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[coalboat]

Things in Guangdong are getting lax, now. Plenty of people have stopped wearing masks. I'm strapped in for round 2...

Yes, although people still wear obligatory masks around where I am, social distancing is non-existent in rush hour bus or metro. Media encourages people to resume normal working.

However, I don't think it will really get out of control again. During the last few months (on the base of what has been done in the last few years), extensive infrastructure has been established to monitor the movement of every individuals of the population. Individual's activity is digitally documented like a released wolf with tracking collar. With this, to track and quarantine infected people is as easy as to locate a copper pick via DF stock menu.

So, Chairman, while it's reasonable to praise the decisive measure to contain the epidemic, maybe we should also consider if this infrastructure has the possibility of being used against the people.

[ChairmanPoo]

Possibly. As it is now I'm too terrified to consider anything but lockdowns. In all honesty I'd be happier if the lockdown was made absolute and the army distributed food house to house here. In sterile boxes.

I'm self-aware enough to know this is fight-or-flight kicking in, heavily on the side of "flight, hide in a hole variant"

[delphonso]

Coalboats on the money. To return to work most people had to show a certificate of 14 days self-quarantine. I think that has made people slightly over confident, but at the same time, getting back into regular life will be good for peoples health - both mental and physical.

[Lidku]

The reality of China is that they want to save face. They've since the beginning lied about most of the virus. Tried to cover it up. Arrested whistleblower Li Wenliang, arrested independent reporters like Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin who we never heard from again. We don't know their true death count- they lied about that too. The crematoriums that had active in Wuhan was never discussed or disclosed. We don't know anything. Nothing in China is transparent. By virtue of its governmental system, its fundamentally worse in disclosation than how Western governments were acting in response to this virus as well.

They've really outdone themselves this time. Usually they keep their mass murdering to its own citizens, but I guess with the CCP's attempted cover up in the beginning (Virus was active in Wuhan since November 2019) and allowing air traffic to continue, a huge portion of people are about to die. Just look at Italy. Look at its death count and compare it to China's. You KNOW China is lying because they didn't lockdown anything since mid-January. Before that the virus had a whole two months to spread around Hubei.

I can't stand China anymore. Before I was neutral about it, but now I'm vehemently against it and its practices. It also influenced WHO to downplay the virus so it didn't take any loss of face in the beginning.

[Reelya]

Is there any factual basis to the cremation thing. As far as I can tell it's related to a website run by Steven Bannon, and a wealthy Chinese ex-pat - so Breitbart-related and from a Chinese guy who's not even in China but has a bone with the Chinese government.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/26/facebook-posts/chinese-billionaire-floats-conspiracy-about-corona/

The video was uploaded by Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire and political activist. Wengui fled China in 2014 in anticipation of corruption charges from the Communist Party. Since then, Wengui, who is a member of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, has become known for his criticism of Chinese leaders.

A watermark for G News, the media arm of Wengui’s company Guo Media, appears on the YouTube video. The site, which also employs Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and former executive chairman of Breitbart News, has previously published misinformation about the coronavirus. Other conspiratorial websites, such as pro-Trump outlet the Epoch Times, have amplified the video on social media.

So you got a guy who's gone into exile to avoid corruption charges, and who clearly has a vested interest in taking down the Chinese government: he can go back home a wealthy man, and the corruption charges magically go away, who's also good buddies with Trump and Steve Bannon who concocted and spread the story.

The Epoch Times pushed the story, and they also refer to the virus as "The CCP virus", along with pushing every possible conspiracy theory - as long as it makes their man Trump look good and the CCP look bad. Amusing yes, unbiased news source, definitely not.

[delphonso]

Lidku, this has been discussed plenty. Ease off it. China, like it or not, is going to be the first stable place from which this long fight can actually start.

[Reelya]

Also, it's silly to say that because the disease has been traced back to infections in November then the Chinese should have acted then.

Most people only get mild symptoms. So there would only be about 1 in 20 chance that any initially-sick people would get sick enough to even come to the attention of the medical authorities. Before they even had any pneumonia patients to deal with, this disease was already spreading outside Wuhan via asymptomatic and mild symptoms patients.

https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coronavirus-outbreak-and-cover-up-ee65211a-afb6-4641-97b8-353718a5faab.html

Here's the time line according to research:

Dec. 10: Wei Guixian, one of the earliest known coronavirus patients, starts feeling ill.

