Political critics can argue that the U.S. response (travel restrictions) to the coronavirus outbreak which began in Wuhan, China and rapidly spread was too harsh, but data show it was probably a greater error for other countries to posture about xenophobia before doing the exact same thing.

China was lying about coronavirus in January and likely still is, since their number of deaths has barely changed in a month while funeral incinerators were running non-stop. The number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95 percent if China had been transparent about the virus three weeks earlier - and if the World Health Organisation had not once again been willing dupes for dictators and believed what they said months ago.

America rightly ignored WHO declaring that it was wrong to limit travel and in hindsight it would have been a huge error to do anything but what the federal government did.

The biggest loser in listening to WHO; Italy. They believed director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus when he said he had "absolutely no doubt about China’s commitment to transparency” and have paid the price. While America has 300,000 cases most of them are not severe. We even had 160,000 ventilators for severe cases before this got started. Obviously, 4,000 deaths in New York is tragic, no one is diminishing those losses, but we had already lost 24,000 in the U.S. this season due to flu, so we are well-prepared for how viruses can impact our loved ones at great risk from infectious diseases.

Those who abdicated their trust to United Nations bureaucracy, however, have paid a higher price. While the U.S. restricted travel on January 31st, Brazil has found itself with 14,000 cases that they know about and nowhere near the needed infrastructure to manage it. America is calling everything with a dry cough a coronavirus case and reacting accordingly while Brazil does not even have 14,000 ventilators in its entire country. Brazilians researchers calculated how coronavirus arrived using genome sequencing of patients: 55 percent came from Italy while 9 percent came from China and 8 percent from France. All by March 5th, five weeks after the US imposed travel restrictions and a week before WHO declared coronavirus a pandemic.



It's impossible to blame Italy for listening to the head of WHO gushing that China had set “a new standard for outbreak response" even though they threw doctors in jail for talking about COVID-19 and that “WHO doesn’t recommend limiting trade and movement.” They believed WHO and so that is where the blame must lie. Italy was the first western country to go into lockdown and would have done it sooner if WHO had not been denying that it was even a pandemic until March 11th.

At the time I had thought perhaps WHO was being reasonable and not panicking but it turns out they were just as timid as they always are when it comes to demanding the truth from dictatorships.