Unit2Sucks said:

---

FiatLux - it appears we pose more of an infection risk to China at this point than vice versa.

Eliminating travel lowers the effective R0 of the virus but not as much as a full lockdown does. By the time we started travel bans, the virus was already spreading within the community and we took essentially no steps to do anything about the community spread until last week.

The travel bans could have been a part of a successful comprehensive response to the virus but Trump sold them as a panacea and didn't use the little time it bought to prepare us for the pandemic.

---

If you don't think this is insane, given everything else that is going on, I just don't know what to say.

The Chinese authoritorian communist government lied to its own people and the world. They ruthlessly clamped down on dissenters. They in effect killed the doctor who was warning about it,, and then apologized... talk about day late, yuan short.

The WHO gave them cover.

And now you think it's just peachy keen.

We're just operaing on completely different planes here.

FiatLux - this is old news. We have known about this for months and haven't taken enough action. I'm not saying China is peachy keen but how is that going to save our country from this virus?

We are operating on completely different planes. You seem to be focused on b1tching about China and WHO but they aren't capable of taking action in this country. The Trump administration has known about this since January and only recently began to take any meaningful action to address community spread. The intelligence community warned us this was coming and that it would be a disaster. Public health officials and others starting ringing alarm bells in January (read any number of opeds from that time frame). The administration repeatedly told us everything was under control while at the same time we had essentially no testing capacity or other plans in motion to address the problem that everyone else saw coming from a mile away.

I believe our government should be doing more to resolve this crisis. I have no idea how b1tching and moaning about China and WHO helps us in the near term, but please enlighten me if I'm missing something.

TheFiatLux said:

---

Unit2Sucks said:

---

FiatLux - it appears we pose more of an infection risk to China at this point than vice versa.

Eliminating travel lowers the effective R0 of the virus but not as much as a full lockdown does. By the time we started travel bans, the virus was already spreading within the community and we took essentially no steps to do anything about the community spread until last week.

The travel bans could have been a part of a successful comprehensive response to the virus but Trump sold them as a panacea and didn't use the little time it bought to prepare us for the pandemic.

---

If you don't think this is insane, given everything else that is going on, I just don't know what to say.

The Chinese authoritorian communist government lied to its own people and the world. They ruthlessly clamped down on dissenters. They in effect killed the doctor who was warning about it,, and then apologized... talk about day late, yuan short.

The WHO gave them cover.

And now you think it's just peachy keen.

We're just operaing on completely different planes here.

---

Nothing this large and public goes on in China without the CIA and other US intelligence agencies knowing. Nothing. We spend $billions on spy satellites, monitoring communications, agents on the ground... The US government does not rely on what the CCP says or on WHO or any other international agency for info, even though in January WHO warned it would become a pandemic. Our own intelligence agencies have been warning the administration for months.

The problem is, beyond the travel ban for Chinese from China, there is no evidence the Administration did anything. In fact, when people were publicly warning it would be bad Trump politicized it and called the idea "A Democratic hoax." Fox News perpetuated that dangerous myth obviously more worried about the DOW than the risk to American lives. People making noise at the CDC were silenced or even fired. Trump's elimination of the pandemic task force from the NSC was a mistake, but rather than just admit it and reestablish it when this crisis started (which is what he said he would do when he eliminated it), he put Mike Pence in charge. The same Mike Pence who had ignored and bungled an AIDS epidemic in his own state for months due to his religious fundamentalism and homophobia. Shouldn't someone who believes in and understands science be in charge?

My daughter lives and works in Japan. They have been wearing masks and practicing social distancing since early February and she was sent home with her office closing 3 weeks ago, which was well after similar actions in South Korea. It is not like Japan and Korea had any different information than our government had. We wasted valuable time we could have been preparing for this and if we had the impact would be much smaller than it is and will be.