Dec. 16: Patient admitted to Wuhan Central Hospital with infection in both lungs but resistant to anti-flu drugs. Staff later learned he worked at a wildlife market connected to the outbreak.

Dec. 27: Wuhan health officials are told that a new coronavirus is causing the illness.

Dec. 30:

    Ai Fen, a top director at Wuhan Central Hospital, posts information on WeChat about the new virus. She was reprimanded for doing so and told not to spread information about it.
    Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang also shares information on WeChat about the new SARS-like virus. He is called in for questioning shortly afterward.
    Wuhan health commission notifies hospitals of a “pneumonia of unclear cause” and orders them to report any related information.

Dec. 31:

    Wuhan health officials confirm 27 cases of illness and close a market they think is related to the virus' spread.
    China tells the World Health Organization’s China office about the cases of an unknown illness.

so it's a little silly to say that because they've estimated the outbreak to have started back in November then the Chinese should have acted sooner. The soonest they could have acted is after Dec 27.

The bits they fucked up later are ominously similar to the things that fucked up in America too: labs ordered not to test samples they already have, and declaring there's no community transmission when there clearly had been.

How the Chinese messed up here is exactly the thing some people are calling for in the West: just let the virus blow through, because reacting to it will tank the economy and daily lives too much. So ... which is it? The virus is overblown and we shouldn't have to end our partying and nightlife to deal with it, or the Chinese are to blame because they didn't react and shut their own economy down quick enough?

[coalboat]

Lidku it's good to not get blinded by propaganda from Chinese government, but you can help with the situation instead of declaring war to China.

As I said, Hong Kong and Singapore reacted quickly because they also speak Chinese. They were accessible to information everybody were talking about over the Internet, and not only what was translated from official report. You can register in Chinese social media and see what people are talking about and translate them into English (google translate is good enough in most cases) to share with others. What you describe are events that happened a month ago. Currently the situation is visibly much better. Although there's possibility of a second round of outbreak, it is unlikely to affect other countries any further, given how much the virus has already gone global.

[Max™]

Oh god... I think Trump was such an idiot back when he made that mysterious covfefe tweet--and then said nothing else the rest of the night--that in trying to escape the pain of being trapped inside itself, his mind looked outward and he caught a glimpse of the future.

Fear the COVID
Fear COVID Fear it
COV FEAR FEAR
COVFEFE

Sonofaturd hodor'D us.

[wierd]

There was some scary shit on the morning news this morning.
They were interviewing a nurse in California (who was using one of those voice anonymizer things), who was saying that due to limited availability of supplies, they were being used to re-use Single Use Only PPE and equipment.

That is some serious shit right there if true. WTF Yo.

[ChairmanPoo]

There was some scary shit on the morning news this morning.
They were interviewing a nurse in California (who was using one of those voice anonymizer things), who was saying that due to limited availability of supplies, they were being used to re-use Single Use Only PPE and equipment.

That is some serious shit right there if true. WTF Yo.

You're surprised? All the world is like that. You'll also see people working with regular surgical masks due to lack of PPEs, and people engaging in DIY projects to try to make something at home, which will oscillate between just making paper masks and trying to fit roomba HEPA filters in diving masks.

This is the picture all over the world.

These are our lives for the next few months at least 😭

[Flying Dice]

Is there any factual basis to the cremation thing. As far as I can tell it's related to a website run by Steven Bannon, and a wealthy Chinese ex-pat - so Breitbart-related and from a Chinese guy who's not even in China but has a bone with the Chinese government.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/26/facebook-posts/chinese-billionaire-floats-conspiracy-about-corona/

The video was uploaded by Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire and political activist. Wengui fled China in 2014 in anticipation of corruption charges from the Communist Party. Since then, Wengui, who is a member of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, has become known for his criticism of Chinese leaders.

A watermark for G News, the media arm of Wengui’s company Guo Media, appears on the YouTube video. The site, which also employs Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and former executive chairman of Breitbart News, has previously published misinformation about the coronavirus. Other conspiratorial websites, such as pro-Trump outlet the Epoch Times, have amplified the video on social media.

So you got a guy who's gone into exile to avoid corruption charges, and who clearly has a vested interest in taking down the Chinese government: he can go back home a wealthy man, and the corruption charges magically go away, who's also good buddies with Trump and Steve Bannon who concocted and spread the story.

The Epoch Times pushed the story, and they also refer to the virus as "The CCP virus", along with pushing every possible conspiracy theory - as long as it makes their man Trump look good and the CCP look bad. Amusing yes, unbiased news source, definitely not.

