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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

> but I do think the needed response to fully control the spread of a virus creates perverse incentives for governments. Especially governments that would like to disrupt other countries which have cultures that don't like to be told what to do by their own government.

China, Russia and every other country has been given a wonderful blueprint for absolutely disrupting the US and really entire western order. The fact nobody seems to be talking about the national security implications of this virus and what our rivals or enemies have learned is frightening.

Can you imagine how fucked things would get if another virus struck the US right after we deal with Covid?

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> China, Russia and every other country has been given a wonderful blueprint for absolutely disrupting the US and really entire western order.

Probably not. Notice something interesting about COVID - countries that were scared of SARS did fine, countries that weren't scared of SARS suffered.

If you chart out the response to COVID in the West it is probably something like disease growing exponentially, response growing linearly. The mobilisation of resources over the last 11 months has been staggering. If another virus appeared now it would get demolished because everyone is already on high alert. The regulatory paths for emergency tests would be exercised recently, and it seems likely that the stupid issue where the US government basically banned private testing in the first month of the response is resolved.

If it is contained early, COVID is experienced quite differently to if it is allowed to become endemic. Really, if we replayed this pandemic but people understood the risk of air travel w.r.t. disease it would go completely differently. It'll be decades before people relax again.

What I've learned is the game theory of this. Isolating early just means you are lonely longer, because many will defect and air travel and live it up, until the flights stop going.

If the government doesn't take decisive action early, then I will chose camp defector rather than camp sucker.

I don’t see it. What is the blueprint? Release a deadly virus? I think we have always known how bad that would be and there are international laws against it.

the international laws can't contain a virus outbreak, people still get murdered by guns when there's laws against using guns, the scale of the damage to economy and security to enemy nation has made this too lucrative to pass for any strategist

What I’m trying to say is that this isn’t a new strategy people have not considered before. Biological warfare is a well known term.

Smart governments would be using this pandemic as a natural experiment on their biowarfare preparations.

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