5 ms·

The Plague Year

135 points by jsomers 6y ago

rgovostes 6y ago
For subscribers to the print edition, this article spans 40 pages and space in the issue is dedicated to little else. I haven’t worked through the entire thing yet to decide if this is due to the gravity of the reporting or is typical of an end-of-year slowdown at the publisher.
- zeofig 6y ago
  40 pages! That's intriguingly long. There's also a nice audio version.
  - rgovostes 6y ago
    Yes, if you have 3.5 hours to spare!
    - joegahona 6y ago
      Yeah, that Audm player sucks. No controls to make it play at 1.5x or anything.
      - JZL003 6y ago
        Because I do this trick a lot of places, almost all these players use the default <video> tag of the browser for the actual decoding/playback. So you can use that tag's control's manually even if they don't give a button So for this, something like: $("video").playbackRate = 2 or whatever. It's nice even for players with controls (like YT) if you want more than 2x speed Also you can just look at the video tag's internal URL and just download and play however, offline :)
        _nalply 6y ago
        I tried that out on Firefox and the maximum speed is about 12x. At about 5x you lose sound.
        JZL003 6y ago
        Hah! Nice, I've never experimented that far. I seem to remember even audacity had trouble with >4x speed (but don't remember if I just couldn't keep up at all, or if it was just choppy quality)
        _nalply 6y ago
        You need to resample sound. If you play sound faster everything will sound higher like Mickey Mouse. At 2 or 4 times the speed I think is a simple step, just omit every two or three of four samples. Anyway, this gives different distortions. I am Deaf so I don't hear the distortions but I understand sound in a mathematical way. At a sampling rate of 44.1k the highest representable sound is about 22kHz. At 4 times the speed this is only the fourth of it, about 5500 Hz. If higher sounds aren't filtered they will wrap around and re-appear as low frequency sounds. I imagine that this sounds very weird. And for n not being a power of two or at 8 times or more, you need to resample sound. Transform the samples into the frequency domain and back into the time domain but sped up. This is quite a mathematically heavy operation and probably there are other limits I don't know of.
- andirk 6y ago
  Give us the 5 paragraph essay summary! Although 2021 will also be the plague year.
  - Exmoor 6y ago
    I know you're mostly joking, but here were some of the takeaways I took from the article: * China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably wouldn't be a big deal. * The FDA completely dropped the ball on testing kits and it took an incredibly long time to resolve the issue. Its unclear that people in power even realized this. Back in January and February when we were hearing about a case here, a case there there was almost certainly rampant community transmission and death occurring. * CDC leaders were very slow to consider that the virus might transmit through the air. This led to the early advice being misguided (6ft of distancing and washing your hands protects you) and just flat out wrong (wearing a mask does nothing). * Inside the executive branch, people who gave bad news were forced out and people who gave good news got promoted. Predictably this made things much, much worse.
    - gen220 6y ago
      I read the article, and agree with this summary fwiw. I would also emphasize that, in terms of personal culpability, Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services comes out looking very poor. (Mnuchin was also the speaker of some, in retrospect, appalling secondhand quotes). The article points out that Azar is the director of both the FDA and the CDC, and should have played a more active role in orchestrating their handshakes in February. Misunderstanding and miscommunication between the FDA and CDC were responsible for the absurd delay in widely-available testing, which otherwise should have been available in med-February. Not only was he aware of problems early on, he didn't properly communicate them up (to Trump, which contributed to Trump's belief that the whole thing would blow over), or manage them down. This is my reading, as a disclaimer, not an explicit statement from the article. I recommend people read it for themselves.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Somebody on Titter mentioned that the initial submission was 7X,000 words, and they cut it down to half that to fit within a single issue.
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    I hope this original is published as a book. (This is actually fairly common for journalism in the New Yorker.)
- teeray 6y ago
