It is interesting to think about how such a counterproductive attitude could develop. I imagine that the Party saw a problem, suppressed some people who were impacted by it, and saw the problem go away (at least for them). The they saw another problem, suppressed some people, and saw that problem go away too. After doing this for several decades, their default reflex upon seeing a problem was to suppress whoever was complaining about it. This strategy worked for small problems that would stay about the same size over time, because they could tell the sufferers to suck it up and at most a few people would become discontent. Eventually the strategy became a habit, and the habit became an integral cultural component of their way of governing.
Then, one day, they saw a problem, suppressed some people... and discovered that the small problem would not stay small and suppressible after all.
This is pure speculation without one spec of proof:
My guess is that the regional government covered up the problem. But once the national disease authorities learned of the issue, they did the right thing because of their experience with diseases over the last decade.
I can't see the whole article. It might have some information which supports or refutes my guess.
---
Edit.
From the full article:
"on January 3, the National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued its own gagging orders"
It is not really possible for outsiders to tell how orders are being moved around within the party mechanism. China's message is that the regional government is at fault, but that's what they always say when there is an expression of discontent among their people. It is not "kosher" for the central government to take the blame for anything, so you can never really believe it when someone else takes the blame. Maybe the CIA knows, but anyone who isn't tapping internal communications is not likely to get beyond speculation.
In any case, a culture of honesty has to start at the top, and it is likely that the local government "knew what not to report." There are many situations where the claim that no official report was given to the central government would be true, while at the same time the central government played a role in the suppression. So as for speculation, I would say that there are many possibilities where the central government had a role to play in the suppression (even if it was played over years before), but only one possibility where the local authority went off and did something totally out of line.
Edit:
>The laboratory findings were relayed to officials in Beijing at the Centre for Disease Control (CDC). The information should have alerted national health chiefs to a looming crisis, but on January 3, the National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued its own gagging orders. Laboratories were told not to release any information and to hand over or destroy the samples.
Well, it looks like the local government didn't know what not to report after all. (Thanks to makomk's comment for pointing this out.)
According to the article, this came from the top: the national medical authorities were directly telling the labs to destroy the samples and keep it a secret.
Midway through HBO’s Chernobyl it struck me: this was the start of the fall of the USSR. I guess that’s obvious, but the dominant narrative growing up was that the US outspent them militarily and it bankrupted them.
But it was so eloquently shown in the miniseries that it was really about the facade coming down — the illusion of the all-knowing regime crumbling into that vast, hellish pit at the center of the reactor.
You could watch Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation documentary for further insight into this. It's about the current political elite but comoares the current situation with the one in the USSR before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Another think the US likes to look at differently:
US: Marchal plan was self-less help.
Reality: Marchal plan was mostly self-help, preventing a economical collaps of the US and securing strong longterm influence in the EU/Germany to make sure the EU/Germany won't side with communism in the future. Also allowing them "secure/safe/accepted" military presence in the EU/Germany "just on the border to their enemy". Etc. (Don't get me wrong. It was still awesome and I'm still grateful. Just don't go around stating the EU/Germany owns the USA and should do thinks which would harm itself to support the USA, especially given that currently the US is slightly falling from grace.).
To someone in the USSR at around the same time it might as well have looked that AIDS epidemic is going to put the US in serious trouble. The US authorities were not admitting it as a serious problem until many thousands had died.
I would discount much of the insinuations that the HBO series is making, it was made without any inputs from Russians/Ukrainians which should be a serious argument against its authenticity of sentiment.
A theory is that the collapse of the USSR was not any grassroots uprising or the expression of people longing for democracy, it was just mostly a few higher-ups like Yeltsin figuring out that they can hold and exercise greater power and authority by dissolving the Union than keeping it. I view the claim that Chernobyl had much to do with the end of the USSR as a naive and unrealistic analysis.
The part with "poor quailty Soviet tech" is of course bullshit. The VVER reactor fleet works fine without any major incidents. The RBMK by contrast was an irresponsible design pushed by a politically connected engineer. Otherwise most of the article also applies to China.
> A theory is that the collapse of the USSR was not any grassroots uprising or the expression of people longing for democracy, it was just mostly a few higher-ups like Yeltsin figuring out that they can hold and exercise greater power and authority by dissolving the Union than keeping it.
This theory must've been dreamt up by someone with next to no knowledge about the USSR. The Soviet Union collapsed through its republics (puppet states) declaring self-government, followed by declarations of independence later on.
Day by day, general disillusionment from Afghan war, disasters like Chernobyl and massacres like those in Tbilisi and Vilnius eroded authority of the central government until Gorbachev was commanding phantom armies like Hitler in his bunker in the final days of WWII. The conspiracy theory of KGB-led (or whoever else) coup ignores the decade of events leading up to the 1991 and Kremlin's increasingly desperate attempts to maintain control, all of which are extremely well documented, with direct participants of all levels still alive today.
I would place it on the same level as suggesting that the whole Vietnam-era peace movement and 1960s cultural revolution was a KGB plot and not a genuine grassroots movement.
You are spot on. Now realize that all you read about china in the press, is created by this strategy. The green turn around, everything. And our press copys blindly from state media news outlets and organizations that have been corrupted with soft power.
Meanwhile on the ground, the world begs to differ.
The west aint perfect either (Julian Assange, Snowden), but at least dissent is able to reach the ears of the public, before beeing silenced. And the government wishful thinking aloud is discussed as the foolishness it is.
There seems to be much misinformation, as per one translation of sources, the Chinese CDC only asked that the samples which are kept in unsecured conditions/facilities be destroyed.
The way things work in governments around the world, that detail doesn't really tell us anything. The interpretation of "unsecured condition/facility" would be completely up to what the local government thought the central government was implying.
China's monthly infectious disease report numbers had 1.71m cases of infectious disease in December 2019, compared to only like ~700k in December 2018. Interestingly the number of deaths from infectious disease declined in December 2019 vs 2018...
Cite for that? While the PRC trying to suppress evidence of an outbreak is totally plausible, a 1M undercount of COVID-19 cases in one month just doesn't match the data on the ground. Something like that would have run rampant across asia by now. Where are they hiding all the bodies?
Sorry, but this sounds like a mixed up fact, or a conspiracy rumor.
Then how does that square with the data from the west, which broadly confirms the CFR China reported originally? Why are Italians dying like flies to this thing the Chinese were able to hide?
This "The CFR is much lower!" thing is rapidly becoming a conspiracy-level fallacy... It's probably true that there are a bunch of unmeasured cases (a reasonable study yesterday guessed at a 6x undercount) and that the CFR is currently overstated because of sampling problems with test availability.
It is absolutely not possible that there were a million cases in Hubei in december. Not from this disease. Come on, folks.
Everybody knows the real number of cases is greater than the confirmed number of cases, everywhere, regardless of what country is reporting the numbers.
Nobody knows. Anybody that cites numbers is pulling them from a very biased sample. With the exception of a few countries, most of the testing is done on a very self-selected set of people. Those with symptoms who were ill enough to get tested and willing deal with a with a 14 day quarantine if they turned up positive.
Even counties with good, pervasive testing can’t test for how many people already had it and are carrying antibodies.
We are flying very blind here. Treat all numbers with a huge grain of salt.
No it's about knowing how diseases spread. This is not a new disease. the mortality rates come from the ratio of known deaths to known infections. Obviously not all cases are known especially in the USA where we don't even have enough tests to test people coming in with severe symptoms.
That is the thing. Nobody knows because we have no earthly clue how many people have it currently or had it in the past few months. People quoting “death rates” are pulling the denominator (number of deaths) for that rate out of their ass. Same for transmission rate. Any rate requires a good denominator—we have zero clue what that number is. We have little testing here in the states, and my understanding is we currently do not have a way to test if you previously had it.
We are making massive social and economic changes based on very unclear data. People are sitting at home with nothing to do but watch live streaming YouTube videos of “confirmed cases” on a map or looking at some website showing the same and freaking the fuck out. But it is all based on crap data.
We can “pause” our global economy for a short while (week or two) but any more than that is going to have massive issues. Those toilet paper memes are funny until you run out yourself. Not having baby wipes in stock isn’t very funny. People are going to start getting into physical violence in stores over that shit (if it hasn’t happened already). People are gonna relapse into addiction. People are going to mill themselves. Supply chains are going to fall apart.
We can’t make massive sweeping changes like this for very long without a solid understanding how how pervasive this virus is.
Italy, China, U.S. most likely determine cases the same way so far. No wonder CFR is similar. However, these tests are limited compared to serologic tests:
> The test kits in use in the U.S. described in the articles detect viral genetic material—RNA, in the case of coronaviruses—which can be infectious material or noninfectious fragments. Once the patient has recovered and the RNA has been cleared, the tests will be negative. If we’re trying to ascertain what proportion of the population has been infected and experienced asymptomatic, mild or more serious infections, such post-infection testing yields “false negatives.”
> Additional, essential information will need to come from “serological tests” that measure antibodies in blood, which will tell us whether a person has been recently infected with SARS-CoV-2 and recovered. (Note that antibodies take about 10-14 days from exposure to the virus to appear.)
So just to be clear, since you're mostly just quoting sources: those data do not corroborate a 1M infection undercount in China in December. They match what we're seeing, probably with a much more moderate (e.g. 6x) undercount of active infections.
Is CFR in doubt? As I understand this, CFR means "number of people dead from this disease, in the hospital" / "number of people entering the medical system with this disease". Defined that way, there is really no room for the figure to be wrong.
I think we're looking for a different measure (IFR?) which is "how likely is it on average for someone in the population to die from this?". That's the number we don't know because we don't know the number of infected people.
What we do know is that in the places where the disease has gotten out of hand, the medical system becomes overloaded. That's the real, immediate, present problem and whether it's a problem or not doesn't depend on the CFR. Note that most of the existing hospitalized cases in Italy are _still_ on ventilation. So although they don't show up in the CFR, they're still taking up medical resources and some number of them will eventually not make it. (Source: watch the many videos on Youtube from the Drs working in the Red Zones).
I'd be much more interested in what credible Chinese sources know about the disease and its epidemiology. Much of the reporting on the Chinese response has been overtly xenophobic and added to the confusion at just the moment we needed more clarity.
