I would prefer to isolate them rather than force everybody into isolation? I suppose if they want to come out while the virus ravages the young they could but that wouldnt be ideal.

Thankfully it wasn't so viral I had heard of it before this :)

No they didn't. They went to China and blindly praised Chinese efforts. On March 11th, they declared a Global Health pandemic. Here's what I published on my podcast January 28th:

"You see, the disease was first noticed in early December. Locking down Wuhan was very impressive, but the chances are the horse has already left the barn. Over four million people left the city between the time of initial detection and when they shut the doors.

If the disease can be transmitted during its dormant period of up to 2 weeks then millions of people could have left, undetected, as carriers.

If the disease is contagious when there are no symptoms, then there’s no way to get a leash on it now."

This was a month before the WHO declared it to be so. I'm no scientist, but it didn't require one.

I went on to say:

"One of the problems is, we don’t have good information.

And the reason we lack that information is tied directly to the reason city authorities waited so long to intervene?

It is basic: midlevel governors in Communist China don’t pass bad news up the chain. Bad news indicates they aren’t good at their jobs. It can get them canned, or worse. Instead, like Richard Madoff, they try to paper over the bad stuff until it gets to be okay. Sometimes, as with Richard Madoff, this just makes things worse. A lot worse.

To put it another way, the sign of good management is good outcomes. And so reported outcomes, no matter what the reality, are good."

I praised the WHO then - because I didn't realize how much they had been corrupted. I expected standard interventions would be applied - I didn't realize the WHO had already decided not to apply them, because Beijing didn't want to.

Oh, and I think Trump is a vain idiot. I doubt he realizes any mistakes - he's too good at getting other people to pay.

The WHO has been awful. They simply repeated Chinese garbage information (and dismissed early Taiwanese input). The problem, of course, if that you can't predict *which* disaster movie will strike. An asteroid could hit tomorrow and we'd point fingers at cutting asteroid searching efforts. Or Yellowstone could go up and we'd point fingers at not investing enough in vulcanology. Or a major Earthquake could hit Oregon - same. There are lots of predictable disasters, you can't actually prepare for every one of them.

On a more focused case, I'm not sure what the proper response would have been. Initial calls were for borders with China to remain open - probably because Trump closed that. That almost certainly delayed things. He continued to shut down borders with the proper authorities mocking him. It was probably the right thing to do though.

There hasn't been an actual ventilator shortage, so I don't suppose that is added to the list of failures.

There wasn't effective case tracing. But the US can't do the sort of tracing that other countries can - we can't even find 10 million illegal immigrants - so that's a nonstarter.

There needed to be support for the financial hit. That was done, although it'll never be enough. But he gets a passing grade here.

Basically the one core thing a President can do that he didn't do well enough was messaging - Trump was almost certainly awful at that (I don't know, I've never managed to watch a whole speech of his).

But even if he had been brilliant he would have been pilloried and the effect of his speaking would have been awful.

As far as this precise criticism: I don't think the lack of a Pandemic Response Team had much impact - just as the Genocide Council hasn't done much to stop any genocides.

The social impacts may well be greater than the medical ones.

The Spanish Flu wasn't from Spain, but that was where it was first broadly reported and so that was how it got its name. The US story is hogwash on a stick, of course. Crafting it and pushing it is part and parcel of the propaganda effort that included arresting doctors who reported on the disease in the early days. In reality, we don't know what *caused* the virus although the most likely answer seems to have been a containment screw up in a lab known for them. The lab was likely engaging in legitimate research. The blame falls on the Communist Party information control infrastructure - just as it did in Chernobyl.

However, using a place name is not applying blame. Nobody blames the Spanish for the Spanish Flu or the people of Lyme for Lyme Disease. I'm only using WURS because the attempt not to use a place name is an attempt by the CCP to disassociate their likely actions from the destruction that followed. So while a name doesn't lead to blame, I will ignore this effort *not* to have a related place name. And I will ignore WHO official conventions because they have been complicit the entire time.

I am not calling it the Chinese Flu or something like that because 1) China is too reliable a source of epidemics for that to be descriptive. And 2) 'Chinese' has a broader cultural/ethnic association that doesn't have the same geographic focus. Being Chinese is in no way a cause of this disease. This would be like calling MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) the Muslim or Arab Flu because it emerged from Saudi Arabia. Being Muslim or Arab didn't cause MERS and being Chinese didn't cause WURS.

We've already seen it. Social media is redefining our world and very very quickly. People lose jobs, are mocked by millions, drive panics etc... Facebook values very quickly become social values and then acquire the force of law.

Without any judgement on to whether the changes are good or not, they happen. The social shift on gay marriage happened in very little time, and was driven by social media.

Currently, we've gone from Facebook panic on the virus to extremely judgmental perspectives on dangerous activity (insert your definition of dangerous here, it is changing regularly but it was having private masks a few weeks ago) to not just a call for personal responsibility but actual legal attempts to eliminating the freedom of assembly, worship and even (in a flowback) of speech. You can't meet people in person, but Twitter, Facebook etc... follow WHO directives on what you can and can not say about WURS.

Facebook results in government power, government power results in Facebook limits, rights are limited in the name of perfectly reasonable values. It is one heck of a circle.

The story covers that too :)

I've been working at home forever. My kids are largely self-managing. etc... I've taken a massive pay cut, but am still okay. But I know people looking out their window and calling the cops on lone folks on walk without masks. I can definitely see supply chain problems beginning to creep in in important ways. As a weird little example, the cocoa trading towns have shut down or small shops in Europe that have been allowed to reopen are lacking their supplies.

And, of course, lots of people don't have jobs and that will creep upwards - trickle up economics.

Plus, the more money the government issues the less meaningful and valuable one's savings will be. One way or another there will be a future shift in resources to handle the emergency.

After the Diamond Princess I was flying home. Other people on the plane were delighted because they'd gotten a great deal on a cruise. I was kind of shocked at their excitement.