  While I get that some folks like The New Yorker’s long-form content, I would greatly appreciate a Cliff Notes version of many of their articles.
- pdar4123 6y ago
  Read it, listen to it, share it, discuss it. This is one of the most important pieces of journalism in American history.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  My understanding is that they have very rarely done this; John Hersey's pulitzer prize winning article on Hiroshima was one of the few other examples of dedicating the entire magazine to a single article. So, "gravity" all the way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)
  - overlordalex 6y ago
    For anyone who is interested, the article is available to read online https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima Here is the most recent time it was posted (5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712
    - dan-robertson 6y ago
      There’s also another article from 1985 by Hersey on the same people and the long-term aftermath 30 years on
    - harrydehal 6y ago
      Thank you for sharing -- last summer in August 2020, PBS Newshour also covered a new book about Hersey and 75 years from the Hiroshima bomb: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-intrepid-journalist-who-exposed-hiroshimas-horror https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-intrepid-journalist-wh... And here's the book, "Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World" https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-Revealed/dp/1982128518 https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-R...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
paulpauper 6y ago
this must be the longest article ever. the audio version is 3.5 hours, or about one LOTR movie TBH, I don't think it matters that much. The virus is a serious situation but the stock market is acting like the worst is long over. I know the stock market is not the economy , but I think it is no longer a catastrophe but rather more like a wildfire. It could have been a far worse situation if the IFR was 2-4% as originally feared back in Feb-March. Then we would probably be seeing the S&P 500 about 50-70% lower than it is now, cuz when you got airborne cancer, that is not exactly something you can patch over by throwing stimulus money at it. Now it's more like a bad flu in terms of IFR for middle-aged people, but worse though for elderly, so I don't want to dismiss that. But it could have bene sooo much worse, and we were spared that.
- Guthur 6y ago
  I feel we build in a reaction expection based off the earlier unknowns wrt to covid-19 but as more data became available we never revised those perceptions and instead doubled down on the narrative that this was some world destroying super virus and it's just so clearly not now.
  - anonunivgrad 6y ago
    It became a point of civic religion to believe that the virus was catastrophically dangerous. Disagreement was not just mistaken but evil.
    - cartoonfoxes 6y ago
      I can echo this. Most unhappily, I think I may have just estranged myself from my father after an evening of trying to defend my questioning of the value of non-medical mask mandates. Some people want police-state style intervention, and to hell with anyone who raises an eyebrow. clarification for the downvoters: questioning in the sense of asking a question, not engaging in anti-mask advocacy. Sorry if not being a blindly obedient serf makes me evil. Should I kill myself now and save you the trouble of forming the firing squad?
Exmoor 6y ago
For what its worth, this article is the best thing I've read on the pandemic in the USA in the last year and I'm glad it finally hit the front page. It's incredibly long, but I found the part 25% or so that focused on the USA's early failures at detecting the virus most enlightening and horrifying. I'd suggest reading at least that part. In case you hit the paywall: https://archive.md/on1X2 https://archive.md/on1X2
- gen220 6y ago
  The New Yorker has cast a merciless spotlight on governments' early actions (and inactions) against the pandemic. As a New Yorker myself, the article in the May 4 issue [1], contrasting the responses of Seattle/WA and NYC/NY was a gut-wrenching read. We should be grateful that journalism like this exists, to boldly contradict the political spin-jobs. If your opinion even slant rhymes with "it was rough in the beginning, but we did as much as we could as early as we could, thanks to the courage/leadership of Mr. Cuomo / De Blasio", and you care about the truth, I encourage you to read. [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leade...
tomohawk 6y ago
