Coronavirus and the blindness of authoritarianism
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Although, ironically, they originate in China because of too little government control over hygiene in wet markets and game meat, not too much authoritarianism.
China isn't unique here, it's also the case for most of Africa and other South East Asian countries.
China (country), India and Africa (continent) each separately have > 1/6 of the World Population.
So, even if human disease came randomly, it would have a 50% chance of being from these 3 areas.
What is surprising is that the high population densities of the Philippines haven't correlated to disease.
Granted, there's an underground in every country I'm sure, and if all things were equal with the rules and enforcement, your argument would be much more reasonable.
The Chinese government promotes "traditional medicine" for nationalistic reasons, and I suspect it's playing a significant role in these zoonotic diseases -- not to mention the extinction of rhinos and whatnot.
The federal and local governments in the U.S. do not have the same power as CCP to suppress the "rumor". The eight doctors would not have been reprimanded by the local police for discussing the new virus in private online groups. The Trump administration would not have power to tell the CDC to shut up. The Trump administration would not have power to force the CDC to under-report counts. The states would not cooperate with the federal government to under-report counts.
The dust-up with the NOAA and the White House last year over a hurricane is probably a good model for what a CDC / White House disagreement might look like. Recall that during that episode, the White House directed NOAA to disavow the claims of forecasters that went against the president’s claim that Alabama was in Dorian’s line of fire.
1) show up to work at, say, McDonalds even if they're not feeling great.
2) wait until the last minute to seek health care because it's expensive
And by "curious" I mean "extremely worried".
Edit: I'm certainly no expert though; it'd be nice to consider some actual data about how these things spread (is the flu a similar enough model?). Maybe the above points don't really matter that much. I'm still worried in any event. Several relatives-in-law live in one of the affected areas of Italy.
We have a system where people are too terrified of their insurers to get tested or get medical care, and too terrified of their employers to stay home from work. It's a recipe for disaster in a pandemic.
Incidentally, the fact that authoritarianism and extreme predatory capitalism cause the same kind of fear that impedes things like public health might also suggest that maybe authoritarianism and extreme predatory capitalism are pretty similar, as folks like Elizabeth Anderson[2] and I[3] have argued...
[1] https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article24047680...
[2] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/pr...
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08913811.2014.9... (paywalled sorry)
The US generally has extremely strict guidelines regarding food safety and hygiene. In terms of food safety, America ranks above all but the Nordic countries.[1]
I can assure you that American restaurants absolutely will not tolerate a food worker with an active upper respiratory infection. If anything US restaurants are more likely to order a worker to stay home, because unlike Europe they generally don't have to give hourly workers paid sick time.
The obvious "dude is coughing / sneezing" case simply doesn't apply to Coronavirus. It can spread long before you show any symptoms.
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There are even cases where people are passing the virus on without ever actually getting, or feeling, sick. https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-confirmed-patients-...
Coronavirus is deadly enough to kill some people, but weak enough that some people's immune system represses it entirely.
In some ways, something like Ebola is easier to control. Because everyone who gets sick with Ebola actually shows symptoms (because Ebola is so deadly).
And of course people may be contagious before exhibiting a lot of symptoms, but that's certainly not US specific.
I think you're speaking with too much certainty here. It really depends on the restaurant's management, just based on my personal experience. Some will just assign people to jobs that aren't customer-facing because they can't afford to be short-handed and it's difficult to get people to come in on their day off.
"they generally don't have to give hourly workers paid sick time."
..is exactly why you should expect them to take something for their fever, turn up for their shift and say absolutely nothing to anyone about feeling unwell.
"But not all state and local food codes include FDA’s sick worker rules. In fact, 19 states have not adopted these rules. And some food workers work while sick even when their states or localities do have those rules. Indeed, 20% of food workers say they worked at least one shift with vomiting or diarrhea in the past year."
https://blogs.cdc.gov/yourhealthyourenvironment/2016/12/05/f...
See, he‘s getting experts involved, already:
https://mobile.twitter.com/HomelandKen/status/12320273067320...
~44 million people have no health insurance in the US, and another 38 million have inadequate health insurance. how many of them will skip the doctor and show up for work because they rather not face a surprise bill?
I got no doubt at this stage that the US will be hit the hardest from all the developed countries. No amount of testing and prevention mechanism the CDC can come up with, effective mitigation will depend on people seeking treatment and be willing to go to a doctor even without symptoms.
I'm pretty convinced that the only reason the US hasn't been hit as hard yet is that they aren't testing on the same scale.
In other news on twitter people from Vietnam, Thailand are currently boasting that the number of /their/ infected is tiny compared to South Korea - SK just tests on a massive scale. Not testing and educating people keeps your numbers low but you'll lose in the long run.
