It's just as easy to find supercuts of Pelosi, DeBlasio, and other prominent Democrats telling people that they didn't need to start social distancing or that the virus wasn't airborne contagious.
Bad judgement is a human failing that cuts across party lines. To think that this is a long-term credibility problem for only some people shows a lack of a healthy diversity of news sources. At the end of this, everyone will go back to their teams' dugouts and prepare for the next political battle. Nothing will have been learned about credibility.
It did come from all political quarters, however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer. Notice how many of the clips from your video are from January or early February.
The POTUS was still publicly pushing the coronavirus = flu comparison in early March even after we saw what happened in Iran and Italy. Remember, he said on February 28 that being worried about the coronavirus was “their new hoax” from the media and his political opponents, so he himself recognized his political opponents were pointing out the severity by late February.
Edit: i don’t want to get too deep in the politics with this, I do agree with your ultimate point that most won’t learn from this and will simply return to their team’s side regardless of who got this one more right.
however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer
Now you're splitting hairs. You know who the first politician in the USA who was banging the drums in alarm about Wuhan and the coronavirus? Tom Cotton. Republican Senator. Do you support him now? Does his early conviction of the severity of this event put you behind him and everyone who echoed his concerns? Are you likewise now opposed to the people who were ridiculing him as a conspiracy theorist and fear-monger?
Tom Cotton was one of the people who were on this and warning of it early. So was Steve Bannon. There are others. Just because someone has an R by their name doesn’t mean they’re a homogeneous blob.
I think that’s great, I don’t agree with all their politics but they didn’t let themselves be blinded by optimism and looked at what was actually going on here. And the theory that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab where they were studying bat coronaviruses always seemed credible to me (Reminder, the 1977 flu likely escaped from a Russian or Chinese lab but this was never admitted either).
The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought (Hannity, etc.) Edit: again, he was calling it “their new hoax” so you really can’t deny that he was behind on this one :-)
"The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought"
How did you come to that conclusion? What about the Democrats in New York, which is the epicenter of the virus outbreak right now (certainly the US and probably the world)? I remember hearing someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close.
> ...someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close.
This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. Without those programs, many students have little to eat at home. It's a little disingenuous to represent it in another light. If anything, it highlights yet another weakness in our society.
Yes, of course they had reasons. It's not obvious what to do in a disaster.
But did people die because of that decision? Probably. Maybe a lot.
Tough calls. It comes down to who made those tough calls earlier. And that's not a partisan thing, or a smart/dumb thing.
Plenty of bad decisions to go around, but we probably shouldn't lay the blame to thick anywhere. Because it's chaos and people are adapting and changing in real time.
Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people and he has to shut down the state to slow down the virus. I guarantee he's going to be a different person in 12 months.
> This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school.
California schools pretty much immediately set up daily meal pickup when they closed (often, for anyone under 18 at any school site.) And this was already happening when they said that.
The theories which are explored in the Washington Post article (around the idea that someone Wuhan Institute of Virology might have been accidentally infected with the virus while studying bats) are completely different to the claim the it's an engineered bio-weapon that came from those labs.
(To be clear, Tom Cotton himself says the bio-weapon thing was just a hypothesis[1].)
There’s a mix there, AFAIK there’s no reason to believe the virus is a bioweapon.
On the other hand the fact that they were researching bat coronaviruses in the lab in the city where the outbreak began certainly is suggestive of a possible lab accident. I doubt we’ll ever find certainty of this though just like the 1977 outbreak of H1N1. Not impossible it’s just a coincidence either (after all SARS and MERS jumped to humans without any help).
I think you're misreading this - it's an opinion piece and it includes some speculation about how the virus ended up infecting people. It does not say the virus 'originated' in a lab and it's not 'WaPo admitting' anything.
Some HN readers who seem to be knowledgeable about genetics were discussing the spread 73 days ago [1]. If you don't want to read the whole thread, I'll also link to a couple specific sub-threads [2] [3].
However, I will note that a colleague of mine saw the virology institute's location change on Google Maps around this time. Free software legend Eric S Raymond mentioned this on his blog as well [4].
