8 ms·

I live in Canada and our response between January - mid March was in line with the U.S. where the government said things like "the risk to Canadians was low" an

by colmvp 6y ago

I live in Canada and our response between January - mid March was in line with the U.S. where the government said things like "the risk to Canadians was low" and "asymptomatic people are not main drivers of epidemics." That laissez-faire attitude perpetuated the belief that we didn't need to screen people at airports, or force people coming in from hot zones to self-isolate for 14 days. Meanwhile, a country like Vietnam which doesn't have the same technological or financial resources as North America managed to quell the spread through mass quarantines and aggressive contact tracing done as early as February. They literally fenced off a village that had one known infection. Taiwan acted quickly and decisively throughout the key time periods of the crisis. Things like stockpiling and producing more PPE in January, making quarantine taxi's ferry potential infected to their homes instead of allowing them to take public transit, using technology to aid with contact tracing, mandatory use of masks in public spaces, thermal screenings at airports and stations... Looking back, I think we both woefully under-estimated the potential for asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic individuals to spread the virus. As a society we looked at the low numbers and scoffed at the idea of doing proactive preventative measures... until it all hit the fan and we had to hard stop.

Ididntdothis 6y ago
i think there is a lot of superiority feeling in Western countries over Asia and then in Western countries against each other. For example when things started happening in Italy the Germans thought that it's an Italian problem. As far as the US goes it was pretty clear that the administration didn't want to deal with this at all at home. So they were constantly behind the curve and did things only when basically forced.
- davidw 6y ago
  > For example when things started happening in Italy As someone who lived in Italy and now lives in the US, this was driving me absolutely crazy. They have a great health care system, and are a transparent democracy. When things started to happen rapidly there, it was very, very clear that the same situation would play out in the US, and yet there were still a lot of "just a flu" people.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > When things started to happen rapidly there, it was very, very clear that the same situation would play out in the US... When it was still restricted to China, I was able to reassure myself into complacency with memories of the original SARS. China contained that, so maybe they will contain this one, too? As soon as it hit Italy hard, that story didn't work anymore, and it was clear it was only a matter of time before it spread everywhere.
  - briandear 6y ago
    However the history of flu in Italy is interesting— they have a much higher fatality rate in general than the rest of Europe. Their 2017 flu season killed as many people as Coronavirus killed this year. Italy doesn’t have a great track record with infectious disease and they also have among the fewest ICU beds of any developed country: about 8 beds per 100k while the US has 32 beds per 100,000 population. They also have some ridiculous politics that led them to not closing borders sooner. Didn’t the mayor of Florence have a “hug-a-Chinese” day in February? There was so much political correctness around banning travelers from China that it probably cost significant lives.
    - davidw 6y ago
      > Didn’t the mayor of Florence have a “hug-a-Chinese” day in February? There was so much political correctness around banning travelers from China that it probably cost significant lives. They were one of the first countries to ban travel from China. What you call "political correctness" was just an anti-racism message. Italy certainly had some things go wrong in some areas, but they were also unlucky in some ways, being the first country to get hit hard.
      - jakeogh 6y ago
        A lot of power is derived from and dependent on pretending there is division where there is not.
    - fspeech 6y ago
      And yet the Chinese community in Italy didn't suffer much from Covid outbreaks https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-chinese/from-zero-to-hero-italys-chinese-help-beat-coronavirus-idUSKBN21I3I8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-..., neither did Chinatown in San Francisco https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/san-francisco-coronavirus-chinese-hospital.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/san-francisco-coronavi...
briandear 6y ago
The WHO and Chinese telling people in mid January that it wasn’t person-to-person transmissible should probably take some serious blame. Taiwan warned the WHO on Dec 31, and the WHO ignored them. The WHO and Chinese obfuscation and downright deceit should not be ignored. The Taiwanese know better. Of course, there is also the question of Sweden..
- moreorless 6y ago
  Taiwan did not warn the WHO. Go read the actual letter, it was verbatim of what was released by China. Go read the WHO press release again. It literally said "no evidence of human to human transmission" at the time. It did not say "NO HUMAN TO HUMAN TRANSMISSION." Stop spreading FUD.
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    In the December 31 2019 email, Taiwan specifically references seven cases of “atypical pneumonia” as well as mentioning it was not found to be SARS (and by implication that it may be something else). Taiwan’s position is that by making it clear the new diaease was an was “atypical pneumonia”, it could reasonably be inferred that human to human transmission was likely. The WHO claiming “no evidence” after this was pointed out to them is the issue - there was some evidence, even if it wasn’t conclusive. Taiwan’s statement is here: https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Category/ListContent/sOn2_m9QgxKqhZ7omgiz1A?uaid=PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-viBOuw https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Category/ListContent/sOn2_m9QgxKqhZ7o...
    - dirtyid 6y ago
