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Comment by fyp | Hacker News Reader

China has shown that it's possible to contain the virus even though they were initially criticized for it being "draconian".

They've capped out at under 100k cases (at least for the first wave) with 3k deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2020_coronavirus_patients...

Imagine if china had gone for the herd immunity strategy instead. With a population of 1.4billion and letting everyone get infected you are looking at 42 million deaths.

If draconian measures is what it takes, that is what the world should do.

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China had no choice left because they suppressed and censored the epidemy. But after that strong measures were necessary. Other countries could have opted for the Korean or Taiwanese strategy: test early, often and broadly + quarantine suspected cases.

But it's too late for that in most countries now. Confinement it is!

Confinement by itself is not enough. See Donald McNeil's interview on what china is doing: https://youtu.be/e3gCbkeARbY?t=32

It's kind of racist to describe the chinese response as suppressing and censoring and then for others its, "well woops, we were a little slow on response".

It's kind of appalling to put more than a million muslims into forced labor and "re-education" too.

I think it's worth remembering this in every mention of the "effectiveness" of the Chinese response. They act quickly and decisively because they have absolute power concentrated in a corrupt and authoritarian government. We can't trust anything they report because their press isn't free. In the west, the media isn't automatically right, but we can criticize and demand better standards. Likewise with the actions of our leaders.

It's also worth remembering that the Chinese had every opportunity to make sure this did not happen again after SARS. And their censorship of the discovery of the disease and the subsequent propaganda blaming the US for the disease is nothing short of disgusting.

The Chinese government silenced the doctor first raising the issue and blocked him from communicating about the disease. If other countries do that, then they will also be suppressing and censoring. Have other countries done that?

Well, by definition there's only one doctor in the world that first raised the issue. Other countries have done similar things.

Ex. USA

- silenced one of the NIH's director of infectious disease only allowing him to say what the government wanted

- released propaganda and misinformation from the highest levels downplaying the severity

- prohibited doctors from testing people to keep the confirmed numbers low

idk, i'm sure you could find more. I'd describe the US' response more critically than the chinese. The US already knew how bad it was, and the poor behavior was from the top of government, not just some local body.

Stop throwing accusations like that and devoid the word of its meaning. It's really tasteless.

Many governments messed up. They didn't have the logistics ready for broad testing and failed to act. Now they have to resort to strong actions too. It's factual.

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