Hacker News Reader

Comment by _nkl1 | Hacker News Reader

> I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising. Given a couple weeks, sure, but by then it will be too late.

It may well seem that way in retrospect. When it does, just remember that those same authoritarian governments are the ones who played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.

View on HN

Do you really think it will be any different in the USA or Europe? Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls? Or will instead, in the interest of "the economy" (ie, money) keep too light a hand on things.

Basically I don't expect the west to be able to react to this any better if it gets big. Their populations are uncontrollable (for mostly good reason) but in this particular case that feature will turn out to be bug.

> Do you really think it will be any different in the USA or Europe? Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls?

Look at Italy right now.

> Or will instead, in the interest of "the economy" (ie, money) keep too light a hand on things.

Sure, but this has nothing to do with authoritarian states vs democracy. You'll find a ton of authoritarian states doing exactly the same. It's just a matter of who's the ruling class, and in most places in the world (100% of liberal democracies but also most authoritarian states), it's the business owners, so of course they will try and save their business before their people.

> Basically I don't expect the west to be able to react to this any better if it gets big. Their populations are uncontrollable (for mostly good reason) but in this particular case that feature will turn out to be bug.

Western people aren't uncontrollable. The one who are, are the one who are pissed of by their plutocratic governments and have lost all faith in them. I'm pretty convinced that Switzerland will be fine, and I'm not surprised Italy is in the same kind of shit than Iran.

I'm French, and we've been lucky so far, but I expect chaos when it's going to start. The government has long lost all political legitimity here, and people absolutely distrust them, so I don't think they will not peacefully comply to government attempt to limit the propagation.

Here's the thing with Italy. They're the first Western country to get a major outbreak. They're being told to do things and assuming that it will stop the virus. But the truth is, containment does not actually stop the virus. It simply slows it.

When or if this hits the US or elsewhere in Europe, and it becomes obvious that despite the quarantine in Italy, the virus still continued to spread, they will question the measures being taken. As time goes on, the West will become critical of government response and may be difficult to control.

In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.

> Here's the thing with Italy. They're the first Western country to get a major outbreak.

Here is the other thing with Italy: differently from other neighbor countries, they have been testing people without symptoms.

Numbers: until February the 24th, Italy performed ~8500 tests (mostly on people without symptoms, but that were in contact with confirmed SARS-CoV-2-infected patients), while UK did ~6500 (focused on people with influenza-like symptoms), Germany ~1000 and France ~500.

This is better from a safety point of view (you get to discover all problematic patients earlier and you can quarantine them before they spread the infection even more). But is makes "your stats look worse" (cit. The wire) because now you look like the epicenter of the infection.

Guess what? The testing method has now been changed ("aligned") to what the other countries are doing, so that the numbers do not look that much worse.

Source: https://www.ilpost.it/2020/02/25/tamponi-coronavirus-italia-...

This is amusing to hear in light of all the "saving face" talk about China.

> until February the 24th, Italy performed ~8500 tests

How is this relevant? For all we know, they might have only tested 200 people by 22nd, when the panic (quarantine, news) first started.

> In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.

Sigh, this is so cliché… I don't know where you're from, but the “west” as the unified entity you describe doesn't exist. When it comes to authority and how people comply with the rules, France and Germany are more different than China and the US.

> When it comes to authority and how people comply

This is a different matter, people will comply for their own safety. If goverments or other agencies send the right message things could be okay imo.

> When it comes to authority and how people comply with the rules, France and Germany are more different than China and the US.

How so?

Can't comment on France, and of course it's a generalization, but in Germany people love to follow the rules. Just watch how people cross the road without looking left or right, but obeying only the light. Sometimes other pedestrians will shout at you if you walk across the road when the light isn't green.

I find this (truncated) quote pretty funny and quite an accurate description of French's relationship with rules:

> in England, everything which is not forbidden is allowed, in France, everything is allowed even if it is forbidden

That isn't the experience in noticing here as a tourist in Berlin, where locals seem to cross against the light quite often. But yes, I realize Berlin is not the typical German experience.

I'd consider it suicidal to blindly trust the lights, no matter if as pedestrian or bcyclist. But then i'm bicycling since 40 years plus in different parts of .de, always wary of every other traffic :-)

Can speak of Hamburg for about 15 years now, and since maybe about 10 years i have the feeling that at least 50% of traffic participants are absolutely insane, again no matter which mode.

I don't like the way how you characterize Chinese people. The fact is that most of Chinese trust the government and believe collectively they are making the correct choice. Maybe we don't think the same way as you, it doesn't mean we don't think.

> But the truth is, containment does not actually stop the virus. It simply slows it

Isn't slowing it the best we can hope for? I mean, I'd rather the pandemic slowly take its course so that there's maximum chance a ventilator will be available if I need one when I get it in six months time. If everyone gets it on the same day.....

