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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

All pretty much preventable if the government has done its job correctly.

I'm not sure what we could have expected after 40+ years of anti-government policies and rhetoric in the name of "freedom".

We had a bi-partisan program set in place to deal with this event -- we were technically prepared. Note the use of past tense.

Which country has 0 COVID deaths ? :o)

Today? Quite a few, but not the US.

Vietnam has 35 in a country of 90 million people.

Wow, that's amazing. How is that possible?

Sane leadership, people who listen to facts, preparation, contact tracing.

Could it be that they have one (if not the best) obesity rate in the world?

I’m suspicious that this isn’t just countries with order of magnitude healthier populations (although maybe they have malnourishment the US doesn’t have).

The USA and Vietnam have almost the same life-expectancy stats. I don't think one can say the difference in health is "an order of magnitude".

Obesity in Vietnam is 1%...lowest in the world. Versus US with ~42%.

We know the seriousness of obesity wrt covid.

Seems like this relationship would be very easy to discover in the worldwide statistics.

If this was the decisive factor, you'd expect Belgium, Italy and France to have low rates, with Germany, the UK, and most of Eastern Europe having high rates.

This turns out not to be the case.

Maybe not - but I'd guess that some combination of lack of chronic disease like obesity/diabetes on top of mask usage helped a lot.

If the lack of chronic disease leads to less severe covid, you'd expect the nosocomial spread factor of the pandemic is lower.

They throw anyone who had any contact with someone who had covid in quarantine camps. Basically, the power of being an authoritarian government where people have no rights.

Probably also a fair bit of luck. Those tactics don’t scale. So they only work when you catch it early. The wrong travels visit a conference and it’s impossible to keep up.

There is some speculation Asian counties had some level of immunity from past epidemics, but it’s only a hypothesis at this point.

> pretty much preventable

These countries haven’t reported any COVID-19 deaths yet: Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, North Korea, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

Mostly tiny islands in the Pacific.

The key thing is we (as in the government and it's people) could have handled this crisis differently.

There's no good reason for the USA to have had a higher per capita death count than South Korea, Germany or other well resourced nation that is fully capable of dealing with large-scale crisis.

This was a profound failure of leadership when it was needed the most.

In the future, students in high school history classes will watch with their jaws hung open at clips of the president of the USA in 2020 free-associating doing and his insipid "air-accordion" gestures during the daily briefings at the peak of the crisis.

> There's no good reason for the USA to have had a higher per capita death count than South Korea

There are some reasons which probably explain part of the gap:

* South Korea and Germany are both smaller and more homogeneous, making them easier to govern

* South Korea has a lot of recent experience responding to respiratory epidemics

Moreover, while I would like to see the US at the bottom of a chart of deaths per capita, the US is in the same cohort as many western European countries including Sweden, the UK, Spain, and Italy.

There's still plenty to criticize, but the media are pretty deliberately choosing metrics that are designed to exaggerate the US's handling of the crisis, specifically by ignoring per-capita death rates. I'm sure they're just doing this to get Trump out of office at all costs (ends justify the means), but they risk playing right into Trump's hand (and in any case, they certainly contribute to a broader atmosphere of fake news and partisanship).

> ...the media are pretty deliberately choosing metrics that are designed to exaggerate the US's handling of the crisis...

"The media" would have had far less grist if Trump hadn't been astonishingly incoherent and outright lying much of the time. I think it's not a coincidence that a good number of nations with delusional tin-pot autocratic wannabee's have been hit very hard by covid-19.

> "The media" would have had far less grist if Trump hadn't been astonishingly incoherent and outright lying much of the time

See, that's exactly the thing. Trump is absolutely a liar and incompetent and lots of other things, but it doesn't follow that the media has to lie to exaggerate these attributes. If the media contented itself to report the facts, they would expose Trump's lies and incompetence, the would preserve their own credibility, and they would reduce the overall volume of disinformation, partisanship, and other kinds of toxicity. Instead they play into his hand, presumably because there's a market for that kind of grifting.

What were they supposed to do differently?

Distribute masks to everyone’s door, not send mixed signals - being charitable here - about the seriousness of the virus when they had intelligence briefings about it in January, not turned mask-wearing into a political thing, not contradict their own doctors and scientists, not water down the stimulus meant to make staying home and closed affordable for people, and on, and on, ...

That's A Bingo!

The politicization of masks was an interesting thing, at least in my bubble. Initially when the CDC and the WHO were telling people not to wear masks, my very left-leaning friends and acquaintances were anti-mask and my right-leaning friends were very pro-mask. But once the CDC and WHO came around that (obviously) masks were effective, the positions nearly reversed (my right leaning friends didn't become anti mask per se, but they became very sympathetic toward those on the right who were anti-mask).

Every partisan affair is a tragedy, but this one felt particularly sad. The right had an opportunity to be correct and vindicated and they spurned it. The left initially took the anti-science position (I'm assuming there's no scientific defense for "in the absence of knowledge about a respiratory virus, we should default to masklessness"--and to be clear, none of my left-wing friends were arguing that we should forego masks to save them for healthcare workers), but only came around to masks when it became politically convenient (which is marginally better than the other way around).

Anyway, here's to hoping we can overcome COVID and partisanship in short order.

You do realize doctors, the WHO and the CDC were advising against masks originally? The same "problem" of not recommending masks from the beginning happened in a lot of other countries.

I do think it was pitiful how masks were turned into a politician device, but this was the doing of both parties. Not just the "government".

As for taking the virus seriously, a travel ban with China was put in place fairly early and was criticized as being "racist".

You do realize that the downplaying of masks was because we didn't have enough for medical staff and they didn't want to cause a run on that and leave our frontline responders unprotected?

And that it was an acknowledged mistake done under duress for the above?

https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...

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