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China’s handling of this is the reason we are all in this situation. They had a chance to contain it and they chose to shut down information that would have stopped the spread. Now the Chinese government are some kind of heroes?

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I really don't get this sentiment. China fucked up their initial handling of the situation, but it took over a month for them to figure out that they're dealing with a dangerous new pathogen. These things aren't apparent from the first few cases that get discovered. Meanwhile, the rest of the world had two months of warning about the danger, and we fucked up worse. Blaming China for not containing it is ridiculous and completely unfair - I doubt anyone would've fared better. US handling of the situation in particular proves it would fare even worse (complete with suppression of data).

The screw up was caused by the lower level CCP trying to sweep the problem under the carpet. Once the big boys got involved it was taken seriously.

As for instantly closing the borders: if you did that everytime a new virus popped up then you'd be closing the borders twice a year.

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