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China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus (bloomberg.com)
87 points by dsr12 on Feb 6, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 123 comments



Just dropping a link here, anyone who is concerned about the coronavirus and has opinions about it should imo read the daily situation reports from the WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

In 5 minutes a day you will have a better informed perspective than what any news sites provide, my own alarm has lessened considerably after reading these.


I just ran across this link (https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3871594) suggesting that the official numbers coming out of China may be significantly understated. I'm not familiar with the site, though - are they a reliable news source? Not sure how much credence to give it.


The story is implausible because it rests on top-secret data about the "real" number of cases being shared with Tencent News and making it all the way to the lowly data-entry operator updating their website. All those disease-tracking websites in China I'm aware of link to a long list of local government press releases and seem to simply aggregate the numbers in those.

https://xw.qq.com/act/qgfeiyan

https://news.sina.cn/zt_d/yiqing0121

https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia

I don't believe they have privileged access to government secrets. If the government wants to hide something, the last thing they're going to do is share that data with a news org.


I don't know about those numbers but I think deaths may be considerably understated due to them only counting people who have been properly tested for coronavirus, found to have it and then died but there are probably many others who have died without being able to get a test such as the grandmother mentioned in the article. It's a bit worrying there are no figures for that - the local officials must have an idea how many extra bodies are turning up at crematoria and the like but it doesn't seem to be public.


^ This exactly. They may be accurately reporting the actual number of diagnosed cases (which I'm on the fence about), but they are certainly not reporting "suspected" cases. I understand that's hard to discern, but they should have a decent idea about the average mortality rate in the area, and be able to see an uptick that will give them a rough estimate.


Honestly I think it is hard job to get an accurate reporting giving the scale of the problem. We are talking about a single digit accuracy at the scale of 10k+. Even in H1N1 outbreaks, the medical visits and death tolls in the US was estimated with a wide band. That being said, the death of un-confirmed patients could be intentionally ignored to make the problem look not so big. But this is not a unique thing to authoritarian governments.


I think the most likely explanation for that is that they confused the numbers of quarantined->infected and infected->dead people


Curious as to what's making you feel better from those reports. Reading today's, the documented cases in China grew 15% in the last 24 hours, and cases outside China grew by almost the same. It seems highly unlikely that this is going to be able to be contained, even assuming that China's numbers are remotely accurate.


Fair question, it's not that the situation is looking great, but that the media is making it look worse than it currently is.

Outside of China the worst hit countries have a little more than two dozen cases and there's only been a single death. It makes me not be afraid of this disease. My chance of getting it is crazy low and if I do I will likely just have a mild to bad flu.

Of course things can and probably will get worse, we'll see by how much.


It does seem like countries other than China have it under control currently, which is really good news.

But the reason for concern isn’t your chances of getting this virus today, which is extremely remote unless you’re in Wuhan. The concern is that China can’t contain this and it’s only a matter of time until it becomes a global pandemic, with the risk of killing millions and overwhelming medical infrastructures. There’s a reason so many epidemiologists seem worried...


To add to the list of stuff that I consider positive/encouraging:

- Out of 270 confirmed non-China cases there's still been only one death. That's a 0.3% death rate. Which raises the question, why is the death rate 2-3% in China? Are we sure it will be that high worldwide? Is it 2-3% because of something unique to the virus or something unique to China (i.e. a delayed response leading to overwhelmed health services).

- I think the histographs in the WHO situation reports (Fig 2 and Fig 3 in the latest one [1]) tell an interesting story which has gone largely unreported. Excluding the situation on the Japanese cruise ship (which is tragic but easy to quarantine), new international infections have been declining since the end of January. That's because the majority of non-Chinese who became infected got it in Wuhan. No one is going in or out Wuhan now, so those cases have basically dropped to zero, and other sources of infection are stable to down.

Obviously vigilance is important and the threat of an international spread needs to be taken seriously. But I think we should at least consider the possibility that this virus may have appeared more dangerous than it actually is because of a poor early response in Wuhan. And while the response can always be better, no one now is screwing up as badly as Wuhan did.

[1] Latest situation report: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...


