3 ms·
That turns out to be a fairly small number of people. The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this co
by TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
That turns out to be a fairly small number of people.
The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny.
Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Triad fringes.
In fact we're still there even after millions of dead.
The tragedy is that a no compromise planetary policy of short full lockdowns, a total ban on non-essential international travel, and aggressive testing/tracing could have ended Covid within 3-6 months.
But our economic systems aren't designed to handle that contingency, so we're dealing with much higher levels of personal and economic harm instead.
- CTDOCodebases 5y agoGood points. Personally I thought there was a little racism mixed in to it too. I found it amusing that people were like "but that's China". Once it took hold in northern Italy it seemed to magically become real for a lot of people.
- usrusr 5y agoGuilty of that. While I do remember being concerned about the virus becoming worldwide, I was more concerned about electronics supply chains collapsing at the source. It's not just racism, objectively wasteful car cultures should be considerably less at risk than high density Asian cities, but I can't claim that those lines were not blurry, they definitely were.