Article on why the West did so much worse than Asia with Covid

[cmarshall]

This is the article that I have been waiting for throughout the long year past.  The journalist David Wallace-Wells asks and answers the question of why the richest countries in the world in Europe and America performed so execrably especially when compared with the Asian countries, which most Western journalism scrupulously ignored.

For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a story in which wealth and medical superiority offered, if not total immunity from disease, then certainly a guarantee against pandemics, regarded as a premodern residue of the underdeveloped world. That arrogance has made the coronavirus not just a staggering but an ironic plague. Invulnerability was a myth, of course, but what the pandemic revealed was much worse than just average levels of susceptibility and weakness. It was these countries that suffered most, died most, flailed most. Gave up most easily, too, acquiescing to so much more disease that they might have been fighting a different virus entirely. For nearly the entire year, the COVID epicenter was not in China, where the pathogen originated, or in corners of South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, where limited state capacity and medical infrastructure seemed, at the outset, especially concerning, but either in Europe or the United States — places that were rated just one year ago the best prepared in the world to combat infectious disease.

This fact, though not unknown, is probably the most salient and profound feature of what has been a tremendously uneven pandemic with the world’s longtime “winners” becoming by far its biggest losers. The gold-standard responses were those in East Asia and Oceania, by countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia — countries that saw clearly the gravest infection threat the world had encountered in a century and endeavored to simply eradicate it within their borders. Mostly, they succeeded. When it mattered most, no nation in what was once grandly called “the West” even really bothered to try.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/how-the-west-lost-covid-19.html

[OswaldBastable]

18 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

This is the article that I have been waiting for throughout the long year past.  The journalist David Wallace-Wells asks and answers the question of why the richest countries in the world in Europe and America performed so execrably especially when compared with the Asian countries, which most Western journalism scrupulously ignored.

Read the whole thing, seemed mainly BS to me.

[cmarshall]

4 minutes ago, OswaldBastable said:

Read the whole thing, seemed mainly BS to me.

In response to your vacuous criticism let me repeat the essential point: 

The gold-standard responses were those in East Asia and Oceania, by countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia — countries that saw clearly the gravest infection threat the world had encountered in a century and endeavored to simply eradicate it within their borders. Mostly, they succeeded. When it mattered most, no nation in what was once grandly called “the West” even really bothered to try.

Not BS.

[Stocky]

19 minutes ago, OswaldBastable said:

Read the whole thing, seemed mainly BS to me.

Why BS? It struck me as well researched and analytically accurate article. 

[Surelynot]

Including Russia, but excluding NZ and Australia......whilst focussing on Brazil......seems on odd way to go about it.

Edited March 19, 2021 by onthedarkside
quote of hidden post removed

[mtls2005]

Does Brazil qualify as "the west"? Italy? Eastern Europe?

 

Asian countries, for the most part, followed the China model: close borders, limited movement in-country, quarantine. testing-tracing, shutdown, lockdown, masks, social distancing, etc. One assumes these were major factors? It certainly wasn't "the weather".

 

I think many things contributed to the devastion in the U.S.

Ignoring and politicizing the virus were probably our major mis-steps. Given dozens of options and decisions, it seems like we made the absolute wrong choices each and every time? I'm convinced a monkey throwing darts could have fared better.

 

[irishman25]

20 hours ago, Stocky said:

Why BS? It struck me as well researched and analytically accurate article. 

this was NOT b.s about time someone pointed out why the superpower WEST failed to safeguard there people, because we are better then all others were super in all ways?     

[cmarshall]

19 minutes ago, mtls2005 said:

Does Brazil qualify as "the west"? Italy? Eastern Europe?

 

Asian countries, for the most part, followed the China model: close borders, limited movement in-country, quarantine. testing-tracing, shutdown, lockdown, masks, social distancing, etc. One assumes these were major factors? It certainly wasn't "the weather".

 

I think many things contributed to the devastion in the U.S.

Ignoring and politicizing the virus were probably our major mis-steps. Given dozens of options and decisions, it seems like we made the absolute wrong choices each and every time? I'm convinced a monkey throwing darts could have fared better.

Wallace-Wells, the author, thinks it comes down to how quickly the governments responded to the threat.  The Asian countries all responded quickly even though their approaches varied.  S. Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Thailand never had a national lockdown.  Neither did China, although its local lockdowns in Wuhan and then Hubei were severe.  

