Coronavirus Came from Bats, Can Infect Cats, Ferrets, WHO Says | Hacker News Reader

Coronavirus Came from Bats, Can Infect Cats, Ferrets, WHO Says

bloomberg.com

25 pointspseudolus89 comments

WHO said for weeks it wasn't transmittable between humans, that countries should not impose travel restrictions, and insisting late into the pandemic that you don't need to wear masks unless you're infected.

Arguably the WHO has blood on its hands for allowing the virus to spread.

They unquestionably are influenced by China and CCP's politics, not just denying Taiwan's existence, but the many statements praising China throughout the entire pandemic, on virtually all talking points, while being critical of western nations handling of the virus.

If ever there was a time to take action, point fingers, and restore some dignity to supposedly independent health organizations, it is now, by creating a new organization.

This seems to be a "look over there" response. China had a big issue. In Netherlands not much was done. Italy had big issues. Netherlands ignored it. It spread to Netherlands, suddenly extreme measures had to be taken. Meanwhile, not much was done in USA, aside from things like "meh, everything will probably be fine".

Now instead of acknowledging that things went wrong, it's because of someone else, say WHO. And China!

UK had a report saying that a pandemic was the biggest threat. They recommended a tactical amount of ventilators to be kept, plus various other actions. Nothing was done.

> If ever there was a time to take action, point fingers

Blaming doesn't really help anything IMO. Figure out the various causes and take action on them. Blaming, too easy.

> WHO said for weeks it wasn't transmittable between humans

This is not true. They posted:

"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,"

I agree this was not very wise from the WHO to post this, but China refused any other investigations so the WHO had to rely on information from China.

On January 20th the Chinese Health Commission confirmed human-to-human transmission.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/20/coronavirus-sp...

You act like the world didn't know until April, but by then China, Iran, Italy, and Spain were ablaze and people were saying by the thousands. Your government had the same information everyone else had. why did South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Jordan fare so well? Blame your own government for not responding fast enough and for not listening to their advisors. The blood is on their hands.

At that time, they relied only on chinese info, which turned out false. They didn't have much more. Do they still claim it?

By your logic, we should dissolve US government too - they knew very well what's coming, the scale of it, and focused more on attacking and blaming anything external rather than working on preparation and minimizing the spread. Do you remember top of US government claiming covid is hoax?

Trump's mis-handling of this created by far the biggest epicentre of covid - this concerns whole world, not US only. And US had quite a bit of time to prepare.

This has been flagged off the front-page, likely because it mentions the WHO. I haven't really been following the criticism of their handling of this all that closely, so this might be worth reading for others in the same boat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization%27s_...

This article seems to directly contradict some of the claims made by anti-WHO folks here. In particular, this portion of the timeline jumped out at me, contradicting the claim that the WHO was claiming no human-to-human transmission as late as early February:

On 14 January, Maria Van Kerkhove of the WHO told in a press briefing that "it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families, but it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission"

The WHO recommended countries to take precautions due to the human-to-human transmission during earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks. On the same day, the WHO's Twitter account reported that "preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission".

On 20 January, the WHO released a tweet that it was "now very clear from the latest information that there is at least some human-to-human transmission" that has occurred, given that healthcare workers had been infected.

On 22 January, WHO issued a statement stating that the data "suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan", and called for more investigation.

This certainly sounds to me like they initially said that we weren't seeing human-to-human transmission in mid-Jan, but within a week or so, the data was starting to show the opposite, and they said so.

What exactly is the controversy here?

Indeed. The timeline speaks for itself, and it provides excellent sources in international media. There is a massive misinformation campaign going on in many countries.

On Jan 15 in fact Wuhan government publicly said they identified a possible case of h2h from husband to wife

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/wireStory/china-virus-spre...

US media and some of right wing European media is charging against WHO because they have to blame someone. That way the can put all the death people numbers on WHO and not take any responsibility fro their handling of the situation.

I completely agree that there's a political element, but I'd like to hear from the individuals who are so up-in-arms about this as to why they personally are so aggrieved and how they interpret the facts to indicate such culpability on the WHO's part.

I can't help there, I suppose that is the same when someone feel attacked in their beliefs religious or political, some people get really aggressive about that.

A US administration which was still insisting that they were on the cusp of eliminating it in late March and is actively encouraging public disobedience of disease control measures for partisan reasons has decided it's the WHO's fault. This inevitably means discussion of their claims dominates the news cycle where many HN readers are based.

[The fact the criticism is politically driven is also why people are focusing to political trivia like WHO treating One China as a reality like all other major national and transnational organizations and attributing positions actually made by Trump's domestic critics to the WHO, and paying less attention to the WHO's dubious stances which might have actually cost lives, such as their position on masks]

First, this doesn't belong on HN.

