Coronavirus

[Stavros]

The fact is: China Lied and People Died. I put this squarely on China who decided to send 5 MILLION AMBASSADORS OF DEATH around the world. Trump did the unthinkable and shut down all travel from China. He was attacked by the NYTimes, CNN, MSNBC and every major media outlet out there.
Didn't the WHO and China kept saying there is no human to human contagion way until the end of January?!!!! And even when we closed Chinese fights to the US, WHO criticized the decision!!! How do you answer to that? And please don't mention FoxNews again, because (1) I don't work for them, and (2) I couldn't care less about them.

A few points-
1) The US did not ban flights from China, it imposed travel restrictions, which is how 40,000 Americans were able to return Stateside from China -were any of them infected?

2) The first case of the Coronavirus outside China was reported in Thailand on the 13th of January and the human-to-human form of the infection was confirmed by the WHO on the 20th of January, the same day that the first case was reported in South Korea, and in the USA, in the State of Washington. This led the President to state of the viral infection- "We have it totally under control. Its one person coming in from China".
If you take January 20th as a key date, consider the difference in the responses of the Governments of South Korea and the USA (with the UK just as sloppy as the US)
Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
A week after that, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by two former top health policy officials within the Trump administration under the headline Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic. Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb laid out a menu of what had to be done instantly to avert a massive health disaster.

Top of their to-do list: work with private industry to develop an “easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic test” – in other words, just what South Korea was doing.

It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ealth-disaster

see also
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ti...d19-responses/

The point here is that whatever the newspapers were reporting, or Fox News broadcasting, or Joe Biden saying, only one man is President at one time when decisions -real decisions- must be made.
On balance, it is clear: the President failed to grasp the importance of this viral infection, and as a resut the US lost control of the political agenda and more crucially, the public health agenda, aggravated by the fact the US does not have an integrated public health service such as exists in Europe.


3) Epidemics and Pandemics appear to have a timeline, but that is only with regard to recorded cases. Even now there is no absolute proof that the infection began in the Wet Market in Wuhan, though I am not sure if there is any proof either that a 'leak' from a laboratory in Wuhan is the source. There are now claims there may have been cases in the Wuhan area earlier in November which at the time were thought to be a bad case of 'flu. The origins are thus as obscure now as they were for years with regard to HIV/AIDS, even today there is a dispute as to the nature of HIV and some scientists dispute it eve exists.
I do not state this to diminish the role played by the Wet Market or the consumption of the meat of obscure or endangered species, this happens in China and also happens in Africa. It may be that a Coronavirus of this type has existed for some time but has been dormant, or it may have merged with another viral infection, such as 'flu to become what is now known as Covid 19. What this has done is expose the dangers to humans of eating species that are not normally part of the human diet, it is not as if most Chinese eat bamboo rat or dog, and there are moves to end the farming of bamboo rats in particular- (warning, photos in this link)
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...a-wildlife-ban

4) The WHO appears slow to respond because a) it did not know at first what the illness was, b) it worked on the basis it could be contained in China, and c) the WHO cannot simply declare the existence of a Pandemic until there are cases in more than one country that do constitute a pandemi.

5) I take issue with this claim: "China who decided to send 5 MILLION AMBASSADORS OF DEATH around the world".
-China does not and will not benefit economically from a Pandemic that stops production at home and trade abroad. It does not benefit politically from a deliberate strategy of infection that is equivalent to a declaration of war; and it does not benefit socially owing to the restrictions this places on the movement and contacts of its own population.
-China when it lies, does so to protect the Party, Chernobyl is the model here. The ony excuse they have is that neither they nor the WHO knew in December just how virulent this illness is, and how easily and quickly it can be spread.

Indeed, it is because viral infections cannot be controlled in their early stages that biological warfare has been so rare, other than the use of chemical weapons in limited areas in the form of bombs which have chemical reactions but not viral infections. Every case of a viral infection that has spread from one source to become first an epidemic and then a pandemic, be it the Plagues that wracked Europe between the 13th-19th century, the Typhoid epidemic in the US in the 20th century along with the Global Influenza Pandemic that erupted in 1918, every one begins in obscurity, and because of this, carriers who have not been identified as carriers are free to spread the illness, which is how Covid 19 has spread across the world.
Testing and control in advance of a vaccine have been crucial to the different outcomes in, say, South Korea and the US.

What this viral infection has exposed is the different ways in which Goverments have acted, and as I suggested before, there was a time when key actors did not want to believe this was serious enough to merit the policies that have since been imposed. It is the classic case of the boy shouting 'Fire!' in the cinema, and nobody taking any notice, because they don't see fames, and don't smell smoke.

