The paper you cite says nothing about bringing bats back to Wuhan, much less keeping them there. The paper says they follow a standard procedure described in re

The paper you cite says nothing about bringing bats back to Wuhan, much less keeping them there. The paper says they follow a standard procedure described in reference 47. While I don't have access to that reference, another paper [1] that uses the same standard procedure states that > Captured animals are anesthetized, identified, weighed, measured, sampled (e.g., blood and oral swab), marked with a unique number, and released at the exact site of capture. I don't see quarantine measures during an acute public health emergency as "totalitarian." You're just demonizing China (excuse me, I mean the "CCP") for what was actually a very effective public health measure that saved lives. > It's true that that nine days later - a long time during an outbreak of a novel disease - the genome was posted online. Has any genome of a novel pathogen ever been released more quickly? I was under the impression that this was record speed: just two weeks from discovery of the first cases to the whole world having the full genome. > You're free to condemn the Trump administration's handling of the situation, but perhaps you should take into account that the US is a free country and the president has limited powers. This might be a valid excuse if Trump had been begging for states to take appropriate measures, and the states had resisted. Instead, Trump downplayed the virus for two months, while it spread exponentially. The Federal government also has a great deal of power and a large role in dealing with public health, and it performed terribly in that role. But I'm not going to blame Trump alone. There is plenty of blame to go around at many levels of government in the US. > I'm not "the country". You're having a conversation with an individual. I can criticize anything I want, I don't need moral license. Indeed. But you're claiming that the government that decided to let 70,000 of its citizens die, and which has now decided to let the virus run its course, had a superior response to the country that decided to take much more drastic action to save lives. > Does that mean more people will die? Of course! It's a trade-off. The trade-off China chose was much further to the "save lives" end of the scale. Because they much more effectively suppressed transmission, they also were able to safely reopen more quickly, without endangering people's lives. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2640244/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2640244/