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Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean this in a vindictive way, truly I don't, but when we look back at 2020, I hope that we don't let governments off easily for messing up as badly as they did.

This was avoidable. Tens of thousands of deaths were avoidable. Multiple countries totally avoided catastrophe, and the U.S. did not.

We cannot just throw up our hands and say "oh well, we'll get 'em next time." The people responsible for the complete and utter fucking-up of millions of peoples' lives need to be held to the truth: that they could have stopped this.

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...if only all the other countries had had the foresight to be a small island before the coronavirus pandemic hit...

1) Multiple small islands, thanks, that together approach the size of Great Britain. 2) A small island nation with large amounts of of foreign tourists

You make it sound we live on Pitcairn Island, which is rather overly simplistic.

IMO, it was the timing of our lockdown - we went into lockdown before community transmission was established, which kept it limited to clusters.

(I'm Australian, and very much pro-NZ except for when a cricket match is being played).

NZ has 7.3% of UK's population.

Auckland has about 1/4 the population density of London's.

NZ's airports have have approx 7% the number of annual passenger movements as UK, and that's before you count the significant numbers of travellers who enter the UK by road or rail.

When the virus started to spread internationally, NZ and Australia were in summer and early autumn, whereas London in recent months has had the same cool winter/early spring conditions that Wuhan, Milan, Madrid, Korea and northern US have had when their outbreaks were most severe.

I agree NZ and Australia have done well to contain our outbreaks.

But we've been aided by infinitely more favourable conditions than the UK and US.

Well, at least you didn't have an open border with one of the latest countries to lock down in Europe, like we did in Ireland.

Unfortunately, we can't close the border with Northern Ireland for political reasons, so it looks like the island of Ireland won't be able to eliminate Covid-19.

To be fair, we should have stopped inbound/outbound travel much earlier (like NZ did) but I suspect concerns around EU law may have driven that.

What’s the population of NZ compared to GB?

Our geography definitely helps, but it would still have been possible for the govt to screw up the approach.

I would add that the populace could've screwed up our approach.

This is only working (it's absolutely not a done deal) because both the government and people of New Zealand are handling it well.

The US government reacted pretty quickly. They closed travel from China on January 31st. When the US had just 7 known cases. That was like a week (or a day?) after World Health Organization wrote on their website that travel shouldn't be banned because of this virus.

This is absurd. The US did exactly one of the many things that were required, and then did nothing else for a full month. Other countries did more of what was required early and defeated the virus.

This is exactly the sentiment of the parent comment. How can we let the US leadership off the hook by just shrugging and saying, hey, they did slightly more than absolutely nothing. This was avoidable and the US did not take the well-understood public health measures required to avoid it.

Name one, just one country comparable to the US in population and the mobility of their population that did well. Once the virus got in, and remained undetected for a few weeks, it's too late to trace it like they did in South Korea (a tiny country with a very homogeneous population).

It's easy to judge it in hindsight, but think of it from US or most EU countries' governments perspective. You got barely any infections locally. The number of infections in China at the end of January was under 10K (a country with the population of over a billion). China just started their quarantine a week ago (23rd of Jan). Is it reasonable to quarantine the whole country at this point? I don't think so. Italy waited for a whole month to start theirs.

What is a reasonable set of actions in this scenario, in your opinion?

One country? Brazil. 200 million people. We started lockdowns very early when there were very few cases. The usually very busy streets outside my apartment have been mostly empty for well over two months now. I've lost track. But not of the fact that we have a fraction of the deaths that the US has had. No thanks to the president here, but thankfully the vast majority of people here are ignoring him and following the advice of state and city leaders.

Brazil didn't do well at all. Try again.

> remained undetected for a few weeks

This is precisely the problem.

Why, when the virus had circulating for weeks, did we only have 7 confirmed cases? Because the CDC massively messed up the testing regime on several levels: only testing people with travel or links to travel, not having nearly enough tests due to major slip-ups in development, etc.

Why was the CDC such a disaster this time? We don’t really know yet, but there was clearly a failure of leadership there. I don’t know whether Trump is to blame or not, but the Republican denigration of government as ineffective appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

IMO the key issue that caused it to spread so much in the US is there weren't restrictions on mobility. If borders were closed between states, and stricter lockdowns were put in place in hot spots, it could have been controlled.

