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Comment by jennyyang | Hacker News Reader

At the very least, medical supplies and drugs manufacturing will get pulled back into each country. The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic.

Whether it means all manufacturing will move away from China or if it means that they will spread it globally, is an interesting question. China will have more incidents of pandemics for sure, because they haven't learned from the last one, and they won't learn from this one. It's certainly less efficient to have the same products being produced everywhere, but maybe ruthless efficiency isn't good for the world or its citizens, especially when it comes to income inequality.

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To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA.

Obviously, cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency, (1) more a question of fairness, (2) can be done domestically (low-cost immigrant workers) and (3) there's plenty of cheap workers worldwide, not just in China.

Another potential advantage could be, factories are closer to natural resources, but it seems to me that that's not as much a question of efficiency, as it is of lax (enforcement of) environmental standards. Which I personally don't see as a net gain, even if it results in cheaper production.

The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses. Again, IMO it would be better to have a local high-skilled population of engineers & entrepreneurs.

> The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses. Again, IMO it would be better to have a local high-skilled population of engineers & entrepreneurs.

There are probably advantages for many large corporations. e.g. Nike, Apple. Design in the US, manufacture in China (or equivalent), reap profits in the US

What perhaps we should be thinking about is the second order effects of unfettered globalization. In the good times we only see the advantages. Ultimately, it looks like it is better to have some redundancy (in certain areas/sectors at least) to be able to deal with situations like these

Why do the design in the US? Chinese engineers are doing great designs themselves, and for less than American salaries... And they can visit right there on the factory floor, talking to the manufacturers directly about how to make their designs, in the same time zone and the same language...

Are US engineers imagining the same ideas about being irreplaceable that an earlier generation of American machinists, tool-and-die experts, and manufacturing workers also did?

> cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency

Never thought of it this way, but you're right, at least in spirit. Efficiency is probably not the right word but I couldn't agree more. This drive towards ruthless efficiency actually hurts us in being more productive. We all need to rethink the endgame that capitalism, low cost - high efficiency systems inevitably leads us towards.

> To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA.

A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain. But if China has most of the factories, and supporting industries, and supporting education, etc. it suddenly becomes more efficient. But then if China decides it doesn't like you, you're screwed. So it's the concentration of skill you mention, but also concentration of all kinds of relevant infrastructure.

As for cheaper workers - it's a temporary "efficiency" in financial terms, in forms of price arbitrage. Over time it evaporates. Even as the 2019 was coming to an end, China was already too expensive for many industries - being the world's factory enabled them to enrich their citizens, and suddenly there was a middle class that demanded humane working conditions and employee protection and what not. So suddenly poorer countries became of interest for future manufacturing...

>> To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA.

> A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain. But if China has most of the factories, and supporting industries, and supporting education, etc. it suddenly becomes more efficient.

But I'd argue that shouldn't be considered "globalization": there's nothing "global" about concentrating things in one country. It's just outsourcing.

> A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA.

I'm not sure how you're defining efficiency, but in the Netflix special American Factory, it would seem like the chinese workers were not only cheaper but also more productive.

Totally agree. It take time and management skills to be a efficient factory.

anecdotally, but comparisons of model 3s produced in China showed a much higher attention to detail than those in the US. There appeared to be a strong focus on the product as it represented those who built it. This level of "pride" if you want to call it that is a cultural issue that some nations have lost. While I am not saying workers should put the manufacturer before themselves many have taken that so far as to put themselves before their fellow employees as well.

that didn't happen overnight, that happened by politicians playing people against each other and invoking the all too common negative traits of envy, jealousy, and even anger. The mantras of you did not win life's lottery, its not fair, you deserve, they stole, has really done a number at not just manufacturing levels but in all aspects of life.

> but in the Netflix special American Factory

A single, sensationalized data point.

1 > 0, but if you have details on why that is not indicative of reality please share.

> cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency

It is efficiency, really, because it's making better use of an underutilized resource. Over time, of course, the price of labor evens out because the resource is no longer underutilized.