>containment does not actually stop the virus. It simply slows it

If containment slows the virus then it might be wise to slow the virus if any of the following is true:

1. You expect to develop some treatment for it.

2. You think a slowly growing group of infected will allow you to study the infected and possibly discover a treatment (related to 1 but not exactly the same)

3. The virus is not expected to be a problem in the summer.

4. A slowly spreading virus means that you can better ramp up your facilities to take care of the infected. (related to 1 and 2)

slowing down the virus is required while hospital capacity is being scaled up.

Is it scaling up now? I live in Kazakhstan, we have huge border with China and a lot of people going through Kazakhstan transiting to other countries. I don't really see any scaling. I don't even see proper reporting, apparently we have no ill people. It sounds stupid and unrealistic, so nobody believe that, but officials say so. I'm prepared to get this virus soon enough, it seems inevitable. I'm young, so probably I'll survive, but I can't say the same about my parents. It's a stupid situation, really.

Thank you, I appreciate your perspective (and I think you're right)

And while we're quite literally waiting for the vaccine to be created. The fewer people get infected the next month or two, the better.

I don’t know why people are assuming we can create a vaccine. There’s no vaccine for any other corona virus.

Due to lack of need. Creating vaccines for the common human strains of corrona virus would be spending a lot of effort to stop the common cold (possibly including a flu like seaaonal vaccine).

Work on SARS resulted in cadidate vaccines, but was abonded before human trials because of succsefull containment.

Work on MERS resulted in a vaccine that is currently showing succsess in humans.

Work on SARS-COVID-2 is starting from those, and already has canditate vaccines based on modifying ones we know showed signs of success against other corona virus.

Maybe this will turn out to be another HIV, where a virus proves ellusive, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that.

Because we're already starting trials of one: https://time.com/5790545/first-covid-19-vaccine/

There's a bit of a description there about why this approach is different.

Obviously we’re trying, but I wouldn’t assume it’s going to be successful. It’s most likely that it won’t be.

Human coronaviruses are usually just common cold, so there was no need to make them before.

Maybe we should try having more common colds... In wonder if that would help to create resistance.

That's a hypothesis why young children aren't affected by COVID-19, maybe they had more exposure to related viruses due to school. Currently, no reported death for children; but mortality rate is significantly higher for 50+.

There was once a vaccine for the common cold. However it only covered a couple of the 300+ different common colds and so it made no statistical difference.

Realistically, creating a vaccine will take in the order of years.

In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.

<sarc />I guess that's how we in the USA managed to reject the TSA full-body scanners and pat-downs.

It seems to me that most of us complained a lot, the government ignored us, and we knuckled under and complied.

>In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.

this is immensely racist btw

Probably. Is it accurate?

No it is not. Incredible that you even ask.

>In China when the government tells its citizens to do >something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't >deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply >follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for >debate. People don't like to be told what to do.

No, they do not. Chinas propaganda machine just tells you they do. That is why china- even with all its measures couldnt clamp down. Behind the waver thin authoritarian theater presented lurks the same chaos as in africa and india.

The point is that if doctors had been free to investigate and alert the existence of the disease very early on, it might have been contained to a small number of cases right from the start, and never gained any traction in the population in the first place.

The first few weeks of an outbreak are absolutely crucial, and the Chinese authorities actively obstructed efforts to address the issue in that period precisely because of their authoritarian system.

Well from what we've seen in Japan and South Korea, that seems to be far from guaranteed. Those countries had all the warnings they needed, and knew much more about the virus than the earlier days, yet they still failed to contain the initially small outbreaks.

How can they have all the warnings they needed if China didn't give them the right info from the start ? That 27 days incubation period got a lot of people infected and becoming carriers. It's like, China had a relatively well defined outbreak center while other countries started with a wide spread invisible web of carriers.

A single cruise ship is about as well defined as targets can get. It’s pretty damn hard to blame anyone else for completely screwing that up.

Japan started with a swarm of Chinese visitors during Chinese new year. Hardly an auspicious beginning.

>How can they have all the warnings they needed if China didn't give them the right info from the start

So what country gave China info from the start? Japan and SK had a lot more info with regard to the disease (human to human transmission, asymptotic transmission, 14 days incubation period, hell even the RNA sequence was done on the virus) than what China had at the beginning.

I don't understand your statement. WHO didn't hid any information from China, neither other countries did. What kind of info could they have given to China when they didn't even know there was an outbreak (much less when China didn't even want to acknowledge it) ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_ou...

