re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

This article on Caixin may disappear. Articles like these tend to get wiped by censors after a day or two. Thus, I've copied it below:

LINK

The two main points are that 1) there is growing unrest that is being expressed on Chinese social media (and the occasional news outlet like Caixin) and 2) Xi Jinping and his cronies in Beijing are quickly scapegoating provincial officials in an effort to quell growing anger.

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Huanggang, the second most populated city in the virus-hit province of Hubei, has had a total of 337 party officials, including six county-level principals, punished for their incorrect handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the city’s mayor said Saturday.

The sweeping action came two days after the head of Huanggang Health Commission, Tang Zhihong, was dismissed on Thursday after she was filmed by China’s state broadcaster, showing her unable to answer an inspection team’s questions about the numbers of hospital beds and patients in the city.

Located east of Wuhan, the city with about 7.5 million residents, has the second-most confirmed cases of coronavirus infections. As of Feb. 2, it has reported 1002 confirmed cases, second only to Wuhan which has 4109 confirmed infections in the province.

When asked about the dismissal of Tang Zhihong during a press conference on Saturday, Qiu Lixin, the mayor of Huanggang said that she felt “very guilty and responsible” for Tang’s misconduct, which drew public anger on social media over the city government’s ability to fight the disease.

“In the early stage [of the outbreak], we failed to recognise [the disease] and lacked the preparation, and some of the officials neither paid sufficient attention nor acted thoroughly,” Qiu said, “[that] led to shortcomings and weak spots in our prevention work, including still having insufficient medical capabilities and weaknesses in rural area’s prevention and control of the disease.”

The mayor warned that “from today until tomorrow, in two days, the number of confirmed cases in Huanggang could rise sharply.”

Among the total number of officials punished, six county-level principals have been dismissed from their duties, she said.

Also in Xiaogan, a city that has the third-most confirmed cases in Hubei province, 43 officials have been punished, the city’s mayor Wu Haitao said in a press conference on Thursday.

Across the country, several lower-level officials had already been suspended from their duties for mishandling disease control, including Tang Hu, head of a district health authority in Yueyang, Hunan province, and Yao Zhongjing, a district market regulator at Jinan, Shandong province.

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The Chinese government is one of the most irresponsible governments in the world. I have never been convinced we are getting the Truth about how many deaths and infected there is. There is a worldwide vested interest in trying to keep panic levels down with the world economy in play.

We see big jumps in deaths and cases every day, more cases get confirmed in other countries and I see this bullshite propaganda of Don't look over there! "Look at the recovery numbers!" instead.

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Interesting how Carrie Lam jumped so quickly on the WHO's language about "stigmatization" to justify keeping the Hong Kong border open.

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Lam is a puppet of Beijing... she does whatever they tell her.

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If it doesn’t then why does everyone always say “just wait until the next big pandemic, it’s going to be soooo much worse with the prevelance of international travel”. If stopping or slowing international travel doesn’t do anything then why would pandemics be any different in the modern era?

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Because of the ability to travel around the world after exposure before turning symptomatic.

For example, everyone here is feeling better about the restrictions with sentiments along the lines of “about damn time.” But the only thing it did was stop direct flights. Nothing is stopping them from coming to the US via another country. India already seems a popular option.

And even if you ban travelers anyway....what do you do with the planefull of now potentially exposed passengers? Involuntary quarantine for them all?

How bad do these 3rd party countries need to get before they get banned too?


And the comment you gleefully linked about months? That’s probably if you aggressively ban travelers where ever the virus emerges, so over the top on everything, and you STILL get the virus.

That’s a damned strong case for “doesn’t work,” but you think there is a win. On yes, time to work for a cure. 2-3 months delay is plenty of time for vaccine that takes 6 months to develop and more months to manufacture/deploy on a scale that vaccinates a third of a trillion.

Think about it: the US at this point would have to ban all of the 30 odd countries with active infection from Asia and Europe. All automatically at the drop of a hat before you even know if there is a problem. Wanna make all countries be like China and want to suppress the story till they feel there is an issue?

Meanwhile, you limit portability of the medical teams that go travel to the outbreaks to learn about treatment/curing. This isn’t WWZ where the teams get a dedicated plane.

The hubris of calling it “nonsense liberal garbage” is massive. It’s a meta-analysis of disparate and independent articles pulling excerpts. You are literally arguing against the entire world of experts because your feelings mean more than any objective facts brought up. That strikes me as liberal as anything.

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And if they were creating a bio-weapon, I’d think it was a little more potent than this thing

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How would you know the potency without testing it on people?

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How would you know the potency without testing it on people?

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So they release this thing as a test?

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And if 2019-nCoV had similar mortality rate as the flu then we would be looking at 7 - 14 deaths world wide at this point.

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Sigh. Y'all still don't get it.

2009 swine flu, the same subtype as the Spanish Flu, killed 12,000 Americans. It originated in Mecixo. Do any of you recall any international travel bans? Do you remember not being able to leave the US in 2009? Swine flu killed over 500,000 people worldwide that year.

You csn keep throwing out mortality rates and R0 values, but let me know when one of these outbreaks sniffs 500,000 people dead.

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And I already found other papers that disagree with the paper you cited. T

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Link them up...

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Swine flu killed over 500,000 people worldwide that year.

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Not according to the WHO.

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me know when one of these outbreaks sniffs 500,000 people dead.

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Ban bet time?