Comment by djcapelis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djcapelis | Hacker News Reader

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> But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared

This is silly. There are clear differences in response. Here’s just one example:

21 Jan - The city department of public health activates its operations center to prepare for a potential outbreak. 28 Jan - The city activates its emergency operations center. 25 Feb - The city formally declares a state of emergency to prepare for an upcoming outbreak. 5 Mar - The city confirms its first case of COVID-19. 17 Mar - Shelter in place order implemented.

This was a great timeline. And it comes from the local jurisdiction so many here love to hate: San Francisco.

There are absolutely lessons we should be drawing from this pandemic. And one of them is that the political movements who want to drown government in a bathtub are putting your own lives and those of every vulnerable person you know because of that ideology. And those that want functional government aren’t.

I’m all for more radical solutions too. But if you aren’t going to learn the lessons of the present you’re in a shockingly bad place to tell anyone what’s right for the future.

Also, we need to tone down the white supremacy and learn some lessons from the Asian governments who did well here too. My search space for good ideas isn’t confined to “western governments” and neither should that confine anyone else’s.

NYC and SF have roughly similar sized city budgets when measured on a per capita basis and they had _wildly_ different responses to Coronavirus. Whatever it was that causes such different responses, I don't think it was "political movements who want to drown government in a bathtub."

Yeah, it's fair to point out that both New York and San Francisco are thoroughly Democratic in their politics, and yet responded very differently to the crisis.

He could be referring to Trump’s disbanding of the pandemic protection team within CDC two years back

The first official case was in March. The actual first case was at the beginning of January. The shelter in place order means the city failed to anticipate and acted when it was too late. Like the rest of the Western world.

> The actual first case was at the beginning of January.

Receipts please.

You are claiming that the timeline of SF matched other countries where deaths started much earlier and went much higher. Are you really making the claim that our hospitals were overlooking a couple hundred people drowning in their own lungs and unable to breath during the month of February?

Because that would basically have to have been true if we had community spread in early January.

> The shelter in place order means the city failed to anticipate and acted when it was too late. Like the rest of the Western world.

Your assumption is that the death rate being substantially lower in SF and California is luck and not preparation?

That stance doesn’t seem supported by the evidence.

It’s only logical. There are typically 90 weekly roundtrip flights operating between SFO and China or Hong Kong. But somehow no one was infected for two months? Lol.

What I’m saying is that if the West acted like Taiwan there would be no lockdowns. They acted, they were prepared. Western world was caught with its pants down, including San Francisco.

https://sfist.com/2020/04/10/some-scientists-suggest-undetec...

Sure. Let’s learn lessons from Taiwan too that sounds great to me.

(Taiwan activated its health department epidemic operations center on January 20th. SF activated January 21st. If SF had been able to use state and federal powers, we probably would have had a much better shot at avoiding shelter in place.)

No. San Francisco was the first to act, and put pressure on the rest of the Bay Area to follow, and subsequently California. If SF didn't act first, who knows how long it would have taken for other politicians to have the "courage" to put in such draconian, but effective, measures. As far as I'm concerned, London Breed saved tens of thousands of lives in the Bay Area alone, and I hate her politics.

Actually a lot of large tech companies acted earlier and had already implemented work from home orders by the time the city acted.

The time to act was in January. It’s good that they acted first but it was still too late.

They did act in January.

SF’s emergency operations center was active and running. The CDC was still making it illegal for anyone to test outside some unreliable and faulty test kits.

The fact that our federal government was obstructing anyone’s ability to build up a testing apparatus is very much the responsibility of the incompetent management of this crisis by the federal government.

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