A lot of smaller European countries are starting to get to the same point as NZ because that's exactly what they did - they restricted travel between borders and required any citizens returning home to self-quarantine. In a lot of places people regularly travel across borders for work, shopping, leisure etc, so Europe as a whole can be compared to the US in this matter. In my country they did this before even the first death, and two months later life is now starting to return to normal.

Along the same lines, it's not surprising that larger countries like Italy, Spain, France and the UK have a worse outbreak, as they put few restrictions on travel domestically and what they did was too late.

The US reaction has been abysmal to the extreme. The response looks more like a satire of epidemiology in a farce movie.

The level of testing is still not where it needs to be and PPE is still in short supply. The ban on China only applied to Chinese nationals. Most of the cases on the east coast had their origin in Europe.

The federal response has been keystone cops level of chaotic with mixed messaging, deflection, downplaying alternately at every turn. The re-opening of states shows every indication of going exactly as well, and a lot of it appears to be driven by political pressure rather than science.

I liked the bit where the President banned flights from Europe, but not the UK - the response has not really been coordinated or coherent.

And they also went earlier and harder than the US... Which the US could have also done, but chose not to.

I am not sure why you are getting so much heat for this. There are several countries, including some with land borders, that have successfully reduced new cases to a trickle. There's ample evidence that severe restrictions can basically eliminate Covid-19 spread.

> This was avoidable. Tens of thousands of deaths were avoidable.

This is not really accurate. Also, looking at NZ is misleading -- they're a waterlocked island with fairly restrictive travel even prior to COVID-19. It would have been very difficult to contain something as contagious as COVID-19 even with better leadership from the WHO, US, China, Trump, Obama (insert whomever you blame the most). In fact, there may be some evidence that it was spreading in France as early as December 2019.

New Zealand had over 250,000 foreign visitors(excluding Oceania) in Jan 2020, and over 2.1 million in the Year ending December. How does this compare with the countries that didn't avoid mass deaths?

Here is a list of places visitor came from:

Asia China, People's Republic of Hong Kong (SAR) Indonesia India Japan Korea, Republic of Malaysia Philippines Singapore Thailand Taiwan Viet Nam Europe Austria Belgium Switzerland Germany Denmark Spain France United Kingdom Ireland Italy Netherlands Russia Sweden Americas Argentina Brazil Canada Chile United States of America Africa and the Middle East United Arab Emirates Israel South Africa

I see this said a lot "New Zealand is a small island nation far from the world, so what works there is not applicable to other places" I never see anyone giving any evidence to this claim that there was not much travel to New Zealand. As far as I can see there was a lot of international visitors. https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/international...

https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/?filters=Tour...

Multiple islands, two of them are pretty big even. And what do you mean by restrictive travel? We were a prominent tourist destination.

Being a tourist destination and having tight travel restrictions are not mutually exclusive by any stretch. Relative to any other western country I New Zealand has very strict customs (Only the US could compete and our our border screening is pretty pathetic when you start to look at it). Most of New Zealand's restrictions center around bio-controls/plant inspection, but consequently the country maintains a pretty comprehensive screening process. Also being surrounded by 1000 miles of Ocean means that it is pretty easy to monitor the three international airports in the country. (Relative to say the Netherlands which has trains arriving in from 5 different countries in the same custom's union every day).

> Three international airports

5 :) 3 of them are limited in destinations, only Christchurch and Auckland go direct to places other than Australia or the Pacific islands (Wellington Airport's runway isn't long enough for the bigger planes), but a lot of people coming here will fly via Aussie anyway.

But I agree, we're definitely better placed in that regard, except we initially relied on self-isolation and well, that didn't work very well for us.

If we'd actually implemented stringent testing at the airports, or mandatory and enforced quarantine (not that we had the facilities to do so), then we possibly could have avoided the lockdowns altogether.

We closed the borders to all but citizens and permanent residents when we realised a fair proportion of tourists were ignoring the self-isolation requirements. One helicopter pilot at Franz Josef Glacier flew his passengers to the Police when they told him they'd just arrived in the country.