Having more info once contaminated people got reported doesn't change the fact that weeks went by with potential carriers spreading everywhere unchecked.

maybe not all. but from the moment china admitted they had an outbreak. maybe a more wary country would...ban all non-local travelers from china , quarantine all locals travelling from china, stop all flights to-and-from china, revoke all visas of chinese people...etc

Also China could have prevented people leaving, but by allowing infected people to leave they ensure that China does not need to fight it in isolation, and is not impacted more than other countries, ie. crab mentality

When you have an initial outbreak, you have a single original source of the incident and no possibility of people outside the area bringing in additional sources of the virus, because the virus hasn't spread outside the area yet. If you contain it locally, you have contained it completely, full stop.

The situation for other countries is completely different. Someone could fly into Japan right now from anywhere in the world carrying the contagion at any time. It was brought into Japan by multiple carriers at different times and different places. You can contain one incoming source, and three more will spring up. It's a completely different problem.

No you don't, there is 27 days incubation factor which means 27 days before the initial outbreak for things to spread and no possible way to do anything about that. Then you have whatever time for doctors to identify that this is something new and a big deal, again time that things can spread without your ability to control it.

The 27 days incubation is the maximum observed time. The median time is about 8 days.

In part likely due to the fact that China misled everyone so significantly in the beginning other countries could not plan appropriately

Ok, which part did China mislead people? China told the world the virus can be transmitted asymptomatically, can be transmitted human to human, with a 14 days incubation period, and provided all the clinical data.

Probably worth reading this:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/26/the-re...

It misled people by hiding the extent of the problem, by harassing and prosecuting doctors who were raising awareness. Their first response was to suppress warnings.

It doesn't looks so. Chinese scientist did research and found that virus was originated outside of Wuhan. It just became wide spread in Wuhan. IMHO, it's from Koltsovo.

> It just became wide spread in Wuhan. IMHO, it's from Koltsovo.

What?

The great circle distance between Koltsovo Airport (USSS) and Wuhan Tianhe International Airport (ZHHH) is 5000km:

* http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?&DU=km&P=USSS-ZHHH

And here I thought you were serious... until I looked at a map.

> IMHO, it's from Koltsovo

Why do you think it comes from Koltsovo, in Russia?

There was an explosion at a virology lab in Koltsovo in September last year. There were no reported infections as a result and no apparent cases of Coronavirus or anything like it in the area or any established link with Wuhan, but apparently actual evidence isn't required for some people to come to all sorts of conclusions.

> There was an explosion at a virology lab

Why are conspiracy theories so irresistible to so many people?

The idea that we are in possession of special knowledge or rare insights is very compelling. This is especially true if we often find ourselves disbelieved or shown to be wrong on a regular basis, because it creates a justification for being marginalised. Ok those people might be clever, but I know things they don't so I'm still special. As a result people will consciously seek out unlikely connections or speculative ideas and latch on to them to try to get ahead of the pack.

> The idea that we are in possession of special knowledge or rare insights is very compelling.

There's also evidence that people with lower levels of schooling particularly like conspiracy because it allows them to make sense of a chaotic world. Instead of feeling powerless and hopeless, they have a truth not even the smart and powerful have.

It is of course not true, but therein lies the appeal.

This is not a special knowledge. Just Google it: Vector, Koltsevo, 16.09.2019. Moreover, even if outbreak will be traced back to Koltsevo (because it's only one bio-laboratory which had this virus), explosion will be used as excuse.

The news was an explosion, there is no evidence any strain had escaped because of it. That's you filling in details with no proof, ie. conspiracy.

I knew a ex-friend in school a few years back. He has schizophrenia.

He tells you that he knows people in the chines government and other stuff.

You know what the problem here is? You just don't know who is posting.

So, if we will test all workers in Vector, then we will find nobody with antibodies for corona-virus, right?

If explosion can break all windows in the lab, then it can break some vials too.

Koltsevo-Harbin route was used regularly by tourists.

It gets even weaker, Harbin is the opposite end of China from Wuhan and has the second lowest levels of the disease of all the regions in China, beaten only by Tibet. But if it was spread to tourists through the population in Koltsovo, how come there isn't a significant outbreak in Koltsovo? How many Chinese tourists were given the special tour of a blown up virology lab?

I don't know. I need list of passengers from Koltsevo to Wuhan to make conclusion. I cannot get it. IF this is incidental, I will suspect a student with asymptomatic infection.

The Milan fashion show was basically cancelled and whole cities in Italy have been cordoned off under the threat of military action if the quarantine isn't followed.

>Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls?

So Yes.

I've had a dig around the BBC News website and despite Italy being the lead story, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51638095, quarantine and control of population movement doesn't get any 'column inches' - all they do say is borders aren't closing.

I'd guess the UK government have told them not to report quarantine in order to keep the UK population calmer.

> Do you really think it will be any different in the USA or Europe? Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls?

You are poorly informed. The Italian government did precisely that this weekend.

