As time passes, the number of victims of the Wuhan virus are mounting, with the latest count at 131 dead. In this entry of the thread, I reacted to James Griffiths’ early evaluation of the Chinese response to the virus’ outbreak. Another view is put forth by Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, as noted in WaPo:
As Chinese officials widened a travel ban in recent days in an effort to control the virus, concerns emerged that the quarantine may not be effective. Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said China’s ability to implement such a dramatic ban on movement “might be an example of resilience of the authoritarian state, especially in a crisis setting, but there is no strong evidence supporting that the approach will be effective.” …
Despite concerns over the efficacy and ethics of a travel ban, Huang said that if China does ultimately control the virus, some officials there may actually see the outbreak as “an opportunity to beef up their legitimacy when they portray themselves as being decisive and as being wise.”
If the outbreak doesn’t last long, he said, “they would claim to be the winners.”
It’s one thing to stick your chest out and pin a deserved medal on it, quite another to spin incompetence as heroism. The trick is discerning the difference between the two.
That said, it’s difficult to see any particular political system being better suited to deal with an epidemic than another – and also hard to see why the best one so suited should be selected purely on that criteria. I suppose you can make the argument Better alive and not completely free than dead, but the results may be unpalatable.
Then again, a lot of people think an absolutist 2nd Amendment regime is the only palatable approach to gun control, and they tend to look a little wild-eyed at the best of times.
