Comment by Knuthtruth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Knuthtruth | Hacker News Reader

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Do you ever get tired of listening to this rhetoric all over the Internet. It is so obvious they hid the pandemic within their country. They didn't lockdown in time or prevent flights to other countries. It is also coming out as suspected that the WHO was in cahoots with China over misrepresenting the actual state of affairs. A simple search tells you how China has used this time to advance militarily across the South China Sea and other neighboring countries.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/05/ch...

https://m.hindustantimes.com/india-news/troop-movements-halt...

Add to all this the anecdotes from several people on the Internet including several in this very thread that seem to suggest the starting of a viral spread as early as July. There are literally hundreds of articles, social media posts and anecdotes that indicate this has started as suggested around the August-november timeline last year. This is not racial bias at play, even though there is no dearth of that on the Internet. But calling it bogus and slandering factual content based on personal bias and opinion is not the way to get to the truth.

So, assuming all that is true, why did the virus not spread worldwide earlier? That's the crux of what that person you're responding to was taking about. Can you share something from your knowledge of articles, posts, and anecdotes that provides some clarity on that question?

Here's a suggestion and no scientific evidence backing this.

The virus might have spread worldwide earlier. There might have been deaths due to it earlier too. There was no way of knowing it until Jan 2020. No testing. Nothing. Also the fact that this virus affects people with existing conditions, there's a very good chance that initial deaths / patient 0 / index patient might have been tagged as dead under their respective conditions. As far as the symptoms go, there's no 'unique' symptom so that might have led to people saying that their coughing is due to cold or whatever.

It’s not a “unique symptom” of the disease exactly, but health care disasters like we saw later in Lombardy and New York would not have gone unnoticed even if we had no particular virus test.

There was no health care disaster in New York. I assume you mean hospitals being overrun.

NYC was putting patients into hospital cafeterias, the Javits Center, and a US navy ship in the harbor if you didn’t notice. Moreover, many people who called in sick were told to stay at home because there wasn’t room in the hospital for them like there normally would have been.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/javits-center-comfor...

> It was only a month ago when Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) suggested that the crisis would blow over. But as the need for more hospital beds became clear, Cuomo, at his daily news briefings, described his forceful push on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and then his calls to President Trump, to allow covid-19 patients at the Javits Center.

I’m not playing semantic games. I consider what happened to be a healthcare disaster, and if you don’t, that’s fine. We’re still talking about the same thing.

An analysis of sewer water has detected the virus as early as 15th of January in Barcelona. See for example (in Spanish) https://www.lavanguardia.com/local/barcelona/20200607/481654...

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