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[ChairmanPoo]

Yes, because it is not black death "50% of population dead" epidemic.

No, but it is a "100% of the population inside" lockdown. Of whole countries.
To what extent I believe the goverment can guarantee regular food supply chains? Eh... 🤔

And "western goverments lied about everything" is untrue, there was some incompetence but they did far less lying than Chinese gov

Look dude, I dont know where you are and what your goverment is doing. But here the goverment's level of lying was bad to begin with and in the last two weeks has reached orwellian levels. Anyone checking the numbers or talking with people on the frontline can see as much

[ChairmanPoo]

Pd: Italy has started mass incinerations.

I keep expecting to wake up from all this 😰

[Reelya]

And "western goverments lied about everything" is untrue, there was some incompetence but they did far less lying than Chinese gov

Look dude, I dont know where you are and what your goverment is doing. But here the goverment's level of lying was bad to begin with and in the last two weeks has reached orwellian levels. Anyone checking the numbers or talking with people on the frontline can see as much

Additionally, people talk about "the Chinese" as if 1.5 billion people are a monolithic entity.

A lot of the lying in China is actually at the regional government level, and the main target of their lying is the central government "no no everything's fine here, Control, nothing to see here!" Basically because they know they can be replaced if things go pear-shaped so there's an incentive for regional heads to withhold the scale of problems from the central authorities. Mostly this works in their favor, as most problems can be swept under the carpet in this manner. It backfired bigtime with this virus because the problem is one you can't hide, and it spreads.

So, the issue isn't that China is lying to the outside world per se. They couldn't give a shit what anyone outside China thinks. The problem is that you have institutions in China which actively lie to each other. So, the institutional culture is such that they withhold information from each other and try and solve problems locally so that they don't lose face/authority.

[ChairmanPoo]

Snip

Makes  sense TBH. I think given the scale of China regarding the Chinese goverment on the same lines as another goverment outside China is probably missing nuances. I surmise given the size of the country it probably works in many ways as one of our supranational entities do... except with more control over what happens underneath

[Reelya]

An analogy would be if the officials in Florida screwed something up we wouldn't immediately jump to thinking it was a monolithic failing of the federal American government.

[mko]

Yes, because it is not black death "50% of population dead" epidemic.

No, but it is a "100% of the population inside" lockdown. Of whole countries.
To what extent I believe the goverment can guarantee regular food supply chains? Eh... 🤔

"100% of the population inside" can you list countries that are allowing only remote work?

And "western goverments lied about everything" is untrue, there was some incompetence but they did far less lying than Chinese gov

Look dude, I dont know where you are and what your goverment is doing. But here the goverment's level of lying was bad to begin with and in the last two weeks has reached orwellian levels. Anyone checking the numbers or talking with people on the frontline can see as much

OK, what is your country? Poland had some standard "we are well prepared" claims by government that were opinions/lies, some usual chaos/incompetence. But no lies reaching orwellian levels.

[mko]

t give a shit what anyone outside China thinks. The problem is that you have institutions in China which actively lie to each other. So, the institutional culture is such that they withhold information from each other and try and solve problems locally so that they don't lose face/authority.

I am mostly irritated by China government because it is doing unusually horrible things (to people living there). It has potential to be more influential on the world and badly affect others. It is now  digging out of hole created by opium colonization, Japanese invasion, Mao stupidity, communism damage and many other things.

I was not really expecting pandemic (experts were aware about risks caused by China) but I feel fully justified in being powerlessly irritated at China gov. Their terrible government structure and live animal markets are responsible for starting this mess.

EDIT: sorry, misspost (it seems that there is no way to delete)

[TamerVirus]

Saw a guy passed out on the sidewalk driving into work today
Could be anything...
But still got me spooked

[Frumple]

I was not really expecting pandemic (experts were aware about risks caused by China) but I feel fully justified in being powerlessly irritated at China gov. Their terrible government structure and live animal markets are responsible for starting this mess.

EDIT: sorry, misspost (it seems that there is no way to delete)

They... really aren't responsible for that. Cross-species pandemics like this can arise basically anywhere human to animal contact occurs, which is more or less everywhere; china's behaviors may increase the chance somewhat, but the fact their population is goddamn huge is the primary reason shit seems more likely to hit a fan there.

So far as response and mitigation efforts go, they've also been one of like maybe three countries worldwide that haven't been entirely fucking everything up, alongside south korea and maybe singapore. It hasn't been 100% perfect by any means, but china's legit been doing more than just about any other country on the planet to reduce and contain the spread of the virus. You could say that that's more a condemnation of everyone else than it is praise for china and the few others that have taken legitimately meaningful effects to contain the crow plague (and I'd agree with you if you did), but they're not really to blame for happening to have lost the dice roll on viral mutation and then genuinely trying to deal with the situation once it became obvious what was going on.