Only the worst cases are making it to hospitals in China, while outside of China lost anyone suspected of having the virus is going to get some hospital attention. So that selection bias alone results in the death rate being higher in China than abroad.

Also, a lot of people that get this virus will just think of it as a bad flu and blow it off over a few days. They don’t get counted in the statistics.


The WHO is captured by China. You're not going to get any reports from doctors who have challenged the CCP narrative there.


When I read who's statements like: do not close boarders to china because it will hurt business, I do start to wonder.


Yes, the WHO says quarantining within China is fine but canceling flights to other countries is unnecessarily punitive. It's absurd.

If China wants countries to open their doors again then they need to let the rest of the world's doctors in to help research the nature of this virus.


When did they give a statement like that? Show me


> No travel ban: Tedros, as he is called, said the WHO does not recommend limiting either trade or travel to China at this time. “In fact, we oppose it,” he said. The health organization said it would question border closures, quarantining of airplane passengers who aren’t ill, and similar steps.

https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615123/the-china-coronavi...


Wow. That's quite an imaginative claim. Got anything to support it?


It doesn't take much imagination. The head of the WHO does not recommend banning travel to/from China and constantly praises China's actions regarding this virus. Meanwhile, China arrested the very doctors who attempted to alert the public about the virus, and is effectively using quarantine within its own borders to stop its spread. So it makes no sense for the WHO to complain, on behalf of China, about travel bans, when China is implementing a massive travel ban on itself internally.


Correction: not arrest. They were summoned and given written warnings. China is quarantine one Province. Travel between other provinces are still not affected. International travel bans is basically as strict as traveling out of Hubei province, stricter than average travel restrictions in China.


That's an arrest. Arrest does not mean you go to jail. You're taken in for questioning for up to 24-48 hours at which point you must be further charged or released.

> International travel bans is basically as strict as traveling out of Hubei province, stricter than average travel restrictions in China.

The Chinese government censured doctors who sounded the alarm, and you want other countries to follow their advice? I'd say exercising more caution than China advises is appropriate given how little we know about this disease.


The real terrifying thing is how many people will ignore international expert consensus to push their own worldview narratives.

China is bad, everyone else is good. Anything more complicated than that is essentially discarded.

I think they've doing a good job. The world health organisation does. What's the actual problem here other than the usual China flamewars?


I haven't really dug into them but there are criticisms that the Chinese government ignored the situation in the early stages and suppressed information about it. Which sounds like typical negatives of an authoritarian government that hinders free expression and isn't democratically accountable. Perfectly valid to criticize that.

Now that they're engaged, the WHO is saying they're responding pretty well.


> I haven't really dug into

An international collective of doctors and scientists who advise the World Health Organisation said this isn't a these you currently, why exactly do you have any reason to doubt them?

Only have to look at the other response here to see how certain types with absolutely no concern for the truth want to dominate this debate, it's just another opportunity for them, nothing else.

The WHO has been previously criticised for only declaring emergencies when it involves America or the holiday season. There's published papers on the matter saying so.

You can't please all the people with this stuff but the onus is on anyone claiming why this body made up of international experts all in competition with each other suddenly decided to collectively conspire in some sort of bizarre attempt to hide the truth?

The scientists advising WHO saying this stuff have far more to lose than the commentators here, people shouldn't lose sight of that very salient fact.


The World Health Organisation had not said "this isn't a these you currently" or anything to that effect. They are a scientific body that does not consider it it's remit to comment on Chinese politics.

At least some Chinese officials suppressed information in the early days.


I'm sorry I made a spelling/grammar mistake, please forgive me. Thanks for quoting it.

Now which body do you trust more, also which one says it's not a problem and people shouldn't be worried: The Chinese govt or the World Health Organisation?

People panicked about this situation and spreading false information are the ones to worry about, not those with the virus.


Personally I'm more worried about the virus than any scaremongers.

Especially in countries like Indonesia where I am now:

>In Indonesia, Terawan Agus Putranto, the health minister, advised citizens to relax and eschew overtime work to avoid the disease, which has killed more than 360 people and infected more than 17,000 others, mostly in China.

>“To prevent it is very easy as long as your immunity is good,” Mr. Terawan said.

