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As an Asian American, this baffles me a little bit. We knew the virus was airborne since January 2020. It was all over Chinese/Taiwanese/SEA news outlets. I liv

As an Asian American, this baffles me a little bit. We knew the virus was airborne since January 2020. It was all over Chinese/Taiwanese/SEA news outlets. I live in New England, Asians here started wearing masks months before others. I remember purposely choosing to go to Asian Supermarkets instead of Stop & Shop for safety back then.

toyg 5y ago
I'm Italian and the events in February and March 2020 made it very clear to me how the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources. The "debate" about lockdown in the UK mirrored the Italian one almost day by day, with a delay of 3 weeks between here and Italy. Italian sources and discoveries were either ignored or discounted. It was like watching a child "discover" on their own how to start a fire. If they do that with sources in a relatively easy and popular language, I cannot imagine what they do with complex Asian ones.
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  Even though I usually like to stay away from political topics on here, but it pains me that a country I (used to) love so much, UK, is spiraling deeper and deeper into a void. So much so I have to believe its leadership no longer acts in favour of the country. For reasons unknown to me, however it is long known Brexit was a wanted scenario for Russian geopolitics, as laid out in their textbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
  - aix1 5y ago
    Thanks for pointing out the book. Terrifying.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    One guy writing a book in 1997 that argues France and Germany should be strongly united in a Union, does not imply anything about the decision of British voters in 2016. You're peddling a literal conspiracy theory there.
    - ricardobayes 5y ago
      Well, if said book is the de facto textbook for their foreign policy students, then yes I would say at least the intent was there to influence things the way they occurred. How much did that effectively take place, now that's a conspiracy theory.
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    Stop blaming the Russians, they can only exploit the rot if it's already there. It reminds me of Germans blaming everything on the Nazis after WW2 conveniently forgetting they voted for them and cheered them on.
    - tim333 5y ago
      I still blame them for exploiting the rot. I wish they could behave like a normal country instead of trying to destabilize most of the world.
      - ricardobayes 5y ago
        I do believe all superpowers are doing that, US has a long history too to back certain leaders/powers etc.
- reallyagain 5y ago
  ... and if Italy learned the lessons from Asian countries, the initial spike in Italy would not have been so devastating. I think a more fair take would be that most countries did not take COVID19(in particular, the early variants which were much more dangerous) seriously enough until there was a major source of infections in their country, at which point it was obviously too late. There are some exceptions(in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign), but I think in general it is a true statement.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    That's not it, the problem with Italy was in the way they were treating them and the fact that Italy is mostly old people (after government policies drove out young peoples for decades). Several Italian doctors criticised the Italian guidelines (in particular about giving corticosteroids) but they were silenced. We also don't know the real numbers of Asian countries, do you trust the numbers given by the CCP?
    - blitzar 5y ago
      > do you trust the numbers given by the CCP? No less, or more than for the USA.
    - tim333 5y ago
      Most Asian countries are not China. The standards of reporting in places like Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore are probably better than the west.
  - toyg 5y ago
    The world tends to respect the anglo press more than the rest, because they work in the world's current lingua franca, they are historically less subject to governmental influence, and effectively report (and affect) the state of the biggest superpower on the planet. In some cases (covid, Judith Miller, etc), it becomes evident that such high respect is often unwarranted. I say this from a place of sadness, not anger. It's not a criticism of anglo countries per se, but of cultural attitudes around certain sectors, inside and outside such countries. > in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign NZ and Australia largely benefited from their geographical and economic periphery to achieve the level of safety that they did. By the time the virus got there in critical numbers, it had already been taken seriously in the anglosphere as a whole because of the UK debacle. I'm not saying their lockdowns didn't help (they very much did), but it's easier to enforce controls on entrance in far-flung corners of the world rather than around the backbone of the world economy.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  The UK has been one of the freest countries in terms of restrictions. I wasn't happy with the restrictions but they never went as crazy as the rest of Europe. Overall I'm glad we had Boris and not someone from the other side who would have been even more draconian - even if having a real conservative would have been better.
