What??

EDIT: Thanks!

The first few paragraphs are promising:

I have no credential whatsoever in medicine, public health policy, or anything that would make me an expert in this matter. Neither do I have any work experience in these sectors.

There is absolutely no reason why should trust anything I tell you, full stop.

You should always trust medical professionals and agencies for your information, and ignore what you read from random people on the internet.

That’s where I stopped reading. It sounds pretty dispositive, especially since the person deleted it.

EDIT 2: I did read the comments though, and I was impressed by how quickly the vicious bigot popped out from behind the pseudo intellectual mask.

If you want to write speculative fiction based on your limited understanding of current events, why not just do that instead of putting a weird fake-rationalist veneer over the whole thing?

the full post for context and to make it easier to read for everyone

Let me just get some things out of the way: I have no credential whatsoever in medicine, public health policy, or anything that would make me an expert in this matter. Neither do I have any work experience in these sectors. There is absolutely no reason why should trust anything I tell you, full stop. You should always trust medical professionals and agencies for your information, and ignore what you read from random people on the internet. Okay. Now for the post. When coronavirus makes inroads in the US it will be a catastrophe worse than the Civil War and the Spanish Flu combined. We have nothing close to the “social harmony” found in China By social harmony, we mean obedience to authority and conformity to rules. China went full totalitarian on the virus, yet it’s still spreading there. We can’t do 20% of what China did even if we wanted to. First, we have far less experience in central planning, which characterizes China’s relationship with construction and planning measures. Second, the US does not have a culture dedicated to diligent rule-following and obedience to authority. We will have hundreds or thousands of people defy quarantine measures that are put in place, either due to a rumor, due to spite, or due to some perceived personal need. We know this will happen, because it’s happened whenever curfews have been put in place or large environmental tragedies have hit our cities. We simply do not have the cultural affinity toward obedience to authority that is prevalent in East Asia. This comes with many pluses, of course, but a pandemic is obviously a time where it’s really important to obey authority and follow rules. Part of the lack of social harmony manifests in our work culture. Americans working for state agencies and utility companies are working for a paycheck, without any semblance of higher purpose, let alone for ~Glorious Cultural Victories~. The Americans who work for our state services are doing it for a paycheck, whereas in China there’s an element of a greater good at play. And you can say it’s all just propaganda and for show, but the fact is that it’s been internalized by a lot of Chinese workers. I would point you to the documentary American Factory, I believe on Netflix, particularly the end of the documentary where they show the lavish company-held celebration. In Chinese cities, people really buy in to the idea of working for the group and for the nation. Far fewer people in America will feel any sense of “duty” to state services. What does this mean? Well, many workers who have a better option will quit working when the virus is bad. Expect your garbage to be picked up? Your mail to be sorted? The ticket booth to be manned? These services will be a lot slower if we get a China-style pandemic. Crime and Social Decay I don’t think most Americans realize how little crime and homelessness East Asia has. If the coronavirus makes inroads in the US, many of the police will be reluctant to make contact with anyone who could be sick. Our homeless population will spread disease, and then we have the civil unrest aspect. China doesn’t have gangs. China doesn’t deal with riots. But we do. Crime-ridden areas are going to be upset when stores have stopped opening. You’re going to have cases of fed up people running amok when they realize they got infected and are probably going to die because they’ve been a pack a day smoker for a decade. Some doctors living in penthouses with families are going to get out of the cities, instead of risking their lives to help residents. Customs & Work Sector Differences Far fewer food services in the US are family-owned, meaning the employee base will quit en masse, whereas many stores in Wuhan have one employee working a family-owned business at a time. In many cities across the US, shelves are stocked by 20-year-olds who are still surviving off of their parents support (I know because I was one, and so were my coworkers). Do you think they’re going to continue checking out customers when this hits? They’ll be OUT, and the manager won’t be able to handle the workload. At any given store you’ll have 20-35% of the employees permanently missing. Trust me, I’ve worked at packed grocery stores in cities. These grocery stores will be unable to handle a normal amount of customers with 20% fewer employees, let