Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

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> They followed the basic test/trace/isolate advocated by WHO seriously

No. TW started inspecting flights from Wuhan before the WHO even did anything. NZ blocked inbound flights while the WHO was figuring out what to do.

> TW itself got a chance to act early due to warning by PRC doctors due to cross strait connections.

No. Taiwan heard whispers of SARS/Unknown pneumonia and reacted accordingly.

> Again, import case statistics from TW/NZ demonstrated PRC exported less than a few hundred cases to these places TOTAL

No. NZ closed its border to China in Feb. TW closed its border for flights from Wuhan. China stopped domestic flights from Wuhan but continued to allow flights out of Wuhan. This has nothing to do with "they can't keep foreign citizens trapped in country", because 1) they can and 2) they do.

> Yet you list actions of how CCP took covid MORE seriously then and now than basically anyone else.

So you agree that welding people into their apartments is a good approach to controlling the virus?

> Politicized by Tom Cotton and republican peers in early Feburary

It was a valid theory, and still is. Was never a conspiracy theory to anyone but the left. While nothing from the PRC has been anything other than propaganda conspiracy theory. The lab leak theory should have been taken seriously in the beginning when it was theorized at the beginning of Jan.

NZ blocked flights to China in early Feb after Wuhan was already locked down. TW was informed about unknown pneumonia directly from PRC doctors around time when WHO was notified in Dec 2019. Both responded to completely salient signals provided by PRC.

>1) they can and 2) they do

For breaking PRC laws, not epidemic prevention. At end of day, countries wanted to repatriate and PRC obliged. It's asinine to suggest PRC can with hold foreign nationals, as if that won't spark a completely different kind of outrage. Obviously said criminals who broke PRC laws weren't repatriated. TW citizens from Wuhan was repatriated via rail to Shanghai. TW CDC had up to date release of repatriation flights and positives. Up till Aprial, TW repatraitaed about ~1000 out of Wuhan with 1 testing positive on an early Feburary flight. That's it. Because Hubei lock down was that effective.

> good approach to controlling the virus

Covid-0 strategy is probably the right one for PRC. More importantly it demonstrates containing covid was absolutely a viable. But other relatively milder intervention stratgies also possible as seen in other successful countries that adhered to basic WHO guidelines who didn't resort to PRC tier interventions. They were just slightly less successful. Even TW response barely ranks well when measured against other PRC provinces. Taking pandemic response seriously is correlated to serious results should not be shocking.

> was a valid theory

About as valid as Fort Detrick at the time (and now). Point is early lab leak propaganda was just that, propaganda designed to policized for Sino-US rivalry when origin tracing hasn't even begun and hampered subsequent efforts. PRC position has always been to let science handle origin tracing which in terms of propaganda is tame. Reality apart from delays around two-sessions in Jan PRC has provided more than enough info and signals for most serious actors to contain covid19 depite virus already spreading abroad prior to two-sessions or detection of market cluster. Or that there's still zero indication covid19 originated in PRC vs PRC discovering first cluster. Lot's of valid theories out there, but what gets pushed by whom and when and for what purpose is how things get politicized and what treaty is designed to mitigate.

At the end of the day CCP + WHO did fine, because those that took them seriously (like actually seriously) did Ok. Those that didn't, burned and have been looking for escape goats to their own failure.

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