Chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in December?

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That applies on Chinese topics as much as any other topic.

We added that rule after years of experience and I don't know how many hundreds of hours poring over data on this. At least on HN, these perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. That is, people perceive such biases based entirely on their pre-existing opinions, and one can reliably predict their opinions from the complaints about bias and secret manipulation that they post. You can find years' worth of cases here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

There's a psychological explanation for this phenomenon: pain is more memorable than pleasure. Posts we dislike make a stronger impression than ones we like. We're more likely to notice them and they burn more into the retina, creating an afterimage that's intensely biased—but the bias is in the eye, not the objects. Clear evidence of this is that people with opposing views about X inevitably have opposite views of how the community (or mods) are biased about X. Perceptions of sinister manipulation are a variation of this.

The reason this comes up so often is that HN is a much larger and more diverse community than it seems. People are coming here from all sorts of different backgrounds—a much wider range than most readers assume. When we judge comments by our own range of familiarity, many of those comments end up sounding "...odd to say the least". This is an artifact in the perceiver, not the perceived. We all have a more parochial perspective than we imagine we do. When our sensibilities get hit by what to us is an outlier, a flying internet object of obnoxious opinion, we immediately feel anger and fear. Those feelings suck, so we defend against them by reframing the provocation as not-in-good-faith: a spy, a shill, a sinister manipulator.

The solution is to have one's default reaction to these outlier ("...odd to say the least") comments become expansion rather than protection: that is, to allow the encounter to expand our mental model of what the community is and whom it contains. To do that is to practice the site guideline, "Assume good faith". This isn't easy, because it means you have to tolerate the initial hit of pain and anger and wait for it to subside before settling on a reaction. That's the hard work of tolerance.

It doesn't follow there's no such thing as manipulation, of course. It simply means that one no longer reaches for manipulation as a first explanation for what one finds "odd", instead requiring that there be additional evidence before entertaining such a charge.

This is not an abstract issue for HN, it's an existential one. People have been hounded off this site simply for representing their backgrounds and expressing sincere views. I'm sure the users who did the hounding would be horrified if they knew what they were doing, but it all happens so easily on the internet, at such great distance, where we're all talking not to living humans but to little bits of text that we flesh out with our imagination.

Countries and citizens remember where the virus comes from, like they do for SARS and it they will put pressure on their governments to move production elsewhere.

Crises are how rising powers become dominant powers - WW2 was the crisis that propelled America past UK to become the worlds dominant power.

NOTE: before you dismiss the source, notice that it is merely a commentary on a collection of individual sources that you can verify yourself. Now I do not agree with the conclusion in the link below, that this is a deliberate bioweapon, but there is ample circumstantial evidence here to at least presume that the virus could have leaked from the only level 4 biolab in China, which happens to be less than 10 miles from Wuhan. It's likely they were conducting legitimate research, all I'm pointing out is that the evidence for this actually coming from China is pretty good.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-china-steal-coron...

There's a reason you can find so many videos online of Chinese people torturing animals. There is a belief in China (and to a lesser extent in other nations like Korea and I believe Vietnam) that making animals suffer pre slaughter makes the meat tastier. And honestly it isn't a stretch that adrenal hormones released just before death can influence the flavor or texture of meat, but I don't know if that justifies cruelty...

These wildlife markets are a particular problem. But virologists (see: Pandemic on Netflix) highlight not just the wildlife trade be our enormous animal agriculture production as an explosive situation.

This is a pretty common theme with black markets in general, on that note. See also: black market drugs being "cut" with harmful substances, black market sex labor being a vector for human trafficking and STDs, black market medical procedures being more susceptible to adverse outcomes, etc.

There are other good reasons to not eat exotic mammals, of course (i.e. if doing so puts species at risk of extinction), but the sanitation issue seems solvable.

