to feel incandescent with rage

[Dragongirl10]

I have just read on the BBC news channel, Covid-19 Five days that shaped the outbreak.

The Chinese Government allowed this virus to spread for over a month before notifying the world.
Unforgivable is an understatement.

This isn’t new news, we’ve known that for a while.

It was being tracked over here from January 1st pretty much, we knew about it, we did nothing.

If I was going to be incandescent about anything it would be our own governments absolutely shitty handling of the same issue.

to feel incandescent with rage

Is that you Donald?

That's been known about for ages. They should have been held to account somehow.

Whereas the UK sprang into action as soon as they were made aware of the situation...

Nobody dealt well with this pandemic.

I mean... the Chinese government didn't cover itself in glory, no. But its a totalitarian state and you wouldn't expect full transparency on this front. And in all fairness it was the first point where the outbreak was identified and they had less idea of what to expect.

I can think of several western democracies with highly developed healthcare infrastructure which have arguably handled it worse. Including our own and the US. We've been trying to get this under control for months now and have the highest death rate per capita in the world. So focusing on what China did or didn't do a year ago is a bit beside the point.

@MythsandSparkles

This isn’t new news, we’ve known that for a while.

It was being tracked over here from January 1st pretty much, we knew about it, we did nothing.

If I was going to be incandescent about anything it would be our own governments absolutely shitty handling of the same issue.

^ This. Our own government made a half-hearted attempt at Track and Trace at first and then seem to have thrown their hands in the air and said 'Oh, this is a bit hard! Let's not bother. If we just ignore it maybe it will all go away'. Not helped, of course, by not having kept our pandemic planning up to date, having run the NHS into the ground so it was already understaffed, handing out vital contracts to Tory donors with no relevant experience, focussing on bloody Brexit instead of public health, etc etc etc.

Our death rate is amongst the worst in the world and it was avoidable. I hope voters take this into account at the next election.

YANBU. If the UK had been responsible people on here would have been sickened and outraged but it's China so brace yourself for accusations of racism

Where have you been for the past 9 months?

Have you been napping for over a year?

You'll love the sequel 'how the UK fucked it up'

There was no way of knowing at the outset how this was going to play out.

SARS, swine flu, bird flu, Ebola... none of these turned out this way.

I have not been napping (although l could do with one most days !)
Of course l have been aware of the delays by the Chinese Government, but it particularly hit this morning as l read about the worldwide death toll then read this article.

UK ignored the signs of something happening.

UK residents merrily went on ski breaks in Italy over spring midterm and brought it home - even though it was known to be in Italy before midterm week.

UK residents merrily went on continental European holidays all summer, even though it was still prevalent.

UK residents are STILL going on holidays abroad, despite lockdowns.

UK residents were very slow to start wearing masks and are still very resistant even though it is well proven to reduce transmission by wearing masks.

UK residents were very keen to go back to pubs and socialising and meeting up even though numbers were still high and when they were skyrocketing again.

There are soooooo many reasons why both the UK Government and UK residents have made it all so much harder on themselves. Well well beyond what some other countries have done.

And because so many UK residents travelled to Ireland over the Christmas period (and don't tell me they didn't - there were hundreds of UK reg cars in our area, far away from the border) even when they were not allowed to travel - it made the numbers here skyrocket as well.

Thanks a bunch for that.

There are plenty of threads on the UK response, or lack of it, and l totally agree, our Government were appallingly slow to react.

However this is about the deliberate cover up by the Chinese Government of a potentially deadly virus. Whether it was likely to spread or not, it should have been reported immediately, the mapping of it should have been released immediately.

The responsibility for this Pandemic lies squarely with the Chinese Government, it could well have been contained early on.

The first official death was Jan 10th, which was the same day China released the gene sequence of the virus, how much quicker do you think that could have happened?

WHO had been tracking it for at least three weeks before hand.

Flutrackers/worldometers were tracking it since Christmas 2019.

Governments knew about this, it wasn’t a surprise to any of them.

We know that China didn’t release details of known human to human transmission quickly enough and they should have locked down Wuhan well before CNY.

But I don’t think they’re to blame for the veritable shit show most of the rest of the world has made in handling it.

I'm a bit miffed too.

I don't think it was known exactly how bad the virus was going to be at first, how could anyone know? If you know in advance a virus is likely to kill millions of people then the chances are you'd act quickly to contain and eradicate it, but since you can't know then you just treat it like other viruses until you know otherwise.

It's called hindsight, and there's nothing you can do to change the past once you realise what has happened, the thing to do is change the future by acting in the present.

The Chinese Government have failed to act before, see this extract, (BBC)
When Sars spread through southern China in late 2002 and 2003, Beijing covered up the outbreak, insisting that everything was under control. This allowed the virus to spread around the world. Beijing's response invoked international criticism.

Reading todays report and looking at the timeline, they seem to have followed the same path, and we are all suffering as a result.