China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
In 5 minutes a day you will have a better informed perspective than what any news sites provide, my own alarm has lessened considerably after reading these.
https://xw.qq.com/act/qgfeiyan
https://news.sina.cn/zt_d/yiqing0121
https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia
I don't believe they have privileged access to government secrets. If the government wants to hide something, the last thing they're going to do is share that data with a news org.
China is bad, everyone else is good. Anything more complicated than that is essentially discarded.
I think they've doing a good job. The world health organisation does. What's the actual problem here other than the usual China flamewars?
Now that they're engaged, the WHO is saying they're responding pretty well.
The WHO is captured by China.
An international collective of doctors and scientists who advise the World Health Organisation said this isn't a these you currently, why exactly do you have any reason to doubt them?
Only have to look at the other response here to see how certain types with absolutely no concern for the truth want to dominate this debate, it's just another opportunity for them, nothing else.
The WHO has been previously criticised for only declaring emergencies when it involves America or the holiday season. There's published papers on the matter saying so.
You can't please all the people with this stuff but the onus is on anyone claiming why this body made up of international experts all in competition with each other suddenly decided to collectively conspire in some sort of bizarre attempt to hide the truth?
The scientists advising WHO saying this stuff have far more to lose than the commentators here, people shouldn't lose sight of that very salient fact.
At least some Chinese officials suppressed information in the early days.
Now which body do you trust more, also which one says it's not a problem and people shouldn't be worried: The Chinese govt or the World Health Organisation?
People panicked about this situation and spreading false information are the ones to worry about, not those with the virus.
Especially in countries like Indonesia where I am now:
>In Indonesia, Terawan Agus Putranto, the health minister, advised citizens to relax and eschew overtime work to avoid the disease, which has killed more than 360 people and infected more than 17,000 others, mostly in China.
>“To prevent it is very easy as long as your immunity is good,” Mr. Terawan said.
...
>Indonesia has 264 million people, over 2 million tourists from China, but 0 reported cases of coronavirus
By the time the idiot finds it's run amok there will be a lot of unnecessary deaths.
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615123/the-china-coronavi...
If China wants countries to open their doors again then they need to let the rest of the world's doctors in to help research the nature of this virus.
> International travel bans is basically as strict as traveling out of Hubei province, stricter than average travel restrictions in China.
The Chinese government censured doctors who sounded the alarm, and you want other countries to follow their advice? I'd say exercising more caution than China advises is appropriate given how little we know about this disease.
Outside of China the worst hit countries have a little more than two dozen cases and there's only been a single death. It makes me not be afraid of this disease. My chance of getting it is crazy low and if I do I will likely just have a mild to bad flu.
Of course things can and probably will get worse, we'll see by how much.
But the reason for concern isn’t your chances of getting this virus today, which is extremely remote unless you’re in Wuhan. The concern is that China can’t contain this and it’s only a matter of time until it becomes a global pandemic, with the risk of killing millions and overwhelming medical infrastructures. There’s a reason so many epidemiologists seem worried...
- Out of 270 confirmed non-China cases there's still been only one death. That's a 0.3% death rate. Which raises the question, why is the death rate 2-3% in China? Are we sure it will be that high worldwide? Is it 2-3% because of something unique to the virus or something unique to China (i.e. a delayed response leading to overwhelmed health services).
- I think the histographs in the WHO situation reports (Fig 2 and Fig 3 in the latest one [1]) tell an interesting story which has gone largely unreported. Excluding the situation on the Japanese cruise ship (which is tragic but easy to quarantine), new international infections have been declining since the end of January. That's because the majority of non-Chinese who became infected got it in Wuhan. No one is going in or out Wuhan now, so those cases have basically dropped to zero, and other sources of infection are stable to down.
Obviously vigilance is important and the threat of an international spread needs to be taken seriously. But I think we should at least consider the possibility that this virus may have appeared more dangerous than it actually is because of a poor early response in Wuhan. And while the response can always be better, no one now is screwing up as badly as Wuhan did.
[1] Latest situation report: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
Also, a lot of people that get this virus will just think of it as a bad flu and blow it off over a few days. They don’t get counted in the statistics.
Oh and it was during the Cultural Revolution too, so they were executing counter revolutionary people behind the school every afternoon (this was after the epidemic). Needless to say it left a very bad impression of China gov on my father.
They let this problem get out of hand—and now the people there suffer.
How?
They ignored the doctors who attempted to report the problem on New Year’s day.
They (the CCP) take no precautionary measures until their political regime is threatened.
So many things done wrong—including maintaining wet market controls up a few years after H1N1.
Coronavirus has disrupted many businesses in China, and I think the government knew this would happen if more people found out about it. So their priority was not getting a big economic hit, not solving the issue.
This is a good post on what happened, but there are others like it if you want to dig deeper on how they tried to cover it up:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/coronavirus-dis...