> The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention By this time, Taiwan had already started quarantining travelers from China (starting Dec 31). They were bitten by the lack of transparency and paranoia of the China government with SARS in 2003, so had developed a focus on outbreaks in China so as not to be caught unawares again. The US CDC failed to learn from SARS and we're paying the price now. No one should trust that China will be forthcoming and transparent about these matters. The CDC needs to learn to "trust, but verify". They didn't verify, and they trusted a source with a long history of not being truthful or timely in divulging information. Also, by this time, Dr Li had been hauled down to the police station and forced to recant his warning that this was human transmissible. So, the wheels of CCP governance were already grinding the truth under foot.
- adolph 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what did the US CDC fail to learn from SARS/MERS/Swine Flu/Ebola? What were the actions that Taiwan took that could be replicated in a much larger scale liberal democracy on a large continent with a diverse globally engaged population?
thepangolino 6y ago
"plague" Diarrhea probably ended up killing more people than SARS-CoV-2 in 2020.
- ianlevesque 6y ago
  In the United States 50,000 more people died of COVID-19 directly in 2020 than died in World War 2. I don’t get these comments.
  - leereeves 6y ago
    I'm sure thepangolino was talking about deaths worldwide, and it's probably true. Here in the developed world, where COVID was an aberration, it's easy to forget that it was barely a blip in Africa. "Diarrhea kills 2,195 children every day—more than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined."[1] "In 2016, diarrhoea was the eighth leading cause of death among all ages (1 655 944 deaths, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 1 244 073–2 366 552)"[2] 1: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html 2: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(18)30362-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
    - sdenton4 6y ago
      OTOH: 'A Continent Where the Dead Aren't Counted' https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-deaths-underreporting.html?searchResultPosition=2 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coron... Tl;dr: Reporting of deaths is incredibly irregular across Africa, and counting excess deaths is likely impossible as a result. The population is younger on average, which likely helps, but we probably don't know the real numbers there.
      - leereeves 6y ago
        There are still doctors and hospitals there who would see a huge increase in deaths due to respiratory illness, if one occurred. According to your source, they haven't: > “The mortality due to Covid in the African continent is not a major public issue,” said Dorian Job, the West Africa program manager for Doctors Without Borders. The rest of that article is just speculation that there might be an outbreak that isn't being recorded, with little evidence.
andred14 6y ago
Enough with the lies. This has nothing to do with "COVID". For example, the Irish government has admitted they have no proof that it even exists: https://gemmaodoherty.com/defending-our-freedoms/hse-admit-they-have-no-proof-the-virus-exists/ https://gemmaodoherty.com/defending-our-freedoms/hse-admit-t... And here, STATISTICS show that in fact the emergency of 2020 is FAKE: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... You are wasting your time here. Us computer scientists do not buy into your lies...
mhh__ 6y ago
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-obama-coronavirus-pandemic-response https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-obama-coronavi... This article is also a nice microcosm of the whole American situation
neonate 6y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20210102201702/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year https://web.archive.org/web/20210102201702/https://www.newyo... https://archive.is/on1X2 https://archive.is/on1X2
u801e 6y ago
I was surprised that there was no mention of the COVID tests from the WHO and why the US did not make use of them.
JimTheMan 6y ago
>> "If flights from China were halted, Matt asked, could America have more time to prepare? Paul was hesitant. Like most public-health practitioners, he held that travel bans often have unintended consequences. They stigmatize countries contending with contagion. Doctors and medical equipment must be able to move around. And, by the time restrictions are put in place, the disease has usually infiltrated the border anyway, making the whole exercise pointless" Except Australia and New Zealand have shown that is not really true. If you shut the border early enough and police it well enough, you can suppress the virus. The idea that doctors can't travel doesn't have to be true. Put them in hotel quarantine for 14 days on arrival and then get them to work. 14 days on the way back too. All too often I hear problems(excuses truly) as to why something can't be done. But with additional planning and willpower (and not just rolling over) it can be.