Cal88 called it a month ago. I work for a medical gas production company on Guam. At my direction we began producing and building up oxygen supplies at the beginning of February and then when flights and tourism from Japan and Korea went to near zero developed a plan to turn a hotel we own into a quarantine site.

The Navy just began activation of its hospital ships this week, ships that will take weeks to activate and deploy.

Unit2Sucks said:

---

FiatLux - this is old news. We have known about this for months and haven't taken enough action. I'm not saying China is peachy keen but how is that going to save our country from this virus?

We are operating on completely different planes. You seem to be focused on b1tching about China and WHO but they aren't capable of taking action in this country. The Trump administration has known about this since January and only recently began to take any meaningful action to address community spread. The intelligence community warned us this was coming and that it would be a disaster. Public health officials and others starting ringing alarm bells in January (read any number of opeds from that time frame). The administration repeatedly told us everything was under control while at the same time we had essentially no testing capacity or other plans in motion to address the problem that everyone else saw coming from a mile away.

I believe our government should be doing more to resolve this crisis. I have no idea how b1tching and moaning about China and WHO helps us in the near term, but please enlighten me if I'm missing something.

---

The reason i keep point this stuff up is you insist on doing what these organizations tell us, completely ignoring the fact that the WHO completely bungled and gave direction that is malpractice for a health organization... and - at least tacitly - defend China. Something very odd about that.

YOu think the government should be doing "more." No, they should be doing smart more.

Here is a chart made using WHO, CDC, and other public data about deaths per day of outbreak. It shows the U.S. death rate due to covid-19 flu is much lower at the same stage of the outbreak than most of the other high-spread countries.



Here is the data from South Korea



None of that suggests these insance doomsday theories. None of it.

We are living in a society where hysteria rules, where you are not allowed to question the prevailing narrative despite facts... because those facts are just dismissed.

TheFiatLux said:

---

Unit2Sucks said:

---

FiatLux - this is old news. We have known about this for months and haven't taken enough action. I'm not saying China is peachy keen but how is that going to save our country from this virus?

We are operating on completely different planes. You seem to be focused on b1tching about China and WHO but they aren't capable of taking action in this country. The Trump administration has known about this since January and only recently began to take any meaningful action to address community spread. The intelligence community warned us this was coming and that it would be a disaster. Public health officials and others starting ringing alarm bells in January (read any number of opeds from that time frame). The administration repeatedly told us everything was under control while at the same time we had essentially no testing capacity or other plans in motion to address the problem that everyone else saw coming from a mile away.

I believe our government should be doing more to resolve this crisis. I have no idea how b1tching and moaning about China and WHO helps us in the near term, but please enlighten me if I'm missing something.

---

The reason i keep point this stuff up is you insist on doing what these organizations tell us, completely ignoring the fact that the WHO completely bungled and gave direction that is malpractice for a health organization... and - at least tacitly - defend China. Something very odd about that.

YOu think the government should be doing "more." No, they should be doing smart more.

Here is a chart made using WHO, CDC, and other public data about deaths per day of outbreak. It shows the U.S. death rate due to covid-19 flu is much lower at the same stage of the outbreak than most of the other high-spread countries.



Here is the data from South Korea



None of that suggests these insance doomsday theories. None of it.

We are living in a society where hysteria rules, where you are not allowed to question the prevailing narrative despite facts... because those facts are just dismissed.

---

Like global warming, the doomsday scenario won't happen (or wouldn't have) if we take (or took) dramatic action to prevent it from happening, not by dismissing it.

calumnus said:

---

TheFiatLux said:

---

Unit2Sucks said:

---

FiatLux - it appears we pose more of an infection risk to China at this point than vice versa.

Eliminating travel lowers the effective R0 of the virus but not as much as a full lockdown does. By the time we started travel bans, the virus was already spreading within the community and we took essentially no steps to do anything about the community spread until last week.

The travel bans could have been a part of a successful comprehensive response to the virus but Trump sold them as a panacea and didn't use the little time it bought to prepare us for the pandemic.

