Taiwan: 0.3 per million (7 deaths)
China: 3 per million (4,636 deaths)
Singapore: 5 per million (29 deaths)
Hong Kong: 25 per million (189 deaths)
South Korea: 29 per million (1,496 deaths)
Japan: 52 per million (6,557 deaths)
US: 1,500 per million (483,200 deaths; +3K daily)
New Zealand: 5 per million (25 deaths)
Australia: 35 per million (909 deaths)
..
UK: 1,700 per million (114,851 deaths)
Nations that successfully suppressed outbreak include both small and large, both island and non-island, and both autocratic and democratic.
Sole relevant parameter for success or failure is whether government took prompt resolute action (success) or whether it did not (failure).
Fast, strong, and sustained response by government equals success.
Slow, weak, and unsustained response by government equals failure.
Every death above 100 per million in a developed nation is the direct result of governmental negligence.
Accountability--Nuremberg-Trials-style accountability--will be required for the tens to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, and economic ruin, in nations like US and UK, where governments deliberately chose negligence over response.
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"Cuomo’s plan to reopen New York City restaurants for indoor dining..is baffling."
"Too many leaders..are ignoring [reality]..Massachusetts and New Jersey are allowing..restaurants..to expand..indoor service..and Iowa just lifted its mask mandate."
"It’s not just their own efforts they are undermining. They are also thwarting their citizens who have been making collective sacrifices all along."
"Average people have spent the better part of the past year waiting for leaders to take charge. America finally has those leaders in place at the national level, but the nation needs better and more consistent leadership on this issue at the state level."
"'If the only information you're allowing to be weighed is provided by the very people who have everything to lose by revealing such evidence, that just doesn't come close to passing the sniff test,' said David A. Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford"
"Relman suggested that the WHO team should have sought complete, detailed records from the laboratories about their experiments and the raw genomic sequence data of their research going back a decade."
"'Just saying that they have really good safety protocols is not an answer in my view,' said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who was not among the scientists on the trip. 'That alone does not put my mind at rest.'
"Any self-replicating agent released into..wild will be selected for enhanced transmission, underscoring..evolutionary risks inherent to..engineering and release of transmissible viruses"
"In addition to these troubling safety concerns, the development of transmissible vaccines will incur grave biosecurity risks due to the dual-use potential of the insights, tools and experience gained through such work."
"[T]ransmissible vaccine research will create an incentive to explore ways of engineering viral vectors to evade the immune response, as any pre-existing immunity to the vaccine vector will slow vaccine spread. "
"Signs..we live in a dying superpower are all around us. Officials..make illogical, chaotic decisions; and everything is much more complicated than it needs to be. Could no one have invented an app or..website that assigns people to..vaccination sites in order of priority?"
"Is it impossible for [a state] to..take direct control of the process, and order its National Guard to give out the vaccine at schools? How about letting the..oldest people get their shots first—as..orderly countries have done—before opening up the system to a million others?"
To Ashish Jha..of..Brown University..the insistence on offloading responsibility to..states looks less like a reasoned plan than a deliberate evasion tactic."
"'It’s very clear that the feds..didn’t know or care whether states were going to be able to do this or not. If states can’t do it, [they could] always blame them. And that has been the strategy from the very beginning.'"
"China’s experience has underscored the advice that many experts have suggested but few countries have followed: The more quickly you bring the pandemic under control, the more quickly the economy can recover"
“In many countries, debates have raged over the balance between protecting public health and keeping the economy running. In China, there is little debate. It did both.”
"The success has positioned China well, economically and diplomatically, to push back against the United States and others..It has also emboldened Mr. Xi, who has offered China’s experience as a model for others to follow."