I hope everyone understands that we ban users not to punish anyone, but to protect the site. If people give us reason to believe that they sincerely want to use HN as intended, we're happy to unban them, and do that all the time. Also, we make mistakes sometimes—because moderation is guesswork—and appreciate being told when we do, so we can correct them.

I keep hearing they have contained it, but I also get reports that they haven’t. Also, something needs to change for their policies to not impact the rest of the world in such drastic manner.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Iamactuallyverybadass/comments/fhju...

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That one perceives something to be apparently consistent with any particular world view does not make that worldview the correct one.

I doubt anyone can talk with moral certitude in such matter, when the discussion has devolved into unreasonable degree of polarization and hostility.

All I can say is that, this isn't the time for another cold war.

The current numbers are the ones that don't add up. Even John Hopkins estimates up to 500k cases in the US at the moment.

> The test kits in use in the U.S. described in the articles detect viral genetic material—RNA, in the case of coronaviruses—which can be infectious material or noninfectious fragments. Once the patient has recovered and the RNA has been cleared, the tests will be negative. If we’re trying to ascertain what proportion of the population has been infected and experienced asymptomatic, mild or more serious infections, such post-infection testing yields “false negatives.”

> Additional, essential information will need to come from “serological tests” that measure antibodies in blood, which will tell us whether a person has been recently infected with SARS-CoV-2 and recovered. (Note that antibodies take about 10-14 days from exposure to the virus to appear.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-antibody-testing-to-understa...

http://archive.vn/SJkJu

> The mortality rate is thought to be ≤2%, but precise numbers uncertain due to a lack of available serological testing.

https://www.hopkinsguides.com/hopkins/view/Johns_Hopkins_ABX...

I think we're looking for a different measure (IFR?) which is "how likely is it on average for someone in the population to die from this?". That's the number we don't know because we don't know the number of infected people.

What we do know is that in the places where the disease has gotten out of hand, the medical system becomes overloaded. That's the real, immediate, present problem and whether it's a problem or not doesn't depend on the CFR. Note that most of the existing hospitalized cases in Italy are _still_ on ventilation. So although they don't show up in the CFR, they're still taking up medical resources and some number of them will eventually not make it. (Source: watch the many videos on Youtube from the Drs working in the Red Zones).

Just as an example, saying “no tourist travel” itself would destroy a ton of regions who depend on tourism.

It is easy to armchair quarterback how you’d deal with something like this. Especially when you can wave away “trivialities“ like “ban all non work related gatherings for a year”. LOL. Good luck with that.

Your cure is worse than the virus my friend.

PRC 145 people per square kilometer

ROC 649 people per square kilometer

South Korea 503 people per square kilometer

Second, no one is defending the US’ actions, but you’re clearly trying to minimize China’s.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/c...

> "The Chinese Government is squarely to blame for this situation. Could it have been prevented if they had acted responsibly? I don't know"

The parent comment made no statements about how it could never happen in another country. It was specifically about the Chinese government's mishandling -- it was you who injected the bit about the US.

US: Marchal plan was self-less help.

Reality: Marchal plan was mostly self-help, preventing a economical collaps of the US and securing strong longterm influence in the EU/Germany to make sure the EU/Germany won't side with communism in the future. Also allowing them "secure/safe/accepted" military presence in the EU/Germany "just on the border to their enemy". Etc. (Don't get me wrong. It was still awesome and I'm still grateful. Just don't go around stating the EU/Germany owns the USA and should do thinks which would harm itself to support the USA, especially given that currently the US is slightly falling from grace.).

I would discount much of the insinuations that the HBO series is making, it was made without any inputs from Russians/Ukrainians which should be a serious argument against its authenticity of sentiment.

A theory is that the collapse of the USSR was not any grassroots uprising or the expression of people longing for democracy, it was just mostly a few higher-ups like Yeltsin figuring out that they can hold and exercise greater power and authority by dissolving the Union than keeping it. I view the claim that Chernobyl had much to do with the end of the USSR as a naive and unrealistic analysis.