I am OK with it in this case. And for having all relatives of the people who were involved in making this decision being tattooed with signs saying things like, "My uncle's coverup caused COVID-19 to go worldwide."
And for having all Chinese officials to have regular reminders that this is the punishment for covering up health crises.
Penalizing family members for life is admittedly unfair. However Chinese society places a premium on the importance of family. And we want a penalty that will deter officials. I cannot think of a better deterrent in that society than knowing that their wives, children, siblings and parents will forever bear the mark of shame should they screw up.
Indeed. Collective punishment is prohibited in armed conflict by article 33 of the Geneva conflict, from 1947. Degradation as punishment was prohibited by International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in the mid-1960s. There is a taboo against it for good reason.
However once projected body counts of the results of someone's actions are measured in the tens of millions, and the same family members would have been expected to be beneficiaries of the person's intended actions, what punishment would be proportional to the consequences? I'm OK with abandoning normal taboos if the suffering of a handful prevents a repetition of this kind of event.
And let's be clear. This is far from the first time that local coverups by Chinese officials have put the whole world's health at risk. (The most extreme example being the anemic first response to SARS.) And it is extremely unlikely to be the last time that Chinese officials will be in a position to be tempted to try coverups in the future. In a society and country that already accepts the death penalty as normal, what would YOU suggest to be sure that those future officials are deterred from even TRYING to gamble with the lives of the world?
Yes. What I proposed was shocking. It was supposed to be. It is unpopular. This is again not a surprise. But do you have a better solution?
Taking your hyperbolic suggestion seriously, if the Chinese government normalized family punishment by using it in this case, they would probably go on to use it on journalists, the next set of doctors they wanted to silence, and whichever officials happened to fall out of favor that year.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. Someone else posting a bad comment doesn't make that ok.
Haha, seriously? Suggesting to someone that they should be OK with a treatment that they think should be policy is breaking site guidelines? You are a funny bunch.
Shouldn't one at least start by giving tough punishments to officials i.e. years in jail etc, before reaching for the more monstrous punishments? I worry that the extreme suggestions distracts people enough that the focus instead becomes on the extreme, rather than punishing the officials. Then, like US white collar criminals, they walk away with no punishment.
Remember Li Wenliang. We warned his fellow doctors about the situation, in December. The police punished him for this.
He later died of the disease.
We are all suffering because an authoritarian government suppressed the good intentions of its citizens.
The Chinese Government is squarely to blame for this situation. Could it have been prevented if they had acted responsibly? I don't know – but there is a strong chance that the answer is yes. We'll never know, however, because that is not the path they took.
They are a little comparable, in that what the US is trying to do indicates that it would go the same way as in China if there was not a semi-functional press, a freedom-minded citizenry, and a mostly-functional democracy holding them back. The intent and "evil" is there, what makes the difference is what restrains it.
I get the point you are trying to make but I think you have missed the undertone, which is generally accepted in the US: Most people in the US agree that without freedom of press, "checks and balances", etc, the US government would indeed become an authoritarian state with all the evils that entails.
Firstly, he wasn't arrested. Secondly, this isn't about who did more wrong. I don't really care if signing that letter or a transfer for disciplinary reasons is worse - both did the right thing and both should have been praised instead.
He was forced by the police to come to the police station and not allowed to leave until he admitted to disrupting the social order[1]. Call that whatever you want, but I think arrested accurately portrays the situation.
Second, no one is defending the US’ actions, but you’re clearly trying to minimize China’s.
No, but what about Helen Chu at UW? What about UPMC the other day as someone pointed out. Can the feds leave people alone when they know how to tie their own shoelaces and focus on getting ventilators deployed?
As in most cases when this link gets posted here, this is not actually a case of whataboutism.
Here, the argument is "this cannot happen here because the US is not a dictatorship and we have free press". I linked to an actual case of this happening in the US. So apparently, the Chinese don't have some unique property making only them supress whistleblowers.
The parent comment argued nothing of the sort. It said simply:
> "The Chinese Government is squarely to blame for this situation. Could it have been prevented if they had acted responsibly? I don't know"
The parent comment made no statements about how it could never happen in another country. It was specifically about the Chinese government's mishandling -- it was you who injected the bit about the US.
Can you fully blame the Chinese government? The WHO could have sounded the alarm in January and stopped global travel. Trump could have had a fearful knee jerk reaction and done the same. Everything we are doing now should have been done mid January. State governments, county health departments, they all could have reacted louder, faster.
Trump is in a no-win situation here - if a fearful knee-jerk reaction would have successfully mitigated the disease making it into the USA, it would have been painted as xenophobic and overreaching. The WHO has just proven itself to be largely ineffective. It's a dumpster fire all around.
I think you misunderstand. OP was saying if China had acted better, maybe COVID-19 wouldn't have spread in the first place. Maybe they could have contained it before it reached other countries or Chinese provinces.
I doubt that could have happened, but it could have significantly slowed COVID-19's spread.
If the timeline in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO5EXjFKE7U are true, doesn't seem like the information was suppressed. WHO knew about a new virus/disease by 31st Dec/1st Jan and the market in question was closed.
What they didn't know was if these were one off cases from eating bad meat or is it spreading human to human. Also, Li Wenliang circulated SARS info on WeChat on 30th/31st and public broadcast in Wuhan/Hubei was on 31st.
Possible the source is biased and info. is missing but doesn't look any info is false.
This heroic doctor can no longer speak for himself and did not write his wikipedia page. I really doubt that if he were alive right now that he'd be focusing on the stupidity of the initial reaction to his reports.
I find it hard to imagine that the current CDC would have done better if the pandemic had started in the US. Sure, they would have been more honest, but they haven’t been demonstrating much competence recently.
Honesty is what lets businesses scale production to meet demand. I also find it hard to imagine the CDC would have done much better, BUT it would have indicated to businesses the potential.
We were actually in the perfect position to react appropriately to this virus and we completely failed. We saw what it did to China and their response yet we stalled for weeks. Those weeks matter. The only country that seems to have responded well based on what happened in China is South Korea. South Korea was in second place for total infected for a long time, but they responded incredibly well and have remained relatively stable for a while, and now others are rocketing past them.
OTOH the same authoritarian government quarantined a city the size of New York and built field hospitals for thousands of people on very short notice when the situation truly got out of hand.
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. Also, would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments generally? We unbanned you awhile ago because your comments had improved, but they've backslidden.
Both are very classic traits of authoritarian gov: In times of crisis, it's far more efficient than democratic governments. However, in times of non-crisis, its centralized power and information control would cause a crisis that would've been otherwise avoided.
As long as we’re giving strikes for/against their authoritarian government, should we mention the millions in concentration camps and the complete lack of civil liberty?
The Soviet government ended up addressing the Chernobyl disaster when that got out of hand, too.
I think any government, facing any crisis, is eventually going to do the right thing by virtue of running out of other options. The question is how many mistakes they make beforehand, and this seems like a big one.
The narrative in China right now is finding ways of externalizing the problem. One narrative either pushed intentionally or by fake news sources are blaming American soldiers that were in Wuhan for a military fitness competition. While it sounds crazy it's widely believed. The source works for government in Guangzhou.
Because there's one narrative in China, folks, and this douchebag knows what it is.
But seriously, don't buy what he's selling.
The only narrative China needs right now is its victory lap. It's nearly stopped new cases. Xi visited Hebei/Wuhan.
The comment above is wishful thinking of the highest order, and perfect projection. It's Western media and nincompoops like this clown who seem to need to play the "blame game"
China got on with solving the problem. Now they're taking a victory lap and responding to requests to help overseas. The Chinese, if they are blaming anyone, are not blaming foreigners for this, they're blaming the Hebei provincial authorities for their initial mistakes in handling it.
Because they've been successful at containing a virus in the largest country on Earth, they don't need to play the blame game. It's slow-to-act and complacement Western-style governments that are in desperate need of a finger of blame to point at anyone but themselves.
Because they know that the worse the crisis gets, the harsher the economical consequences for China will be.
Countries and citizens remember where the virus comes from, like they do for SARS and it they will put pressure on their governments to move production elsewhere.
I think China will be "punished" anyways, regardless when this crisis ends. There's no way globalization will continue in the future, governments will force companies to move production of essential supplies (food, medicine, raw materials) back locally to make their economies resilient to similar shocks in the future.
Fortunately, for China, the country is starting to have enough local consumption that it probably doesn't need to be just an export hub any more (but undoubtedly it will hurt).
Edit: this will, I predict, hurt Western companies & shareholders as well. I expect many companies to be much more rigorously stress-tested for supply chain and/or labour issues, similar to how banks are stress-tested for credit issues. This will mean thinner margins, lower profits.
Obviously, which is why I'm guessing it will be centrally enforced (laws by governments). Not for companies like Uber or Netflix, but whatever is consider "essential" (medicine, energy, food, raw metals, ...).
Frankly I'm on the side that the Chinese are acting in good faith here. They have every motivation to do so. Stamping out the virus worldwide is for them a first order national priority.
It’s not necessarily an act of charity. China has a vested interest in looking like the country capable of leading the world out of the pandemic, especially as Trump continues to stumble and alienate the rest of the world - it’s the same game of politics that all countries play all the time.
Crises are how rising powers become dominant powers - WW2 was the crisis that propelled America past UK to become the worlds dominant power.
You are a plain fool if you don't understand that the CCP literally sets the narrative out of China, imposed with force. Tow the line or, at best, lose social credit points, at worst enjoy your permanent stay at gulag.
The Soviet Union only collapsed some 30 years ago. The CCCP was literally the model that the CCP is based on. Don't be naive.
You've done a lot of damage in this thread. I'm not going to ban you because you've been a good user in the past, but please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606977 and don't do this again.
Edit: I spoke too soon. Alas, you've been spreading this contagion in other threads as well—including shockingly bad-for-HN comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587177. Therefore I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
One of the headline news from a couple of days ago, voicing support for Foreign Ministry Spokesperson's conspiracy rant on twitter. It's bizarre and make Chinese Gov look extremely childish.
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Yeah. Someone made a good point: all those Chinese scientists and their supervisors and local government and local police and numerous agencies were actually acting to protect the US. Xi obviously has lost control of the Chinese government to secret US agents. Lol.