> more a question of fairness

If it's fairness you want, telling companies to hire locally isn't going to cut it. That's the opposite of fairness, really—you would be subsidizing local workers whose wages are already higher at the expense of foreign labor that has more need for the income.

> Another potential advantage could be, factories are closer to natural resources, but it seems to me that that's not as much a question of efficiency, as it is of lax (enforcement of) environmental standards.

Locating factories near their required materials is a net gain even when ideal environmental standards are maintained. It's almost always cheaper (economically and environmentally) to ship end products where they need to go than it would be to ship raw materials around to distributed factories. Concentrating manufacturing in one area also makes it easier to confine the environmental impact.

> If it's fairness you want, telling companies to hire locally isn't going to cut it. That's the opposite of fairness, really—you would be subsidizing local workers whose wages are already higher at the expense of foreign labor that has more need for the income.

It sounds to me like you're saying that it is unfair to strangers that you would help out your family first before helping them.

Most countries do subsidize local workers and industry. Should it be another way?

The United States actually does heavily subsidize foreigners for the benefit of the rich and powerful, at the expense of its citizens. Most work visa programs are an example of this.

This is the problem with the globalist mindset. Chinese workers are ultimately working for China. Chinese companies are always inclined to help Chinese people and the Chinese government. So telling domestic firms to be neutral in national loyalty is essentially telling them to be loyal to China.

A government not pressuring firms to hire and buy locally is deeply unfair to the point where I would argue it is a dereliction of their duty to the people.

Anyone care to respond instead of just downvoting?

i would disagree with you on two points

- work visas aren't subsidized. not even close. it costs a lot to sponsor and the workers pay taxes without benefits. not to mention the brain drain.

- you've grouped people as working for countries. people work for their own benefit and compete globally. as long as countries ensure their trading partners have humane working conditions, it's up to each person to remain globally competitive. your wage is a loose function of value generated for the employer.

> It sounds to me like you're saying that it is unfair to strangers that you would help out your family first before helping them.

Well, yes, it is unfair to the strangers that you're favoring the people you personally care about when others are worse off. Being unfair doesn't necessarily make it wrong. You're free to help whoever you want—with your own resources. However, organizations distributing resources they took by force, or enforcing their own rules on others, ought to be held to higher standards.

> Chinese workers are ultimately working for China.

Chinese workers are ultimately working for themselves and their own families, just like all workers everywhere. Not for the Chinese government. If you have a problem with the Chinese government forcibly and unjustly profiting from the labor of Chinese workers, great! So do I. The same goes for every other government, both foreign and domestic.

> Well, yes, it is unfair to the strangers that you're favoring the people you personally care about when others are worse off. Being unfair doesn't necessarily make it wrong. You're free to help whoever you want—with your own resources. However, organizations distributing resources they took by force, or enforcing their own rules on others, ought to be held to higher standards.

And I think that a government has an obligation to prioritize its own citizens before foreigners. And it appears that people here disagree with me.

Most governments do this. The Chinese government certainly does this for its own citizens. I wish that US government was as protectionist as the Chinese government is.

As it is now, American citizens pay taxes to subsidize our exploitation. The only people who benefit from the current immigration system are billionaires. The government is more concerned with the pursuit of capital for the elites than they are with the welfare of the people.

Thankfully, this administration has actually been enforcing the rules with H1-B visas. So lots of people I know have gotten great jobs in the last few years as visas are no longer rubber stamped. H1-B is nothing but a scam to help tech billionaires.

But yeah, putting outsiders above those you have a responsibility to care for is wrong. Volunteering at a soup kitchen does not excuse neglecting your own children. It brings me no comfort that the American middle class was eviscerated to help China. And yet that is trotted out whenever an American expresses frustration at how they have been harmed by globalization. It would be like if someone said: Sure, your bike was stolen, but at least the bike thief is happy, so it is ok.

> Over time, of course, the price of labor evens out because the resource is no longer underutilized.

The price would have evened out if labor could cross borders as freely as the goods that it produces - then it would flow to areas where it's in high demand. But with borders and immigration controls and different laws (esp. environment and labor) in different jurisdictions, it's not really a free market. Instead, it looks a great deal like a contraption that's deliberately designed to allow transnational corporations to extract massive economic rents from otherwise pointless brokerage (outsourcing).

