To be so angry at the Chinese government

[HildegardeCrowe]

Because they didn’t shut the wet markets down permanently after SARS so another pandemic was inevitable. The rest of the world is now putting pressure on China to end it’s wildlife trade but this won’t be easy. Most of the world is in lockdown because of this trade and it’s so depressing to think history will repeat itself if China doesn’t get its act together.

The more I learn about how the Chinese abuse wild animals the angrier I get - the latest thing I read about is how they make the lives of bears a misery by extracting their bile.

Surely this is a PR disaster for China?

No problem Giraffe,
Did you know that the bio weapon conspiracy crowd got their start due to a fake news tweet by CNN reporter Ezra Cheung on 15 Feb.
Here is a screenshot. Her tweet is still there on twitter too.

“more they downplayed the infection and mortality rates by up to 40 times. Do you believe they only had 3,000 odd deaths, when there are accounts of them burning 1,000 plus bodies a day in Wuhan alone?”

Source please?
The WHO situation reports and studies done to date show very similar mortality rates to Europe. Not a 40x difference. See this graph, China is in the upper average bracket.
www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-varies-by-country.php

This is a good article that explains death (mortality) rates and why they differ by country and why they differ over time within each country.

www.businessinsider.fr/us/coronavirus-death-rate-by-country-current-fatalities-compared-to-cases-2020-3?op=1

I read the OP and didn’t see any such comparison. What gives you this idea? I don’t think they even mentioned the UK at all!

Exactly. It put 100% of the blame for our situation on China alone.

The WHO situation reports and studies done to date show very similar mortality rates to Europe. Not a 40x difference.

The british government. You go and look it up, love.

Blimey plan - how did even the conspiracy-est of conspiracy theorists get bio weapons from that tweet?

There are a couple of plausible routes of transmission from the information we’ve been given at least. From bats via wild animals to the wet market. Critics of this theory have said that bats don’t live anywhere near this city, therefore impossible. However, nobody’s catching these wild animals in the city - the wild animals being caught for trade will have come from the countryside, and could well have been exposed to bat viruses.

The other route is from the level 2 lab in Wuhan, close to the market. I don’t think many people (apart from the conspiracy theorists) believe it was released intentionally and certainly not as a bio weapon/man made virus as that’s already been disproven.

Accidentally though - is that possible? If the scientists there had been researching the bat/mammal combined virus with the protein spike that allowed it to infect humans, could a lab worker have infected themselves without noticing? Or quarantined themselves for 14 days, but actually had it asymptomatically and spread it that way? Any scientists here who could comment on how plausible that is?

The majority of SARS initial cases were wild animal handlers/traders which does suggest the the first route is the more obvious in this case too.

'accounts of them burning 1,000 plus bodies a day in Wuhan alone'

Link?

Burning them how? Crematoriums? In which case why use such emotive language?

We had what 900 deaths yesterday, vast majority of those people will be cremated.

If someone said 'they are burning 800 people a day in London' would that feel reasonable to you?

We eat wild animals in the UK as well.

I mean discuss it/ criticise by all means but let's not get carried away with what 'they' do and ignoring the things that we do too iyswim.

The WHO situation reports and studies done to date show very similar mortality rates to Europe. Not a 40x difference. See this graph, China is in the upper average bracket

Look at that suspiciously flat curve. Sorry, I linked you to the WaPo article before and you didn’t acknowledge it. There’s good evidence for saying they had 40,000+ die in Wuhan.

Exactly. It put 100% of the blame for our situation on China alone

If the OP wants to talk about her anger towards the UK, she can start another thread. Here, she’s talking about her much justified anger towards China.

I think you are blaming the victim a bit. Literally no Western country, except possibly the US, took it seriously until they saw Italy’s numbers.

You can quibble that the UK should have locked down earlier but South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and now Sweden did not follow that path.

In fact we won’t know what was effective until we look at the stats and figure out what worked. Everyone is grasping in the dark.

And China did no favours by downplaying the severity of the disease with the WHO (see the FT linked earlier for more on this) and trying to put frankly embarrassing conspiracy theories out there that said the US military spread it.

Beetroot you need to read this: www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-families-should-be-sweeping-graves-now-but-thousands-still-havent-buried-their-dead/2020/04/03/5a6daa50-7234-11ea-ad9b-254ec99993bc_story.html

It’s incredibly sad what the people of Wuhan went through. So much needless suffering

I 100% Blame the Chinese government who knew in November and suppressed disclosure to the rest of the world aided and abetted by (bought and paid for?)Tedros the leader of the WHO, who incidentally has form as he was accused of covering up 3 cholera epidemics when he was health minister of Ethiopia from 2005 to 2012.
qz.com/africa/986672/dr-tedros-adhanom-ghebreyesus-the-top-candidate-to-lead-the-world-health-organization-is-being-accused-of-covering-deadly-outbreaks-of-cholera-in-ethiopia/amp/
100'000 people currently dead people are understandably angry and upset.
Thank God for the Taiwanese and Chinese doctors who likely have lost their lives for letting the World know, otherwise it would be millions.
Also any sympathy China may have gained has been lost by the treatment of Africans in China right now which is blowing up on social media
m.youtube.com/watch?v=YvN4WHBhnoo
m.youtube.com/watch?v=0zji8pkCE3Y

Accidentally though - is that possible? If the scientists there had been researching the bat/mammal combined virus with the protein spike that allowed it to infect humans, could a lab worker have infected themselves without noticing? Or quarantined themselves for 14 days, but actually had it asymptomatically and spread it that way? Any scientists here who could comment on how plausible that is

The Chinese woman who sequenced it says the samples from her lab do not match. This gives a good overview: www.ibtimes.sg/who-shi-zhengli-chinese-virologist-was-silenced-after-she-decoded-coronavirus-strain-december-42878

This is from the Nature article:

Shi instructed her team to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another laboratory to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own laboratory’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

Now someone from her lab could have been selling bats to a vender on the sly while marking records that the bats were destroyed. But Shi says this didn’t happen based on the samples she analysed.

