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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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