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Comment by exposay | Hacker News Reader

China has been covering it up for 2 months. Minimal action was taken to prevent the disease from spreading and they kept denying until a couple days ago when it was no longer possible to cover it up because it is spreading to neighboring countries who have been complaining for the whole time. Regional/local governments have been trying to downplay it because it makes them "look bad". It is essentially a replay of SARS. Only admit and take action when it's too late.

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China doesn't get to decide the scientific consensus. Teams of scientists spanning multiple countries + NGOs like the WHO make the risk assessment. The reason the scientific consensus was that there was no human-human transmission was because...there was no evidence of human-human transmission. All previous cases could be directly traced back to the market, and there were previously no clear evidence of healthcare workers or relatives with no exposure to the market but exposure to an infected individual getting sick.

Unlike anonymous users online, professional scientists can't make a claim, especially a very serious one, without evidence. If they do so, later the public will crucify them if it turns out the virus actually cannot spread from human-human.

It's only in the past three days that it because clear that there is evidence of people who don't have a direct link to the market being infected. A big reason for this breakthrough was that the genome of the virus was identified (by, yes, Chinese scientists working within two weeks of realizing a novel outbreak, which is also impressive). This genome sequence makes possible very sensitive tests for identifying infected people more accurately.

Hence, in the light of this new information, the scientific consensus has been updated to reflect likely human-human transmission.

Please stop spreading false information and unnecessary hatred. This only makes the response to a crisis worse.

All previous cases that had been reported to the WHO could be directly traced back to the market. That might be a rather important distinction if the rumours about regional and local governments covering up possible cases are accurate...

It's really sad to see that Chinese scientist and health workers are somehow 'sacrificed' due to some covering up of some regional and local official. When people refer to China I think it's more like the local officials who have done all the cover-up not only to 'save face' but more like to save their position. Yeah but I agree that a distinction between groups of Chinese people has to be clarified and referred to more precisely.

Well, in this case professional scientists actually made claims about the classification of the virus as soon as they had evidence, and before the government had put out an official statement. But then they got prosecuted for "spreading rumors" and people stopped talking publicly about the progress of their research.

Now the government is getting criticized for this by e.g. Hu Fanzhu of East China Normal University's National Discourse Environment Research Center, whose open letter you might want to read if you think stopping people from "spreading false information" is what's important here.

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/toFmfLsLn_x6PhGFliictg

The Chinese central government has already admitted their officials have been trying to cover it up. The president Xi had made it clear that he would "nail" the officials who are covering it up on the "pillar of shame" and those people will be "criminals of 10 thousand years".

Well looking at a large scale public health incident from only science perspective is a naive simplification.

It's hard to cover it up now. It's called the Wuhan virus.

Source?

From wikipedia:

> The first suspected cases were reported on 31 December 2019

It is just pointless bashing, covering up 2 months? Think how this pandemic had escalated in a week, and neighboring countries will not notice it for 2 months?

Some people have some weird imagination

There were no new cases in China except Wuhan and HongKong a week ago, how's that possible if they weren't covering up?

Why is this covering up?

Firstly there isn't one case confirmed in HongKong yet.

Secondly, the virus could take up to 2 weeks to start showing symptoms and it is only until recently the method to detect this virus efficiently had been discovered.

This is a new virus, and its behavior takes time to understand.

> Firstly there isn't one case confirmed in HongKong yet.

[0], [1]

I agree this is a new virus we know little about, but did you know folks in Wuhan were still gathering in crowds without any precautions [2], and ppl got caught spreading so-called fake news of this virus?

[0] https://twitter.com/alvinllum/status/1219911842723553283

[1] https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/ch/component/k2/1504214-20200122.h...

[2] https://twitter.com/Xhnsoc__Redflag/status/12194676125282181...)

I don't think you follow the news there. Just because you've only heard it yesterday doesn't make it new. The neighbouring countries have been on guard on the issue. There have been lots of news, leaks and complaints on this issue for the past several weeks. In fact the wet market in Wuhan had been officially "closed" for at least 3 weeks due to the disease. That means the pandemic has been spreading far longer than that.

Now they suddenly started to release updated numbers (due to pressure from their neighbouring countries) and you think it'd only "escalated in a week".

Some people have some weird imagination

* http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/01/WS5e0c6a49a310cf3e3...

Chinese sources have been reporting on the issue from 2019 December. How does your reference a proof that the chinese gov has been covering it up?

I have been following the issue since start of this month from Chinese media, where is the covering up?

Where is due to the pressure part? At first there had not been showing enough evidence of the virus's capacity to spread from human to human, which only confirmed recently because the medical staff gets infected and 2 cases in Guangdong, so the alert level is much lower than it is now.

You can blame the Chinese authority for not fully predicting the severity of the situation, but intentionally covering stuff up is a different accusation you better have strong evidence to support that.

Some people indeed had some weird imagination.

Well, didn't they hide the true extent of the Great Famine as well for multiple decades?

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