where we might be had the Chinese been transparent and quick off the mark.
If, as seems likely, this virus was one of many being studied and/or developed in the Wuhan Institute and was spread around the world by participants in the 7th CISM Military World Games, there’s little doubt that the CCP knew more about its escape from the lab and its properties than they have so far seen fit to divulge.
The Chinese government is anything but stupid. Faced in October 2019 with the local spread of a deadly zoonosis, the CCP must have war-gamed (correctly, so far) that its best hope of emerging politically and economically unscathed was to ensure that the rest of the world shared the joy.
I have mused where we might be had the Chinese been transparent and quick off the mark.
We had a second chance with the warning from Italy. That was transparent, and we failed to act sufficiently.
dublinpilot wrote:
That was transparent, and we failed to act sufficiently
I think we reacted fast initially. Then the urge to get back to normal life, the urge to show “individual freedom”, the resistance to do things differently was much larger than the urge to deal properly with the situation. Australia and NZ did. Seems to me right now that MooneyDriver has been right all along.
LeSving wrote:
I think we reacted fast initially. Then the urge to get back to normal life, the urge to show “individual freedom”, the resistance to do things differently was much larger than the urge to deal properly with the situation. Australia and NZ did. Seems to me right now that MooneyDriver has been right all along.
I dont think so.
I think it was pure and simple the lack of political will, and the reservation about plotting a different course to everyone else. I think the “people” would have gone along with what they were told.
Lets face it look at the flack that countries who either introduced no controls or committed to complete lock down took in the early days (and even more recently). It is a case in point when more than ever strong and deteremined politics were need – of course they might have been wrong and just as with SARS and MERS it might have fizzled out and perhaps they would have paid the consequence, but this is the judgement every politician must make in desperate situations, and my gut feeling as I said before is it is bit like avaition, if there is doubt, then there is no doubt. After all you can always back track if and when the virus seemed to be fizzling out, but it never did, and never was, and the politicians knew that, albeit perhaps not in the very early days, when not many, and possibly no one, could predict exactly how this one would play out, although I suspect a few had a pretty good idea, quite early on, and when it wasnt too late.
Jacko wrote:
If, as seems likely, this virus was one of many being studied and/or developed in the Wuhan Institute and was spread around the world by participants in the 7th CISM Military World Games, there’s little doubt that the CCP knew more about its escape from the lab and its properties than they have so far seen fit to divulge.
This seems extremely unlikely. Let’s take them in turn
BTW – the “Military World Games” conspiracy theory originally was “The Americans attending these games were biowarfare operative introducing the virus to China”…
All those saying that somehow China suppressed information / acted slowly would do well to re-read the timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_2019: Around two weeks from the first hospitalisation to WHO notification – at that point, nobody had died yet – and under four more weeks to total lockdown in Wuhan.
While the CCP in China certainly runs an oppressive and dictatorial regime, people spreading the message early on were treated very badly and they downplayed the risk in the first few weeks of January, compared to the western countries they acted very fast, and the lockdown was certainly no secret.
And also – while there are good reasons to mistrust the official death toll in China, we also should remember that back then, there were no reliable tests, certainly not in quantity.
So in summary – by end of January, it was well known that the Chinese government deemed the virus so deadly as to lock down Wuhan… while the rest of the world outside Asia was basically whistling, hopping it would pass.
LeSving wrote:
I think we reacted fast initially.
Not really. We could have reacted in January, blocking flights from China for starters, then, as the thing broke loose in Italy, shut that door too. Once we started to get cases, we could have locked down then and did not, for the very reason you state. Those who did got away much better.
LeSving wrote:Australia and NZ did. Seems to me right now that MooneyDriver has been right all along.
Well I was not the only one and for once I wish I had been as wrong as possible.
The US had enough warning of the disease coming from Europe and did shut down travel from both China and Europe quickly, but had no success with shutting down borders. I think border controls are nonsensical political theatre unless the country is already very remote and physically non-integrated with other countries.
I think people hope somehow that government policy can or could somehow have prevented their problems. Sometimes it simply can’t, in this case due to the real and necessary world of real people and real trade, and the solution is technology, a vaccine, not policy.
All the kings horses and all the kings men etc.
It is interesting with 9/11 the US was able to shut down its airspace almost instantly. Yet the pandemic did not seem to justify this at the time. It can be done, but there simply wasnt the political will, nor was Covid seen as the threat it has become.
The world will however go on, and in terms of the human species it is a mere blip given that perhaps 1% of the population will die.
Even without the vaccine the consequence is not disimilar, but this is of no consellation to those involved.
I flew to Europe from the US on holiday in mid-September 2001, and back a few weeks later.
Do I understand correctly that you estimate 79 million people are eventually going to die of Coronavirus?
Whether or not we believe all that is written in Wikipedia, the statement in that article “Phylogenetics estimates that SARS-CoV-2 arose in October or November 2019” does not seem inconsistent with international spread by people returning from the Wuhan Military Games at the end of October.
The CCP hasn’t exactly invited independent scrutiny of alleged links to the WIV…
Some questions in my mind are:
Why did the CCP thereafter deny (for weeks if not months) the possibility of human to human transmission of a type of coronavirus which the WIV and various PLA labs have been studying for years?
What do these labs study, if not mutations and their possible transmissibility to and between humans?
Why did the CCP isolate and lock down Wuhan city and then the entire region, but allow international passenger flights to leave?