...

>Indonesia has 264 million people, over 2 million tourists from China, but 0 reported cases of coronavirus

By the time the idiot finds it's run amok there will be a lot of unnecessary deaths.


update "In Indonesia – it’s unlikely to spread much as it’s very hot and humid." so maybe ok https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/puzmZFQGRTiiquwLa6tT-g/confere...


There's always going to be someone on the Internet saying something terrible and extreme about any topic. I'm not really sure what to say about that other than it's not changing any time soon, and I'm glad I stopped keeping my phone on me 24/7 because now I don't see it as much.


> the WHO is saying they're responding pretty well.

The WHO is captured by China.


[flagged]


When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

[...]

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Can you be more specific? If you believe the WHO is wrong, can you provide more details on why you hold this position?

An argument backed by facts will help.


Care to share the regression you did? Just eyeballing it on a semilog scale, looks like it is plateauing already.


For someone who accuses other people of being crazy you sure sound pretty crazy yourself. Maybe back up your claims with numbers instead of throwing around accusations of censorship and propaganda?


Back in the 60s, my father went to China to continue his study (our country was being ravaged by B52s every days). Just after he arrived, he and his classmates were put under quarantine for 1 month as a Meningitis epidemic was spreading. They spent the every days locked in the house, with a serving of guanzhong medicine in the morning. It was a shock to all the Vietnamese there, as it's basically house arrest. China has been using quarantine as a tool to prevent epidemic spreading for a long time, ignoring all the hardships of the people inside.

Oh and it was during the Cultural Revolution too, so they were executing counter revolutionary people behind the school every afternoon (this was after the epidemic). Needless to say it left a very bad impression of China gov on my father.


Sacrifice my ass. Their incompetence led to a province and its people being hung out to dry.

They let this problem get out of hand—and now the people there suffer.

How?

They ignored the doctors who attempted to report the problem on New Year’s day.

They (the CCP) take no precautionary measures until their political regime is threatened.

So many things done wrong—including maintaining wet market controls up a few years after H1N1.


Do not agree. Government everywhere makes mistakes under emergencies. Just look at past responses to hurricanes in the US and the current wildfire in Australia. Maybe you could say every government is incompetent. But the fact is that China reported the cases very early to WHO, get the genes mapped very quickly, and decisively locked down Hebei. So I would say so far China has shown competence and resolve, against a tough virus.


Mistakes can happen but wittingly suppressing news is not accidental nor a mistake.

I was born in Wuhan and half of my family are currently holed up there. A few days before the Wuhan lockdown was ordered, coronavirus already made it to the headline in CNN and NYT, but there was not any headline news about the coronavirus within China. Heck my dad wasn't even wearing a mask on his 1hr metro commute to work until the day before lockdown happened.

In early January, government officials and news outlets were reporting: "There are false rumors about Wuhan having a SARS like virus. This is an unknown virus that's _probably not_ transmittable from human to human. There are only 45 confirmed cases. There is no need to panic. "

One of the officials even organized a thousand people CNY dinner as part of the CNY celebration a few days before the lockdown.

They had a thousand opportunities to curb the disease and alert the people, but the Chinese bureaucracy and leadership's imcompetence directly caused the coronavirus disaster.

Edit: January 21 news article on the thousand people dinner from a Chinese source. About 40k people participated, this neighbourhood is about 10 minutes away from the epicenter: https://news.163.com/20/0121/15/F3E3UTKI0001899N.html


Did you miss the part when they arrested doctors who reported the virus because they didn't want to deal with the virus during a local government meeting and banquet?


Is it confirmed? I see just some YouTube videos; that + the description upthread triggers my conspiracy theory alarm.


The FT article has

>Piecing together the events in Wuhan shows that for at least three weeks before the banquet, city authorities had been informed about the virus spreading in their midst but issued orders to suppress the news. (https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06... linked above)


This is at least related. Dunno if he was arrested, but the police expressed displeasure. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/03/asia/coronavirus-doctor-whist...


Xinhua reporting on the Chinese Supreme Court's stance on the issue includes a section on the 8 people who were punished for spreading rumors and whether that punishment was reasonable:

http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-01/28/c_1125508460.ht...

