5 ms·

I know you're mostly joking, but here were some of the takeaways I took from the article: * China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside

by Exmoor 6y ago

I know you're mostly joking, but here were some of the takeaways I took from the article: * China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably wouldn't be a big deal. * The FDA completely dropped the ball on testing kits and it took an incredibly long time to resolve the issue. Its unclear that people in power even realized this. Back in January and February when we were hearing about a case here, a case there there was almost certainly rampant community transmission and death occurring. * CDC leaders were very slow to consider that the virus might transmit through the air. This led to the early advice being misguided (6ft of distancing and washing your hands protects you) and just flat out wrong (wearing a mask does nothing). * Inside the executive branch, people who gave bad news were forced out and people who gave good news got promoted. Predictably this made things much, much worse.

gen220 6y ago
I read the article, and agree with this summary fwiw. I would also emphasize that, in terms of personal culpability, Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services comes out looking very poor. (Mnuchin was also the speaker of some, in retrospect, appalling secondhand quotes). The article points out that Azar is the director of both the FDA and the CDC, and should have played a more active role in orchestrating their handshakes in February. Misunderstanding and miscommunication between the FDA and CDC were responsible for the absurd delay in widely-available testing, which otherwise should have been available in med-February. Not only was he aware of problems early on, he didn't properly communicate them up (to Trump, which contributed to Trump's belief that the whole thing would blow over), or manage them down. This is my reading, as a disclaimer, not an explicit statement from the article. I recommend people read it for themselves.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  I haven't read this article yet, but my impression has been that every political official in the Trump Administration – Azar, Redfield, Hahn, Pence, Mnunchin, Pompeo, Kushner, Birx, Adams, Atlas, Barr, Kudlow, ... – has egg all over their face in this crisis. A whole crew of sycophants afraid for their jobs, falling over themselves to keep Trump happy. Fauci and (sidelined and silenced) career officials at the CDC, FDA, and NIH are the only ones who came out looking okay.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    Most of the trump appointees and trump himself come out of the article looking bad. Fauci comes out okay but not fantastic, with Birx looking a little better. About the only senior figure who seems to look good coming out of the article is Pottinger, who came into the government attached to Flynn.
    - gen220 6y ago
      I trust the New Yorker’s fact-checking chops, but I think it’s wise to be skeptical about Pottinger, as he’s the primary source for the story. I believe he advocated for a stronger response, and was summarily dismissed by his colleagues as there’s plenty of evidence for that. But I don’t know how accurate his portrayals of the intentions behind the CDC and the FDA officials are. There aren’t a lot of ways to cross reference his analysis of the quoted meetings, since the CDC and FDA both declined to comment for the piece. This is as close to a “full story” as we’re going to get before a hypothetical “COVID commission” congressional investigation, but it’s still quite two dimensional.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jacobolus 6y ago
> China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably wouldn't be a big deal They shared the genome quite quickly. Scientists got working on it ASAP, around the world. Chinese hospitals and medical experts were also pretty quick about sharing detailed information about what they knew of symptoms, disease progression, and their local best practices for keeping healthcare workers safe. (Sadly many hospitals around the world did not follow those...) Independent epidemiologists, virologists, etc. in the West immediately started issuing urgent warnings, begging governments to take decisive action. Neighborhoods in Western countries with significant Chinese expat populations were paying attention and started masking up and staying in their houses by the beginning of February. What outsiders could objectively see in January was that China shut down the entire national economy and transportation network, instituted unprecedented public quarantine/curfew measures (blocking off neighborhoods, only allowing occasional trips out of apartment buildings, stopping all inter-household gatherings, locking domestic immigrants out of their own apartments, forcing people into temporary isolation facilities, etc.), shifted massive numbers of healthcare workers to Hubei province, vacuumed up whatever PPE supply they could, started building temporary hospitals at ludicrous (probably structurally unsound) speed, etc. There were videos online of people getting welded into their own apartments or forcibly shoved into vans by the local police, falling down dead in the street, large-scale public disinfection of streets by armies of workers in hazmat suits, etc. etc. It was like a post-apocalyptic horror movie. The provincial government clearly screwed up by wasting time and covering things up in November–January, but after the national government took over the response was swift and decisive. (I think some steps were clearly an overreach and some of the implementation was sloppy and disorganized, which ended up hurting a lot of people. But it is easy to criticize from afar, and at the time there were many unknowns.) Sure the aggregated public statistics put out by the Chinese government of cases and deaths in the Wuhan area were obviously a massive undercount (partly because getting reliable data of a new disease that nobody understands yet and can't perfectly test for is always extremely difficult; there were also dramatic undercounts in Italy, Iran, the USA, etc. a couple months later), but anyone paying even the slightest attention could see that this was a huge serious threat coming for the world. Certainly by mid February it was abundantly clear that this would be a pandemic requiring large-scale coordinated decisive action by governments around the world. Some governments (e.g. Taiwan, South Korea) took their own decisive action, mobilized a national response and spun up PPE, testing, isolation, quarantines, contact tracing, etc. ASAP, and saved countless lives. Other governments (e.g. England, USA) were disorganized, avoided taking prompt action, sidelined local experts, and ended up with many avoidable deaths and economic devastation. Attempts by leaders in the latter countries to deflect blame to China can be rationalized by saying that China was not as forthcoming as they should have been, but frankly that is a cop out, with at least some racist undertone. It didn't take any brilliant insight to see that the Chinese government considered the epidemic to be a catastrophic national crisis, and that there was significant risk for a severe worldwide crisis.
mcguire 6y ago
Thank you! I will now go read the article.
tinus_hn 6y ago
Heh, in the Netherlands we are still making these mistakes and the authorities still focus on washing hands and 1.5m distancing. From January 1 schools can now apply for funding to improve their ventilation systems and it will probably arrive around June. And we still have not started vaccinating and won’t start vaccinating the elderly for at least a month. And only very slowly the media finally is starting to notice that the government has messed up. But still most reporting is just copying the press releases, shifting the blame around, jealously pointing fingers at supposed transgressors and blindly defending policy. It’s truly sad.