- adolph 6y ago
  If I recall correctly, the initial US infections came from Europe not China, so Paul's hesitance to a China-specific travel ban wasn't a bad call. Island and smaller nations have some capabilities as far as population movement controls that the big ones don't have or can't sustain for as long. Eventually COVID will come for all, suppression strategies only allow a nation to adjust the timeline. This study shows an unexpected very early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 among asymptomatic individuals in Italy several months before the first patient was identified, and clarifies the onset and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Finding SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in asymptomatic people before the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy may reshape the history of pandemic. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    China itself is neither an island nation nor small, and it has managed to prevent further large outbreaks. This probably would not be possible if not for travel restrictions and strict infection control at the border (test before boarding, 14 day quarantine, test after quarantine). Essentially all countries that have kept COVID in check have similar testing and quarantine policies. This is a reasonable alternative to closing the border entirely, but it was never taken up by the U.S.
mchusma 6y ago
The content that is there is good, so I would recommend this article, however it omits anything related to the FDA, or Operation Warp Speed. For an article that purports to describe the year of the virus, this is a huge gap. I think the biggest mistake of this whole pandemic was none of the things listed, it was banning all vaccines for almost a full year. The FDA was granted far reaching powers by congress multiple times to ensure they can approve vaccines quickly in a pandemic. The FDA instead forced. So as badly as Trump handled the pandemic (and he did handle it badly), at least he wanted a fast vaccine. You might blame the first 100k deaths on the disease, but everything after that is due to the ban on the vaccine. Now, as the vaccines are distributed they are requiring them to go through an ineffective CDC, who is holding back 50% of the vaccines, to the states who aren't able to distribute more than 30% of what they get yet. The FDA, CDC, and states need to just stop banning people from getting a vaccine. Let private industry help. Should Trump have proposed legislation to fix this? Yes, but so should Democrats and Republicans. Our beaucracies failed, both parties failed. Even Biden is coming in with goals like "vaccinate 100M in the first 100 days." What a low bar, since we have already bought 200M doses for delivery by the end of Q1 (70ish days into his term). So Biden's goal seems to be "not approve any more vaccines and try not to lose most of the vaccines we have." His goal should be vaccines for everyone that wants it within 60 days. That is achievable with existing supply+ Astrazeneca and if J&J looks good too then that makes it a slam dunk, unless the government gets in the way again.
- vharuck 6y ago
  >it omits anything related to the FDA, or Operation Warp Speed. For an article that purports to describe the year of the virus, this is a huge gap. The FDA is addressed in the article, mostly when talking about the botched tests in February. >You might blame the first 100k deaths on the disease, but everything after that is due to the ban on the vaccine. That's a reckless way to approach vaccination. From TFA: "Like COVID, [RSV] is dispersed through particle droplets and contaminated surfaces. In the nineteen-sixties, a clinical trial of a potential RSV vaccine made children sicker and led to two deaths—a syndrome called vaccine-enhanced disease." Potential vaccines can make things worse, which is why we have three test phases. Even if you want to let people get an untested vaccine, which ones get approval? Do they need to get multiple? Will they interact badly? >Even Biden is coming in with goals like "vaccinate 100M in the first 100 days." What a low bar, since we have already bought 200M doses for delivery by the end of Q1 (70ish days into his term). Forgive me if I'm wrong, but this is because the approved vaccines require two doses per recipient. Factoring in logistics and public outreach, that's a reasonable goal.