Just wait until it happens on a massive scale, and does not appear to be stopping the spread of the virus. People in the West are going to be tough to keep on lockdown. The entire purpose of lockdowns and quarantines at this point seem to be delaying until a vaccine is ready.

This will be hard for the average person to understand, and people think much more critically in the West.

>People in the West are going to be tough to keep on lockdown

Historically they haven't been proven particularly tough to lock down, stir up by authoritarians (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc), be surveilled, sold lies, and so on...

As for those "obedient" Chinese, they got this authoritarian party they have today by doing a whole revolution thing first...

>people think much more critically in the West.

That's what uncritical westerners are told...

It's very easy to lock people down. have you ever been in New York before a declared snow day? How about Houston just before a big hurricane? Absolute ghost towns.

People are actually eager to be told to stay home and not go to work. They don't have to be forced. Especially if it's for their safety.

Many parts of China have been on lockdown for over 4 weeks now. Hundreds of millions of people have still not returned to work. I am not sure a lockdown of this scale will be accepted in other countries.

Yeah exactly. It's one thing to board up the windows for a day or two, a completely different story to do it for a month+. People get restless and impatient. They start working each other up about perceived ineffectiveness of the lockdown.

>people think much more critically in the West.

From what I've seen, the majority of the people anywhere don't think very critically.

Why yes; cities / counties in Italy are on lockdown, a hotel in Tenerife is quarantined, the biggest mobile conference, Mobile World Conference in Barcelona was cancelled (a move which will affect the sector for months / years), etc.

I'm not sure if you just haven't heard of these things or if you're intentionally ignoring them to make a point.

Actually I’m in Japan at the moment and people seem to be taking reasonable precautions without the use of force.

Wearing masks, avoiding crowded places, maintaining good hygiene, staggering work hours, working from home and stocking up on supplies.

I mean, where does this idea come from that people need a dictator or they’re completely lost and as you’re saying, freedom in this case is a bug?

You might find because people have access to free information and good services means they can look after themselves and they just might ?

> in the interest of "the economy" (ie, money)

this is childish. "the economy" is the thing that makes everything you have, and the food you eat and medicines you need. there's very good reason to not just turn it all off.

By now we know much more about the virus and the threat is evident so the situation is not really comparable to the start of the outbreak.

I guess a lot of "what if it started in another country" scenarios can be debated, ranging from "another government wouldn't cover up the real situation so the virus would be quickly contained" to "western governments wouldn't have the balls to quickly enact proper quarantine measures so the virus would spread much more quickly" but is it really productive? At this point these debates are pure speculation.

I the 21st century we should be able to do better then speculate and have a clear idea of what the proper response is to a virus like this or any other.

Did it ever occur to you that if there is open / reliable information about the disease people might choose not to go out and/or engage in these conferences? The whole reason all of these cancellations are happening in the first place (MWC, etc) is because rational actors have decided (without government intervention and even with incomplete information) that the risks are too great.

Honestly my main concern in the United States is the complete and utter panic that will be caused by something that is only marginally less dangerous than getting in one's car to go to work each morning.

A government concerned with "not screwing up" can at times take drastic "emergency" measures with an overly cautious basis (at best) and with malintent (at worst), and we should be skeptical and continue to push for reasons for any actions. I don't see how this turns out to be a bug. They can have more impact on peoples actions with a press conference presenting skewed data than with any sort of attempt at straight-up bans or enforced quarantines.

> Honestly my main concern in the United States is the complete and utter panic that will be caused by something that is only marginally less dangerous than getting in one's car to go to work each morning.

If the fatality rate of COVID-19 is 2% as feared, that is dramatically more dangerous than getting in your car every morning.

The flu kills somewhere around 20-30k Americans every year. The common flu has a fatality rate of around .1%. So for something that is potentially 20 times as deadly, we're looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. By contrast, car accidents only kill around 35k Americans per year.

Absolutely. It's scary as hell in that context and I likely was typing that trying to cope with the reality.

I'm really hoping we get more data on this so we can figure out what's happening. With the lack of testing / confirmation and light symptoms it must be impossible for our science community to track things right now.

In no way is this refuting or at least commenting on the original post.

> [..] played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.

Diverting a sensitive topic to a false-equivalence seems to be a go-to tactic of those in favor of China (Chinese government to be precise, the actual Chinese people are the biggest victims here).

Barcelona cancelled the Mobile World Congress right away a few days ago. So yes, it is ready to do that.

The organizers of the MWC canceled it. Barcelona didn't want them to do so.

> Will the governments ban conventions?

I would have had to go to a convention/trade show in Paris next week, but luckily it got postponed for two months. So far people are getting more cautious.

Between the two standard criticisms "too little, too late" and "unnecessary panic" there is very little margin, especially in public opinion.

