The problem is even if WHO hadn't completely ****ed this up, the world still wouldn't have been able to shut down travel and eliminate the virus in that way. There's no chance the west would have continued with sufficient measures if **** didn't get out of control. A proactive response (to an infectious disease with fairly low mortality and long incubation time) simply isn't the reality - everything is reactive in most of the west. Even New Zealand and Australia would never have closed borders so early if **** didn't get out of control in Europe.

They’re certainly one of the most hygiene conscious societies in the world, but I don’t think we have a clear view of the situation there yet given how centralized and opaque testing has been. Someone asked Abe in parliament this week how many infections there were officially and he couldn’t answer, really bizarre. Japanese people are furious at their government for the slow and feeble response on COVID. Reports gov signaled this week they’ll extend the state of national emergency beyond May, not sure how long.

Croatia seems like an interesting case study, seemingly had a lot more challenges than other success stories like Taiwan and NZ, 500km from Lombardy, and a bunch of land borders, but somewhat low population density, haven’t seen much about its success beyond your posts. Have you heard from any locals or press about their behavior and attitudes towards the gov response?

I agree, a lot of luck involved for those types of countries, being geographically isolated with low population density, and not being one of the first countries to have major outbreaks. It’s one thing to observe Italy and Spain experience severe outbreaks and react quickly, but a different thing altogether to act before there’s any precedent of outbreak outside of China.

So my brother, midwest ER doctor (think Chicago/Cleveland/Columbus and so on) has been telling me most of what they've been doing is drills for Covid-19 and testing. And, unlike in early March and before during more normal times, he's finding a lot of time on his phone and he's run multiple marathons in recent weeks basically just waiting to be paged.

We really need to figure out a way to tell people Covid-19 is scary but they still should get the medical care they need for other issues.

It will be a waste of time because it will get politicized and people will believe what they want to believe about what happened, why it happened, and whether the right decisions were made or not. Its common place today to see people hot taking on social media that the lockdown wasn't necessary, or "overblown" then citing the current numbers. Even the CA doctors did this that Musk seemed to back. (the numbers are the way they are *because* we locked down and started social distancing....sigh)

My point is that the bottom line is obviously clear. That testing, tracing, isolating and locking down EARLY is the only response. There's no other way to deal with a novel virus with a significantly high death rate in the moment, unless you're amoral and see people as expendable. Of course, those people who are playing the real life Trolley Problem game out during this pandemic would have a very different take if, A. they were in the expendable group and B., if children were the vulnerable group.

And it is easy to follow that logic to the obvious conclusion that opening up too early will be a disaster, even if we had the correct amount of testing, tracing, and isolating in place. There are too many ways for outbreaks to happen with a non compliant population who think the lockdown is "absurd" and that 100k deaths is no big deal. And time after time, people in leadership positions have shown a total lack of understand of my paragraph 1. See. Meat packing bosses, Tyson CEO's, Nursing home bean counters, Trump, the governor of Georgia, idiots protesting, and on and on...

I guarantee none of these "absurd" takes or "Liberate!" takes would be happening if children were the most at risk.

If you think somehow think that the elderly are less important than the children, then you may want to take a personality test to see if you are a sociopath.

A huge part of what people dont understand is that a huge part of getting back to normal involves people being able to see and spend time with their parents and grandparents who are over 65. I guess you can't blame the young people, their frontal lobes aren't fully developed until their mid 20's. The frontal lobe is where actions and future consequences get processed....

We (the US) have been posting 2k+ deaths per day for weeks. Most places outside NYC are still escalating because our lockdowns were only ever half assed, and yet we have idiots protesting in the streets and storming State buildings because they're "being oppressed." Unfortunately we're just too stupid and undisciplined to have ever had a chance of a good outcome here. We're going to open up into the face of a million active confirmed cases, and good knows how many unconfirmed. 300,000 dead by year end seems optimistic.

Trump switching from "65k deaths in the USA!!!" to "lets hope it stays below 100k" the day it hit 65k was hilarious. USA will be over 110k on June 1st, possibly over 120k.

Yeah that really is hilarious! If it was 100K or 200K or a million it would be laugh out loud funny!

You are a sick bastard. Hoping for death so the president looks bad and seeing this crisis as nothing but political gamesmanship. Nobody made good calls going into this as it is something never seen in any of our lifetimes. Pinning blame and pointing fingers (other than at China) is ridiculous from any angle of political perspective.