[scriver]

Lol, I remember when this began in China and all media reported on that video of a dead guy in the streets. Even my own dear Swedish state media did it, the fuckers. "Hurr we have no idea what this guy died of but it was in Wuham so we're going to strongly imply that it was Corona for the sake of sensationalisation durrdlegurr". Fucking awful.

Derision is not aimed at you, Tamer. I understand that it's frightening to see. I just remembered the above and it got me all in a tissy again. Shameful goddamn media work.

[Reelya]

Had some people at work with a weird set of beliefs about this.

First up they were going on about the "China secretly cremated millions of bodies" conspiracy theory, then later they were downplaying what the disease would mean if it got loose here, saying we can handle it fine and it's just flu.

Some people have an amazing ability to compartmentalize their beliefs in ways that suit their preconceptions:

Plague in China? must be bad, millions dead.
Plague here? impossible, can't happen.

[McTraveller]

Still, I want to see "virus trackers" like we have for Coronovirus for every other communicable disease.  I think a lot of both the panic and the "lack of panic" is both due to having no context.

For instance, it would be helpful to show the daily change in plain old flu "active cases / serious cases / deaths" along with the Covid ones.  Side-by-side, both in absolute and relative plots, would show both how Flu does impact a lot of people but also how Covid is much more severe in terms of rate of cases. I think?  I mean holy crap look at the numbers for Oct-March for the flu in JUST the US: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm.

Does anyone have a link to side-by-side time series?

More statistics curiosities - I'm still trying to figure out why the US numbers for recovery are so low - people have been 'active' for more than 3 weeks here - what is the time required to declare 'recovered'?  I mean yesterday's stats on Worldometer said that the US had zero new recoveries.

[mko]

I was not really expecting pandemic (experts were aware about risks caused by China) but I feel fully justified in being powerlessly irritated at China gov. Their terrible government structure and live animal markets are responsible for starting this mess.

EDIT: sorry, misspost (it seems that there is no way to delete)

They... really aren't responsible for that. Cross-species pandemics like this can arise basically anywhere human to animal contact occurs, which is more or less everywhere; china's behaviors may increase the chance somewhat, but the fact their population is goddamn huge is the primary reason shit seems more likely to hit a fan there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/fl1aec/from_my_college_microbiology_textbook_c2009_no/

"the animal reservoir and live animal markets in China are still present allowing animal-to-human transfer to once again happen" - excerpt from textbook about coronaviruses.

"can arise basically anywhere human to animal contact occurs, which is more or less everywhere" - live animal markets, especially ones with wild animals are quite rare in Europe. I have never seen one in my entire life. And I like hiking with regular visits to remove, rural and less developed regions.
 Selling wild animal for human consumption is also fairly rare.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So far as response and mitigation efforts go, they've also been one of like maybe three countries worldwide that haven't been entirely fucking everything up, alongside south korea and maybe singapore. It hasn't been 100% perfect by any means, but china's legit been doing more than just about any other country on the planet to reduce and contain the spread of the virus. You could say that that's more a condemnation of everyone else than it is praise for china and the few others that have taken legitimately meaningful effects to contain the crow plague (and I'd agree with you if you did), but they're not really to blame for happening to have lost the dice roll on viral mutation and then genuinely trying to deal with the situation once it became obvious what was going on.

Later response was quite good, it seems unlikely that we will reach comparable effectiveness. But initial response - censorship, attacking doctor who found new disease, coverup attempt... No country in Europe was/is hunting down doctors and force them to lie that illness is not existing, none is censoring info about such things. Huge initial delay was caused by maliciousness of Chinese system and their coverups.

First up they were going on about the "China secretly cremated millions of bodies" conspiracy theory, then later they were downplaying what the disease would mean if it got loose here, saying we can handle it fine and it's just flu.

Some people have an amazing ability to compartmentalize their beliefs in ways that suit their preconceptions:

Plague in China? must be bad, millions dead.
Plague here? impossible, can't happen.

Yeah, some people are amazingly stupid. WTF, how you hide deaths of millions and secretly cremate them? This is stupidity reaches quater of stupidity of chemtrails.

[TamerVirus]

Taiwan has been on the ball with Coronavirus even when it was some "weird pneumonia from Wuhan that doesn't seem to transmit between humans" back in January. Even without any assistance from the WHO because China.

All I'm saying is Taiwan numbah one! 

[scriver]

Technically they're number wan