> The price would have evened out if labor could cross borders as freely as the goods that it produces.

Not really, if that was the case for ex, everyone doing similar jobs would be getting paid the same in US or EU. I am not saying things dont get evened out to an extent, but people are harder to move than the goods they produce.

True. Still, though, it's drastically easier to move within a single country (or economic area like EU), then it is to move across the border with immigration controls - even if moving across the border is much closer geographically. You can bet there'd be a lot more Chinese workers competing for jobs directly in US if they could.

> The price would have evened out if labor could cross borders as freely as the goods that it produces…

That would certainly speed up the process. However, labor prices are still gradually rising in China and other common outsourcing areas despite these restrictions. As are environmental standards. I'm not saying it's an ideal free market—there are governments involved, after all. But free or not, the trade is still advantageous for both sides.

>> cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency

> It is efficiency, really, because it's making better use of an underutilized resource. Over time, of course, the price of labor evens out because the resource is no longer underutilized.

It's not efficiency at all, it's stagnation. Since the 80s instead of trying to innovate and automate production lines too many companies have been hopping from country-to-country looking for the cheapest labor pool. We lost 40 years of manufacturing innovations because they were economically unnecessary due to offshoring.

Can you blame them? It was cheaper to outsource than automate, so why wouldn't they have outsourced?

I can't blame them, just like I can't blame a company for becoming a monopoly. We need to regulate them like we do with antitrust, worker's rights, and other things. The free market unabated is terrible for humanity.

It's worse then that, we all live in a socialist society, it's just a corporate socialism. A free market would be a fantastic start. There is a real lack of competition and innovation in our socialist model.

Yes, a true free market can only exist via governmental regulation, as otherwise, companies tend towards monopolies and collusion. It would be nice to have such a market, but I do wonder how we'll get there with moneyed interests at the door.

I can't "blame" a corporation, because it's not a person.

But they are run by people, those people are the ones crafting the legal and regulatory environment that encourages this behavior, and we can certainly blame them.

I can't blame the workers either. They are driven by incentives, so of course they'll fulfill their incentives. Expecting them to do the right thing without incentivizing them to do so doesn't effect any change. If you want to change them, change their incentives, whether through money, government regulation, or other.

I think the problem is in allowing capital to continuously seek out higher profits by finding places and people that they can exploit.

Unrestrained capitalism leads to slavery (J. Pournelle). So we have to regulate it so that it doesn't get to that state. Capitalism is built around exploitation; either workers, physical resources, or knowledge. This has the benefit of increasing prosperity over time, though at a cost. As unfortunate as these costs are, Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

(Apologies to Sir Winston Churchill)

Not at all. Being close to your inputs means you don’t have to ship them as far to make use of them. And the shorter the distance you have to ship them, the less you will pay for shipping. Lower overhead equals higher efficiency.

It’s like, why were car factories in the U.S. clustered around the Great Lakes? Because car factories need steel, and the steel mills were in Pennsylvania. And why were the steel mills in Pennsylvania? Because steel mills need coal, and the coal mines were in Appalachia. You could theoretically build these factories anywhere, but the company that built close to their inputs would have an economic edge over the company that didn’t.

Shipping is very cheap in the era of globalization and containerized shipping so it doesn't mean much.

Companies focused on cost cutting, outsourcing and the like, but in doing so sacrificing agility and deep knowledge, and sometime even cost.

>The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses.

This is why a factory in Spain or the USA is not as efficient as one in China (or vice-versa). Institutional knowledge has to be built up over time. You can't just start a factory in a place with no skilled labor for it. It's going to be way too expensive.

Just look at the US and compare to the EU. The EU has very few influential (or large) tech companies. The US has many of them. There's clearly some kind of concentration going on there and some of it probably is due to skill and thus efficiency. It's not that individual European developers are necessarily worse, but rather that as a collective (for some reason) they don't produce the same results as Americans do. I imagine that the same applies to factories.

