CStarFlare wrote:
EDIT: for those who were around and paying attention during SARS, how does the Chinese response to that outbreak compare to COVID?
Government or population? (please read my previous post for background)
My boss was finishing his Ph.D. in Hong Kong, so he compared the two outbreaks as a single individual. He mentioned that the levels of panic may be more or less the same, but at the time the fact that the outbreak started from HK created big psychological hurdles. He was bereaved of friends, so the shock is still present in his psyche (I literally can see it).
Still to this day, people from the mainland and from HK have tons of conflicts because of the complicated political status of HK.
In terms of response, the government has been much faster, but please see my other comments below.
Partially a tangent: I do not see the Italian or South Korean governments building new hospitals in 6 days (they build two, 1k beds, in Wuhan), but then again it would be interesting to measure how many "beds per capita" the three countries have, which is a key factor for epidemics.
The fact that the Wuhan government also had *plans* for building an hospital in 6 days is telling: did engineers have blueprint for cases in which new hospitals were needed quickly? And son on.
The wild rumour I heard from colleagues is that the Chinese government has emergency protocol plans for a bit of everything, because with 1 billion something individuals clustered in big and not so clean cities, all kinds of emergencies can break loose any time.
It is a matter of fact: provincial governments are making titanic efforts to modernise and clean cities, but having 20 M people clustered in "small" spaces and offering them proper hygienic conditions is not easy.
I leave in a clean complex, but the back alley right beside the complex has rats. Lots of them, and probably with lots of interesting virii. The local government knows, and they are working to improve matters, but big changes take time.
Please feel free to have your own opinion on al lof these matters, but please also consider that the picture is very, very complex. I am not defending or accusing any government, but the sheer size of "what must be administered" in these cases, and the structures that allow this task, play a crucial role. Making decisions on such scales is supremely difficult, I believe.
Xer Xian wrote:
Those numbers are like one week old, now Italy has 230+ deaths and 5000+ infected (source). And while in Italy you can generally put some blame on the government for most things, this probably isn't one such time.
Please don't get me wrong but I did not have fresh numbers, and I was too lazy to find some (sorry, but I don't get paid to find sources to post on the intarwebs, and sorry for the
stronzo style of remark).
I am simply tracking whether family members of mine are at risk or not. You may have read that my current situation is a tad complicated. I wouldn't blame "the government", but politicians' general inability to operate through emergency protocols without feeling sorry (but please see below).
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China apparently managed to contain the outbreak but they can rely on an authoritarian system and a disciplined population, Italy has neither.
I somehow disagree, in the sense that in case of public emergencies there should be a number of protocols ("draconian measures", courtesy of BBC) that a government can swiftly apply to handle the problem.
To be precise: for emergencies, I think that a government can democratically debate what to do and how well in advance, draft a precise plan, and then trigger the plan as soon as the emergency appears.
Reaction times are crucial, so why waste time in debating decisions once it is too late? I cannot honestly see why democracy is supposed to be a short-term process of voting on stuff when it is too late to do so (...maybe the M5S disagree).
I experienced firsthand the 2009 Earthquake in L'Aquila and the 2017 snow blizzards (you know, when there were 4 metres of snow), and the implementation of these protocols was swifter.
True, these problems were *obviously* local, but my understanding is that in a state of emergency any government can swiftly apply "authoritarian" measures, and be within the limits of international law. There *should* be UN-sanctioned protocols on this matter, but my memory may still be bad.
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Still, they've taken several strict measures here (towns locked down, closed schools, banned gatherings, etc) but contagion is still spreading fast, hospitals in the most affected areas are overstretched and the economy is tanking. As I'm writing this the cabinet is deciding on whether to lock down the entirety of Lombardy (wealthiest italian region) and an additional 11 provinces.
In the Wuhan case, the province governor tried to play down the initial information before asking for quarantine.
Contagions could have been cut down sensibly (I have read all kinds of numbers in Chinese sources, so reliability is meh), so the decision-making was NOT swift and as authoritarian as it could have been.
Lombardy should have been locked down as soon as the cases emerged, if we follow the quarantine protocol thesis. I honestly doubt that the locals would not understand the issue, except for the stray contrarian.
I also disagree that discipline levels are different. Police here in Guangzhou has arrested 1k people or so for quarantine infractions (I risked arrest yesterday, by a means of an example.
Please read my previous post). The police force has issued a "plea" for people to cooperate, because they cannot see the point in arresting citizens over trivial matters (and slammers are full...).
On this note, I have colleagues from Wuhan (...I was negotiating a contract in Wuhan Central University before the outbreak) who suggest that reports about civil unrest in Wuhan will be forever hidden because the situation there was akin to civil war.
Hearsay? Yes, but out of 10M people, if e.g. the 0.1% of people explode and break the laws (i.e. 10k citizens), the only way to handle public order is call in the army. Where do you put all these people, if you arrest them? In a jail? What about contagion? Should the army quickly build new jails? (They probably could use blueprints for POW camps, I guess, but that would be for their own citizens).
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By the way, I *have* to move from south to north Italy for work (planned before the outbreak) and am currently staring at google maps trying to figure out what route I will have to take to go around the regions that could be locked out as of tomorrow morning. I also shipped 227kg of belongings yesterday and don't know whether they will be delivered anytime soon.
Do ask the police if you can move to begin with, and how. If they have to follow strict procedures, it is pointless to break them and end up in a situation in which you may antagonise them just because of the sheer stress of the situation.
Yesterday I literally had to wait for the police to show up and sort out the situation (bloody trolleys!). My Mandarin sucks, building administration and policemen speak Cantonese and Mandarin as a second language, but with a bit of an effort (and my boss' intervention), all was solved.
I hate Italian police and military forces, but on these matters they could be surprisingly helpful (...because of Genoa 2001, which I sit out knowing what was going to happen).
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Anyone for whom the internet is the only annoyance out of this whole situation should consider him/herself lucky. I hope that in your country it never gets as bad as it is over here
Not to be pedantic, but the situation over "here" for me is a bit worse (please see previous post...). Nothing unmanageable, as I have literally seen worse. Of course, the internet is all about having free access to the cheapest and most powerful drug: fear.
And now, the incredibly stupid post that reminds me of Churchill's comment on the "worst advertisement for democracy"...
kitten wrote:
you put her... "off the balcony." dude, do you just lock your wife on the balcony?
We use 5 minutes for small issues, 10 minutes for mid-size issues, 20 for serious business. The offending party must go on a voluntary basis (voting in 2 sounds a bit funny, I know: it's a split vote or a majority). When we were living in Sweden it was a easier way to cool off (well, in winter at least). Well, when we had an open balcony, anyway. Besides, we have spent the last 6 weeks quarantined in our building with permission to go out once every 4 weeks.
Do you now understand what you cherry-picked about, in my post? If not, please do not answer. If you do, please do not answer anyway.