  - aix1 5y ago
    Which countries do you have in mind when you say "rest of Europe"? For example, Switzerland (one country I've been following pretty closely) seems have had less strict restrictions than the UK pretty much throughout the pandemic. (To be clear, I'm not qualified to say which is a better approach, I'm just curious about your comparison.)
  - blitzar 5y ago
    Interesting conclusion given by almost every measure the UK restrictions have been more draconian than the rest of europe.
- loup-vaillant 5y ago
  Same in France, we mirrored Italy with a 10 days delay or so, yet didn't take advantage of that warning. And that's despite YouTubers all over the place warning about that. I literally watched our government ignoring reality.
- michaelt 5y ago
  > the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources As I recall, one of the first things that happened in response to the pandemic was loads of our foreign correspondents either not getting sent in the first place, or getting pulled out. For something like an earthquake or tsunami, there would be reporters on the ground filing in-person reports within days. Somewhat understandably, nobody wanted to send reporters to outbreak hotspots. It wasn't until further into the pandemic that journalists decided interviewing randos from their living rooms over skype was good enough.
- makomk 5y ago
  From what I can tell, the UK and US press pushed the argument that the UK and US should've learned from Italy primarily because journalists there hated the current governments and wanted to portray them as uniquely incompetent, which meant they had to spin them as worse than Italy even though that was a trainwreck. The problem is that the information coming out of Italy was utter garbage. For example, Italy was reporting zero cases when the US and UK weren't, and exponential growth is really slow at the start - you don'tt just go from zero cases to hospital collapse in an instant. The only way this makes sense is if Italy was failing to test people hospitalized with Covid symptoms even more totally and completely than even the US, which had an official policy of not doing so for patients without travel from China yet still managed to pick up unlinked cases at a much earlier stage. Which means the information on how Italy ended up this way was useless and not applicable to other countries, and all the hospitalisation and death rates were worthless too - and remember, no other country in the world had Covid spread from China result in the kind of outbreak that Italy experienced, their major outbreaks all seem to have come from Italy. So other countries had no way of knowing whether to expect something more like Italy's experiences or their own prior experiences and also no way of knowing what if anything could prevent this. The information on how to treat Covid patients from Italy also seems to have been hot garbage. Like, their information and treatment policies around stuff like intubation and ventilators which every other country based their policies on likely outright killed a bunch of people. On the other hand, the UK found the first effective treatment for patients with Covid that was actually confirmed to substantially reduce their risk of dying - yet somehow, you don't hear the press arguing that other countries whose outbreaks happened after the UK's should've been able to do better because they had the UK to learn from like they do with Italy. What they have been doing is comparing the total number of deaths with other European countries (rather than per-capita figures) to falsely make it look like Covid was more deadly here than everywhere else.
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  In Spain, up until the 8th of march the government was inviting people to go to women's marchs and saying everything was under control. A guy in charge of the job safety for national police was demoted because he decided to buy and give masks to policeman. Media affiliated with the government was actively trying to ridicule everyone, calling people alarmists, fascists or whatever insult they came up with. That includes science divulgators, medical personnel, etc. Pretty ugly. Then, suddenly, the 9th of March we had a very worrysome situation and yadda yadda. Not to mention the mask thing. I mean, how in the hell are you going to trust any of this any more? I know I don't. Now if something else happens you have to be very careful, they may be lying to you, or having a combination of lies and stupidity. I guess this is what happens when the selection of elites is optimized for marketing purposes.
  - namlem 5y ago
    IMO, this is a problem inherent to electoralism. The types of leaders that are best at winning elections tend not to be very good at actually leading. That is why we need to start gradually moving away from this outmodded version of pseudo-democracy. I believe the future of democracy lies in the combination of of deliberative citizens assemblies (such as those that have been taking place in Ireland) and deliberative, consensus-seeking online platforms (such as the vTaiwan project). Elections still have their place, but they should not be the primary mechanism by which we conduct democracy.
nicoburns 5y ago
Yep, I (in the UK - no asian heritage) was also aware of this by around February/March 2020 due to posts here on HN. But even otherwise smart and well informed people that I know seemed clueless about these things until many months later.