And now we are burning, and the smoke is in our lungs, and our loved ones are dead.

[filghy2]

America is a vast country. You cannot compare it to S. Korea where 60% of the population live in the Capital Seoul, or Germany, a country the size of New Mexico. We are at 3 million tests, More than any country by far. S.Korea has 500k, yet the media is not satisfied. Besides why do you need to test a bunch of rednecks scattered around the countryside when they only meet once or twice a year during a holiday.

You may not have heard, but Australia is also a vast country. We've tested 1.4% of the population compared to less than 0.9% in the USA. https://virusncov.com/ We have had strict restrictions across the whole country for 3 weeks now and we have only 2 deaths per 1 million population compared to 67 deaths per million in the USA.

Canada, another vast country right next door to you, has tested 1.1% of the population and has 19 deaths per million population. Doesn't that suggest to you that something's gone wrong in your country?

Incidentally, only 20% of South Korea's population lives in Seoul. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul Maths is clearly not your strong point.

[rodinuk]

At a time when millions of people are having to be on their best behaviour it’s appalling to see one or two on this thread behaving in the worst possible manner. They’ve been banned.

[broncofan]

You may not have heard, but Australia is also a vast country. We've tested 1.4% of the population compared to less than 0.9% in the USA. https://virusncov.com/ We have had strict restrictions across the whole country for 3 weeks now and we have only 2 deaths per 1 million population compared to 67 deaths per million in the USA.

Canada, another vast country right next door to you, has tested 1.1% of the population and has 19 deaths per million population. Doesn't that suggest to you that something's gone wrong in your country?

Incidentally, only 20% of South Korea's population lives in Seoul. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul Maths is clearly not your strong point.

This illustrates the problem very well. I also want to point out that while big cities are the hardest hit, every state has an outbreak and it's maybe even more critical to get adequate testing to states in the early stages.

When a state has a few dozen cases, local health officials can find asymptomatic cases and mild cases by contact tracing and have those people isolate. We have an outbreak in every state, in most counties in every state, and testing bottlenecks everywhere. Even the .9% figure is misleading because we are allocating a lot of tests to places that already have very bad outbreaks.

What he was suggesting is that local health authorities not have the testing to control their outbreaks until it's a big problem. That is why even very capable governors have had difficulty acting quickly enough. You cannot control something you don't know the severity of. As I said, we were at least two weeks too late everywhere.

[broncofan]

What this country truly needs in a leader who is a cheerleader for it. This country can run on autopilot as witnessed many times in the past when we had gridlock between Congress and the White House. It was built to run on auto-pilot by few genius men and we are thankful to them. This Covid-19 storm shall pass. So don't worry. 

Nothing illustrates better what Trumpism is. Early on there were promises that he could restore us to greatness. Now we hear that all we need is a cheerleader and someone to do nothing in office. So what if people die who would not have died? So what if other countries did a much better job of handling this? So what if he doesn't know the most basic things he's talking about and is saying things that make health officials' jobs harder. The important thing is that he boasts afterwards and is a cheerleader for himself and the country.

It always starts with promises he'll do a great job and ends with a shoulder shrugging exclamation "well who cares if he didn't".

[Fitzcarraldo]

It always starts with promises he'll do a great job and ends with a shoulder shrugging exclamation "well who cares if he didn't".

But previously the shrugging was accompanied with, "Just look at your 401(k)!" Not hearing much of that now.

[KnightHawk 2.0]

Nothing illustrates better what Trumpism is. Early on there were promises that he could restore us to greatness. Now we hear that all we need is a cheerleader and someone to do nothing in office. So what if people die who would not have died? So what if other countries did a much better job of handling this? So what if he doesn't know the most basic things he's talking about and is saying things that make health officials' jobs harder. The important thing is that he boasts afterwards and is a cheerleader for himself and the country.

It always starts with promises he'll do a great job and ends with a shoulder shrugging exclamation "well who cares if he didn't".

Completely agree. And taking no responsiblity for his poor handling of the crisis and blaming everyone else when things go wrong.

[Laphroaig]

Completely agree. And taking no responsiblity for his poor handling of the crisis and blaming everyone else when things go wrong.

Yep, was just about to post this...

[Del06]

"like a woman" - a little sexism there too.

[GroobySteven]

At a time when millions of people are having to be on their best behaviour it’s appalling to see one or two on this thread behaving in the worst possible manner. They’ve been banned.

I don't normally step into these threads but I took once look at the top of this page with Stavros responding to someone who is so factually incorrect (and probably here to just sow discontent) that I was about to ban them. Thanks for taking care of it.