Really. I mean sure - they dropped the ball on a new virus emerging from a familiar situation and getting blindsided by incompetent and image obsessed party of

Really. I mean sure - they dropped the ball on a new virus emerging from a familiar situation and getting blindsided by incompetent and image obsessed party officials who silenced the alarms and it took a while for the highly concentrated power structure of blindly loyal party officials to pivot and move. However ... It was not an unknown anymore for Europe There was months of warning time There is no suppression of scientific at scale There was daily warnings from WHO and many countries There was precedent for effective measures from Asia There is no no no reason this should happen in a western democracy right. And lets not even look at the US where image obsessed national officials with highly concentrated power and blind loyal party following have been actively downplaying (flu), suppressing the national response and hampering testing and effective containment. It's like China in reverse - the stupid version playing out right in front of our eyes. We all here love to repeat the virtues of western democracy over the autocratic China but right now we need to take a really good look at how much the theoretical ideals have been replaced by practices that combine the worst of both systems to absolutely devastating results. If we don't want a major collapse down the road from all the other wait-and-see known threats, from antibiotic resistance to resource exhaustion to broken pension systems to climate change, we better start thinking about how we get of the 'reality is what we want it to be as long as we vote for people who tell us what we want to hear and cast out people who tell us what we need to act upon' train. Darwin is about survival of the most adaptable to an ever changing world, not necessarily the strongest and right now China looks a lot more adaptable than we do- so if we like our values and system we better start making sacrifices to the gods of science and reality again. That however would require us to even admit there is a problem and it's not looking promising