But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. COVID-19 attacked every country. With the exception of, like, New Zealand (but it affected them as well... had to shut down their borders, etc).
These viruses are a threat to all humanity. I just want us to fight them better and help everyone.
I think it's super important that we both simultaneously hold China accountable (rhetorically, in the social sphere at very least) for aggressive expansionary actions (i.e. vs Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines) and human rights abuses (Uighur, etc)...
...while simultaneously trying to help everyone do better, including the Chinese, to face common threats (like novel viruses, climate change, etc). And we must not start up a new Cold War with all its proxy conflicts, death, and unnecessary economic suffering and threat of annihilation.
As someone who lives in New Zealand, we were still "attacked" by covid all the same. The only difference arguably is the coordinated response from our government compared to others. Some of that is presumably culture too (we don't have a document held to a pseudo-religious standard ie the constitution for example) although being too laid back can have its consequences too if emergency health laws were to be abused in order to infringe on personal freedoms for example
What is most astonishingly stupid about this particular racism is that while the CCP doesn’t come off looking great in significant ways, Taiwan comes away looking spectacular! Japan, Korea and Vietnam also have a lot to be commended for major aspects of their responses! Asians in the United States have on average done an excellent job of staying safe and therefore keeping our communities safer! The rest of us should be studying their policies and behaviors with a mind to adapt and emulate not having racist delusions.
At least for now, the powers at be seem content just continuing the existing one.
It would be more accurate to say: these viruses are a threat to the current socioeconomic and sociopolitical status quo.
Take air travel for instance. It was key to spreading this and other pandemic viruses. Yet no one is questioning air travel. Note: I'm not suggesting it should be shut down, only that the idea of international flights being normalized should be revisited.
Looking at Forbes latest list to the richest people in the world tells us 2020 was a great year for wealth redistribution (from the bottom to the top). It was a great year for the status quo, for the globalists. As for the rest of us? 2020 was not so good.
Ultimately, the virus is a symptom.
It's more correct to think of e.g. Carlos or Elon as leading efforts to bake lots and lots more pie, and then keeping a lot of the pie for themselves. The dominant theme is that they're creating value that didn't exist before, not taking a larger proportion of already-existing value.
If we had shut down air travel early on globally (not just China...) and pursued a vigorous in-country test and trace program, we would’ve had a chance.
Maybe per capita but not per se. The US had 241 million international air passengers in 2019[1]. The UK had >160 million[2]. The US has two land borders with significant traffic and the UK had 21.5 million Chunnel passengers in 2019[3]. The volume of passenger shipping is also vastly higher in both countries. NZ also has almost no illegal border crossings.
NZ has a much smaller risk profile than these and many other countries. And this is born out by events. By the time the world became aware of what was happening the virus had already been spreading in Europe and the US for months. While it had been introduced to NZ it was still in much earlier stages.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/final-full-year-2019-traffic-da...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/303654/number-of-arrivin...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/304968/number-of-passeng...
It is true that in absolute terms NZ has small trade and travel relative to the UK and US, but those factors are far from being the only reasons that NZ has suffered less death and destruction. It’s more that the UK and US have done poorly.
Yes, hence my "per capita" comment. The risk of infection getting into a country is more of a function of how much total traffic it gets rather than the per-capita traffic.
> And those figures are for the country, not a city.
Auckland Airport represents the vast majority of all international traffic into New Zealand, and not just flights.
> The point made that Auckland has a lot of travellers.
Not by absolute number which is what matters most for how easy it is for a virus to find its way in and get established domestically.
> It’s more that the UK and US have done poorly.
This is an important point and I do not belittle it at all. My point isn't to defend the USA and the UK but to point out that the difficulty of NZ's response was enormously easier both absolutely and relatively given the nature of NZ's geography and the fact that the local epidemic had barely started by the lockdowns. NZ has a lot to be proud of in its response, but no reason to be smug.
In any case, the point I think is important, and which I wanted to make, is "more pie, not dividing up the same pie" which works with both our stories.
Edit: oh, and I think it's probably not true that the people at the bottom are having a "harder and harder time". It of course would depend on which metrics you pick, but I generally understand that sort of sentiment as popular in the media but wrong in a Better-Angels-of-our-Nature kind of way. I could believe that people at the bottom are getting a smaller share percentage-wise, but the actual amount of pie they're getting is growing. People are living longer, healthier lives, there's less food insecurity, etc.
Yes - and that is a hell of a lot for a small place. It’s comparable to something like SFO, but at the far end of the planet. But yes, the scale is small by international standards.
> the difficulty of NZ's response was enormously easier both absolutely and relatively given the nature of NZ's geography
This helped, but there are a lot more islands that have done poorly. I’m not sure that it was enormously easier, but the few week we got were key. In terms of getting governments to move fast, NZs government moved far faster than one would have expected, and the advantage gained by the short delay due to geography undoubtedly saved us a lot of deaths. We were on a vicious exponential growth.
> NZ has a lot to be proud of in its response, but no reason to be smug.
Absolutely. My view is more one of horror at the considerable reliance placed on gut feeling, belief systems and hope rather than science and cooperation.
Correction, NZ had its first cases of swine flu connected directly with travel to Mexico, the epicenter of the pandemic, 10 days after the USA identified its first cases which were community spread. In other words the virus had been circulating for some time in the United States already and just happened to be observed then. Case in point. The US/Mexico border is the most crossed border in the world with 350 million documented crossings annually and undocumented crossings in the 6 figures annually. Each crossing is another chance that the virus gets in and starts spreading domestically which is why the first case was community spread and not associated with travel to Mexico.
> Covid19 reached New Zealand before Berlin.
Maybe the first detected case but considering that Germany had its first detected case in late January in Bavaria a full month before NZ's first case, again directly associated with international travel, the virus very well had opportunity to have already gotten to Berlin and elsewhere undetected.
> Even back in 1918 the flu pandemic reached NZ in months at a time when that journey by ship wasn't much faster!
This was the massive demobilization from WWI with a rush of repatriation from the epicenter of the pandemic which had been active in Europe for some time, Spain was just the first country to admit it had an epidemic. Again, my case in point, NZ was infected long after most of the rest of world because NZ is out of the way. Thank goodness it is.
I disagree, and think small island nations do have much better chances. Otherwise we'd probably have great success stories in places like Andorra, Armenia, and Vatican City. I'm sure island countries to be more self reliant, with fewer major transport hubs that can be locked down.
I think from what we've seen, you need to be a small island nation AND have a strong policy response to have a chance at averting this crisis.
Taiwan had high mask usage early on. That would’ve helped a lot in the US.
Testing was very successful, actually, in places like Singapore. Didn’t help that there was official discouragement of wearing masks followed by culture-war mask avoidance in the US.