[bitbrewer]

Do not agree. Government everywhere makes mistakes under emergencies. Just look at past responses to hurricanes in the US and the current wildfire in Australia. Maybe you could say every government is incompetent. But the fact is that China reported the cases very early to WHO, get the genes mapped very quickly, and decisively locked down Hebei. So I would say so far China has shown competence and resolve, against a tough virus.

[BiasRegularizer]

Mistakes can happen but wittingly suppressing news is not accidental nor a mistake.

I was born in Wuhan and half of my family are currently holed up there. A few days before the Wuhan lockdown was ordered, coronavirus already made it to the headline in CNN and NYT, but there was not any headline news about the coronavirus within China. Heck my dad wasn't even wearing a mask on his 1hr metro commute to work until the day before lockdown happened.

In early January, government officials and news outlets were reporting: "There are false rumors about Wuhan having a SARS like virus. This is an unknown virus that's _probably not_ transmittable from human to human. There are only 45 confirmed cases. There is no need to panic. "

One of the officials even organized a thousand people CNY dinner as part of the CNY celebration a few days before the lockdown.

They had a thousand opportunities to curb the disease and alert the people, but the Chinese bureaucracy and leadership's imcompetence directly caused the coronavirus disaster.

Edit: January 21 news article on the thousand people dinner from a Chinese source. About 40k people participated, this neighbourhood is about 10 minutes away from the epicenter: https://news.163.com/20/0121/15/F3E3UTKI0001899N.html

[ourlordcaffeine]

Did you miss the part when they arrested doctors who reported the virus because they didn't want to deal with the virus during a local government meeting and banquet?

[TeMPOraL]

Is it confirmed? I see just some YouTube videos; that + the description upthread triggers my conspiracy theory alarm.

[tim333]

The FT article has

>Piecing together the events in Wuhan shows that for at least three weeks before the banquet, city authorities had been informed about the virus spreading in their midst but issued orders to suppress the news. (https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06... linked above)

[charlieflowers]

This is at least related. Dunno if he was arrested, but the police expressed displeasure. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/03/asia/coronavirus-doctor-whist...

[yorwba]

Xinhua reporting on the Chinese Supreme Court's stance on the issue includes a section on the 8 people who were punished for spreading rumors and whether that punishment was reasonable:

http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-01/28/c_1125508460.ht...

Google Translated: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

[BiasRegularizer]

Here is the news from Jan 1 in Chinese.

https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2020_01_01_530191.shtml?s=zw...

[unityByFreedom]

Reading the translation, this sounds like what police would say in a parody, yet this is real. Thank you for sharing it and I hope your family and we all make it through this in good health.

[corndoge]

Here in Australia the general sentiment is that the response has been good relative to the magnitude of the fires. At some point nature overwhelms any government.

[chance_state]

Did the Australian government lie to the world and their own people about how bad the fires were and arrest people who posted on social media about them?

[DarthGhandi]

Well no arrests but the govt is investigating the fake coronavirus health department press releases made by some racist folks and which spread like wildfire on social media prompting the communications minister to step in.

As for the govt lying about the bushfires, yes most definitely, we had tourism chiefs out there on the offensive claiming Australia was fine to visit when most of the East Coast had the worse air quality on Earth for months.

We had a tourism minister standing on a half burnt Kangaroo Island which was still in lockdown from the fire telling people it's the best time to visit.

Govts lie all the time for self interest. And strangely many of the public totally support them doing so when it's their team or for personal benefit.

[zozbot234]

They were very late even in informing the people in Wuhan or Hubei. Even after everyone in the West knew about this new SARS-like virus, people there were still going around with no face masks or anything, no precautions at all. Disgraceful and a total failure.

[mkl]

Face masks likely don't help much: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/01/29/8005317...

WHO says they can, but only if used very right, and only alongside other measures: https://www.who.int/publications-detail/advice-on-the-use-of...

[zozbot234]

They don't have to be foolproof, it's enough if they're better than wearing no mask at all.

[mtgx]

His point is that their #1 priority was keep this under wraps instead of fixing it as soon as possible, even if it meant more people had to learn about it to protect themselves and not have the virus spread.

Coronavirus has disrupted many businesses in China, and I think the government knew this would happen if more people found out about it. So their priority was not getting a big economic hit, not solving the issue.

This is a good post on what happened, but there are others like it if you want to dig deeper on how they tried to cover it up:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/coronavirus-dis...

I'll just copy these 2 paragraphs here to address your "China responded quickly" comment:

> To be sure, at first glance, China’s government has appeared to be more forthcoming about the latest outbreak. But, although the first case was reported on December 8, the Wuhan municipal health commission didn’t issue an official notice until several weeks later. And, since then, Wuhan officials have downplayed the seriousness of the disease and deliberately sought to suppress news coverage.

That notice maintained that there was no evidence that the new illness could be transmitted among humans, and claimed that no health-care workers had been infected. The commission repeated these claims on January 5, though 59 cases had been confirmed by then. Even after the first death was reported on January 11, the commission continued to insist that there was no evidence that it could be transmitted among humans or that health-care workers had been affected.

[yread]

Chinese government definitely doesn't have it easy on the internet. Whole host of conspiracy theorists were saying: wtf couple hundred infected why are they locking down cities and closing provinces - they must know something we don't. And now you get people saying they didn't do enough.

In this thread people are still sharing articles about how there akshually 10s thousands of dead and how the virus was intentionally released from a government lab. And at the same time surprised that the government arrested people spreading panic on social media.

It took them a month to recognize atypical viral pneumonia and report it to WHO. Another ~10 days to isolate the virus (no mean feat, read the paper) and sequence it. Here in the Netherlands people would be just sent home on paracetamol - I had a pneumonia couple years back so I speak from experience.

[literallycancer]

Did you forget about what they are doing to ethnic minorities right now? They are running literal concentration camps. Of course they don't have it easy on the internet.