135 points by jsomers 6y ago

For subscribers to the print edition, this article spans 40 pages and space in the issue is dedicated to little else. I haven’t worked through the entire thing yet to decide if this is due to the gravity of the reporting or is typical of an end-of-year slowdown at the publisher.

zeofig 6y ago
40 pages! That's intriguingly long. There's also a nice audio version.
- rgovostes 6y ago
  Yes, if you have 3.5 hours to spare!
  - joegahona 6y ago
    Yeah, that Audm player sucks. No controls to make it play at 1.5x or anything.
    - JZL003 6y ago
      Because I do this trick a lot of places, almost all these players use the default <video> tag of the browser for the actual decoding/playback. So you can use that tag's control's manually even if they don't give a button So for this, something like: $("video").playbackRate = 2 or whatever. It's nice even for players with controls (like YT) if you want more than 2x speed Also you can just look at the video tag's internal URL and just download and play however, offline :)
      - _nalply 6y ago
        I tried that out on Firefox and the maximum speed is about 12x. At about 5x you lose sound.
        JZL003 6y ago
        Hah! Nice, I've never experimented that far. I seem to remember even audacity had trouble with >4x speed (but don't remember if I just couldn't keep up at all, or if it was just choppy quality)
        _nalply 6y ago
        You need to resample sound. If you play sound faster everything will sound higher like Mickey Mouse. At 2 or 4 times the speed I think is a simple step, just omit every two or three of four samples. Anyway, this gives different distortions. I am Deaf so I don't hear the distortions but I understand sound in a mathematical way. At a sampling rate of 44.1k the highest representable sound is about 22kHz. At 4 times the speed this is only the fourth of it, about 5500 Hz. If higher sounds aren't filtered they will wrap around and re-appear as low frequency sounds. I imagine that this sounds very weird. And for n not being a power of two or at 8 times or more, you need to resample sound. Transform the samples into the frequency domain and back into the time domain but sped up. This is quite a mathematically heavy operation and probably there are other limits I don't know of.
andirk 6y ago
Give us the 5 paragraph essay summary! Although 2021 will also be the plague year.
- Exmoor 6y ago
  I know you're mostly joking, but here were some of the takeaways I took from the article: * China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably wouldn't be a big deal. * The FDA completely dropped the ball on testing kits and it took an incredibly long time to resolve the issue. Its unclear that people in power even realized this. Back in January and February when we were hearing about a case here, a case there there was almost certainly rampant community transmission and death occurring. * CDC leaders were very slow to consider that the virus might transmit through the air. This led to the early advice being misguided (6ft of distancing and washing your hands protects you) and just flat out wrong (wearing a mask does nothing). * Inside the executive branch, people who gave bad news were forced out and people who gave good news got promoted. Predictably this made things much, much worse.
  - gen220 6y ago
    I read the article, and agree with this summary fwiw. I would also emphasize that, in terms of personal culpability, Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services comes out looking very poor. (Mnuchin was also the speaker of some, in retrospect, appalling secondhand quotes). The article points out that Azar is the director of both the FDA and the CDC, and should have played a more active role in orchestrating their handshakes in February. Misunderstanding and miscommunication between the FDA and CDC were responsible for the absurd delay in widely-available testing, which otherwise should have been available in med-February. Not only was he aware of problems early on, he didn't properly communicate them up (to Trump, which contributed to Trump's belief that the whole thing would blow over), or manage them down. This is my reading, as a disclaimer, not an explicit statement from the article. I recommend people read it for themselves.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Somebody on Titter mentioned that the initial submission was 7X,000 words, and they cut it down to half that to fit within a single issue.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  I hope this original is published as a book. (This is actually fairly common for journalism in the New Yorker.)
teeray 6y ago
While I get that some folks like The New Yorker’s long-form content, I would greatly appreciate a Cliff Notes version of many of their articles.
pdar4123 6y ago
Read it, listen to it, share it, discuss it. This is one of the most important pieces of journalism in American history.
sdenton4 6y ago
My understanding is that they have very rarely done this; John Hersey's pulitzer prize winning article on Hiroshima was one of the few other examples of dedicating the entire magazine to a single article. So, "gravity" all the way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)
- overlordalex 6y ago
  For anyone who is interested, the article is available to read online https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima Here is the most recent time it was posted (5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    There’s also another article from 1985 by Hersey on the same people and the long-term aftermath 30 years on
  - harrydehal 6y ago
    Thank you for sharing -- last summer in August 2020, PBS Newshour also covered a new book about Hersey and 75 years from the Hiroshima bomb: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-intrepid-journalist-who-exposed-hiroshimas-horror https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-intrepid-journalist-wh... And here's the book, "Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World" https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-Revealed/dp/1982128518 https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-R...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

paulpauper 6y ago

this must be the longest article ever. the audio version is 3.5 hours, or about one LOTR movie TBH, I don't think it matters that much. The virus is a serious situation but the stock market is acting like the worst is long over. I know the stock market is not the economy , but I think it is no longer a catastrophe but rather more like a wildfire. It could have been a far worse situation if the IFR was 2-4% as originally feared back in Feb-March. Then we would probably be seeing the S&P 500 about 50-70% lower than it is now, cuz when you got airborne cancer, that is not exactly something you can patch over by throwing stimulus money at it. Now it's more like a bad flu in terms of IFR for middle-aged people, but worse though for elderly, so I don't want to dismiss that. But it could have bene sooo much worse, and we were spared that.

Guthur 6y ago
I feel we build in a reaction expection based off the earlier unknowns wrt to covid-19 but as more data became available we never revised those perceptions and instead doubled down on the narrative that this was some world destroying super virus and it's just so clearly not now.
- anonunivgrad 6y ago
  It became a point of civic religion to believe that the virus was catastrophically dangerous. Disagreement was not just mistaken but evil.
  - cartoonfoxes 6y ago
    I can echo this. Most unhappily, I think I may have just estranged myself from my father after an evening of trying to defend my questioning of the value of non-medical mask mandates. Some people want police-state style intervention, and to hell with anyone who raises an eyebrow. clarification for the downvoters: questioning in the sense of asking a question, not engaging in anti-mask advocacy. Sorry if not being a blindly obedient serf makes me evil. Should I kill myself now and save you the trouble of forming the firing squad?

