"But Taiwan has also been taking a relatively experimental approach to the pandemic with technology. Like working with civic hackers to code its way out of the pandemic. Today on the show, we dive into Taiwan's pandemic policies and ask: Would the U.S. ever take a similar approach?"
https://www.postal-reporter.com/blog/white-house-axed-usps-p...
I am unaware of a US implementation of a direct copy of the Taiwanese webapp. In the US through at least May, health authorities were scrambling to get enough PPE to keep the healthcare system functional.
Don't you have to address those fundamental issues first?
Singapore has certainly decided to show how bad it can be, but the root of that is an authoritarian mandate, not the contact tracing itself.
But there's a lot of room outside of "do nothing" and "omnipresent perfect surveillance" to do good things with civic technology, including non-pandemic stuff. Why aren't all public records online and searchable through a single engine? Or all forms editable and submittable? Or budgets and financial reports navigable or comparable? I'd love to be able to know how some random municipality is going to gouge me before I move there.
There's loads of room for good solutions for these and tons of other pain points. But as far as I can tell, American government is scared of letting go so the private sector can develop these things. And it's not imaginative or technically competent enough to want or develop this kind of stuff on its own. Or maybe it's not organized or unified enough?
Are we talking about the US? In what metric is the USA the epicenter? In deaths per capita? In infections per capita? I’m pretty sure US leads in testing per capita. I’m not being snarky, I really don’t know if you are referring to USA, and in what way.
Depending on the source of your data, extrapolations on personal experience or rumor or innuendo, or distrust of different government systems, there may very well be massive outbreaks - on the level or exceeding per capita infections in the US. Frankly, we don't have solid data, so it's hard to say.
The US has, best case, massive testing shortfalls and untested cases, periodic government attempts to downplay the issue, and chaotic spikes and overwhelmed systems. It is almost certainly still better in all of these areas than those countries listed above. We can't do anything about that though.
It's fog of war. But you're probably getting downvoted because the tone of your message seems to be one of 'pfft the US isn't that bad' - which by most metrics we seem to have, isn't the case, at least in high profile areas like Southern California. Keeping it from not being overly bad, near as we can tell, also requires taking serious and often painful approaches to the problem to mitigate it, which doesn't happen if it isn't taken seriously. Not taking those measure seems to make the problem even worse - in the sense of concrete, real people being dead that otherwise wouldn't be.
To more directly answer your question - in total number of REPORTED new cases and deaths, US is solidly number 1. As a percent of population, the only sizable country with more cases than the US right now is the Czech Republic - which is serious, but isn't going to get headline news like the US will. By tests per capita, the US is doing reasonably well - the only largish country doing better so far is the UK. However, considering the scope of it's spread in the US, that is probably misleading. Most countries haven't NEEDED to test so much.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Feel free to click on the various sorting widgets to see it from different views.
People are constantly underestimating the Chinese relationship with contagion. I guarantee that China would not be able to hide any major covid outbreaks. Word would escape to outside relatives.
Chinese people are extremely averse to contagion, coupled with a deep surveillance infrastructure and strong authoritarian government they are in a solid position to hold covid at bay.
Regarding China - https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/china-up...
As I said, there is plenty of room to dig and analyze.
US is maybe 3rd, behind United Arab Emirates, and UK. But countries like Iceland and Korea that used aggressive test-trace-isolate to get the epidemic in control, they did get the epidemic in control so they don't have a continuous need for large daily volumes of testing.
Note, you have to play around w selecting different countries and dates on that website, I wish they had some kind "select by GDP quartile" or something.
Would the US ever admit their exceptionalism is perhaps flawed?
Would the Europeans ever admit their exceptionalism led to ignoring Taiwan's alarm bells?
I highly doubt it. They are not stupid, they know what's going on in China and they are not telling everybody else because they are worried of losing credibility as leaders.
Almost all of our current response assumes the Chinese Communist Party is capable of being transparent and honest.
This is what worries me but perhaps the Chinese money has too much sway on YC and Silicon Valley in general to realize you are all being led into a death trap.
Pay attention to January 6th very carefully. A few hedge fund managers I speak to tells me they are hedged for a potentially a massive shock.
Similarly, the market seems to show that Biden's increase in corporate/wealth tax will become a reality at a time when the market desperately needs lower taxes and less punishment for the wealthy.