Um, no. We have continued to experience these types of events for generations. We are in this precise position because the people who could have prepared for the inevitability of this. Even if it's a generational occurance,you leave the next guy better off than you were last time.of course its all political too, or else why would both sides keep taking credit and deflecting blame? China might have biologically nuked the world, but where is the fallout plan? Cuomo is a ****ing crook, bankrupted ny, polling at 90% up from 35% prerona. Lol man.Plump talks about building the greatest economy ever, like it was 200 floors of opulence, only to have a bioplane crash and bring it down. Not political? Aren't you also long right now?

You are accusing me of political gamesmanship while nothing in my post indicates that. Anyway, my reaction to your post full of assumptions & inaccuracies:

*There are countries that got this right, people are saying that nobody got this right because every major economy in the West got this wrong. That is not the entire world.

*Getting something right or wrong is not a binary state, there are degrees of right and degrees of wrong. Trump his downplaying and handling of this crisis has been exceptionally wrong. The USA is lucky that Trump his power doesn't reach as far as he thinks it does.

*My post was not meant to make fun of the tragedy or loss of life and I even suspect that you also know that but intentionally missunderstood the intensions of my post to get some sort of high ground.

*Trump his 65k deaths number was incredibly unrealistic since Early April and he still held on to it until the USA was already over 60k deaths. Why is that? What are his intentions behind that? You accuse me of mocking the tragedy, but Trump's incompetence on repeating that "only 65k" will die surely did not help the citizens of the USA of taking this tragedy as serious as they should. And me mocking the president on a random internet forum does less damage than the president blasting off lies every night to the >300 million citizens of America.

*The reason why "I hope less than 100k" is funny, is because it's exactly the same thing as saying 65k. It's moving the goal post slightly so that people underestimate the severity of this crisis. There is a close to 0% probability that USA has less than 100k corona deaths by June 10th. Yet somehow the leader of the country is selling it on TV as a realistic final death toll, and people even get attacked by pointing out that that is ridiculous.

Not even going to touch the China remark because I also want bad things to happen to the CCP because of this, but only pointing fingers at them is simply ridiculous and not accepting the reality that a lot of people ****ed up and it will lead to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people dying.

Maybe not hilarious, but ridiculous that they were throwing those numbers around a few weeks ago when it was obvious you would hit 60k in no time. It just makes all of the experts and politicians look bad, just trying to calm people down for a few days as they lose credibility.

Actually when you are inside the magic show that is US politics/information economy, being an expert who is completely wrong all the time actually causes you to lose very little credibility, if any.

That is because everything is filtered through an extremely partisan lens, and once you choose your "tribe" you pretty much well never criticize anyone you perceive as an avatar of your tribe.

Dr. Fauci and other experts keep saying wrong stuff over and over and over and over, and yet they lose very little credibility (at least among the people that gave them any to begin with). That is because the media portrays a narrative where he is the voice of "science" opposing Trump and tribe "anti-science," so no good liberal would every question an avatar of tribe "science," as that would be seen as support of team "anti-science." So support for the "experts" pretty much never goes down no matter how wrong they are about everything all the time.

The exact inverse is of course true for the Trump crowd.

You're the king of false equivilancy on this forum.

Yeah, I don't agree with this POV at all.

Look at Taiwan and Hong Kong. They are at the front line of dealing with China and serious infectious disease. Based on previous experience they knew how to react, closing off travel from Mainland China early, and thwarting possible outbreak. Their citizenry were also familiar with this stuff, and no draconian measures were required.

And outbreaks are not created equally. Calling AUS and NZ essentially lucky in their reactive steps misses the point entirely. They had a chance to stop its spread and they did it. Kudos to them for having the guts and wisdom for moving decisively. Not every country moves in lockstep for a whole host of reasons. I'm not here to praise Trump, because his early response was clearly not enough. But it probably served as a catalyst for what AUS and NZ did, that is showing it is possible to shut down international travel against the advice and wisdom of WHO.

IRT how the US responded once the outbreak had become uncontrollable in NYC, the clear early move was to restrict travel from there. Of course that was politically infeasible at the time (at least at the federal level). But other states clearly had it within their rights to do so, and some tried (FL). But it only would have made sense if the restriction was imposed for all states, and certainly not all states would have made the same decision of their own volition.

What is certain going forward: international travel restrictions will be the primary means of stopping spread of deadly viruses.

It seems clear to me Fauci is not concerned with measuring the societal effects of his recommendations. His hammer is hitting the nail that is CV, and whatever suffers in the process can be addressed later. As a result fear has increased to black plague levels.

The role of Trump is to convince people that this level of fear is unwarranted, and we can quickly return to normalcy. Many of his supporters buy into his sales pitch, but his opponents use his medical buffoonery as clear evidence he should be ignored.