What about US based 3m workers going on strike at unfortunate moment?

Exactly. By outsorcing to China, they’re not actually seeking “efficiency”, they’re just seeking to skirt labour rights and other regulations.

Unions and strikes are a political topic, and we should probably figure out how to handle it better, probably some middle ground between fairness and efficiency (I’m not really well versed in the topic), but regardless companies bypassing the discussion completely by just having a factory in China is wrong and anti-competitive.

That's exactly the argument that Tim Cook used a few years ago. He said that an iPhone not manufactured in China would cost 30k USD...before quickly moving manufacturing out of China. These arguments sound nice, but are lies. When offshoring first started the cheap labor pool was the only thing that mattered, and it still is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Taleb describes this well: globalism allows for optimization (cost, efficiency), but increases risk. To reduce risk, add redundancy (locally).

Sorry, trying not to nitpick, but you mean Globalisation, not globalism.

In some ways it decreases risk though, too. The risk of war, specifically. The US and Chinese governments are far from friends but our economies are much too interconnected to allow either side to instigate too much of a disagreement.

For the most part globalization is good but the pandemic has certainly highlighted the value of strategic redundancy or at least an emergency plan B.

Isn't WWI the usual counterargument to globalization reducing the risk of war? Or were the countries back then not interconnected enough?

That's a good point. Perhaps globalization alone only marginally reduces the risk and it's the combination of globalization + trust (or at least not mistrust) that reduces the likelihood of war.

If that's the case then the US government's efforts to take supplies away from some of our closest allies is even more dangerous and short-sighted than I initially thought.

A month ago I would have said a mask factory in Canada vs. US is nearly equal in terms of national security because Canada could be trusted to help in a time of crisis. I'm sure many Canadians felt the same way. Now I'm not so sure that's true and I certainly don't blame the Canadians.

No shortage of ink was spilled on the wishful thinking that globalization will prevent future wars... All through the 1910s.

I wasn't familiar with this counterargument, and did a quick dig and found this primer:

https://www.economist.com/buttonwoods-notebook/2017/06/14/th...

Do you have any particular recommendations/sources for further discussion around this argument?

Not really, it's just something I've seen used as the most common counterargument to "tighter economic connections decreases risk of war", given that apparently in 1914 people thought international war was nearly impossible due to all the trade interdependencies. I honestly never dug deeper into the similarities and differences between then and now.

Back then every component of a battleship, the most powerful and advanced weapon of the time could be built independently by Britain, France, Germany, Italy, USA, Japan etc. Today, there are very few weapons systems that do not depend on allied countries for a critical component. E.g. it is quite well known that Britain's nuclear powered subs use US reactors and US missiles, but even the steel plate for the hull is likely sourced from another country as there is only one steelworks left in the UK which probably is not able to produce the right alloy in the desired thicknesses. In fact, industry in the UK has declined to the extent that we could not independantly produce a WW1 era battleship any more without a vast restructuring of the economy which would take decades.

If a half-arsed backward place like N Korea can produce ships , rockets and nuclear weapons I am pretty sure the UK could pull it off.

That's the thing, though: being self-sufficient in manufacturing is now considered "backwards".

"Reducing" and "completely eliminating" are very different things.

This was the prevailing thought before World War 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

The economist Norman Angell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Angell) published a highly influential book, The Great Illusion, making this exact argument. In 1909.

It has, let’s say, not aged gracefully.

I think one of the greatest mistakes made over and over by sociologists, futurists, and economists, is to assume that people are rational.

The problem with this argument is ignoring the counterfactual cases: the wars that have not occurred, that would have occurred otherwise.

Europe was mired in endless wars for millenia. It's now in the longest stretch of peace in centuries and, by sheer coincidence, at its highest levels of trade.

In the rest of the world trade has steadily risen and wars and deaths from wars have fallen steadily. Correlation might not be causation, but it would interesting know what third factor explains both "more trade" and "fewer wars" other than "it's hard to fight a war with the people who feed you".

I suggest that the third factor is US policy.

