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Comment by mike_h | Hacker News Reader

Covid is turning out to be a disease of culture. The same virus hit the East and the West. The East got through it, the West is on its knees.

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I’d call it a disease of experience, first and foremost.

The US missed the worst of SARS-Cov1 and MERS, which were catastrophic in some parts of the world. East-Asian Democratic countries had public debates about what are and are not reasonable public health measures. They passed enabling laws, built public health infrastructure, and established cutting edge novel virus surveillance programs.

The US did not. We were creating homeland security departments and starting stupid trillion dollar wars.

How do you explain certain states and cities doing so much better, even within the US? And other western countries, such as NZ, Canada, and Germany really beating the US in every metric possible? Experience is not the key here. Quality of leadership is

Is Germany really beating anything now? They sure did before but things have changed over here, the whole Europe is affected though.

Do you see anything happening in the US public sphere to make you particularly hopeful about how we’ll handle the next one? These people are literally dying on the hill of “covid is a hoax”. Half of the country claims they won’t take a vaccine, and the leadership of half of the country has learned they can gain power by downplaying covid.

I expect this will go like Watergate—-it’ll be unclear and confusing for the people who lived through it, but clearer to subsequent generations with the aid of historical perspective.

I’m not hopeful at all about the US (RE: SARS-Cov2 or otherwise). I think we should have pulled the plug on this version of the Republic when we gave up on reconstruction after Civil War I.

The East already had a few diseases like this in the past. I wonder whether their reaction for the first time was much better.

I saw some people say there were two different strains. One that went East and one that went West. I don't know how accurate that is, but it may not be identical.

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