Behind the tactical decision of a prompt response all the successful countries in Asia and Oceania set a strategic goal of eradication and achieved it with the occasional local lapse.  The Western governments, including Brazil, simply couldn't be arsed even to try to stamp out the virus.  

The US achieve a spectacular combination of the highest death toll with the longest economic shutdown.  The Keystone Cops could hardly have improved on it.  Meanwhile after a seventy-seven day shutdown in Wuhan the city was free of the virus, which the Chinese government verified by testing all eleven million inhabitants during a two-week period in May.  Thereafter, the Wuhanese were having massive beach parties.

Trump, Bolsonaro, and Johnson were the worst possible leaders in the biggest health crisis in a century, but it didn't matter.  Even the better countries like Germany failed abjectly.  I remember in the Spring when the hospitals and morgues were overflowing in Bergamo, Italy which had "locked down," a Chinese epidemiologist visited Italy and commented, "They haven't locked down at all."

A catastrophic and despicable performance for virtually all the Western countries (not Finland, Norway, or Denmark, though.)

Edited March 17, 2021 by cmarshall

[rabas]

Sorry to pop the proverbial bubble, but any article that ignores the most relevant, scientifically established  point is just verbiage and/or political mumbo jumbo.

Many scientific papers and the world's primary SARS2-COV genome data base, GISAID, clearly prove the West, starting in Italy, Europe, then the US east coast, was initially hit with a much more infectious 'G' strain of the virus rather than the slow poke D strain the initially seeded just those countries that 'did so well'.  Best scientific estimates show it was ~10x more infectious.  There are many papers but here is one:

NIH-funded study finds COVID-19 mutation 10x more infectious than original

This G614 mutation initially occurred in Asia, probably in China, but never caught on because the D strain was already present. The early Thailand sport stadium super spreader event was likely an example of G stain. Luckily it was traced out. 

I will take science over a main stream media "West no good" political piece any day.

[cmarshall]

 

1 hour ago, rabas said:

Sorry to pop the proverbial bubble, but any article that ignores the most relevant, scientifically established  point is just verbiage and/or political mumbo jumbo.

Many scientific papers and the world's primary SARS2-COV genome data base, GISAID, clearly prove the West, starting in Italy, Europe, then the US east coast, was initially hit with a much more infectious 'G' strain of the virus rather than the slow poke D strain the initially seeded just those countries that 'did so well'.  Best scientific estimates show it was ~10x more infectious.  There are many papers but here is one:

NIH-funded study finds COVID-19 mutation 10x more infectious than original

This G614 mutation initially occurred in Asia, probably in China, but never caught on because the D strain was already present. The early Thailand sport stadium super spreader event was likely an example of G stain. Luckily it was traced out. 

I will take science over a main stream media "West no good" political piece any day.

Attribution of the differential infection and mortality rates entirely to the different strains of the virus is not a more scientific theory.  It is merely a more technical, single-cause theory confined to the domain of virology.  

Single-factor models are inherently less credible for a phenomenon as complex as a world-wide pandemic.  Attributing the differential performance entirely to the difference in the strains of the virus completely discounts the vast differences in applying the best practices of test, isolate, and trace contacts which were widely applied in the successful Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, S. Korea, and possibly Japan, but were never attempted in the Western failure countries at scale.  It seems unlikely to suppose the effect of the best practices turned out to be indistinguishable from abject surrender.

If the G614, more highly infectious strain started in China, why didn't it "catch on," i.e. ou-compete the already present D strain?  Unless you subscribe to the discredited theory of herd immunity arising from infection, that should not have happened.  

If the article is correct that the more infectious G614 strain achieved dominance in New York and Italy by May, then it must have done so by out-competing whichever D strain was present by January in those regions.  How is that the G strain replaced its predecessor in the West, but was unable to do so in China, for example, where it had a head start?    

Here is a graph of the confirmed deaths in China and the US for Mar. 1, 2020 to Mar. 16, 2021.  So, from the initial period until the G strain achieved dominance in May, 2020, both the US and China are confronting less infectious D strains.  Why the difference in death rates?  (Note there is a line for deaths in China, but it is sitting so close to zero as to be hard to discern.)  Why is the G strain so effective at dominating in the US, but can't seem to make any headway in China at the same period, since by May SARS-COV2 was effectively eradicated in China?  

 

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/china?country=CHN~USA 

If Thailand had a super-spreader dissemination of a G strain that you suppose that it then contained through contact tracing, why do you not attribute cause of the failure of the US Covid efforts to the more or less complete lack of contact tracing in the US?  