Before World War II, Britain had its trading empire, France had its empire, Japan had its empire, etc. Oceanic trade between nations not in the same empire ran a high risk of the cargo simply being confiscated or destroyed by one of the imperial navies. A key pillar of the US's strategy in the Cold War was to use its naval supremacy to prevent the return to the imperial trading system; in other words, it extended to nations an offer of the ability to trade freely on the world's oceans in exchange for that nation's joining the US in opposing the Soviets.

The United States also suppressed wars. For example, the 2 nations that arguably had the most powerful pre-WWII militaries (Britain and France) allied with Israel to attack Egypt after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, but the United States, worried that the Soviets could enter the conflict, threatened Britain and France with economic sanctions unless they withdrew, which they did.

Or rather, it was the nuclear “balance of terror” that emerged between the US and the USSR. Neither of those powers wanted to risk a confrontation that could turn into World War III, so they both had a strong incentive to limit their own ambitions and to restrain their allies/client states.

Europe fought the two most destructive wars in the history of the world in the three decades immediately following the publication of that book.

I guess you could argue that things could somehow have turned out even worse than that, but that feels like a reach.

You could just as well argue that the highest levels of trade are the result of peace, not the other way around. Especially given that levels of trade were already high enough for people to make this same argument before WW1, as this book illustrates.

It did quite well for its author though. It appears he got a Nobel Prize in 1933. Maybe he was pulling the illusion thing.

The book didn't argue that the war wouldn't happen, only that it would be economically disastrous for everybody involved, and thus to choose to go to war is foolishness, since everybody is strictly worse off than they were before - i.e. there are no absolute winners. Countries did go to war anyway, and, exactly as predicted, it was a disaster for all of them, proving the point.

Most people think WW1 was so bad because people kept killing each other (with machine guns, artillery and poison gasses). Less so because they severed their commercial ties.

Today, yes. But in that era? The notion of declaring a war to profit from the plunder (or reparations, or whatever you call it) was not yet dead back then.

Empirically, I'd say it's doing very well.

The world has more trade than ever, and fewer wars than ever.

If you're referring to WW1, lowering a risk and completely eliminating it are different things.

> It has, let’s say, not aged gracefully.

It's aged wonderfully. The Europeans proved its premise in spades between 1914 and 1945.

No, it won't.

Speaking as someone who is currently spending his days sourcing medical equipment for his medical center: the cheapest US-based face shield costs nearly 3x what the average face shield in China does (the most expensive US face shield is >10x). Even with shipping hiccoughs and the desire to buy American, I can't justify purchasing 1/3 the personal protective equipment.

In the current situation they probably don't have a lot of incentive to lower prices.

But the question is:

how much premium would you be willing to pay for a local supplier?

If the american company was "only" 50% more expensive, would it work out after the pandemic?

Probably not?

I mean, as a personal consumer, yes - I'd pay a premium on my own products to buy American. I do, in fact, do that when it's an option.

As an organizational representative, though, that's iffier. Healthcare reimbursement is pretty heavily regulated (most of the wild price fluctuation you see has to do with numbers used for public-facing negotiations, not the contracted rates we actually ever get paid.) The only way we get by is by minimizing costs; we can't really increase revenue effectively, except by increasing volume of services. As it is, operating margins in hospitals tend to run at about 2% - it's razor, razor thin. Upping expenses 50% on "critical" items (which for us is, you know, a huge proportion of our stuff) would put us out of business.

It's not something we can do unilaterally. Either it has be funded through an increase in funding earmarked for that, or something equivalent.

> China will have more incidents of pandemics for sure, because they haven't learned from the last one, and they won't learn from this one.

I disagree. They took many months to report SARS to WHO, yes. But this time, reporting to WHO took ~5 days. It was discovered by dr Zhang Jixian on Dec 26, then reported to WHO on Dec 31. Then it took them about another week to sequence the genome and share it with the world. Plus the whole lockdown shows that they obviously made plans beforehand. The difference is huge.

Take a look at this timeline by the American Medical Association: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130

We've now been able to trace the earliest case back to November, but nobody knew about it until late December, so that doesn't count as cover-up.

