even when covid was ravaging italy (as in, when it was endemic to italy, derp derp), european neighbouring states just stood and watched idly by. no travel restrictions despite scenes of carnage and alarm calls from the italian health service. we knew it was terrible, we knew italians were dying en masse, and yet we kept the borders open and scratched our heads, 'why is italy so uniquely bad at dealing with illness? maybe they're uniquely affected because they live close together with their families and they're corrupt and incompetent? shrug'. the EU didn't even send financial or medical AID to italy, let alone pivot to an emergency pandemic scenario with full lockdowns. again, that's not china's fault.
the idea that the world would have committed immediately to a heavy pandemic response, if ONLY we had the right information or if ONLY china were honest, is pretty fucking fanciful. by all accounts, we failed to implement our own 'robust' pandemic response measures in many cases (US, UK, singular examples of multi-leveled failure), and often times it seemed we didn't even believe the evidence of our own eyes.
the only countries who seemed willing to commit the immense amount of economic resources, make hard political decisions, restrict freedoms, etc, ahead of time were the countries who had recently been taught the painful lessons of sars-2 (e.g. taiwan, korea). for most of the rest of the world, i think the full extent and potential awfulness of the unfolding scene was simply incomprehensible to them. there was no way that a boris johnson or a donald trump were prepared to make such extreme moves in the early days of the pandemic, even when we already knew it was very bad indeed.
the idea that the world would have committed immediately to a heavy pandemic response, if ONLY we had the right information or if ONLY china were honest, is pretty fucking fanciful. by all accounts, we failed to implement our own 'robust' pandemic response measures in many cases (US, UK, singular examples of multi-leveled failure), and often times it seemed we didn't even believe the evidence of our own eyes.
the only countries who seemed willing to commit the immense amount of economic resources, make hard political decisions, restrict freedoms, etc, ahead of time were the countries who had recently been taught the painful lessons of sars-2 (e.g. taiwan, korea). for most of the rest of the world, i think the full extent and potential awfulness of the unfolding scene was simply incomprehensible to them. there was no way that a boris johnson or a donald trump were prepared to make such extreme moves in the early days of the pandemic, even when we already knew it was very bad indeed.
Last edited by uziq (2021-12-23 01:29:41)