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It's no worse than everyone over here proclaiming it was coming out of a Chinese bio-weapons lab. They're no more responsible for the virus than the US/Mexico was responsible for swine flu.
That attack on another user is egregiously against the site guidelines. Please don't post like that to HN.
You've done a lot of damage with flamewar comments in this thread. I'm banning most users who did that. I'm not going to ban you, because you've been a great user in the past and have a long history here. But please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606977, stop now, and don't do any more of this.
No, it's worse. The Chinese government has apparently actively been censoring scientists and anyone else who points out the really obvious, glaring evidence that this virus originated in China, probably Wuhan. Their diplomats have been spreading the theory on social media too. This is basically a government-sanctioned conspiracy theory spread using the full power of a totalitarian state-run censorship apparatus.
There is legitimate evidence of Canadian researchers working on coronaviruses in bats smuggling something to the Wuhan lab. Arrests were made a month before people across the world were taking the virus seriously.
Also the lab in Wuhan has leaked at least one SARS strain in the past.
>They're no more responsible for the virus
Do you understand the conditions of the ubiquitous meat markets in China? Do you realize how easy it is for pathogens to spread when you stack wild animals in cages on top of each other, torture and butcher literally everything, wild animals off the street, in open air and on the literal ground?
The reality is that most of China is third world. Sorry, sometimes specific cultural practices are harmful to people and societies.
I'm on mobile so I don't have time to collate a bunch of sources for something you could search for online, so here's a link to a summary.
NOTE: before you dismiss the source, notice that it is merely a commentary on a collection of individual sources that you can verify yourself. Now I do not agree with the conclusion in the link below, that this is a deliberate bioweapon, but there is ample circumstantial evidence here to at least presume that the virus could have leaked from the only level 4 biolab in China, which happens to be less than 10 miles from Wuhan. It's likely they were conducting legitimate research, all I'm pointing out is that the evidence for this actually coming from China is pretty good.
They have collected legitimate reports from e.g. the news.
It's no less legitimate than a bunch of links on a Wikipedia page. Don't be lazy and dismiss this because you don't like the political leaning of zerohedge.
>Russian disinformation site
But we're just going to believe everything out of China without a second thought right now?
Everything in that link, all the suspicious relationships, all the published research (arrested smugglers have published on coronavirus very recently) is verifiable. Don't be lazy.
I do not understand the reason for butchering wild life animals (e.g. bats). Is it belief system (e.g. traditional Chinese medicine) or they are just hungry?
Both. Folk medicine is extremely common in China and the idea is that certain body parts from certain animals cure ailments/improve performance. Total backwards voodoo bullshit - like suppliments and crystals and homeopathy in the west, except animals are literally tortured over it.
There's a reason you can find so many videos online of Chinese people torturing animals. There is a belief in China (and to a lesser extent in other nations like Korea and I believe Vietnam) that making animals suffer pre slaughter makes the meat tastier. And honestly it isn't a stretch that adrenal hormones released just before death can influence the flavor or texture of meat, but I don't know if that justifies cruelty...
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Being right and following the site guidelines are different things. The latter is what protects the community from destroying itself—assuming that's possible.
Fortunately, the two support each other, because if you're right, expressing your view in a thoughtful way makes the truth more apparent to others, while fulminating and attacking enemies merely alienates everyone who doesn't already agree with you. You end up discrediting the very truth you're advocating for. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Anthony Bourdain (RIP) loved weird exotic food — he talked about it at length in his books. The weirder the better. (Not for me; I went vegetarian about 5 years ago.)
These wildlife markets are a particular problem. But virologists (see: Pandemic on Netflix) highlight not just the wildlife trade be our enormous animal agriculture production as an explosive situation.
The virus smuggling thing cannot be linked to the outbreak. However the whole culture of consumimg exotic mammals really needs to stop. Wuhan had a flourishing underground animal market apart from the usual vast meat market where everything was consumable. This is bad. I do credit Chinese scientists for the fast gene sequencing that led to a test being developed but even if exotic meat consumption is a cultural thing it still needs to the phased out.
Eating exotic mammals would be less bad if the mammals and their meat were actually subject to the same health regulations as less-exotic mammals. That is: the problem ain't the animals themselves, but rather that they're being sold in a black or grey market instead of through more legitimate channels.
This is a pretty common theme with black markets in general, on that note. See also: black market drugs being "cut" with harmful substances, black market sex labor being a vector for human trafficking and STDs, black market medical procedures being more susceptible to adverse outcomes, etc.
There are other good reasons to not eat exotic mammals, of course (i.e. if doing so puts species at risk of extinction), but the sanitation issue seems solvable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y2uGlHT4iU Chinese culture is to blame. Try and stop boiling dogs alive, beating them with clubs, burning them alive with torches, and other torture. Also stop mass consumption of wild bushmeat and maybe all these zoonotic diseases will stop emerging in China.
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One can argue modern definition of racism has expanded much beyond race. Though I also didn't want to start a pedantic argument on the definition of racism with the original OP. Rather to point out how distastefully the Chinese Gov have acted in response to Trump and Pompeo.
The WHO named it COVID-19 specifically to change that fact, as it leads to things like Asian-Americans being beat up despite having nothing to do with the virus.
This is not racist and if you're not a Chinese astroturfer you're playing right into their hands by spreading this idiotic take.
China is a geographic region. The virus most originated from China. In any case it has become associated with China. If you can't hear the words "Chinese Virus" without feeling ill will towards Chinese people, the problem is with you, not with semantics.
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China is currently in the running for the most racist country in the world. From the wide-scale ethnic cleansing they're performing on Uyghurs and Tibetians, to their hostility to non-chinese, to the way that companies still post restrictions on your birth province for employment (though this is nominally illegal).
To dilute the concept of racism, a concept meant to describe toxic and life-wrecking behavior like many of China's current policies, and try to stretch its meaning to cover the use of the geographical location of the origination of a virus- that is itself depraved behavior.
It's absolutely possible for group X and group Y to both be discriminatory against each other, and the solution is not to well "Group X is right" - the solution is to treat discrimination, from whomever, as the bad thing.
We should separate Uyghurs/Tibetans and other issue.
Uyghurs/Tibetans are targeted due to their religion. The PRC ideology has no room for religion that puts Entities above nation. Uyghurs themselves have long history of rebellions to the point that nobody knows who started the tit-for-tat incident: the Uyghurs? the Han?
You can have a long-winded argument but if you don't understand their history, culture, and 1 billion problems they have, then you don't "get" why their mindset is like that just like 'Murica with their guns and their "freedom of expression".
Nationalistic and religious flamewar is not welcome here. Please do not post like this to HN again. I appreciate that you didn't mean your comment that way, but at the end it clearly crosses into flamebait, which is a contribution to destroying this community, not helping it.
Deleting a comment after perpetuating a flamewar does nothing to unburn this place. However, we'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that the deletions mean you intend not to do this again.
I certainly do not intend to do this again. I think under normal times it would not have been as bad. I will take particular care under current circumstances. My sincere apologies to you.
Appreciated! It makes me happy that I guessed right and didn't ban you.
I hope everyone understands that we ban users not to punish anyone, but to protect the site. If people give us reason to believe that they sincerely want to use HN as intended, we're happy to unban them, and do that all the time. Also, we make mistakes sometimes—because moderation is guesswork—and appreciate being told when we do, so we can correct them.
Yes, people are blaming the Chinese government, because there's evidence that they actually tried to cover it up and botched the response. Sometimes blame is rightly placed.
They may have screwed up at first but then they reacted drastically and made huge efforts, which are paying off. I'm not convinced that others would have managed it better overall. The Chinese are now helping others.
Experts have been warning us for years than something like this coronavirus was coming, and we got several alerts (SARS, MERS, etc). The Chinese cannot be blamed for the global spread of the virus and for the lack of readiness of other countries.
Let's focus on defeating this virus through global cooperation instead of pointing fingers. Once this pandemic is behind us then hopefully everyone will reflect and learn what can be learned from it.
I keep hearing they have contained it, but I also get reports that they haven’t. Also, something needs to change for their policies to not impact the rest of the world in such drastic manner.
Please, try to use official sources, like the WHO or CDC to base your assumptions. Anecdotal reports on Reddit do little to add to the discussion, specially since it is very hard to verify claims people post there.
I believe we should be focused on the virus, but when this world wide short down is over we shouldn't forget were this came from and put some international influence on shutting down the wild animal markets in China which no doubt will just spawn another coronavirus in the next decade. I don't respect any "tradition" that leads to havoc like this.
There is no proof that such markets are the link. Bats life close to humans almost everywhere on earth, and any contamination could have been the link.
This scenario of someone eating an infected, exotic animal is just blatant racism.
Yes, it's just like that and it's ugly. There is also plenty has been done on the other side of Pacific Ocean. And now, reading through the thread it's clear how much we hate each other. Or fear?
At the beginning of the trade war, one of my fav NYT columnist remarked Trump was the opponent Chinese deserved, despite being pretty anti-Trump in all other regards, and had being promoted globalization for decades.
Last week, there has been a surge of articles on the Chinese websphere, describing how impotent the western authorities were when dealing with COVID-19, implied superiority of the system/culture. However, in spite of the height of nationalism, there were articles in Chinese mainstream called for respect and understanding, and they would probably never be reported anywhere in the west, after all, not news-worthy.
I thought COVID-19 would have brought us closer to deal with the unknown in front of all of us. We blew it. welcome to the era of 2nd cold war, if we are lucky enough.
There are egos at the top of every superpower which don’t see themselves as equal to mostly anyone. As long as that’s the case, there will be a Cold War or something similar.
You might wonder if the path to leadership is especially enticing to people with overinflated egos that enjoy the high they get from ordering others around.
Top of the piramide is for narcissists, some just have learned better to play the sympathetic character. Since recent the most efficient modus is to not be bothered by that thin layer of veneer.
I could list plenty done by US govt deem not acceptable, from meddling with our Civil War.
But what's the point? By claiming moral high ground the argument goes nowhere. the question really is, do we fear/hate each other more than we need each other?
>But what's the point? By claiming moral high ground the argument goes nowhere.