Google Translated: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...



Reading the translation, this sounds like what police would say in a parody, yet this is real. Thank you for sharing it and I hope your family and we all make it through this in good health.


Here in Australia the general sentiment is that the response has been good relative to the magnitude of the fires. At some point nature overwhelms any government.


Did the Australian government lie to the world and their own people about how bad the fires were and arrest people who posted on social media about them?


Well no arrests but the govt is investigating the fake coronavirus health department press releases made by some racist folks and which spread like wildfire on social media prompting the communications minister to step in.

As for the govt lying about the bushfires, yes most definitely, we had tourism chiefs out there on the offensive claiming Australia was fine to visit when most of the East Coast had the worse air quality on Earth for months.

We had a tourism minister standing on a half burnt Kangaroo Island which was still in lockdown from the fire telling people it's the best time to visit.

Govts lie all the time for self interest. And strangely many of the public totally support them doing so when it's their team or for personal benefit.


They were very late even in informing the people in Wuhan or Hubei. Even after everyone in the West knew about this new SARS-like virus, people there were still going around with no face masks or anything, no precautions at all. Disgraceful and a total failure.


Face masks likely don't help much: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/01/29/8005317...

WHO says they can, but only if used very right, and only alongside other measures: https://www.who.int/publications-detail/advice-on-the-use-of...


They don't have to be foolproof, it's enough if they're better than wearing no mask at all.


His point is that their #1 priority was keep this under wraps instead of fixing it as soon as possible, even if it meant more people had to learn about it to protect themselves and not have the virus spread.

Coronavirus has disrupted many businesses in China, and I think the government knew this would happen if more people found out about it. So their priority was not getting a big economic hit, not solving the issue.

This is a good post on what happened, but there are others like it if you want to dig deeper on how they tried to cover it up:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/coronavirus-dis...

I'll just copy these 2 paragraphs here to address your "China responded quickly" comment:

> To be sure, at first glance, China’s government has appeared to be more forthcoming about the latest outbreak. But, although the first case was reported on December 8, the Wuhan municipal health commission didn’t issue an official notice until several weeks later. And, since then, Wuhan officials have downplayed the seriousness of the disease and deliberately sought to suppress news coverage.

That notice maintained that there was no evidence that the new illness could be transmitted among humans, and claimed that no health-care workers had been infected. The commission repeated these claims on January 5, though 59 cases had been confirmed by then. Even after the first death was reported on January 11, the commission continued to insist that there was no evidence that it could be transmitted among humans or that health-care workers had been affected.


[flagged]


You broke the site guidelines badly with this comment. We ban accounts that do that, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.

HN is a highly international community. Someone having an opposing view to your own is evidence merely that the community is divided. People here need to assume good faith in the absence of some objective reason not to. Merely disliking what someone else says doesn't come close to an objective reason.

I've written a great deal about this if you or anyone want more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys what this site is supposed to exist for, so please don't do that.


> 'People here need to assume good faith in the absence of some objective reason not to. Merely disliking what someone else says doesn't come close to an objective reason.'

All this sounds good in theory, yet here I am on my second account after the first one 6 weeks ago was shadowbanned in less than 15 posts, simply for expressing my honestly held and well researched opinions.

Meanwhile I'm all the time seeing you on here busting various people's balls for the most ridiculous and trivial of things.

The person you replied to just now, while it's true that I don't agree with their comment (obviously they're wrong) they certainly ought to have the right to express their opinion. And the community as a whole has a right to see that opinion be expressed, to see the opinion itself and see the responses to it, so they can judge for themselves what is or is not the truth, without having a Nanny State/Government picking apart and criticizing every word someone writes.

You really need to lay off the bondage-and-discipline mod mentality. You're driving away good people from this site. Who the hell wants to stay in a place where they are constantly being nagged and harassed and even shadowbanned (one of the cruelest things that can be done to an online forum member) simply for having opinions? What is it about you personally that makes you so qualified to treat people this way?


[flagged]


Please don't do this here.