Some extreme end of the hedge fund managers think that the USD is going to collapse but I believe that this is just another ploy by people who bought Gold years ago are trying to dump their positions on people who buy this shit up.
the USD will never be allowed to fail because the rest of the world's currency is backed by it.
lmao. What world are you living in? The wealthy have never had it better at any point in history.
Actually, all of our current response, up to this point assumes that if we half-ass our response to the pandemic, it will go away.
"What China is doing" has largely stopped being relevant to anyone outside China in early/mid-February.
As of today, China could have zero people testing positive, or a billion people testing positive, and it wouldn't matter one bit to our domestic planners - they'd just keep doing what they've been doing.
If the answer is yes, then you also believe the statement "China has zero cases since it stopped reporting them".
Our responses are based on the numbers reported by the CCP, if you realize that there is now tens of millions of suddenly deactivated phone plans in a country where the smartphone is integrated into everyday life, on top of the millions of urns, one can connect the dots at the true nature, and its imminent danger.
Example: As our Canadian Health minister quickly shot down criticisms of China's low case numbers as "conspiracy" and "racism", it absolutely is relevant to the decision makers who seem oblivious that they are quite possibly being lied to. Again. ( For a country that allowed the CCP to steal from their biggest telecom company and fund the rise of Huawei, it is absolutely puzzling as to why the US should trust Canada )
China currently has 1332 symptomatic cases according to the official figures (which include Hong Kong and Taiwan, but Shanghai also has 100 cases) https://news.sina.cn/zt_d/yiqing0121
China has repeatedly announced localized outbreaks, usually attributed to failures of quarantine procedures, which were countered by localized lockdowns and subsequently fizzled out.
That's not too different from Australia and New Zealand. Do you believe that their numbers are also fake?
My answer? Probably not, but even if I did, it wouldn't matter. It doesn't matter what I believe about China. What matters is that the virus is here, and we're not dealing with it, and instead of pressing our governments' feet to the coals we are busy getting distracted by pointless nationalistic arguments about what is happening in a country that we have banned travel from.
Let me say it again - it doesn't matter what's happening in China. It's not the reason for why our daily cases are rising.
> millions of cell phone plans cancelled
Allright, then.
There is a mountain of reasons for why that would happen in the middle of a global recession, and a travel ban. Please consider applying the same skepticism to a wild-ass claim that was made in March, and has not since had any follow-up. (If we were to take it at face value, the entirety of China got the virus, all by March. Which is, of course, complete bullshit.)
If you don't believe me, ask any five Chinese ex-pats about how their extended family's doing. Chances are near certain that they'll tell you that not a single one of their relatives got COVID.
I personally know a lot more than five people from China. I've talked to them about COVID. Not a single one of their relatives have caught it this year. [1]
[1] Meanwhile, much of my extended family in Eastern Europe, plus a few people they know got it. Funny, that...
But what accounts for this compulsion to argue that they therefore lost control like the west. You can’t hide widespread outbreaks. Iran failed to. Russia failed to.
There are millions of Chinese outside the country with relatives outside. Vast economic trade networks. Satellites scanning every inch of China every day. Witness the exposés on Uighur concentration camps despite intense Chinese effort to hide them.
Life in China appears to be....mostly normal virus wise. And multiple other countries achieved the same. It doesn’t strain credulity to believe China mostly contained it.
I could believe China has somewhat more cases than they say, but it’s simply implausible that they have a raging epidemic.
China is the land of the dual-SIM phone, to the point where Apple even made a special iPhone for them that takes dual SIM cards. People have a second SIM for work, or for their mistress, or just for cheaper calling rates to their family. During a lockdown where you're not working (=not making money) and you're stuck at home with your family (and free calling over WiFi), why wouldn't you cancel your second SIM?
Huh? The savings rate for the rich zooming coworkers from the hamptons is huge. Yes, pursue counter-cyclic policies, but given the rich people unable to consume services as before, raising taxes on them is hardly pro-cyclic.
> They are not stupid, they know what's going on in China and they are not telling everybody else because they are worried of losing credibility as leaders.
means. The rest of the post is about Taiwan. Is the insinuation that the politicians know they controlled it better in Taiwan, the PRC, or both? Or is this about stuff in Xinjiang totally separate from quarantining?
The issue isn't that we don't have leadership that would work with "groups" who do similar to what was done in Taiwan the issue is government would want control over the groups to include who was in them. pretty much they would drive the innovation right out the door.
then they would turn around and clamp down on anyone who dared do similar work that was not part of the government sanctioned cooperative effort.