The point is that, apparently, you think "meddling in a Civil War" and harvesting organs from prisoners are morally equivalent. I'm not even sure what to say about that.
I can tolerate some inter-nation sabre-rattling, spying, hacking, propaganda, election meddling, maybe even the odd annexation or assassination. Although they are not necessarily things I would approve of, I consider them politics.
Drop the China bashing. If we're going to criticize any government on this issue, we need to criticize all of them.
Was there really any government without guilt or incompetence in their handling of this?
Really nobody who in any way delayed taking steps, nobody who in any way sat on information, nobody who in any way instructed a certain type of scale of coverage in an attempt to minimize panic?
Let those without sin cast the first stone.
But actually, I think the "blame game" is bullshit.
Everyone should just be like, "Holy crap, this virus doesn't care about what passport you have, we all need to just work together on this."
Good to see people contesting the blame narrative here, but better if we didn't promote this news at all. This is a highly technical site, surely there's a chance to share articles about studies, algorithms, ways data scientists/programmers/bioinformaticians can get involved, pool resources, donate cloud time, etc.
Ok, let's call it CPC bashing then, if that makes you feel better. What they have done during this whole debacle is despicable, and their attempts to push the conspiracy theory that the virus came from the US Military is just the icing on the cake.
Let's call it "Westerners blaming China to feel better, while they all get the virus anyway". Seems to be Western-style policy in a nutshell right now.
If you call saving millions of Chinese people despicable, it sounds like you're to be despised.
The cake isn't cooked yet, but Western governments are already eager to play the blame game, while China got on with getting results. Nearly zero new cases. Contained to Hebei.
You've been reading fake news... and worse, believing it. They're not pushing a conspiracy theory. They're taking a victory lap.
The comments about it being a bio weapon are from the FM, who is just volleying back Pompeo's comment about it being the "China virus". That's all it is. Tit for tat. If you believe everyone in China is obsessed with blaming the US for the virus origins, or, worse, that Chinese people believe it's a bioweapon, you're wrong, sorry.
They contained a crazy new pathogen in the biggest country on Earth, they don't need to play the blame game, and domestically their media is taking a victory lap. It's just revealing of Western incompetence, and insecurity that Western media is fanning these blaming narratives.
If you want to make me feel better, I thank you. Start by admitting your pro-Western propoganda does not tell you what's really happening in China.
Please stop with this flamewar now, and please stop posting in the flamewar style in general, regardless of how right you are or how wrong or ignorant someone else is.
Please stop with this flamewar now, and please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally. It's not what this site is for and we've had to warn you already.
I don't think it's fair to criticize all governments (or forms of government) equally.
In our town (New Jersey, USA), several parents decided to keep their kids home from school as the virus spread nearby, even as the school stayed open. Evidently (https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000006970549/cor...) in other forms of government, the government itself controls what information is available (and the ability of citizens to make prudential judgments).
That doesn't mean this virus is "China's fault." As you say, all governments demonstrated some form of incompetence (usually starting with the assumption it can't be that bad). There is here an interesting contrast in how two systems respond to incompetence. Since surely how we disseminate information is important to the response to the virus, it seems fair to point out how one system disproportionately impedes how that happens.
To be fair, western authorities had an even longer amount of time before the virus spread to their countries, and are doing about as well or slightly worse than the Chinese authorities did even given this initial suppression.
In what way? You do realize that taking dramatic measures “just to be safe” has severe consequences of its own right? Our supply chain will break down. People will kill them selves from this lockdown. Addicts will relapse. People will fall into depression. Nothing good.
It is a very tight space to thread the needle—- overreact and do massive damage to our economy and physical and mental health. Too little and we overwhelm our medical system and more people die from the virus needlessly.
It is very delicate balance. Add in 27/7 media of all forms plus intense political pressure to “do something!!!! “ and here we are.
I don’t envy anybody in my regional government having to make this call.
Ps: people downvoting this and other comments like it make my point. It is currently not okay to question our current actions. There is massive social and political pressure to move toward heavy handed measures... we should be allowed to be critical or question things. Groupthink is not a good thing.
So now it is groupthink? Curious. I was being downvoted to hell a month ago when I was telling people we should enable measures.
You can definitely do things like:
• stop all tourist and non-essential travel, giving airlines the option to freeze their accounts
• enable work from home for all public employees
• force private companies to do so too for jobs that can be
• close all educational institutions and let them give lessons remotely if they want
• ban non-work related gatherings
• ramp up production of masks and other basic stuff
• ban people from buying too much of 1 given item per day
for even 1 year if necessary, without destroying the economy.
That alone would have flattened the curve so much it is not even funny.
You cannot do half those things for a year without radically changing our economy.
Just as an example, saying “no tourist travel” itself would destroy a ton of regions who depend on tourism.
It is easy to armchair quarterback how you’d deal with something like this. Especially when you can wave away “trivialities“ like “ban all non work related gatherings for a year”. LOL. Good luck with that.
Of course the economy would suffer a lot, but comparing it to having a pandemic with a million deaths and breaking the already stretched health system... it is a win.
Exponential growth with 6 hidden doublings is nasty stuff.
Far more will die from the virus than the measures already. It take about a month from exposure to death. There are 1000s to 10s of 1000s 'walking dead' in the UK alone.
This i just saw a clip of a few days ago about my Minister of Health being in a debate with the bigger opposition party leader.
He asked the minister if he was familiar with how Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan are handling the corona situation.
And he was not informed about those nations approach to their local epidemic.
He rather look in countries within Europe, instead of nations that have been where we are going too.
I just searched the version in Chinese.
This is the google translated version :
"“”
When the severity of the virus is unknown, many companies have been commissioned by different hospitals to perform sequencing. After the National Centers for Disease Control received the report, they ordered all units without safety qualifications to destroy all virus samples. Less than two weeks later, the full virus sequencing results were made available to the world.
"“”
I found that it's deplorable that so many white politicians and media practitioners lack professionalism and wisdom that caused so much severe spread around the world.
Look at South Korean, it should be served as manual for pandemic crisis resolutions.
If this is the case than china acted fully responsible. _And any western country would have acted the same_.
Especially it wouldn't mean any research result was destroyed just strands of the virus kept in places where it's not safe to keep them.
This would be really sad that a media outed completely turned around the facts to put blame on China... I mean let's be honest if it would have started in the USA (like ironically the Spanish flue did, even through it had Spanish in it's name) then I'm pretty sure the results would have been far worse then they are now.
It's good that you're attempting to provide factual information. But it's bad that you're adding flamebait like "so many white politicians and media practitioners". Please keep doing the first and stop doing the second. That sentence is a specimen of the same pathogen you're deploring. Your comment would be just fine without it.
We should transports experience inthe form of bureaucrats from areas that experienced catastrophes/near catastrophes to other nations.. that way its gets implemented elsewhere, and becomes not just another ignored conference talk. Germany could learn from california how to prevent drysummer forrestfires, america could learn from south korea how to contain diseases..
Im pretty sure, the informtion was transfered somewhere - but the urgency of the information was never transfered.
Liberal societies around the world are afraid of making strong statements and criticism of the way China handled this outbreak. The CCP is separate from the Chinese people and it has created an aura of defiance, callous behavior and intolerance for truth that collides with their image. When someone says "Fuck the CCP", it should not be met with liberal racist card - this is not racism, but criticism of the goverment and IMO the CCP needs to be criticized, dismantled and revolted against by the Chinese themselves. This is starting to happen but on a very small scale after the Coronavirus mishandling. It is very much productive to play the "blame game" because ultimately, we want the Chinese government to shutdown these wet markets, allow free speech of their citizens.
Uhm, the CCP in how it acts wrt. indoctrination is acting quite racistic them self (doesn't matter that that might be by accident). So criticizing or even denouncing it can't really be called acting racistic.
Well except if it's _obvious that you act that way because of racistic ideas instead of criticism_ . Which might very well be the case for some people.
So if given out of context the sentence might be racistic or might not be racistic. Also depending on your culture it might be just a sign of strong annoyance and just that. Or a very strong insult.
Because of this, it's not really appropriate to say it either way as it seen as a insult in more cultures then ones at which it's just seen as a expression of annoyance/dislike.
There are many other, better and more appropriate ways to criticize them. Like pointing out that they act racistic themself, like it did above.
Also the initial bad response mainly comes from problems with local governance not the CCP. While the CCP controls the local goverment tightly it's also an open secet that the local government often actes in their interest first and only then in the interest of the whole country, especially if they believe they can get away with it. In the end the country is just to big with to many people to be efficiently governed. Maybe in the future with the help of more technology but not now. Through they are trying their best.
Also lets be honest. Just consider how it would have went if that virus would have sourced in the USA. I mean after having a example which is both bad (initial response) and good (follow up response) the response in the USA (or the EU) is still sup-par. I would not have been surprised that if it would have been sourced in the USA then it would have spread even faster around the world including china.
(Also as far as I have heard China did ban part of the food trading, additionally I have heard pretty racist thinks about how chines people where at fault because they eat everything etc. But the truth is they mostly eat pork. And the virus most likely was _not_ transmitted through food, through maybe still alive food, but then again still alive _normal_ food)
Is it possible the researchers handling this virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology simply screwed up and the release was accidental? That seems like the most plausible explanation to me, and especially given the institute's proximity to the seafood market on which the Chinese officials blamed the outbreak. I think it's pretty plain to see the story we've all been fed about the seafood market was a deflection attempt. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Wuhan has been working with bats and the various viruses they carry for many years... well before the BSL4 lab opened even. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17030870#
The suppression of researchers who sounded the alarm and forcing all the hospitals to return their samples certainly makes sense if you consider it as a "guilty reaction", after something they weren't supposed to be doing got loose. Or the government considers it embarrassing that the handlers were incompetent and this got loose.
It could also just be the reaction of a government who is trying to downplay the virus and retain control of the narrative, however.
Sequencing shows it's 96% similar to a wild strain of coronaviruses that has been previously studied in bats though, which argues against it being engineered.
Yeah I agree, it's likely not an engineered virus at all. It was likely incompetence on the part of the handlers, and a subsequent cover up to try and reduce/deflect culpability.
Those are not opposites. An engineered virus can escape via incompetence. A non-engineered virus can be intentionally released.