There was a story that broke in late January about Initium Media (a HK-based news outlet) conducting interviews with cremation center workers who reported that bodies were being shipped directly to their locations from hospitals without identification. That story was mostly circulated in second- and third-tier media outlets, but seems to have been corroborated by a Guardian article from mid-January which reported on an interview with the son of one of the early deaths who was pressured into allowing immediate cremation.

There was also a very clever bit of investigation someone did using the satellite tracking program at Windy.com which provides a module for following active wildfires. They located a SO2 bloom on the order of 1300 micrograms per cubic meter near Wuhan and cross-referenced with satellite maps -- it was an empty field. For comparison, SO2 concentrations over major Chinese cities in the same timeframe were <150µg/m³. One of the main sources of atmospheric SO2 is the burning of fossil fuels, but another is the burning of fresh biological material. This occurred in early February, and I was able to confirm the findings myself mid-day on the 4th. People were crunching numbers and estimated that it would have taken ~13k human corpses to produce that much SO2, but I haven't done the math myself on that.

e: And "the CCP cremated thousands of corpses and didn't report the deaths to save face" isn't even remotely unlikely. There's plenty of strong circumstantial evidence that this was an escaped bioweapon and the whole "bat soup" shit was more lies to save face. You don't even start to touch conspiracy theory territory until you get past "the CCP used the outbreak as a media smokescreen to cover for their authoritarian actions in HK" and into "the CCP deliberately released the virus to help deal with their aging/over-population crisis".

I genuinely don't know why people are so willing to believe and forgive the CCP more than the apologists for Hitler or Stalin, when Maoist Communism and its adherents killed as many people out of sheer incompetence as often as malice.

[delphonso]

Oh god... I think Trump was such an idiot back when he made that mysterious covfefe tweet--and then said nothing else the rest of the night--that in trying to escape the pain of being trapped inside itself, his mind looked outward and he caught a glimpse of the future.

Fear the COVID
Fear COVID Fear it
COV FEAR FEAR
COVFEFE

Sonofaturd hodor'D us.

I'm going to stay up all night thinking about this.

[mko]

There was also a very clever bit of investigation someone did using the satellite tracking program at Windy.com which provides a module for following active wildfires. They located a SO2 bloom on the order of 1300 micrograms per cubic meter near Wuhan and cross-referenced with satellite maps -- it was an empty field. For comparison, SO2 concentrations over major Chinese cities in the same timeframe were <150µg/m³. One of the main sources of atmospheric SO2 is the burning of fossil fuels, but another is the burning of fresh biological material. This occurred in early February, and I was able to confirm the findings myself mid-day on the 4th. People were crunching numbers and estimated that it would have taken ~13k human corpses to produce that much SO2, but I haven't done the math myself on that.

Sorry, but it is absurdly poor evidence, so that it is not almost no evidence at all. Aerial images, S02 concentrations etc are very easy to misinterpret. And there are massive assumptions here. And without link to research attempt it is completely worthless.

I am guessing that it is done by people with nearly 0 knowledge about any topics mentioned here, without even attempt to judge error bars and no experience in making any research. And firm believers in stupid consipiracy theories like

There's plenty of strong circumstantial evidence that this was an escaped bioweapon

wat. This is an extremely stupid conspiracy theory, nothing resembles bioweapon here. Everything here goes against an effective bioweapon. And claim "plenty of strong circumstantial evidence" without link to this supposed evidence is [citation needed] for me.

and the whole "bat soup" shit was more lies to save face.

Nope, lies to save face were "AmErIcA StarReD CoViD, iT is All ThEiR FaUlT" that begin to appear. Coronaviruses in China were known to be one of the likely animal-to-human vectors.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.

I genuinely don't know why people are so willing to believe and forgive the CCP more than the apologists for Hitler or Stalin, when Maoist Communism and its adherents killed as many people out of sheer incompetence as often as malice.

Hitler lost war. And sadly Stalin has plenty of apologists. Compare reaction to people walking with swastika on their hat and people walking with sickle & hammer / red army star on their hat.

[martinuzz]

So Trump was already warned by the intelligence agencies that the virus would become pandemic back in january, and again in february, but he disregarded that and called it a hoax.

When are you guys going to get rid of this dangerously insane president?  I'd start a new impeachment, for he has endangered the life of many US citizens.