Coronavirus Lockdown in Wuhan Is a 'Living Hell'
npr.org
npr.org
1. The reason they didn't pre-announce the quarantine was that it would defeat the purpose -- people would rush to leave ahead of the deadline.
2. Guy being kicked out of his college dorm: they had so many cases that they needed more space to isolate confirmed cases. They may have built a pre-fab hospital in a week, but that was nowhere near the capacity necessary. A college dorm is one of the better buildings if you need a building to turn into a makeshift hospital immediately. You've got a bunch of small individual rooms, kitchen facilities, and common areas that can be repurposed. The government determined that it was necessary to appropriate the building for the good of the city and did it.
And look at where we are here in the U.S. We had a two month head start, and we still can't do widespread testing, the virus is spreading undetected. China was strongly criticized for providing unreliable numbers, and here we are, now the CDC has simply stopped providing state by state data on testing, and stopped providing a total count of tests done. It's truly shameful, and I pray for the health of people in this country, especially older people.
A little bit off topic: for me, this first case looks very impossible to be the first one, and it further supports my theory that wuhan virus is a bio-weapon created by CCP and got leaked. That is why it is so hard to pinpoint the zero patient because CCP is hiding this info.
Of course, there's no way to trust NK on this, but there's been no confirmation of cases in NK by another source (I'm discounting South Korean anti-NK propaganda as an unreliable source).
They are not pointing the blame at the national government nor the ideology but a regional government and corrupt individuals. Indeed the story is that the national government helped the people against the corruption.
I find it fascinating.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1224042220...
[1]https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-...
Political and censorship considerations aside, one possible reason for doing this could've been to ensure that the tests were all centralized and "valid" while preventing accidental leakage of the virus from local testing companies. Yet this kind of policy precisely prevented the virus from being quickly identified.
The CDC's focus on the validity of the tests and its refusal to let local hospitals test for the virus mirrors this mistake. Even if the CDC did not actively try to suppress information, it is acting too slow.
https://www.ibtimes.sg/focus-wuhan-potluck-dinner-cpc-fires-...
(midway down the article)
I think we may not have even heard about the virus if not for this
Edit: relevant portion:
Ill-advised potluck dinner helped spread the virus
Another major perceived lapse of the Wuhan party authorities was their decision to let a large public feast go ahead in January despite the fact that there were clear signs that an epidemic was gathering pace. The local government had controversially allowed nearly 40,000 families to gather and share food as part of the Chinese New Year festival even as deaths from the virus were increasing.
It later turned out that at least 10 cases of coronavirus infection were reported from among the participants of the feast on January 18, raising fears that the event must have accelerated the spread of the infection in Wuhan.
and I live here...
A commenter below mentioned the US, but the reaction here in Germany has also been ridiculously slow and very lacking in both the political department as well as healthcare officials.
An overwhelming majority of NHS medics doesn't think the UK is prepared either. [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/02/coronavirus-...)
Our lower population densities and much higher hygene standards make it less likely for a breakout to start here, but our dealing with a pandemic is at least as frighteningly incompetent as the chinese response.
I realize that 'Europe' is broader and there are diverse systems, but by and large - and especially where there is a huge public interest in people healthy - their systems are going to take care of people.
I'm sure that this kind of thing will not happen in Germany and UK.
It's not really the handling of the virus situation, it's his realisation that he's living in a totalitarian state that he's writing about.
What is really needed in a situation like this is transparency, and they are providing this: https://www.moh.gov.sg/
They are also doing very good work when it comes to tracing cases and determining who has been in contact with them and ensuring that they are also tested.
There are special clinics set up where people with symptoms can go. This is to avoid having patients infect every single clinic all over the country.
In places where people gather, such as office buildings, there are temperature screenings, typically using IR cameras. I read somewhere that these catch about 50% of cases.
If you're a visitor to an office building, you have to sign a health declaration form, including contact information and declare where in the building you will be going. This information is used if a case is discovered and they need to trace who has been in contact with the patient.
When you take a taxi you are adviced to go to a web site where you can fill in your contact information as well as the license plate number of the taxi. This is again used for tracing if needed.
Some companies have implemented work-from-home policies where the teams are split with half the team working from home. This is done because if a case is discovered in a company, everybody will evacuate, tracing will be done on all people and the entire office sanitised. If only half the team was in the office at the time, this reduces the impact on the business.
For the most part, except the things mentioned above, things are pretty normal. There are of course less tourists, and a lot of businesses are hurting because of that. Singapore usually has a lot of Chinese tourists.
People are of course hoping that things will be better soon. I didn't live in Singapore during SARS, but I have been told that it lasted several months.
Are there any "better" governments that eliminated e.g. cold or flu virus "when only 100 people had it"? I guess not. Cold and flu are common around the world.
Hard to contain, and the containment would cause too much disruption and cost. So we learned to live with cold and flu.
This is simply speculation and not credible.
> while the virus ran around getting the better of them
In 6 months time, most (or all) western countries will look back and wish they had handled the virus as well as China.
Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of Chinese people are very disenfranchised by their government. But a lot of them love it too. But western media always focuses on those that dislike it. Which is not a balanced perspective of their people.
What do you think their views would have been had a free press existed and schools did not engage in indoctrination?
>Why were we notified about the city lockdown at 2 a.m. on the second to last morning before the Lunar New Year?
...
>We tried every method to escape from Wuhan, but the cage was already locked.
This is why.
...
>But people are not thinking critically. They do not understand that if we had human rights, democracy and freedom, we would have learned about what happened in Wuhan one month earlier. And the first whistleblower would not have died for nothing.
See Japanese response. CDC just removed testing statistics from their website. Now that initial hysteria has died down and the virus seemingly contained, Chinese social media is noticing the containment failures abroad from countries with ample warning and commenting that CPC central government might not be so incompetent after all. The WHO report from today is going to reinforce those notions.
E: Also Xi visited Wuhan recently, and the annual two sessions meeting is happening in a few days while events are being cancelled around the world. It's the biggest annual political event. Xi is basically over if we get a bunch of infected kids or politicians like in Iran. I guess we'll see if it's confidence or calculus.
But what is the alternative? Letting things run rampant because you didn't want to impose upon peoples human rights? The greater good of the whole population means more than the convenience of the Wuhan people. I just hope America falls in line.
And yes, they didn't act immediately when they had patients in December. That could have been handled better. Hindsight is 20/20. But their mindset, about not wanting to start an unwarranted panic, about wanting to investigate things fully, is understandable.
When there's clear evidence of the beginnings of an epidemic, a public panic (like we're seeing right now, but on a global scale) is much better than the epidemic spreading.
Apparently doing the best they can involves discrediting doctors warning about an outbreak.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/03/asia/coronavirus-doctor-whist...
This is still a good distance from the best in my view.
Yes this is the alternative. We trade security, another form of it in this case, for freedom. I didn't think the author made a very good case for "living hell", or for that matter have a very good list of egregious things the govt did. But they made a good point at the end with "one day you may be the price that is paid".
Anyway the US won't have to face the issue as China did because it will arrive everywhere if it gets bad, not one starting point that can be contained. And then all the govt here has to do is scare people enough with warnings of danger to lock things down pretty well. Fears of liability will do most of the rest when it comes to schools and other things shutting down.