We can't prove that the virus was or was not engineered unless somebody finds a copyright message in the RNA. We do however know that the Wuhan lab had engineered similar viruses, slightly modifying bat coronaviruses so that they would be much more active against human cell lines.
I've wondered the same, given the early Chinese resistance to outside help [1]. However, the Party will always prefer to downplay problems that threaten its grip on power, and this qualifies regardless of any possible lab involvement.
China reported the disease to WHO on 31 Dec 2019. The article is short on first hand information and long on speculation. I think articles like this are only going to add to confusion and misinformation.
It was isolated first on Dec 27th or thereabouts. Later retroactive investigation determined that some cases in late November was infact the same virus.
That is assuming that the information in this article is incorrect. Could have been identified earlier and the information censored.
The implication is that there was enough time for this to be the case. There are 1.5 months between the time estimations for patient zero and the publishing to WHO.
Willful or malicious suppression is only a theory as of now, with hardly any indication to back it up. This kind of insinuations stemming from a vacuous sense of moral superiority isn't helping us tide over this crisis.
That one perceives something to be apparently consistent with any particular world view does not make that worldview the correct one.
I doubt anyone can talk with moral certitude in such matter, when the discussion has devolved into unreasonable degree of polarization and hostility.
All I can say is that, this isn't the time for another cold war.
Does anybody seriously believe that the US would have done a better job controlling the outbreak? Just look at how we did handle it when it made it over here!
There needs to be a discussion about how China is going to compensate the world for covid19. Given the thousands of lives lost and billions of lives disrupted, it seems unfair and unwise to let the source of the loss escape shouldering the cost.
Somebody is trying to open Pandora's Box here. Who is to decide what deserves compensation and who is going to enforce it? List of various grievances countries have against each other must be enormous.
We've banned this account for using HN for flamewar and ignoring our requests to stop. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
All: please do not post nationalistic or ideological flamewar comments to HN. Commenters doing this have ruined this thread, and more of it would ruin the site. We won't let that happen, a.k.a. we ban accounts that do this, so please stop now and don't start again.
If you want to bash each other's countries, tribes, parties, and ideologies, there are other places on the internet. This place is for curious, thoughtful conversation. That's what the majority of the community comes here for, and HN being a public forum does not entitle you to wreck it for them. The commons is delicate. Posting is a privilege. Using this place as a battlefield will lose you that privilege. Normally we'd bury any thread this wretched, but I'm leaving this one up in the hope that people will learn from the examples below.
Viruses are not the only thing that's spreading right now. If you're commenting here, you are responsible for containing your share of the stress, fear, and rage of the moment, and finding capacity for curiosity in yourself—which includes respect for other commenters. If you can't do that, that's understandable and fine, but then please self-isolate until you can.
I've spent a fair amount of time on HN (especially yesterday) trying to respond to threads with verifiable facts and evidence, and as positive tone as I could muster even when responding to people with a very argumentative tone. I would like to think that was helpful, and was disheartened to see such a degradation in the quality of discourse today. Thanks dang for your doing your part to make things better, and I implore readers of the site to do your best to spread facts not misinformation, and engage in constructive conversation.
Can the mods make sure this is "policed" fairly. I don't recall seeing any of the many blatant anti-US comments getting any warnings from the mods while factual and properly sourced but negative-sounding comments on China-related threads always seem to raise alarm bells. If I'm wrong on this, I stand corrected. For the record, however, I completely agree that unsubstantiated and hostile comments should not be tolerated.
I agree with most of what you said, but I don't think you blatantly ban my account and all other involved just for the comment is fair. I didn't know my comment would be considered as flamewar in the first place.
from your username I wonder are you on the Chinese side as well? I understand HN needs to do business with China, which it tried a while ago and failed.
If github can be used as a discussion platform it will be nice, as so far CCP dares not to close github.com, as it will impact its software industry badly.
I'm on the side of this community, whose values are expressed at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Among other things, that includes no nationalistic attacks. Or personal attacks.
> from your username I wonder are you on the Chinese side as well?
Are you not going to address the racist dog-whistle? You work in San Francisco where many of your fellow Americans actually do have last names like Dang. Maybe you should consider the harm this type of rhetoric does to them when you ignore it.
I'm aware, I'm saying there are others who don't have the convenience of saying "actually I'm white" when they get accused of being fifth columnists simply on the basis of their names. Because of that, maybe the mods should actually call out this type rhetoric instead of ignoring it like dang has.
The idea of saying "I'm not Chinese" as if it were a sort of defense is repulsive. If someone assumes that about me as part of attacking or slurring Chinese people, I am honored. The fact that the post was downvoted, flagged, and stupid is signal enough that the comment was unacceptable.
Users who are concerned about HN moderation practices around racial (including anti-Chinese) attacks on HN, and personal attacks on HN, won't have a hard time finding examples. Needless to say, this has nothing specifically to do with China or Chinese people. It would be the same for any national or ethnic background.
There would have been no need to insinuate had you stopped to check that his username is an abbreviation of his name and surname.
I take it that you consider moderation in the thread as an attempt at appeasement of the Chinese government?
I'm not sure if you share my opinion, but I've felt that this thread, even though it was about a great article, had very destructive and misinforming discussion. I too am incensed at the contents of the article, but discussing it calmer would be preferable and lead to more useful insight.
>I take it that you consider moderation in the thread as an attempt at appeasement of the Chinese government?
There's some god-awful xenophobic comments in this thread, for sure.
[snip for guidelines]
But it's no secret that there's a Chinese propaganda machine out there, fighting to control the media narrative. This article (and the expulsion of US journalists) are just the latest evidence.
> But it's impossible to have any reasonable discussion on this subject matter when anything remotely negative about the CCP is, somehow, down-voted instantly. And some of the arguments coming from the side defending China are...odd to say the least.
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like.https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That applies on Chinese topics as much as any other topic.
We added that rule after years of experience and I don't know how many hundreds of hours poring over data on this. At least on HN, these perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. That is, people perceive such biases based entirely on their pre-existing opinions, and one can reliably predict their opinions from the complaints about bias and secret manipulation that they post. You can find years' worth of cases here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There's a psychological explanation for this phenomenon: pain is more memorable than pleasure. Posts we dislike make a stronger impression than ones we like. We're more likely to notice them and they burn more into the retina, creating an afterimage that's intensely biased—but the bias is in the eye, not the objects. Clear evidence of this is that people with opposing views about X inevitably have opposite views of how the community (or mods) are biased about X. Perceptions of sinister manipulation are a variation of this.
The reason this comes up so often is that HN is a much larger and more diverse community than it seems. People are coming here from all sorts of different backgrounds—a much wider range than most readers assume. When we judge comments by our own range of familiarity, many of those comments end up sounding "...odd to say the least". This is an artifact in the perceiver, not the perceived. We all have a more parochial perspective than we imagine we do. When our sensibilities get hit by what to us is an outlier, a flying internet object of obnoxious opinion, we immediately feel anger and fear. Those feelings suck, so we defend against them by reframing the provocation as not-in-good-faith: a spy, a shill, a sinister manipulator.
The solution is to have one's default reaction to these outlier ("...odd to say the least") comments become expansion rather than protection: that is, to allow the encounter to expand our mental model of what the community is and whom it contains. To do that is to practice the site guideline, "Assume good faith". This isn't easy, because it means you have to tolerate the initial hit of pain and anger and wait for it to subside before settling on a reaction. That's the hard work of tolerance.
It doesn't follow there's no such thing as manipulation, of course. It simply means that one no longer reaches for manipulation as a first explanation for what one finds "odd", instead requiring that there be additional evidence before entertaining such a charge.
This is not an abstract issue for HN, it's an existential one. People have been hounded off this site simply for representing their backgrounds and expressing sincere views. I'm sure the users who did the hounding would be horrified if they knew what they were doing, but it all happens so easily on the internet, at such great distance, where we're all talking not to living humans but to little bits of text that we flesh out with our imagination.
>The reason that this comes up so often is that HN is a much larger and more diverse community than it seems.
I agree with what you're saying, and appreciate the point, but there's a practical basis to the frustration as well:
Sometimes seemingly banal comments are down-voted with no explanation or reply, and this starts the "You're posting too fast" chain, and next thing you know any slightly contrarian view (which, apparently, I hold in spades) is prevented from being presented. (It's literally happening to me as I attempted to post this comment).
If people want to down-vote, that's their prerogative; I'm not interested in accumulating points. But the mechanism of throttling people with down-voted comments contributes to an echo chamber, even if it serves a higher purpose. I've been hanging around here for a long time, and it feels like it's gotten a lot worse, especially for someone on the less common side of the political spectrum. It's hard to participate sometimes.
I realize even the discussion of voting is against guidelines, and I have no solution, so I'll bow out. I appreciate the thoughtful reply.
It would be good, if you could "invest" dharma into posts. So if you have a contrarian view, you can invest your gathered points into this view and keep it longer visible, even during downvotes. Of course, this could bankrupt one, so it would be a rare luxery - or you could gather a dividend on any useful discussion spawned below a controversial post.
What you do here -competently, compassionately and altruistically facilitating productive discussion at scale is of the rarest and most valuable human skills. If you ever put yourself up for political leadership in an electorate in which I can vote for you I will.
The day a relative or a family member died because Covid-19 and Chinese incompetence, you can come to tell me to self-isolate. How they let a Chinese moderate Hacker News.
One think which should not be forgotten when interpreting this article is, that while Chine is often displayed as this large united country. The different regions in China still have quite a bit of independent governance, all below the central governance but not always acting in the best wiches of it. So you should not conclude "china tried to hide it" but a "sub-goverment in china tried to hide it even _even from china central government". Maybe even mainly from china central government.
But what makes me worried is how china tends to always shift blame of their mess-ups on western countries and tends to display them (especial the USA) as that "evil" states which constantly wants to harm them. This, weather intentionally or accidentally, is setting the ground work for a far reaching economical and military escalation: I.e. for a war with strong racist tendencies. This can long term be far more dangerous then the SARS-Cov-2 virus or climate change as it could me a fully escalated third world war.
EDIT: Be aware that some other comments imply that the context is quite different then show in the article and china might have acted very responsible.