Hypocritical? Sounds like a completely orthogonal problem to me. You can have insanely unaffordable healthcare in authoritarian states and liberal democracies. If anything, the US is an outlier considering that healthcare works well in every other liberal democracy.
It's the biggest and most diverse so that's wouldn't be surprising, yes.
Whenever I read "homogeneous nation" I take a glance at my racism-o-meter...
I have no idea how reliable these polls are, or how much things have changed since they were conducted, but I've heard the statistic before and I at least got the impression that it wasn't considered a controversial one.
From what I understand, there are similar statistics about various other policies that could be considered 'socialist' (but are more European-style social-democratic). While many Americans are strongly opposed to anything with the label socialism, they seem to often actually be in favor of the actual policy that these 'progressives' propose.
I haven't taken any kind of deep dive into this though, so for all I know this is more controversial than I assumed.
This reminds me of the 2016 election. All the poll results said that Hillary would easily win the election. So much for those polls.
In fact, I'd say it's rather unsurprising that, whatever people might actually want, they would vote against their interest because 1) socialism is evil, and 2) "my team should win, no matter the policy".
Furthermore, there's a difference between a poll that predicts an election winner, which is notoriously difficult to do, and a poll that simply asks people whether they want <thing x>.
It's possible the wording of the questions is manipulative, or that they happened to poll an unrepresentative sample of the population. I don't know at this point.
But the fact that 1) the results of an 'issue' poll don't align with voter behavior and 2) that the results of an election winner poll doesn't in itself make a good case that the poll must be flawed.
If people are honestly this stupid, then why even bother polling them to see what policies they want? This is a serious question: if people don't bother voting based on policies they want, then why is that even important? If this theory of yours is true, then it really seems to call the voting population's basic intelligence into question, not to mention the fundamental idea of democracy itself. If the people are too utterly stupid to vote for their own best interests at least most of the time, then why wouldn't authoritarianism be a better system?
Honestly, I find it easier to believe that the polls are bad. I've seen way too many polls in my lifetime where the questions were manipulative, or just plain poorly worded or chosen. On top of that, the other problem with polls is that they only capture results from people who actually bother to respond to the polls, or are in a place where the pollsters are. Usually, when the latter is brought up, we're supposed to somehow believe that the pollsters have some great methodology that lets them determine what a larger population wants just by sampling a much smaller number of people in that population, but this is completely subject to bias and error. And finally, I point again to the 2016 election: predicting a winner is not as hard as asking if they want <thing x>. In this case, the poll is asking exactly the same thing as the election itself will: who do you plan to vote for? Asking about <thing x> is not as easy, because you can get wildly different results by asking the question differently. Do I want "Medicare for All"? Well, the answer might depend on many things, like how exactly it would be implemented. Is private insurance still allowed to exist as a supplement or alternative? Are non-citizens/"illegal aliens"/"migrants" (pick your term) covered? etc. You would probably get very different answers depending on those points in a large poll in America, so if you just ask a simple "do you want it? yes/no" question, that might not align at all with what actual candidates are proposing. Asking "who do you plan to vote for?" avoids that. And in the 2016 election, the polls were nowhere even close to the election results. That tells me the polls were either garbage, or rigged to try to influence the election.
All kinds of things play a role in this 'stupidity': tribalism, decades of anti-socialist propaganda, legitimate concerns based on history, and disengagement. It's completely understandable that one could reject 'socialism' and yet support most of what actual socialist argue in favor of.
> Honestly, I find it easier to believe that the polls are bad. I've seen way too many polls in my lifetime where the questions were manipulative, or just plain poorly worded or chosen.
If you're honestly engaging with me on this, and I'm hoping you are, I'd challenge both of us to do some research and further discuss this. I'm inclined to believe that in this case, with concrete policy questions, the questions and answers are not too manipulative, but of course I don't "know" this. Let's look into it.
> On top of that, the other problem with polls is that they only capture results from people who actually bother to respond to the polls, or are in a place where the pollsters are. Usually, when the latter is brought up, we're supposed to somehow believe that the pollsters have some great methodology that lets them determine what a larger population wants just by sampling a much smaller number of people in that population, but this is completely subject to bias and error.
True, but afaik this generally skews in favor of older, more conservative respondents and, crucially, more socalism-phobic, so to speak.
> And finally, I point again to the 2016 election: predicting a winner is not as hard as asking if they want <thing x>. In this case, the poll is asking exactly the same thing as the election itself will: who do you plan to vote for? Asking about <thing x> is not as easy, because you can get wildly different results by asking the question differently. Do I want "Medicare for All"? Well, the answer might depend on many things, like how exactly it would be implemented. Is private insurance still allowed to exist as a supplement or alternative? Are non-citizens/"illegal aliens"/"migrants" (pick your term) covered? etc. You would probably get very different answers depending on those points in a large poll in America, so if you just ask a simple "do you want it? yes/no" question, that might not align at all with what actual candidates are proposing. Asking "who do you plan to vote for?" avoids that. And in the 2016 election, the polls were nowhere even close to the election results. That tells me the polls were either garbage, or rigged to try to influence the election.
