Comment by drinchev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drinchev | Hacker News Reader

Back in time ( end of January ) when I heard the news about Wuhan and what happened there I was a bit worried, but always positive. When the virus spread in Italy ( I live in Berlin ) I was daily asking "Why don't they stop people from / to Italy?", "Why don't they go and help Italy?", "Where is a plan for handling the situation?", "Why nobody knows >how< to handle the situation, don't they see how China managed?"

All in all the answers were : "They don't want to kill the economy, that's why no restrictions.", "We are democracy, that's why no restrictions."

Look at the situation now. Killed economy, unstoppable virus and nobody knows for how long. They can't contain it anymore. What we do is flattening the curve, not eliminating the thread.

Come on. These politicians, IMO should be investigated for committing crime agains humanity. I can't believe that in 2020 there is no such thing as emergency procedure / plan in case of ... well ... emergency. I tend to think that all government decision makers make a "daily" for what should happen today and then wait for tomorrow, with no further planning.

That's just irresponsible.

Yeah it's a fundamental failure of government. One key function of government is to hedge against and plan for unlikely but serious scenarios just like these, especially when there is no money to be made by doing what's in the public interest. Helping to deal with crises like this is a big part of why epidemiological research gets public funding. Despite this deep underlying infrastructure, the weakest link is usually whoever is in power at the moment doing things like disbanding pandemic response groups and censoring experts.

How is it a crime against humanity to not stop individuals from hurting each other? Doesn't responsibility lie with the person infecting others after being warned?

Proactively shutting things down and restricting freedoms are politically impossible to implement. There's no incentive for any single politician to do anything like this because if it actually worked there'd be no visibility to the general public and thus nobody would understand what they actually did.

It's like the proverbial secret goverment agency that stops a bomb from going off and nobody knows what they did.

In politics this mean that the general public would only see the downsides of such measures and not the gains. This would not get a single politician re-elected.

Therefore in terms of politics it's much better and safer to be reactive only rather than proactive. Later speech can include statements "we could not have possibly known", "there was no indication that...", "it was a complete surprise...", "we acted as quickly as possbile..."

Not true, because there will be enough "test groups" due to this thinking already (and I believe now even the last one realized that this will now go everyhwere).

China locked down around ~400 known infections, in terms of spread we will soon learn what it means to have only done similar but much less strict lockdown at 1000, 4000, 8000 infections, actually it is all a number game, and the numbers were sharp enough and visible for everyone during February already.. we will pay a lot four our stupidity and "politically impossible", we said this since start of the year about Chinas measures, but what was politically impossible will now take longer and almost reach same strictness levels here..

Lol Cuomo at his press conference today was saying "Don't be reactive, be productive"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com