Here is the most recent time it was posted (5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-intrepid-journalist-wh...
And here's the book, "Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World" https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-R...
* China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably wouldn't be a big deal.
* The FDA completely dropped the ball on testing kits and it took an incredibly long time to resolve the issue. Its unclear that people in power even realized this. Back in January and February when we were hearing about a case here, a case there there was almost certainly rampant community transmission and death occurring.
* CDC leaders were very slow to consider that the virus might transmit through the air. This led to the early advice being misguided (6ft of distancing and washing your hands protects you) and just flat out wrong (wearing a mask does nothing).
* Inside the executive branch, people who gave bad news were forced out and people who gave good news got promoted. Predictably this made things much, much worse.
I would also emphasize that, in terms of personal culpability, Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services comes out looking very poor. (Mnuchin was also the speaker of some, in retrospect, appalling secondhand quotes).
The article points out that Azar is the director of both the FDA and the CDC, and should have played a more active role in orchestrating their handshakes in February.
Misunderstanding and miscommunication between the FDA and CDC were responsible for the absurd delay in widely-available testing, which otherwise should have been available in med-February.
Not only was he aware of problems early on, he didn't properly communicate them up (to Trump, which contributed to Trump's belief that the whole thing would blow over), or manage them down.
This is my reading, as a disclaimer, not an explicit statement from the article. I recommend people read it for themselves.
Fauci and (sidelined and silenced) career officials at the CDC, FDA, and NIH are the only ones who came out looking okay.
But I don’t know how accurate his portrayals of the intentions behind the CDC and the FDA officials are. There aren’t a lot of ways to cross reference his analysis of the quoted meetings, since the CDC and FDA both declined to comment for the piece.
This is as close to a “full story” as we’re going to get before a hypothetical “COVID commission” congressional investigation, but it’s still quite two dimensional.
They shared the genome quite quickly. Scientists got working on it ASAP, around the world. Chinese hospitals and medical experts were also pretty quick about sharing detailed information about what they knew of symptoms, disease progression, and their local best practices for keeping healthcare workers safe. (Sadly many hospitals around the world did not follow those...)
Independent epidemiologists, virologists, etc. in the West immediately started issuing urgent warnings, begging governments to take decisive action. Neighborhoods in Western countries with significant Chinese expat populations were paying attention and started masking up and staying in their houses by the beginning of February.
What outsiders could objectively see in January was that China shut down the entire national economy and transportation network, instituted unprecedented public quarantine/curfew measures (blocking off neighborhoods, only allowing occasional trips out of apartment buildings, stopping all inter-household gatherings, locking domestic immigrants out of their own apartments, forcing people into temporary isolation facilities, etc.), shifted massive numbers of healthcare workers to Hubei province, vacuumed up whatever PPE supply they could, started building temporary hospitals at ludicrous (probably structurally unsound) speed, etc. There were videos online of people getting welded into their own apartments or forcibly shoved into vans by the local police, falling down dead in the street, large-scale public disinfection of streets by armies of workers in hazmat suits, etc. etc. It was like a post-apocalyptic horror movie.
The provincial government clearly screwed up by wasting time and covering things up in November–January, but after the national government took over the response was swift and decisive. (I think some steps were clearly an overreach and some of the implementation was sloppy and disorganized, which ended up hurting a lot of people. But it is easy to criticize from afar, and at the time there were many unknowns.)
Sure the aggregated public statistics put out by the Chinese government of cases and deaths in the Wuhan area were obviously a massive undercount (partly because getting reliable data of a new disease that nobody understands yet and can't perfectly test for is always extremely difficult; there were also dramatic undercounts in Italy, Iran, the USA, etc. a couple months later), but anyone paying even the slightest attention could see that this was a huge serious threat coming for the world. Certainly by mid February it was abundantly clear that this would be a pandemic requiring large-scale coordinated decisive action by governments around the world.
Some governments (e.g. Taiwan, South Korea) took their own decisive action, mobilized a national response and spun up PPE, testing, isolation, quarantines, contact tracing, etc. ASAP, and saved countless lives.
Other governments (e.g. England, USA) were disorganized, avoided taking prompt action, sidelined local experts, and ended up with many avoidable deaths and economic devastation. Attempts by leaders in the latter countries to deflect blame to China can be rationalized by saying that China was not as forthcoming as they should have been, but frankly that is a cop out, with at least some racist undertone. It didn't take any brilliant insight to see that the Chinese government considered the epidemic to be a catastrophic national crisis, and that there was significant risk for a severe worldwide crisis.
