Coronavirus

[Paladin]

So? That has nothing to do with the topic. And if you want to play stupid games, I have more posts than you.

That only means you've been wasting more time than I have.

[Paladin]

If anyone can disprove anything I have posted with hard verifiable facts - not innuendo, supposition, opinion, or any lies from the chicoms or who, then I will post a retraction for that item. Otherwise, the facts are the facts.

[Stavros]

If anyone can disprove anything I have posted with hard verifiable facts - not innuendo, supposition, opinion, or any lies from the chicoms or who, then I will post a retraction for that item. Otherwise, the facts are the facts.

1) It is difficult to prove you are wrong when you provide no objective proof of your own claims.
Nevertheless, here are some challenges to your claims-

2) In a previous post you claimed "as far back as OCTOBER, China was already blocking off roads outside of that town. They completely sealed off Wuhan from all ground travel out AND halted ALL DOMESTIC air travel out of Wuhan to other parts of china. "
-You provide no evidence for this claim, and you do not mention that the World Military Games was held in Wuhan from the 18th to the 27th of October and that traffic may have been restricted owing to his event, and in other areas something as simple as road maintenance.
A claim made by Senator Tom Cotton that mobile phone access to the P4 Lab in Wuhan was shut down in October has also been shown to be a claim without solid proof, thus:
"U.S. intelligence agencies received reports based on publicly available cellphone and satellite data suggesting there was a shutdown at the lab, two U.S. officials familiar with the matter say. But after examining overhead imagery and their own data, the spy agencies were unable to confirm any shutdown, and deemed the reports "inconclusive."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...perts-n1202716
-So, there is no verifiable proof roads were being blocked around Wuhan, no proof that if they were it was because of a viral outbreak, not even much proof traffic was restricted because of the Military Games, and the 'proof' that cell/mobile phone access was shut down in the P4 labs remains conjecture without verifiable proof.

3) You claim in post#361 that "In Jan, China and WHO stated "no indication of human to human transmission" which was a complete false statement." In fact, China declared that human-to-human transmission had occurred on the 20th of January.
That said, it was not beyond proof that this was the case- take the infection of a woman whose husband may have been the first to die, but who might not have been the source of her infection but meat she handled, as is also the case with those in Shenzhen who fell victim on the 10th of January.
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/27/210823...arly-on-lancet

4) Your claim is that the Chinese Government deliberately withheld information from the WHO, and to some extent this may be true, but may also 'merely' reflect the fact that China operates a large and complicated bureaucracy, and that junior officials in Wuhan may have been reluctant to inform their superiors of a potentially catastrophic viral outbreak even though in December it is likely they did not actually know what it was that was causing people to fall ill frm flu like and pneumonia like symptoms. If Chernobyl is the model, then again, the reluctance of local party officials to admit they had screwed up was a factor in the delayed response. Thus, what you claim is a deliberate cover-up may in fact just be a cock-up.

5) Your claim about the restriction of travel movements in China does not factor in the most obvious for late January- the Chinese New Year, when millions of Chinese are on the move. Thus, restricting movement out of and into Wuhan spared most of China from infection. Now consider what the US administraton would have or might have said had thousands of American citizens been detained in China and not allowed to return to the US, given that in January the President was dismissing the viral outbreak in China as 'just the flu' that was shortly going to disappear.
You seem to want the returning Americans to China to be part of a deliberate plan, when China was more likely solving a dispute with the US before it happened. As for the US, had it taken this viral outbreak as seriously as Taiwan and South Korea, it mght have tested travellers flying in from China, or insisted they be quarantined for 14 days, or even banned from entry -none of this happened because the US did not take the threat seriously.

6) What we do know now which we did not know in January, February and March, is that there is a strong possibility that the first cases of Covid 19 were in the Wuhan area, that there might have been individual cases as early as November, or for that matter in rural China cases going back years, if the transmission from animals to humans is the cause, rather than a lab experiment leaking into the civilian population.
The Lancet article cited in the Vox link above does appear to show more cases than was first reported, that many cases had no connection to the wet food market in Wuhan, that throughout December as the Chinese began to more closely monitor these cases and by early January describe the genome sequence of the virus, new information added to existing information, but that even by early March when the WHO declared Covid 19 to mark a pandemic, a lot of facts about the virus in both its genetic and social terms was not known.
-But we do know the President was not bothered; he said on the 13th of January 'I take no responsibility at all', and decided not to take control of the US agenda, not to offer any form of national leadership or develop a nationally co-ordinated policy, and decided not to spend any money on the emerging threat, and continued to ignore its implications throughout February as thousands and thousands of Americans returned to the US from China and infected countries in Europe, embedding the disease in the US when prompt action might have limited the spread of it and saved lives.

China is not exonerated from this, it is a vast country of more than 1.3 billion people with in many areas standards of hygiene in public places that do no meet 'our standards,' and in any case the threat of a global viral pandemic has been factored in to disaster management scenarious for years, and not just emanating from China.

The WHO is also at fault for not being more acutely aware of the problem with regard to human to human transmission-thus, when Tedros Ghebreyesus said on the 3rd of February "There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade. We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent. WHO stands ready to provide advice to any country that is considering which measures to take,” -he was playing into the hands of those countries lke the USA and the UK which denied the importance of Covid 19 and critically sought an excuse to do nothing.

That said, while the WHO declared Covid 19 a pandemic on the 11th of March that probably should have been made at least by the end of January, the WHO like China is a large bureaucracy and it is a big deal to declare that a pandemic is in progress. It may be the case that the WHO was less than honest with the WHO on the cases it had in January, but none of this prevented states from acting on their own as was the case with Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore. It is not as if any member of the WHO cannot act without the WHO's say so, in fact the WHO cannot operate in any member country without its permission.