It wasn't good enough, that's true. And before human-to-human transmission was confirmed, they should have been a bit faster, though I would argue they couldn't have been much more faster than about a week or two.

Mistakes definitely have been made, and it still isn't good enough, but "they haven't learned and they won't learn" is quite simply not true, and is more based on prejudice than fact.

> Plus the whole lockdown shows that they obviously made plans beforehand.

And the hospitals. Not even China can just one day decide, out of the blue, to build two large-scale specialized hospitals in 10 days. Having that capability requires recognizing the need for it and preparing beforehand - which is another thing they've learned from the past pandemics.

> But this time, reporting to WHO took ~5 days. It was discovered by dr Zhang Jixian on Dec 26, then reported to WHO on Dec 31.

False. It took much longer than five days. The WHO was indeed notified on the 31st but the Chinese government organs knew about this long before. First CCTV report that I recall was around the 15th. First confirmed cases were early December. There’s even US intel reports dating back to November.

But when this started, the Chinese system did what the Chinese system always does: try to save face and pretend all is okay. I do not share any optimism that this trait will change especially given the crushing blows to press freedom in the last ten years.

We heard about it just before Xmas time in Singapore. Basically that there was another SARS outbreak in china. It was definitely known before the 26th.

Well doesn't the fact that they mention "SARS" confirm that they didn't know it was a new virus?

COVID-19 is not SARS. It's less lethal but far more contagious. SARS would not have been such a big issue because it doesn't spread as easily.

COVID-19 is SARS2. Not sure what your point is unless it's to be pedantic that Novel Coronavirus is not what is colloquially known as "SARS".

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/covid-19

The initial scientific name is similar, but it is still a different virus with very different characteristics. As I said: it is less lethal than SARS but MUCH more contagious, plus a much longer incubation time and possibility of asymptomatic spread. Sars cannot be spread asymptomatically. About the only things similar are that they are both coronaviruses, and the symptoms. I am not being pedantic at all, these characteristics are key.

Sars 2 is to Sars 1 as Mario 2 is to Mario 1. About the only thing similar is the characters.

How many times have we seen another variant of bird flu in the past 15 years? I lost count. Some of them even jumped to humans. But when that happened, we didn't immediately raise alarms of an upcoming pandemic: a virus jumping to humans does not always mean human to human transmission is possible.

I don't agree. SARS-1 and SARS-2 are both highly contagious and had similar effects on decimating hospital staff.

You can read the effect on Toronto hospitals in 2002 by SARS-1 to get an idea of the panic it caused, wiping out whole ICU teams. Just like SARS-2 (Covid-19.)

Wiping out ICU teams is a property of lethality, not so much contagiousness. Only 8000 people was infected by sars 1 and China didn’t even have lockdown at the time. The contagiousness and long incubation times are key this time. Otherwise you may as well compare it to Ebola.

Apparently a lady heard it appeared in September, somewhere not in China.

FYI: there was a powerful, contagious flu-like disease circulating already in SE Asia between Dec. 6 and Dec. 15.

If anybody in public healthcare seriously wants to know more, contact me and I'll narrow down the dates, symptoms and locations and you can verify if it was corona virus or a different illness.

Fascinating ... the dates Dec. 1, Dec. 6 and Dec. 16 are mentioned in this article, which almost match the flu dates I mentioned above:

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devas...

Based on those dates, it's possible Covid-19 was on Chinese airliners as early as Dec. 1 - 8. Wuhan has an international airport that connects to Shanghai (Pudong), which is a major international hub.

So that moves the onset possibly back into November.

Researchers should be looking at Chinese death certificates for the month of November if they're looking for patient zero.

(I've read about one unconfirmed US flu case in October that sounds like corona, but I'll look around for some more info.)

Not to mention there are direct flights from Wuhan to both LA and SFO (China Southern). Wuhan may not be very well known in the US, but it is absolutely a major city in China. I’m not sure what the best comparison would be, but maybe a St Louis or Denver of sorts.

Haven't the Chinese already traced a case back to November? That the earliest case is from November is not exactly news nowadays, is it?

