[keiru]

They showed a strong unwillingness to declare the high state of emergency from the start, which dragged the numbers 30 fold through delayed action. They were the one institution with the moral authority to drive prevention (incentivising testing, the closure of air travel, etc). People act as if the only possible responses are complete inaction or panic. This is terribly misguided. Had the WHO declared high alert a month ago, it would have meant a whole month to take it all in, plan, condition your touch-your-face reflexes, rethink your lifestyle, etc. Maybe they didn't want to be the boy who cried wolf after SARS, MERS and H1N1 were declared global outbreaks and ended up not being full-blown pandemics. But now what? Is the watchdog scared to watch? They act as if Chinese numbers are trustworthy, and I can only guess that it's half political reasons, half delusion. The CCP has a history of under/misreporting catastrophe that should be factored in, at the very least as a warning label. With a mostly mild disease that spreads like wildfire there's bound to be huge visibility biases which were not taken into account, and then you end up with things like Italy where they don't even know how it spread.

Instead there's a discourse vacuum where people seem to decide what's going to happen more on the basis of pre-existing narratives than reality. Examples; People mistrust the US believed it's all exaggerated to hurt China, for a while some "journalists" wrote more about racism and stigma than the actual ongoing development, politicians kept ringing the everything's OK alarm, and finally, mindless optimists are the worst.

The Chinese government decided to establish an economy-crippling quarantine on January 23rd with only 1000 confirmed cases. Something was awry. And in the following week all the warning sings have been available (the quick spread, reports of CCP measures and life in Wuhan, research papers about the spread, incubation, etc). But for a month now the WHO refused to read the writing on the wall, only god knows why.

[rasz]

We now know with certainty Chinese numbers are more trustworthy than US (and half of EU) ones on the sole basis Chinese are actually TESTING people, while CDC refuses any due diligence.

[keiru]

But back to the discussion about the WHO, their bland attitude is greatly to blame for the inaction of the CDC, and the rest of the world.

As a case study, for some days half of all confirmed cases outside of China were in the Diamond Princess, and the proportion held until very recently with 1000+ cases worldwide (sans China). Why? Sampling bias. Even arguing that a cruise is more virus-friendly cannot possibly account for a single ship holding half of the world's cases. And then came about Iran and Italy, with no clear path of spread. It's hurtfully evident that there are so many more cases and there's a huge visibility issue, and the WHO delaying measures aggravates the matter dramatically.

[dragonwriter]

> We now know with certainty Chinese numbers are more trustworthy than US (and half of EU) ones on the sole basis Chinese are actually TESTING people, while CDC refuses any due diligence.

That just means the upper bound of the potential quality of the Chinese numbers is better, not that the actual quality of the numbers is better. Just because they are gathering more information doesn't mean they are publicly reporting it accurately.

That is, the Chinese potentially internally have more complete data, because they are doing more surveillance. That doesn't mean that the numbers they are reporting are more trustworthy.