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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the initial response to Covid-19 in the US was based plainly on implicit racism against Asians. Essentially the government saw the Chinese, Korean and Japanese fighting this virus with all their forces and then just thought "this will never happen in American because somehow we are better". They had 3 months to prepare and, still, they believe that to fight the virus is just enough to wash hands and stay a few feet away from their coworkers, just as with a normal seasonal flu. That's ridiculous.

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How do you know that? I'd be more willing to bet that Americans have been mostly complacent as they haven't dealt with any meaningful threat since 9/11. Most of them don't prepare like they should anyway, even when Obama told them to do so.

If there's any racism going on, it's with the people who fear Asians because they think they're all contaminated with COVID-19.

> They had 3 months to prepare and, still, they believe that to fight the virus is just enough to wash hands and stay a few feet away from their coworkers, just as with a normal seasonal flu. That's ridiculous.

That's what they've been told to do by government officials and journalists.

As an Asian American... no, I don’t think racism played into this at all. Would have been exactly the same if it started in London.

I don't know if it's racism but I also am sure that if it had started in London we wouldn't be hearing about "the British virus" and so on.

Spanish Flu disagrees with you

Interesting point, but the Spanish-American War was only 20 years before that. Attitudes in the US toward Spain were probably much different then than they are now.

As an Asian American, let's not try to speak on behalf of a minority of 18+ million.

Especially to downplay a possibly valid concern of an individual of your supposed group

It’s a stupid concern. The reason the government is incompetent is that the government is incompetent. That’s not uniquely American, and there’s no evidence that race has played into any of this. We didn’t exactly change our tune when Italy freaked out. Does that mean we’re racist against Italians?

My read from the US is different. I think over the past 20 years Americans have seen coverage of many scary diseases from afar (SARS, west nile, zika, MERS, ebola). None of these had a large impact on American society. So these experiences have led Americans, not wholly unreasonably, to not pay much attention to a new infectious disease in a faraway place.

I doubt it comes down to thinking America is somehow “better”. If anything, people seem more inclined to envy the coordinated responses of Asian countries, especially South Korea.

I saw exactly the opposite. Until 2 weeks ago, people who took it seriously were regularly being accused of themselves being racist against Asians.

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