I'm pretty sure the Google Maps thing is a sign that the Chinese leadership heard these bioweapon rumors, and figured the best way to combat them was to require Google to lie about the institute's reported location.
There are plenty of ridiculous rumors on the Internet, why would the Chinese government react so strongly to this particular one?
It could be because the Chinese leadership has something they're trying to hide. But in China things are often censored all over the place with little rhyme or reason as well. "We know this rumor's false and ridiculous, any serious scientist knows it came from some country bumpkin eating an improperly cooked bat, but this rumor could potentially be destabilizing, so let's force Google to tell this lie for us" is certainly a way the Chinese government might think.
Is it created in a lab?
The Google maps thing is pretty weak evidence. It could be explained by the "oh crap people are catching on, we'd better make Google help with the coverup" hypothesis, but it's equally well explained by the "we know it's false, but we'll censor things willy-nilly because we're China and that's what we do" hypothesis.
I don't know enough about mol bio to really understand the genetic sequences.
To summarize: The evidence seems to be inconclusive, but certainly consistent with the possibility the virus is a Chinese bio-weapon. "Coronavirus is a Chinese bio-weapon that somehow accidentally escaped" is a possibly true hypothesis. There's not nearly enough evidence to say for sure. But it's a reasonable possibility, not tin-foil hat territory.
Suggesting it was let out on purpose probably does get pretty close to tin-foil hat territory; it seems hard to figure out a sane and reasonable motive for unleashing this on the world, without also requiring some much bigger, more complex conspiracy (which greatly weakens the prior probability of the hypothesis).
If it is lab-created, it probably escaped by a mistake, or someone not following the rules (e.g. the janitor who's supposed to burn the dead infected research bats sold them to a market instead to make an extra buck).
They react to all kinds of irrelevant bullshit strongly all the time. It's a gigantic unimaginative bureaucracy. It could very well be some peon 18 levels down doing something done 200 times prior, in response to some news article some other peon has classified as western propaganda.
Is this about whether Republican s or Democrats are better, or about how our politicians dropped the ball and the top one stayed in denial the longest?
I watched that video and no one on the left was making a joke of the coronavirus. They were all stating that the flu is more dangerous which while being clearly a miscalculation, not the same as calling it a left wing hoax so save your moral equivalence for another day.
That's one of the issues with hyperpartisanship. Everyone thinks that people need to be held accountable - as long as it's people they already decided were terrible. The truth is the response to this pandemic has been poor across the board. Go back and read what people were saying in February to see how unprepared everyone was.
Bill Gates, for example, is held up as someone who saw this coming. However, if you read what he wrote at the end of February about what needs to be done to stop the Coronavirus, you'll he didn't raise any issues about the way it was being handled within the United States, and viewed the main problem being the difficulties that poor countries would have handling it. Even a few days ago there were almost no leaders calling for mass use of face coverings. And there still seem to be very few (if any) calling for an implementation of measures like those that are successfully combating the virus in South Korea.
It's also one of the issues with a bipartisan system designed to stay that way - one side eternally blames the other for being evil incarnate and how their side's excrement has no olfactory emission. It's conducive to this hyperpartisanship and I really agree with some of the founding fathers of the US that political parties should be forbidden because of the types of dramatic intrigue that result, which hurt people the most during times such as now. I just call them both the War Party now because that's what they are.
Also, we should be careful about how much we eviscerate people on both sides politically during this time. If our leaders are too afraid of repercussions to make difficult decisions, they may make bad decisions instead.
I'm calling for moratorium on partisan finger-pointing. I think we're all in this together, and that's the only way we're getting out of it.
Your link is a bit different, she was in Chinatown to show people that not all Chinese people have the virus. Seems there businesses were stagnating due to xenophobia. She was wrong to encourage people to go out and shop in general but she was not wrong to try to stop the rumors surrounding Chinese Americans.
Not sure what that has to do with denial of the severity of the virus. Not to mention NYT just published a report confirming that the virus strain in the US mostly came from European sources, instead of Asian ones. Are you equating "avoiding Chinatown" with "preventing the spread of the virus"? That sounds extremely worrisome, to be polite.