Second, we already know for weeks or months that ferrets and cats are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2—they even find it in their feces. This paper was released to preprint in March 31st and today is May 8th: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.015347v1

Third, virologists and especially those who have studied Coronaviruses for decades say the intermediate species could not have been a pangolin: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-609/

I recommend HN mods lock or delete this thread.

This article misrepresents the lab theory. At least in its most common version, the lab theory is not "it came from a lab, not bats". It is "it came from bats, was being used for research, and got out accidentally". The article omits this, creating the impression that animal origin is evidence against the lab theory, when of course both could be true.

They wouldn't have left this out by accident. It's an obvious omission once you know about it and it changes the meaning of the story. I have no opinion about whether the virus came from a lab or didn't (how the hell would I know), but when I see someone trying to manipulate me this way, it makes me angry and suspicious and pushes me toward the other side. I've had no interest in the criticisms of Bloomberg reporting before now, but this article incriminates itself.

Unpopular opinion (for HN maybe :) - the WHO, which does not solely deal with infectious diseases, much to the world's chagrin, is doing the best job that they can considering the situation. On average the advice from the WHO on a whole range of medical topics has been nothing but excellent, and I am loathe to discount them entirely based on a few press statements that have been taken wildly out of context by the media and the internet as a whole. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when HN unfailingly dogpiles onto the WHO in yet another thread. Are people missing the forest for the trees?

I'm also glad we have a WHO as central point of information and knowledge.

But the WHO could have been more careful with how they put out information. For example: "...no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission,...". This was a true statement, there was no evidence at that time. But they also knew what was going on in China. They could have asked themselves: what if it is human-to-human transmittable? Then they would have never used those words, because those words downplayed the potential risks.

I agree with you the media (and governments) blew this up later when the evidence was there. The WHO never said it was not human-to-human transmittable, but words were taken out of context and suddenly the WHO was to blame.

It is worth noting thst the @WHO account tweeted clarification just a few hours later. Whoever made that tweet did not consider their audience correctly, and the resulting misinterpretation is partially on them. But the way it's been spun as some sort of smoking gun is shocking given it is so easy to debunk.

The problem is leaders should not be basing decisions on a tweet but by listening to experts they have at hand. e.g. someone like Fauci would have told what that tweet means.

The second point, none of the nations did do anything different on 23rd Jan when WHO confirmed the H2H transmission and its severity, so how did that tweet made any difference?

I wouldn't want to discount them entirely, but their recent foray into TCM has left me less than entirely on-side. On average I'm sure they do a great job, but they're not perfect and should be pushing back against damaging woo like this.

Not very unpopular, any rational actor would not blame WHO for a lot, CCP maybe for few things. The US has screwed up big time for the richest nation, it's state and central govt and people all have acted completely orthogonal of common sense and now they need a scapegoat.

They are doing a good job and they have been preparing for such a pandemic for years.

Countries that are faring best today are those that have worked with the WHO and heard its advice.

Can you list even a single thing they have done a good job of in their handling of this crisis? And which countries are you referring to exactly which have worked with them and are doing well? They won't even acknowledge Taiwan which is handling this better than almost every other country.

Sure, almost everything on this timeline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization%27s_...

They setup a response team within a day or two of hearing from China about a handful of atypical pneumonia cases, they notified all member states within a few days of that (including of the risk of human-to-human transmission), and within another week they had issued comprehensive testing guidance and asked a German team to design a test. This was all within the first couple weeks.

Taiwan's handling of Covid-19 is based on WHO's advice. Same for Korea. They experienced SARS, MERS (for Korea), and prepared.

The WHO have been working on pandemic scenarios for years. They worked out plans to prepare and respond, they alerted on the risk.

The attacks against them are crass political games by desperate and inept politicians.

> The attacks against them are crass political games by desperate and inept politicians.

Not necessarily inept as politicians, though clearly so at governing; they seem to know their audience quite well.

Unpopular opinion indeed!

Apart from the impossibility of doing the “best” (as there is no such thing except in mathematics), it is not a frw press statements. It is knee-jerking before China.

Like always.

I don't think "average advice" is a good metric here -- if you play russian roulette you will "win" on average or even in most cases. What matters is protection from downside which is where the WHO failed when they said the disease was not transmissible between humans and travel restrictions were not necessary.

Sorry but this is just hopelessly naive. Have you seen their handling of Taiwan, their statements parroting CCP propaganda in January claiming the virus was not transmissible between humans, their condemnation of travel restrictions as xenophobic? I could go on.....

All international organizations have the same handling of Taiwan. It's not a WHO specific issue, it extends to basically every other similar intergovernmental organization you can think of, even the ones that aren't specialized agencies of the UN (which the WHO is), like INTERPOL.

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