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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, they seem to be handling this crisis better than we are so far.

They created this crisis by silencing whistleblowers and hiding case numbers. Don't forget they banned wildlife markets during SARS, but allowed them again a year after. This is going to happen again.

Sure, but the U.S. is actively discouraging/thwarting testing efforts, because ~the economy~. And our chief executive is disseminating misinformation (whether out of ignorance or ulterior motives is unclear).

I'm not saying China did a great job. But they seem to have gotten a handle on things at least, meanwhile we've yet to even really start preparing. And we have the advantage of hindsight, which they didn't have.

> they seem to have gotten a handle on things at least

According to the Chinese communist party.

They can fudge the specifics, but I highly doubt they could hide the fact of whether or not it's continuing to explosively spread across the country.

And how do you account for the fact the US have been known this virus for a month since the Chinese outbreak, and still does very little to prepare for basic things like testing?

They did a horrible job in the beginning and a good job in the end. They wasted december and january (both for themselves and the world) but the february response was quite effective. https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop... is an informative illustration.

Right now, the USA response is somewhere between those two China approaches but it seems that it has been closer to the "early China" response than to the "late China" response.

I'm pretty sure when those officials decided to silence the whistleblowers, they are thinking exactly what some of the US officials are thinking right now: "Just another flu."

By imposing a draconian lock down on all citizens (even those who havent tested positive)? I guess...

Yes, one that was _extremely_ effective.

Personally, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my liberties to a PRC-style quarantine, but to insinuate it wasn't an astoundingly effective way to control the spread is false.

Just like Italy started doing now, and everybody else will in the coming weeks.

How many whistle-blowers trying to alert the public to this disease did the US government throw in prison?

eh, the US doesn't exactly have the greatest track record on whistleblowers...

It does when "whistleblower" means "independent person publishing data from independent sources".

The US has a crappy record on people who leak government data, but that's an entirely different thing.

..and I'm in no way suggesting that the US has a good track record on whistleblowers. I'm simply saying that it's a major stretch to argue that China has done a better job managing the Coronavirus outbreak given all of the reports of suppression that we've seen come out of there.

>To be fair, they seem to be handling this crisis better than we are so far.

"seem" being the operative word. You only know what the CCP wants you to know.

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