thinking about how the WHO openly admits they came up with the name "COVID-19" specifically in order to obfuscate the fact that this virus is the 2.0 version of SARS because if the general public knew this was SARS 2.0 they'd have "unnecessary fear".

Asian countries responded aggressively and early compared to Western countries *specifically because* of their experience with SARS 1.0 and because everyone made the connection this was SARS 2.0. The fear wasn't unnecessary; that fear was a godsend. Lack of fear brought death.

Reminder:

Taiwan was hit very hard by SARS 1.0 (73 deaths per wiki) and they did exemplary work to prepare the infrastructure and the ability to react extremely rapidly against a possible future pandemic. It paid off. They've had seven (7) deaths in total from SARS 2.0.

Taiwanese health officials were so viscerally terrified of SARS returning that "posts on Taiwanese equivalent of 4chan about unknown viral pneumonia" met the threshold for starting to take action. They didn't wait for WHO. They had a hair trigger for this shit and it saved lives.

On the other hand WHO and pretty much every Western public-health agency spent that valuable time spreading horseshit about "no person to person transmission confirmed yet" or about how masks haven't been Proven to Work and doing everything they could to downplay the situation.

in January, while WHO + Western public health institutions were pretending this would just go away; Taiwan was already starting to drastically increase domestic production of surgical (and N95) masks, specifically in order to guarantee *every resident* a supply of surgical masks.

Taiwan used to be a net importer of surgical masks; but after increasing domestic production by more than an order of magnitude (they make 20 million surgical masks per DAY now) *and* allotting a supply to each resident; they're a net exporter now. It's really very impressive.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as SARS-2 is in fact COVID-19/SARS-2, or as I've recently taken to calling it, COVID-19 plus SARS-2. SARS-2 is not a disease unto itself, but rather the virus that causes the COVID-19 symptoms comprising a full and