4 ms·

Our government is led by idiots, this is the result

m0zg 7y ago
Hate to break it to you, but nearly all governments are led by idiots who don't know anything and don't care to know. Becoming a non-idiot is hard, time consuming work that's incompatible with politics needed to get elected into a public office. At least our executive branch had enough common sense to ban flights from China on Jan 31st (and was panned by the "free press" and Democrats in congress for it at the time). Had they not, we'd be dealing with tens of thousands of infections and thousands of deaths by now, as exemplified by Italy.
- DangerousPie 7y ago
  And yet somehow most other countries have still managed to come up with a significantly more competent response. Germany is tracing contacts of all cases and has capabilities to test 20,000 people per day. How many is the US testing right now? And that's a country with 1/3 the population. There are probably thousands of infections in the country already, we just don't know it yet.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    > Germany Now try Italy or South Korea. Germany still has twice as many cases as the US, and 7.5x as many cases per million of population (12.1 vs 1.6 CPM in the US). Proximity to Italy doesn't do them any favors. To their credit though, they have zero deaths. If you order the stats by cases per million, the US comes in 40th, so containment doesn't suck too bad, compared to others. By deaths it's the 5th though - the main cluster basically took out a bunch of very old, medically problematic folks at a senior care facility. As the officials from the facility said, about 7 people die there per month under the normal circumstances, but this month they were additionally hit with the coronavirus. Bad luck.
    - palmy 7y ago
      The issue is that Germany is testing ferociously while in the US this is not the case. It's therefore likely that the US numbers are severely underestimated, while Germany's are much closer to their true value. Worth noting that Germany not having any deaths despite such a large number of cases can also indicate that they discover the infection very early, and similarly the number of US deaths can indicate late discovery.
- danso 7y ago
  Italy banned all flights from China on the same day that the U.S. did: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-10/italy-s-hopes-for-closer-china-ties-hit-by-virus-flight-ban-rift https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-10/italy-s-h... > Italy on Jan. 31 suspended flights to and from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan in a bid to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus. The ban, due to last until April 28, was the first by a European Union member. The Czech government later followed suit.
- Daishiman 7y ago
  You're already on your way to having tens of thousands of infections. But because it's absolutely false that "all governments are led by idiots", countries with good health care systems are raising awareness of the severity of the issue and taking effective measures. The US isn't a first-world country; but it is a very rich thirld-world nation.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Tens of thousands would be a great outcome actually. Tens of thousands of infections would mean only single to low double digit thousands of deaths - lower than the flu. 45 million people a year in the US suffer from the flu, and anywhere from 30 to 60 thousand die of complications. 30K dead, therefore, would be "business as usual", as strange as that sounds. Anything lower than that would be "better than usual".
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Please stop with the disinformation. The govt didn't stop flights from China, it barred entry from China to non-citizens. The only reason our numbers of confirmed cases aren't much higher are due to a lack of testing. I think you know full well that just days ago Trump was saying in a press conferences that there were only 15 cases and the number would soon be zero, and likewise was saying at the CDC a couple of days ago that he'd rather cruise ships didn't dock and cause the numbers to go up.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Yes, US citizens, permanent residents, and their immediate family members can return from China, with some conditions: "Americans returning from China will be allowed into the country, but will face screening at select ports of entry and required to undertake 14 days of self-screening to ensure they don’t pose a health risk. Those returning from Hubei province, the center of the outbreak, will be subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine."
dang 7y ago
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

m0zg 7y ago

Hate to break it to you, but nearly all governments are led by idiots who don't know anything and don't care to know. Becoming a non-idiot is hard, time consuming work that's incompatible with politics needed to get elected into a public office. At least our executive branch had enough common sense to ban flights from China on Jan 31st (and was panned by the "free press" and Democrats in congress for it at the time). Had they not, we'd be dealing with tens of thousands of infections and thousands of deaths by now, as exemplified by Italy.

DangerousPie 7y ago
And yet somehow most other countries have still managed to come up with a significantly more competent response. Germany is tracing contacts of all cases and has capabilities to test 20,000 people per day. How many is the US testing right now? And that's a country with 1/3 the population. There are probably thousands of infections in the country already, we just don't know it yet.
- m0zg 7y ago
  > Germany Now try Italy or South Korea. Germany still has twice as many cases as the US, and 7.5x as many cases per million of population (12.1 vs 1.6 CPM in the US). Proximity to Italy doesn't do them any favors. To their credit though, they have zero deaths. If you order the stats by cases per million, the US comes in 40th, so containment doesn't suck too bad, compared to others. By deaths it's the 5th though - the main cluster basically took out a bunch of very old, medically problematic folks at a senior care facility. As the officials from the facility said, about 7 people die there per month under the normal circumstances, but this month they were additionally hit with the coronavirus. Bad luck.
  - palmy 7y ago
    The issue is that Germany is testing ferociously while in the US this is not the case. It's therefore likely that the US numbers are severely underestimated, while Germany's are much closer to their true value. Worth noting that Germany not having any deaths despite such a large number of cases can also indicate that they discover the infection very early, and similarly the number of US deaths can indicate late discovery.
danso 7y ago
Italy banned all flights from China on the same day that the U.S. did: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-10/italy-s-hopes-for-closer-china-ties-hit-by-virus-flight-ban-rift https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-10/italy-s-h... > Italy on Jan. 31 suspended flights to and from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan in a bid to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus. The ban, due to last until April 28, was the first by a European Union member. The Czech government later followed suit.
Daishiman 7y ago
You're already on your way to having tens of thousands of infections. But because it's absolutely false that "all governments are led by idiots", countries with good health care systems are raising awareness of the severity of the issue and taking effective measures. The US isn't a first-world country; but it is a very rich thirld-world nation.
- m0zg 7y ago
  Tens of thousands would be a great outcome actually. Tens of thousands of infections would mean only single to low double digit thousands of deaths - lower than the flu. 45 million people a year in the US suffer from the flu, and anywhere from 30 to 60 thousand die of complications. 30K dead, therefore, would be "business as usual", as strange as that sounds. Anything lower than that would be "better than usual".
anigbrowl 7y ago
Please stop with the disinformation. The govt didn't stop flights from China, it barred entry from China to non-citizens. The only reason our numbers of confirmed cases aren't much higher are due to a lack of testing. I think you know full well that just days ago Trump was saying in a press conferences that there were only 15 cases and the number would soon be zero, and likewise was saying at the CDC a couple of days ago that he'd rather cruise ships didn't dock and cause the numbers to go up.
- m0zg 7y ago
  Yes, US citizens, permanent residents, and their immediate family members can return from China, with some conditions: "Americans returning from China will be allowed into the country, but will face screening at select ports of entry and required to undertake 14 days of self-screening to ensure they don’t pose a health risk. Those returning from Hubei province, the center of the outbreak, will be subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine."

dang 7y ago

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.