toyg 5y ago

I'm Italian and the events in February and March 2020 made it very clear to me how the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources. The "debate" about lockdown in the UK mirrored the Italian one almost day by day, with a delay of 3 weeks between here and Italy. Italian sources and discoveries were either ignored or discounted. It was like watching a child "discover" on their own how to start a fire. If they do that with sources in a relatively easy and popular language, I cannot imagine what they do with complex Asian ones.

ricardobayes 5y ago
Even though I usually like to stay away from political topics on here, but it pains me that a country I (used to) love so much, UK, is spiraling deeper and deeper into a void. So much so I have to believe its leadership no longer acts in favour of the country. For reasons unknown to me, however it is long known Brexit was a wanted scenario for Russian geopolitics, as laid out in their textbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
- aix1 5y ago
  Thanks for pointing out the book. Terrifying.
- native_samples 5y ago
  One guy writing a book in 1997 that argues France and Germany should be strongly united in a Union, does not imply anything about the decision of British voters in 2016. You're peddling a literal conspiracy theory there.
  - ricardobayes 5y ago
    Well, if said book is the de facto textbook for their foreign policy students, then yes I would say at least the intent was there to influence things the way they occurred. How much did that effectively take place, now that's a conspiracy theory.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Stop blaming the Russians, they can only exploit the rot if it's already there. It reminds me of Germans blaming everything on the Nazis after WW2 conveniently forgetting they voted for them and cheered them on.
  - tim333 5y ago
    I still blame them for exploiting the rot. I wish they could behave like a normal country instead of trying to destabilize most of the world.
    - ricardobayes 5y ago
      I do believe all superpowers are doing that, US has a long history too to back certain leaders/powers etc.
reallyagain 5y ago
... and if Italy learned the lessons from Asian countries, the initial spike in Italy would not have been so devastating. I think a more fair take would be that most countries did not take COVID19(in particular, the early variants which were much more dangerous) seriously enough until there was a major source of infections in their country, at which point it was obviously too late. There are some exceptions(in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign), but I think in general it is a true statement.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  That's not it, the problem with Italy was in the way they were treating them and the fact that Italy is mostly old people (after government policies drove out young peoples for decades). Several Italian doctors criticised the Italian guidelines (in particular about giving corticosteroids) but they were silenced. We also don't know the real numbers of Asian countries, do you trust the numbers given by the CCP?
  - blitzar 5y ago
    > do you trust the numbers given by the CCP? No less, or more than for the USA.
  - tim333 5y ago
    Most Asian countries are not China. The standards of reporting in places like Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore are probably better than the west.
- toyg 5y ago
  The world tends to respect the anglo press more than the rest, because they work in the world's current lingua franca, they are historically less subject to governmental influence, and effectively report (and affect) the state of the biggest superpower on the planet. In some cases (covid, Judith Miller, etc), it becomes evident that such high respect is often unwarranted. I say this from a place of sadness, not anger. It's not a criticism of anglo countries per se, but of cultural attitudes around certain sectors, inside and outside such countries. > in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign NZ and Australia largely benefited from their geographical and economic periphery to achieve the level of safety that they did. By the time the virus got there in critical numbers, it had already been taken seriously in the anglosphere as a whole because of the UK debacle. I'm not saying their lockdowns didn't help (they very much did), but it's easier to enforce controls on entrance in far-flung corners of the world rather than around the backbone of the world economy.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
The UK has been one of the freest countries in terms of restrictions. I wasn't happy with the restrictions but they never went as crazy as the rest of Europe. Overall I'm glad we had Boris and not someone from the other side who would have been even more draconian - even if having a real conservative would have been better.
- aix1 5y ago
  Which countries do you have in mind when you say "rest of Europe"? For example, Switzerland (one country I've been following pretty closely) seems have had less strict restrictions than the UK pretty much throughout the pandemic. (To be clear, I'm not qualified to say which is a better approach, I'm just curious about your comparison.)