---

If you don't think this is insane, given everything else that is going on, I just don't know what to say.

The Chinese authoritorian communist government lied to its own people and the world. They ruthlessly clamped down on dissenters. They in effect killed the doctor who was warning about it,, and then apologized... talk about day late, yuan short.

The WHO gave them cover.

And now you think it's just peachy keen.

We're just operaing on completely different planes here.

---

Nothing this large and public goes on in China without the CIA and other US intelligence agencies knowing. Nothing. We spend $billions on spy satellites, monitoring communications, agents on the ground... The US government does not rely on what the CCP says or on WHO or any other international agency for info, even though in January WHO warned it would become a pandemic. Our own intelligence agencies have been warning the administration for months.

The problem is, beyond the travel ban for Chinese from China, there is no evidence the Administration did anything. In fact, when people were publicly warning it would be bad Trump politicized it and called the idea "A Democratic hoax." Fox News perpetuated that dangerous myth obviously more worried about the DOW than the risk to American lives. People making noise at the CDC were silenced or even fired. Trump's elimination of the pandemic task force from the NSC was a mistake, but rather than just admit it and reestablish it when this crisis started (which is what he said he would do when he eliminated it), he put Mike Pence in charge. The same Mike Pence who had ignored and bungled an AIDS epidemic in his own state for months due to his religious fundamentalism and homophobia. Shouldn't someone who believes in and understands science be in charge?

My daughter lives and works in Japan. They have been wearing masks and practicing social distancing since early February and she was sent home with her office closing 3 weeks ago, which was well after similar actions in South Korea. It is not like Japan and Korea had any different information than our government had. We wasted valuable time we could have been preparing for this and if we had the impact would be much smaller than it is and will be. The Navy just began activation of its hospital ships this week, ships that will take weeks to activate and deploy.

---

And for weeks MSNBC and CNN were calling this the Wuhan or China virus...

But just ignore this...

And I'll say it again, and you can ignore it again, it was after Trump imposed the travel ban, that WHILE IN CHINA the head of the WHO said

WHO chief says widespread travel bans not needed to beat China virus

Quote:

---

GENEVA (Reuters) - World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday there was no need for measures that "unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade" in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 361 people in China.

"We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent," Tedros told the WHO executive board, reiterating his message from last week when he declared an international emergency.
China is facing increasing international isolation due to restrictions on flights to and from the country, and bans on travellers from China.
There have been 17,238 confirmed infections in China including 361 deaths, as well as 151 confirmed cases in 23 countries and 1 death which was reported from the Philippines on Sunday, Tendros added.
"Because of this strategy and it weren't for China, the number of cases outside China would have been very much higher," he said.

Referring to the virus' spread abroad, he said it was "minimal and slow", while warning that it could worsen.

---

So we have CNN, NBC, Reuters and so on... but you just keep ignoring that.

I am totally with you FiatLux. I read the WHO report (it's easily accessible online) and it went out of its way to say China has their infection under control and to praise Xi and The Chinese Government for their response.

And can someone watch this excellent New York Times illustration of the early spread of the virus and tell me how China could possibly have their infections under control???

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-spread.html

And read this and ask again why the WHO praised China's response?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/china-trolling-world-and-avoiding-blame/608332/

I will be curious to see if observations about the actions of an authoritarian communist government are considered xenophobic by some.

TheFiatLux said:

---

calumnus said:

---

TheFiatLux said:

---

Unit2Sucks said:

---

FiatLux - it appears we pose more of an infection risk to China at this point than vice versa.

Eliminating travel lowers the effective R0 of the virus but not as much as a full lockdown does. By the time we started travel bans, the virus was already spreading within the community and we took essentially no steps to do anything about the community spread until last week.

The travel bans could have been a part of a successful comprehensive response to the virus but Trump sold them as a panacea and didn't use the little time it bought to prepare us for the pandemic.

