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?

[PlanDeRaccordement]

Goch
Any source for these eight arrests? You do know that it takes time to gather evidence before knowing whether it can transmit human to human and the WHO decides that not China?

[ShanghaiDiva]

BiBi
Ironically, this is exactly what is happening in China re quarantine and testing. My dh was ‘released’ from 14 day quarantine yesterday.

[Greysparkles]

If the British government had to pay for the misery it's visited on people all over the world it would be bankrupt in a week

The current British government?

Or the ones who have all been dead for centuries? Let's not play this game, it's a bit silly

[BiBiBirdie]

@ShanghaiDiva it also seems like the Chinese economy is not going to be hit as hard as others.

It's disgraceful that they are now acting like other countries are disgusting and must be quarentined when they were so slow to act in the first place.

[TheDailyCarbuncle]

Strange how discussion of the British government's responsibility is not relevant and silly. I wonder why that is.

The Chinese government hasn't covered itself in glory and I agree it needs to look at its management of animal welfare. But the tone of this thread is that China is Evil and Needs to Pay. Which is rich coming from Britain of all places.

[1981m]

If WHO raised the alarm 5 days after the original information from the Chinese government then o think that is pretty quick. I guess they had to verify the situation themselves first.

I don't blame our government for their initial slow response as they thought it would be like SARS and would stay in China. They weren't to know this one would spread and be more lethal yet. But when it started spreading to other countries and they were locking down and we seemed to have a completely different approach to the other countries with our hard immunity stance, I do blame them then. We should never have followed that path, we should have shut down so much quicker.

Comparing this to things the UK government did in Ireland is a stretch, the two have no connection

[PlanDeRaccordement]

Bibs birdie

Your source says that China announced the human to human transmission six DAYS after this woman discovered it. Hardly the “months” you said. It also reflects that they were not allowed to post updates to social media due to fears of a panic that is normal nondisclosure agreement that gov workers sign for their jobs under most governments- hardly being told to say nothing to their own superiors because of Chinese New Year.

[TheDailyCarbuncle]

My point is, if governments have to account for the impact they have on other people, then that should apply to all governments, not just those filthy foreign governments.

It doesn't make sense to hold one government to account and at the same time say that the British government gets to just slink out of its responsibilities.

[nettie434]

Surely this is a PR disaster for China

A few weeks ago the columnist Allison Pearson tweeted that buying goods made in China would become a ‘mark of shame’. People immediately pointed out that that she was using an iphone, made like almost every electrical item in China.

China is hugely powerful economically. It’s all very well Donald Trump making racist comments about China and Chinese people. However, China has been buying up American debt for years. He (or his advisers) know how much the US needs China, despite what he says. Other posters have pointed out the amount of infrastructure in African countries provided by Chinese technology, finance and engineers.

Obviously there do are huge risks of animal to human transmission from the wet markets. However, what about all the countries who were so slow to shut down air travel? Rightly or wrongly, I think this will change very little.

[PlanDeRaccordement]

Daily carbuncle
“But the tone of this thread is that China is Evil and Needs to Pay. ”

Yes I agree completely. It is very painful to read.

[GetOffYourHighHorse]

'the British government had to pay for the misery it's visited on people all over the world it would be bankrupt in a week.'

The same could be said of Germany, fortunately people move on and don't blame current governments for everything that has occurred in the past.

Anyway, as others have said this is about a current global disaster what've you got to say about that Carbuncle?

[sleepingdragon]

I thought they had found that the virus didnt start at the wet market? But was brought in there by a person who was infected and then spread as it is a crowded place? Even the fiercest anti-China politicians are saying that now??

[ShanghaiDiva]

@BiBiBirdie
Yes, the irony is not lost on me! As pp mentioned upthread there has been a dramatic increase in anti-foreigner sentiment and action which is very concerning.

[user764329056]

The Institute of Virology in Wuhan has over 1,500 deadly viruses apparently and scientists conduct research there on the most deadly pathogens, I think it’s too easy to blame CV on the wet markets, more likely this was accidentally leaked

[Redpurplegreen]

How about stop playing the blame game and going on about mistakes which countries have made in the past, and look at how we, as a global community, are going to learn from these things and stop them from happening again?

