Do not agree. Government everywhere makes mistakes under emergencies. Just look at past responses to hurricanes in the US and the current wildfire in Australia. Maybe you could say every government is incompetent. But the fact is that China reported the cases very early to WHO, get the genes mapped very quickly, and decisively locked down Hebei. So I would say so far China has shown competence and resolve, against a tough virus.
Mistakes can happen but wittingly suppressing news is not accidental nor a mistake.
I was born in Wuhan and half of my family are currently holed up there. A few days before the Wuhan lockdown was ordered, coronavirus already made it to the headline in CNN and NYT, but there was not any headline news about the coronavirus within China. Heck my dad wasn't even wearing a mask on his 1hr metro commute to work until the day before lockdown happened.
In early January, government officials and news outlets were reporting: "There are false rumors about Wuhan having a SARS like virus. This is an unknown virus that's _probably not_ transmittable from human to human. There are only 45 confirmed cases. There is no need to panic. "
One of the officials even organized a thousand people CNY dinner as part of the CNY celebration a few days before the lockdown.
They had a thousand opportunities to curb the disease and alert the people, but the Chinese bureaucracy and leadership's imcompetence directly caused the coronavirus disaster.
Edit: January 21 news article on the thousand people dinner from a Chinese source. About 40k people participated, this neighbourhood is about 10 minutes away from the epicenter: https://news.163.com/20/0121/15/F3E3UTKI0001899N.html
Did you miss the part when they arrested doctors who reported the virus because they didn't want to deal with the virus during a local government meeting and banquet?
>Piecing together the events in Wuhan shows that for at least three weeks before the banquet, city authorities had been informed about the virus spreading in their midst but issued orders to suppress the news. (https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06... linked above)
Xinhua reporting on the Chinese Supreme Court's stance on the issue includes a section on the 8 people who were punished for spreading rumors and whether that punishment was reasonable:
Reading the translation, this sounds like what police would say in a parody, yet this is real. Thank you for sharing it and I hope your family and we all make it through this in good health.
Here in Australia the general sentiment is that the response has been good relative to the magnitude of the fires. At some point nature overwhelms any government.
Did the Australian government lie to the world and their own people about how bad the fires were and arrest people who posted on social media about them?
Well no arrests but the govt is investigating the fake coronavirus health department press releases made by some racist folks and which spread like wildfire on social media prompting the communications minister to step in.
As for the govt lying about the bushfires, yes most definitely, we had tourism chiefs out there on the offensive claiming Australia was fine to visit when most of the East Coast had the worse air quality on Earth for months.
We had a tourism minister standing on a half burnt Kangaroo Island which was still in lockdown from the fire telling people it's the best time to visit.
Govts lie all the time for self interest. And strangely many of the public totally support them doing so when it's their team or for personal benefit.
They were very late even in informing the people in Wuhan or Hubei. Even after everyone in the West knew about this new SARS-like virus, people there were still going around with no face masks or anything, no precautions at all. Disgraceful and a total failure.
His point is that their #1 priority was keep this under wraps instead of fixing it as soon as possible, even if it meant more people had to learn about it to protect themselves and not have the virus spread.
Coronavirus has disrupted many businesses in China, and I think the government knew this would happen if more people found out about it. So their priority was not getting a big economic hit, not solving the issue.
This is a good post on what happened, but there are others like it if you want to dig deeper on how they tried to cover it up:
I'll just copy these 2 paragraphs here to address your "China responded quickly" comment:
> To be sure, at first glance, China’s government has appeared to be more forthcoming about the latest outbreak. But, although the first case was reported on December 8, the Wuhan municipal health commission didn’t issue an official notice until several weeks later. And, since then, Wuhan officials have downplayed the seriousness of the disease and deliberately sought to suppress news coverage.
That notice maintained that there was no evidence that the new illness could be transmitted among humans, and claimed that no health-care workers had been infected. The commission repeated these claims on January 5, though 59 cases had been confirmed by then. Even after the first death was reported on January 11, the commission continued to insist that there was no evidence that it could be transmitted among humans or that health-care workers had been affected.
You broke the site guidelines badly with this comment. We ban accounts that do that, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
HN is a highly international community. Someone having an opposing view to your own is evidence merely that the community is divided. People here need to assume good faith in the absence of some objective reason not to. Merely disliking what someone else says doesn't come close to an objective reason.
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys what this site is supposed to exist for, so please don't do that.