I think with the election polls one of the big issues is exactly the problem you describe earlier. Getting an accurate, representative sample is very difficult. Especially when voting for Trump was, for many people, a kind of social suicide.
That said, you might be right. I am inclined to believe that policy questions, even with all the hidden complication behind implementing said policies, are probably answered honestly and I'm assuming that the sampling is relatively 'honest' too. But I don't know this, and it's absolutely fair to challenge me on that.
What I'll do, one of these days, is look more into this because while I don't think my beliefs depend on the accuracy of these polls, I do think it's important that my beliefs are truthful (as well as my claims). If you're not just interested in defending your beliefs or attacking mine (which I'm not saying you are), I'd very much like it if we could both look further into this and at some point continue the discussion with more than our respective assumptions :). I'm happy to be corrected if the facts are on your side.
with that said, the underlying critique is valid: there is more overt pressure for information-hiding in an authoritarian regime. but boeing, for example, shows that you don't need an authoritarian communist system to want to look good to people who have influence over your livelihood and stature (and thereby suppress bad information).
How is it hypocritical when the article doesn't even mention the US at all? It's possible to be critical of China's authoritarianism AND whatever the US's failures are.
Saying "X doesn't work" never necessarily implies that "Y does work", especially when options Z, A, B, and C still exist.
"Calling China blind while we still have our eyes shut."
The point is, it's not like in Wuhan, where you have reports of 10s to hundreds of people dying from a mysterious pneumonia, before the government even acknowledges it. It's not like you have the government telling people everything is okay, and to go back to work, and anyone who says anything differently gets welded into their apartment and shut off from the Internet.
Meanwhile, nobody trusts China's numbers. Initially it was to to keep the narrative under control, and now it's probably because they've lost control of the situation. Now Iran suddenly says, "oops, we actually have coronavirus and it's pretty bad."
Many Chinese language forums in the US are reporting people with symptoms that match Covid-19 and testing negative for the common flu, yet are denied CDC RT-PCR testing because they do not meet the stringent criteria set. Add to this the fact that the CDC's initial test is flawed and a new test is still nowhere to be seen.
This will go very badly in the US. The average citizen need to start preparing for a pandemic.
Cersorship serves to make the people feel good, but general hospitals are almost all state-owned thus the infomation flow is not that impeded.
The system punishes those who take risks (right or wrong) and rewards those who obey orders, display loyalty and don't make mistakes.
In this case, low level officials waited for orders, the national level agency went to the site fairly early on but they too waited, here's the catch, high officials and Xi don't want to make mistakes too. The power dynamics were on display when the governor knew he's about to be sacrificed so he went on a high profile live interview to accuse Beijing of inaction, couple days later, Xi released his own version of the story, replaced the local boss with his old sport, gaining even tighter grip on local governments.
Every body in this system avoids doing things with the slightest possibility of harming their political careers, but doubles down on the things that make them politically safe (heavy-handed/draconian lockdown measures).
It's not immediately clear to me which of these is actually more important, but it doesn't seem quite as simple as this article is portraying it to be.
Enforcing quarantine in New York would be very difficult, not least because it's in the middle of a continuous urban agglomeration between DC and Boston with no hard boundaries.
You now have a quarantine zone separating New York City, Long Island, and some of the nearby cities in New York from the rest of the country. The Hudson River provides a pretty decent barrier to travel along the NEC. The Delaware, Potomac, and Susquehanna also provides some barriers, but enforcing quarantine barriers to inland travel is much more difficult (unless you're cutting off the Delmarva entirely).
Because decision making here is less centralized. People have rights, and they will agitate about them. It's not clear where the governmental authority to quarantine an entire city would come from in say, the US. It might be constitutionally challenged, people would get mad and sue. None of that happens in China.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/02/where-should-...
I suppose we can put them onto military bases.
Edit: Oh, you said city scale. Well, I’ll leave this up anyway.
> you have the power to enforce city-scale quarantines rather effectively.
These two things cannot possibly both be true, which is why people are skeptical that authoritarian regimes are good at this kind of thing. If you can't trust what your officials are telling you, you can't organize and maintain a quarantine, an effort that requires detailed coordination to keep the quarantined area well-supplied enough to avoid most escape attempts.
This is not to say that democracies are "good" at it, just that the idea that authoritarian regimes can actually control their people any more than democracies can is mostly a fantasy.
That's part of what contributed to various failures explored (I do not know how accurately) by the HBO Chernobyl series. Punish truth and reward lies, and you're bound to end up with fragile systems that can't be efficiently fixed or otherwise addressed when they fall apart, in part because information can't be trusted.
