Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

>China tried to actively cover up the infection in Wuhan. News got out, doctors posted on social media

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.

View on HN

> A simple visit to the Wikipedia article on Covid timeline showed that to be false.

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.

I wouldn't even call what happened with Li Wenliang a coverup. When someone makes a tremendous claim the usual response is to figure they're wrong--it's just in China that also resulted in an official visit telling him to quit scaremongering.

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.

>Wuhan police summoned and admonished him on 3 January

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.

You spend a lot of time excusing the actions of an authoritarian government (while living in what I can only assume is a free western country).

Criticism of the Chinese government isn't criticism of you personally.

Criticism should be levied if they deserve criticism, which can only be evaluated based on objective facts. "We should be critical of everything they do regardless because they are an authoritarian country" is unscientific and devoid of critical thinking.

Meanwhile the free western country I live in had a million Covid death.

"Police states actually do some good while enslaving everyone else" is not the killer argument you think it is.

> Meanwhile the free western country I live in

Yep.

I never made an argument for police state. It seems like you are unable to objectively evaluate policies and science apart from the people behind it.

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.

>> China tried to actively cover up the infection in Wuhan. News got out, doctors posted on social media

> 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

"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."

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.

> A simple visit to the Wikipedia article on Covid timeline showed that to be false.

It does not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...

Can you point me toward where they tried to hide the outbreak?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_Chi...

> 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.

Thanks, this is a good article that backed up one of the quotes: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55756452

I appreciate you bringing new info to my eyes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com