US intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic | Hacker News Reader

US intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic

washingtonpost.com

29 pointscyang089 comments

Any intelligence service worth its salt would have kept a close eye on the situation developing in China, so in that respect this is not unexpected.

Personally I knew this could be very bad when I started hearing news about the Chinese qarantining first Wuhan, then the surrounding cities. This involved huge numbers of people and was done quite swiftly and on a scale never seen before in modern times (to my knowledge anyway). Quite frankly it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I did wonder at the time how long before it reaches our shores (not that long) and what would our response be like (nowhere near as organised and focused although I guess things are picking up). I'm in the UK.

The newsworthy bit isn't that intelligence services noted the potential threat. It's that the White House chose to ignore them.

The White House ignoring sound advice and doing its own thing... we've had a few good years of that. How is that news? (By White House I mean one person, and I'm saying this in a jokey way)

Part of the problem was that we thought this was just another virus that we could control. We were over confident and it didn't help that our president thinks he knows everything. We have seen that most countries were unprepared for the avalanche this virus is turning out to be. I think that only the countries that have gone thru a previous epidemic have it under some control. The world was caught unprepared.

To be fair this has been on Reddit and Twitter since late January. So it wasn't exactly a state secret.

Here is the post that first alerted me to the possible pandemic 55 days ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/eusojf/conc...

Didn't the intelligence community warn of a likely pandemic with sars and swine and...

>Didn't the intelligence community warn of a likely pandemic with sars and swine and...

Yes, and MERS as well, and these warnings were listened to. Actions were taken. Experts deployed. Testing enacted. A whole machine of pandemic expertise, sitting dormant, shuddered to life, and pinched off the supply of fresh hosts for the viruses.

This time, not so much.

I seem to recall that we were told that those people could be hired back really quickly if needed while disbanding the part of the NSC that was supposed to take point on this.

And the reason they didn't become huge problems like corona is because those warnings were listened to and proper responses were put in place. Our intelligence agencies also shared that info with the rest of the world, so other countries could also be prepared and prevent the spread. None of that happened with corona.

There's an old joke about sysadmins that when they do their jobs correctly, they never get any credit because nothing is ever noticed going wrong.

Health crisis response is the same way.

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