Here in Germany, people are starting to stock up on supplies, which is reasonable unless they completely plunder the supermarkets. Otherwise, it's all wait-and-see over here. Of course it doesn't help that Europe is also in the midst of flu season...

I'm guessing most countries have laws allowing the authorities to forcibly quarantine people if they feel they are at risk of spreading disease, and similar laws for limiting public activity. Certainly they do for shutting schools and other public buildings.

Institutions in developed countries are far better equipped to deal with this level of crisis than China has been. Australia, where I'm from, has had infections since mid Jan but has been able to effectively quarantine people and prevent community transmission thus far.

> those same authoritarian governments are the ones who played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistle-blowers, and refused to let international experts in.

I'm scared that it will become a lot worse than that. The pandemic gives them a real-life stress test and lessons to harden the surveillance state and further improve technical controls and tweak the technology to become more effective. It's another step on the road to integrating and normalizing intrusive and outrageous ideas for government to retain control. (-> both in China and the West!)

From the videos I watched from Chinese pigs (aka LE) in uniforms beating old people not wearing a mask and welding the doors shut of giant apartment blocks where people live like ants (or slaves), I tell myself this will not happen in the West. Then I look at our current research and Europe's own ambition to create a central biometrics database (along with tweets from the UK LE which ask you to report anything people see online that may look like terror and all I think is "STASI!" neighborhood watch. These days I see a uniform and my first reaction is disgust mixed with fear, the sort of claustrophobic feeling normally only Orwell brings up in me.

I get that quarantine laws (locking people in their homes, issuing a curfew, rations etc) can be harsh but important to combat a deadly problem. But looking at the authorities in charge in the West I wouldn't trust them for a second and think it's also a play with fire. There are lots of edge-cases everywhere for this to be a massive human rights violation (elderly care facilities, prisons, migrants, the homeless, and more power to the rigged justice systems and corrupt EU institutions and generally everyone already wielding lots of power)

The CDC and WHO have utterly failed. Why are there no hand-outs of free face-masks and other PPE - oh because there are no stocks! - instead the problem is downplayed (by both WHO and the dear leaders). Why is there no transparency (constant news) about how many people an individual country is testing? Oh because we don't have adequate testing right now. Instead medical professionals were arguing on France24 yesterday whether the game between Juventus/Lyon should go ahead and they felt that they're not qualified to make a statement on a complex subject like this. Instead Italy and other countries are reminding us not to press the panic button just yet and media should be "more responsible in their reporting".

What would have to take place for you to stop thinking this virus is going to push the entire world over the edge and fully in to 1984?

CDC and WHO are probably not perfect but saying they "utterly failed" because you're angry over not getting a free face mask is a bit disrespectful toward the many people their working their asses off in times like these.

> because you're angry over not getting a free face mask is a bit disrespectful toward the many people their working their asses off in times like these.

my partner is a health care professional and there aren't enough masks for them (this is central Europe btw). but yeah tell me about how hard they work and how I don't appreciate them.

Here in Belgium it's almost impossible to find masks as well, except if you want to pay 70+ EUR https://i.imgur.com/dGd56Ng.png I suspect Asian customers have been plundering online EU shops for a while.

Having said that, I don't think it's the responsibility of the WHO to distribute masks to health professionals like your partner.

The WHO acts like an advisory board that could have recommended governments to stockpile them before the disease appeared.

Whether they should or not is a different story.

An article in the Guardian just mentioned France will make 15 million masks available to the public.

So it looks like perhaps they have stockpiled. Until there's no recommendation to wear masks, any shortages are just private businesses that have run out. No failure of govt or WHO.

There are emergency stock piles, but not enough for everyone and clearly we haven't reached the point where we would need to use them yet.

N95 masks are available on eBay from sellers with good reputations for around 2x normal prices.

> Having said that, I don't think it's the responsibility of the WHO to distribute masks to health professionals like your partner.

it's the CDC's who acts on advise and recommendations made by the WHO. The WHO has in 2018 warned about a disease X[1], so the CDC and local health ministries would have had 2 years to prioritize and make sure there are enough stocks for PPE in the country. It's not only about the masks for a theoretical pandemic that may or may not play out. There are shortages in other areas as well on a daily basis which are more complex and require structural cahnges. Take Germany as an example that hires Eastern Europeans as health-care workers (mostly for disabled people and elderly facilities) with salaries of ~€600-€800/month where they are placed on contracts from Slovenia and Poland to avoid paying the local insurance. (so some of the people working in healthcare can be put on crazy shifts under what is for EU standards a slave-labor condition). I won't even mention the health-care facilities in Croatia, Romania, Slovenia where elderly facilities buy drugs illegally because they want to pocket the difference, or where somebody who is hired as a nurse has actually never had any training as a nurse.

