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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

I think the deeper point of this story is NOT "oh look a kid can do it in their dorm=room".

The point is that this test is totally doable. Nation-state resources in the USA and Europe missed their opportunity to provide testing to their people, while South Korea was able to rise to the occasion by making the right decisions at the right time.

This demonstrates a profound lack of leadership in the USA and Europe. It's not just President Cheeto-Satan (though his dithering idiocy is certainly part of it https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Mueller/comments/fl9gng/oc_a_pl...). We knew better, we could have done better.

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This is the why people who have experience bureaucracy have learned to hate it. It makes even the simplest thing impossible. The more useless people you add to anything, the harder it becomes.

My experience is that bureaucracy stems from something - it has a cause, regardless of the outcome. My personal experience is that 99% of it is avoiding litigation.

Not sure what that adds to the conversation, just my experience with forms and layers of people paid to do nothing but sign them.

Some of it, sure. But it leads to people gaming the system.

In bureaucracies, many positions/people only have the power to slow down or stop the process. People need to feel important and powerful, and they cannot contribute to moving a process forward because they are, for example, a cybersecurity analyst or a lawyer.

So they say "well this process doesn't check box #134 on the list, we need to circle back and solution this" and they hang up and go back to reading reddit until the next meeting on their calendar.

It's awful to be a "doer" in a bureaucracy.

I agree, but I suspect that South Korea also has heavy bureaucracy.

The sad thing is the USA and Europe were fully capable of handling this just like South Korea. That's why this is really about a failure of leadership.

I would like to think that this crisis will force Americans and Europeans to demand accountability, but I don't think that's going to happen. A token scapegoat will be found, "the people" will be congratulated for taking action in a time of emergency (and failure of government) and the leadership that were out-to-lunch when this stuff started going down will be accountable to nothing.

Yet some bureaucracies have done a much better job than other bureaucracies

It's a difference in culture that must not be underestimated. South East Asian societies have a long history of autocratic leadership and a much lower sense of individuality among the population.

South Korea wasn't a democracy for most of its history and it shows as soon as drastic measures need to be taken. The first reaction among the populous in the West is resistance against any form of government mandated measures due to a deep mistrust. Add to that federal structures versus centralised government and you get to the results we see today.

Calls for strong leadership end in dictatorships because measures taken in times of crisis tend not tobe taken back once the crisis is over. This is nothing new - this is how the Roman Empire got its emperors after all.

You could argue that some of the european countries that the parent claims didn’t react properly also have a long history of autocratic leadership. Another explanation for the difference in reacting to this event from south asian countries is because of the learnings from the SARS outbreak in 2002 which affected that part of the world a lot more.

Time scales play a role. South Korea started to transition to a democracy in 1997, just to put that into perspective.

Sure, experience from SARS plays a role, too. But ignoring the emphasis of individual freedom and federal government structures and blaming leadership is a huge oversight.

Adult citizens should be mature and responsible in light of a crisis. The opposite is the case and the irrational hoarding of irrelevant goods (see the TP crisis) is a symptom of that.

The fact of the matter is that many European countries simply don't have the political means to react the same way a central government with compliant citizens can.

Just look at the Spring Breakers in Florida - they don't care about social distancing. Neither did the ski tourists in Ischgl and South Tirol where apre ski parties continued until the bodies started dropping (first metaphorically,later literally).

That's a cultural difference that's hard to deny.

> Sure, experience from SARS plays a role, too. But...

South Korea holds regular country wide simulations for pandemics because of SARS and bird flu.

Their last one was 18 months ago and ironically focused on simulating a large scale coronavirus outbreak.

You might be overestimating the cultural differences here compared to plain old preparedness.

They also use their superior communication infrastructure for basically total surveillance of affected citizens.

This is something that isn't technically possible in Europe and simply doesn't fly with the vast majority of the population. Their strategy is based on policies that just don't work in Europe.

EDIT: also not to forget that South Korea is technically an island with its only land border being the most fortified one in the world...

Yeah that's a fair point.

Another point I forget to mention is mask wearing which certainly is cultural. In Australia and much of the West it's considered not normal whereas no one thinks twice in Asia.

I've seen Australians say they wouldn't wear one even if sick and we've had incidents of people abusing perfectly healthy mask wearers in Sydney demanding they self quarantine.

These attitudes within a society have pretty clear outcomes for anything contagious.

Have you read Discipline and Punish? Europe was doing this 400 years ago.

One hotspot was in the Tyrol, not South Tyrol. The two areas are even in different countries

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