So, not persuasive.  It's more likely the case since the US policy was official, abject surrender to the virus, any of the strains would have spread uncontrolled.

[Jillie Norman]

Sounds accurate to me, too. 

[placeholder]

On 3/16/2021 at 12:18 PM, OswaldBastable said:

Read the whole thing, seemed mainly BS to me.

A comment like the above with no explanations or analysis offered seems like BS to me.

[Lacessit]

According to the World Obesity Foundation, the statistics are showing the countries with the highest percentage of obese people are 10 times more likely to have deaths from infection than those nations with low levels of obesity. Perhaps that explains why America was hit so badly, whereas a country like Vietnam was basically unscathed.

[onebir]

6 hours ago, cmarshall said:

Why is the G strain so effective at dominating in the US, but can't seem to make any headway in China at the same period, since by May SARS-COV2 was effectively eradicated in China?  

Government measures etc were definitely a factor, but the bats this virus came from are endemic to SW China & (northern) SE Asia. Similar viruses may have crossed the species barrier recently enough (in evolutionary time) that the local populations have some adaptations that render them less susceptible.

Examples of similar adaptations: sickle cell anemia (confers some protection to malaria) and CCR5 Delta 32 (confers immunity to HIV, apparently a mutation that was selected for during the Black Death).

Can't say for sure, or how big an effect similar factors might be having on Covid-19, but I don't think their existence can be excluded yet.

[cmarshall]

7 hours ago, Lacessit said:

According to the World Obesity Foundation, the statistics are showing the countries with the highest percentage of obese people are 10 times more likely to have deaths from infection than those nations with low levels of obesity. Perhaps that explains why America was hit so badly, whereas a country like Vietnam was basically unscathed.

Australia with an obesity rate of 29% and New Zealand with an obesity rate of 31% both eradicated the virus through vigorous application of public health measures.  The death scorecard so far reads:

               Covid deaths per million

USA                     164

Australia           3.64

New Zealand   0.53

Next theory exculpating the incompetent or indifferent governments of the West?

[cmarshall]

7 hours ago, onebir said:

Government measures etc were definitely a factor, but the bats this virus came from are endemic to SW China & (northern) SE Asia. Similar viruses may have crossed the species barrier recently enough (in evolutionary time) that the local populations have some adaptations that render them less susceptible.

Examples of similar adaptations: sickle cell anemia (confers some protection to malaria) and CCR5 Delta 32 (confers immunity to HIV, apparently a mutation that was selected for during the Black Death).

Can't say for sure, or how big an effect similar factors might be having on Covid-19, but I don't think their existence can be excluded yet.

This is one of the more ridiculous theories.  China is a large country.  The bats in question are found in the extreme western part of China.  So, it beggars belief that people in Shanghai on the East coast of China would have had any contact at all with the bats in question.  But, the facts are even worse for your theory since we understand even in Western China human contacts with bat population are a recent phenomenon brought about by increasing areas of human activity in a zone that had been wild.

To say nothing of why the Thais, Japanese, Taiwanese, New Zealanders, and Australians would have developed any resistance to pathogens originating in Western China.

By contrast malaria was widespread and endemic in West Africa for the millennia which are necessary for an adaptation like sickle cell to evolve.

Why is it so hard to believe that the Western governments have been either grossly incompetent or criminally indifferent or both?  Sometimes the obvious explanation is the right one.

Edited March 17, 2021 by cmarshall

[onebir]

19 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

Why is it so hard to believe that the Western governments have been either grossly incompetent or criminally indifferent or both?  Sometimes the obvious explanation is the right one.

Because the outcomes in different non-asian countries seem pretty inconsistent; there could be factors other than policy, at work. If you want to do a detailed comparison of

 

22 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

To say nothing of why the Thais, Japanese, Taiwanese, New Zealanders, and Australians would have developed any resistance to pathogens originating in Western China.

Most of those countries are islands, making excluding potential covid carries rather easy. Is being an island a policy choice? (Northern) Thailand is within the bat species range (which if IIRC covered Burma, Vietnam, Laos and southern China, to within a few hundred km south of Wuhan).

27 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

But, the facts are even worse for your theory since we understand even in Western China human contacts with bat population are a recent phenomenon brought about by increasing areas of human activity in a zone that had been wild.

Think about it: homo sapiens - genetically  modern humans - shared caves with bats. That's what "not that long ago in evolutionary time" means. (And in some parts of the region some humans were still living in caves not that long ago in historical time. eg google "Wa Zu".)

