Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes

When COVID-19 blows over, looking back, people will find tons of mistakes, wrong words, wrong actions, made in China and elsewhere.  Everybody, every country, none spared.  I also thought it was no worse than SARS in Jan 2020.  Some mistakes are inconsequential and corrected quickly.  Many are inevitable and being replayed all around the world.  Most were made due to lack of knowledge, not malice.  The worst kind, however, are those with political motives.  They and the endless finger-pointing make it harder to work together to contain COVID-19 and the global situations unnecessarily much worse. 

The story of Dr Li Wenliang is well-known, and whenever one wants to attack China, he uses this case (my Mar 16, 2020 blog).  Yet since Mar 2020 we have had numerous reports of doctors/nurses being fired for sounding alarm about the unpreparedness at US hospitals, and now an American captain also getting fired (https://news.yahoo.com/navy-fires-uss-theodore-roosevelt-210606455.html).  Dr Li wrote a private message to 150 people, saying it was SARS.  The message was leaked by someone else.  Capt Crozier e-mailed 20-30 people about a plead for his ship.  It is not known who leaked his letter when he was fired.  Dr Li was given a warning by the police because, technically, it was not SARS, and law dictates endemic information must go through official channels; warning was rescinded later.  The situations described by Capt Crozier were true, but he was fired, officially because he shouldn’t have had sent his letter to so many people; instead, he should have given it to his direct superior.  You will be hard pressed to find daylight between the actions of Dr Li and Capt Crozier.  Clearly, both Dr Li and Capt Crozier flaunted some rules.  Even the Capt’s supporters agreed he went over the chain of command, but by analogy, didn’t Dr Li go over his as well?  And he was not fired.  The only difference is maybe Capt Crozier is in the military.  But during an endemic Drs and hospitals are also like the military, whereas Crozier’s ship is not actively, directly engaged in fighting or even in a war zone, Crozier stated as such.  And how about the other medical professionals being fired in the US?  If Dr Li’s case is about suppressing information, what about all the others?

Soon after Wuhan lockdown was imposed on Jan 23, much domestic and foreign media attention was on how doctors and nurses were overwhelmed, lacked sufficient protections, how patients couldn’t get admitted, and the dead couldn’t be sent away quick enough.  At the time only China was dealing with this crisis, so the undertone was that it would happen only in China.  My Jan 26 blog pointed out that no place in the world can handle this kind of activity.  Since late Feb the same scene has been happening in South Korea, Italy, the US, etc.  This is just the nature of things, mistakes or shortcomings predictable, unavoidable, regardless of people, countries, and governments.

Certain mistakes, however, are made by some countries but not others, at least less so.  Everybody gets the same messages, same numbers, from China, since day 1.  If country A prepares better than country B, shouldn’t country B really compare itself to country A instead of blaming China hiding something?  Japan didn’t ban the entry of Chinese (except from Wuhan or Hubei) until March 30, and South Korea has no blanket Chinese ban, yet both are doing well in the COVID-19 fight.  Compared to the many European countries and the US, which stopped their commercial flights and banned Chinese since late Jan or early Feb.  Even Canada, which didn't ban entry of Chinese and other foreigners until mid-Mar, performed clearly better. 

There was an article on Yahoo in Feb commenting on the two hospitals with over 1000 beds each Wuhan built in about 10 days, the author asserted: although nobody but China is able to do this so quickly, with forced labor (my take: isn’t all Chinese labor forced labor?), our American system ensures that we will never need these hospitals.   Similar opinions had been expressed over and over around the globe from Jan to Feb.  Now fast forward to March and April, I am curious how the author and the like-minded think now, or do they even ever reflect on themselves?  Or not, see https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-wants-coronavirus-over-world-103022425.html.  If you ask any Chinese about this, he or she will laugh at it, or you.  Yet someone really believes it, or wants people to believe it.  There is always a lot of trash online and offline, in China and elsewhere, not worthy of anything.  But the unmistakable reality is that in mainstream Western media bashing China is political correctness, while the Chinese media is doing mostly defense.  End result is poisoning the well in the West.  China is guilty until proven innocent.  Any dirt will stick, even if it is completely bunk from the beginning.  Then if found factual or morally wrong or fabricated, free speech will serve as a universal cover and magic wand.  If I have more COVID-19 cases and deaths than China, even though I have better infrastructures, but I am transparent about it, then I still do better than China, or, better yet, China is hiding something.  Ideology trumps life.  

When the disease struck in Dec 2019, various models were proposed, some suggesting the worst scenarios, absence of any actual results from any country.  Since Feb 20 or Feb 29 China has shut down COVID-19, and if the story had ended there as a bigger SARS, everybody would have been happy.  Or if other countries were able to do as well as South Korea and Japan, we are not having a 1929.  In essence, the worst scenarios are not pre-determined, not inherently inevitable, and can truly be avoided.  But why are we still heading that way?  This is because there is this political virus having infected so many people for long.  It is ideological, racist, xenophobic, and lately putting on a nationalistic cloak.  It makes people anti-science, anti-common sense, lose decency and humanity.  China can do no right.  China always has bad motives.  Anything goes.  Only China can screw up like this.  It will never happen here.  Until it did.  Then of course it is still China’s fault.  COVID-19 is bad and will pass, this political virus is worse and will linger.

Note on 4/25/20:  This report gave a tiny snapshot of medical workers being fired or suspended in the US and pretty of reasons by the hospitals (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hospitals-fire-doctors-nurses-covid-19_n_5ea2fcb1c5b6f9639813d50b).  What the workers did was no "worse" than Li Wenliang.  Dr Li was never fired, suspended, or publicly criticized (like the captain).  He posted and gave interviews all along.   Using Li was just a China-bashing act, with zero regard to truth (Mar 16, 2020 blog).