Quote Originally Posted by chris lee View Post
I think they have done OK giving the circumstances, they were obviously caught cold and unprepared, but lets be honest we all were. most of us did not really start taking it seriously for a long time, and there was so much miss-information (mostly from the media) telling us how harmless it was 0.1% death rate number floating around everywhere.

China, should be held hugely responsible for the delays and misinformation, Outstandingly their propaganda machine has been working overtime and they even have people still defending and praising them on the public stage.


I suppose we can just be thankful it is not an incredible lethal disease, but one that can cause just enough ripples to make us sit up and take notice, I hope in the long term we can look back on this as a positive experience to help shift our priorities back in the right places.
It doesn't matter that we, the public, were caught cold. The government has a pandemic response ready to use, in fact a really good one. Apparently Singapore took it and followed it to good effect - the UK didn't follow its own guide. So it's not really enough to say, well I was surprised by it so it's understandable that they were too.

As for China, yes they deserve blame. But we can't blame them for it all. By the third week of January, we (as in the public) could see it was becoming pretty serious, let alone the government. I haven't checked dates but I think that was clear from reports before the first confirmed UK case.

Aside from that, I don't recall 0.1% as the covid death rate at any point, I recall that as the flu death rate. Not saying I'm right and you're wrong, but that's my recollection.