There needs to be a great deal of introspection in the coming months. About what cultural practices are allowed to continue, and which are not. We need to have solutions for people that rely on dangerous ways of securing food an alternate method that's safer for everyone. We need to look closely at resource utilization and ask ourselves if we need to spend X amount of space/water for Y product, just because previously we have done so. We need to consume less, travel less, be more responsible.
Is there evidence this strain of SARS was enginered in the lab, and it accidentally escaped? That seems the only reason that makes sense for trying to destroy evidence.
It’s concerning how polarized any thread about China becomes. Normally rational calm people expressing extreme views (eg punishing innocent family members as deterrent). I wasn’t old enough at the time but I imagine this is what thing felt like during the Cold War.
Why must we always have a foreign enemy? Be it soviets, muslims, mexicans or now China.
It is. It’s perhaps also the part of us that if we can change could do the world the most good.
Also seems a lot of folks takes a stance on China and view anything they do through that lens only. Those that are anti China seems unable to find anything China does to be positive. Similarly those that defend China seems unable to criticize China at all. Because of these default positions take, more nuanced discussions become ideological ones.
My feeling is that it's more often than not the norm, society-wide speaking.
However, at places like HN, usually people and discussions are more rational and fact-based.
I've seen this happening in other circumstances and on other topics, that people who are educated and respected becoming mindless drones, or loss a significant portion of their reasoning ability and rationality whenever a certain note is played. Sometimes decency is lost too.
But then, I expect better on HN and I'm glad the moderator(s?) is doing something about it.
Agreed, and I too expected better from the HN crowd. Also agreed the moderators here are doing a great job.
I don't know what the solution is. Maybe we should all strive to understand the other side better instead of casting quick judgement. Environmental and other issues aside, perhaps this is one of the benefits of the recent increase (not counting the current issue with COVID19) of global travel and tourism.
I haven't been reading HN long enough to experience other eras of geopolitical strain, but I have a guess about one part of the puzzle.
A non-trivial part of the tension between these two powers centers on and around technology, science and industries on the cutting edge. The sensitive topics touch on many of the readers' primary domains.
"we" is the generic we, as in whoever is reading this. China is no different, they've been pointing at external influences; typically the US as the bad guys for a long time.
But this response is the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm sure you have legitimate reasons to have a negative view of China, but discussions just devolve into emotionally charged rhetoric that doesn't go anywhere. How am I supposed to respond to this in a constructive way?
Most problems China has with other entities and other entities have with China can be solved by the communist party of china just basically stopping their shit.
I think it is okay to get a bit emotional if the whole world economy is plunged into the gutter because Xi Jinping conducts himself like insolent prissy spoilt child in need of a good talking to by an adult. And maybe if his parents did their job the whole world would not be in this state now. So yes, I am fucking emotional about this. Billions of people have to suffer because of Xi Jinping and his party.
Nearly all government leaders' first reaction is try to downplay disasters.. after all they are politicians, not science experts.
Did you not watch Chernobyl? It's literally the same plot.
Even in this particular case, the Chinese govt. wasn't the only one trying to downplay this. The US government did the exact same thing even after China had already come to its senses.
> Nearly all government leaders' first reaction is try to downplay disasters.. after all they are politicians, not science experts.
There is a difference between the capacity of US and EU to suppress information and the capacity of authoritarian Chinese State to do this. The media in US and EU does not take direction from the Government.
> The US government did the exact same thing even after China had already come to its senses.
Did the US govt allow wet markets with live wild animals to operate in China for the political gain of Xi Jinping and China? Did the US govt downplaying this change the reporting of the media? Did the US order samples destroyed and ordered laboratories to not release information? No?
347 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadThen, one day, they saw a problem, suppressed some people... and discovered that the small problem would not stay small and suppressible after all.
My guess is that the regional government covered up the problem. But once the national disease authorities learned of the issue, they did the right thing because of their experience with diseases over the last decade.
I can't see the whole article. It might have some information which supports or refutes my guess.
---
Edit. From the full article: "on January 3, the National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued its own gagging orders"
In any case, a culture of honesty has to start at the top, and it is likely that the local government "knew what not to report." There are many situations where the claim that no official report was given to the central government would be true, while at the same time the central government played a role in the suppression. So as for speculation, I would say that there are many possibilities where the central government had a role to play in the suppression (even if it was played over years before), but only one possibility where the local authority went off and did something totally out of line.
Edit:
>The laboratory findings were relayed to officials in Beijing at the Centre for Disease Control (CDC). The information should have alerted national health chiefs to a looming crisis, but on January 3, the National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued its own gagging orders. Laboratories were told not to release any information and to hand over or destroy the samples.
Well, it looks like the local government didn't know what not to report after all. (Thanks to makomk's comment for pointing this out.)
I'm not saying the CCP's days are numbered, but maybe, just maybe they will live in interesting times.
But it was so eloquently shown in the miniseries that it was really about the facade coming down — the illusion of the all-knowing regime crumbling into that vast, hellish pit at the center of the reactor.
US: Marchal plan was self-less help.
Reality: Marchal plan was mostly self-help, preventing a economical collaps of the US and securing strong longterm influence in the EU/Germany to make sure the EU/Germany won't side with communism in the future. Also allowing them "secure/safe/accepted" military presence in the EU/Germany "just on the border to their enemy". Etc. (Don't get me wrong. It was still awesome and I'm still grateful. Just don't go around stating the EU/Germany owns the USA and should do thinks which would harm itself to support the USA, especially given that currently the US is slightly falling from grace.).
I would discount much of the insinuations that the HBO series is making, it was made without any inputs from Russians/Ukrainians which should be a serious argument against its authenticity of sentiment.
A theory is that the collapse of the USSR was not any grassroots uprising or the expression of people longing for democracy, it was just mostly a few higher-ups like Yeltsin figuring out that they can hold and exercise greater power and authority by dissolving the Union than keeping it. I view the claim that Chernobyl had much to do with the end of the USSR as a naive and unrealistic analysis.
https://unherd.com/2019/06/chernobyl-and-the-meltdown-of-the...
The part with "poor quailty Soviet tech" is of course bullshit. The VVER reactor fleet works fine without any major incidents. The RBMK by contrast was an irresponsible design pushed by a politically connected engineer. Otherwise most of the article also applies to China.
This theory must've been dreamt up by someone with next to no knowledge about the USSR. The Soviet Union collapsed through its republics (puppet states) declaring self-government, followed by declarations of independence later on.
Day by day, general disillusionment from Afghan war, disasters like Chernobyl and massacres like those in Tbilisi and Vilnius eroded authority of the central government until Gorbachev was commanding phantom armies like Hitler in his bunker in the final days of WWII. The conspiracy theory of KGB-led (or whoever else) coup ignores the decade of events leading up to the 1991 and Kremlin's increasingly desperate attempts to maintain control, all of which are extremely well documented, with direct participants of all levels still alive today.
I would place it on the same level as suggesting that the whole Vietnam-era peace movement and 1960s cultural revolution was a KGB plot and not a genuine grassroots movement.
The sentiment in Chernobyl is spot-on.
Meanwhile on the ground, the world begs to differ. The west aint perfect either (Julian Assange, Snowden), but at least dissent is able to reach the ears of the public, before beeing silenced. And the government wishful thinking aloud is discussed as the foolishness it is.
The point the being the highly charged political divide on this issue makes it impossible to trust sources on either side of this and similar matters.
Sorry, but this sounds like a mixed up fact, or a conspiracy rumor.
Dec 2018 - 712k - http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-01/27/c_137778435.htm
Dec 2019 - 1.71m - http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-02/01/c_138748020.htm
This "The CFR is much lower!" thing is rapidly becoming a conspiracy-level fallacy... It's probably true that there are a bunch of unmeasured cases (a reasonable study yesterday guessed at a 6x undercount) and that the CFR is currently overstated because of sampling problems with test availability.
It is absolutely not possible that there were a million cases in Hubei in december. Not from this disease. Come on, folks.
The current numbers are the ones that don't add up. Even John Hopkins estimates up to 500k cases in the US at the moment.
Even counties with good, pervasive testing can’t test for how many people already had it and are carrying antibodies.
We are flying very blind here. Treat all numbers with a huge grain of salt.
We are making massive social and economic changes based on very unclear data. People are sitting at home with nothing to do but watch live streaming YouTube videos of “confirmed cases” on a map or looking at some website showing the same and freaking the fuck out. But it is all based on crap data.
We can “pause” our global economy for a short while (week or two) but any more than that is going to have massive issues. Those toilet paper memes are funny until you run out yourself. Not having baby wipes in stock isn’t very funny. People are going to start getting into physical violence in stores over that shit (if it hasn’t happened already). People are gonna relapse into addiction. People are going to mill themselves. Supply chains are going to fall apart.
We can’t make massive sweeping changes like this for very long without a solid understanding how how pervasive this virus is.
> The test kits in use in the U.S. described in the articles detect viral genetic material—RNA, in the case of coronaviruses—which can be infectious material or noninfectious fragments. Once the patient has recovered and the RNA has been cleared, the tests will be negative. If we’re trying to ascertain what proportion of the population has been infected and experienced asymptomatic, mild or more serious infections, such post-infection testing yields “false negatives.”
> Additional, essential information will need to come from “serological tests” that measure antibodies in blood, which will tell us whether a person has been recently infected with SARS-CoV-2 and recovered. (Note that antibodies take about 10-14 days from exposure to the virus to appear.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-antibody-testing-to-understa...
http://archive.vn/SJkJu
> The mortality rate is thought to be ≤2%, but precise numbers uncertain due to a lack of available serological testing.
https://www.hopkinsguides.com/hopkins/view/Johns_Hopkins_ABX...
I think we're looking for a different measure (IFR?) which is "how likely is it on average for someone in the population to die from this?". That's the number we don't know because we don't know the number of infected people.
What we do know is that in the places where the disease has gotten out of hand, the medical system becomes overloaded. That's the real, immediate, present problem and whether it's a problem or not doesn't depend on the CFR. Note that most of the existing hospitalized cases in Italy are _still_ on ventilation. So although they don't show up in the CFR, they're still taking up medical resources and some number of them will eventually not make it. (Source: watch the many videos on Youtube from the Drs working in the Red Zones).
