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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

Remember Li Wenliang. We warned his fellow doctors about the situation, in December. The police punished him for this.

He later died of the disease.

We are all suffering because an authoritarian government suppressed the good intentions of its citizens.

The Chinese Government is squarely to blame for this situation. Could it have been prevented if they had acted responsibly? I don't know – but there is a strong chance that the answer is yes. We'll never know, however, because that is not the path they took.

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If the timeline in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO5EXjFKE7U are true, doesn't seem like the information was suppressed. WHO knew about a new virus/disease by 31st Dec/1st Jan and the market in question was closed.

What they didn't know was if these were one off cases from eating bad meat or is it spreading human to human. Also, Li Wenliang circulated SARS info on WeChat on 30th/31st and public broadcast in Wuhan/Hubei was on 31st.

Possible the source is biased and info. is missing but doesn't look any info is false.

> WHO knew about a new virus/disease by 31st Dec/1st Jan and the market in question was closed.

China knew about the disease in mid to late November. That's quite a lag time.

The virus was first identified on Dec 27th.

The first case was on Nov 17th. But that was found retroactively.

The Supreme People’s Court said that suppressing the information hampered responding to the virus.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3048042/chin...

OTOH the same authoritarian government quarantined a city the size of New York and built field hospitals for thousands of people on very short notice when the situation truly got out of hand.

Killed 20 million too in the great revolution.

This was during the COVID-19 outbreak?

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. Also, would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments generally? We unbanned you awhile ago because your comments had improved, but they've backslidden.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sure, but they closed the barn gates after the horses had already bolted.

Edit: Oof, the truth hurts don't it?

Both are very classic traits of authoritarian gov: In times of crisis, it's far more efficient than democratic governments. However, in times of non-crisis, its centralized power and information control would cause a crisis that would've been otherwise avoided.

Wow, so an authoritarian government did authoritarian things. Big surprise.

As long as we’re giving strikes for/against their authoritarian government, should we mention the millions in concentration camps and the complete lack of civil liberty?

We shouldn’t be so fast to accept their system

The Soviet government ended up addressing the Chernobyl disaster when that got out of hand, too.

I think any government, facing any crisis, is eventually going to do the right thing by virtue of running out of other options. The question is how many mistakes they make beforehand, and this seems like a big one.

I find it hard to imagine that the current CDC would have done better if the pandemic had started in the US. Sure, they would have been more honest, but they haven’t been demonstrating much competence recently.

Honesty is what lets businesses scale production to meet demand. I also find it hard to imagine the CDC would have done much better, BUT it would have indicated to businesses the potential.

We were actually in the perfect position to react appropriately to this virus and we completely failed. We saw what it did to China and their response yet we stalled for weeks. Those weeks matter. The only country that seems to have responded well based on what happened in China is South Korea. South Korea was in second place for total infected for a long time, but they responded incredibly well and have remained relatively stable for a while, and now others are rocketing past them.

If not prevented, severely curtailed. I'd almost give them the benefit of ignorance if their actions weren't so clearly malicious.

This heroic doctor can no longer speak for himself and did not write his wikipedia page. I really doubt that if he were alive right now that he'd be focusing on the stupidity of the initial reaction to his reports.

Can you fully blame the Chinese government? The WHO could have sounded the alarm in January and stopped global travel. Trump could have had a fearful knee jerk reaction and done the same. Everything we are doing now should have been done mid January. State governments, county health departments, they all could have reacted louder, faster.

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Meanwhile China has mostly contained this virus and the West is at the brink of despair?

If the virus started in USA, it would be even worse...

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All that may be true. But the rest of world has no excuse for not reacting.

Mostly contained based upon numbers. How much of those numbers are lies or omissions?

Trump is in a no-win situation here - if a fearful knee-jerk reaction would have successfully mitigated the disease making it into the USA, it would have been painted as xenophobic and overreaching. The WHO has just proven itself to be largely ineffective. It's a dumpster fire all around.

Indeed, the only "win" would have been to go on national TV and outline the ways that we had been preparing for something like this.

More like an "already gambled and lost" situation.

I think you misunderstand. OP was saying if China had acted better, maybe COVID-19 wouldn't have spread in the first place. Maybe they could have contained it before it reached other countries or Chinese provinces.

I doubt that could have happened, but it could have significantly slowed COVID-19's spread.

On the other hand their lockdown measures wouldn't be so successful if they weren't an authoritative regime.

Seems that Taiwan, Korea and Japan haven’t had such a hard time with it.

Not as densely populated as China though, and they're richer countries, as per capita GDP.

Japan 336 people per square kilometer

PRC 145 people per square kilometer

ROC 649 people per square kilometer

South Korea 503 people per square kilometer

Thank god this could never happen in the US. https://www.newsweek.com/hhs-coronavirus-whistleblower-claim...

People are people, and have been shooting the messenger for millennia.

Li Wenliang was arrested and forced by the police to sign a letter admitting to “false comments.” These aren’t even remotely comparable.

They are a little comparable, in that what the US is trying to do indicates that it would go the same way as in China if there was not a semi-functional press, a freedom-minded citizenry, and a mostly-functional democracy holding them back. The intent and "evil" is there, what makes the difference is what restrains it.

So you're saying that if the USA was a different country, like China, then things would have gone the way they did in China?

If you don't want to be banned on HN, please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606977 and do not post any more flamewar comments.

I get the point you are trying to make but I think you have missed the undertone, which is generally accepted in the US: Most people in the US agree that without freedom of press, "checks and balances", etc, the US government would indeed become an authoritarian state with all the evils that entails.

Firstly, he wasn't arrested. Secondly, this isn't about who did more wrong. I don't really care if signing that letter or a transfer for disciplinary reasons is worse - both did the right thing and both should have been praised instead.

He was forced by the police to come to the police station and not allowed to leave until he admitted to disrupting the social order[1]. Call that whatever you want, but I think arrested accurately portrays the situation.

Second, no one is defending the US’ actions, but you’re clearly trying to minimize China’s.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/c...

No, but what about Helen Chu at UW? What about UPMC the other day as someone pointed out. Can the feds leave people alone when they know how to tie their own shoelaces and focus on getting ventilators deployed?

Again, not comparable at all. Find a case where someone was arrested and forced to sign a false confession.

Ah yes, what this comment section really needed was a healthy dose of whataboutism /s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

As in most cases when this link gets posted here, this is not actually a case of whataboutism.

Here, the argument is "this cannot happen here because the US is not a dictatorship and we have free press". I linked to an actual case of this happening in the US. So apparently, the Chinese don't have some unique property making only them supress whistleblowers.

The parent comment argued nothing of the sort. It said simply:

> "The Chinese Government is squarely to blame for this situation. Could it have been prevented if they had acted responsibly? I don't know"

The parent comment made no statements about how it could never happen in another country. It was specifically about the Chinese government's mishandling -- it was you who injected the bit about the US.

Please do not post in the flamewar style to HN.

Also, please keep that particular trope away from here. It's a marker of lame discussion.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Oh. Someone criticized China. And then someone rapidly turned around and said "But what about the US!"

Where have I possibly seen this before?

Yes, everyone hinting that xenophobia might not be a sensible pursuit when facing a pandemia is obviously a paid troll.

I'm German, BTW, and considering the history of our country I'm a bit sensible to things like this.

Please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606977 and do not post any more nationalistic flamebait, or other flamebait, to HN.

Sorry, that wasn't my intention at all. Nationalism was the opposite of what I was trying to convey, but obviously that didn't work out that well.

In times like these we all have to look at what can be done to minimize human suffering, not who is to blame.

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