If Trump had the balls he would have shut down all international travel early/mid January.

I can only imagine how people aligning with your view would have reacted to a "power" move such as that.

You think it's lack of "balls" that stopped Trump from shutting down travel in January?

My opinion of Trump hasn't moved since Q4/2019, I already saw him as a terrible human being and a terrible political leader.

My view on Trump pre-corona was that the USA was lucky that there was no world event during his presidency that allowed him to damage the USA in a way that is not fixable in a year or 2. Unfortunately he might still get the chance.

Also, as someone who is not a USA-resident (don't know if you are tbf), posts like these just seem alien to me. I really don't see politics like you or some other posters ITT. I have my opinions on politicians but I seperate my opinion on a person and my position on an issue into 2 seperate things. I often agree on things that Trump does (though it's been a while now), but still think he's a terrible human being and a terrible leader.



Moving past that, the whole "it was impossible to react in a major way to this threat" is such a ****ing bull **** excuse. The major economies in the West reacted somewhere between the beginning-mid of March or later. The world was already scared enough in mid February that making conservative moves was certainly possible. If there was a world leader in the West that made a speech like Macron eventually did in France, everybody would have fell in line and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.

And even if that weren't true, if you are a leader you have to ****ing lead, and not make moves that suit your own agenda. If a leader makes moves to suit his own agenda and they blow up in his face, he should be ****ing burried under it. Especially if the costs is as big as this crisis. Trump handled and handles this crisis horribly. This is true for various world leaders in various countries, I really don't see why this is not an objective truth and why it is sensitive to call it out.

I still don't see why President Trump gets so much hate. Yes, he speaks out a lot and winds up the media, yes, if you are a man thinking you are a woman you will probably dislike him, yes, if you have a mental disorder and sensitive you will dislike him, but what has be actually done compared to previous Presidents?

The war in Iraq was based on lies and killed so many, ruined the US reputation among many etc, but maybe some people are more concerned at not having their feelings hurt.

I wish President Trump was the leader of the UK.

As for 'having to f***ing lead, I believe many of the states within the US are quite independent and have a lot of power. Also, there are many different ideologies. You need the people on your side to obey orders in times like this, where the government could be asking people to stay at home for example. You do not want to cause civil unrest and freedom is firmly in the minds of people in the US.

By the way, has anyone seen the recent interview by Valuetainment on anti-vaccination activist Dr Judy A Mikovits?

It is called 'Former AIDS Scientist Exposes Dr. Fauci’s Medical Corruption'.

Just wondering if she is a nutcase or has a point.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgnBldI7KPY

that guy literally runs a MLM scheme.

Yes. I think he wanted to do it, but he was scared he might lose in November because the reaction would be 100% negative from the Dems, and 50%+ from his base.

The fact he banned travel from China in January indicates to me he probably wanted to do more.

He was dragged kicking and screaming to do the half-assed ban on China travel that he did.

no. no.. jesus christ no.

I believe youre delusional about the relationship between Trump and Fauci.

Trump has had little to no interest in problem solving since this began. His only interest is to avoid blame, win the election, keep the stock market high, and keep the attention on himself. That's it. Thinking Fauci and Birx had an actual chance with this guy is hilarious. People go straight to blaming Fauci when, in actuality, he's just a member of the king's court standing next to the mad king trying to act like he doesn't know that the emperor has no clothes in fear he will get his head cut off if he steps out of line. And out of line with this guy is to talk about when hes an expert in. It would be like one of us stepping up and discussing how aces actually will win 80% of the time, and then he gets up there and says he always loses with aces, and muzzles us for have the audacity to talk about math. Its a sad joke. This is how everything goes in this presidency. There is no intellectual thought or higher level thinking. Its seen as a threat.

As I stated months ago, its obvious Fauci and Birx are just trying to work with what they have, because they know they can't win with this guy. No one can. Dealing with Trump in any capacity is a lose lose situation for any individual trying to do good work. Its all about Trump. Always. Nothing else matters and if you dare try to speak to the truth or use reason, be morally sound, or go against his "gut", you get axed.

Thinking that Fauci and Birx actually have any sort of say in any of this is laughable. Anyone who can't see that hasn't been paying attention to this presidency from the beginning.

Now, I *do* think they scare Trump into believing reality here and there to avoid complete disaster, but he snaps right back to la la land usually within a day or so. Its like convincing your child to eat something healthy. They're fighting the good fight, and every now again, Trump eats some broccoli, but the inmate is running the asylum here, so its futile.

We are at war with the chicommy scum