Spartanmack
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jul 9, 2013
- Messages
- 17,453
Nitpicking.
We have intelligence agencies and shouldn't just rely on what other nations tell us.
Focusing on who was screaming over the travel ban is also 24 hr cable news partisan nonsense; it was a blip on my radar.
The travel ban was too late anyway.
Nobody trusts China's numbers.
no, it's not nitpicking, there's a big difference between being late and over/underreacting. Nitpicking is more like making points about semantics like "projecting not measuring". Our intelligence agencies rely on whatever information they have available, it's not like we have spies with unlimited access to what's going on in China. And I'm not focusing on the ban, I'm citing examples of how it politicized from the beginning which caused us to react late.
Hindsight is 20/20 - the travel ban may have been too late, but at the time (assuming our spies didn't know more) there were only 102 cases in the US and literally everyone including the WHO was saying not to close borders. It's not true that nobody trusts China's numbers. The WHO trusted China's numbers and as recently as a week or two ago, they continued to push China's claims about the impact, source, virtually every aspect of the pandemic. China is clearly lying about this but it's not just their numbers that can't be trusted. I don't have a lot of confidence in our numbers, particularly the death toll. Many people have openly admitted the death toll includes deaths due to other causes. There's no way to know whether the impact of that is material or not, but it certainly calls the numbers into question and is one of the reasons that makes it hard to determine if it really is worse here than elsewhere.
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