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Comment by mjayhn | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not too happy with the govt in my country either, but I realize 90% of my situation would have been the same under most possible govts.

We are literally in the polar opposite government than we were from 2008-2016.

I don't think we'd be at 100k dead today if our government was different and responded properly. Is this what we're debating? Why did Hong Kong only have 4 deaths the last I looked a few days ago? The government and societal response?

Maybe we're miscommunicating. Yeah, 90% of my life is the same but we all have friends and family affected by some part of it (healthcare or unemployment typically). The most mutual thing right now is our combined stress (except for the people partying at the beach).

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Sorry to read that, mate. FWIW I don't think your government had a course of action that would have made a lot of difference. It caught everybody on the planet off guard and exhausted already-provisioned healthcare resources pretty fast.

When did you quarantine? Most States have only been closed for a month and now they're opening. This "didn't catch us offguard" it is more like "our leader didn't tell us how bad it was for 3 months while the rest of the world shut down so most of our businesses didn't close and it's worse than it should be". That's the government. It's coming from the top. Companies weren't going to close offices until govs/Pres told them to do so, they had NO idea what to do.

Most of our Republican Govs will do whatever Trump tells them. That is the problem.

I just moved out of a red state that acts like this is nothing to blue state that is almost completely shut down until next week and has had FAR FAR fewer cases.

So yeah, I think government matters now.

> I don't think your government had a course of action that would have made a lot of difference.

The obvious counter-argument to this are China and India. Significantly larger populations, living in far greater densities, possessing fewer healthcare resources, yet far fewer overall deaths. Even if China had 10x the deaths they're reporting (which would be hard to cover up, but you never know), it's still lower than the US. Their lockdown wasn't for as long. Schools in Wuhan reopened this month.

> It caught everybody on the planet off guard.

It caught China, and maybe Italy and Iran off guard. Surely after learning that a Chinese province of 20 million people had been put on house arrest, the rest of the planet should have cottoned on.

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