I don't know how significant this particular non-policy factor is; my main point is there are could be many other significant non-policy factors that we simply haven't imagined. So don't jump to conclusions.

[cmarshall]

11 minutes ago, onebir said:

Because the outcomes in different non-asian countries seem pretty inconsistent; there could be factors other than policy, at work. If you want to do a detailed comparison of

 

Most of those countries are islands, making excluding potential covid carries rather easy. Is being an island a policy choice? (Northern) Thailand is within the bat species range (which if IIRC covered Burma, Vietnam, Laos and southern China, to within a few hundred km south of Wuhan).

Think about it: homo sapiens - genetically  modern humans - shared caves with bats. That's what "not that long ago in evolutionary time" means. (And in some parts of the region some humans were still living in caves not that long ago in historical time. eg google "Wa Zu".)

I don't know how significant this particular non-policy factor is; my main point is there are could be many other significant non-policy factors that we simply haven't imagined. So don't jump to conclusions.

An exceptionally poor piece of reasoning.  There is just no evidence of any adaptation against any of the coronaviruses, which is what we would expect since, in contrast to West African malaria, the exposure of the population to bat pathogens has never been widespread in any of the countries.  Sars-Covid2 is a "novel" virus, which means it has never been encountered before and therefore no human has any immunity to it.  By contrast virtually every person in West Africa has been exposed to malaria for millennia.

What you are arguing without any data goes under the category of "faith-based" science.

We have a natural experiment in Scandinavia.  Do you think differential exposure to bats explains why Sweden has 129 Covid deaths per million while Finland, Denmark, and Norway have 14.5, 41.3, and 12.06 respectively?  Or do you think the Swedish governments decision just to let the old folks die might better fit the data?

 

 

[placeholder]

1 hour ago, onebir said:

Most of those countries are islands, making excluding potential covid carries rather easy. Is being an island a policy choice? (Northern) Thailand is within the bat species range (which if IIRC covered Burma, Vietnam, Laos and southern China, to within a few hundred km south of Wuhan).

 

4 Scandinavian nations aggressively moved on Covid 19 from the start. They have enjoyed great success in suppressing the virus. Only one of them is an island. One Scandinavian nation didn't. Its experience has been disastrous.

[Lacessit]

2 hours ago, cmarshall said:

Australia with an obesity rate of 29% and New Zealand with an obesity rate of 31% both eradicated the virus through vigorous application of public health measures.  The death scorecard so far reads:

               Covid deaths per million

USA                     164

Australia           3.64

New Zealand   0.53

Next theory exculpating the incompetent or indifferent governments of the West?

Where did I disagree with your basic premise of incompetence? It's beyond doubt Trump and Johnson exacerbated the pandemic in their respective countries. I was adding extra information, that is obviously not appreciated.

Not a theory, the obesity correlation is a fact.

Hostility appears to be your trademark on TV, I won't bother responding to your threads or posts again. Goodbye.

[cmarshall]

1 hour ago, Lacessit said:

Where did I disagree with your basic premise of incompetence? It's beyond doubt Trump and Johnson exacerbated the pandemic in their respective countries. I was adding extra information, that is obviously not appreciated.

Not a theory, the obesity correlation is a fact.

Hostility appears to be your trademark on TV, I won't bother responding to your threads or posts again. Goodbye.

I apologize if I was too aggressive.  I am not patient with arguments that seem to me to be clutching at straws to exculpate our governments for their failure, which is how I read your raising the issue of obesity in the current context.  

Yes, the obesity correlation is a fact.  The question is what does it explain?  The answer is: not much.

You suggested that obesity can explain the difference in outcomes between the US and Viet Nam, which, whatever your own intention, is the kind of argument used to exculpate the US government while failing to give credit due to the Vietnamese government.  The Vietnamese conducted the most extensive contact tracing program in the world: they not only traced all the contacts of anyone who tested positive, but they uniquely traced all the contacts of all those contacts.  

At any rate the obesity hypothesis is flatly contradicted by the cases of Australia and New Zealand with their high rates of obesity and low rates of Covid deaths. 

It is probably more reasonable to conclude that if governments fail to apply the public health best practices to control Covid, obese populations will die off at higher rates than those with low rates of obesity.

Edited March 18, 2021 by cmarshall

[Lacessit]

32 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

I apologize if I was too aggressive.  I am not patient with arguments that seem to me to be clutching at straws to exculpate our governments for their failure, which is how I read your raising the issue of obesity in the current context.  