Exmoor 6y ago

For what its worth, this article is the best thing I've read on the pandemic in the USA in the last year and I'm glad it finally hit the front page. It's incredibly long, but I found the part 25% or so that focused on the USA's early failures at detecting the virus most enlightening and horrifying. I'd suggest reading at least that part. In case you hit the paywall: https://archive.md/on1X2 https://archive.md/on1X2

gen220 6y ago
The New Yorker has cast a merciless spotlight on governments' early actions (and inactions) against the pandemic. As a New Yorker myself, the article in the May 4 issue [1], contrasting the responses of Seattle/WA and NYC/NY was a gut-wrenching read. We should be grateful that journalism like this exists, to boldly contradict the political spin-jobs. If your opinion even slant rhymes with "it was rough in the beginning, but we did as much as we could as early as we could, thanks to the courage/leadership of Mr. Cuomo / De Blasio", and you care about the truth, I encourage you to read. [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leade...

tomohawk 6y ago

> The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention By this time, Taiwan had already started quarantining travelers from China (starting Dec 31). They were bitten by the lack of transparency and paranoia of the China government with SARS in 2003, so had developed a focus on outbreaks in China so as not to be caught unawares again. The US CDC failed to learn from SARS and we're paying the price now. No one should trust that China will be forthcoming and transparent about these matters. The CDC needs to learn to "trust, but verify". They didn't verify, and they trusted a source with a long history of not being truthful or timely in divulging information. Also, by this time, Dr Li had been hauled down to the police station and forced to recant his warning that this was human transmissible. So, the wheels of CCP governance were already grinding the truth under foot.

adolph 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what did the US CDC fail to learn from SARS/MERS/Swine Flu/Ebola? What were the actions that Taiwan took that could be replicated in a much larger scale liberal democracy on a large continent with a diverse globally engaged population?

thepangolino 6y ago

"plague" Diarrhea probably ended up killing more people than SARS-CoV-2 in 2020.

ianlevesque 6y ago
In the United States 50,000 more people died of COVID-19 directly in 2020 than died in World War 2. I don’t get these comments.
- leereeves 6y ago
  I'm sure thepangolino was talking about deaths worldwide, and it's probably true. Here in the developed world, where COVID was an aberration, it's easy to forget that it was barely a blip in Africa. "Diarrhea kills 2,195 children every day—more than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined."[1] "In 2016, diarrhoea was the eighth leading cause of death among all ages (1 655 944 deaths, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 1 244 073–2 366 552)"[2] 1: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html 2: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(18)30362-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
  - sdenton4 6y ago
    OTOH: 'A Continent Where the Dead Aren't Counted' https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-deaths-underreporting.html?searchResultPosition=2 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coron... Tl;dr: Reporting of deaths is incredibly irregular across Africa, and counting excess deaths is likely impossible as a result. The population is younger on average, which likely helps, but we probably don't know the real numbers there.
    - leereeves 6y ago
      There are still doctors and hospitals there who would see a huge increase in deaths due to respiratory illness, if one occurred. According to your source, they haven't: > “The mortality due to Covid in the African continent is not a major public issue,” said Dorian Job, the West Africa program manager for Doctors Without Borders. The rest of that article is just speculation that there might be an outbreak that isn't being recorded, with little evidence.

andred14 6y ago

Enough with the lies. This has nothing to do with "COVID". For example, the Irish government has admitted they have no proof that it even exists: https://gemmaodoherty.com/defending-our-freedoms/hse-admit-they-have-no-proof-the-virus-exists/ https://gemmaodoherty.com/defending-our-freedoms/hse-admit-t... And here, STATISTICS show that in fact the emergency of 2020 is FAKE: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... You are wasting your time here. Us computer scientists do not buy into your lies...

mhh__ 6y ago

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-obama-coronavirus-pandemic-response https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-obama-coronavi... This article is also a nice microcosm of the whole American situation

neonate 6y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20210102201702/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year https://web.archive.org/web/20210102201702/https://www.newyo... https://archive.is/on1X2 https://archive.is/on1X2

u801e 6y ago

I was surprised that there was no mention of the COVID tests from the WHO and why the US did not make use of them.

