zlacker

Does it even matter any more? From where I stand Covid-19 might have been much less devastating globally if it had been treated seriously in the early days.

In fact, based on the initial footage from Wuhan, countries should have adopted more stringent protocols when they repatriated their nationals, i.e. quarantine on arrival etc... If in doubt throw everything including the kitchen sink at just to be sure. But it is what it is. I just hope we've learnt from this and are prepared for the next one.

>>wilson+(OP)
I guess we have to accept the fact that when Russia or China is involved, then we cannot find the truth. The same can even be said of the US.

The 1977 H1N1 spread was never truly explained, here a possible lab incident in Russia was one of the possibilities:

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01013-15?permanent...

The Coronavirus from Wuhan, China has a similar story, only this time it is in China.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

To me a solid scientific explanation is still useful, e.g. the intimate study of the Wuhan lab into Coronavirus seems risky at best.

>>wilson+(OP)
It's clearly too virulent to contain as is evident nearly 2 years later.

Yes it matters. If China (and other orgs) are responsible they should be held criminally and civilly liable. Millions have died on account of what appears to have been reckless and dangerous gain of function research. If there's no accountability, it will happen again.

>>wilson+(OP)
In the UK we quarantined all people coming in from Wuhan, while flights from Chinese cities outside of Wuhan continued to run without restriction, even though it was known that the virus was there too.

There was a lot of wishful thinking and denialism back in January/February 2020.

The only country that got the initial response right was North Korea, they shut all their borders, and were mocked for it too.

>>chrisc+q1
How are you going to do that then? Without a painful rethinking of the world economy, China does what it pleases. That’s the realpolitik.

>>mnd999+92
The US could start by not funding gain of function research in China..

>>wilson+(OP)
It doesn't work. It didn't work for Australia and NZ. It just fuels racism and police abuse. What works is vaccinate as many people as possible even from poorer nations.

The disease was already in curculation in Europe and the US when we found out about it.

Its outcome will change the way we travel for years to come just like 9/11 has.

>>zarzav+r1
Japan closed its borders 3 weeks before North Korea. Several other countries too. I suppose one difference between North Korea and Japan is Japan allowed residents to return, however that's unlikely to be an issue for North Korea, given residents aren't allowed to leave in the first place.

>>mnd999+92
The world economy is already being re-thought. The pain has started.

>>zarzav+r1
It's reasonably plausible that what doomed efforts to keep Covid out of the UK (and the US too!) was travel from Italy, not China. Both countries had pretty decent contact tracing for cases linked to China and those people didn't spread it much, the initial outbreak cities of London and New York had substantial travel to the worst-affected region of Italy due to Fashion Week, and the first exported case from the UK detected in I think Singapore had direct ties to that.

Also, something definitely seems to have gone seriously wrong with Italy's response - they were detecting zero cases up until way too soon before their hospitals collapsed, which suggests they were doing a worse job of testing people hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms than even the US which had screwed up so badly it had an official policy of not doing so due to test shortages. Trouble is, Italy is currently run by the kind of technocrats the media likes, so there was no incentive to drag them through the mud. Instead the press spun other countries as worse because they weren't caught by surprise like Italy and so should've done better, without asking questions about how that surprise happened exactly.

>>wilson+(OP)
That would be true had COVID not also spread through animals and pets. We can’t control the animal response to a pandemic…

>>petre+X7
Why are you saying that it didn't work for NZ? Sure, they still got infections, but the scale is incomparable to those countries that didn't lock down travel.

>>mnd999+92
Well, the US media could report on it and the actors in government that funded GOF research in china, and their political supporters so that they could be voted out of office.

>>makomk+to1
The hospitals never actually collapsed. I remember this at the time - there were many reports claiming they were about to totally run out of beds, and this kept being upgraded by commenters into "they have already run out". I kept asking for links that proved this and not getting any. Later some patients got moved to hospitals in Germany but there was some odd stuff about it: an Italian politician was demanding to know why patients were being moved there when there were nearby hospitals in Lombardy with spare beds.

Overall the idea the hospitals collapsed seems to have been a form of telephone game exaggeration, egged on by media reports claiming there were so many bodies they were piling up (actuality: undertakers were refusing to touch bodies because they are mostly old and had been told it would kill them).

What did collapse were care homes. But not because of COVID. Staff fled in fear, often back home to Eastern Europe before the borders closed, leaving too many elderly to die of dehydration and abandonment.