Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is people saw China bring the situation under control in under six weeks and thought that containment rather than management was also an achievable goal here. They therefore interpreted the term "flatten the curve" in that context and assumed it would lead to containment. What they didn't see (and what was never really talked about) is just how extreme China's eventual response to COVID was relative to th…
That's if you buy the numbers from China at all. For all we know, China just stopped counting and is accepting whatever new cases or deaths come up. We know they fake other numbers. There's not reason not to think they aren't faking them here. If the news wasn't telling me about the Virus all the time, I would not know there was a "raging" epidemic. I only know one person who contracted the virus among my entire fami…
A few months into this, basically every single American media outlet was tripping over themselves to defend American values when it was abundantly clear that they were impeding our ability to successfully respond to this crisis. There was a huge appetite for bashing China / authoritarianism and pointing out the universal superiority of our system. The fact that we have largely heard nothing about the Chinese response (no criticism, no praise, no critique, not even general acknowledgement that it was much different than ours) from the government or the media suggests that it was a success whereas our efforts were a colossal failure and we don't want to talk about it or admit it: this situation doesn't align with the story we tell ourselves ((freedom and democracy) > authoritarianism, always).
> If the news wasn't telling me about the Virus all the time, I would not know there was a "raging" epidemic. I only know one person who contracted the virus among my entire family and friends group
We are basically a year into this with 500K dead and counting. How many citizens need to die before people stop feeling the need to create throwaway accounts to announce that this whole thing is overblown.