---

If you don't think this is insane, given everything else that is going on, I just don't know what to say.

The Chinese authoritorian communist government lied to its own people and the world. They ruthlessly clamped down on dissenters. They in effect killed the doctor who was warning about it,, and then apologized... talk about day late, yuan short.

The WHO gave them cover.

And now you think it's just peachy keen.

We're just operaing on completely different planes here.

---

Nothing this large and public goes on in China without the CIA and other US intelligence agencies knowing. Nothing. We spend $billions on spy satellites, monitoring communications, agents on the ground... The US government does not rely on what the CCP says or on WHO or any other international agency for info, even though in January WHO warned it would become a pandemic. Our own intelligence agencies have been warning the administration for months.

The problem is, beyond the travel ban for Chinese from China, there is no evidence the Administration did anything. In fact, when people were publicly warning it would be bad Trump politicized it and called the idea "A Democratic hoax." Fox News perpetuated that dangerous myth obviously more worried about the DOW than the risk to American lives. People making noise at the CDC were silenced or even fired. Trump's elimination of the pandemic task force from the NSC was a mistake, but rather than just admit it and reestablish it when this crisis started (which is what he said he would do when he eliminated it), he put Mike Pence in charge. The same Mike Pence who had ignored and bungled an AIDS epidemic in his own state for months due to his religious fundamentalism and homophobia. Shouldn't someone who believes in and understands science be in charge?

My daughter lives and works in Japan. They have been wearing masks and practicing social distancing since early February and she was sent home with her office closing 3 weeks ago, which was well after similar actions in South Korea. It is not like Japan and Korea had any different information than our government had. We wasted valuable time we could have been preparing for this and if we had the impact would be much smaller than it is and will be. The Navy just began activation of its hospital ships this week, ships that will take weeks to activate and deploy.

---

And for weeks MSNBC and CNN were calling this the Wuhan or China virus...

But just ignore this...

And I'll say it again, and you can ignore it again, it was after Trump imposed the travel ban, that WHILE IN CHINA the head of the WHO said

WHO chief says widespread travel bans not needed to beat China virus

Quote:

---

GENEVA (Reuters) - World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday there was no need for measures that "unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade" in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 361 people in China.

"We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent," Tedros told the WHO executive board, reiterating his message from last week when he declared an international emergency.
China is facing increasing international isolation due to restrictions on flights to and from the country, and bans on travellers from China.
There have been 17,238 confirmed infections in China including 361 deaths, as well as 151 confirmed cases in 23 countries and 1 death which was reported from the Philippines on Sunday, Tendros added.
"Because of this strategy and it weren't for China, the number of cases outside China would have been very much higher," he said.

Referring to the virus' spread abroad, he said it was "minimal and slow", while warning that it could worsen.

---

So we have CNN, NBC, Reuters and so on... but you just keep ignoring that.

---

What is you think I am ignoring? Trump banned foreigners who had visited China in the last 14 days from entering the US. That was a good move, yet incomplete. No restrictions on Americans or from any other country at that time. And we already had cases in the US, it was already spreading with almost no actions to do anything about it in the last two months.

You want to make WHO the scapegoat? Trump apparently ignored his own intelligence agencies, why would he listen to WHO? Trump continues to ignore every major international scientific organization on global warming, who will you scapegoat (or do you, since we already have devastating ecological damage in the Arctic and here in the tropical Pacific) when the damage is undeniable and irreversible?

Besides, Trump now says he knew all along it would be huge (but did nothing and just said it would be a few cases and go away?). The question is, why do you keep defending him? I know why he cannot admit a mistake, he pretty clearly has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Why can't you just admit he should not have been calling it a Democratic hoax while it was spreading in this country? Why are you so invested in defending him? I don't get it.

