Quote from: stompix on Today at 04:04:04 PM

There will be no de-chinafication, nothing on that scale will happen because countries will try to bribe the industry back to Europe and Us.
This is daydreaming, but something pretty interesting might come out of this whole mess.

During a crisis, the middle class is the one getting the short straw, and this is the main target of Chinese exports. The poor already don't have that money to spend, the luxury sector thrives even during these times as rich people losing half of their money means they can only buy 20 private jets, not 10 and most of their merchandise is not Chinese.
With demand for cheaper stuff, there will be demand for cheaper labor, Bangladesh is already closing in on garment exports competing with China, Malaysia is becoming a leader in rubber and latex products, they are already the largest condom and gloves manufacturers, they are producing tons of other petrochemical products, Vietnam is also producing a lot of stuff from cheap plastic items to clothes and shoes for western brands, and they all do it cheaper. And then...there is India!!!

Low labor cost countries are also plagued by low labor productivity. Maybe instead of countries chasing low labor costs, they will continue a shift towards regional models in an attempt to cut down on local supply chain costs and tariffs. Mexico offers the best of both worlds, with better wage to productivity ratio than China, Vietnam, or India and also very low/no tariffs. It's a triple whammy when you consider its proximity to the US:

Quote

What of more capital-intensive industries? Among carmakers, Hau Thai-Tang, Ford's top supply-chain executive, sees a trend towards greater regionalisation with three hub-and-spoke networks: Mexico as the low-cost spoke for America; eastern Europe and Morocco for western Europe; and South-East Asia and China for Asia. Meanwhile, Mexico is emerging as an alternative to China for global sourcing, thanks to its four-dozen free-trade agreements.

https://www.applied.economist.com/megatrends-home/article-10a

Quote from: stompix on Today at 04:04:04 PM

Quote from: Darker45 on Today at 02:26:29 AM

I guess it is not worth comparing China and Italy or Spain. The first ever COVID-19 case was in China. Where specifically in Wuhan it actually originated, I know not, but that type of corona virus was novel. It was not recorded in any book yet. Therefore, China was facing something new. It didn't have any clue at first. It had to familiarize itself with the enemy while already facing it.

Oh , really...
The first case, 1 December, nothing....doctors that dared to say anything were silenced, 30 December although they had hundred of cases they reported to the WHO there is no human to human transmission.

They did not say there was no human-to-human transmission. They said they had found "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" (yet) based on "preliminary investigations." https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152

The WHO actually informed the US and other countries of human-to-human transmission risk by January 10th. Western governments should have been addressing that risk absent confirmation, given SARS and MERS. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/who-cited-human-transmission-risk-in-january-despite-trump-claims

Let's look at the timeline of events.

Li Wenliang's online chat room warning came on December 30th.
The Pentagon was aware of growing reports of atypical pneumonia in Wuhan as of December 30th.
China informed the WHO on December 31st about growing reports of atypical pneumonia of unknown origin.
The CDC was officially informed on December 31st.
Chinese doctors isolated the SARS-CoV-2 genome and identified it as a new coronavirus on January 7th, then began studying transmissibility.
Thailand confirmed the first known case of the coronavirus outside China on January 13th.

Keep in mind, this was an unknown pathogen, never seen before in the world. There are millions of atypical pneumonia cases per year in China. Because of that, it would have been very difficult to recognize the possibility of novel infectious pathogen until a sufficiently large surge of cases triggered detection. The first cluster of cases' apparent relation to the Wuhan Seafood Market initially made it appear the outbreak was foodborne.

We now know the corona virus is characterized by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic viral shedding by much of the infected population for long periods. Up to 14 day incubation time! This made it even harder to detect before it had already widely spread. This is why there was an epic failure to contain it all over the world, including but not limited to China. We also know the coronavirus was circulating in other countries by very early January.

It's tempting to play the blame game but that's a really compressed timeline for us to assume any other outcome was possible since the pathogen was still unidentified and transmissibility unknown in early January. For countries like the US who were grossly unprepared and didn't heed any of the warnings anyway, it's hard to believe they could have stopped it regardless of what happened in China.

There is a prevailing assumption that China could have prevented the pandemic after the outbreak occurred. I think that's naive, given everything we now know. Did China make mistakes, could they have been more forthright? Absolutely! That doesn't change the fact that the pathogen had already widely spread (beyond China) before China had even begun to understand it. At that point, western countries still did almost nothing to stop its spread until national epidemics had already appeared.[/list]