State controlled media
The great firewall of China. Most of the internet is blocked, including Facebook, Twitter and HN.
Monitoring and censoring of all social media
For alternative news we are depended on rogue reporters, whose credibility is tragically also unknown.
I am OK with it in this case. And for having all relatives of the people who were involved in making this decision being tattooed with signs saying things like, "My uncle's coverup caused COVID-19 to go worldwide."
And for having all Chinese officials to have regular reminders that this is the punishment for covering up health crises.
Penalizing family members for life is admittedly unfair. However Chinese society places a premium on the importance of family. And we want a penalty that will deter officials. I cannot think of a better deterrent in that society than knowing that their wives, children, siblings and parents will forever bear the mark of shame should they screw up.
However once projected body counts of the results of someone's actions are measured in the tens of millions, and the same family members would have been expected to be beneficiaries of the person's intended actions, what punishment would be proportional to the consequences? I'm OK with abandoning normal taboos if the suffering of a handful prevents a repetition of this kind of event.
And let's be clear. This is far from the first time that local coverups by Chinese officials have put the whole world's health at risk. (The most extreme example being the anemic first response to SARS.) And it is extremely unlikely to be the last time that Chinese officials will be in a position to be tempted to try coverups in the future. In a society and country that already accepts the death penalty as normal, what would YOU suggest to be sure that those future officials are deterred from even TRYING to gamble with the lives of the world?
Yes. What I proposed was shocking. It was supposed to be. It is unpopular. This is again not a surprise. But do you have a better solution?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, and it has been. It didn't work.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_offences_in_China for a list of existing crimes that result in capital punishment in China. This coverup is a very good fit for #14, endangering the public safety.
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-...
He later died of the disease.
We are all suffering because an authoritarian government suppressed the good intentions of its citizens.
The Chinese Government is squarely to blame for this situation. Could it have been prevented if they had acted responsibly? I don't know – but there is a strong chance that the answer is yes. We'll never know, however, because that is not the path they took.
PRC 145 people per square kilometer
ROC 649 people per square kilometer
South Korea 503 people per square kilometer
People are people, and have been shooting the messenger for millennia.
Second, no one is defending the US’ actions, but you’re clearly trying to minimize China’s.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Here, the argument is "this cannot happen here because the US is not a dictatorship and we have free press". I linked to an actual case of this happening in the US. So apparently, the Chinese don't have some unique property making only them supress whistleblowers.
> "The Chinese Government is squarely to blame for this situation. Could it have been prevented if they had acted responsibly? I don't know"
The parent comment made no statements about how it could never happen in another country. It was specifically about the Chinese government's mishandling -- it was you who injected the bit about the US.
Also, please keep that particular trope away from here. It's a marker of lame discussion.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Where have I possibly seen this before?
I'm German, BTW, and considering the history of our country I'm a bit sensible to things like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, please keep that particular trope away from here. It's a marker of lame discussion.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
In times like these we all have to look at what can be done to minimize human suffering, not who is to blame.
If the virus started in USA, it would be even worse...
More like an "already gambled and lost" situation.
I doubt that could have happened, but it could have significantly slowed COVID-19's spread.
What they didn't know was if these were one off cases from eating bad meat or is it spreading human to human. Also, Li Wenliang circulated SARS info on WeChat on 30th/31st and public broadcast in Wuhan/Hubei was on 31st.
Possible the source is biased and info. is missing but doesn't look any info is false.
China knew about the disease in mid to late November. That's quite a lag time.
The first case was on Nov 17th. But that was found retroactively.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3048042/chin...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: Oof, the truth hurts don't it?
We shouldn’t be so fast to accept their system
I think any government, facing any crisis, is eventually going to do the right thing by virtue of running out of other options. The question is how many mistakes they make beforehand, and this seems like a big one.
Because there's one narrative in China, folks, and this douchebag knows what it is.
But seriously, don't buy what he's selling.
The only narrative China needs right now is its victory lap. It's nearly stopped new cases. Xi visited Hebei/Wuhan.
The comment above is wishful thinking of the highest order, and perfect projection. It's Western media and nincompoops like this clown who seem to need to play the "blame game"
China got on with solving the problem. Now they're taking a victory lap and responding to requests to help overseas. The Chinese, if they are blaming anyone, are not blaming foreigners for this, they're blaming the Hebei provincial authorities for their initial mistakes in handling it.
Because they've been successful at containing a virus in the largest country on Earth, they don't need to play the blame game. It's slow-to-act and complacement Western-style governments that are in desperate need of a finger of blame to point at anyone but themselves.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
Countries and citizens remember where the virus comes from, like they do for SARS and it they will put pressure on their governments to move production elsewhere.
Fortunately, for China, the country is starting to have enough local consumption that it probably doesn't need to be just an export hub any more (but undoubtedly it will hurt).
Edit: this will, I predict, hurt Western companies & shareholders as well. I expect many companies to be much more rigorously stress-tested for supply chain and/or labour issues, similar to how banks are stress-tested for credit issues. This will mean thinner margins, lower profits.
Your well constructed arguments about resilience will fall on deaf ears come bonus time.
Crises are how rising powers become dominant powers - WW2 was the crisis that propelled America past UK to become the worlds dominant power.
The Soviet Union only collapsed some 30 years ago. The CCCP was literally the model that the CCP is based on. Don't be naive.
Edit: I spoke too soon. Alas, you've been spreading this contagion in other threads as well—including shockingly bad-for-HN comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587177. Therefore I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://new.qq.com/omn/20200313/20200313A06PZU00.html
You've done a lot of damage with flamewar comments in this thread. I'm banning most users who did that. I'm not going to ban you, because you've been a great user in the past and have a long history here. But please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606977, stop now, and don't do any more of this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also the lab in Wuhan has leaked at least one SARS strain in the past.
>They're no more responsible for the virus
Do you understand the conditions of the ubiquitous meat markets in China? Do you realize how easy it is for pathogens to spread when you stack wild animals in cages on top of each other, torture and butcher literally everything, wild animals off the street, in open air and on the literal ground?
The reality is that most of China is third world. Sorry, sometimes specific cultural practices are harmful to people and societies.
NOTE: before you dismiss the source, notice that it is merely a commentary on a collection of individual sources that you can verify yourself. Now I do not agree with the conclusion in the link below, that this is a deliberate bioweapon, but there is ample circumstantial evidence here to at least presume that the virus could have leaked from the only level 4 biolab in China, which happens to be less than 10 miles from Wuhan. It's likely they were conducting legitimate research, all I'm pointing out is that the evidence for this actually coming from China is pretty good.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-china-steal-coron...
It's no less legitimate than a bunch of links on a Wikipedia page. Don't be lazy and dismiss this because you don't like the political leaning of zerohedge.
>Russian disinformation site
But we're just going to believe everything out of China without a second thought right now?
Everything in that link, all the suspicious relationships, all the published research (arrested smugglers have published on coronavirus very recently) is verifiable. Don't be lazy.
There's a reason you can find so many videos online of Chinese people torturing animals. There is a belief in China (and to a lesser extent in other nations like Korea and I believe Vietnam) that making animals suffer pre slaughter makes the meat tastier. And honestly it isn't a stretch that adrenal hormones released just before death can influence the flavor or texture of meat, but I don't know if that justifies cruelty...
https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=south+korea+bokna...
Fortunately, the two support each other, because if you're right, expressing your view in a thoughtful way makes the truth more apparent to others, while fulminating and attacking enemies merely alienates everyone who doesn't already agree with you. You end up discrediting the very truth you're advocating for. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There is evidence for this.
These wildlife markets are a particular problem. But virologists (see: Pandemic on Netflix) highlight not just the wildlife trade be our enormous animal agriculture production as an explosive situation.
This is a pretty common theme with black markets in general, on that note. See also: black market drugs being "cut" with harmful substances, black market sex labor being a vector for human trafficking and STDs, black market medical procedures being more susceptible to adverse outcomes, etc.
There are other good reasons to not eat exotic mammals, of course (i.e. if doing so puts species at risk of extinction), but the sanitation issue seems solvable.
https://youtu.be/e7S7r31cjAQ
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've banned this account for doing flamewar on HN. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607118. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
China is a country, not a race.
For example, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html says "Coronavirus (COVID-19)". So does https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2....
The point: WHO has moved away from geolocated names. https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-has-a-name-the-deadl...
https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-d...
China is a geographic region. The virus most originated from China. In any case it has become associated with China. If you can't hear the words "Chinese Virus" without feeling ill will towards Chinese people, the problem is with you, not with semantics.
To dilute the concept of racism, a concept meant to describe toxic and life-wrecking behavior like many of China's current policies, and try to stretch its meaning to cover the use of the geographical location of the origination of a virus- that is itself depraved behavior.
Uyghurs/Tibetans are targeted due to their religion. The PRC ideology has no room for religion that puts Entities above nation. Uyghurs themselves have long history of rebellions to the point that nobody knows who started the tit-for-tat incident: the Uyghurs? the Han?
You can have a long-winded argument but if you don't understand their history, culture, and 1 billion problems they have, then you don't "get" why their mindset is like that just like 'Murica with their guns and their "freedom of expression".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I hope everyone understands that we ban users not to punish anyone, but to protect the site. If people give us reason to believe that they sincerely want to use HN as intended, we're happy to unban them, and do that all the time. Also, we make mistakes sometimes—because moderation is guesswork—and appreciate being told when we do, so we can correct them.
Everyone is trying to find a culprit to pin the blame on instead of looking at their own shortcomings.
Experts have been warning us for years than something like this coronavirus was coming, and we got several alerts (SARS, MERS, etc). The Chinese cannot be blamed for the global spread of the virus and for the lack of readiness of other countries.
Let's focus on defeating this virus through global cooperation instead of pointing fingers. Once this pandemic is behind us then hopefully everyone will reflect and learn what can be learned from it.
I keep hearing they have contained it, but I also get reports that they haven’t. Also, something needs to change for their policies to not impact the rest of the world in such drastic manner.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iamactuallyverybadass/comments/fhju...
This scenario of someone eating an infected, exotic animal is just blatant racism.
At the beginning of the trade war, one of my fav NYT columnist remarked Trump was the opponent Chinese deserved, despite being pretty anti-Trump in all other regards, and had being promoted globalization for decades.