I'll just copy these 2 paragraphs here to address your "China responded quickly" comment:
> To be sure, at first glance, China’s government has appeared to be more forthcoming about the latest outbreak. But, although the first case was reported on December 8, the Wuhan municipal health commission didn’t issue an official notice until several weeks later. And, since then, Wuhan officials have downplayed the seriousness of the disease and deliberately sought to suppress news coverage.
That notice maintained that there was no evidence that the new illness could be transmitted among humans, and claimed that no health-care workers had been infected. The commission repeated these claims on January 5, though 59 cases had been confirmed by then. Even after the first death was reported on January 11, the commission continued to insist that there was no evidence that it could be transmitted among humans or that health-care workers had been affected.
As for the govt lying about the bushfires, yes most definitely, we had tourism chiefs out there on the offensive claiming Australia was fine to visit when most of the East Coast had the worse air quality on Earth for months.
We had a tourism minister standing on a half burnt Kangaroo Island which was still in lockdown from the fire telling people it's the best time to visit.
Govts lie all the time for self interest. And strangely many of the public totally support them doing so when it's their team or for personal benefit.
WHO says they can, but only if used very right, and only alongside other measures: https://www.who.int/publications-detail/advice-on-the-use-of...
http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-01/28/c_1125508460.ht...
Google Translated: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2020_01_01_530191.shtml?s=zw...
>Piecing together the events in Wuhan shows that for at least three weeks before the banquet, city authorities had been informed about the virus spreading in their midst but issued orders to suppress the news. (https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06... linked above)
In this thread people are still sharing articles about how there akshually 10s thousands of dead and how the virus was intentionally released from a government lab. And at the same time surprised that the government arrested people spreading panic on social media.
It took them a month to recognize atypical viral pneumonia and report it to WHO. Another ~10 days to isolate the virus (no mean feat, read the paper) and sequence it. Here in the Netherlands people would be just sent home on paracetamol - I had a pneumonia couple years back so I speak from experience.
I was born in Wuhan and half of my family are currently holed up there. A few days before the Wuhan lockdown was ordered, coronavirus already made it to the headline in CNN and NYT, but there was not any headline news about the coronavirus within China. Heck my dad wasn't even wearing a mask on his 1hr metro commute to work until the day before lockdown happened.
In early January, government officials and news outlets were reporting: "There are false rumors about Wuhan having a SARS like virus. This is an unknown virus that's _probably not_ transmittable from human to human. There are only 45 confirmed cases. There is no need to panic. "
One of the officials even organized a thousand people CNY dinner as part of the CNY celebration a few days before the lockdown.
They had a thousand opportunities to curb the disease and alert the people, but the Chinese bureaucracy and leadership's imcompetence directly caused the coronavirus disaster.
Edit: January 21 news article on the thousand people dinner from a Chinese source. About 40k people participated, this neighbourhood is about 10 minutes away from the epicenter: https://news.163.com/20/0121/15/F3E3UTKI0001899N.html
“Coronavirus: the lies and the truths” (29th of January) “Let’s look at a timeline of what’s happened to see how slowly it has been dealt with, and how the information was actively suppressed.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSIt496d82s&t=1m2s
“Coronavirus - Doctors arrested for revealing the truth” (31st of January) “So by now you’ve undoubtedly heard that, right in the beginning, a number of people were arrested for spreading rumors when they first tried to discuss the fact that there was a new virus going around in China. Turns out these people were all doctors.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=0m12s
Winston, the author of the second video, is in fact married to a Chinese doctor, and they keep in touch with their doctor friends in China. He also worked for years organizing training sessions for doctors all around China, so they both have direct knowledge about how those things work there and direct communication with people currently dealing with the situation on the ground.
They have more recent videos, but those two are the first ones I recommend watching. Their channels are: - laowhy86: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChvithwOECK5g_19TjldMKw - serpentza: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl7mAGnY4jh4Ps8rhhh8XZg - ADVChina (their joint channel): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNPa8fSXzzAZuT9859GVhg
Edit: a brief take on this from the BBC (4th of February): “... well, we know that some warnings were ignored or silenced. Let’s focus on this doctor, he was working at Wuhan central hospital and noticed seven cases that he thought looked like SARS (that’s a virus that led to a global epidemic in 2003) and in December he posted a warning about a potential outbreak in a chat group with fellow medics. Shortly afterwards he was summoned by Police and accused of making false statements, and being told he’d severely disturbed the social order. He was then given this document to sign. [...] «We solemny warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice - is that understood?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRggIb5Je_w&t=4m0s
https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2020_01_01_530191.shtml?s=zw...
Others like The Guardian updated their articles, keeping the URL, as the situation changed. After the announcement that he was being kept alive, they added a paragraph at the top of the article explaining that, and later when he was finally confirmed dead updated that note to simply say “Early reports of death of Li Wenliang were retracted, only for doctor to succumb to disease later in day”: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/whistleblower-...
