> I also find it astonishing that you seem to think a country that could have prevented 95% of cases having not covered it up should be lauded for giving advice about self-isolation and lockdowns after it caused them. The families of 0.95 * 1.5M people thank you so much for the clarification.
In no way do I think China should be lauded. They should obviously be condemned for failing to contain this while it was a localized epidemic and not a pandemic, and for actively hurting and silencing the doctors that tried to do so. The CCP is a despicable regime that has caused much harm to its own citizens and to the world in general, in this crisis and in others.
However, I can do little to change the regime in China. However, I have much more power to influence and change the regime in my own country, and so I am much more interested in how they handled the crisis at least once information got out, and it is hear where I think the press should also focus, as they rightly have.
China's reputation for covering up should have been ample reason to start pandemic preparation in December or at least January, as Taiwan, Vietnam and other countries with successful responses did.
European countries and the US instead chose to believe China's early lies. They then added their own lies on top once China started telling (some of) the truth, claiming that masks are not useful, claiming that the disease is not that bad, claiming that it will go away in the summer and myriad other lies.
They then avoided as long as possible to take any serious measures that could have curtailed the spread of the disease early on extremely effectively, with some more serious but very short term economic impact, leaving the rest of the year for growth.
Instead, they chose lukewarm 'lockdowns' where many stores remained opened, they chose to only do contact tracing for direct contacts (serious countries were contact tracing and isolating up to 3 levels of contact), they chose to not even recommend masks until the second half of the year (particularly stupid regimes like the one in Sweden have only recommended them last week!) etc.
These are all things for which we can hold our politicians accountable. We can't hold the CCCP accountable.
By the way, I'm neither a citizen nor a resident of the USA, Trump is not 'my president' in any sense of the word.
In no way do I think China should be lauded. They should obviously be condemned for failing to contain this while it was a localized epidemic and not a pandemic, and for actively hurting and silencing the doctors that tried to do so. The CCP is a despicable regime that has caused much harm to its own citizens and to the world in general, in this crisis and in others.
However, I can do little to change the regime in China. However, I have much more power to influence and change the regime in my own country, and so I am much more interested in how they handled the crisis at least once information got out, and it is hear where I think the press should also focus, as they rightly have.
China's reputation for covering up should have been ample reason to start pandemic preparation in December or at least January, as Taiwan, Vietnam and other countries with successful responses did.
European countries and the US instead chose to believe China's early lies. They then added their own lies on top once China started telling (some of) the truth, claiming that masks are not useful, claiming that the disease is not that bad, claiming that it will go away in the summer and myriad other lies.
They then avoided as long as possible to take any serious measures that could have curtailed the spread of the disease early on extremely effectively, with some more serious but very short term economic impact, leaving the rest of the year for growth.
Instead, they chose lukewarm 'lockdowns' where many stores remained opened, they chose to only do contact tracing for direct contacts (serious countries were contact tracing and isolating up to 3 levels of contact), they chose to not even recommend masks until the second half of the year (particularly stupid regimes like the one in Sweden have only recommended them last week!) etc.
These are all things for which we can hold our politicians accountable. We can't hold the CCCP accountable.
By the way, I'm neither a citizen nor a resident of the USA, Trump is not 'my president' in any sense of the word.