Australia, Taiwan, and South Korea pulled off similar stunts. It's a repeatable success.

Not only did NZ get a lot of tourists, we also had a large diaspora who ran for home when the pandemic hit. In fact it's mostly the latter who imported COVID19 into NZ.

I'm not sure why you're singling out the US. The overwhelming majority of the countries didn't avoid it. And the ones that did, got lucky, either due to the low population density, or due to the travel patterns.

For the US to avoid it, they would have to shut down all travel at the beginning of January, when it was a small local infection. Once the infected Chinese people traveled to the US and Europe, it was game over. The numbers were small at first and mostly unknown, but that particular virus spreads so fast, within a month it became a problem, and within another month it became a huge problem.

To avoid it in Europe and the US, the countries would have to severely overreact based on some (seemingly) small stats. Do you really want to do mass-testing every time there's a random outbreak in some other part of the world? Do you want to manufacture tens of millions of new tests because a few thousand got infected in Timbuktu? Is that a realistic approach?

What we really need to concentrate on is the solution, which is biotech. We need to find an efficient way to stop viruses.

New Zealand didn't "avoid it" either. We closed down our border, went in to physical isolation for a long enough period to get things under control, and implemented both a testing regime and contact tracing. None of these have been cheap or easy.

Shutting down travel from China is exactly what the US should have done in January, as well as shutting down travel from anywhere that has a significant outbreak. Had we done that, we might have been able to contain the disease, or, at least limited the damage significantly. But, Trump was too busy painting it as a Democratic hoax to be bothered to do anything.

Trump did shut down travel from China in January. He did it before many other countries.

That was not the only thing he shut down. The pandemic task force in 2018 for that matter.

Restrictions did not take effect until Feb 2.

No. You don't understand. By the end of January the disease already spread to the US. It was in multiple random places. We knew of 7 cases, but by now we know there were tons more asymptomatic and barely symptomatic.

And stop spreading fake news, Trump has never claimed the virus was a democratic hoax. He said the politicization of it was. Why would he close travel from China if he thought it was a hoax? You don't even think your fake news through.

Why would he have spent the month of February doing nothing except holding rallies and golfing if he didn't think it was a hoax?

You know that not everyone here is an idiot and can understand what Trump said right. Don't interpret Trump's words for us.

The disease was known to have pandemic potential for weeks before Trump did anything. He could have shut down travel in the beginning of January. But, he was too busy politicizing things himself, by calling Democratic criticism of his so called "response" a hoax. So, he waited until literally the last day of January to do anything. That's not fake news. That's reality.

Here are his actual words:

> Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.

> One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.

The antecedent of "this" is "the virus." This is what he said, buddy. Why don't you think that through while the death toll keeps going up?

Here's a chart that pretty clearly shows how well the US is doing in comparison to the rest of the world: https://twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1256769252369072134

Live version of essentially the same chart here: https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries

The US could have a) shut borders generally to every country reporting COVID19 outbreaks, not just to China b) had an early, coordinated nationwide hard lockdown for a few weeks at least to stop the spread and buy time to identify outbreaks so they could be snuffed out c) not ignored the CDC's testing failures d) gone big early to pay/coerce companies to massively scale up production of tests/PPE/ventilators (the latter not needed as it turns out, but we didn't know that).

Not very different from what NZ did. Probably would have worked, but even if not, at least it should have been tried.

Undetected spread and even quite large outbreaks can be contained and eliminated. NZ did it. Other countries did it. Trump didn't even try.

>This was avoidable. Tens of thousands of deaths were avoidable. Multiple countries totally avoided catastrophe, and the U.S. did not.

Wait until 2022 and the economic fallout before you praise anyone too highly.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52373888

30 million people dead from hunger so we could keep a bunch of old rich people alive for another few years.

Why would they?

Look at gun violence. That’s someone that’s entirely of the US’ failing, but at levels that matter no one cares that thousands die because of inept government.