by Exmoor 6y ago

gen220 6y ago

I read the article, and agree with this summary fwiw. I would also emphasize that, in terms of personal culpability, Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services comes out looking very poor. (Mnuchin was also the speaker of some, in retrospect, appalling secondhand quotes). The article points out that Azar is the director of both the FDA and the CDC, and should have played a more active role in orchestrating their handshakes in February. Misunderstanding and miscommunication between the FDA and CDC were responsible for the absurd delay in widely-available testing, which otherwise should have been available in med-February. Not only was he aware of problems early on, he didn't properly communicate them up (to Trump, which contributed to Trump's belief that the whole thing would blow over), or manage them down. This is my reading, as a disclaimer, not an explicit statement from the article. I recommend people read it for themselves.

jacobolus 6y ago
I haven't read this article yet, but my impression has been that every political official in the Trump Administration – Azar, Redfield, Hahn, Pence, Mnunchin, Pompeo, Kushner, Birx, Adams, Atlas, Barr, Kudlow, ... – has egg all over their face in this crisis. A whole crew of sycophants afraid for their jobs, falling over themselves to keep Trump happy. Fauci and (sidelined and silenced) career officials at the CDC, FDA, and NIH are the only ones who came out looking okay.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Most of the trump appointees and trump himself come out of the article looking bad. Fauci comes out okay but not fantastic, with Birx looking a little better. About the only senior figure who seems to look good coming out of the article is Pottinger, who came into the government attached to Flynn.
  - gen220 6y ago
    I trust the New Yorker’s fact-checking chops, but I think it’s wise to be skeptical about Pottinger, as he’s the primary source for the story. I believe he advocated for a stronger response, and was summarily dismissed by his colleagues as there’s plenty of evidence for that. But I don’t know how accurate his portrayals of the intentions behind the CDC and the FDA officials are. There aren’t a lot of ways to cross reference his analysis of the quoted meetings, since the CDC and FDA both declined to comment for the piece. This is as close to a “full story” as we’re going to get before a hypothetical “COVID commission” congressional investigation, but it’s still quite two dimensional.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jacobolus 6y ago

> China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably wouldn't be a big deal They shared the genome quite quickly. Scientists got working on it ASAP, around the world. Chinese hospitals and medical experts were also pretty quick about sharing detailed information about what they knew of symptoms, disease progression, and their local best practices for keeping healthcare workers safe. (Sadly many hospitals around the world did not follow those...) Independent epidemiologists, virologists, etc. in the West immediately started issuing urgent warnings, begging governments to take decisive action. Neighborhoods in Western countries with significant Chinese expat populations were paying attention and started masking up and staying in their houses by the beginning of February. What outsiders could objectively see in January was that China shut down the entire national economy and transportation network, instituted unprecedented public quarantine/curfew measures (blocking off neighborhoods, only allowing occasional trips out of apartment buildings, stopping all inter-household gatherings, locking domestic immigrants out of their own apartments, forcing people into temporary isolation facilities, etc.), shifted massive numbers of healthcare workers to Hubei province, vacuumed up whatever PPE supply they could, started building temporary hospitals at ludicrous (probably structurally unsound) speed, etc. There were videos online of people getting welded into their own apartments or forcibly shoved into vans by the local police, falling down dead in the street, large-scale public disinfection of streets by armies of workers in hazmat suits, etc. etc. It was like a post-apocalyptic horror movie. The provincial government clearly screwed up by wasting time and covering things up in November–January, but after the national government took over the response was swift and decisive. (I think some steps were clearly an overreach and some of the implementation was sloppy and disorganized, which ended up hurting a lot of people. But it is easy to criticize from afar, and at the time there were many unknowns.) Sure the aggregated public statistics put out by the Chinese government of cases and deaths in the Wuhan area were obviously a massive undercount (partly because getting reliable data of a new disease that nobody understands yet and can't perfectly test for is always extremely difficult; there were also dramatic undercounts in Italy, Iran, the USA, etc. a couple months later), but anyone paying even the slightest attention could see that this was a huge serious threat coming for the world. Certainly by mid February it was abundantly clear that this would be a pandemic requiring large-scale coordinated decisive action by governments around the world. Some governments (e.g. Taiwan, South Korea) took their own decisive action, mobilized a national response and spun up PPE, testing, isolation, quarantines, contact tracing, etc. ASAP, and saved countless lives. Other governments (e.g. England, USA) were disorganized, avoided taking prompt action, sidelined local experts, and ended up with many avoidable deaths and economic devastation. Attempts by leaders in the latter countries to deflect blame to China can be rationalized by saying that China was not as forthcoming as they should have been, but frankly that is a cop out, with at least some racist undertone. It didn't take any brilliant insight to see that the Chinese government considered the epidemic to be a catastrophic national crisis, and that there was significant risk for a severe worldwide crisis.

mcguire 6y ago

Thank you! I will now go read the article.

tinus_hn 6y ago

Heh, in the Netherlands we are still making these mistakes and the authorities still focus on washing hands and 1.5m distancing. From January 1 schools can now apply for funding to improve their ventilation systems and it will probably arrive around June. And we still have not started vaccinating and won’t start vaccinating the elderly for at least a month. And only very slowly the media finally is starting to notice that the government has messed up. But still most reporting is just copying the press releases, shifting the blame around, jealously pointing fingers at supposed transgressors and blindly defending policy. It’s truly sad.