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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

Where was the media in this? Lots of scare stories about potential pandemics back to January, in the US media, but I dont recall much if any "the CDC is fucking up / not testing" coverage.

Of course that kind of thing was probably being said in the froth of the fringe and conspiracy theorists, but thats all "fake news" and unmentionable now.

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I don't remember the exact start date when people started noticing we had severely fucked this up, but it's been a common refrain in the media for the last month at least. If you're still asking "where was the media" NOW then you need to seriously reevaluate what media you're paying attention to, because the ones you're looking at are doing you a big disservice.

Here's one from a month ago: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-02-28/corona...

Ten days before that, people were becoming aware of asymptomatic carriers which should've triggered a huge testing effort to try to prevent community spread: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-02-18/report-show...

Less awareness of it in late January: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-26/coronavi...

Feb 1st in Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/tests-for-coronavirus-us-mig...

Feb 12th in the NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/health/coronavirus-test-k...

Feb 12th in LiveScience: https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-testing-kits-flawed....

Feb 12th from Physicians Weekly: https://www.physiciansweekly.com/some-u-s-states-launch/

Feb 13th on FoxNews: https://www.foxnews.com/health/some-coronavirus-testing-kits...

The media has been all over this, news stories just don't have the penetrating power they used to. Plus, Trump admin officials kept saying the tests were fixed and would be shipped shortly even though it was patently false, so I don't think people thought much of it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-06/trump-aid...

I didnt start digging until 2/19; when my daughter went to a clinic for something that "wasn't flu or strep"; and there was no answer about "is there a test for the new wulan virus?"

I think the Media the-boy-who-cried-wolf itself. There are scares all the time and people grew (rightly) indifferent. Imagine a responsible media that's not out looking for click grabbing headlines all of a sudden mentioning a would-be pandemic...

Can you mention a few scares that you mention that happen "all the time" ?

World War 3 supposedly started in January by some accounts, but is nearly forgotten now. What's some mystery flu in China got on that as far as headlines go?

Sure, we can answer this with a bit of hindsight, but it's amazing how quickly we forget even wildly incorrect predictions.

Can you expand on thst WW3 reference - it's not a story that made the rounds here.

I think they are referring to the killing of Qasem Soleimani and the subsequent retaliation [1].

[1]: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/United_States_military_kills_Qa...

Indeed, there were a lot of people going on about WW III, a draft, etc. It's a bit harder to find good examples now that the hype has faded and the results get buried on Google, but here are a few samples -

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2020/01/03/some-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/01/04/...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/07/youth-nee...

Can you show some predictions of World War 3 imminently happening by news sources? Say CNN.

Look down thread, I linked to a few WaPo articles.

I was on Google news in January and you'd have thought that WW III was already started.

You're right. A fair, unbiased media is key for western government as we know it.

There is so much misinformation everywhere, and it has been exacerbated by the internet.

It's not hard to see why many distrust the media these days. And that's extremely problematic.

> Lots of scare stories about potential pandemics back to January, in the US media

We live in an environment where the signal to noise ratio has been deliberately polluted by politicians to the point where actual signal is being lost. Everything that disagrees with the ruling regime, calls out incompetence, or is even slightly embarrassing, is "fake news". We've entered a scary time, indeed.

I don't know if your wording was intentional, but your comment gives the impression that you think this was "scare stories", when clearly, in retrospect, they were warnings. We should have listened. Some did. Leadership clearly did not.

The pandemic is getting worse and we're ramping up the finger-pointing. Instead, we should be listening to experts, mounting effective response, and holding leaders accountable. We continue to fail on that last point and shoot messengers.

As I recall, a lot of the media was saying we should be more worried about the Flu than this. That was the prevalent mantra from Jan-Feb.

An exponential curve looks like nothing when the numbers are really low. By mid-February even in media it wasn't a curious case in China anymore, though.

Because in the initial days, the CDC had a valid point. The W.H.O/Chinese test wasn't that reliable (at the time) and it wasn't unreasonable for the US to make their own. It wasn't until week after week went by, with the CDC straight up lying to the FDA/HHS, that the real failure became apparent.

The second the CDC realized it wasn't up to the job, it should have begged the FDA to allow labs/companies to make their own tests. Instead they lied for weeks, wasting the most critical time in the US's portion of the pandemic getting nothing done. It wasn't until UC Davis broke the law and tested a patient and the governor of California dared the FDA to do anything about it, that Trump put Pence in charge and things started to move forward and responsibility for testing was moved away from the CDC.

