Comment by nickczj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickczj | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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

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...

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".

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

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