> It would have been a lot more effective if they had done it sooner. China startet radical measures after a rather low number of mystery lung issues. I really

> It would have been a lot more effective if they had done it sooner. China startet radical measures after a rather low number of mystery lung issues. I really doubt that any other government would have taken decisive action much earlier. What would you expect, martial law whenever a doctor isn't quite sure about a diagnosis? The initial silencing of the first public reports is very unfortunate and puts the government rightfully in a very bad light, but I'm not sure that it had any influence on the speed of countermeasure implementation at all. I see that more as a case of one part of a huge organisation not knowing what the other is doing, not as a government-wide attempt at ignoring the problem. The authoritarian version of a PR department still sending out denials while the rest of the company is already working on a fix (and too busy to rein in the PR department/thought police)