I don't know if Dr. Redfeild of the CDC made these calls, but either way, he should have been replaced immediately, because he'll make the history books for the amount of lives this will cost.

> Because in the initial days, the CDC had a valid point. The W.H.O/Chinese test wasn't that reliable (at the time) and it wasn't unreasonable for the US to make their own. It wasn't until week after week went by, with the CDC straight up lying to the FDA/HHS, that the real failure became apparent.

The initial test was developed in Germany, and was ready by 17 January. This test proved able to isolate the virus from other coronaviruses, and thus received the recommendation of the WHO. CDC published its protocol on 28 January, a test that was less efficient and reliable than the German test. In the mean time, WHO had recommended countries use the German protocol.

> Because in the initial days, the CDC had a valid point. The W.H.O/Chinese test wasn't that reliable (at the time) and it wasn't unreasonable for the US to make their own.

How would this be an excuse not to start using the WHO tests while the CDC was developing theirs? Even if the test was hot garbage (as you imply), surely something is better than nothing.

The CDC test was mostly pretty good. My impression from This Week In Virology was that some aspects were too clever which is why it took so long to come out but the parts of it that involved the detection of SARS-Covid-2 worked just fine. The problem was that there were some bad reagents in the part of the test that looked for other respiratory illnesses so the third part of the test that wasn't directly concerned with the Coronavirus didn't work. And it would be illegal to run a test that didn't conform to protocol - simply skipping the relatively useless part of the test that didn't work.

The CDC deserves some blame for taking 3 weeks to produce a gold-plated test that had a part that didn't work but I think we ought to blame the FDA more for preventing any of the qualified labs from doing any tests until the CDC finished taking its sweet time to make a test and then that test didn't work to FDA standards. There are tons of competent hospitals, universities, and companies that could have made a test to WHO standards in under a week and gotten us testing early.

Well, the FDA managed to prevent most testing but Dr. Helen Chu was willing to break the law and alerted us to the Seattle outbreak. She saved countless lives and I hope she doesn't go to jail for it.

We didn’t know there was a huge testing problem until we had a huge amount of people who needed tests.

On 1/24/20 the WHO said there’s no human to human transmission of covid-19

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=20

They are to blame as much as anyone else

WHO isn't faultless, but that's a fairly misrepresentative version of what that Tweet actually says..

"WHO said there's no human to human transmission" vs.

> Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.

Agreed. They surely share in the blame but then again, it's not as if China is our ally who we can count on to give accurate and timely information. They (and others) would love nothing more than to see the US crumble and burn. So I understand some of the WHO (and CDC) skepticism in the early days. Not that I'm defending their later actions (or lack thereof).

It was 1/23/20. Wuhan was under lockdown but there was no clear evidence of human to human transfer? Cmon

That tweet was from ten days before the lockdown, based on evidence gathered prior to that. The first death from the disease was 3 days prior to the WHO tweet and Chinese researchers had only identified the specific virus 6 days prior:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou...

That very same day the WHO was recommending handwashing / avoiding close contact with anyone with flu-like symptoms / and avoiding wet markets and close contact with animals (since the largest known source of infection was the market in Wuhan):

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1216754859292184577

It's hard to lay any blame on the WHO for not taking the virus seriously enough in the first days of the outbreak when major politicians were still dismissing it two months later.

Your source for that is China itself?

WHO deserves a ton of blame. For one, they refused to call it a pandemic and actually pressured experts who disagreed to take back what they said and then called it a Pandemic the very next day. https://twitter.com/RizaHawkeye8/status/1241415090097684480

Um, I've not been watching the WHO that closely, but didn't they state clearly their definition of a pandemic, and say [not a direct quote] "it's not yet a pandemic but might well become one", and then when it did pass their definition they called it a pandemic.

Seems reasonable, forthright, and scientific.

What did you want instead? Every epidemic to be called a pandemic?

It was obvious to many experts (see tweet for one example) that it was a pandemic. These experts were frustrated that WHO was not recognizing it as one.

My opinion is that WHO should have called it pandemic much earlier and raised the alarm much earlier.

They said there is no evidence of it, that's completely different from what you wrote.

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