Failure by WHO team to visit Wuhan sparks concerns over virus probe | Hacker News Reader

Failure by WHO team to visit Wuhan sparks concerns over virus probe

ft.com

38 pointsabc-xyz16 comments

So they think there is one specific animal path from bats to humans? It's already been shown that several types of animals can become infected, so why not multiple paths? I don't understand why they think it necessarily started in the Wuhan area either; that's where it first started spreading rapidly and was noticed, but as we've seen in the US sometimes it spreads fast and sometimes it doesn't and even with testing there appear to be a lot of excess deaths where no one realized the cause was COVID-19. Could have been around long before Dec 2019 and then flared up in Wuhan. I'm not an expert though, maybe they have other clues such as from gene sequencing.

I normally like the FT, but this article smells very like the standard Australian/US saber-rattling around China's responsibility for Covid-19.

It sortof smacks of looking for someone to blame, which is weird given that China dealt with Covid-19 far far better than most Western countries.

Compare the 'Active Cases' graph in each of the links below. Does the Chinese graph seem credible to you?

China: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/

Japan: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/Japan/

Italy: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/Italy/

Denmark: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/Denmark/

Iran: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/Iran/

Russia: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/Iran/

You should add graphs for Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, etc.

We know what China did to eradicate the virus. None of the other countries you listed did anything close.

China completely locked down, and they also individually quarantined infected persons and their contacts in isolation rooms (Reference from February: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/24/808995258/china-has-built-ove... and https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21238456/centralized-isolation... ) . The other countries you’re listing didn’t do that - they let people with mild coronavirus continue to circulate in their households and sometimes in the population, spreading the disease and continuing the rise in cases.

Taiwan has a similar graph [0], you can also use the South Korean CDC data [1] as proxy of the number of infections and see that South Korea hasn't imported a single case from China in the past 28/29 weeks.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/

[1] https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a30402000000&bid=00...

I completely agree that the data from China is not particularly reliable. In fact, I remember noticing this in early March.

That being said, it's clear that they have dealt with Covid 19 much better than much of the West.

Like, I guess I got sucked into geo-political flamebait here, but this FT article is quite poor by their standards and it's a shame that it's getting covered on HN.

Well yeah, the PRC can literaly weld people into their apartments to force people to be quarantined:

https://www.the-sun.com/news/378365/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-quarantine-i...

When a government has that sort of power, of course they can handle a forced quarantine. That is, when they actually have to admit there is an issue, which is this not the first pandemic they have attempted to cover up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea...

I am happy to live in a western society where they government doesn't have that sort of power.

Yeah, I love the fact that Karen can decide to kill my friends and family with negligence.

Yay freedom.

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

I'd ask for you to post a reply comment that isn't snarky, per the guidelines. I cannot have much of a productive conversation with your comment as it is.

If you didn't want to be made fun of, you should have made a better argument.

It's not a black and white freedom vs authoritarianism, it turns out that society works a lot better when people aren't needlessly contrary about things they don't understand.

Which is why the American morons can't imagine that Chinas numbers are real, because they can't imagine the Chinese people aren't festering shitbags shouting "FEREEEDOMZ" at every opportunity.

Chinas numbers, and numbers in many other places show the AWESOME POWER OF DOING WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE AS A GROUP.

There is one freedom that is sorely lacking in America, it's the freedom to act as a whole for the good of your countrymen. You literally can't do it. It's illegal in half the country, and you risk being shot in an altercation with an armed moron if you're conspicuously not being a festering cunt.

Why don't you fight for that freedom?

....what? I have read through your comment several times and it is non-sensical.

Let's not forget that China's credibility goes as far as a one party totalitarian state.

The part when China was welding people shut into apartments was my favorite part about China’s amazing response.

Come on, don't repeat urban myths. There were some cases where panicked people welded their neighbors' doors at the height of the epidemic in China (because they were so scared about transmission and getting sick themselves), but that's like saying America's response to anything was eating Tide pods. It just wasn't

Then I’ll change my favorite to when China started imprisoning doctors who were warning other medical personnel about a new virus emerging.

Yeah, that's more in line with their system.

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