Yes, the obesity correlation is a fact.  The question is what does it explain?  The answer is: not much.

You suggested that obesity can explain the difference in outcomes between the US and Viet Nam, which, whatever your own intention, is the kind of argument used to exculpate the US government while failing to give credit due to the Vietnamese government.  The Vietnamese conducted the most extensive contact tracing program in the world: they not only traced all the contacts of anyone who tested positive, but they uniquely traced all the contacts of all those contacts.  

At any rate the obesity hypothesis is flatly contradicted by the cases of Australia and New Zealand with their high rates of obesity and low rates of Covid deaths. 

It is probably more reasonable to conclude that if governments fail to apply the public health best practices to control Covid, obese populations will die off at higher rates than those with low rates of obesity.

Apology accepted.

"At any rate the obesity hypothesis is flatly contradicted by the cases of Australia and New Zealand with their high rates of obesity and low rates of Covid deaths."

To me, it's not contradicted at all. The low death rate in Australia and New Zealand is due to proactive prevention of entry of coronavirus to both countries. Even Australians who want to return are subject to quotas, in order to avoid overloading quarantine facilities. It's what is known as a confounding variable.

I don't know where you are getting your obesity figures from, in 2019 the obesity rate in Australia was 7.5%. Perhaps your figure includes overweight people, which is not the same thing. Compared with the USA rate of 42.4%, quite low. There are quite a few AFL footballers with BMI's of over 30, certainly not obese or they would not get a game. Muscle is heavier than fat.

The other confounding variable IMO is the level of BCG immunization within populations, there is some evidence tuberculosis vaccine is instrumental in preventing deaths and mitigating more severe reactions to coronavirus infection.

I'm not disagreeing some leaders have not been negligent to the point of criminality. Perhaps we are discussing at cross-purposes.

 

 

[cmarshall]

4 minutes ago, Lacessit said:

To me, it's not contradicted at all. The low death rate in Australia and New Zealand is due to proactive prevention of entry of coronavirus to both countries. Even Australians who want to return are subject to quotas, in order to avoid overloading quarantine facilities. It's what is known as a confounding variable.

So, now we find ourselves in agreement.  If fewer Australians got infected because of the effective public health measures implemented by the government, then that exactly supports the thesis of the Wallace-Wells article.  Public health measures are not a confounding variable.  The question at hand is not how to account for differential survival rates among exposed populations, but why some governments effectively protected their populations from exposure in the first place, while others let the virus run rampant in defiance of known best practices.

My source for the obesity rate was the CIA, of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate

We are not at cross purposes, exactly.  While there are no doubt thousands of factors that had some bearing on both infection and mortality rates, my contention and that of the author of the article is that 90% to 95% of the variance is due to the effectiveness or lack thereof of the public health measures implemented by the governments.  Factors like BCG immunity seem to me almost certainly entirely inconsequential, even if real.   For countries that successfully eradicated the virus obesity and BCG immunity had no effect at all.  So, those factors are not really worthy of discussion, except as intellectual curiosities.

We know that the governments that set out to eradicate the virus mostly succeeded in doing so.  None of the Western countries pursued eradication and none of them achieved it.  Why that is is the question at hand, not what are all the factors that might have accounted for as much as 1% of the variance.

 

[onebir]

6 hours ago, cmarshall said:

We have a natural experiment in Scandinavia. 

A natural experiment (in a few, rather similar countries) can support the notion that a factor is important in explaining a phenomenon, but can't prove that it is the sole factor driving differences between the natural 'treatment groups'*.

Think before accusing other people of poor reasoning.

For most of last year, Sweden was poster-country for inaction for certain political factions. How's that bit of cherry-picking extrapolation working out?

*To spell it out for the hard of thinking: other causal factors may exist, both between the countries/regions involved and/or in other countries (or indeed across time; this pandemic has not been a synchronous event).

Not understanding these other differences doesn't mean they don't exist. People who make that assumption should consider themselves ignorant.

 

[simon43]

[quote]

...a Chinese epidemiologist visited Italy and commented, "They haven't locked down at all."

[/quote]

^^^ This....

People's right of free speech, right to demonstrate etc seemed to get in the way of efforts to curb this pandemic.  IMHO, such rights should be suspended when there is a health crisis.