I know of some elderly care facilities in Croatia which are run by a lovely Albanian couple that branched out into this (their other businesses is bars/cafes). The wife of the entrepreneur/owner drives a fat Mercedes and goes on holidays to Paris, but the residents are lying in their own shit and swallow counterfeit drugs - also their employees are paid cash because they are usually elderly women themselves who have a lot of private debt - so this is the only way for them to survive.

This isn't whataboutism but an example of the places which won't stand a chance when this disease really hits. They aren't rare either, we just don't see them because it's disgusting and easier to look away.

As you said the price of masks has increased (in my experience by a factor of 10x !!) because people see an opportunity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_X

Hiring practices of elderly care facilities in Croatia aside, I very much doubt that EU hospitals are already short of facemasks at a time when there's less than 500 cases among a population of over 700 million.

That there are no facemasks available to the general public is a result of people plundering the stocks of private businesses.

European disease control agencies aren't even recommending that people wear masks. Until they do and they can't provide any I don't see any failures on their part.

N95 masks are available on eBay from sellers with good reputations for around 2x normal prices.

A gov run healthcare facility certainly isn't going to order masks from "ebay". I agree that they should though if their normal supply chain isn't able to deliver and there are no other ways.

From what I understand the masks are utterly useless against this anyway.

The common surgical face masks you'll often see people from Asia wear in public are only useful if YOU have the virus by reducing the chance of people catching the virus from you. There are, however, N95 respirator masks that are useful for protecting the uninfected from catching the virus.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use...

> only useful if YOU have the virus

Yes, but given the incubation period and so on, how do you know you don't have the virus?

I'm not going to wear a mask in Central Europe (at least not yet) but I probably would in Asia just in order to not be selfish.

Also, you and I random are not wearing it correct, that’s basically given. It requires regular trainings and tests.

What about catching the infection through the eyes?

They do stop you from breathing in contaminated particles, from spreading them when coughing / sneezing and they stop you touching your face with contaminated hands.

They aren't perfect because you still need proper technique when removing them and they "leak" along the sides etc. Still better than nothing, especially in crowded places.

They won't help you at all. All they do is creating false sense of safety. Viruses are too small and will go through the mask anyway. Also they may protect half of your face against your hands but they won't protect other half, say, against rubbing your eyes.

They may help you to minimize the spread if you are already sick, sneezing and coughing. Droplets are big enough to be stopped by mask. This is actually the reason why surgeons are wearing masks in the first place - not to contaminate the patient.

Unless we are talking about something more advanced. Like above mentioned N95.

Even a regular surgical mask that doesn't have the effectiveness of the N95 can stop water droplets (as you said) and hence, it can stop viruses.

The key insight, though, is that water droplets carry viruses; viruses can travel through masks, but they can't travel by themselves without hitching a ride on a water droplet.

This is why flu season is during the cold winter, when there isn't enough heat to instantly evaporate the moisture in the air. And this is why even a regular surgical mask can offer some protection for a healthy wearer.

That may be. But wearer of surgical mask creates moisture by breathing and a lot of it. One would suspect that kind of environment works in favor of a virus.

The N95 masks require training, and they're not for everyone. It is possible for young children to suffocate because their lungs are not strong enough to pull air through (it takes some effort).

I have asthma, and even a few hours of wearing a procedural mask, let alone an N95 mask are very taxing. Maybe for brief periods in public... But sweat transmitted by hand onto a surface is enough. Sewage in a building is enough to infect residents that don't otherwise encounter each other.

To add to your point, if one is worried and wants a face mask, in the US, right now, they can make effective masks in a few minutes using some gauze (cheap and plentiful in pretty much any US pharmacy), tape, a stapler and a few ribbons.

While this may not be beautiful and might be slightly less effective than a standard surgical mask, it should be good enough unless one is spending significant time inside with infected, coughing folks. In which case one should be doing more than just wearing a face mask. My 2c.

Surgical masks are three-layered with an outer layer that’s waterproof and an inner layer that stops microbes. Pretty sure your makeshift gauze mask would be largely useless at stopping anything.

(Source: Family member who worked in the operating theater for 30+ years.)

> Pretty sure your makeshift gauze mask would be largely useless at stopping anything.

That's a pretty bold statement. As someone who grew up in a less-well-off part of the world where medical supplies were not always available I have personally seen makeshift masks made and used by both doctors (rarely) and visiting relatives (more frequently).

The key problem with homemade masks is durability -- they do fail much quicker than a professional surgical mask that lasts many hours. But then, unless you are a medical professional, you do not need to wear them for hours. Wearing one in the open air environment is almost always an overkill.

First link that comes for me (below), when Googling for evidence, seems to indicate that homemade masks in some small trial were worse than professional but still pretty decent (1 hour with homemade ~ 3 hours with professional mask), although I barely skimmed it and might have misunderstood the results.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t...