[1] http://chinamediaproject.org/2020/01/27/dramatic-actions/
My main point is that HN (including the original poster) seems to assume that the CCP is some all-seeing, perfectly coordinated entity, when it's actually 100 million people (!) and even party apparatchiks have wildly differing agendas and levels of competence.
And I also agree with you—that you are on balance pretty fair.
Like you said—the response from Beijing was "draconian" and the provincial authorities couldn't stand to report the fact that "something was rotten in the state of Wuhan/Hubei."
Why? Because there are however some characteristics to this entity—which is basic disregard for humans as individuals and community and a desperate desire for sycophancy.
Alarmingly—the CCP disregard for individuals and community is spreading—and it's too often excused by people—like the poster below me who says "Event the US government the hurricane response wrong."
By casting a wide net—and lower our standard as humans. For example...
The Trump administration was wrong on purpose for the hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico because they have similar CCP-like viewpoints and motivations. In New Orleans, for Katrina—you had Ray Nagin as governor who has been convicted on several counts of fraud. These are all people who don't care to shoulder community and build it up—however slow and difficult it might be to reconcile. We need to raise the bar.
The place with the most antibodies to this kind of thinking are some places in Europe which try to appeal to our human instincts as opposed to fueling our "Animal Instincts" (and yes, I am referring to that mid-2000s book on US Stock Market people).
If this is really the case, it is going to be very difficult to contain it.
It it very dangerous for China letting a new virus spread. They have lots of 5 Million inhabitants cities. On Norway or any low density country in which people live isolated in Winter anyway not so much.
China is not trying to save the world, it is trying to save itself.
You think that should be praised?
Right now most of China is locked down... look at it this way, people are genuinely suffering and dying over there in droves and not so much over here. I can at least be appreciative of their sacrifice.
They aren't being sacrificed by the central government for us, they are being sacrificed to protect the rest of China. That has incidental benefits for not-China, but its not China sacrificing for not-China, its China sacrificing parts of China for China.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-l...
China.
Bullshit.
The world would have been like exactly like Hubei, and Hubei no different if they didn't lock it down.
There was no "Sacrifices"
Putting in curfew reduced deaths if anything, they also added doctors and built hospitals.
If the 'sacrifice' is economic because of curfews, then fair enough, but they do not have deaths or illness worse because of the lock down.
No, this is false. Supplies and doctors still came in after lock down. Lots of them because they were not needed elsewhere.
> On one side, without a lockdown, people in Human can seek medical help in other cities and provinces when they get sick.
This is also false. As soon as they leave they spread the virus any other hospital will become swamped and just the same.
There sacrifice is they don't get to spread the virus and make everyone else as bad as they have it. Not quite true.... They would have it worse since they will lose resources if it spreads. But they do miss the comfort of being the same by not spreading it. That is all.
Based on the activity data from TV news, fever related medical visit stays in single digit nationwide. If lock down are not announced and enforced, people in Hunan that are richer will flood to other cities such as Shanghai and Beijing for better medical services, as this happens from several news reports. People would choose to travel since their immediate action will not cause medical shortage elsewhere before they are handled. The idea of seeking medical help elsewhere will make matters worse is correct, but it is a macro level insight and will not change these people's mind to grasp these resources before they are gone.
It is not deniable that without a lockdown, people in Hubei province will on average get medical help in the short run and everybody else is much worse off. This is why it's not a sacrifice.
Additionally any speculation about the effectiveness of the quarantine is futile in my opinion.
But maybe you are one of them, now you're going to jump and down telling us FEMA is the Waffen-SS.
They can lock down some roads or a building and maybe the air space, but anything on a larger scale is unrealistic. If someone did this in a western democracy, you can be sure those responsible would be on their last term after the initial hysteria waned.
Concretely, the US CDC for example prefers setting up physically separate internment camps and moving infected populations there for quarantine. And they can easily get the backing of federal military resources or, in the case of a state governor declaring a state of emergency, the state's National Guard to enforce this. It could get ugly, but only for a few zealots. Modern history (20th century til now) shows that a majority of Americans are generally willing to give up civil liberties in emergencies that relate to "national security" or "think of the children" causes.
Edit: And of course curfew laws can be directed by a state government during a state of emergency, or federally during a state of emergency from the Public Health Service Act, and enforced by military forces.
And especially not in cases like this where the hysteria is beginning to be as much of a concern than the virus itself.
As I said, I don't think you could lock down a city. Military support or not. Even with a real threat, you can be sure people responsible would step down afterwards and quarantine be breached widely.
The officers who announced the fact were punished for making rumors. If they didn't hide the truth of Wuhan at the beginning, everyone will be aware of the issue.
China is just paying for the price due to prohibiting freedom of speech
China also claims to have it under control (in the same reprimand) yet Coronavirus has snuck through their borders numerous times and is now in a dozen countries.