      Bluntly, Taiwan lied as part of a coordinated propaganda campaign by US and Taiwan [1] [2]. This was around the time western media articles started spinning up revisionist Taiwan WHO stories. Nevermind, it's literally impossible for Taiwan to know epidemiological characteristics of covid19 on Dec31 when their first imported case was on Jan21. It's propaganda, not even good one since it assumes time travel. Taiwan's email is basically what Chinese CDC reported to publicly [3] and to WHO [4] verbatim, note date and content - SARs like viral pneumonia treated in isolation which is standard practice. They provided zero addition information and tried to swing it as new information retroactively to manipulate public opinion. Taiwan's own CDC deputy director of disease control quoted in early January that H2H could not be determined until new cases are confirmed after Jan14 [5]. [1] https://apnews.com/a0b22f45f0cbc8e83e7d496dd2e09556 https://apnews.com/a0b22f45f0cbc8e83e7d496dd2e09556 [2] https://www.state.gov/virtual-forum-on-expanding-taiwans-participation-on-the-global-stage/ https://www.state.gov/virtual-forum-on-expanding-taiwans-par... [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia/chinese-officials-investigate-cause-of-pneumonia-outbreak-in-wuhan-idUSKBN1YZ0GP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia/ch... [4] https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unkown-cause-china/en/ https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk... [5] https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/202001060113.aspx https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/202001060113.aspx
Brajeshwar 6y ago
I went back to my home-town in mid-Feb and we had thermal screening at the Airport. All the staff working there wore mask and gloves. We were asked lots of questions, noted our contacts, backup contact just in case mine fails. The north-eastern region of India, including my home-town, have zero to low positive cases right now. We also border with Myanmar. That same week, I flew in and out of Delhi, UP, Rajasthan, and Bangalore without seeing any screening. A few days back (mid-APR), we (me, my father-in-law, and my wife) got calls asking how my Japanese friend is doing as he was there in my home-town too (in Feb).
zaroth 6y ago
> They literally fenced off a village that had one known infection. Some countries frankly have a different arsenal of tools available to them in how they can respond. It’s sad but true that the more authoritarian regimes are able to lockdown harder and faster. When Trumped raised the notion of fencing off hotspots, Cuomo called the idea of a physical cordon 'totally bizarre, counter-productive, anti-American, anti-social' Added that such an order would be tantamount to a 'federal declaration of war' and a 'civil war discussion'. I do wonder if the intent is to lockdown and contact trace their way all the way to the point until a vaccine is developed, tested, and can be administered widely, and if that is the intent if they will ultimately be successful and at what cost? Depending on the overall timescale, this could amount to judging the race after the first few miles of a marathon.
- dnautics 6y ago
  There's pretty strong evidence that a light, mostly voluntary, shelter in order, with restrictions on crowds and certain crowded-y places like bars, (AKA the SF bay area policy) is largely sufficient. If the whole US had the bay area's mortality and infection rate we wouldn't be having the same conversation. In terms of "freedom", I haven't felt like if I needed to go into work it would be a problem, and I've gone in twice to take care of critical on-prem infrastructure.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    I’m not 100% up to speed on San Fran stats, but looking here [1] it seems like up until last week they were running about 400 tests per day with about 20% coming back positive. Hospitals were basically empty. I’m not sure what “mostly voluntary” means when businesses are forced to close. Testing rate is much lower in CA than in NY and MA. So is case count and fatalities per million. MA has been locked down pretty hard for about two months now. We are still seeing thousands of new cases a day. It certainly hasn’t had the same effect here as it did in the Bay Area. I strongly suspect there is something distinctly different is happening in MA vs. CA and it’s not due to varying degree of lockdowns. [1] - https://missionlocal.org/2020/04/29-daily-figures-on-sf-coronavirus-cases-confirmed-cases/ https://missionlocal.org/2020/04/29-daily-figures-on-sf-coro...
jphamtastic 6y ago
I'd take the Vietnam numbers with a grain of salt. 0 Deaths seems suspect.
- latchkey 6y ago
  It is unfortunate that this is getting downvoted, but I feel that it is true to at least have an open mind on the number. So, I'd like to give a bit of my own personal context here. I moved to Saigon 4 years ago and I follow the VN news very closely. I've traveled 15k+ km through the whole country (along with Laos and Cambodia), by motorbike. I have been in the largest cities and explored some of the most remote areas. The thing you need you realize here is that this is the first time the govt, north to south, has really truly cared for its citizens. It sounds harsh, but think about it. No expense spared. 60,000+ people put up in quarantine. Borders locked. Full public reporting of the contact tracing. Locking down entire towns (some I've even been to myself in the not too distant past). The response has been swift and very very nationalizing. Unlike watching US people split down the middle and fighting about everything, Vietnamese people are quite proud of their country. There is a lot of 'saving or displaying face' type news and actions. At one point, the country went two weeks without a new case... daily proud updates in all the news about this... until some girl flew in from out of town with it and super spread it to a whole bunch more people. After that, things got even more serious. The point is... the govt is very proud of their track record of zero deaths. Reuters went in and tried to get the govt. to talk about their claims and nobody would speak [0]. If you are so proud of your number, why not tell the world all about how you got there? This is a govt that hasn't been exactly known for being the most umm, how do I say it nicely ... clean? By the way, one of the heads of their cdc got caught profiteering off test kits. So, while I'd love to believe that all the sudden the vn govt cares about its citizens more than anything else and that their numbers are magically amazing because of so much hard work. I just find it really hard to believe that a country that borders China and has a litany of social issues, could be so perfect. I mean, how many millions of pigs did they cull from swine flu? It wasn't like they were able to do nearly as well controlling that one and it wasn't even human! Oh and one more thing... this won't last. Social distancing is easing in the country. People are going out in masses over the weekend because it is Liberation day. The timing couldn't have been worse. Just look at some of the images in this FB group [1]. Da Lat is a very small mountain town, that is tens of thousands of people. Mostly kids... which means they will go home to their parents... =( This is Vietnam's Florida beaches event... [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vietnam-fight-insi/after-aggressive-mass-testing-vietnam-says-it-contains-coronavirus-outbreak-idUSKBN22B34H https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vietna... [1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/ghiendalat https://www.facebook.com/groups/ghiendalat

