zlacker

This is easily explained by a combination of past experience (SARS), Chinese dictatorship (Western countries can’t realistically solder people into their homes), hubris (“our medical system is so good that we could easily handle a pandemic”), wokeism (locking borders is evil) and scientific failures in medicine (if it’s not proven by randomised controlled trials, it doesn’t exist). Add a bit of political infighting in the mix (which presumably doesn’t exist in China) and ...

>>tomp+(OP)
That's a mix of some 5-6 factors... what does "easily" mean here?

>>datafl+W1
Parent comment was highlighting that a healthy variety of plausible factors contributed to each respective country's outcome, and not all of them would have to be true to produce such an outcome

Not "easily" in the sense that it's easy to pinpoint the exact recipe, but "easily" in that the opposite outcomes would have been far more unlikely

>>datafl+W1
Maybe I should have written “obviously” instead. Basically, no need to invent “non-obvious” factors like “China had prior knowledge of the virus”. It’s definitely possible, but you can explain China’s success vs Western failure without that “hidden” factor as well.

>>tomp+T2
I'm not trying to quibble on the wording of your comment, but the thing is maybe you find it easy/obvious/whatever to combine those factors to explain this, but to me it's a fair bit of a jump.

Here's one way to look at it: if we had asked "how will China respond?" back in the beginning, how well would you have been able to predict their response if you had known the virus was of zoonotic origin? What if you had known the virus was of lab origin? I would think in the second case you'd have a lot more people betting that we'd get a swift (& deflective) response than in the former case, but it sounds like you disagree?

>>datafl+q4
Swift response in China is easily predictable by their experience and dictatorship. Taiwan reacted similarly, taking the disease seriously, because of their prior experience with SARS.

The suppression of information and subsequent deflection, I find much more problematic. They can also be explained by China’s dictatorship and their aggressive PR management, but still... one of the easiest ways for China to dispel any “lab leak/release hypotheses” would be full transparency. So far they haven’t done that. But refusal to do so can again easily be explained by accidential lab leak / accident hypothesis, whereas the original parent was proposing that China had superior information in advance... again, possible, but not necessary to explain the current sequence of events.

>>datafl+q4
China responded because they had already suffered from a previous outbreak of SARS.

They probably were aware the risks of a highly infectious disease and possibly had contingencies drawn up for this very thing.

The UK had planned for what would happen during a global outbreak and the Conservative government scrapped them and 140,000 people died.

>>datafl+q4
OP made the argument China acted more competently than the west, and that this is suspicious and supports the lab leak hypothesis. Another explanation is that the west simply acted incompetently, while China acted "normally". Unfortunately it's not conceivable to many westerners that their governments are hilariously incompetent. Unfortunately, because it precludes improvement.

>>adamau+c6
The Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee (THRCC) was scrapped by Boris Johnson in July 2019, and had previously been "mothballed" by Theresa May to focus on Brexit efforts.

Whether the existence of a group of 15 MPs including such luminaries as Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson would have made a marked difference is not so obvious.

Existing plans were not scrapped and some believe using these plans actually was a big factor in the lacklustre initial response. The plans were too specific on what had come before (SARS most recently) and didn't allow accommodation of the differences of covid. It took a notable amount of time to change direction.

I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around if one was inclined to do so, but I don't think disbanding one committee (despite its prescient name) was particularly notable.

>>bondar+m6
There are many stories were filtered out by Western media. Some not by media but could be filtered out by individuals selective ignoring.

For example: China built makeshift hospitals in very short period of time. This one is not filtered. Even Fauci suggested India should do that but in reality not many country can mobilize the resources. Another example is by strict locked down, Wuhan was sacrificed for the sake of all nation. Meanwhile the hospitals over the all country supplied volunteer medical personals and equipment pouring to Wuhan. There were too many registered volunteers even beyond the organizers requested. With enough resource concentrated in one place, covid was quickly under control.

It's mainly due to dictatorship system that other countries can not easily duplicate. This can explain most countries are "incompetent".

>>datafl+W1
"easily" part is that they all exist and they simply need to add up. No intricate interaction between them is necessary.