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Comment by throwawaylinux | Hacker News Reader

Weren't "experts" calling for events to continue and that border closures would be racist and that people should not wear masks around that time?

Maybe he was just listening to the experts.

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Prominent scientists signed their names to articles saying that implying the virus was released from a lab (intentionally or otherwise) was racist and factually wrong.

Those scientists, by and large, have walked back their statements and admit that the hypothesis that this was a lab leak that occurred in Wuhan is not impossible and that stating it is not necessarily racist. Also, those folks aren't considered "experts" any more (everybody else lowered their priors about those expert's beliefs).

I've heard multiple references to experts/politicians/media "calling border closures racist" in early 2020, but only from conservative media claiming that liberals were espousing this viewpoint. Can someone provide sources or evidence for this?

First hit in the first page of a simple google search.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/xenophobe-chief-de...

Weird you have no recollection of it. It was pretty loud in the media for a while there.

This article comes from April 21, 2020, not Feb 2020 as GP mentioned. Apparently it was a Democrat response to a tweet announcing a border closure after the US had already seen 42000 deaths (fta). This looks like Democrats criticizing a policy of shutting the barn door after the animals had already left the barn.

No it doesn't it looks like recklessly spreading disinformation during a crisis purely for personal political gain.

The US has had strict border restrictions on foreign citizens through most of 2021 too. So unless you are going to call the Biden administration racist and xenophobic as well, then this reasoning doesn't work. But even if you did, then what you're saying about barn doors still contradicts what most experts have said in terms of reducing the movement of people to slow the spread.

Didn't Nancy Pelosi go to hug people in China town in late Feb 2020?

Nancy Pelosi Visits San Francisco's Chinatown Amid Coronavirus Concerns https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-sa...

"Fear of the Virus is Racially Motivated."

Around the time the Trump administration announced the travel restriction, Biden said that Trump had a “record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.”

In late January, the Trump administration implemented a travel restriction from China, where the coronavirus originated.

Some on the left described the move as a racist or xenophobic ploy aimed at punishing a country that Trump has clashed with over trade.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/498350-biden-trumps-co...

I mean, it was true that shutting down the border to China was mostly a policy based on xenophobia than any actual facts, because at that point the vast majority of people spreading Covid into the US werent the Chinese. The huge NYC early spike started from an traveler from Europe.

Yes, despite of all the cover-ups and lyings China is never responsible. And everyone else is responsible for pandemic.

This is unlikely to be true and probably an attempt to rewrite the history based on current knowledge and hate of Trump.

The reality is, that back then, there was simply no better information than "coming from China". It wasn't based on xenophobia at all, just on common sense (that seemed to defy the Democrats / mainstream media). In beginning of March, Trump also closed borders to Europe. Xenophobic? No, Europe was having a spike (e.g. Bergamo, Italy). EU "president", Ursula von der Leyen, criticised the decision. 2 weeks later, EU closed its borders. (Ursula is another person that prefers politics to common sense.)

It actually is true, the US’s SARS-CoV-2 lineages were predominantly from Europe. Especially Italy.

There's some evidence in retrospect that a lot of the spread to the US was from Italy. There wre two huge problems with using that as proof Pelosi and co were right to call the travel bans xenophobic. Firstly, it suggests the US policies basically succeeded at stopping the virus spreading there from China whilst Italy failed (and likely doomed the rest of the world in the process). Secondly, in order to block travel from Italy early enough, the US would've had to do it when Italy was consistently reporting zero cases week after week. Given that pretty much the entire US mainstream media and political insisted that it was xenophobic and unjustified to stop travel from Europe even after there was evidence of a major outbreak, I can't imagine there'd be much support for doing so when Italy reported zero cases and the US had cases from China - even though the reason for that was that Italy was doing worse at detecting outbreaks and those local cases turned out to be much less of a problem than ones from zero-case Italy.

Something seems to have gone really badly wrong in Italy and it's somehow gone entirely unexamined by the media, despite the fact that it did more to doom the rest of the world's efforts than any of the countries that have been blamed for doing so. Entirely unrelately, Italy is lead by the kind of boring technocrat that the media likes rather than some Trumpian populist figure.