I doubt we'll see anyone held accountable. In most countries there were multiple failures that will let everyone successfully deflect the blame, often those failures were years ago and the people responsible are no longer around. From Trumps conspiratorial tweets, the CDC screwing up testing and being so insular, multiple world leaders urging everyone to go out and enjoy themselves a week before the lock downs started, universities encouraging their cash cows to avoid the China travel ban, politicians saying the travel ban was racist, the failure to ban travel from countries not already on the shit list, Top docs saying kids can't spread the virus, top docs saying face masks do nothing, outright denialism and conpiracies from the media, the WHO being cuckolded by the CCP. The list goes on.

So many were too worried about the economy and stock market to act but I'm convinced New Zealand's "go hard go early" approach will result in the best possible economic outcome.

Trump and his government is already rewriting the narrative by peddling multiple inter-working conspiracies about covid-19 to deflect attention:

* If only China had provided the world with accurate data about covid-19 the US wouldn't be in this mess.

* Covid-19 was developed by the Wuhan research lab.

* China developed covid-19 as a weapon against the US.

* China is responsible for the tens of thousands of deaths in the US.

> Covid-19 was developed by the Wuhan research lab.

“Developed by” and “released from” are two different things. It’s a fact that the lab was studying bat coronaviruses. It isn’t a huge stretch that improper procedures could have led to one of those viruses getting loose. That’s a subtle, but important nuance. If an outbreak of polio happened a few miles from the CDC in Atlanta, wouldn’t it be fair to suspect that the virus could have escaped from the CDC? It’s also a strange coincidence as to how many deadly pathogens have come from China in the last 20 years. When was the last time some significant, world altering virus originated in Belgium? China has several. And all relatively similar.

It might just be a coincidence, but in my years as an NBC officer in the US Army, I learned that coincidences, especially in these matters, is pretty rare.

Was it intentional? There is no evidence to suggest it was. Was it negligent? Possibly. Is China benefiting strategically? Definitely. Draw your own conclusions, but I would trust even Trump more than I would trust anything coming out of China — and that’s saying a lot. China is not much different philosophically than North Korea. China still teaches in their schools that the Korean War was started by a US invasion. I lived in China for many years; amazing people, extremely hostile government. Imagine living in a place where your phones are tapped and your internet activity is fed to the local office of the Ministry of State Security where you can be subject to questioning over anything even slightly “disruptive.” I was questioned once because I had accessed a video (over VPN!) of the Tiananmen Square event. The principle of the school I was at called me to his office to ask me “to not do that again please.”

There is nothing in China’s character that would suggest they should be trusted over anything. They lie about air quality readings for f-ks sake.

Let’s defund the WHO then. They were the ones promoting China’s straight up lies. Taiwan warned the WHO of human-to-human transmission in December. The WHO ignored it. They maintained that fiction for weeks. Who is the director of the WHO? The former foreign minister of Ethiopia. Who invested billions in projects in Ethiopia during his reign? China. To think that the foreign minister didn’t get personally enriched by the Chinese is beyond naïve. Anyone not think that there was a lot of “benefit of the doubt” happening between the WHO and China? Even when Trump restricted travel from China, the WHO was squawking about how that wasn’t necessary. Then a week later, every other country did it as well. Even the ACLU, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden were calling the travel restrictions “racist.” The US response was politicized from the beginning because “get Trump” was more important than the actual thing. Feb 24, Pelosi, live from San Francisco Chinatown was encouraging people to go visit the local restaurants. De Blasio in New York was telling people to go to shows in New York. What was House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff doing in January? Using his committee to investigate impeachment rather than staying on top of the intelligence that his committee had access to. It’s literally his job to monitor intelligence developments that have a material impact on the US. CNN and all the other mainstream news outlets were calling this no worse than a flu in January and even into February. But let’s go ahead and assign blame to Trump for all of it. Literally every single action he took was met with vitriol and opposition. It didn’t matter what he did. If he called for a complete lockdown, Democrats would blame him for economic damage. If he didn’t, then he gets blamed for the deaths.

It’s my opinion that the seriousness of this whole affair will become forgotten by he day after the election. Some pretty evil people that would play politics with the lives and livelihood of Americans in an elaborate game of “get Trump.”

This whole affair has revealed some particularly vicious political evil.

I imagine something similar was said after the 2008 financial meltdown, and the Iraq War, and the savings and loan crisis, and so on.

You must be new here...

>We cannot just throw up our hands and say "oh well, we'll get 'em next time."

But we will

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