[MaupitiBlue]

> All of these other countries, including my own, had the opportunity to see what China was dealing with and to act quickly and decisively to prevent ...

You’re missing my point. Why should the other countries have to keep acting to clean up China’s mess? Shouldn’t China be responsible for that?

Also, given that China concealed the full extent of the outbreak for as long as they could, I disagree that the rest of the world had a fair opportunity to deal with it.

[thatswrong0]

The first US case of coronavirus was confirmed on January 20th. That's 53 days.. it took 53 days for the president of the U.S. to officially address the issue publicly. Most other countries were complacent as well.

We have had a fair opportunity to deal with it and prepare. We knew how contagious and dangerous it was. We could have screened all people coming into the United States internationally, and we could have started creating way more tests and have been testing people at a much greater degree and tracing people's connections to figure out who is at greater risk, and maybe even considered quarantining people as a precaution for a few days. The first case confirmed in the U.S. literally was in Wuhan and came back on January 15th. But we didn't do shit, and we still haven't really done shit, because we have been complacent and have been waiting to see what happens, like most other countries.

I get in concept what you're trying to argue for, but there's really nothing we can do to punish China for the corruption that allowed the wildlife markets to exist in the deplorable state they did that initially transferred the virus. And while they probably did try to cover it up for a bit, they also probably didn't know what they were dealing with at first. And they were also trying to squash it and implemented pretty draconian measures by our standards to put a stop to it.. they had many fewer cases than the U.S. currently does before implementing them.

I mean we could issue sanctions I guess.. but you would have to think about how that would affect our economy because we are so interconnected to them via trade. At this point I don't think our economy needs even more chaos and turmoil.

[scurvy]

>We have had a fair opportunity to deal with it and prepare. We knew how contagious and dangerous it was. We could have screened all people coming into the United States internationally<

How? Keep them at the airport for two days while the test results were out? Temperature screening here proved ineffective.

[cryptonector]

Given the difficulty we've had getting a testing program going, the only thing that could have been done here in the U.S. is to shut down international travel -- not just to affected areas, but ultimately, everywhere, for a while. We're generally very reluctant to do that sort of thing, and yet the government did shut down travel from China.

BTW, January 15 was around the time of impeachment, wasn't it. Ah yes, the articles were sent the day after. For many of the 53 days you mention, our collective attention was utterly consumed here by the trial. Everyone knew non-removal was a forgone conclusion, and that the trial was distracting. Now I wonder if it distracted from responding to covid-19.

[scurvy]

To be fair, you're right that China embargoed virus samples from leaving the country. That did put other countries at a disadvantage from creating functional test kits.

They also covered it up until the whistleblower came along.