The US is literally doing the exact same thing right now.
When all my Republican family is spouting the same BS, that means it's being pushed hard in the soft right wing information channels.
EDIT: Even NBC news is hinting that government policies are getting in the way of determining real corona virus infection rates. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/n-y-gov-cuomo-questions...
The number of tested individuals are only about 2x the number of confirmed cases. Not a great margin of error.
“This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks”
That’s the same as the USA refusing to test everyone in sufficient quantities right? South Korea is testing 10k per day, has the US completed even 10k tests yet?
“let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city”
That’s every state apart from perhaps 1 section on NY city and small parts of Seattle.
“doctored numbers”
Thats the refusing to test thing again right? There’s states with reportedly zero cases. Yeah right.
“then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries”
That’s the current right wing press stating this is all baloney from the dems for their benefit.
I’ve given a point by point refutation to the best of my ability, care to respond thoughtfully?
In China you are publicly admonished and/or disappeared for going against the official government narrative. That is a stark difference between not just Western/Chinese government, but culture, and cannot be underestimated. It leads to a totally different society and hopefully because of freedom of speech people will be more likely to take protective measures sooner as they realize that the government is responding poorly.
Also you're much less likely to keep the majority of the population ignorant of an outbreak when you don't have a legal and judicial speech suppression machine. Yes, their authoritarian measures were effective in containing the spread (allegedly, all sources afaik from China have gone silent), but they did spend at least a month hiding the outbreak and keeping people from talking about it, for reasons I won't go into.
Not all governments are created equal. Not all cultures are the same. That's pure fantasy brought about by decades of indoctrination in the west.
Note that this isn't just blind nationalism. I fully recognize that under these circumstances the extreme authoritarianism in China may prove to be the best containment measure out of any other country short of North Korea. Good luck convincing 360MM Americans to stay home for a month.
I wouldn't be so sure. Trump's stock market is his best argument for re-election. It's very reasonable to think he would want to downplay anything that could disrupt the economy in the run up to the election.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-secrec...
This honestly is just a wishful thinking. Autocracy are more efficient than democracy in terms of that. It's just how it's designed. Democracy means debate, and it means time wasted, a lot more than in autocracy. The only problem with autocracy is that if they made a poor decision, all those people will die with it. And democracy is built in the way that a fair share of people will never do what the government says, this would be useful if the government made a bad decision, but not if they made a good one.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-secrec...