by colmvp 6y ago

Ididntdothis 6y ago

i think there is a lot of superiority feeling in Western countries over Asia and then in Western countries against each other. For example when things started happening in Italy the Germans thought that it's an Italian problem. As far as the US goes it was pretty clear that the administration didn't want to deal with this at all at home. So they were constantly behind the curve and did things only when basically forced.

davidw 6y ago
> For example when things started happening in Italy As someone who lived in Italy and now lives in the US, this was driving me absolutely crazy. They have a great health care system, and are a transparent democracy. When things started to happen rapidly there, it was very, very clear that the same situation would play out in the US, and yet there were still a lot of "just a flu" people.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > When things started to happen rapidly there, it was very, very clear that the same situation would play out in the US... When it was still restricted to China, I was able to reassure myself into complacency with memories of the original SARS. China contained that, so maybe they will contain this one, too? As soon as it hit Italy hard, that story didn't work anymore, and it was clear it was only a matter of time before it spread everywhere.
- briandear 6y ago
  However the history of flu in Italy is interesting— they have a much higher fatality rate in general than the rest of Europe. Their 2017 flu season killed as many people as Coronavirus killed this year. Italy doesn’t have a great track record with infectious disease and they also have among the fewest ICU beds of any developed country: about 8 beds per 100k while the US has 32 beds per 100,000 population. They also have some ridiculous politics that led them to not closing borders sooner. Didn’t the mayor of Florence have a “hug-a-Chinese” day in February? There was so much political correctness around banning travelers from China that it probably cost significant lives.
  - davidw 6y ago
    > Didn’t the mayor of Florence have a “hug-a-Chinese” day in February? There was so much political correctness around banning travelers from China that it probably cost significant lives. They were one of the first countries to ban travel from China. What you call "political correctness" was just an anti-racism message. Italy certainly had some things go wrong in some areas, but they were also unlucky in some ways, being the first country to get hit hard.
    - jakeogh 6y ago
      A lot of power is derived from and dependent on pretending there is division where there is not.
  - fspeech 6y ago
    And yet the Chinese community in Italy didn't suffer much from Covid outbreaks https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-chinese/from-zero-to-hero-italys-chinese-help-beat-coronavirus-idUSKBN21I3I8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-..., neither did Chinatown in San Francisco https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/san-francisco-coronavirus-chinese-hospital.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/san-francisco-coronavi...