[EDIT] notably it also explores the benefits of authoritarianism: when The System finally decides people who can fix the problem should have what they need to fix it, by god, they'll get it.
The jury is still very much out on that. Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia - give it 12-18 months before we make any categorical declarations about these countries.
We shall see, I suppose. That's all I was saying - it's very early days to say which country has handled this well or not.
Vietnam has already started force quarantining passengers from South Korea.
Vietnam operates a ‘brutal’ militarized ring quarantine which is extremely effective. The SK residents will not be going to a militarized area but all VN exposed to them will. SK residents go to a hospital that has been sprayed and decontaminated.
Compare this with the US and I’d argue I’d feel safer in Vietnam than here.
After a few days it became clear even to the party bosses that this is not an ordinary disaster, and it can't be swept under the rug entirely, so we got some reporting from the site of the disaster, mixed with a heavy dose of propaganda. They'd show trucks, workers, views of the reactor from a helicopter (which was probably getting a bunch of radioactive dust in the air), speak of heroism of those who tried to douse the fires in spite radiation and later died of radiation poisoning, stuff like that.
What they did not do, however, is make any attempt at explaining the magnitude of the disaster, so while the populace was pacified by "reporting" we didn't really know its true effects until many years later.
People are still travelling there for fun.
It's precisely the authoritarian blindness and dysfunction that the article talks about that necessitates its own brutality. So no, the draconian measures that the system is able to enact are not a sign of success, they're the opposite.
It's an absolutely perverse idea. It's as if someone would point at Xinjiang concentration camps and take it as a sign for how great Chinese construction companies work.
"Ridiculous quarantine measures" may look like impressive action, but it's been ineffective at stopping the spread of the virus. It's also been massively inefficient, causing a huge economic impact.
I keep wondering about the mass quarantines, their effectiveness, whether they’re more show than efficacy, etc.
The internet is full of people in the younger demographic, so it's not surprising they are not overly concerned.
Link?
The flupandemic in 1918 was not handled appreciably better in the democracies than it was in the empires.
People in authority reacting too slowly to an epidemic, is not unique to authoritarian states.
Even democratic governemnts are succesptible to staging coverups to save face.
Do you know of an undemocratic country that handled AIDS better?
The early AIDS epidemic response was absolutely terrible, but at least when the government would not respond, civil society did as best it could.
indeed, let us not forget that "AIDS" was originally called "GRID", "Gay-related immune deficiency" and was also called things like "gay cancer" and "gay plague". It was unfortunate events like Ryan White's infection [1] that started to raise awareness for HIV/AIDS.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_White#Ryan_White_and_publ...
> One could go so far as to say that from the highest echelon to the very bottom of the system, this lot represent the worst political team to have run China since 1978. That is why I believe that it is imperative that the nation act on and truly put into practice [Article 35 of the Constitution][1]. That is to say [we ourselves should advance Five Key Demands]:
> 1. Lift the ban on independent media and publishing;
> 2. Put an end to the secret police surveillance of the Internet and allow people their right to freedom of speech so they can express themselves with a clear conscience;
> 3. Allow citizens to enjoy their right to demonstrate as well as the freedom of assembly and association;
> 4. Respect the basic universal rights of our citizens, in particular their right to vote in open elections.
From an [essay][2] by Xu Zhangrun, translated and annotated by Geremie R. Barmé.
[1]: http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/...
[2]: https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/viral-...
But, if this thing (or some other thing down the road) is bad, then won’t democracies essentially be faced with the decision to suspend liberty in a martial-law type situation? Effectively becoming (at least temporarily) authoritarian?
If not, what’s the Democratic model for addressing a situation requiring mass quarantine? Seems like a good question to ask before facing such a crisis, even if it seems outlandish or fringe.
Ok, I hope this won't be bad. I'm getting married in 89 days and in my religion the weddings are at one of our temples... we've closed 2 in Asia indefinitely already due to the virus and I'm hoping it doesn't get bad here in the United States and result in the same. I'm already looking at a punk concert I have tickets for the week of my birthday next month and thinking "yeahhh, maybe I should just eat the cost and not go" but it also has my fiance and I a bit on edge for our wedding and what the earliest we can get the marriage license and other necessary paperwork so that if things start to get bed we can look at all the temples near us and schedule a different date within a few days to make sure we are married before we see any potential closures. sigh
A thought I've had is I wonder how much genes have to do with the severity of this. I have not looked at the data for a racial component, nor am I remotely qualified to, but I wonder if there isn't some genetic variable in Asian populations that is causing this to be more severe. Perhaps there is something there that will see a less severe response in other populations. shrugs just throwing an idea out there.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/south-kore...
[2] - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-24/how-coronavirus-hit-s...
[3] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-latest...
Going to be an interesting year one or more ways.