[flagged]


Internet users are far too quick to assume that someone who disagrees with them can't possibly be holding their views in good faith, and thus far too quick to reach for sinister explanations like communist propaganda. This projection mechanism is destructive of the discourse we want here, so there's a rule in the site guidelines that explicitly ask you not to do it. Please read them and please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

More explanation upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276554


Chinese government definitely doesn't have it easy on the internet. Whole host of conspiracy theorists were saying: wtf couple hundred infected why are they locking down cities and closing provinces - they must know something we don't. And now you get people saying they didn't do enough.

In this thread people are still sharing articles about how there akshually 10s thousands of dead and how the virus was intentionally released from a government lab. And at the same time surprised that the government arrested people spreading panic on social media.

It took them a month to recognize atypical viral pneumonia and report it to WHO. Another ~10 days to isolate the virus (no mean feat, read the paper) and sequence it. Here in the Netherlands people would be just sent home on paracetamol - I had a pneumonia couple years back so I speak from experience.


Did you forget about what they are doing to ethnic minorities right now? They are running literal concentration camps. Of course they don't have it easy on the internet.


For those interested in knowing more about this, from people that have lived in China for a long time, had families there, and have daily contact with others that still live there, I recommend these videos:

“Coronavirus: the lies and the truths” (29th of January) “Let’s look at a timeline of what’s happened to see how slowly it has been dealt with, and how the information was actively suppressed.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSIt496d82s&t=1m2s

“Coronavirus - Doctors arrested for revealing the truth” (31st of January) “So by now you’ve undoubtedly heard that, right in the beginning, a number of people were arrested for spreading rumors when they first tried to discuss the fact that there was a new virus going around in China. Turns out these people were all doctors.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=0m12s

Winston, the author of the second video, is in fact married to a Chinese doctor, and they keep in touch with their doctor friends in China. He also worked for years organizing training sessions for doctors all around China, so they both have direct knowledge about how those things work there and direct communication with people currently dealing with the situation on the ground.

They have more recent videos, but those two are the first ones I recommend watching. Their channels are: - laowhy86: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChvithwOECK5g_19TjldMKw - serpentza: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl7mAGnY4jh4Ps8rhhh8XZg - ADVChina (their joint channel): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNPa8fSXzzAZuT9859GVhg

Edit: a brief take on this from the BBC (4th of February): “... well, we know that some warnings were ignored or silenced. Let’s focus on this doctor, he was working at Wuhan central hospital and noticed seven cases that he thought looked like SARS (that’s a virus that led to a global epidemic in 2003) and in December he posted a warning about a potential outbreak in a chat group with fellow medics. Shortly afterwards he was summoned by Police and accused of making false statements, and being told he’d severely disturbed the social order. He was then given this document to sign. [...] «We solemny warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice - is that understood?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRggIb5Je_w&t=4m0s


This just in: that doctor that raised the first alarm and was silenced back in December has died from it:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178792.shtml

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1225440373880782848


Neither of those links are working for me right now... first one is “not found” and second one is “doesn’t exist”


Yes, both GlobalTimes and WHO just pulled those links, instead of posting a correction, after the authorities decided to plug him to an ECMO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen...) machine to defuse the massive uproar in China about his death, then had to declare him dead again.

Others like The Guardian updated their articles, keeping the URL, as the situation changed. After the announcement that he was being kept alive, they added a paragraph at the top of the article explaining that, and later when he was finally confirmed dead updated that note to simply say “Early reports of death of Li Wenliang were retracted, only for doctor to succumb to disease later in day”: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/whistleblower-...


Here's the actual news from Jan 1 reporting on the 8 "rumor spreaders". They kept emphasizing that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. It's pathetic to look at now. (sorry the article is in Chinese)

https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2020_01_01_530191.shtml?s=zw...


Todays FT also has a good article "Coronavirus: the cost of China’s public health cover-up" https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...


It's not a single "they". Yes, Wuhan/Hubei provincial authorities did the usual Chinese thing of covering up bad news so the Eye of Sauron over in Beijing wouldn't hear about it, and there's a great/depressing read about why over at [1] (TL;DR: big Communist Party summit). But once Xi/Sauron did catch on, their response -- total lockdown, building new hospitals, etc -- was both draconian and massive on a scale unimaginable in most democracies. Compare with (say) the shambolic response to Hurricane Katrina, where pretty much the opposite happened: pleas by local authorities were basically ignored by the central gov't until their hand was forced.