The same goes for the "Chinese Virus" thing. Asian Americans have been physically attacked over this. If CNN, or whatever agency was using that term, they have since done the responsible thing and stopped using it. This is not a time for us to find scapegoats, it is a time to come together as a nation and world. This week Trump has started taking this seriously and is doing some positive things. His insistence on calling this virus "Chinese" is not one of them.

calumnus said:

---

TheFiatLux said:

---

calumnus said:

---

TheFiatLux said:

---

Unit2Sucks said:

---

FiatLux - it appears we pose more of an infection risk to China at this point than vice versa.

Eliminating travel lowers the effective R0 of the virus but not as much as a full lockdown does. By the time we started travel bans, the virus was already spreading within the community and we took essentially no steps to do anything about the community spread until last week.

The travel bans could have been a part of a successful comprehensive response to the virus but Trump sold them as a panacea and didn't use the little time it bought to prepare us for the pandemic.

---

If you don't think this is insane, given everything else that is going on, I just don't know what to say.

The Chinese authoritorian communist government lied to its own people and the world. They ruthlessly clamped down on dissenters. They in effect killed the doctor who was warning about it,, and then apologized... talk about day late, yuan short.

The WHO gave them cover.

And now you think it's just peachy keen.

We're just operaing on completely different planes here.

---

Nothing this large and public goes on in China without the CIA and other US intelligence agencies knowing. Nothing. We spend $billions on spy satellites, monitoring communications, agents on the ground... The US government does not rely on what the CCP says or on WHO or any other international agency for info, even though in January WHO warned it would become a pandemic. Our own intelligence agencies have been warning the administration for months.

The problem is, beyond the travel ban for Chinese from China, there is no evidence the Administration did anything. In fact, when people were publicly warning it would be bad Trump politicized it and called the idea "A Democratic hoax." Fox News perpetuated that dangerous myth obviously more worried about the DOW than the risk to American lives. People making noise at the CDC were silenced or even fired. Trump's elimination of the pandemic task force from the NSC was a mistake, but rather than just admit it and reestablish it when this crisis started (which is what he said he would do when he eliminated it), he put Mike Pence in charge. The same Mike Pence who had ignored and bungled an AIDS epidemic in his own state for months due to his religious fundamentalism and homophobia. Shouldn't someone who believes in and understands science be in charge?

My daughter lives and works in Japan. They have been wearing masks and practicing social distancing since early February and she was sent home with her office closing 3 weeks ago, which was well after similar actions in South Korea. It is not like Japan and Korea had any different information than our government had. We wasted valuable time we could have been preparing for this and if we had the impact would be much smaller than it is and will be. The Navy just began activation of its hospital ships this week, ships that will take weeks to activate and deploy.

---

And for weeks MSNBC and CNN were calling this the Wuhan or China virus...

But just ignore this...

And I'll say it again, and you can ignore it again, it was after Trump imposed the travel ban, that WHILE IN CHINA the head of the WHO said

WHO chief says widespread travel bans not needed to beat China virus

Quote:

---

GENEVA (Reuters) - World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday there was no need for measures that "unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade" in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 361 people in China.

"We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent," Tedros told the WHO executive board, reiterating his message from last week when he declared an international emergency.
China is facing increasing international isolation due to restrictions on flights to and from the country, and bans on travellers from China.
There have been 17,238 confirmed infections in China including 361 deaths, as well as 151 confirmed cases in 23 countries and 1 death which was reported from the Philippines on Sunday, Tendros added.
"Because of this strategy and it weren't for China, the number of cases outside China would have been very much higher," he said.

Referring to the virus' spread abroad, he said it was "minimal and slow", while warning that it could worsen.

---

So we have CNN, NBC, Reuters and so on... but you just keep ignoring that.

---

What is you think I am ignoring? Trump banned foreigners who had visited China in the last 14 days from entering the US. That was a good move, yet incomplete. No restrictions on Americans or from any other country at that time. And we already had cases in the US, it was already spreading with almost no actions to do anything about it in the last two months.

