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Comment by ajkdhcb2 | Hacker News Reader

I've disagreed with the general global response at essentially every step. I think any reasonable person would have done better, and get the feeling that there are likely ulterior motives and disgraceful politicised actions to explain how bad the response was.

In particular, in the beginning there were very clear indications given by Taiwan and China that there was a dangerous virus spreading among the people. Yet sick Chinese people were free to spread over the world for months with no response except down-playing it. They practiced the opposite of the precautionary principle and horrendous risk management.

When politicians knowingly lie to everyone's faces and take harmful actions against the people, pushing toward a more authoritarian society at every opportunity, how can you have any trust and not wonder about conspiracies?

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> Yet sick Chinese people were free to spread over the world for months with no response except down-playing it. They practiced the opposite of the precautionary principle and horrendous risk management.

At what point did the spread in the US stop being driven by sick Chinese people? I don't know the answer, but my impression was pretty darn early - far before politicians were taking the virus seriously as a policy issue. Sometime like early February or even late January.

> At what point did the spread in the US stop being driven by sick Chinese people?

After the first initial cases (that could be tracked directly to travel from China; e.g. that one guy in Snohomish county in the Seattle area), it was already spreading on its own by then.

Yeah if that's the case, the GP seems dumb.

> Yet sick Chinese people were free to spread over the world for months with no response except down-playing it.

> When politicians knowingly lie to everyone's faces and take harmful actions against the people, pushing toward a more authoritarian society at every opportunity, how can you have any trust and not wonder about conspiracies?

Wouldn't pushing toward a more authoritarian society been not allowing sick Chinese people to travel?

Do you think it would have been OK to implement restrictions at the start of the pandemic, just not now?

Doing health checks and restricting foreign nationals arriving from specific high risk areas is not extreme at all, that has been done plenty of times. I don't think it is comparable at all to the unprecedented restrictions that become normal in the last 1-2 years.

>Do you think it would have been OK to implement restrictions at the start of the pandemic, just not now?

Yes. In the beginning nobody knew how dangerous the virus was, so risk management should have been much more strict. It could have been a virus orders of magnitude worse than covid.

> In the beginning nobody knew how dangerous the virus was, so risk management should have been much more strict.

That won't work. Right now we have a pretty good idea of how dangerous the virus is, and plenty of US citizens don't want to participate the risk management of wearing a mask or even vaccinating. Hell many governors are outright forbidding vaccine mandates. Those same people aren't going to go along with strict risk management when the risk is unknown.

The same people I knew who were buying canned food and masks in the beginning of 2020 while the governments and health organisations said it was nothing are now the "antivaxxers". Humans are rightfully afraid of the unknown. I fit into this group

However, the next pandemic could be very different now that covid has been used as a political tool and people think of such a relatively mild illness when they think of 'pandemic'.

I still think the pandemic should be managed. I agree the world could've done better at the start, but I don't think that nothing should be done now. Just my opinion.

My understanding is that US outbreaks weren’t even usually sourced by Chinese travelers. Wasn’t the early NY outbreak actually found to have been through Europe? And that was pretty early. I doubt any restrictions from only certain countries would’ve slowed anything down. We would’ve had to do shit Australia did, total closed borders even to our own citizens abroad…

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