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Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

How is it that Trump is so timely at cutting medical resources right before the moment it is most needed? Or perhaps such outbreaks are more common than you'd expect and it's the equivalent of leaving a firewall down for a day?

And yeah, I'm aware a bigger factor in this freeze was hiding the very obvious Bird Flu pandemic. Can't hide the eggs getting more expensive though.

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> Or perhaps such outbreaks are more common than you'd expect and it's the equivalent of leaving a firewall down for a day?

I think this + bad luck, really.

Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. In this case lots of opportunity and zero preparation.

Well said!

Trump is not acting in people's best interests. Wait, just rumaging around looking for my shocked face mask.

Eggs more expensive doesn't matter any more.

Indeed. I'm just also find it interesting how timely some of his actions can immediately blow up on us.

And yes. It really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but was such a common rationale for those who voted Trump. I'm shocked that he did not in fact keep a promise thst would have benefitted the working class.

Cutting resources often is the root cause for an outbreak.

- SARSv2 (aka Covid-19) happened after Trump disbanded the team that contained SARSv1.

- During COVID, the west suspended polio vaccination programs in developing regions, so now polio outbreaks are a thing again.

- Antivaxxers in NYC caused a massive measles outbreak a few years ago.

Etc, etc.

I won't attempt to defend the administration's actions, but no team ever really contained SARS. That outbreak burned out largely for natural reasons.

I think they’ve muddled a few things together and are in part referring to the disbanding of the NSC’s Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense as part of John Bolton’s NSC reorg.

Covid was spreading in many countries before the US. Off the top of my head I remember China, Korea, Italy and Spain.

And no country of significant size avoided it, regardless of whether they were led by Trump or not.

The US pandemic response team that Trump fired included a significant presence working onsite in China

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-us-slashed-c...

I hit the paywall. But if this is about the same thing I’m thinking of, one reason to be careful about the work China’s CDC was doing (at times with visiting staff from the US) is they were one (among many) source of lab leaks of SARSv1:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/

This was the US working in China, with the government’s permission. It was an international task force that was operated by the US govt.

Also, if look up biological weapons research papers from Wuhan, you’ll find that many were done in collaboration with the US, and with US funding.

People strongly recommended closing the US borders in the early stages of the pandemic, but they were dismissed as racists.

I can show multiple videos up to the end of Feb 2020 where Anthony Fauci said this wasn’t something to be too worried about, it was going to probably remain under control…

I went skiing in Korea during the next to last weekend of Feb 2020. Best skiing of my time there, because the mountain was already empty of people due to public concern. By that time we were already wearing N95 masks: I remember discovering it was very hard to talk with both a ski mask and an N95 on.

By mid Feb, Korea was already covertly acquiring mask materials and preparing a ramp up in testing. I believe we had working PCR tests in my local hospital by mid March, and mask rationing in April. This made me very skeptical of the competence of the US public health establishment.

Edit: Skiing was Feb 21 to 23, just before Daegu locked down. The Mask rationing started early March: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=292662

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. No country avoided it entirely, but a lot of them managed to get rid of at least half the deaths (keep in mind that that's with still with individuals people being rebellious), sometimes more.

Excess mortality per capita is the useful number to look at, since it's immune to scaling problems and the "but diagnosis!" argument. Although it may include "too scared to go to the doctor", that can't be too much of a contribution since that contribution shouldn't spike so much. Let's look at some numbers, smearing the spikes:

* in 2020-2021, South Korea's and Japan's excess death rate hovers below 5%

* in 2020-2021, Canada's, France's, and Germany's excess death rate hovers around 10%

* in 2020-2021, the US's excess death rate hovers around 20%

* in 2020-2021, Spain and the UK have spikes so high (but narrow) that I'm not even going to try to average it out. I would guess they're somewhere near the US for 2020 but better in 2021.

* in 2022, South Korea finally had a bad spike, but averaged over the year it's still only maybe 20%.

* in 2022, in almost all countries it hovers around 10%, and the timing of the swings is very similar between countries

* in 2023, in all countries it hovers around 5%

Source: first chart of https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid ; I've done the calculus by eye with rounding since I don't want to look up billions of numbers to do the math the hard way.

(Frankly, Korea and Japan did even better than these numbers say, since their population is skewed elderly in the first place)

I don't know if any of these would count as being significantly sized, but Japan, Australia, and South Korea handled it a lot better than the US [1] when it comes to deaths per 100k. Interestingly, Australia and South Korea did have more cases per 100k than the US[2].

[1] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

[2] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

So basically it's good to be an island?

An interesting thing to look at is the differences between European countries differing responses and how that worked out for them given many are connected via land borders.

Also worth looking at Denmark, France, Hungary, Romania, and the UK.

The Australian cases would largely have been after the vaccine was available, I think (though Australia did screw up the rollout; they could’ve done better there) so you’d expect a lower death rate.

The team that contained SARSv1? No one contained it successfully. In fact, there were many lab leaks of it. The outbreak itself was stopped by basic measures like masks and screening. But it also was far less infectious than SARSv2.

Blaming Trump for COVID-19 makes no sense for other reasons too. There are so many other people to blame first. Fauci for funding GoF research at WIV through EHA. The CCP for being secretive and denying there was an outbreak for a while and not allowing investigations in Wuhan for over a year. The WHO for repeating CCP propaganda like claiming there was no human to human transmission roughly fourth months after the first scientists fell ill at WIV. Do you remember Pelosi and democrats downplaying the pandemic and accusing those who wanted to close borders of racism? She apparently had no regrets about all that:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pelosi-no-regrets-initial-c...

With all of this how can blame be placed on Trump? If anything his Operation Warp Speed program bailed out the planet from pandemic (with great work from vaccine manufacturers of course).

You left out how conservative media was adamant that it was a politically motivated hoax and ensured their faithful were kept in the dark about the looming threat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKbwDf51bA

Thanks for the find - I don’t follow conservative news usually, so I’m looking forward to learning how things were skewed on that side of media.

> During COVID, the west suspended polio vaccination programs in developing regions, so now polio outbreaks are a thing again.

There are cough other reasons for that as well:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacc...

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