China Hid Severity of Virus to Hoard Supplies: DHS Report
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Reading between the lines, this document seems to include a statistical analysis of Chinese trade patterns to conclude that its trade in medical supplies in January deviated from the past.
The idea that China was buying more medical supplies in January seems entirely obvious to me, and I’m pretty sure I have seen previous reports of this, extending even beyond January.
The Wuhan Lockdown happened on January 23rd. Do I believe that they were importing more medical equipment in the month where they locked down an entire providence due to the emergence of a new and deadly contagious disease? Yes. Does it take advanced statistics and p-values do convince me of that fact? No.
But, of course, including a bit of stats in such a paper might also induce people to put more stock into its other claims, namely that buying such materials was a motivating factor to hide the extend of the disease. Or that China was hiding the extend of the disease in the first place.
Here's the WHO's bulletin on the matter. This is based on information they were given by China in December. If you search any news, you'll also find reference to China briefing their US contacts on January 3rd, with similar information. The bulletin itself is from January 5th: https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk...
Quotes:
On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City
Of the 44 cases reported, 11 are severely ill, while the remaining 33 patients are in stable condition.
National authorities report that all patients are isolated and receiving treatment in Wuhan medical institutions.
One hundred and twenty-one close contacts have been identified and are under medical observation;
So they were hiding it, except they told WHO that they had severely ill patients which had been isolated? And that they were tracking >100 people that had been in contact with these patients, indicating the believe that the disease may be contagious?
Also, the word you are looking for is not "extend" but "extent".
January 14 by WHO
“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,”
https://mobile.twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?la...
AP reports China knew on the 14th that the virus could spread amongst humans, didn’t publicize until January 20:
Every competent public health agency around the world was fully aware of these warnings and recommendations. People pointing to the 14 January tweet that discusses "preliminary investigations" not finding "clear evidence" of human-to-human transmission, but not mentioning the WHO's other statements and recommendations from the same time, are just trying to shift blame.
Screening only makes sense if you believe the disease is contagious.
So that’s what.. 3 days of misdirection?
Before that, on January 6th, the CDC issued a “Level 1 travel warning” and “established an incident management system”.
And according to https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/presidents-... the virus (and it’s true extend) was discussed dozens of times in the president’s daily briefings, starting in early January.
Not that any of it matters: Two months after the first warnings, and more than a month after the Wuhan shutdown that ended any possible efforts to hide anything, the President was publicly forecasting that the number of cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
That’s from February 26th.
Check his own timeline above to see how much use he made of that month. He’s very proud of mentioning it in the SoU and chatting about it with the Indian PM, and various groups being briefed.
FYI: corona was apparently everywhere by Dec. 10, but the "January 6th, the CDC issued a Level 1 travel warning” is interesting as it's one of the earliest US references.
So the CDC was still 4 weeks behind the ball, and about 2.5 months behind the likely patient zero (Oct./Nov.)
Oh! So, China only intentionally lied to the entire world for a 3 days. Or, at least that's all your prepared to acknowledge, while bizarrely attempting to minimize it.
In fact, this is only one example in a pattern of behavior by the Chinese central authorities. You invite the reader to assume the opposite. Why?
You're arguing for China's culpability by simply asserting they are always dishonest. That's just circular reasoning!
Look, I don't particular like dictatorships. I'll grant you all the standard complaints about China's human rights abuses, lack of freedom of the press, and their military leaders' terribly old-fashioned banana-republic-style oversized hats.
But the attempt here is to shift responsibility for 70,000+ US deaths onto them. In terms of causality, I believe that is wrong. As in: even if they were dishonest, it didn't make a difference. It's also wrong for the single purpose responsibility actually has, to avoid repetition: not only is it the US governments' (in)action that primarily influences the outcomes here, that government is also far more responsive to any sort of pressure the US public can create.
A even if you can somehow browbeat China into handling the next such situation in a way that is more helpful, that only protects against a more-or-less exact repeat of this crisis. But if the US government improves, that improvement also applies if the next virus is the Canadian Maple-Fever. Or an earthquake, or whatever.
There probably was some Chinese obfuscation. But it seems to be entirely of the superficial, nationalism-inspired attempt at window-dressing many other, ostensibly more open, transparent, and democratic government engaged in.
Florida, for example, doesn't (or didn't, at the beginning) count out-of-state visitor's deaths in its statistics. Trump famously didn't want cruise ship passengers disembarking because it would ruin his numbers. Many countries were rather slow to start counting out-of-hospital deaths, etc. Even the exact same no-(local)-transmission lie China is accused of was recycled by Trump!
If you look at the graphs of cases and deaths, you'll note that China's data fits in rather nicely with that in other countries. Since they were always a few weeks ahead of everyone else, it seems their data was, by-and-large, credible. Or they are extremely good at guessing.
All this is such a transparently obvious attempt to whip up a bit of xenophobic furore to yet again ride a nationalistic wave to an election victory, it wouldn't be acceptable as the background plot for a politics-themed porn movie. To see it succeeding is just...sad
It is not that once the US learnt of H2H transmission on Jan20th and knew that the virus was in US, it shut down all public events.
The US still proceeded to have the Chinese New Years parade in Manhattan, the LA marathon still happened on March 8th.
Our economic system is not set up for natural issues like this. I would also like to propose another question. You know how we're spending a metric fuckton of money on the Military? What if this was, you know, actually a biological attack?
Is this where all of our preparedness has come to show itself? What if this virus was actually manufactured to be even stronger than this? If we're not even able to prepare for a pandemic through spending this much money, maybe we shouldn't spend this much money on the military and spend more on social systems that would lessen the blow of such an attack.
Logic will work for the MAGA crowd but some of us are more cynical after the lies peddled to justify the mess that was Iraq.