Comment by LurkingPenguin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LurkingPenguin | Hacker News Reader

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Certainly, it was inevitable that the pandemic would hit the US. But after reading the articles I linked to, I think it's hard to argue reasonably that the CDC wasn't at a minimum incompetent if not negligent in its handling of the situation, especially early on.

The US literally imported the virus via evacuation flights, and then the CDC made the decision not to consider asymptomatic infection and spread. Not only would this have significantly reduced the risk of people from those evacuations potentially seeding the country with virus, it would have allowed the CDC to issue accurate preventative guidance to Americans.

Then the CDC pushed out test kits that it knew were faulty. I mean, come on! Is this the best America could have done?

Meanwhile, I was living in a country (Taiwan) that knew something was up in January. At the very beginning of the month, health officials started screening passengers with a travel history to Wuhan. There was a lot talk about what was happening, so people here started masking voluntarily and the government officially banned the export of surgical and N95 masks on January 24 to ensure adequate supply for the country. My family and friends in the US had medical masks and N95s because I told them to stock up in January.

Meanwhile in America, Fauci was telling Americans "there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask" and the Surgeon General was actually telling Americans masks might increase their risk of contracting the virus...in early March!

Yes, I'm aware that Taiwan is an outlier in its success against COVID due to a variety of factors, some intrinsic (like island geography). But the US response was an abject, embarrassing disaster and it wasn't just because of destiny or crazy politicians.

Don't forget the CCP lock down of local Wuhan travel with the exception of international flights. IIRC, early indicators of a possible outbreak existed long before the mass media picked up on the frenzy.

My parents who live in Taiwan were talking about it just as they were coming home from visiting me in the states around November 2019 and they were so concerned that they advanced me a box of medical grade masks by mid January, due to having lived through the hysteria with SARS-COV-1 in 2003.

No one took COVID19 seriously here while I commuted for work in NYC via MTA. At most, bottles of hand sanitizers did start appearing in the office late January but no one wore masks until the announcement for the "15 days to slow the spread" campaign.

In Alberta, nestled deep within the bowels of our provincial health care system, we had this guy whose job was to procure medical equipment in anticipation of any potential medical crisis. He saw the same news item I did about the Wuhan lockdown back in December 2019, and decided it would be a good time to procure extra PPE, just in case the then mysterious flu turned into a big deal.

What hero! In the early days Alberta was donating desperately needed PPE to the other provinces, because of that one guy and his unilateral decision. Every other professional with the agency to act blew it.

I was wandering around for months having accepted that a global pandemic was a forgone conclusion before our Government finally took action in Mid March of 2020.

The whole time I was wondering "Am I the crazy one?".

I was not the crazy one. Everybody else was the crazy one.

Asymmetric information or understanding causes people to think less of each other.

Many times, they just don't know, or haven't been put in a position to know.

You're not alone.

The thing is that the people at agencies like the CDC are literally paid to know.

The CDC has a Center for Preparedness and Response[1] dedicated to "advancing the nation’s preparedness and response for public health emergencies and threats", which receives over a billion dollars annually, hosts an Epidemic Intelligence Service conference every year, etc.

How can one reconcile the amount of money and resources allocated to the CDC programs that were supposed to help protect the US from pandemic threats with the embarrassingly inept response?

I flew from Taiwan to Singapore in late February 2020 and literally everyone on the plane (passengers and flight crew) were wearing masks even though IIRC masks were not required at the time. By then, it had been patently obvious to laypeople in Asia for weeks that this thing was spreading via the air. And yet you had America's top health officials telling people in early March they didn't need to worry about masking.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/index.htm

I feel the same.

These things operate for different purposes than their publicly stated goals.

It can also be a culturally-adopted thing. From the 90's til now, wearing a mask was normalized to be necessary while navigating through cities like Taipei with dense smog and particulate matter. There's a reason why it's some times referred to as the moped capital of the world.

I guess when word got out that there was a potential spread of infection, Asians had no problem adapting mask wearing on other forms of mass transportation as well.

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