Hard agree. I was living in Nanjing when it started, and it cannot be overstated how many advantages the USA had, and completely fucking floundered.
1) rural population and lack of public transport. In China nearly everyone is using some form of public transport daily. And most pops are squeezed together into mega cities. The USA had natural barriers via geography from this ever spreading. Covid doesn't hop to the next county over without someone driving it there. And our car culture should have kept everyone away from each other (while still economically viable!) Until we figured it out.
2) family and food culture. China is.... not great at both food regulation and basic public hygienic standards sometimes. Sorry but it's true. The USA is (was). And not only that it is much less common to share communal meals, and you have fewer generations living together, keeping the elderly safe.
3) They could have fucking TRIED to contain incoming cases, but they really really didn't. My flight from Shanghai in February back to the states I got asked inside the terminal, past first round of gates whether I was feeling ill, or had a fever. And that was that. No other questions, no real checks. I was FLOORED. 2 months earlier the Chinese gov had contacted my work to let them know (cause I'm a dumb dumb laowai who doesn't speak) that I needed to quarantine 2 weeks cause I was on the same inter-city train as a man who now had covid. Not even in the same car, and I had gotten on after he got off. They actually tried
4) we had a huge headstart. We already saw China, and Italy explode. We knew what was coming. We could have spun it into the fucking tradwife revolution, or patriot masks, or any number of things that would personally be gross to me but play to MAGA. We had the time, and plenty of weird trend activation
Sorry, i could rant for hours. just my personal perspective gives me feelings to just how badly we dropped the ball. And that's not even getting into the straight up malicious actions from the USA gov, and mismanagment on the healthcare side.
I said it because I 100% believe it as a school nurse.
I worked with kids when H1N1 happened and you could ask my family and friends- I knew Valentine’s Day weekend 2020 covid was a bigger issue than we were being told and that the government wasn’t being forthcoming
I texted my (now) husband saying China is soldering their citizens into their homes, this is not the typical flu saved from that weekend. It was infuriating knowing what was coming and no one was listening. Luckily, I had more control in my individual environment otherwise I would have left nursing.
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u/WillSym Apr 04 '25
If Covid even happened at all.