JimTheMan 6y ago

>> "If flights from China were halted, Matt asked, could America have more time to prepare? Paul was hesitant. Like most public-health practitioners, he held that travel bans often have unintended consequences. They stigmatize countries contending with contagion. Doctors and medical equipment must be able to move around. And, by the time restrictions are put in place, the disease has usually infiltrated the border anyway, making the whole exercise pointless" Except Australia and New Zealand have shown that is not really true. If you shut the border early enough and police it well enough, you can suppress the virus. The idea that doctors can't travel doesn't have to be true. Put them in hotel quarantine for 14 days on arrival and then get them to work. 14 days on the way back too. All too often I hear problems(excuses truly) as to why something can't be done. But with additional planning and willpower (and not just rolling over) it can be.

adolph 6y ago
If I recall correctly, the initial US infections came from Europe not China, so Paul's hesitance to a China-specific travel ban wasn't a bad call. Island and smaller nations have some capabilities as far as population movement controls that the big ones don't have or can't sustain for as long. Eventually COVID will come for all, suppression strategies only allow a nation to adjust the timeline. This study shows an unexpected very early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 among asymptomatic individuals in Italy several months before the first patient was identified, and clarifies the onset and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Finding SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in asymptomatic people before the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy may reshape the history of pandemic. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/
- cameldrv 6y ago
  China itself is neither an island nation nor small, and it has managed to prevent further large outbreaks. This probably would not be possible if not for travel restrictions and strict infection control at the border (test before boarding, 14 day quarantine, test after quarantine). Essentially all countries that have kept COVID in check have similar testing and quarantine policies. This is a reasonable alternative to closing the border entirely, but it was never taken up by the U.S.

mchusma 6y ago

The content that is there is good, so I would recommend this article, however it omits anything related to the FDA, or Operation Warp Speed. For an article that purports to describe the year of the virus, this is a huge gap. I think the biggest mistake of this whole pandemic was none of the things listed, it was banning all vaccines for almost a full year. The FDA was granted far reaching powers by congress multiple times to ensure they can approve vaccines quickly in a pandemic. The FDA instead forced. So as badly as Trump handled the pandemic (and he did handle it badly), at least he wanted a fast vaccine. You might blame the first 100k deaths on the disease, but everything after that is due to the ban on the vaccine. Now, as the vaccines are distributed they are requiring them to go through an ineffective CDC, who is holding back 50% of the vaccines, to the states who aren't able to distribute more than 30% of what they get yet. The FDA, CDC, and states need to just stop banning people from getting a vaccine. Let private industry help. Should Trump have proposed legislation to fix this? Yes, but so should Democrats and Republicans. Our beaucracies failed, both parties failed. Even Biden is coming in with goals like "vaccinate 100M in the first 100 days." What a low bar, since we have already bought 200M doses for delivery by the end of Q1 (70ish days into his term). So Biden's goal seems to be "not approve any more vaccines and try not to lose most of the vaccines we have." His goal should be vaccines for everyone that wants it within 60 days. That is achievable with existing supply+ Astrazeneca and if J&J looks good too then that makes it a slam dunk, unless the government gets in the way again.

vharuck 6y ago
>it omits anything related to the FDA, or Operation Warp Speed. For an article that purports to describe the year of the virus, this is a huge gap. The FDA is addressed in the article, mostly when talking about the botched tests in February. >You might blame the first 100k deaths on the disease, but everything after that is due to the ban on the vaccine. That's a reckless way to approach vaccination. From TFA: "Like COVID, [RSV] is dispersed through particle droplets and contaminated surfaces. In the nineteen-sixties, a clinical trial of a potential RSV vaccine made children sicker and led to two deaths—a syndrome called vaccine-enhanced disease." Potential vaccines can make things worse, which is why we have three test phases. Even if you want to let people get an untested vaccine, which ones get approval? Do they need to get multiple? Will they interact badly? >Even Biden is coming in with goals like "vaccinate 100M in the first 100 days." What a low bar, since we have already bought 200M doses for delivery by the end of Q1 (70ish days into his term). Forgive me if I'm wrong, but this is because the approved vaccines require two doses per recipient. Factoring in logistics and public outreach, that's a reasonable goal.