You want to make WHO the scapegoat? Trump apparently ignored his own intelligence agencies, why would he listen to WHO? Trump continues to ignore every major international scientific organization on global warming, who will you scapegoat (or do you, since we already have devastating ecological damage in the Arctic and here in the tropical Pacific) when the damage is undeniable and irreversible?

Besides, Trump now says he knew all along it would be huge (but did nothing and just said it would be a few cases and go away?). The question is, why do you keep defending him? I know why he cannot admit a mistake, he pretty clearly has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Why can't you just admit he should not have been calling it a Democratic hoax while it was spreading in this country? Why are you so invested in defending him? I don't get it.

The same goes for the "Chinese Virus" thing. Asian Americans have been physically attacked over this. If CNN, or whatever agency was using that term, they have since done the responsible thing and stopped using it. This is not a time for us to find scapegoats, it is a time to come together as a nation and world. This week Trump has started taking this seriously and is doing some positive things. His insistence on calling this virus "Chinese" is not one of them.

---

I. AM. NOT. DEFENDING. TRUMP. Show me where I've done that. In fact I specifically said we have bungled much of this inititial response. I cringe when he goes off on people at his press conferences. See, this is the binary nature someone referred to earlier, somewhere in one of these threads... There is no nuance.. It seems like (until this last post) is all you want to do is blame Trump and passively absolve the real culprits, and there is real culpability here.

It's not why would Trump not listen to the WHO - because had he, the situation would be clearly far worse right now - but why aren't YOU interested in how obviously the World Health Organization politicized this. The next time you quote a WHO recommendation just remember that Reuters article.

Of course no one, NO ONE, wants people taking actions against any one. But let's not pretend this is happening at a level higher than any of the idiocy that takes place in this (and other) country on any given day (and i'd suggest it's less). We would be seeing it since cell phones are everywhere...

Finally, I just got off a call with an editor at the Wall Street Journal and a client of ours The Biocomplexity Institue at UVA (my Mondays start verrrrrry early). I can't go into the details (the article will come out tomorrow) but i'll provide some thoughts then.

Have a good Monday!

TheFiatLux said:

---

I. AM. NOT. DEFENDING. TRUMP. Show me where I've done that. In fact I specifically said we have bungled much of this inititial response. I cringe when he goes off on people at his press conferences. See, this is the binary nature someone referred to earlier, somewhere in one of these threads... There is no nuance.. It seems like (until this last post) is all you want to do is blame Trump and passively absolve the real culprits, and there is real culpability here.

It's not why would Trump not listen to the WHO - because had he, the situation would be clearly far worse right now - but why aren't YOU interested in how obviously the World Health Organization politicized this. The next time you quote a WHO recommendation just remember that Reuters article.

---

Has there been a point to your posts? If so I'm afraid I missed it. We have known about this for months and haven't taken any action. Cancelling some international flights bought us some time but during that time our own government told us not to worry and took no steps to prevent community spread.

The CDC wanted to recommend that seniors not fly, but Trump wouldn't let them. We could have shut off domestic travel to prevent spread, but chose not to.

I'm not sure how the fact that this virus originated in China absolves our government from its inaction, or worse, since January. I sincerely hope that we ultimately extract some form of payment from China for their role in this, but right now the focus should be 100% on what we as Americans (including our government at all levels) can do to protect our citizens and economy. Any focus on China at this point is misdirection in a transparent attempt to abdicate responsibility by Trump.

okaydo said:

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Big C said:

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TheFiatLux said:

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Big C said:

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Cal88 said:

---

---

What a coincidence: I was just going to suggest, "Let's find out what Bill Gates thinks about the COVID-19 threat!" After all, he was in the right place at the right time and dropped out of Harvard to start a computer software company and is worth fifty or a hundred billion dollars (so he MUST know about everything).

---

Et tu Big C?