[1] http://chinamediaproject.org/2020/01/27/dramatic-actions/


I mean, if one is being reckless with fire and accidentally burned their own house down, but they managed to put it out before spreading to the neighbors. Can people really hail that person as a hero?


Where in my response am I hailing anybody as a hero?

My main point is that HN (including the original poster) seems to assume that the CCP is some all-seeing, perfectly coordinated entity, when it's actually 100 million people (!) and even party apparatchiks have wildly differing agendas and levels of competence.


Not sure if I am the original poster—but if I am—I don't see the CCP as some all-seeing, perfectly coordinated entity.

And I also agree with you—that you are on balance pretty fair.

Like you said—the response from Beijing was "draconian" and the provincial authorities couldn't stand to report the fact that "something was rotten in the state of Wuhan/Hubei."

Why? Because there are however some characteristics to this entity—which is basic disregard for humans as individuals and community and a desperate desire for sycophancy.

Alarmingly—the CCP disregard for individuals and community is spreading—and it's too often excused by people—like the poster below me who says "Event the US government the hurricane response wrong."

By casting a wide net—and lower our standard as humans. For example...

The Trump administration was wrong on purpose for the hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico because they have similar CCP-like viewpoints and motivations. In New Orleans, for Katrina—you had Ray Nagin as governor who has been convicted on several counts of fraud. These are all people who don't care to shoulder community and build it up—however slow and difficult it might be to reconcile. We need to raise the bar.

The place with the most antibodies to this kind of thinking are some places in Europe which try to appeal to our human instincts as opposed to fueling our "Animal Instincts" (and yes, I am referring to that mid-2000s book on US Stock Market people).


Nagin was mayor, not governor (although Blanco’s storm response was questioned by Bush too, to say nothing of her racist ads against Bobby Jindal)


When the dust settles from this event I suspect one positive will be that China will throw technology at the problem of more rapidly detecting viral outbreaks and more quickly locking down the affected areas.


And maybe refrain from arresting doctors reporting the problem?


The amount of up- and downvoting on anything China related feels insane. I wish someone at Hackernews will write a blog post about this some day (accounts, IP addresses, and whatever other data they have). From a casual reader perspective, I feel I have not seen this pattern on other controversial topics that sometimes show up here, e. g. gun control.


Dang posts explanations about this perception once in a while: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...


Well 2019-ncov is probably here to stay permanently, so while I appreciate the effort to slow it down, they're not going to save the world from it quite yet.


It is very much possible that this virus does, in the end, spread to most corners of the world. However, the fact is that by locking down Hubei, China contributed to the fight against the virus by delaying the spread of the virus greatly. So China is to be applauded for doing this.


If they delay the spread it gives the world time to produce vaccines.


We don't have a SARS (a related coronavirus) vaccine yet .... it's likely going to take a while, why we need to be even more careful about keeping it contained


What are you basing this statement on? or is it just the flu of Reddit-inspired speculations on HN?


I think that this article (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/06/h...) illustrate that it is very likely that the symptoms in most people are mild and these people are not seeking medical advice while spreading it around them.

If this is really the case, it is going to be very difficult to contain it.


Feels like some version of Pandora's Box/life (or non-life, in this case) will find a way. We haven't wiped out Polio yet. Actually, there are more coronavirus cases than polio.


Not really. China has the highest population on the world on absolute and relative basis.

It it very dangerous for China letting a new virus spread. They have lots of 5 Million inhabitants cities. On Norway or any low density country in which people live isolated in Winter anyway not so much.

China is not trying to save the world, it is trying to save itself.


The amount of virulent (pun intended) hatred of the Chinese government really shows here. Can't say it's not well deserved but you can at least give them some credit for the quarantine.


They new about it for weeks, 5M people left Wuhan, and then they started the quarantine.

You think that should be praised?


Compared to the US response to H1N1 in 2009, a resounding YES!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-l...