Thus I see incompetence everywhere, people who should have been doing their jobs scared that in doing so they might lose the job, governments reluctant to spend money who now are lumbered with astronomic costs -one at least hopes we have all learned something, because a lot of smart thinking believes viral epidemics and pandemics are going to be more common in the future.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com...oreign-travel/

[filghy2]

In Jan, China and WHO stated "no indication of human to human transmission" which was a complete false statement. Any travel restriction back then would have NOT been supported. Anywhere. Even Pres Trump's restriction was met with cries of racism and xenophobia.

It was only Later that other countries realized the true nature of this virus and by then it had already spread around the world. and THEN, WHO says, human to human transmission is possible.

That's the way it is. It started in China who lied and covered up for months while quietly allowing infected chinese to fly all over the world. There is no way we or anyone else could have prevented this. Only china could have and they chose not to do so.

Taiwan banned travel from China on 26 January, which was before the US. In any case, Trump did nothing else for the next 6 weeks apart from claiming the virus was under control and would magically disappear. Obviously banning Chinese travellers was not sufficient, especially as 40,000 US residents still returned home from China after 1 February.

Consider this. The US now has 300 Covid-19 deaths per million population. Your neighbour Canada has 170 deaths per million. In Australia there have been only 4 deaths per million, even though we probably have just as much travel from China relative to our population. Doesn't that suggest that your country's death rate is substantially due to your own mishandling of this pandemic?

I see you are following Steve Bannon's dictum about flooding the zone with shit. It's odd that you suddenly start responding to so many old comments after many weeks, though I would not be surprised if you disappear again after this flurry.

[Fitzcarraldo]

https://www.sfgate.com/science/artic...d-15289437.php

[Paladin]

I had been away from the boards for a while, busy with real world work. I was just catching up.

I said hard facts. Conjecture / inconclusive challenges are not proof that what I posted is in error.

The greater NYC metro area has over 20 million people, that is 80% of the Entire population of Australia, and it is Very densely packed. Australia's incoming flights from china go to perhaps 2 or 3 locations. The US has dozens of destination and flow from Europe which has flow from china as well. It got all over the place really fast, way before the rest of the world knew what was going on, again thanks to the chicoms lying and covering up.

The who is and has been in china's pocket for a while. They will support any lie the chicoms make.

If you like the chicoms so much, why don't you go live there? Let us know how that works out with you being in this board, etc.

[Paladin]

The chicoms are currently effectively using 3 of the 4 DIME elements against the US and the rest of the world. I'm not looking forward to the day they try to use the 4th.

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=Paladin;1930328]

In days of Yore, a Paladin could be relied on to be virtuous, but there is no virtue in prejudice void of facts. Tedious though it is, again:

I said hard facts. Conjecture / inconclusive challenges are not proof that what I posted is in error.
-You claim in post#361 that "In Jan, China and WHO stated "no indication of human to human transmission"- this is a false statement. In fact, China declared that human-to-human transmission had occurred on the 20th of January.
You made claims with no proof, and on this one claim the fact shows you were wrong.

[Stavros]

The chicoms are currently effectively using 3 of the 4 DIME elements against the US and the rest of the world. I'm not looking forward to the day they try to use the 4th.

A curious comparison, thus=

"By necessity and doctrine, the pro-jection of “soft power” is becoming increasingly important to the U.S. Department of Defense. The elements of soft power are often abstracted as Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic (DIME) actions and their Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, and Infrastructure (PMESII) effects. DIME/PMESII spans the range of operations other than combat, including humanitarian aid, disaster relief, and non-combatant evacuation operations."
https://www.nrl.navy.mil/content_ima...on_Hillson.pdf

In three years since the inauguration of the 45th President, why has neither he nor any of his team used DiME to improve the influence of the USA in the WHO?

Indeed, why has DiME been so absent in the strategic aims of the USA, which has not only chose to absent itself from any soft power/diplomatic/global leadership role in the campaign against Covid 19, but has surrendered the strategic advantage of the USA with regard to nuclear weapons to the Russian Federation by withdrawing from the INF Treaty, surrendered strategic advantage to the Russian Federation by withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty, and has demonstrably failed in its use of economic power to restrain nuclear developments in Iran, and failed to use its economic power to redress grievances on trade wth China -a failure that is costing the US taxpayer $12 billion a year in subsidies to farmers who have lost their contracts with China. And in Diplomatic terms the failure of DiME has made the USA look foolish by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Change Agreement when its own States (eg, California) continue to adhere to it.

Compensating the abject failure of DiME by attacking China is intended to divert attention away from the USA's own failings, while suggesting on available evidence, that China's own use of DiME is more effective because they believe in it, where the current President does not believe in anything other than his own magnificence, and the money he can make playing golf when he should be doing his job.

So get DiME on the table in the open and admit it, if China appears to be stronger (though it is not), it is because the USA under its incompetent President, has let it be so.

[Paladin]

[QUOTE=Stavros;1930357]

In days of Yore, a Paladin could be relied on to be virtuous, but there is no virtue in prejudice void of facts. Tedious though it is, again:

Where have I written something that is considered prejudice? Thought so

[QUOTE=Stavros;1930357]

-You claim in post#361 that "In Jan, China and WHO stated "no indication of human to human transmission"- this is a false statement. In fact, China declared that human-to-human transmission had occurred on the 20th of January.
You made claims with no proof, and on this one claim the fact shows you were wrong.

Earlier in the month they certainly did say there was no indication...