> Chinese pigs (aka LE)

This sort of editorializing immediately makes your whole opinion moot.

If this is how you talk about people you don’t know it’s unlikely your opinion is valid or even remotely unbiased in any other regard.

Watch some of the videos on Twitter and it is easy to understand why those words were used.

You can make this claim about any group, minority or not. Every single group of people has bad apples and some groups are even 51%+ bad but trying to use anecdotal evidence from twitter as proof is really not great.

Additionally using epithets and dehumanization of any group no matter what they've done is a road to more hate and violence and will never resolve anything. I find it pretty ironic that some on the left are ok with insults and dehumanization as long as it's of the right group of people that they've deemed "undesirable" even if that group of people really should stop what they're doing, using insults and animal comparisons is a road that takes you right back to what they claim to be fighting.

This got kinda long winded and preachy...

tl;dr calling cops "pigs" is a slur like any other and will only cause more problems.

> that takes you right back to what they claim to be fighting.

... is also the kind of editorialising we don't need, when describing political views that don't align yours.

Shall we stop, or what?

it's not different than using "allegedly" which is kinda the point... we can't know what someone thinks all we can do is guess based on actions.

my brother is a pig and he has no problem being called that. He is also suffering from depression because 9/10 of his colleagues are literal Nazis in a uniform and openly admit that they vote far-right (in my place that is the people who still use the Nazi salute until today). They not only hate just foreigners but are constantly abusing their power.

The other pigs I met were happy to take bribes and one (in Ireland) even bragged about how much he loved to use his pepper spray every time he gets a chance (he rarely does).

fwiw, pigs in colloquial english is not just a slur but silly slang, unless you are bold enough to call a whole class of blue-collar people (who hate pigs) problematic. Maybe read Orwell (Animal Farm) or the later Irvine Welsh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filth_(novel)

Never ever trust a uniform whatever country you're in. Btw I also do consulting for LE and the "sane" ones usually don't deny that they have a problem with racism. I'm not even talking about the videos from China where people get beaten with sticks or dogs get clubbed to death by men in blue while their colleagues are laughing before they move on to terrifying citizens.

I don't think getting upset about what is "natural language" in blue collar surrounding is going to do any good. I know the pigs are OK with it. (watch out for those who are not though)

You have a good reason for your paranoia. Even today, we have flights from Italy, South Korea, and Japan coming into U.S and nobody is bothering to contain this situation seriously. Unsure how Insurance is going to treat a spread in U.S. We are not set up for success.

So thats how panic looks like.

Great.

Yeah, but if 2% of all the Chinese die that's going to mess their economy up real good. Considering the whole thing is a house of cards, I'm bullish on the coronavirus.

For the virus the biggest challenge is if it survives the weather. If it’s in the same family as SARS, summer will kill it. The window is closing and My bet is it won’t have chance to infect more than 1M people within China. Btw I think 1M infected Chineses are bad enough to bring the economy down seriously, let alone 2% died of the whole population (280M dead people? Oh lord)

that would be 28M, not 280M (Which is still a huge number, obviously)

The recent explosion in cases in South Korea, Italy and Iran would seem to suggest that in fact perhaps the officials in Wuhan did not fuck up handling the early part of the epidemic, at least much more so that the officials in these other countries.

There are some indications of officials playing down the threat and lying, but this was also reversed quickly by higher levels of the same authoritarian government. Did this lying have a significant impact, more so than presumably-less lying in South Korea and Italy, that resulted in the same order-of-magnitude in explosion of cases, even though the world media was already on high alert?

Don't be so overconfident at fitting world events and a few selected media stories into your prejudicial ideological convictions.

If the Wuhan authorities quarantined everybody that traced back to attending the mass dinners at the same early stage in the same way that the Italian and South Korean authorities are doing now, then the people infected in Hubei be at 60,000 or so now.

The quarantine came in too little too late to control the situation in Wuhan, and only helped to contain the virus in other provinces of China, not fully contain it.

> the people infected in Hubei be at 60,000 or so now.

The people infected in Hubei are at about 60k or so now. Actually slightly lower. Were you trying to say something else??

60k is pretty impressive considering all the other apocalyptic "worse case" scenarios being published in various academic journals a few weeks ago based on "conservative models".

Won't be.

And 60k is not pretty impressive considering that many people already died without a proper diagnosis and was not included in the official counts. There is no trust that the reported numbers are reflective of the situation on the ground - in fact it is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.

It is impressive, Wuhan has 11 million people. Would you have done better?

> There is no trust that the reported numbers are reflective of the situation on the ground - in fact it is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.

The numbers are confirmed test cases, which will always be an underestimate of the true situation regardless of the government supplying the numbers. There's no indication to suggest that it's the "tip of the iceberg" especially since the "current case" numbers have been consistently decreasing for the past several weeks.