It's so easy to simply arm chair general this kind of event isn't it?

Right now most of China is locked down... look at it this way, people are genuinely suffering and dying over there in droves and not so much over here. I can at least be appreciative of their sacrifice.


> look at it this way, people are genuinely suffering and dying over there in droves and not so much over here. I can at least be appreciative of their sacrifice.

They aren't being sacrificed by the central government for us, they are being sacrificed to protect the rest of China. That has incidental benefits for not-China, but its not China sacrificing for not-China, its China sacrificing parts of China for China.


And i imagine nobody wanted to tell everyone not to come home for lunar new year...


Credit? They only acted because they had to. Doctors were arrested weeks before for "spreading rumors". Their inability to act has led to this thing spreading beyond their borders.


Would this quarantine happen in your country or any Western country? I doubt it.


Not arrested. They were given a warning and asked to sign a sort of declaration that they agreed what they said were wrong then were sent to home. Still bad but not the same as being arrested.


Compared to their idiotic response to SARS this is at least better.


Agreed, local govt was very poor, federal has been excellent and I’m probably the biggest China critic here


However, it's futile unless it reflects in our purchase (and employer) preferences.


> Two new hospitals, with 2,600 beds in total, were completed in 10 days, built by more than 2,000 migrant workers

China.


Per another HN thread on that, they're really not hospitals so much as warehouses with beds in them. Not that they necessarily need fully equipped hospital facilities for the purpose of housing and treating the infected, but it's still a mischaracterization to call them hospitals.


There are plenty of videos on Youtube showing that they are in fact not just warehouses with beds. What would they need to contain to qualify as hospitals in your opinion?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDIcWkjCKIg


It's mighty impressive


> China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus

Bullshit.

The world would have been like exactly like Hubei, and Hubei no different if they didn't lock it down.

There was no "Sacrifices"

Putting in curfew reduced deaths if anything, they also added doctors and built hospitals.

If the 'sacrifice' is economic because of curfews, then fair enough, but they do not have deaths or illness worse because of the lock down.


It is not entirely true. This sacrifice entails two things. On one side, without a lockdown, people in Human can seek medical help in other cities and provinces when they get sick. After a lockdown, local medical resources are in severe shortage hence higher death rate. On the other side, it limits the spread of the disease for the good of other provinces and hence the rest of the world. If this isn't sacrifice, I'm not sure what sacrifice is.


> After a lockdown, local medical resources are in severe shortage hence higher death rate

No, this is false. Supplies and doctors still came in after lock down. Lots of them because they were not needed elsewhere.

> On one side, without a lockdown, people in Human can seek medical help in other cities and provinces when they get sick.

This is also false. As soon as they leave they spread the virus any other hospital will become swamped and just the same.

There sacrifice is they don't get to spread the virus and make everyone else as bad as they have it. Not quite true.... They would have it worse since they will lose resources if it spreads. But they do miss the comfort of being the same by not spreading it. That is all.


> Supplies and doctors still came in after lock down. You mean the government get doctors from other cities to Wuhan because they are not needed, regardless if Wuhan is in medical shortage? This is a weird logic that I cannot agree. IMO, mobilizing doctors from hundreds of miles away, which costs a lot money and management effort, is exactly an attempt to solve the shortage issue. There are various video materials showing super crowded hospitals in Wuhan and other Hubei cities. It is also consistent with building not one, but two temporary hospitals with thousands of workers at much pricier cost.

Based on the activity data from TV news, fever related medical visit stays in single digit nationwide. If lock down are not announced and enforced, people in Hunan that are richer will flood to other cities such as Shanghai and Beijing for better medical services, as this happens from several news reports. People would choose to travel since their immediate action will not cause medical shortage elsewhere before they are handled. The idea of seeking medical help elsewhere will make matters worse is correct, but it is a macro level insight and will not change these people's mind to grasp these resources before they are gone.

It is not deniable that without a lockdown, people in Hubei province will on average get medical help in the short run and everybody else is much worse off. This is why it's not a sacrifice.


You can only lock down a city in a dictatorship. So I certainly would not approve of this behavior.

Additionally any speculation about the effectiveness of the quarantine is futile in my opinion.