Yes - China needs to change - but - there are wet markets in more places than China!

Giraffe
“how did even the conspiracy-est of conspiracy theorists get bio weapons from that tweet?”

I know, but they did. A conspiracy site called Hnewswire used the tweet as part of its proof that the virus was deliberately made and then leaked from the Wuhan lab.
It’s a very bad site,
hnewswire.com/the-mysterious-origin-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus/
Their latest fake news masterpiece
hnewswire.com/creator-of-us-bioweapons-act-says-coronavirus-is-biological-warfare-weapon/

The first reply is fucking wild! Honestly mumsnet what the actual fuck. Both of these things are awful and entirely different. Every time we talk about deaths as the result of government action we don't have to acknowledge all other wrong doings. What about patrician in India? What about the slave trade? Ffs

Sorry Mango,
But China’s data on death rates puts it in the middle. There is no suspicious flattening. If you want to accuse them of downplaying the severity, then you must also think that Germany, New Zealand, every country with a lower death rate is engaging in an even bigger “downplaying” .....?
And where is this “good evidence” that “40,000” died in Wuhan alone?

Mango thanks, that’s really interesting (and I just remembered I’ve actually read that article and completely blanked on that piece of information. My brain is clearly having a rough day! )

It looks like a similar transmission route to SARS could well be the cause then, on the basis of probability, but I’m always prepared to be surprised.

plan I feel like my phone is going to have a much lower opinion of me if I click on those links! I’ll have a stiff drink then go in.

SnoozyLou
All there is are reports that Boris Johnson is furious with China, but no concrete evidence for the claim of a 40x undercount of corona virus deaths. Just nebulous reports of a radio station in Asia and conflating total deaths (42,000) from all causes as having been all caused by Covid. The Wuhan area locked down has a population of 60m...about the same as England and Wales. Under normal circumstances 10,573 people die every week. www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths
So we would expect to see around 42,000 deaths in a month without Covid both in Wuhan lockdown region and England + Wales. The fact that crematoriums processed 42,000 bodies in March is not evidence of undercounting Covid deaths. In fact it’s evidence to the contrary.

www.businessinsider.fr/us/coronavirus-boris-johnsons-government-reportedly-furious-with-china-2020-3?op=1

Think about it. If they HAD undercounted Covid deaths, then why are their “downplayed” death rates in the middle compared to other countries? Wouldn’t it be way waaaaay below the lowest death rate of all the other countries?

To me, it’s political sabre rattling and scapegoating so that Boris Johnson can justify obeying Trump and cancelling the 5G deal.

plan Wow, that website! I think their main theme seems to be to ignore any scientist or doctor and just write everything in a really large font. Which isn’t as convincing as they seem to think!

Plan I have linked to the WaPo article many times. If you think it’s pro-Trump (laughable) and somehow biased there’s nothing I can do.

Lockdown did not affect the Western curves as much as the Chinese. You can say the Chinese were more brutal in their lockdown of Wuhan, but it still sticks out. NYT needs to register but here’s a relevant bit from that article on CIA intel:

US spy agencies “have concluded that the Chinese government itself does not know the extent of the virus and is as blind as the rest of the world,” the New York Times reports, citing intelligence officials. “Midlevel bureaucrats in the city of Wuhan … and elsewhere in China have been lying about infection rates, testing and death counts, fearful that if they report numbers that are too high they will be punished, lose their position or worse

This is what happened with the swine flu last year by the way in China, and what happens every year with their GDP figures. You think they have somehow not slipped into this habit?

They should have sanctions imposed on them due to corona. This is the second time now and nothing has been done about the sale of wild animals.

So we would expect to see around 42,000 deaths in a month without Covid both in Wuhan lockdown region and England + Wales. The fact that crematoriums processed 42,000 bodies in March is not evidence of undercounting Covid deaths. In fact it’s evidence to the contrary

Not necessarily. Michigan, one of the worst affected states in the USA, had a much lower death rate in March than usual. Much lower:

Preliminary statistics from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services record 5,929 deaths in March 2020. On average, the month of March has seen 8,542 deaths between 2015 and 2019

www.detroitnews.com/amp/5120360002

Quite a significant difference. Stats don’t always tell the whole story.

I thought COVID-19 accidentally escaped from a Chinese lab where they were doing research on fruit bats/SARS. I think the wet market thing was what they thought originally but it had now changed.

DailyCarbuncle can I borrow your crowbar? and when the hell did Britain kill nearly the entire population of Ireland? utter shite. Nobody on this threads concern unless theyre a Victorian member of the ruling class