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Just another Pearl Harbor/9-11 for the US. They could have responded early and mitigated this like Australia/NZ/Taiwan but now there is massive community spread
by shirro 6y ago
Just another Pearl Harbor/9-11 for the US. They could have responded early and mitigated this like Australia/NZ/Taiwan but now there is massive community spread there is no right answer. You open things up and more people die. You close them down and people likely die from poverty related things. The only sane solution was to act early and prevent this.
Why even have intelligence services, scientific expertise, governments, infectious disease agencies and emergency plans if they are all ignored until it is too late. I don't understand how so many countries messed this up.
- fred_is_fred 6y agoMistakes were made, but it's a lot easier on an island.
- shirro 6y agoBeing an island means nothing with air travel. But being remote certainly helped some countries a lot.
- jobigoud 6y agoThe weirdest part is that it all happened in slow motion. First China, then Iran, then Italy... No secret intelligence needed. But every single time other countries thought it wouldn't happen to them.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> but now there is massive community spread there is no right answer. The right answer is SIP plus invest massively in building out testing and contact tracing capacity so you can reopen while replacing SIP with targeted quarantines of the infected and exposed. There's no painless answer, and there's no answer as good as a better early response would have been, but there's a pretty clear right answer.
- Pick-A-Hill2019 6y agoNot a specific commentary on the US reaction (or any particular country) but some of it comes down to complacency. Zika, Ebola, SARS, MERS and various other outbreaks occured and were contained which lead to a general feeling that (especially in the early days) this would be another 'Non-Event'. It reminds me of a post a few months back asking if Y2K was actually a problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22556156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22556156
- fragmede 6y agoMoreover, some of the places with the best reactions (eg Taiwan) were hard hit by previous epidemics and already had practice with responding to an epidemic.
- satya71 6y agoThe opening up is not intended to alleviate poverty, in fact it's the opposite. Currently workers can get ~$3000/month if they are unemployed without fault. If they are unemployed because they refuse to put their lives at risk, they get $0.
- _bxg1 6y agoA large portion of the U.S. today harbors active disdain and distrust towards anyone claiming to know more than them on any subject. And those people have voted one of their own into the highest office in the land. It's really not hard to understand why this played out the way it did.