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Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

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Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#81

Post by Khaine »

stadium wrote: post #60
disabled wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original submitter comment: Agreed. However, I am a dual US|EU (Croatian) citizen living in Croatia. I am culturally American. The US had the expertise, technological capacity, and economic investment capacity to be able to eradicate the virus. Very few governments have similar resources and the ability to scale like the US government, which is quite unique. The issue was the political party that we had in place, wit…

> The US had the expertise, technological capacity, and economic investment capacity And incompetent leadership that foundered an opportunity to be the heroes of a generation.

I'm no trump fan, but his administration did fund operation warp speed, which funded vaccine research and support vaccine production capacity

Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#82

Post by _y5hn »

spankyspangler wrote: post #58
top_post wrote: post #19

Man, all the WHO bashing comments are getting downvoted pretty quickly, except: - WHO took a _long_ time to declare a pandemic when member countries were asking for it. - WHO actively discouraged international border closures for containment. - WHO took way too long to declare aerosol transmission even when countries had identified it. In a global scale event like this, there's no individual country who should have b…

The WHO lost a lot of credibility (deserved or not). They clearly either did not have a good grasp of the science and evidence while they were issuing their proclamations, or they were attempting to steer reality away from certain problematic scenarios for certain interests that have corrupted the organization. Or both. The bigger problem was not the WHO, it's very common for such organizations to be highly dysfuncti…

WHO, being an NGO, has no authority, governments do. States can either improve by cooperation, or become dysfunctional, but they are the authorities in this world.

Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#83

Post by vore »

whimsicalism wrote: post #62
cheeri0 wrote: post #55

I always wondered why people thought quicker lockdowns in Chyna would have stopped covid-19 from spreading since no one knew who was infected and a single person who escaped the country during the arbitrary quarantine would have made the whole thing pointless. I'm also confused why they think a virus with such a low death rate is important. The only thing I can think of is a shocking percent of people don't actually…

You don't have to be a genius to realize that 600k deaths even with lockdowns was quite bad. China managed to pretty much completely mitigate hundreds of thousands of deaths just by having a reasonable policy response. It makes me embarrassed to live where I do

In GP's other comments they're pretty set on downplaying the pandemic. Them spelling China as "Chyna" is not a good sign in that department either.

Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#84

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mxcrossb wrote: post #59
whimsicalism wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was very early in the pandemic, I doubt that many people had masks early, and the problem of people hoarding was very real and medical professionals were having a lot of difficulty acquiring PPE. I think it was a difficult situation, I don't think they handled it the best they could have, but the response (in the context of massive amounts of hoarding) was understandable. I know that this will not be a popular t…

Half a year into the pandemic the president of the United States was filling stadiums was maskless supporters. The WHO seems completely willing to fall on their sword over COVID, and indeed they failed in many ways. But in the long run, we’re seeing a disaster of anti intellectualism around the world, and the next pandemic may be just as bad as this one.

I mean, I don't think that anti-intellectual trend can be divorced from the general messaging problems here. If you roll back to mid-March 2020, things like

* Masks don't help, there's no point in wearing them

* Lots of people are gonna get infected, all we can do is tamp down this current spike

* We'll go back to our normal lives in a month or two

were all well within what was reported to be the expert consensus at the time.

Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#85

Post by cycomanic »

I agree that the WHO bears some responsibility, however much stems from the fact how they are funded. Because they rely on essentially "donations" from member countries, they can't effort to offend anyone. There was immense pressure from many countries not to declare a pandemic because of the economic implications.

We have actually seen similar patterns in many countries. Strong resistance to measures because of the fear of economic effects and pressure from industry. Only when it was really too late did they implement measures. Similarly as soon as things looked up again they opened everything way too quickly which caused the inevitable second and third waves.

Take Germany for example, while they had a good initial response, much of that advantage was squandered because they did not really investigate how the virus spread and wanting to keep the economy (especially the large companies) running at all cost. This lead to measures like being very harsh about only few people meeting outside, but at the same time many factories etc, keeping to work without significant distancing, likely a much larger spread vector.

Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#86

Post by throwawaysea »

whimsicalism wrote: post #64
throwawaysea wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if it would have been unprecedented but the Chinese government knew what the reality of the virus was from what they observed in Wuhan - they just didn’t let the rest of the world know, and the WHO didn’t want to contradict the CCP’s claims (see the Business Insider link in parent comment). This delayed travel bans issued by other nations, such as Trump’s ban (issued on Jan 31). China didn’t stop intern…

China was warning about the virus pretty early on. When you compare the timescales that China is being criticized on with the timescales for the US or Europe to react, it's laughable. People criticize China for taking days to release information when it took weeks if not months for most of the developed world to do absolutely anything. I was in China in early-mid january, there were warnings about the Wuhan virus all…

That's very interesting. Thanks for sharing. Out of curiosity, did they actually call it the "Wuhan virus" in the warnings you are referencing?

How do you reconcile the transparency you saw on the ground with the fact that early reports were suppressed or downplayed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_Chi...), or that a journalist was arrested and sentenced to years of jail for reporting on COVID (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/world/asia/china-Zhang-Zh...), or that China may have misled the world and hoarded COVID supplies (https://abc7news.com/china-misled-world-coronavirus-us/61470...). Is it possible that China was trying to walk a fine line by being transparent in those settings where it would be futile to lie, while acting differently in other settings to serve their own interests as much as possible? I'm genuinely curious to hear the opinion of someone who was in the middle of all this.

Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#87

Post by _y5hn »

rcpt wrote: post #77
_y5hn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bioweapon? A new strain of virus that can mutate to unknown properties, and to which virtually nobody have immunity?

Even if it weren't developed as a weapon (I think the current theory is they were researching possible coronavirus vaccines) the WHO shouldn't be so complacent in letting China control the investigation.

WHO is an NGO and have absolutely no authority.

I agree we shouldn't trust reports from China.

Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#88

Post by raisedbyninjas »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #67
mxcrossb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half a year into the pandemic the president of the United States was filling stadiums was maskless supporters. The WHO seems completely willing to fall on their sword over COVID, and indeed they failed in many ways. But in the long run, we’re seeing a disaster of anti intellectualism around the world, and the next pandemic may be just as bad as this one.

> the next pandemic may be just as bad as this one. or worse. Keep the aerosol vector, but make it even more effective. Increase the effectiveness of surface transmission. Throw in greater resistant to surfactants (soap) and hand sanitizers. boom!

Your scenario only increases infectiousness. Many viruses are more deadly than covid 19. H5N1 is about 60% fatal, more deadly than ebola. It's quite difficult to contract at least until researchers genetically modified it to be airborne. They didn't need permission for this research and didn't even perform it in the highest safety level labs.

Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#89

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mxcrossb wrote: post #72
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the next pandemic may be just as bad as this one. or worse. Keep the aerosol vector, but make it even more effective. Increase the effectiveness of surface transmission. Throw in greater resistant to surfactants (soap) and hand sanitizers. boom!

I always try to use HIV as my point of reference for COVID-19. We got off lucky by that measure. So maybe my pessimism is unfounded, but I really wish we had learned more lessons from HIV.

From what I understand, HIV is fairly difficult to transmit, requiring an exchange of infected body fluids. This makes it deeply traumatic because the people you're most likely to infect will be people extremely close to you. To some extent this is true of almost any transmissable disease, but HIV added the twist that infection is very, very unlikely to happen between two individuals that are not physically intimate with each other.

In this sense, HIV doesn't seem like a particularly good model for anything like a coronavirus pandemic. Aerosol transmission just totally changes almost every aspect of the resulting pandemic.

What lessons do you wish we had learned from HIV?

Re: Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

#90

Post by titzer »

cheeri0 wrote: post #55

I always wondered why people thought quicker lockdowns in Chyna would have stopped covid-19 from spreading since no one knew who was infected and a single person who escaped the country during the arbitrary quarantine would have made the whole thing pointless. I'm also confused why they think a virus with such a low death rate is important. The only thing I can think of is a shocking percent of people don't actually…

In the early part of a pandemic, when there are only a few tens of people infected, and especially when international travel is involved, preventing each one of those persons is eliminating a new cluster in an area around that person. Slowing the spread is important at all stages, but particular important and effective at the beginning. Early quarantine could mean the difference between no outbreak, a little outbreak, or a huge outbreak. It's particularly important to buy enough time putting a testing program in place so that you can identify and quarantine people, which is vastly more effective than broad lockdowns.

Of course, we could just throw our hands up and admit defeat and roll in whatever shit the dirtiest of us swine digs up and let bugs run rampant in the population, because it's "just the flu" or some idiotic crap like that.

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