"China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The US greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency"

So it is about a year ago that Covid-19 first appeared in the news. Thread title is taken from a statement made by Trump almost a year ago.

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

Did you ever imagine it would turn 2020 the way it did?

I did not. Didn't give it a second thought. That lasted until late February, early March for me. At work we were early on with precautions. Separated lunch times between departments. Second week of March it was national lock down here. Over night it changed.

The world has changed forever and not in a good way I just hope someday we can get back to some kind of normalcy.

@warmblur: Western world will most likely see it after summer. Dunno about other countries.

Never thought it'd turn out like this.

Not fond of comparing my country, the US, to others in an effort to say 'well at least we aren't as bad as ____" but for my own sanity I need to start doing that so I don't feel such god damn self-loathing towards this country of mine.

Not just the country, but the people. I rarely blame Americans for the problems of the US, but this time....meh, we have only ourselves to blame.

On the flip side I was honestly expecting the radical left to be the ones to push things too far since they have seemed to be on a roll for the past year or two, but to my surprise it was the right that went absolutely batshit.

Who woulda thunk it>?

We are normal. It's the new normal.

Wish I could say "...and improved" but I can't. It's just...new.

In all seriousness I hate that term "new normal" and people that use it seriously to justify...whatever....need to take a long walk off a short pier.

The US is an unmitigated disaster. Both parties, all states, they're all guilty of managing this like absolute trash.

In Canada, I imagine there will be some sort of normalcy by summer (old normalcy). I'd hope by summer, or latest, fall, restrictions would be lifted. But I'm honestly seeing 2022 being a "free for all" again.

My rant about the US is that it directly affects Canadians.

We doomed.

Pancakes!

I have a photo of the WHO twitter feed dated January 14, 2020

They state;

“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human to human transmission of the novel coronavirus covid19.”

WHO hoped to play Chinas game to get more info from them. In that regard, having this virus starting in China might be one of the worst places for the rest of the world to take precautions against it as information on it is withheld. I did however create this thread in Off Topic because I don't want it to focused on the political aspect. In hindsight I should have made this clearer in my opening post.

My impression is that people handled the first lockdown rather well. Most people put in an effort to follow the new rules. Summer came and it looked promising. And apparently enough people had have enough of it, didn't think it was serious. Gotta go abroad for that summer vacation. Perhaps the biggest mistakes were opening for tourists and foreign workers again who only needed to quarantine while not working. Which made no sense and wasn't followed.

Personally I haven't been this lazy in a long time.

@horgen: Being in China, as you know when it all kicked off, I certainly did not expect 2020 to turn out as it did.

The biggest surprise is really the UK and the US.

In my opinion, their governments sold a fallacy of striking a balance between managing the economy and the pandemic.

Trump and Johnson’s reluctance to shutdown their economies and eagerness to re-open cost lives that should not have fallen.

They gambled the lives of their people for tax revenues, their economic leadership record and their own re-electability.

It does not surprise me that five out of the 10 countries with the highest number of infections are those with unsustainable levels of national debt, US, UK, France, Italy & Spain.

If their governments had previously managed their economies responsibly, they wouldn’t be in a position that encouraged them to disregard logical and scientific advice.

I often hear how the US and the UK criticise other countries for their lack of human rights from their thrones of righteousness. But evidently, the rising death toll still falls on death ears for the majority and their actions are marketed as, “freedom.”

It is angering how little the US took this seriously.

UK and US both have/had leaders when this happened that thought doing nothing was the best response. When leadership was required, the leaders were absent.

Why things went as wrong as they did in Italy and Spain hasn't been so much in the news here. Other than a late response, I can't remember hearing else.

Economy in this matters as well. I guess you could argue that the economy at large had not fully recovered since the financial crisis in 2008. Interest rates were still quite low.

@horgen: I don’t think it’s doing nothing was the best response, they both have teams of scientific advisors.

Johnson did toy with the idea of natural herd immunity, but he quickly ditched that idea when infection and death rates surged.

Their underlying decision making process was likely the burgeoning levels of debt and fears of subsequent austerity policies to reign in that debt. That therefore affects their re-electability.

Perhaps even, “we don’t want to follow what China did,” lockdowns, which they described as draconian.

You’re entirely right that many countries have not fully recovered from prior recessions and that also played a huge role in their reluctance to lockdown and eagerness to reopen.

But like I said, this is an attack on human rights but merely described as freedom.

I remember when it all started with the governments saying “it will only take 2 weeks to slow the spread”. Guess it’s been the longest 2 weeks of all of our lives... I’m not only shocked with the governments abhorrent way of dealing with this but the way that so many citizens are eager to give up their rights and follow along with whatever the government feeds them. I don’t think things will ever be the same again, a lot of common practices from before and industries will be much different for a long time.