I'm no fan of China, but I give credit where credit is due.
Rather than pointing fingers at China we should point at our own governments and ask how with months of warning watching this unfold in China, we were caught completely unprepared and on the back foot? Every single country. It's a truly shameful performance that has cost us big time in deaths and lost economic output.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chie...
In the end, western countries are indeed responsible for their own well being, but China did everything they can to block information from going out.
To know the true severity of the virus, you had to rely on leaked information. Doctors were silenced and journalists arrested, and social media censored.
Taiwan sent their own researchers in December, when only rumors were out. This is what western countries should have done.
China had first hand memory of SARS as a scary illness.
The west mostly thought of SARS as "that thing that mostly stayed in China".
So I guess if there's any good news, it's that for the next one, many more of us will have some frame of reference for how bad it can get.
Although it has been bad, parts of Europe has not been that bad. Germany, Norway, Denmark and maybe others have had very low numbers of deaths with much less impact on the population than China. Also of course New Zealand have done very well.
Sure we should ask our governments to do more, but this issue is because of China. They create the conditions for Coronaviruses and they are extremely unhelpful in fighting them.
Some examples https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nC_VN2SgzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amr-rLpD3lw
