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>And yet, three months after getting its first case in this epidemic, the PRC has handled it orders of magnitude better than the US. >You can only blame the PR

by kop316 6y ago

>And yet, three months after getting its first case in this epidemic, the PRC has handled it orders of magnitude better than the US. >You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures. ....what? Did you actually read the BBC article I sourced? They punished a doctor for trying to raise the flag on this. You are telling me they handled that better than the US? And how would the US actually be to blame for that?

nl 6y ago
I'm going to preface this comment by noting that this is a subtle argument I'm making, and HN posts about C19 probably isn't the best place for this. But anyway.. I don't agree this was a "cover-up" in the sense of a government attempt to hide something they knew was going on. As your own article says "What Dr Li didn't know then was that the disease that had been discovered was an entirely new coronavirus." He was warned about spreading rumors. While I don't agree with the way they warn people for things like that in China, it isn't uncommon for this to happen to anyone who disturbs "social cohesion". Additionally, it was done by the regional government, not the central one. In contemporary news coverage of the outbreak they note how the regional government tried to minimize the severity of the outbreak and it was the central government who intervened to lock the place down. Could China have done better? Yes - I've run the timeline, and I think it was realistic for them to have known and acted about 2 or 3 days earlier than they Wuhan lockdown in the absolute best case. Do I think this would have made a difference for the rest of the world? Not really - the places that dealt with it well acted when the lock down occurred, and the places that didn't deal with it well ignored that. It's worth noting that most of the world couldn't believe the Wuhan lockdown when it happened. I don't think places that ignored that news would have acted on any kind of WHO warning.

by kop316 6y ago

nl 6y ago

I'm going to preface this comment by noting that this is a subtle argument I'm making, and HN posts about C19 probably isn't the best place for this. But anyway.. I don't agree this was a "cover-up" in the sense of a government attempt to hide something they knew was going on. As your own article says "What Dr Li didn't know then was that the disease that had been discovered was an entirely new coronavirus." He was warned about spreading rumors. While I don't agree with the way they warn people for things like that in China, it isn't uncommon for this to happen to anyone who disturbs "social cohesion". Additionally, it was done by the regional government, not the central one. In contemporary news coverage of the outbreak they note how the regional government tried to minimize the severity of the outbreak and it was the central government who intervened to lock the place down. Could China have done better? Yes - I've run the timeline, and I think it was realistic for them to have known and acted about 2 or 3 days earlier than they Wuhan lockdown in the absolute best case. Do I think this would have made a difference for the rest of the world? Not really - the places that dealt with it well acted when the lock down occurred, and the places that didn't deal with it well ignored that. It's worth noting that most of the world couldn't believe the Wuhan lockdown when it happened. I don't think places that ignored that news would have acted on any kind of WHO warning.