this any more? I know I don't. Now if something else happens you have to be very careful, they may be lying to you, or having a combination of lies and stupidity.

I guess this is what happens when the selection of elites is optimized for marketing purposes.

As I recall, one of the first things that happened in response to the pandemic was loads of our foreign correspondents either not getting sent in the first place, or getting pulled out.

For something like an earthquake or tsunami, there would be reporters on the ground filing in-person reports within days. Somewhat understandably, nobody wanted to send reporters to outbreak hotspots.

It wasn't until further into the pandemic that journalists decided interviewing randos from their living rooms over skype was good enough.

I wasn't happy with the restrictions but they never went as crazy as the rest of Europe. Overall I'm glad we had Boris and not someone from the other side who would have been even more draconian - even if having a real conservative would have been better.

(To be clear, I'm not qualified to say which is a better approach, I'm just curious about your comparison.)