Unfortunately it is difficult to trust anything coming out of the Chinese regime, especially if it has the potential to make them look bad.
China's great at suppressing protests, but informationally they're still porous. If millions of Chinese were dying of COVID, we'd know it. If suppressing information about deaths worked as well as you're asserting, they wouldn't have to publicly lock down Shanghai, either.
A simple visit to the Wikipedia article on Covid timeline showed that to be false.
>video on Reddit showed people dying in the streets.
That was literally just a drunk guy falling on street. Covid doesn't just make people drop dead while walking on the street lol. America suffered a million Covid deaths and we have zero videos of people just drop dead on the street from it.
But I agree with you, you can't cover up an actual pandemic in a country with hundreds of thousands of foreigners living and working there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
"Rumors of a deadly SARS outbreak subsequently spread on Chinese social media platforms; Wuhan police summoned and admonished him on 3 January for "making false comments on the Internet about unconfirmed SARS outbreak.""
> That was literally just a drunk guy falling on street. Covid doesn't just make people drop dead while walking on the street lol.
Sure. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/31/a-man-lies-dea...
There were a lot of these at the time: https://www.ibtimes.sg/china-virus-chilling-videos-wuhan-sho...
One of the defining early characteristics of COVID was shockingly low blood oxygen levels without other symptoms until you pass out. (Asymptomatic hypoxia: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8062941/)
Reddit's what got me to stock up a bit in February, which put me in a good position when shelves got empty in March.
> America suffered a million Covid deaths and we have zero videos of people just drop dead on the street from it.
We benefited from knowing about the virus by the time it hit here in any significant amount. (We definitely had a few: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/us/woman-dies-of-covid-on-pla...) Wuhan in January 2020 didn't know mild cold symptoms could turn rapidly into hypoxia and walking pneumonia.
And? China notified WHO and US CDC about the new virus at the end of December: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...
>"making false comments on the Internet about unconfirmed SARS outbreak.""
And he was making false comment. He was an eye doctor and he was telling people in his WeChat group that the original SARS came back.
>Sure. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/31/a-man-lies-dea...
Did you not read that article?
"AFP could not determine how the man, who appeared to be aged in his 60s, had died."
The guy literally had a shopping bag in his hand. Wuhan is a city of 10 million people, how many do you think dies from stroke or heart attacks each day?
Or it could be Covid, in which the only known case of making people drop dead while on a shopping trip is somehow captured by this reporter.
Criticism of the Chinese government isn't criticism of you personally.
Meanwhile the free western country I live in had a million Covid death.
> Meanwhile the free western country I live in
Yep.
Even Nazi Germany has achieved a lot scientifically and they did a great job industrializing post WWI Germany. Acknowledging that fact doesn't mean you are arguing for the Nazis.
Also just because "China Bad", doesn't mean you get to make up random bad stuff and stick to them and call that facts. That's not how any of this works.
It didn't take long for Beijing to realize he was right, admit the disease was real and reverse the wrist-slap the guy originally got.
I do agree that Covid can cause people to collapse--it's not out of the blue but they don't realize how ill they are.
> A simple visit to the Wikipedia article on Covid timeline showed that to be false.
Link to where it shows that to be false? Wikipedia leaving out a detail in a summary is not falsifying evidence.
Also: www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/technology/china-coronavirus-censorship.amp.html
It does not?
Can you point me toward where they tried to hide the outbreak?
> In a March 2020 interview, Ai Fen, the director of Wuhan Central Hospital's emergency department, stated in an interview that “she was told by superiors ... that Wuhan's health commission had issued a directive that medical workers were not to disclose anything about the virus, or the disease it caused, to avoid sparking a panic.
> In the early stages of the outbreak, the Chinese National Health Commission stated it had no "clear evidence" of human-to-human transmissions. However, at this time the high prevalence of human-to-human transmission was evident to doctors and other health workers, but they were forbidden to express their concerns in public.
I appreciate you bringing new info to my eyes.
Falling down unconscious isn't the same as dropping dead. And mere bystanders cannot always tell the difference at first sight.
We had a case of a woman collapsing in the street in Brno, Czech Republic, confirmed by the rescuers who picked her up and drove her to the nearest hospital. Low oxygenation of blood can make you pass out, and Covid pneumonia can cause your blood oxygen to drop to dangerously low levels.
Also, what we have been seeing for the last weeks should make it obvious China wasn't hiding it--because we are seeing how China responds when it is there.
Unfortunately, China is stuck in zero-Covid mode when they aren't able to actually accomplish that against the infectiveness of Omicron. It's like the cartoon character flailing trying to grab something while they've already run off the cliff--except they're killing people in the process.
People are going hungry, they're going to slip out to get food.
If they're using the time to rapidly address their bafflingly low vaccination rates, then maybe it will prove worthwhile, but otherwise I don't see how it would be at this point. ("Baffling" because I understand why the US isn't more forceful in pushing the vaccine, but don't understand why China hasn't pushed their own rates to near 100%.)