For me it felt allways a bit strange how fast china acted. The virus was very fresh, nothing was known, just a few cases and china totaly locked down millions if people. Two, three months later, when we already had high numbers if cases in the west, lockdowns started in the west also. But everybody said, "we know nothing about this new virus". For me it allways like, china knew much more about the virus early on.
This is easily explained by a combination of past experience (SARS), Chinese dictatorship (Western countries can’t realistically solder people into their homes), hubris (“our medical system is so good that we could easily handle a pandemic”), wokeism (locking borders is evil) and scientific failures in medicine (if it’s not proven by randomised controlled trials, it doesn’t exist). Add a bit of political infighting in the mix (which presumably doesn’t exist in China) and ...
Parent comment was highlighting that a healthy variety of plausible factors contributed to each respective country's outcome, and not all of them would have to be true to produce such an outcome
Not "easily" in the sense that it's easy to pinpoint the exact recipe, but "easily" in that the opposite outcomes would have been far more unlikely
Maybe I should have written “obviously” instead. Basically, no need to invent “non-obvious” factors like “China had prior knowledge of the virus”. It’s definitely possible, but you can explain China’s success vs Western failure without that “hidden” factor as well.
I'm not trying to quibble on the wording of your comment, but the thing is maybe you find it easy/obvious/whatever to combine those factors to explain this, but to me it's a fair bit of a jump.
Here's one way to look at it: if we had asked "how will China respond?" back in the beginning, how well would you have been able to predict their response if you had known the virus was of zoonotic origin? What if you had known the virus was of lab origin? I would think in the second case you'd have a lot more people betting that we'd get a swift (& deflective) response than in the former case, but it sounds like you disagree?
OP made the argument China acted more competently than the west, and that this is suspicious and supports the lab leak hypothesis. Another explanation is that the west simply acted incompetently, while China acted "normally". Unfortunately it's not conceivable to many westerners that their governments are hilariously incompetent. Unfortunately, because it precludes improvement.
There are many stories were filtered out by Western media. Some not by media but could be filtered out by individuals selective ignoring.
For example: China built makeshift hospitals in very short period of time. This one is not filtered. Even Fauci suggested India should do that but in reality not many country can mobilize the resources. Another example is by strict locked down, Wuhan was sacrificed for the sake of all nation. Meanwhile the hospitals over the all country supplied volunteer medical personals and equipment pouring to Wuhan. There were too many registered volunteers even beyond the organizers requested. With enough resource concentrated in one place, covid was quickly under control.
It's mainly due to dictatorship system that other countries can not easily duplicate. This can explain most countries are "incompetent".
The Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee (THRCC) was scrapped by Boris Johnson in July 2019, and had previously been "mothballed" by Theresa May to focus on Brexit efforts.
Whether the existence of a group of 15 MPs including such luminaries as Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson would have made a marked difference is not so obvious.
Existing plans were not scrapped and some believe using these plans actually was a big factor in the lacklustre initial response. The plans were too specific on what had come before (SARS most recently) and didn't allow accommodation of the differences of covid. It took a notable amount of time to change direction.
I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around if one was inclined to do so, but I don't think disbanding one committee (despite its prescient name) was particularly notable.
Swift response in China is easily predictable by their experience and dictatorship. Taiwan reacted similarly, taking the disease seriously, because of their prior experience with SARS.
The suppression of information and subsequent deflection, I find much more problematic. They can also be explained by China’s dictatorship and their aggressive PR management, but still... one of the easiest ways for China to dispel any “lab leak/release hypotheses” would be full transparency. So far they haven’t done that. But refusal to do so can again easily be explained by accidential lab leak / accident hypothesis, whereas the original parent was proposing that China had superior information in advance... again, possible, but not necessary to explain the current sequence of events.
They did have the experience with SARS1. And if you look at other countries that had experience with SARS1 they also acted very swiftly and did fairly well - Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.
What I found absolutely baffling is that we in west saw what China was doing and haven't got our shit together until months later (with exceptions). Instead the discourse was about how much the Chinese eat unsavory things and how much pollution is there so it wouldn't be the same if it got here at all.
But none of those countries went to the extent the China did, and also taking into account that the Chinese did not have anybody to base their response on, whereas everybody else did. It is a extremely peculiar first response.
Chinese citizens were visibly angry with what happened in Wuhan, because they saw it as a failure of the govt especially after the same mistake and steps happened with SARS. Their handling, and all of Asia’s handling was deeply informed by their experiences with SARS.
China didn't act fast, they buried their head in the sand and denied it existed until the point where it was undeniable. China didn't start lockdowns until it was clear that their hospitals were going to be completely overwhelmed and that it was spreading fast. If they knew about SARS-CoV-2 they would have done that to begin with instead of jailing doctors for causing alarm.
China built a new giant hospital after all the hospitals on the city were overcrowded and people were dying on their entrance, and instituted a lockdown after the new hospital became crowded.
All of their speed was on the time between the decision and implementation, they din't display any prescience.
