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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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