4 ms·

See, this is the real problem - it's not just the lab leak theory, the efforts to get Trump out of office seeped into and warped every aspect of the media cover

by makomk 5y ago

See, this is the real problem - it's not just the lab leak theory, the efforts to get Trump out of office seeped into and warped every aspect of the media coverage of Covid-19. For example, border closures. Putting aside the fact that at the time the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia, the US had the only remotely sensible early border closures in the Western world - and that was an infinitely bigger problem than whether Trump should've imposed it a week earlier. In particular, Italy massively dropped the ball and ended up with a huge outbreak spreading infections to the US and the rest of Europe whilst somehow reporting zero cases. (Even US testing wasn't that broken!) There is approximately zero chance that the US could've banned travel from them in time to stop this - there was absolutely no justification for this at the time, given they were reporting zero cases unlike the USA. Then the American media pointed to the fact that Italy had banned direct flights from China (much too late) as proof travel bans didn't work. Of course it didn't - Italy has borderless travel with the rest of the EU, everyone could just fly in to a different airport, it's the equivalent of Texas or California banning direct flights in a futile attempt to keep the virus out. The US took the more sensible approach of restricting based on where people had travelled recently, regardless of where they were travelling from - pretty much everyone else now seems to have copied this approach. The media also seems to have misled everyone about what went wrong with Covid testing in the US. As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level, politically appointed levels of the government. The problem was the non-partisan career parts of the CDC screwed up, first by contaminating the testing reagents and then covering it up and letting them ship out to labs anyway, causing confusion and delays as the labs couldn't work out why they failed quality checks.

jjoonathan 5y ago
> the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia Closing the borders before patient 1 or almost immediately after patient 1 (plus aggressive contact tracing) would have been good public health policy. Closing the borders after a week of exponential growth and lack of aggressive contact tracing was hopeless. Good for appearances only -- and the good appearances came largely from xenophobia because the public health cat was well out of the bag by that point. See the difference? I'm sure you can find plenty of bad liberal media takes on the issue, but that's completely beside the point as they were not in charge of anything. The bad (xenophobic) conservative takes didn't just come from the media, though, they also came from the president. Repeatedly and persistently. > As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level Just one tiny little problem with that narrative: Trump said the quiet parts out loud, multiple times, confirming what would otherwise have "just" been rumors and leaks. He didn't just fight and stall the testing, he publicly bragged about it later. "When you do testing to that extent you're going to find more people, you're going to find cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test. We got tests for people who don't know what's going on."
- makomk 5y ago
  The US did have contact tracing early on though, and as far as anyone can tell it did work pretty well at containing the cases coming in from China - maybe not well enough that it could've contained them indefinitely, though that'd be a tall order and we'll never know because this wasn't even the problem. Genetic tracing shows that cases in the US were driven by spread from Europe, almost certainly Italy given the circumstances, which no-one was really equipped to spot. The media just downplayed and omitted the contact tracing that happened in the US because it didn't fit the anti-Trump narrative. Now, of course Taiwan had a lot of success until recently and they did ban travel from China earlier than anyone else - but again, the role of this was almost entirely omitted from the early US news coverage because it didn't fit into the anti-Trump narrative. Their success was attributed to their Covid testing and tied into to the story that this was something Trump screwed up due to his focus on border closures and travel bans. (Meanwhile in the real world, their Covid testing basically collapsed the moment the disease got a foothold - in May 2021 when this had become a mass-produced commodity.) They also didn't have the level of travel from Italy that the US and other worse-affected countries did...

by makomk 5y ago

jjoonathan 5y ago

> the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia Closing the borders before patient 1 or almost immediately after patient 1 (plus aggressive contact tracing) would have been good public health policy. Closing the borders after a week of exponential growth and lack of aggressive contact tracing was hopeless. Good for appearances only -- and the good appearances came largely from xenophobia because the public health cat was well out of the bag by that point. See the difference? I'm sure you can find plenty of bad liberal media takes on the issue, but that's completely beside the point as they were not in charge of anything. The bad (xenophobic) conservative takes didn't just come from the media, though, they also came from the president. Repeatedly and persistently. > As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level Just one tiny little problem with that narrative: Trump said the quiet parts out loud, multiple times, confirming what would otherwise have "just" been rumors and leaks. He didn't just fight and stall the testing, he publicly bragged about it later. "When you do testing to that extent you're going to find more people, you're going to find cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test. We got tests for people who don't know what's going on."

makomk 5y ago
The US did have contact tracing early on though, and as far as anyone can tell it did work pretty well at containing the cases coming in from China - maybe not well enough that it could've contained them indefinitely, though that'd be a tall order and we'll never know because this wasn't even the problem. Genetic tracing shows that cases in the US were driven by spread from Europe, almost certainly Italy given the circumstances, which no-one was really equipped to spot. The media just downplayed and omitted the contact tracing that happened in the US because it didn't fit the anti-Trump narrative. Now, of course Taiwan had a lot of success until recently and they did ban travel from China earlier than anyone else - but again, the role of this was almost entirely omitted from the early US news coverage because it didn't fit into the anti-Trump narrative. Their success was attributed to their Covid testing and tied into to the story that this was something Trump screwed up due to his focus on border closures and travel bans. (Meanwhile in the real world, their Covid testing basically collapsed the moment the disease got a foothold - in May 2021 when this had become a mass-produced commodity.) They also didn't have the level of travel from Italy that the US and other worse-affected countries did...