However, this does not excuse the Chinese Government's active (and ongoing!) attempts to downplay what they knew about the initial severity of the outbreak. I don't think it's fair to blame the botched first two months of response on the provincial government.
But concretely the provincial government did what it could to hide and cover up the epidemic, silencing local doctors, cooking the statistics, etc., hoping it would go away by itself and they could avoid blame or conflict.
The Chinese government completely dropped the ball on providing an objective warning of the situation.
The US federal government completely dropped the ball on preparing an adequate and timely response, even granted the handicap of officially sanctioned misinformation coming from Chinese Government.
I agree that the first problem does not make the second problem any more forgivable, and we should disregard narratives that try to push that idea. Neither misdeed should be tolerated or go un-shamed.
Whatever the Chinese government might have been "saying" (in press releases?) their signals were abundantly clear to everyone paying attention, and should have been even clearer even earlier to folks with access to CIA reports etc.
Feel free to criticize the Chinese government's statements per se all you like, but it is absurd for other governments who didn't take action for months despite an obvious need to blame the Chinese government for this. Especially when those governments have done plenty of their own lying (in the US case, arguably more). Frankly, I don't think more transparency from the Chinese would have made too much difference in the USA. The Trump administration would still have been calling the situation a Chinese hoax or deliberate biological warfare or whatever conspiracy theory.
We can see clearly how e.g. South Korea mobilized the entire country, spun up nationwide testing at unprecedented speed, implemented a huge and very effective contact tracing program (if they had waited an extra few weeks and not caught the Shincheonji church cases in time, they might have ended up with uncontrollable spread), did detailed case studies for every case they could find and published all of the details, made sure every resident had access to masks, etc. etc. There is no inherent reason why much stronger responses couldn't have been made in the US and Europe.
The US is among the best inherently prepared countries in the world for a crisis like this: little reliance on public transit, lots of jobs that can be done remotely, relatively few intergenerational households, a world-class public health agency, one of the richest healthcare systems in the world, world-class universities and research facilities, many large pharmaceutical companies, a national constitution and legal structure that gives the federal government broad powers in a health crisis, a position of international power and leadership with many strong alliances, a central position in the world economic order, a huge industrial base, ability to shift human resources from one place to another in response to local crises, a relatively self sufficient domestic economy, universal access to basic communications infrastructure, ...
And yet we had among the worst responses in the world, due to abject failure of federal leadership, total lack of coordination, and rampant misinformation by GOP-aligned media and others.
You think foreign governments who didn't take the virus seriously after seeing China's response to it would have taken it seriously if China had told them to?
FWIW, while the article does note, correctly, that China were largely unhelpful with providing information or access, it seems the focus is more on how and why the US government and agencies mostly failed to act appropriately to not being able to get the data they wanted.
The lab that sequenced and shared the genome apparently did this without authorization from the central government. Shortly afterward, the entire lab was shut down for "rectification."
The Chinese government also repeatedly refused requests to share a sample of the virus. It refused to allow any independent scientists to enter the country to investigate even up to today, and even the WHO commission that has finally been assembled can only contain members that are approved by the Chinese government.
From January 1 schools can now apply for funding to improve their ventilation systems and it will probably arrive around June. And we still have not started vaccinating and won’t start vaccinating the elderly for at least a month.
And only very slowly the media finally is starting to notice that the government has messed up. But still most reporting is just copying the press releases, shifting the blame around, jealously pointing fingers at supposed transgressors and blindly defending policy.
It’s truly sad.
So for this, something like: $("video").playbackRate = 2
or whatever. It's nice even for players with controls (like YT) if you want more than 2x speed
Also you can just look at the video tag's internal URL and just download and play however, offline :)
At 2 or 4 times the speed I think is a simple step, just omit every two or three of four samples.
Anyway, this gives different distortions. I am Deaf so I don't hear the distortions but I understand sound in a mathematical way. At a sampling rate of 44.1k the highest representable sound is about 22kHz. At 4 times the speed this is only the fourth of it, about 5500 Hz. If higher sounds aren't filtered they will wrap around and re-appear as low frequency sounds. I imagine that this sounds very weird.
And for n not being a power of two or at 8 times or more, you need to resample sound. Transform the samples into the frequency domain and back into the time domain but sped up. This is quite a mathematically heavy operation and probably there are other limits I don't know of.