China covered up coronavirus, costing the world “two months,” says Trump's NSA | Hacker News Reader

China covered up coronavirus, costing the world “two months,” says Trump's NSA

cbsnews.com

7 pointssahin4 comments

What did refusing to use the WHO approved test cost the US?

You realize both countries can screw up, right? And the fact that the NSA belongs to a country that screwed up doesn't prevent them criticizing other responses?

Moreover, the Chinese government has still to my knowledge not cleanly released true figures for lethality, R0, total infection count, etc, as would have been responsible. Instead the world has had to rely on side channels like whatever publications from Chinese scientists made it past censorship. If other world powers were relying on official government numbers, like the WHO, they can't entirely be faulted for the slow response, though I'd like to think government agencies were competent enough to pick up on everything legit and unofficial that started flooding Reddit and 4chan in early January.

The CCP in typical fashion put the CCP first, and that will cost the world many lives.

China started from day zero with a small cluster of cases. Over all they've been moving mountains to squash this.

Meanwhile US three months in doesn't have anywhere near enough testing kits available. The first community aquired case was found by a hospital going around the CDC by developing their own in house tests. At the leadership level the US is still acting like the problem is with outsiders. Senator Lamar just blocked emergency relief for workers impacted by the virus.

The CCP quickly got on top of things. Meanwhile in the US at the leadership level it's all failure. Every State, City, Hospital, and Business is having to fend from themselves.

So yeah no one but people like you are buying this.

This was clear from the start. In typical authoritarian communist fashion, China clamped down on the spread of information both internally and externally. Here's probably the best known example[0], but the most egregious manipulation came in the form of outbreak numbers, which are allegedly at least 10x underreported[1]. This was a deliberate combination of lack of testing, lockdown preventing citizens from seeking treatment at hospitals, misreporting cause of death by listing E.G. pneumonia, and other issues. When an authoritarian dictatorship orders no new cases, the people report no new cases.

I don't understand how people are so shocked to hear of China's manipulation. There's evidence for this kind of trickery from every major socialist state, especially the Soviet Union, which formed the mold the the initial CCP.

An authoritarian state can only exist so long as the people are too respectful and/or afraid to revolt. This creates perverse incentives to save face by, say, controlling information or spreading disinformation even at the cost of citizens' lives. And speaking of perverse incentives, like any massive bureaucracy, they are pervasive in states like China. For example, factor output is measured by the government by tracking electricity production. So if the government orders factories to come back online, but you don't have goods or employees to produce anything, you run the machines empty to run up the numbers.

0. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/china-li-wenliang-whistl...

1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com