briandear 6y ago

The WHO and Chinese telling people in mid January that it wasn’t person-to-person transmissible should probably take some serious blame. Taiwan warned the WHO on Dec 31, and the WHO ignored them. The WHO and Chinese obfuscation and downright deceit should not be ignored. The Taiwanese know better. Of course, there is also the question of Sweden..

moreorless 6y ago
Taiwan did not warn the WHO. Go read the actual letter, it was verbatim of what was released by China. Go read the WHO press release again. It literally said "no evidence of human to human transmission" at the time. It did not say "NO HUMAN TO HUMAN TRANSMISSION." Stop spreading FUD.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  In the December 31 2019 email, Taiwan specifically references seven cases of “atypical pneumonia” as well as mentioning it was not found to be SARS (and by implication that it may be something else). Taiwan’s position is that by making it clear the new diaease was an was “atypical pneumonia”, it could reasonably be inferred that human to human transmission was likely. The WHO claiming “no evidence” after this was pointed out to them is the issue - there was some evidence, even if it wasn’t conclusive. Taiwan’s statement is here: https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Category/ListContent/sOn2_m9QgxKqhZ7omgiz1A?uaid=PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-viBOuw https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Category/ListContent/sOn2_m9QgxKqhZ7o...
  - dirtyid 6y ago
    Bluntly, Taiwan lied as part of a coordinated propaganda campaign by US and Taiwan [1] [2]. This was around the time western media articles started spinning up revisionist Taiwan WHO stories. Nevermind, it's literally impossible for Taiwan to know epidemiological characteristics of covid19 on Dec31 when their first imported case was on Jan21. It's propaganda, not even good one since it assumes time travel. Taiwan's email is basically what Chinese CDC reported to publicly [3] and to WHO [4] verbatim, note date and content - SARs like viral pneumonia treated in isolation which is standard practice. They provided zero addition information and tried to swing it as new information retroactively to manipulate public opinion. Taiwan's own CDC deputy director of disease control quoted in early January that H2H could not be determined until new cases are confirmed after Jan14 [5]. [1] https://apnews.com/a0b22f45f0cbc8e83e7d496dd2e09556 https://apnews.com/a0b22f45f0cbc8e83e7d496dd2e09556 [2] https://www.state.gov/virtual-forum-on-expanding-taiwans-participation-on-the-global-stage/ https://www.state.gov/virtual-forum-on-expanding-taiwans-par... [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia/chinese-officials-investigate-cause-of-pneumonia-outbreak-in-wuhan-idUSKBN1YZ0GP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia/ch... [4] https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unkown-cause-china/en/ https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk... [5] https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/202001060113.aspx https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/202001060113.aspx

Brajeshwar 6y ago

I went back to my home-town in mid-Feb and we had thermal screening at the Airport. All the staff working there wore mask and gloves. We were asked lots of questions, noted our contacts, backup contact just in case mine fails. The north-eastern region of India, including my home-town, have zero to low positive cases right now. We also border with Myanmar. That same week, I flew in and out of Delhi, UP, Rajasthan, and Bangalore without seeing any screening. A few days back (mid-APR), we (me, my father-in-law, and my wife) got calls asking how my Japanese friend is doing as he was there in my home-town too (in Feb).