Yes, Chinese interneters set the date to mid November when the number of cases exceeded 200, and somebody first put an official notice

Any source for your claims? What you're saying contradicts all the reporting, including from Caixin, which has seemed to have the inside scoop throughout this crisis.

The first patient was admitted to the hospital on 16 December 2019,[1] and the first lab result indicating a SARS-like coronavirus came back on 27 December 2019.[2]

> First confirmed cases were early December.

Those cases were not known about in early December. They were discovered after-the-fact, when people went over hospital records to try to find earlier, previously undetected cases. As I wrote above, nobody had any idea that there was a new coronavirus until 27 December, when the first lab results came in.

1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

2. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-02-29/in-depth-how-early-s...

3. The Caixin article is reprinted here: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-...

> First CCTV report that I recall was around the 15th.

Could you link to a source? I have not been able to find any sources that definitively point to something concrete (as opposed to merely rumors and heresay).

> There’s even US intel reports dating back to November.

Ah yes, the CIA reports from November. I find this highly suspicious. How did the CIA know about it that early? And if they did know about it that early, why did they not do anything about it, like preparing America for the coming onslaught?

And please forgive me but US reports about China are not exactly the most trustworthy given the current environment.

> But when this started, the Chinese system did what the Chinese system always does: try to save face and pretend all is okay.

Believe what you will. I believe otherwise (or at least, I believe in a more nuanced story than you do): there was indeed face-saving going on by city-level authorities, but once human-to-human transmission was confirmed, the central government stepped in and kicked the city-level authorities on their asses. Now, the city-level authorities have been fired, and I believe the central government will do something to discourage similar behavior in the future.

The Chinese government is not a monolith. See also https://twitter.com/dbey85/status/1246370465209188357?s=20

See my comments just below. There is a link with a timeline, and it's very likely this started in November.

The comment you replied to asked for a source, the fact you can't produce any despite all this bluster is revealing.

There was a spat btwn Sweden and France too. A Swedish company kept masks in a French warehouse and wanted to ship them home because they finally needed them. France blocked it till it eventually relented.

To explain: a Swedish company warehoused millions of masks in France. Two million of these masks (million each) were supposed to be sent to Spain and Italy. France had confiscated all of these masks. It took two weeks of pressure by Sweden (and other EU countries) for them to release the masks and for them to finally be sent to Spain and Italy.

People have friends, countries do not. The country that doesn't understand this sets up its own misery. Also no government that wants to remain in power is going to ship out goods that are already in short supply in their own country. Excess goods of course will continue to be traded for economic benefit.

What they should do is come up with a trade pact for countries outside China and increase production there. Sort of like a Pacific-wide partnership...

We have seen a lot of talk about a single point of failure but localizing the manufacturing isn't a pancaea by any means as they also shut down during pandemics. The only things immune are automated and unable to be contaminated.

Also technically it is better for income inequality in global terms if it converges to a global median. That is why so many hate it because they are the ones with their ox gored by reduced inequity and they don't even consider themselves that rich!

I recognize that is a glib and misleading truth in many ways given PPI differences mean that a salary to be locally comfortable in one locale could lead to homeless starvation in another, that inequality exists both locally and globally. It is more a note about the irony than any statement of morals.

> localizing the manufacturing isn't a pancaea by any means as they also shut down during pandemics

But you eliminate other failure modes related to the pandemic that don't involve the plant physically not operating due to worker sickness or curve-flattening measures. If Canada produces their own masks then the US can't take them.

In this pandemic, we aren't shutting down things that are deemed essential - and any manufacturing facilities used in pandemic response would, of course, also be essential.

Whereas the current state of affairs is that China just stops exporting masks, and there's nothing we can do about it.

I disagree that China has not learned from the last one:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2020/jan/23...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0771-1

Got a link detailing what happened between Canada and the US? My understanding of the 3M debacle is that they use a distributor model for their consumables, and essentially "wash their hands" of what their distributors do once they have product in hand - and in the 3M case, the PPE was just going to the highest bidder, regardless of national origin.

Not at all applicable in this case. Some federal authorities in the US attempted to halt some 3 million (or 500,000 depending on reports, it seems) purchased shipments destined for Canada from 3M.

