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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

Would things have been different if it had started in a country other than China? Politics aside, starting in the most populous and most trafficked country on Earth seems like the worst-case scenario.

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We'll never know, but it's worth pointing out that the slow and disorganized response by many western countries like the US and UK seemed to be less influenced by where the disease originated and more heavily influenced by a localized desire to pretend everything was normal.

I have a hard time seeing a different outcome if a virus of similar potency came out of Africa or somewhere else, based solely on how poorly leaders from around the world have responded to it.

Things like responding to a pandemic are precisely where authoritarian regimes excel.

Authoritarian structures generally excel when you need a lot of people to do a lot of the same thing: responding to disasters in simple but effective ways, high volume manufacturing, grunt and infantry level military operations, and large infrastructure projects.

These are the areas where China leads the world. With the possible exception of the military, America and other Western democracies are downright horrible at these things. We can't build infrastructure, have lost much of our high volume manufacturing, and react to disasters with delay and bickering and population non-compliance.

Where they don't excel is creativity, invention, innovation, culture creation, and maximizing individual well being in peacetime. They're also more politically brittle because there is no graceful mechanism for non-violent political change.

Chinese style technocratic authoritarianism might excel in the face of pandemic, but one need look no farther than Brazil to see that old-fashioned grievance-based reactionary authoritarianism falls flat on its face when it needs to deal with any problem that can’t be swept under the rug by blaming it on a group of “Others”

It's also much easier for authoritarian regimes to give off such impressions when they can lock up and execute whistle-blowers and critics without with access to any semblance of a just legal system.

While once they make up their minds to act they can be extraordinarily effective, getting to that point can be a mess.

For a while they suppressed information about what was going on in the region, suppressed information to the outside world about the virus, and generally said "Everything is fine" delaying their response.

Now, to their credit, once they committed they did an excellent job. And the population has complied in amazing fashion. But the slow-moving party has a weakness that it won't broadcast when things are starting to go wrong until they can't ignore it any longer.

You can also imagine what would have happened if they continued to lock up critics for even longer.

Enlightened authoritarians only work if they are, well, enlightened. Once corruption seeps in those same levers of power can be exploited for personal and Party gain.

The handling of Covid-19 in Iran is a great counterexample.

South Korea and Taiwan did all right and they're democracies.

I firmly believe your comment is conflating China's competence with its political structure. There are definite benefits when it comes to large-scale planning when your country is already familiar with state-planning and infringement on "freedoms". That being said, a look at a country like Brazil would show you that being authoritarian is not enough.

In the same vein that there are democratic countries who are handling COVID 19 much, much, better than the West. Not to mention those same countries give us great "innovation (e.g. technology), culture creation (e.g. Parasite), etc.". The Western democracies should not escape blame because they are "democracies".

The US is doing just fine and there is no need for further authoritarian measures right now. We'll do what me must when we must.

Only when they have made up their mind to respond. It took the soviets a very long time to respond to Chernobyl. The first instinct of authoritarians is to pretend problems don’t exist.

Ive seen a lot of comments like this recently and I think they're really a bit lazy and simplistic. China made some grave errors as others have pointed out, and those are directly attributable to their authoritarian system. Also democracies and be highly organised and co-ordinated. Look at the speed and efficiency with which South Korea and Germany have responded. It's as much about culture as politics.

Also on high volume manufacturing, China's success at this has nothing whatever to do with authoritarianism. None of the big manufacturing concerns in China are state run, they're all private companies build using private capital. Their success is a result of the government getting out of their way.

You might want to check out the TV miniseries Chernobyl.

Population density is a factor to be sure, but the government response was a bigger factor in failing to contain it in my opinion.

The CCP’s culture of fear and retribution pushed municipal officials to suppress reports of a novel outbreak, and pushed authorities to retaliate against medical professionals sounding the alarm.

A culture of transparency and non-retribution may have enabled China to contain this, and could have provided earlier warnings to the world to prepare for an epidemic or pandemic that might not have even happened.

I guess some people actually believe this. The new orientalism?

Yea, unfortunately that seems to be the case. While local level officials in Wuhan punished some early whistleblowers for posting publicly about the virus the Chinese Supreme Peoples Court said they should not have been punished.

I think China has shown a lot of transparency and has put a ton of resources towards containment.

I agree with your initial reasoning, although given the long incubation period that was initially unknown I still see a high chance this would have spread either way. But

> and could have provided earlier warnings to the world to prepare for an epidemic or pandemic that might not have even happened.

Not in a thousand years. The west was sitting on their hands for almost two months, busy armchair-commenting on the CCP's failings, preparing half-heartedly at best, taking no proactive measures whatsoever. I'm utterly disappointed with my government and don't see how this would have turned out any different for us had we had twice as much time to prepare, or had this originated in a western country.

A handful of countries were able to prevent an epidemic in their own country because they responded quickly. The vast majority of them ignored the virus and claimed it wouldn't come here, and changed their tune only when it was too late.

China gave a perfectly fine head start as evidenced by countries that were able to contain it. Everyone else just wasted the head start, and I see no evidence that they wouldn't have wasted it even if China gave them a longer one.

Which countries are you referring to?

The first US case was diagnosed on Jan 19 2020. The US-China border was closed on Feb 2. Screening procedures followed later on. It is up for debate whether or not screening procedures would have started earlier if the border had closed earlier. BUT, to say there is no evidence at all that a longer head start would have helped countries is a very dubious claim.

And also the most probable, especially given the diet in some of the regions. That said, some countries in Africa also eat bats and pangolin and Ebola came.

Diet is most probably a giant red herring in all this.

There's just no "right diet" if you want to avoid disease mutation. Mad Cow Disease, Salmonella, Avian Flu, Swine Flu, all of those and more have (and continue to) cross-infect our species from standard western diets. Several major western religions ban pork for "uncleanliness"/prone-to-disease, for what were once very good historical reasons.

Even if this virus did have something to do with diet, the only rational response is to cut way back on all meat, not just "weird" meat to a Western view, because it isn't just "rodents" or "ugly animals" that mutate these sorts of virus, because we've seen it with pigs, chickens, cows, etc. Probably no one wants mandatory veganism, but that's nearly the only "safe" option if you want to demand we track regional diets. (Even then you get things like salmonella cross-infections from fertilizers used in vegetable farming. There's no 100% safe diet. Life, uh, finds a way.)

We regularly euthanize diseased pigs and chickens because of viral outbreaks - sometimes millions at a time. We would do well to try not eating so much animal protein.

I have no idea how to figure this out. But my thought process is:

What % of people in a given region in a given month travel outside:

a) Their city

b) Their state/providence

c) Their country?

and then compare it to other countries. I suspect there are many places it could have started with way more international travel.. which would have made the first wave hit more places at once.

There is a large contingent of itinerant fools who travel the world endlessly in search of identity yet never locate it.

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