It’s an intentional misrepresentation of Pelosi and others decrying violence against Asian people.

Your comment violates the HN guidelines which are available here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

(and several others)

The reason was that the GOP was allegedly looking for an excuse to close the borders and further their anti-immigration agenda, and used the pandemic as an excuse.

"The president’s chief adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, had long tried to halt migration based on public health, without success. Then came the coronavirus."[1]

"The idea that immigrants carry infections into the country echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that associates minorities with disease."[1]

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/coronavirus-immigratio...

From The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/02/trump-r...), attributing comments to the WHO:

  *But critics from WHO and elsewhere have said the bans are unnecessary and could generate a racist backlash against Chinese people.*

  *Before long, Trump was running for president on an anti-immigrant platform. One message he pushed was that immigrants carry contagion. In 2015, he put out a statement warning that “tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border,” a claim unsupported by fact.* [ha! That hasn't aged well: https://news.yahoo.com/dhs-dropped-40-000-covid-190800213.html ]

From Huffington Post: https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/china-donald-trump...:

  *Just a month after praising China for its handing of the COVID-19 outbreak, U.S. President Donald Trump has sent out a racist tweet terming the coronavirus as “Chinese Virus”.*

From Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-using-racism-against-c...

  *President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are using racism to try to distract from his disastrous preparations for and response to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of taking responsibility for and addressing early failures, they're blaming the crisis on China.*

Yes, but none of those "experts" were calling it "a normal seasonal virus", they just didn't believe such measures were necessary. SARS-COV-1 didn't require widespread border closures or masking, and it very much wasn't "a normal seasonal virus".

Yep so the rhetoric about it could easily have lead someone to think it wasn't much more to worry about than the seasonal flu.

That's fair, but when people have opinions based on weak evidence, they should hold those opinions weakly, rather than reinforcing them to others.

Are you criticizing the experts here? Careful that's verboten.

I'm not, no. As more evidence is accumulated to support a hypothesis, it is rational to strengthen one's belief in it. All beliefs should start out weakly held, until sufficient evidence is gathered to either reinforce or change them. And of course even strongly held beliefs should be re-examined if sufficient evidence piles up to the contrary.

So the incorrect opinions based on weak evidence that the experts had over the past years of covid should not have been "reinforced to others"? That sounds to me like a criticism of the experts.

No, the experts were disseminating the best available evidence at that time. I will criticize some steps by policy makers, like stating initially that masks were ineffective when in reality they were trying to discourage mask shortages to keep them for essential workers. I think in cases like that it's better to be honest with the public. But I don't have any criticism for scientists who accurately portray the best available evidence at a given time.

My criticism was for the the hypothetical that the OP may have rationally stated that the virus was nothing more serious than a seasonal flu, based on experts stating that borders should not be closed. The statement that borders should not be closed was based on the most relevant research at the time; it turned out to be incorrect and was later reversed. But as a lay person, making the jump from that statement to the opinion that the virus is no big deal, and then echoing that opinion to others as fact, is not rational. One might have taken it as weak evidence in that direction, but no more than that.

If "experts" were saying not to wear masks, insisting that border restrictions were racist and xenophobic, telling people to go out and gather in large groups in public, then OP said absolutely nothing wrong by claiming it was no more serious than the seasonal flu.

Now we know that some "experts" were just totally wrong and had no idea what they were talking about, and others were in fact spreading misinformation abouta pandemic for political gain. But that is not OP's fault. You can't condemn him and absolve the actual people who reinforced that incorrect information to him in the first place. Ludicrous.

From the very early days of the Wuhan outbreak it was clear, and was the consensus of experts, that the virus was much more serious than a seasonal flu. There was indeed disagreement as to the best ways to combat it, but it was not said (by anyone credible that I saw) nor implied that the virus itself wasn't serious. I'm sure you could find an occasional counter-example, as there are going to be people in any field who are wrong about any given subject, but the consensus was pretty clear. (Note that I'm talking about actual experts, not politicians or pundits.)

What data do you base your claims on?

Studies like this one, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..., do not support what you are saying. Experts predicted 30,000 people would die from covid in the UK by the end of 2020, compared with yearly deaths from influenza which is usually quoted at about 25,000-30,000.

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