- blitzar 5y ago
  Interesting conclusion given by almost every measure the UK restrictions have been more draconian than the rest of europe.
loup-vaillant 5y ago
Same in France, we mirrored Italy with a 10 days delay or so, yet didn't take advantage of that warning. And that's despite YouTubers all over the place warning about that. I literally watched our government ignoring reality.
michaelt 5y ago
> the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources As I recall, one of the first things that happened in response to the pandemic was loads of our foreign correspondents either not getting sent in the first place, or getting pulled out. For something like an earthquake or tsunami, there would be reporters on the ground filing in-person reports within days. Somewhat understandably, nobody wanted to send reporters to outbreak hotspots. It wasn't until further into the pandemic that journalists decided interviewing randos from their living rooms over skype was good enough.
makomk 5y ago
From what I can tell, the UK and US press pushed the argument that the UK and US should've learned from Italy primarily because journalists there hated the current governments and wanted to portray them as uniquely incompetent, which meant they had to spin them as worse than Italy even though that was a trainwreck. The problem is that the information coming out of Italy was utter garbage. For example, Italy was reporting zero cases when the US and UK weren't, and exponential growth is really slow at the start - you don'tt just go from zero cases to hospital collapse in an instant. The only way this makes sense is if Italy was failing to test people hospitalized with Covid symptoms even more totally and completely than even the US, which had an official policy of not doing so for patients without travel from China yet still managed to pick up unlinked cases at a much earlier stage. Which means the information on how Italy ended up this way was useless and not applicable to other countries, and all the hospitalisation and death rates were worthless too - and remember, no other country in the world had Covid spread from China result in the kind of outbreak that Italy experienced, their major outbreaks all seem to have come from Italy. So other countries had no way of knowing whether to expect something more like Italy's experiences or their own prior experiences and also no way of knowing what if anything could prevent this. The information on how to treat Covid patients from Italy also seems to have been hot garbage. Like, their information and treatment policies around stuff like intubation and ventilators which every other country based their policies on likely outright killed a bunch of people. On the other hand, the UK found the first effective treatment for patients with Covid that was actually confirmed to substantially reduce their risk of dying - yet somehow, you don't hear the press arguing that other countries whose outbreaks happened after the UK's should've been able to do better because they had the UK to learn from like they do with Italy. What they have been doing is comparing the total number of deaths with other European countries (rather than per-capita figures) to falsely make it look like Covid was more deadly here than everywhere else.
spaniard89277 5y ago
In Spain, up until the 8th of march the government was inviting people to go to women's marchs and saying everything was under control. A guy in charge of the job safety for national police was demoted because he decided to buy and give masks to policeman. Media affiliated with the government was actively trying to ridicule everyone, calling people alarmists, fascists or whatever insult they came up with. That includes science divulgators, medical personnel, etc. Pretty ugly. Then, suddenly, the 9th of March we had a very worrysome situation and yadda yadda. Not to mention the mask thing. I mean, how in the hell are you going to trust any of this any more? I know I don't. Now if something else happens you have to be very careful, they may be lying to you, or having a combination of lies and stupidity. I guess this is what happens when the selection of elites is optimized for marketing purposes.
- namlem 5y ago
  IMO, this is a problem inherent to electoralism. The types of leaders that are best at winning elections tend not to be very good at actually leading. That is why we need to start gradually moving away from this outmodded version of pseudo-democracy. I believe the future of democracy lies in the combination of of deliberative citizens assemblies (such as those that have been taking place in Ireland) and deliberative, consensus-seeking online platforms (such as the vTaiwan project). Elections still have their place, but they should not be the primary mechanism by which we conduct democracy.

nicoburns 5y ago

Yep, I (in the UK - no asian heritage) was also aware of this by around February/March 2020 due to posts here on HN. But even otherwise smart and well informed people that I know seemed clueless about these things until many months later.