Hacker News Reader

Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

The WHO and the US government have lost their credibility. I'm looking to state and local governments to step up. The California state government looks like they are doing and saying the right things ( better than the federal government at least ). Actions speak louder than words, look at what is working ( South Korea ) and what isn't.

View on HN

What did the WHO do to lose credibility? I think I missed that story.

They downplayed the threat in the beginning and strongly advised against travel ban.

Hmm, do you have evidence of the threat being downplayed?

The initial advice against the travel ban was quite political, but it's the classic case of a nonprofit needing to appease its donors. At any rate, I recall them saying that travel bans are ineffective against stopping viral spread (which has clearly been proven true). Their utility on slowing transmission is less clear, though I've read that travel controls have indeed proven helpful.

The problem with travel bans is that there can be all sorts of unintended side effects that exacerbate the problem. It encourages people to make heavier use of illicit and non-mainstream travel channels that can't be monitored or controlled effectively. It may reduce overall travel, but much of the travel that does occur takes place in conditions that are dramatically more likely to cause problems. Also travel bans can lead to severe humanitarian issue on top of the existing health crisis.

Alternative to the complete ban would have been forced quarantine for every person entering the country like Israel is doing.

This virus is going to be around for a very, very long time. As soon as it spread through the general population in China, it was over. Take China, everyone is talking as though they solved the problem, but it’s only a matter of time before it breaks out there again. In fact it’s almost certainly already happening.

Even draconian lockdowns of people entering the country can only delay the inevitable. Now delays can be valuable. The slower the spread, the lower the peak strain on health services, but it cannot be stopped. How long is Israel going to do this, a week? A month? Six months? What about next year when there’s another outbreak? Maybe we’ll have a vaccine by then, but maybe not.

This is all true, but for now China has developed antibody based fast test kit that can give response in 20 minutes without laboratory testing and knowing them they could produce it in huge quantities.

Now they simply have to apply constant mass testing to keep the outbreak under control.

Trans-oceanic air travel bans work very very well because there are few alternate routes to "illicit" travel.

The WHO made an idiotic generalization based on theoretical assumptions that didn't even apply.

I'm impressed by academic institutions' response in Seattle, although I think they should've have gone even further.

It's still incredible to me that local labs discovered community transmission and federal officials told them to immediately stop testing and effectively did nothing to further intervene:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...

+1 also UW's response has been awesome to see.

Why do you say that about WHO?

They failed to do anything in the early stages! They should have declared pandemic weeks ago, instead of today.

In their defense, apparently they got trigger-happy in H1N1 days and got burned for calling pandemic too early.

I'll gladly take trigger-happy health authorities! That's literally their primary function: to sound the alarm.

Edit: I'm looking at you, Santa Clara County Health department, for NOT doing enough.

> That's literally their primary function: to sound the alarm.

Yes, but if they sound the alarm too frequently they'll get a reputation as "the boy who cries wolf." When there really is a wolf, their alarm needs to be believed for it to have any value.

What they have here is an unenviable balancing act. Sound the alarm too frequently, and the alarm is worthless. Sound the alarm too infrequently, and the alarm is worthless.

Edit: Blackwater rebrands itself to make itself more obscure, which runs precisely counter to the goal of spreading public awareness / sounding alarms.

I actually don't know if that's really a huge concern - if the WHO burned their public trust they could always be publicly dismantled and replaced with a new committee[1] - these outbreaks happen rarely enough that public memory isn't going to sustain that well across multiple failures.

Good behavior induced by fear is a real asset in pandemics so we need to not be hesitant to use it.

1. A.k.a. "The Blackwater Approach"

The whole reason you have the alarm though is for a situation specifically like this. This is a once in a century pandemic, and they missed it.

They did not. They have been saying it is likely to become a pandemic from very early on.

They didn't suddenly radically redefine “pandemic” to mean “likely near future pandemic”, but they didn't miss it. They were ignored by lots of governments, but that's the involved governments’ failure.

I would absolutely not. My university was just cancelled and I would not like that to happen lightly.

The problem is people judge this by outcomes, and sounding the alarm at the right moment will have the same outcome as sounding the alarm too early.

There's no way to win this. Going by public perception you either sound too early or too late - never "on time".

I bristle every time someone describes Y2K as a non-event. It was only a non-event because of all of the effort that went into preventing it.

It’s crazy people now think who downplayed the epidemic. I had the opposite feeling until the situation got really bad in italy too : that they cried wolf for something that looked a lot like a flu..

It didn't look a lot like flu. China doesn't shut down their entire country for months over the flu.

There was always this possibility that china communist party was overreacting for fear of alienating its population, after having denied the virus itself for months.

The flu theory was never reasonable. Clinical case studies were available from the beginning of the pandemic and long before the first media personality came up with the flu thing.

My impression was they were very clear, said (to my recollection) that they considered a pandemic to be significant growing endemic transfer on all continents, then appear to have called that when it happened. They don't appear to have hidden numbers, and seem to have helped with knowledge sharing and expertise.

> US government have lost their credibility

If they had credibility for being able to move quickly for something this widespread, or anything at all really, I think it was fiction in someones mind.

Unfortunately the California government seems to support the Trump administrations' coronavirus response.

https://www.newsweek.com/californias-democrat-governor-prais...

I am hoping, hope being the operative word here, that Governor Newsom is trying to telegraph to us that behind the scenes, he is having somewhat productive conversations with the Vice President.

Honestly, at a time like this, where California might need federal resources if a bad outbreak occurs in the state - it serves no one to needlessly antagonize the federal government.

It's politics - everyone else should be criticizing the white house in particular, but government officials really need to remain on the administration's good side.

From your source: “Correction: This article and headline has been updated to clarify that Governor Newsom was specifically referring to the support from the White House regarding the docking of the Grand Princess cruise ship.”

There is no endorsement of the federal policy beyond the handling of that specific task.

Thank god!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com