Despite the title, the heart of the article is really about a Wuhan man's disenchantment with his authoritarian government, by way of the Coronavirus crisis
A commenter below mentioned the US, but the reaction here in Germany has also been ridiculously slow and very lacking in both the political department as well as healthcare officials.
An overwhelming majority of NHS medics doesn't think the UK is prepared either. [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/02/coronavirus-...)
Our lower population densities and much higher hygene standards make it less likely for a breakout to start here, but our dealing with a pandemic is at least as frighteningly incompetent as the chinese response.
I'm sure that this kind of thing will not happen in Germany and UK.
It's not really the handling of the virus situation, it's his realisation that he's living in a totalitarian state that he's writing about.
I realize that 'Europe' is broader and there are diverse systems, but by and large - and especially where there is a huge public interest in people healthy - their systems are going to take care of people.
What is really needed in a situation like this is transparency, and they are providing this: https://www.moh.gov.sg/
They are also doing very good work when it comes to tracing cases and determining who has been in contact with them and ensuring that they are also tested.
There are special clinics set up where people with symptoms can go. This is to avoid having patients infect every single clinic all over the country.
In places where people gather, such as office buildings, there are temperature screenings, typically using IR cameras. I read somewhere that these catch about 50% of cases.
If you're a visitor to an office building, you have to sign a health declaration form, including contact information and declare where in the building you will be going. This information is used if a case is discovered and they need to trace who has been in contact with the patient.
When you take a taxi you are adviced to go to a web site where you can fill in your contact information as well as the license plate number of the taxi. This is again used for tracing if needed.
Some companies have implemented work-from-home policies where the teams are split with half the team working from home. This is done because if a case is discovered in a company, everybody will evacuate, tracing will be done on all people and the entire office sanitised. If only half the team was in the office at the time, this reduces the impact on the business.
For the most part, except the things mentioned above, things are pretty normal. There are of course less tourists, and a lot of businesses are hurting because of that. Singapore usually has a lot of Chinese tourists.
People are of course hoping that things will be better soon. I didn't live in Singapore during SARS, but I have been told that it lasted several months.
https://www.ibtimes.sg/focus-wuhan-potluck-dinner-cpc-fires-...
(midway down the article)
I think we may not have even heard about the virus if not for this
Edit: relevant portion:
Ill-advised potluck dinner helped spread the virus
Another major perceived lapse of the Wuhan party authorities was their decision to let a large public feast go ahead in January despite the fact that there were clear signs that an epidemic was gathering pace. The local government had controversially allowed nearly 40,000 families to gather and share food as part of the Chinese New Year festival even as deaths from the virus were increasing.
It later turned out that at least 10 cases of coronavirus infection were reported from among the participants of the feast on January 18, raising fears that the event must have accelerated the spread of the infection in Wuhan.
and I live here...
[1]https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-...
Political and censorship considerations aside, one possible reason for doing this could've been to ensure that the tests were all centralized and "valid" while preventing accidental leakage of the virus from local testing companies. Yet this kind of policy precisely prevented the virus from being quickly identified.
The CDC's focus on the validity of the tests and its refusal to let local hospitals test for the virus mirrors this mistake. Even if the CDC did not actively try to suppress information, it is acting too slow.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1224042220...
Are there any "better" governments that eliminated e.g. cold or flu virus "when only 100 people had it"? I guess not. Cold and flu are common around the world.
Hard to contain, and the containment would cause too much disruption and cost. So we learned to live with cold and flu.
This is simply speculation and not credible.
> while the virus ran around getting the better of them
In 6 months time, most (or all) western countries will look back and wish they had handled the virus as well as China.
Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of Chinese people are very disenfranchised by their government. But a lot of them love it too. But western media always focuses on those that dislike it. Which is not a balanced perspective of their people.
What do you think their views would have been had a free press existed and schools did not engage in indoctrination?