It’s when they took control of the narrative…it’s when they SAID they ‘snuffed it out.’. You probably are one of the ‘most anti-CCP folks on this board’…which says something right there.
At any rate, we don’t need a dictatorship or brutal or draconian measures. We don’t need or want to set aside the Constitution. We didn’t do that during the pandemic flu, and we don’t need to do it now. Taiwan didn’t do that, nor did any of the other really successful countries during this outbreak. China, of course, claims to have been successful and claims what you are saying…you need to be brutal. You need to be draconian. But, really, what they have been successful in doing is convincing everyone how successful they have been. They have convinced you. They have convinced most of the western press. They have convinced most of the world. THAT is what they have been successful at. And damn, they are good at it.
Well, this current pandemic has exposed the West’s fatal flaw. Unfortunately, now that it’s no secret it can be exploited and there really isn’t anything anyone can do.
Yes, it’s terrible that China exploited us like this, and that there just isn’t anything we can do to stop our leadership and ourselves from acting like morons.
? Last time I looked, New Zealand (which has been pretty much COVID-free and mostly without restrictions within the nation’s borders since early June) was generally considered part of “the West”, in the global sense of modern European-derived developed democracies.
So are countries like Norway and Australia and Germany, which although nowhere near COVID-free have had far lower infection and death rates than the US.
So whatever this supposed “fatal flaw” is, it clearly has a very uneven impact on how different “Western” countries manage to control a pandemic.
Terrorism with microbes is certainly not a fun potential prospect. But like everything else involving microbes, it would doubtless have, as we’ve seen, a much more severe impact on countries with the stupid irresponsible anti-science kind of leadership than on countries with the sensible pragmatic well-informed kind.
Hey, maybe we should have a special organization that watches for bioterrorist attacks. Or even just regular naturally occurring pandemics. Something like a National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. It’s such an obviously good idea that I don’t imagine anyone except a complete idiot would be against something like this. But that’s no worry. It’s not like a complete idiot will ever be in a position of power.
If the next pandemic were like, say, ebola lethal, I think people wouldn’t need to be shocked into staying indoors. Part of the problem with coronavirus is that while it’s deadly, it’s not deadly enough to scare people. The default assumption is “It’s a bad flu that kills old and weak people - I’m good. People die every die. I need money to live, and I want to enjoy my life.”
If people were dying of a virus that eats flesh or fills up your lungs and kills you dead within 12 hours of your first symptoms, I think a lot more people would ‘get it.’ But that’s not what we’re dealing with, and I think that we have to assume that most pandemics are going to be like COVID-19 and AIDS: deadly but not enough to scare the average person into cooperating with public health restrictions.
With AIDS, we fought back and made significant progress through sustained public education. It also helped that more and more people understood that it’s not just a gay disease, but again, I credit education for that. I think that’s ultimately what we have to do is have a public information campaign that enlightens people as soon as possible and then encourages them to take action to protect themselves first, and then others around them. In short, we have to get across the idea that masks are to ordinary folk in 2020 what condoms were to horny young people in 1989: a little inconvenient and uncomfortable but a basic act of self-protection.
Of course, there would not be such widespread skepticism that the thing is even real.
But I don’t see why higher stakes would imply that MAGA “mah freedom” anti-government types, or the anti-science “trust in God’s will” types, would suddenly change their worldview to become compliant with following rational science-driven government policy.
Also, with something extremely lethal we’d likely be dealing with much more difficult policy decisions. It might be possible to contain the spread to limited parts of the country, but only by absolute quarantine, nobody in or out. National Guard blocking all roads, helicopter patrols, etc. Asymptomatic people in the quarantined areas are all going to want to get out into the safe areas, and you’d have to be very unselfish and public-spirited to realize that you just have to sit tight and accept the rationale behind the quarantine because you might already be infected.
How many people would the National Guard have to shoot to enforce a strict area quarantine in some MAGA part of the U.S., as compared to an equivalent quarantined area in (say) Japan or Europe?
It’s not a threat to the very young, which is unusual for a disease. If under 5s were dying like over 70s . . .which is not out of the question for the next one . . .we’d have all reacted very differently.
I think the REAL lesson is that no amount of money spent on prevention is too much. Let’s double down on maintaining strategic stockpiles of PPE, subsidizing the education of healthcare workers and expanding medical and nursing programs, developing plans to quickly expand medical capacity in an orderly way, having trained media people ready to set up educational campaigns. Let’s start mass producing tests for any potential pandemic virus long before it’s actually a problem, and throw them away if we don’t need them. Let’s have plans for contact tracing and converting hotels to managed isolation units.
We don’t need to double down on fascism. We need to double down on competence.
But calling the U.S. problem lack of competence just seems off the mark to me. We have incredibly competent people, massive human and material resources. We already have the competence do anything we set our minds to better and quicker than anywhere else in the world - if we choose to do it.
The problem is that such a large proportion of our population wallows in benighted antagonistic ignorance and elects incompetent and corrupt leadership.
This unfortunate situation means that, compared to other far more mutually cooperative and enlightened societies in the world, we’re screwed in any kind of public health crisis, from mild to civilization-threatening.