[winterisstillcoming]

Didn't we give the world CJD??

[BiBiBirdie]

@TheDailyCarbuncle @PlanDeRaccordementhow are they NOT?

Bird Flu
SARs
MERs
Covid-19

Remind me again where these came from?
*Hint, it wasn't an estate off the M1
I agreed with Pearson, it should indeed be a mark of shame. We need to support our own industry if we have any hope of recovering what will be left of our economy after this, elsewise the Chinese will walk all over us all.

Time to cut all ties and ban the lot of them.

[GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER]

Even if the markets selling live wild animals for food are banned, I wouldn’t have much confidence that it’ll be rigorously enforced.
Blind eyes and backhanders - China is not renowned for being a corruption-free zone.
And before anyone says it, yes, I know it goes on to some extent everywhere, but in some countries it’s endemic, as those of us who’ve lived in countries where it’s more or less like oxygen, will know.

[sleepingdragon]

I think you can be angry at the Chinese Commmunist Party, and it's desire to maintain a positive picture rather than encouraging honesty about a situation (e.g. during the Great Leap Forward when tens of millions of people starved to death and local parties made paper mache vegetables to photograph and pretend they had bumper harvests rather than admit people were starving). But this has never been a problem for the West when China could supply us with cheap goods, whatever the cost to Chinese people.

[PlanDeRaccordement]

The only study I have seen on the origin of COVID is this one:
www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

It rules out laboratory genetic manipulation of the virus and says it is definitely of natural origin. As for how it mutated to infect humans, the study proposes two possible scenarios:

1. Natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer
   “As many early cases of COVID-19 were linked to the Huanan market in Wuhan1,2, it is possible that an animal source was present at this location.”
   
   
2. Natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer
   “It is possible that a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans, acquiring the genomic features described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission. Once acquired, these adaptations would enable the pandemic to take off and produce a sufficiently large cluster of cases to trigger the surveillance system that detected it1,2.”

[Alexis21]

China has permanently shut down one wild life market in a province and made it illegal. The same will follow on but it will take time. China is a huge county and these wet markets thrive in the countryside. They are also going to stamp out the eating of dogs again practiced mainly in the countryside .

It will take time but at least common sense seems to be prevailing.

For the record China is not the only country to have live animal markets - America for instance other European cities.

Oh and people who have to caveat a sentence with I'm not racist most definitely are whether or not they choose to believe it or not

[sunfloweryy]

@Redpurplegreen you mean like by applying pressure on China to ban these wet markets?

[MangoFeverDream]

Pandemics are inevitable anyway

They are not. They are preventable with the animal
husbandry knowledge we’ve gained over the years. We fix protocols and procedures when something happens. A poster here outlined the extensive changes that happened to the British beef industry as a result of mad cow.

What did China ever do to change things after SARS? What protocols and procedures did they change?

Nothing. Entirely preventable disaster.

Besides the U.K. trades in wildlife and eats game meat too. It was more bad luck and dodgy hygiene that caused this outbreak

It’s not bad luck. It’s bad practice.

The Spanish flu did not originate in Spain but in Kansas, USA

There’s evidence that also came from China with Chinese railroad labourers: www.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health



Getting angry towards the country that raises the alarm is counter productive. We should be thanking China

You are ridiculous. No one should be thanking China. Needless tens of thousands have died.

They hid this and punished whistleblowers. They denied human-to-human transmission until late January. Taiwan had evidence of human-to-human transmission in December and alerted the Chinese health authority. What happened then?

Also, Chinese New Year was in late January this year and the government allowed them to go abroad and other Chinese regions, spreading it carelessly around the globe.

[ShanghaiDiva]

China has already banned markets that trade in wild animals for consumption. New regulations were introduced at the end of Feb, I think.
Let’s hope the new regulations are being strictly enforced.

[PlanDeRaccordement]

MERS originated in China ? 🙄
Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

Now I know why you get your information from the Daily Mail....