We're now going to diminish the opinion of people like Bill Gates - to what end? Honestly, you don't think he might have some insight into this the rest of us don't? He's dedicated billions of dollars to eradicating diseases, and I don't mind saying this, he's smarter than most of this board combined (would probably have to remove SebastaBear from that equation because his inclusion might even the scales out for us!).

And then of course we diminish... I mean, he was just in the right place at the right time, right? Or maybe he helped create that place and time.

---

Thanks for the affirmation, TandemBear, but I need to concede that Cal88 and FiatLux have a point. Bill Gates has probably acquired some expertise about pandemics the past twenty years or so. I wasn't thinking about what he's surely learned as a result of his foundation. My bad.

Gotta say, Fiat, yes, perhaps I diminished his opinion, but maybe you are magnifying his opinion. Suppose I had learned a whole lot about pandemics because I was donating $100,000 to fight them... would he know more because he's donating $10,000,000,000?

Is Bill Gates intelligent? No doubt. Is he smarter than most of this board combined? Well, I know that was an exaggeration, but c'mon. Smart guy, maybe even brilliant, but he was in the right field, at the right place, at the right time. I'm sure there are whole lot more brilliant people who aren't billionaires, than are.

---

Apologies for responding to a post from Leap Day...But I just started reading this thread today (I've been reading/posting on the OT coronavirus threads).

Anyways, re: Bill Gates. Don't know if this was posted yet.

But this video was uploaded 5 years ago, in May 2015:

---

Very interesting and very scary.
This is why the US should always have an agency responsible for pandemic response prepared up to date and ready to respond at all times. We don't have the luxury of time.
No smart leader would shut down such an office for cost saving purposes with the plan to get the team back together whenever we eventually decide we
need that team back.
We might as well say we will let all firefighters go. And call them back as soon as the fire alarm sounds.

NVBear78 said:

---

I am totally with you FiatLux. I read the WHO report (it's easily accessible online) and it went out of its way to say China has their infection under control and to praise Xi and The Chinese Government for their response.

And can someone watch this excellent New York Times illustration of the early spread of the virus and tell me how China could possibly have their infections under control???

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-spread.html

And read this and ask again why the WHO praised China's response?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/china-trolling-world-and-avoiding-blame/608332/

I will be curious to see if observations about the actions of an authoritarian communist government are considered xenophobic by some.

---

this is a berkeley board, so i have a feeling these are the same people now who in the 80s said we in the united states just need to understand the ussr, and we should coexist and that most "soviet" citizens are happy. who are we to judge what system is right.

LunchTime said:

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Go!Bears said:

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oskioski said:

---

this is a berkeley board, so i have a feeling these are the same people now who in the 80s said we in the united states just need to understand the ussr, and we should coexist and that most "soviet" citizens are happy. who are we to judge what system is right.

---

That turned out to be pretty good advice. Didn't it.

---

No. It didnt. Are you on crack?

---

Really? I would like to hear your vision of the Cold War that would have been a better ending.

calumnus said:

---

LunchTime said:

---

Go!Bears said:

---

oskioski said:

---

this is a berkeley board, so i have a feeling these are the same people now who in the 80s said we in the united states just need to understand the ussr, and we should coexist and that most "soviet" citizens are happy. who are we to judge what system is right.

---

That turned out to be pretty good advice. Didn't it.

---

No. It didnt. Are you on crack?

---

Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika were real, he ended the Soviet Union and broke up the Soviet Union and the Soviet Block, including letting the Bellin Wall fall and Germany reunify without a bullet being fired. A miraculous ending really, much like the ending of Apartheid in South Africa, nobody thought it would end without a fight.

Which Putin sees as a huge mistake and seeks to undo.

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Our big mistake was not creating a Marshall Plan for the former Soviet Union. We could have helped them reform their society. With serious investment, Russia and the former SSRs could have developed as Western-style democracies.

Instead, they became kleptocracies. Ruled by authoritarians and oligarchs. It turns out that by emphasizing extreme wealth and greed, Russia's ability to undermine the West is even more effective now, than under communism.