It was only the intervention at the highest level of the Canadian government that stopped this.

It's worth pointing out that without Canadian nurses from Windsor who cross the border every day to work in Detroit hospitals, the healthcare system in Detroit wouldn't function.

Or that apparently the pulp used to make the 3M masks comes from softwood from British Columbia.

I'm sure Chrystia Freeland made these points and many others abundantly clear when she got on the phone with the Trump administration.

Which is why Canada keeps losing. Canada loses more than the U.S. does it they stop exporting pulpwood. The U.S. can replace Canadian forestry products easily. Canada can't find a new buyer so easily. Detroit makes up one fifth of one percent of the US population. Windsor nurses aren't going to set national policy for the United States. Chrystia Freeland keeps bargaining from positions of absurd weakness and gets the expected results. Not sure why any Canadian likes her but maybe they care more about the perception of eye poking than actual productive results for the Canadian public.

Having 1/10th the population of the United States, and correspondingly smaller economy, puts us in a weak position no matter what.

I never voted Liberal, never have, but honestly, Freeland is decent.

Trudeau's dad said it best, to Nixon, in 1969:

"Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt," said the late Pierre Trudeau.

The N95 masks are made out of plastic, not pulp.

I looked into the pulp claim, and it's true that pulp is used to make some types of lesser surgical masks. But there's no reason to think there is anything all that special about that pulp - it could be sourced from the US too at somewhat higher cost.

Or we could all just prepare for pandemics the way we’re supposed to. Otherwise moving manufacturing will be a band aid at best.

Trade barriers, price controls, stimulus, etc. -- remarkable how fast economic liberalism goes out the window in a crisis.

What I get from this is it's remarkable how inept the model established by 'economic liberalism', with its just-in-time delivery and 'globalized production to cheapest labour zone' is at delivering on people's real needs in time of crisis.

It's amazing how quickly the very proposition that we can get by without any state-level macroeconomic planning, -- and that the free market organically produces superior results -- is shown to be an ideological fantasy the moment s*hit hits the fan, with bare shelves and missing medical equipment and millions set to be without health insurance in the US...

My opinion: States that retain some capacity of a planned economy will do better in scenarios like this. And with climate change becoming more serious, there will be more of these kinds of crisis.

> What I get from this is it's remarkable how inept the model established by 'economic liberalism', with its just-in-time delivery and 'globalized production to cheapest labour zone' is at delivering on people's real needs in time of crisis.

Indeed. The PPE/toilet paper/tasting kit/flour shortages are becoming farcical at this point. It feels like the Soviet Union, where wonderful pronouncements about the plenitude of _______ are made, but then you discover otherwise at the grocery, or the doctor.

Of course, in 2020, the solution to these problems is rationing.

It's almost as if rationing is the only way to solve these kinds of shortages. But since the rationing is per-shopping visit, people just hoard by hitting up multiple stores in one shopping trip...

> with bare shelves

yes, this is a mystery. Free market should have fixed that. Even if the last roll of toilet paper would cost $1000000 the shelf should not be empty. Is the price regulated in some way?

> The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic.

I think the Canadians worked that out a few years ago when the Trump administration declared Canadian steel a security threat to the United States so they could impose trade restrictions in contravention of our treaty obligations.

The last time Canada had a military backstop against the US was when the British empire was still around, back in the 1920s when stuff like War Plan Red and Defence Scheme No. 1 was floating around about how a US-Canada/British war would play out. After WW2 and the collapse of the British empire, Canada had no military last resort against the US. 100 years is a hell of a long time to develop Stockholm syndrome.

To be fair, before WW2 Canada was a protectorate of Britain as well. Such is the fate of smaller players on the world stage.

Absolutely.

For example, companies in New Zealand are pursuing a coronavirus vaccine. Do you think they really doubt the willingness of Moderna [0] (Boston based biotech company) to sell them the vaccine if it is successful? I'd be willing to bet that no, the primary concern is how long they would have to wait to buy it.

[0] Arbitrary choice, replace with anyone who gets a vaccine past trials

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