That was on February 24th, a full week before there was a single case in NYC. Promoting local commerce before the virus reached that area seems pretty far from denying the level of risk presented by COVID-19 on a global scale.
You can cherry-pick different opinions from all over the spectrum. For example, Tucker Carlson took the virus pretty seriously early on, but he was one of the only voices on Fox News to do so. Views on the left have been more mixed.
At least that's been my observation, but I don't watch TV news; I just read about what's on it. I've been getting my news from WaPo and WSJ, both of which took the virus seriously from the beginning.
Not enough is said about people who saw it before it came. Relying on someone to do the right thing in the middle of chaos is unreliable. You really don't need to cherry pick to find examples on both sides.
As much as I disagree with almost everything Carlson says, I have to give him credit for going against the grain on this and a few other issues in the past. Lindsey Graham also deserves some credit for calling up Trump and trying to convince him to take this situation more seriously. There's something to be said for the strategy of kowtowing to Trump most of the time so that he will still listen to you when it really counts. That strategy shouldn't be necessary with a competent leader, but here we are.
And now, where is the truth? I would like not to be infected. I try to avoid being infected by flu as well. But maybe we really are overreacting. We don't have immune system trained for this - that is problematic. Elderly people and people with health conditions should be isolated. But that's probably it. Once the population has enough people with trained immune system, it will be "like a flu" or won't it? Who to trust?
I don't think the point is about an apocalyptic image of people cogging up and dying in the corridors or whatnot. It's the lack of equipments like ventilators. Also it's confirmed from many sources that the medical workers are all stretched to their limits and some of them even died from overexertion. That's probably much more convincing than some random videos.
I'd be all for holding politicians in charge accountable, but that's where everyone gets squishy depending upon who they support?
One guy's being wrong becomes another guy's "not that big of a deal".
By what metric will you measure "being wrong" for this COVID-19 pandemic? A super cut of video clips showing a reluctance to believe uncertain information coming out of China? Death rate compared to other OECD countries? Whether or not the great Hydroxychloroquine efficacy debate goes one way or another? Whether or not the ban of flights to/from China were effective?
When you are not in charge you can say whatever you want, it won't kill people. So that's why it matters. It's not about who you support. "The Buck Stops Here".
it's an ideal, not a metaphysical necessity. But we need to enforce the ideal because otherwise the powerful use their power to their interest and against their detractors. It is absolutely essential to hold them responsible for their decision making process if we value life in a liberal democracy or a classical republic. They cannot get every decision right, but they must at least get them wrong for a fair reason.
Otherwise it's just "personal responsibility for the many, riches and fiefdoms for the few"
It probably depends who you are taking your information from. For example, here is an expert saying that it is just like the flu[0] (Linkedin [1]).
The other part, is that we shouldn't expect consensus in something like this. Why? Because data is evolving and changing. This is in contrast to something like Climate Change where we have a large amount of post hoc data/analysis. Here the analysis is being done in situ and that is much more difficult. It should be unsurprising that opinions change as information changes.
The video snippet you linked is from January. You can tell because it talks about the upcoming Iowa caucus.
This is approximately the time that the first patient tested positive in the U.S. The video that OP references goes into February and March, so I don't think these are equivalent.
It's also true that both sides presume the worst intentions when they say the other side was wrong.
I can't get over the fact, however, that only one side was (and still is) in a position to do something about it. Moreover that one side had access to better intelligence about the severity of the situation, and that one side sowed the seeds of their awful response over the past three years with the various cuts they made.
Here's one showing the mistakes of left-leaning media I found in 2 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=wVDPVBZF2Xg
It's just as easy to find supercuts of Pelosi, DeBlasio, and other prominent Democrats telling people that they didn't need to start social distancing or that the virus wasn't airborne contagious.
Bad judgement is a human failing that cuts across party lines. To think that this is a long-term credibility problem for only some people shows a lack of a healthy diversity of news sources. At the end of this, everyone will go back to their teams' dugouts and prepare for the next political battle. Nothing will have been learned about credibility.