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Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

> China dropped the ball for a full 10 days back when the disease was nicely contained to a small part of Wuhan...

Uh, China dropped the ball for a full 3 months since the first reports of a novel respiratory disease started back in November. First denying it, then jailing the doctors who tried to raise the alarm. Not to mention not enforcing their own laws regarding food hygiene put in place after SARS which would have prevented the transmission in the first place.

Yeah, they're now showing containment measures that work. But they could have stopped this in its tracks before going global, or prevented it entirely.

Too little, too late.

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New viruses come out all the time. This viruses wasn't isolated as different till the end of December.

The Doctor wasn't jailed ...

The virus was spread at the market. It didn't start at the market.

Until we know where it started we don't know if it would have stopped the virus or not.

The doctors were not jailed, because luckily CCP need them to work to fight the virus. Some of them died for it already, mostly due to the hard work, insufficient protection CCP provided to the doctors, and in one case at least, intentionally punish the doc by delay his treatment.

Talking about the origin of this virus, this paper of 2015 is quite interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 . In this paper, the wuhan P4 institute people basically described how they produced a prototype of the 2019 wuhan virus.

"the people who sign this letter are not aware that they're being manipulated by CCP, in the meantime, let me push conspiracy theories".

I said in my comment clearly it is a hypothesis. While it is important and useful to think logically the Euclidean way, it is also important to find clues and make hypothesis, that is how people discover things in the real world.

Without information about how this letter was prepared and signed among these people in detail, my hypothesis stands.

He was brought in to sign a confession/apology on the 3rd before things were out of control.

He is/was also a member of the CCP.

> The virus was spread at the market. It didn't start at the market.

The virus came from bats. The "wildlife market" in question sold raw bat meat. How else would it have gotten there?

Is this known for a fact? I thought the bat angle was more a most likely scenario but not proven.

No, Chinese markets generally don't sell bat meat or eat bats.

They eat lots of animals but bats are not one of them. (I'm sure there is a village in China where they do eat bats. It is a big country.)

The photos you see online of Chinese people eating bats are Tourist in the Pacific.

Correct, Chinese markets generally don't sell such things. I know, I'm Chinese ;)

But this particular part of China does. It's more a subculture derived from one of the minority groups in that province, but it's there.

Never heard about such a thing. Sounds like some sort of conspiracy theory unless you have concrete proof of that.

The original hypothesis was that some other animal sold at the market acted as an intermediate host between bat and human, just like the case in 2003 SARS, but this is also not proven.

Conspiracy theory has a specific meaning. Their claim might be false but even if this is the case they are not implying the existence of any conspiracy.

Chinese containment measures gave other countries a head start of at least two months. Too bad that no government took the challenge seriously.

Taiwan started acting on 31st December. Taiwan were prepared because they predicted an event like this could happen. Taiwan hasn’t been hit by a sledgehammer even though they have huge flows of Chinese people travelling.

Any delays by other 1st world countries after 31st Dec are largely their own fault.

I don't think you've followed this argument to its logical conclusion. Taiwan started acting on the 31st of December because they didn't believe a word coming out the Chinese government's mouth. They haven't been hit like a sledgehammer even though they usually have huge flows of Chinese people travelling because they promptly rounded up and quarantined travellers from the affected regions and their close contacts back when China was falsely claiming it was a small outbreak with no evidence of person-to-person transmission, and then locked down travel entirely over the objections of China and the WHO which insisted doing so was racist and counterproductive. Any delays by other 1st world countries after 31st Dec are therefore largely their own fault for believing a word coming from of a totalitarian dictatorship with a long history of cover-ups and their parrots over at the WHO.

None of that is really the point though. The point is that so many other countries are dropping the ball in the same (or worse!) ways than China did after having the luxury of seeing what happened in China.

If you have 3 people and one slips on a patch of ice and falls you could argue they should understand how ice works and should have been more careful, but if you have 2 other people see that person fall and they blithely walk across the ice and also fall, who should you judge more harshly?

For me personally, I'm going with the people who saw the result of the first event and then followed the same path.

Maybe the best solution would be to get rid of the patch of ice instead of finding someone to blame, while people keep slipping over it.

They traced the virus back to November, but at the time it was not a serious threat. They just didn’t have enough data then.

Let’s put it this way, other countries have had a full 2 months of warning and preparation time and they are also dropping the ball.

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