What? US state and federal emergency responders have plans and tools for locking down a city, too.


Yup. Specifically, many people have speculated that FEMA has contingency plans where they would even be able to set up internment camps for as many people as needed, if required to quarantine an epidemic or other national emergency. Not too far from what's going on in Wuhan.


Which people have speculated, and on what grounds? Anyone can speculate anything about FEMA's disaster plans to make internment of arbitrarily large numbers of people sound like a totally normal thing.


Look, there's a lot of material on this already, I'm not making up anything. Just google FEMA internment camps.


If you google that, you get right wing propaganda, the kind of sites which also claim Obama is a Kenyan-Muslim-time-travelling-terrorist.

But maybe you are one of them, now you're going to jump and down telling us FEMA is the Waffen-SS.


I seriously doubt a quarantine on that scale would be effective and accepted by citizens in cases like this. If they did it may be the last time they had these privileges.

They can lock down some roads or a building and maybe the air space, but anything on a larger scale is unrealistic. If someone did this in a western democracy, you can be sure those responsible would be on their last term after the initial hysteria waned.


I think you're copy-pasting China's literal response into some hypothetical other culture that isn't being clearly explained, which isn't useful for those of us that can't read your mind.

Concretely, the US CDC for example prefers setting up physically separate internment camps and moving infected populations there for quarantine. And they can easily get the backing of federal military resources or, in the case of a state governor declaring a state of emergency, the state's National Guard to enforce this. It could get ugly, but only for a few zealots. Modern history (20th century til now) shows that a majority of Americans are generally willing to give up civil liberties in emergencies that relate to "national security" or "think of the children" causes.

Edit: And of course curfew laws can be directed by a state government during a state of emergency, or federally during a state of emergency from the Public Health Service Act, and enforced by military forces.


Modern history also tells me that they never locked down a city. Certainly because the consequences are predictable.

And especially not in cases like this where the hysteria is beginning to be as much of a concern than the virus itself.

As I said, I don't think you could lock down a city. Military support or not. Even with a real threat, you can be sure people responsible would step down afterwards and quarantine be breached widely.


Correction: China makes a show out of sacrificing a province to demonstrate to the world that no, they really are being serious about it this time, honest!


Feels like the story of Dying Light


Sacrifices?

The officers who announced the fact were punished for making rumors. If they didn't hide the truth of Wuhan at the beginning, everyone will be aware of the issue.

China is just paying for the price due to prohibiting freedom of speech


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Do not agree. It is like saying doctors work only to earn money. The fact is that China is helping itself and other countries at the same time.


It's been a while since the West had the capability and know-how to manufacture most of the trinkets it uses, so Chinese economy going belly-up is going to have profound consequences on our own.


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> they keep maintaining a standard of living that promotes the rapid hybridization and diffusion of viruses.

Please elaborate on what you mean by "standard of living". I couldn't follow how the former leads to the latter.


wet markets? overcrowded cities? hukou preventing internal economic migrant from healthcare access?


Agree that markets selling live animals should be banned or at least monitored more strictly. Do not think the other two points are relevant. Regarding cities, if you look at Chinese society and economy, urbanization is a very positive force that contributed hugely to people's wellbeing, including health. Also BTW Chinese cities are probably the safest cities in the world. Regarding hukou, it limits access to education and house/car buying, much more than healthcare access. Actually a lot of rural residents routines go to big cities to get healthcare service.



WHO clearly does not recommend travel bans. https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on... : The Committee does not recommend any travel or trade restriction based on the current information available.


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Some people still do believe them for what they have to say on this, for whatever reason. When you’ve got your quasi-ally (Russia) closing the 2000 km land border you know something is not right (especially as Russia is not known for caring that much for its citizens), but maybe the WHO officials know better from half a world away. On top of that the actual videos that come out of Wuhan are really heart-breaking.


The point is that China implements severe travel bans within their own country, and yet are reprimanding another country for trying to do something similar.

China also claims to have it under control (in the same reprimand) yet Coronavirus has snuck through their borders numerous times and is now in a dozen countries.


Bloomberg didn't get the memo to report only negatively on China?




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