It rather seems that you've been so convinced by the sheer amount of anti-Chinese-government-propaganda, that even positive facts can't change your prejudice that everything they do is negative.

I don't know how you could conclude they did not fuck up when they imprisoned doctors who blew the whistle on the outbreak.

That's not to say other countries will fare much better. But China had by far the best chance at containment, and they blew it. And the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout.

> I don't know how you could conclude they did not fuck up

I explained in my comment - the sudden increase in cases in Wuhan in January, was not that much worse that what we're seeing in S Korea, Iran and Italy right now. These latter countries are also less dense than Wuhan, and also had plenty of warning time. Nobody was imprisoned in Italy, yet despite that we still have several hundred cases today. This suggests that this single imprisonment didn't have a huge effect on the epidemic in Wuhan.

> by far the best chance at containment

What does it mean to have a "chance" at containment, and what makes one "chance" "better" than another "chance"??

> the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout

If you acknowledge there's a possibility that no "other countries will fare much better", why maintain such an accusatory tone? No government can control where an epidemic starts.

By your logic, if the epidemic had started in the US, the government would be at fault if it prevented the epidemic from spreading to any other countries? Is that what you're saying? That's an extremely high bar, probably unrealistic.

> When it does, just remember that those same authoritarian governments are the ones who played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.

This doesn’t address the commenter’s claim that China did the best job of completely shutting their infrastructure down and quarantining the virus effectively. They did make their bed, but they also laid in it as well.

The OP said "I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best." Had they dealt with it better initially, the might never have needed such draconian actions. "They made their bed" implies they did _not_ deal with it well at least initially.

And welded people into their apartments so they couldnt leave no matter what, regardless of if they had it or not.

The authoritarianism is a red herring IMO. The real issue is economic incentives trumping everything else. For example in Japan if you test positive the hospital gets quarantined losing tons of money. In the US, you can end up payong huge medical bills. The fear is the same.

The lesson from WW2 should have been that people are all the same when pushed to extremes. This includes the people who make up the communist party leadership in China and every moral philosoher in the west as well.

My armchair belief is that China has ended up absorbing at a global scale, all of capitalism’s externalities. It is an integral part of the world that gives us many things we take for granted like cheap iphones and many others. We do NOT have the convenience to look away and scapegoat one aspect without taking into consideration the whole.

This ended up kinda ranty but every time coronavirus is used to bring up something whose purpose is to draw an “us vs them” line between the world and China I want to throw something.

I often think to the fable of Armus in ST:TNG, an advanced civilization achieved transcendence, but they left behind the black tar creature that gained sentience and represented all of their evils.

+1 I am not sure why, but your comment is the best thing I have read this morning.

A couple of my friends kid me about it, but I meditate almost every day for world peace and the reduction of suffering in the world. It can’t hurt and it makes me feel more connected to the world at large. I live in a small town, volunteering at the local food bank is one of my favorite activities, but I tend to think too much about just local life. I have a difficult time getting too excited about national/global politics, etc. Meditation on peace is the most effort I put into the global situation.

This is a thoughtful comment. Don’t see why it’s getting downvoted.

“in Japan if you test positive the hospital gets quarantined losing tons of money” is at least inaccurate, Japan has national healthcare that short-term “sales”/cash strapping don’t matter for hospitals. Economy wise there’s nothing for their corporate to lose OR gain.

I’m not sure that matters.

Look at any government institution in the US - despite not having a profit motive, there are still plenty of incentives to grow the budget - increased influence in the government, funding pet projects,etc.

And not to mention shutting down a hospital likely means lost wages for a lot of people.

In the UK hospitals still have individual budgets, is that not how it works in Japan.

Yes, I'd expect them to be overridden in times of emergency, but nonetheless - do Japanese hospitals really have scope to spend at will without constraints?

Your comment is very reasonable and informative, please don't let the Hacker News anonymous downvote thoughtpolice mafia discourage you from posting comments to this site. They are the ones who should be getting banned.

Chernobyl comes to mind as another example of this.

I think that's apt. Authoritarian governments are environments least able to prevent novel problems and least able to react to them with agility, but best able to coordinate state-scale responses.

But in this case we'll see. China's problems don't end if they successfully contain the outbreak to Wuhan. Eventually everyone else will get sick too and re-infect the chinese via other roads.

I take it all back. We (the US) are not any better.

considering the strong rumors that this is an engineered biological warfare agent escaped from the lab, authoritarianism still isn't looking so hot right now.

That's exactly my thought. Giving medal for dealing with the problem forgetting who let that problem get large in the first place.

The time when Chinese doctors screamed there is something wrong but instead being helped were downplayed or even threatened would be enough to prevent it from snowballing it to the size we face today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com