[sirineou]

On 3/17/2021 at 6:36 PM, cmarshall said:

Australia with an obesity rate of 29% and New Zealand with an obesity rate of 31% both eradicated the virus through vigorous application of public health measures.  The death scorecard so far reads:

               Covid deaths per million

USA                     164

Australia           3.64

New Zealand   0.53

Next theory exculpating the incompetent or indifferent governments of the West?

If you only have two people, it is easier to control transmission. . You put one on one side of the island, the other one on the other side, and a bunch of kangaroos in the midleg. Problem solved .????

US                     population     330 million        Zero            Kangaroos 

Australia         population       26 million        35 million  Kangaroos 

New Zealand population         5 million         zero            Kangaroos, but  some wallabies 

Edited March 18, 2021 by sirineou

[cmarshall]

The kangaroos don’t count, because the population of Australia is concentrated on the East coast.  But, it’s true that Australia has a small population.

How then do you explain this:

                                Population                          Covid deaths/million

US                          330 million                           164.11

China                     1.4 billion                             0.35

In fact, that’s a rhetorical question, since I know very well how you will explain it: China must be lying about its statistics.  First, we know that some of the American states have been deliberately under-reporting their infection and Covid death rates, since the excess death rate for the US during the Covid year is about 100,000 more than the confirmed Covid death count of 536,000.  Second, if the Chinese had a death rate anywhere approaching the American rate, they would not have been able to hide it. 

Your followup objection is likely to be: yeah, well the whole Covid thing is the fault of the Chinese to begin with.  It is true that the Chinese government screwed up by delaying announcement of the epidemic.  But that fact does not excuse the ghastly American performance.  Both the (South) Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency and the Taiwan Center for Disease Control were well aware after SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2015 of the possibility of a new pandemic originating in China.  They set up their own surveillance programs monitorig signs of an outbreak in China.  Both programs identified the Covid outbreak by Dec., 2019 long before either China or the WHO made any information public.  Both agencies immediately put into action disease control plans that had been prepared years earlier.

The US CDC was also quite aware of the possibility of a new epidemic in China and had set up their own offices in China to conduct their own surveillance.  The CDC Beijing office had 54 staff members including epidemiologists.  In addition, other US agencies also had staff in China dedicated to disease response including USAID.   In 2017, the Trump government in its wisdom cut the staff of the CDC Beijing office to 14, firing all the epidemiologists and closed the USAID and other offices.

Even if the US government decided to blind itself in this fashion, it could still have had access to the best up-to-date information and organized a prompt effort at control, just by asking our Korean and Taiwanese allies to keep us informed of their observations.  But they didn’t do that and that is not the fault of China.

So, let’s look at the scorecard and see the outcomes of these different policies:

                                                Covid deaths/million

US                                          164.11

S. Korea                               3.24

Taiwan                                 0.0000004

Neither S. Korea nor Taiwan ever imposed wide-scale lockdowns.

So, yes, the atrocious loss of life in the US was almost entirely preventable and was entirely the fault of the US government.

Edited March 19, 2021 by cmarshall

[jayboy]

On 3/16/2021 at 12:26 PM, cmarshall said:

In response to your vacuous criticism let me repeat the essential point: 

The gold-standard responses were those in East Asia and Oceania, by countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia — countries that saw clearly the gravest infection threat the world had encountered in a century and endeavored to simply eradicate it within their borders. Mostly, they succeeded. When it mattered most, no nation in what was once grandly called “the West” even really bothered to try.

Not BS.

Thank you for posting this excellent article.

[huangnon]

4 hours ago, simon43 said:

[quote]

...a Chinese epidemiologist visited Italy and commented, "They haven't locked down at all."

[/quote]

^^^ This....

People's right of free speech, right to demonstrate etc seemed to get in the way of efforts to curb this pandemic.  IMHO, such rights should be suspended when there is a health crisis.

Great. And when do you think those rights will be reinstated?

[Surelynot]

On 3/16/2021 at 5:26 AM, cmarshall said:

In response to your vacuous criticism let me repeat the essential point: 

The gold-standard responses were those in East Asia and Oceania, by countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia — countries that saw clearly the gravest infection threat the world had encountered in a century and endeavored to simply eradicate it within their borders. Mostly, they succeeded. When it mattered most, no nation in what was once grandly called “the West” even really bothered to try.

Not BS.

If one were inclined you might think some in the 'West' saw an opportunity to kill off the old, the weak and the sick, make a quick buck selling stock early, buying back in as the Republicans did, backing the right companies, starting 'medical' companies (as some Tories did) and generally make hay.......all we need now is a war and their fortunes are made.