alone a mass rush on the grocery store when the pandemic hits. Similarly, many restaurant dish washers and city bus drivers are people who literally just got off welfare. These people are going to stop working, and nobody will be there to replace them. One more thing: grocery store stockers do not wash their hands, almost ever. They take your money, and then an hour later will be stocking produce. This is actually how many grocery stores in the US manage time for their employees: one hour stocking, one hour at a register. I am not kidding, the majority of workers never wash their hands or use hand sanitizer unless they’ve just used the bathroom. We’ve replaced dedicated lifelong cab drivers with side-gig uber drivers who are often still being supported by a day job or even their parents. Many (maybe 15%) of these drivers are going to stop working when the pandemic hits, at a time when everyone will be looking to use the service because of the threat on the subway. The cities are going to have so much traffic it’s unreal, and many people are going to have to walk to do anything when it hits, opening them up to more disease. And our public transportation is cleaned less in the US. Customs & Work Sector Differences In China, only 18% of citizens OWN a car, let alone use it daily. In the US, only 8% of Americans don’t own a car, and 85% of Americans get to work in a car. You might think this will help our transmission rate, and you’re right it will help our transmission rate in rural and suburban areas. But it also makes localized quarantines next to useless. Even many Urbanites own cars in America. In order to quarantine a city in the US you would need Trump to declare martial law. Let that sink in: if NYC gets hit hard, Chicago and Detroit and other cities would need to ask Trump to declare martial law in order stay unaffected. This pandemic could not come at a worse time politically. Who is going to ask Trump to declare martial law? Cultural Differences In cities across East Asia (not rural areas, but cities), practicing good hygiene is the norm. They wear masks as a rule when they’re sick, and already in places like Taiwan and Japan you’re more likely to see normal people wear masks than not. It’s impolite to openly cough or talk on transit. These rules DO NOT apply to America. It’s extremely common to board a bus or train and have someone a few seats down from you coughing or doing drugs. Our public transit will have a transmission rate 5x that of East Asia, adjusted for per capita use of course. Note again that East Asia emphasizes diligence and rule-following. That is EXTREMELY HELPFUL during a pandemic, because everyone in the society will be hand sanitizing and so on. And let’s not get too into average IQ, but there are serious IQ differences between the US and somewhere like Japan or South Korea that do have an effect on ability to follow procedures. Now let’s talk about food for a moment. China is heavy on communal meals, which surely boosts transmission, right? It does, of course, absolutely. But restaurants in the US actually have more hand-to-hand transmission. Touchless Alipay via phone is the norm for paying in many Chinese cities, accounting for half of all purchases in China. In the US, we have TOUCH SCREEN point of sale systems. Do you have any idea how many people working in a restaurant touch the same PoS system? The manager, the waiter, the busboy, and the bartender ALL touch the same PoS system. What else do they touch? Literally every darn thing that gets to your table. As for health? Sure, the Chinese smoke more, but they also eat immunostimulants more, like garlic, spice, and onion. In US restaurants, there is a clear transmission avenue where glasses, plates, cash, cards, and touchscreen PoS systems are all touched within the same two minutes, continuously.

For some reason, my link didn’t go through. Here it is.

[deleted]

This user claims to be a teacher, and is quite clearly a full-on nazi (though I’m sure he’d have some much more rational, multisyllabic way of wording that), and it seems that he most likely lives in my part of the world.

This is extremely distressing to me, knowing that there might be someone out there in my community, teaching young people, who holds this hate-filled ideology. I sincerely wish there was a way to find out who this is and let his employer know about this.

I mean the dude had a point. Minus lol racism, there’s areas of US society/culture that will be weaker when faced with a pandemic. However bus drivers aren’t literally just off welfare lol, at least in my city (Chicago) they’re part of a Union and get decent income. Hilariously, a lot of the black bus drivers are part of the black Freemason group (Prince Hall) I dunno what the white staff does.

Edit: also the US would have advantages also regarding this stuff, for example the average American white doesn’t eat as many different meats as Chinese Han do, ie sources of transmissions of new viruses. The US is more urbanized, so less transmissions from animals. The US government won’t crack down on doctors reporting a new illness, so there is a chance to contain things easier or fix them earlier on.

Oh, “affirmative action niggers” don’t wreck the construction sector. Huh, it’s full of Mexicans and whatnot.