zaroth 6y ago

> They literally fenced off a village that had one known infection. Some countries frankly have a different arsenal of tools available to them in how they can respond. It’s sad but true that the more authoritarian regimes are able to lockdown harder and faster. When Trumped raised the notion of fencing off hotspots, Cuomo called the idea of a physical cordon 'totally bizarre, counter-productive, anti-American, anti-social' Added that such an order would be tantamount to a 'federal declaration of war' and a 'civil war discussion'. I do wonder if the intent is to lockdown and contact trace their way all the way to the point until a vaccine is developed, tested, and can be administered widely, and if that is the intent if they will ultimately be successful and at what cost? Depending on the overall timescale, this could amount to judging the race after the first few miles of a marathon.

dnautics 6y ago
There's pretty strong evidence that a light, mostly voluntary, shelter in order, with restrictions on crowds and certain crowded-y places like bars, (AKA the SF bay area policy) is largely sufficient. If the whole US had the bay area's mortality and infection rate we wouldn't be having the same conversation. In terms of "freedom", I haven't felt like if I needed to go into work it would be a problem, and I've gone in twice to take care of critical on-prem infrastructure.
- zaroth 6y ago
  I’m not 100% up to speed on San Fran stats, but looking here [1] it seems like up until last week they were running about 400 tests per day with about 20% coming back positive. Hospitals were basically empty. I’m not sure what “mostly voluntary” means when businesses are forced to close. Testing rate is much lower in CA than in NY and MA. So is case count and fatalities per million. MA has been locked down pretty hard for about two months now. We are still seeing thousands of new cases a day. It certainly hasn’t had the same effect here as it did in the Bay Area. I strongly suspect there is something distinctly different is happening in MA vs. CA and it’s not due to varying degree of lockdowns. [1] - https://missionlocal.org/2020/04/29-daily-figures-on-sf-coronavirus-cases-confirmed-cases/ https://missionlocal.org/2020/04/29-daily-figures-on-sf-coro...

jphamtastic 6y ago

I'd take the Vietnam numbers with a grain of salt. 0 Deaths seems suspect.

latchkey 6y ago
It is unfortunate that this is getting downvoted, but I feel that it is true to at least have an open mind on the number. So, I'd like to give a bit of my own personal context here. I moved to Saigon 4 years ago and I follow the VN news very closely. I've traveled 15k+ km through the whole country (along with Laos and Cambodia), by motorbike. I have been in the largest cities and explored some of the most remote areas. The thing you need you realize here is that this is the first time the govt, north to south, has really truly cared for its citizens. It sounds harsh, but think about it. No expense spared. 60,000+ people put up in quarantine. Borders locked. Full public reporting of the contact tracing. Locking down entire towns (some I've even been to myself in the not too distant past). The response has been swift and very very nationalizing. Unlike watching US people split down the middle and fighting about everything, Vietnamese people are quite proud of their country. There is a lot of 'saving or displaying face' type news and actions. At one point, the country went two weeks without a new case... daily proud updates in all the news about this... until some girl flew in from out of town with it and super spread it to a whole bunch more people. After that, things got even more serious. The point is... the govt is very proud of their track record of zero deaths. Reuters went in and tried to get the govt. to talk about their claims and nobody would speak [0]. If you are so proud of your number, why not tell the world all about how you got there? This is a govt that hasn't been exactly known for being the most umm, how do I say it nicely ... clean? By the way, one of the heads of their cdc got caught profiteering off test kits. So, while I'd love to believe that all the sudden the vn govt cares about its citizens more than anything else and that their numbers are magically amazing because of so much hard work. I just find it really hard to believe that a country that borders China and has a litany of social issues, could be so perfect. I mean, how many millions of pigs did they cull from swine flu? It wasn't like they were able to do nearly as well controlling that one and it wasn't even human! Oh and one more thing... this won't last. Social distancing is easing in the country. People are going out in masses over the weekend because it is Liberation day. The timing couldn't have been worse. Just look at some of the images in this FB group [1]. Da Lat is a very small mountain town, that is tens of thousands of people. Mostly kids... which means they will go home to their parents... =( This is Vietnam's Florida beaches event... [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vietnam-fight-insi/after-aggressive-mass-testing-vietnam-says-it-contains-coronavirus-outbreak-idUSKBN22B34H https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vietna... [1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/ghiendalat https://www.facebook.com/groups/ghiendalat