> 'People here need to assume good faith in the absence of some objective reason not to. Merely disliking what someone else says doesn't come close to an objective reason.'
All this sounds good in theory, yet here I am on my second account after the first one 6 weeks ago was shadowbanned in less than 15 posts, simply for expressing my honestly held and well researched opinions.
Meanwhile I'm all the time seeing you on here busting various people's balls for the most ridiculous and trivial of things.
The person you replied to just now, while it's true that I don't agree with their comment (obviously they're wrong) they certainly ought to have the right to express their opinion. And the community as a whole has a right to see that opinion be expressed, to see the opinion itself and see the responses to it, so they can judge for themselves what is or is not the truth, without having a Nanny State/Government picking apart and criticizing every word someone writes.
You really need to lay off the bondage-and-discipline mod mentality. You're driving away good people from this site. Who the hell wants to stay in a place where they are constantly being nagged and harassed and even shadowbanned (one of the cruelest things that can be done to an online forum member) simply for having opinions? What is it about you personally that makes you so qualified to treat people this way?
Internet users are far too quick to assume that someone who disagrees with them can't possibly be holding their views in good faith, and thus far too quick to reach for sinister explanations like communist propaganda. This projection mechanism is destructive of the discourse we want here, so there's a rule in the site guidelines that explicitly ask you not to do it. Please read them and please don't do it again.
Chinese government definitely doesn't have it easy on the internet. Whole host of conspiracy theorists were saying: wtf couple hundred infected why are they locking down cities and closing provinces - they must know something we don't. And now you get people saying they didn't do enough.
In this thread people are still sharing articles about how there akshually 10s thousands of dead and how the virus was intentionally released from a government lab. And at the same time surprised that the government arrested people spreading panic on social media.
It took them a month to recognize atypical viral pneumonia and report it to WHO. Another ~10 days to isolate the virus (no mean feat, read the paper) and sequence it. Here in the Netherlands people would be just sent home on paracetamol - I had a pneumonia couple years back so I speak from experience.
Did you forget about what they are doing to ethnic minorities right now? They are running literal concentration camps. Of course they don't have it easy on the internet.
Agree that markets selling live animals should be banned or at least monitored more strictly. Do not think the other two points are relevant. Regarding cities, if you look at Chinese society and economy, urbanization is a very positive force that contributed hugely to people's wellbeing, including health. Also BTW Chinese cities are probably the safest cities in the world. Regarding hukou, it limits access to education and house/car buying, much more than healthcare access. Actually a lot of rural residents routines go to big cities to get healthcare service.
Some people still do believe them for what they have to say on this, for whatever reason. When you’ve got your quasi-ally (Russia) closing the 2000 km land border you know something is not right (especially as Russia is not known for caring that much for its citizens), but maybe the WHO officials know better from half a world away. On top of that the actual videos that come out of Wuhan are really heart-breaking.
The point is that China implements severe travel bans within their own country, and yet are reprimanding another country for trying to do something similar.
China also claims to have it under control (in the same reprimand) yet Coronavirus has snuck through their borders numerous times and is now in a dozen countries.
It is very much possible that this virus does, in the end, spread to most corners of the world. However, the fact is that by locking down Hubei, China contributed to the fight against the virus by delaying the spread of the virus greatly. So China is to be applauded for doing this.
Fist, Huawei will be mostly fine. They have the largest consumer market called China to them. Second, the notion that a company could be "independent" from the government of the countries that they operate in is hard-to-define at best. Google and Microsoft immediately shut down business with Huawei following Trump's order, without concrete evidence that Huawei had done anything wrong. Huawei is just operating under the laws of China, and also US, EU. They are not so different from the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft. All this is a tragedy for the 200 thousand Huawei employees and their families, to see the company they built with hard work getting ruined. And if China retaliates, it will create more tragedies for US companies, their employees and families.
They will have a lot to tackle in 2019 and 2020. This is a sad story, if they are targeted for no wrongdoing. But in the longrun, they should be mostly fine. Moreover, it is foreseeable that these events help Huawei accelerate their chip and operating system businesses, because there will be a lot more incentive for Chinese government and companies to promote Huawei's ecosystem.
Is there proof that any of what you said is true? The Huawei people I know are all working super hard to create high-quality products for consumers and enterprises. This, as far as I know, is a good thing for our world.
The information in the article is vague. It could be just them selling equipment to the government or it could be security related. US tech companies also routinely work with spy agencies if that's something.
