A doctor who helped defeat smallpox explains what’s coming | Hacker News Reader

A doctor who helped defeat smallpox explains what’s coming

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82 pointsemrah12 comments

Good read!

CNN calls out gashlighting and untruths that makes employees stoop to becoming puppets in order to work effectively around the person:

http://www.edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/politics/donald-trump-...

Media is experiencing what it's like to be the target of gaslighting (yeah, sounds funny, but really really isn't).

Hopefully this will raise awareness how detrimental and destructive such toxic behaviour is.

Contrast with: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/angela-merkel-nails-...

Thank you emrah.

This is definitely worth reading and sharing.

This language needs more commas. It took me a while to realize the title has nothing to do with Doctor Who, the series.

Not capitalizing words in titles would be more helpful than commas to avoid that misunderstanding.

I don't see a place to put commas that would help. "The Doctor, Who Helped Defeat Smallpox, Explains..." would refer to a subject already introduced, and there's no other way to separate "Doctor" and "Who" that I can see.

> [Speaking of Trump] Saying it’s fake, by saying this is a Democratic hoax.

False. Trump referred to "politicizing" of the coronavirus by Democrats as "their new hoax." He did not refer to the coronavirus itself as a hoax or call it fake. You can criticize that he did not take it seriously enough to shut down the economy sooner, and that'd be fair, but he did shut down air travel from China on Jan 31, for which he was shat on at the time, as usual. Had he not done that, we'd be dealing with 10x the number of cases now.

Semantics are crazy here. This is their new hoax to me means “Democrats are taking this and blowing it out of proportion.” How long did Fox News spin this as a conspiracy and just like the flu and all is well before things got very bad? Where are the test kits? Why was South Korea able to recognize and respond with massive testing early but the US is not? And regarding his China shutdown he was shat on because it was too little too late not because it was considered too extreme. How many weeks or months were people unable to get tested unless they met too strict criteria? How many people came through us customs from Italy during its outbreak without an eyebrow raised or basic questioning? If we want to play Monday morning quarterback had he ordered screening early enough we’d be 10 times better than we are and maybe we could have contained it.

Trump kept telling us that there was no shortage of tests, which was a complete lie. And he kept telling us there were few cases and things were under control, when you can't tell that without a huge number of tests, which we did not have.

As far as treating the pandemic as serious, he dismissed it as minor, until his speech a week ago. He has been a lot better since then. But if he had done things right from the beginning, we would be in a much better situation now, and we might have been able to contain it.

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