Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwk8s | Hacker News Reader

There's so little content to the references to WHO's COVID handling that I can't tell whether they mean WHO over-reacted or under-reacted to COVID.

View on HN

Agreed. I don't quite understand the focus on the WHO. They don't really control much in a practical sense. In terms of global response to the pandemic, I think we both under-reacted (at the start) and over-reacted (towards the "end"). China could have stopped the virus if they had locked down back in November/December of 2019, instead of updating their WeChat filters. Whereas by mid-2021, we were past the point of controlling the virus, but NPIs continued in force for a while longer before people realized they were mostly pointless.

> Agreed. I don't quite understand the focus on the WHO.

Some conspiracy folks consider the WHO, just like the UN, the manifestation of the NWO global government that secretly controls everything.

Didn't help that Trump had some weird hate boner for the WHO to such a degree that the US left it, plus a lot of "WHO is in the pocket of China to suppress the truth!" hysteria around t he same time.

Then there was this whole episode of, mostly US conservative media, creating a shit-storm over this WHO tweet [0] by interpreting that tweet as "WHO said it doesn't transmit between humans, WHO has been wrong and shouldn't be trusted!"

[0] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152

I think you’re muddying the waters. Outside of US partisan stuff, corruption at the WHO is _legendary_ and has been for decades.

Those positions are surprising to me, for two reasons:

① Finger-pointing an institution that has very limited funding, and very limited power, for corruption, is like blaming the river for sea level rise. Sure, if you dig into the numbers, it contributes to the result; but fundamentally it is not the cause of the problem, and there are much bigger fishes that deserve much more scrutiny.

② Blaming WHO for a tweet where they simply report the words of the Chinese investigation with attribution, at a time where many countries with actual power pretended there was no risk, feels disingenuous.

Forget about conspiracy though, the WHO should have a relatively clear and narrow mandate, while the UN is known to be a toothless assortment of petty bureaucrats involved in everything with no clear consensus. The only thing they share is the goal of their members to grow their personal fiefdoms.

Hum... Looks like it was already a worldwide pandemic at December 2019, and in several countries already by November. So no, China trying that wouldn't have much of an impact.

I don't know if it would be possible to detect the virus earlier if it happened on some place that wasn't trying to cover it up, but when we got to know about it, it was already too late to contain.

China didn't know they had a virus at all in November 2019. The 16th of December is the first documented hospitalization in Wuhan. A wastewater sample in Italy collected on 18th of December was later found to be positive. 23rd/24th of Dec was the first sample collection in Wuhan which was sent to be analyzed for a novel pathogen. 27th-30th of December is when the alarm bells started really going off in China. The first official messages and international alerts went out on Dec 30th and on Dec 31st Reuters published it's first report.

So the virus had been in Italy at least 2 days after the first hospitalization in Wuhan, and around 5 days before doctors collected the first samples which were sent off to labs which later determined it was a novel virus.

You actually can't blame China for not acting before they really had any patients or knew anything was going on.

Chinese government records put the first case as Nov 17, with a daily trickle of cases after that:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...

That's useless since he didn't cause any suspicion in medical authorities, he was just a 55 year old patient, presumably with pneumonia. He was of no public health significance until the retrospective analysis was done in January.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com