Last week, there has been a surge of articles on the Chinese websphere, describing how impotent the western authorities were when dealing with COVID-19, implied superiority of the system/culture. However, in spite of the height of nationalism, there were articles in Chinese mainstream called for respect and understanding, and they would probably never be reported anywhere in the west, after all, not news-worthy.
I thought COVID-19 would have brought us closer to deal with the unknown in front of all of us. We blew it. welcome to the era of 2nd cold war, if we are lucky enough.
What did we "blow" by not appeasing governments that do things like this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
I really don't understand how things like this are acceptable for the sake of commerce. We should expect more of our allies and partners.
But what's the point? By claiming moral high ground the argument goes nowhere. the question really is, do we fear/hate each other more than we need each other?
The point is that, apparently, you think "meddling in a Civil War" and harvesting organs from prisoners are morally equivalent. I'm not even sure what to say about that.
I can tolerate some inter-nation sabre-rattling, spying, hacking, propaganda, election meddling, maybe even the odd annexation or assassination. Although they are not necessarily things I would approve of, I consider them politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
Was there really any government without guilt or incompetence in their handling of this?
Really nobody who in any way delayed taking steps, nobody who in any way sat on information, nobody who in any way instructed a certain type of scale of coverage in an attempt to minimize panic?
Let those without sin cast the first stone.
But actually, I think the "blame game" is bullshit.
Everyone should just be like, "Holy crap, this virus doesn't care about what passport you have, we all need to just work together on this."
Good to see people contesting the blame narrative here, but better if we didn't promote this news at all. This is a highly technical site, surely there's a chance to share articles about studies, algorithms, ways data scientists/programmers/bioinformaticians can get involved, pool resources, donate cloud time, etc.
If you call saving millions of Chinese people despicable, it sounds like you're to be despised.
The cake isn't cooked yet, but Western governments are already eager to play the blame game, while China got on with getting results. Nearly zero new cases. Contained to Hebei.
You've been reading fake news... and worse, believing it. They're not pushing a conspiracy theory. They're taking a victory lap.
The comments about it being a bio weapon are from the FM, who is just volleying back Pompeo's comment about it being the "China virus". That's all it is. Tit for tat. If you believe everyone in China is obsessed with blaming the US for the virus origins, or, worse, that Chinese people believe it's a bioweapon, you're wrong, sorry.
They contained a crazy new pathogen in the biggest country on Earth, they don't need to play the blame game, and domestically their media is taking a victory lap. It's just revealing of Western incompetence, and insecurity that Western media is fanning these blaming narratives.
If you want to make me feel better, I thank you. Start by admitting your pro-Western propoganda does not tell you what's really happening in China.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've banned this account for flamewar comments. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607034
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In our town (New Jersey, USA), several parents decided to keep their kids home from school as the virus spread nearby, even as the school stayed open. Evidently (https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000006970549/cor...) in other forms of government, the government itself controls what information is available (and the ability of citizens to make prudential judgments).
That doesn't mean this virus is "China's fault." As you say, all governments demonstrated some form of incompetence (usually starting with the assumption it can't be that bad). There is here an interesting contrast in how two systems respond to incompetence. Since surely how we disseminate information is important to the response to the virus, it seems fair to point out how one system disproportionately impedes how that happens.
It is a very tight space to thread the needle—- overreact and do massive damage to our economy and physical and mental health. Too little and we overwhelm our medical system and more people die from the virus needlessly.
It is very delicate balance. Add in 27/7 media of all forms plus intense political pressure to “do something!!!! “ and here we are.
I don’t envy anybody in my regional government having to make this call.
Ps: people downvoting this and other comments like it make my point. It is currently not okay to question our current actions. There is massive social and political pressure to move toward heavy handed measures... we should be allowed to be critical or question things. Groupthink is not a good thing.
You can definitely do things like:
for even 1 year if necessary, without destroying the economy.That alone would have flattened the curve so much it is not even funny.
Just as an example, saying “no tourist travel” itself would destroy a ton of regions who depend on tourism.
It is easy to armchair quarterback how you’d deal with something like this. Especially when you can wave away “trivialities“ like “ban all non work related gatherings for a year”. LOL. Good luck with that.
Your cure is worse than the virus my friend.
Far more will die from the virus than the measures already. It take about a month from exposure to death. There are 1000s to 10s of 1000s 'walking dead' in the UK alone.
"“” When the severity of the virus is unknown, many companies have been commissioned by different hospitals to perform sequencing. After the National Centers for Disease Control received the report, they ordered all units without safety qualifications to destroy all virus samples. Less than two weeks later, the full virus sequencing results were made available to the world. "“”
I found that it's deplorable that so many white politicians and media practitioners lack professionalism and wisdom that caused so much severe spread around the world. Look at South Korean, it should be served as manual for pandemic crisis resolutions.
Especially it wouldn't mean any research result was destroyed just strands of the virus kept in places where it's not safe to keep them.
This would be really sad that a media outed completely turned around the facts to put blame on China... I mean let's be honest if it would have started in the USA (like ironically the Spanish flue did, even through it had Spanish in it's name) then I'm pretty sure the results would have been far worse then they are now.
For more explanation, see these links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606977
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No: look at Taiwan. They started acting immediately on the 29th of December and escalated very early January.
Did Taiwan have information that other countries did not? Or why did they act so quickly when other countries did not?
Certainly not from China.
Well except if it's _obvious that you act that way because of racistic ideas instead of criticism_ . Which might very well be the case for some people.
So if given out of context the sentence might be racistic or might not be racistic. Also depending on your culture it might be just a sign of strong annoyance and just that. Or a very strong insult.
Because of this, it's not really appropriate to say it either way as it seen as a insult in more cultures then ones at which it's just seen as a expression of annoyance/dislike.
There are many other, better and more appropriate ways to criticize them. Like pointing out that they act racistic themself, like it did above.
Also the initial bad response mainly comes from problems with local governance not the CCP. While the CCP controls the local goverment tightly it's also an open secet that the local government often actes in their interest first and only then in the interest of the whole country, especially if they believe they can get away with it. In the end the country is just to big with to many people to be efficiently governed. Maybe in the future with the help of more technology but not now. Through they are trying their best.
Also lets be honest. Just consider how it would have went if that virus would have sourced in the USA. I mean after having a example which is both bad (initial response) and good (follow up response) the response in the USA (or the EU) is still sup-par. I would not have been surprised that if it would have been sourced in the USA then it would have spread even faster around the world including china.
(Also as far as I have heard China did ban part of the food trading, additionally I have heard pretty racist thinks about how chines people where at fault because they eat everything etc. But the truth is they mostly eat pork. And the virus most likely was _not_ transmitted through food, through maybe still alive food, but then again still alive _normal_ food)
It could also just be the reaction of a government who is trying to downplay the virus and retain control of the narrative, however.
Sequencing shows it's 96% similar to a wild strain of coronaviruses that has been previously studied in bats though, which argues against it being engineered.
We can't prove that the virus was or was not engineered unless somebody finds a copyright message in the RNA. We do however know that the Wuhan lab had engineered similar viruses, slightly modifying bat coronaviruses so that they would be much more active against human cell lines.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/cdc-coronavirus-ch...
The implication is that there was enough time for this to be the case. There are 1.5 months between the time estimations for patient zero and the publishing to WHO.
Their attitude afterwards is consistent with an intent to control the narrative and opacity, beyond public health interest. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51364382
That one perceives something to be apparently consistent with any particular world view does not make that worldview the correct one.
I doubt anyone can talk with moral certitude in such matter, when the discussion has devolved into unreasonable degree of polarization and hostility.
All I can say is that, this isn't the time for another cold war.
If you want to bash each other's countries, tribes, parties, and ideologies, there are other places on the internet. This place is for curious, thoughtful conversation. That's what the majority of the community comes here for, and HN being a public forum does not entitle you to wreck it for them. The commons is delicate. Posting is a privilege. Using this place as a battlefield will lose you that privilege. Normally we'd bury any thread this wretched, but I'm leaving this one up in the hope that people will learn from the examples below.
Viruses are not the only thing that's spreading right now. If you're commenting here, you are responsible for containing your share of the stress, fear, and rage of the moment, and finding capacity for curiosity in yourself—which includes respect for other commenters. If you can't do that, that's understandable and fine, but then please self-isolate until you can.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More explanation, if wanted, is here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22386811
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If github can be used as a discussion platform it will be nice, as so far CCP dares not to close github.com, as it will impact its software industry badly.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Are you not going to address the racist dog-whistle? You work in San Francisco where many of your fellow Americans actually do have last names like Dang. Maybe you should consider the harm this type of rhetoric does to them when you ignore it.
Users who are concerned about HN moderation practices around racial (including anti-Chinese) attacks on HN, and personal attacks on HN, won't have a hard time finding examples. Needless to say, this has nothing specifically to do with China or Chinese people. It would be the same for any national or ethnic background.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I take it that you consider moderation in the thread as an attempt at appeasement of the Chinese government?
I'm not sure if you share my opinion, but I've felt that this thread, even though it was about a great article, had very destructive and misinforming discussion. I too am incensed at the contents of the article, but discussing it calmer would be preferable and lead to more useful insight.
There's some god-awful xenophobic comments in this thread, for sure.
[snip for guidelines]
But it's no secret that there's a Chinese propaganda machine out there, fighting to control the media narrative. This article (and the expulsion of US journalists) are just the latest evidence.
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That applies on Chinese topics as much as any other topic.
We added that rule after years of experience and I don't know how many hundreds of hours poring over data on this. At least on HN, these perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. That is, people perceive such biases based entirely on their pre-existing opinions, and one can reliably predict their opinions from the complaints about bias and secret manipulation that they post. You can find years' worth of cases here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There's a psychological explanation for this phenomenon: pain is more memorable than pleasure. Posts we dislike make a stronger impression than ones we like. We're more likely to notice them and they burn more into the retina, creating an afterimage that's intensely biased—but the bias is in the eye, not the objects. Clear evidence of this is that people with opposing views about X inevitably have opposite views of how the community (or mods) are biased about X. Perceptions of sinister manipulation are a variation of this.
The reason this comes up so often is that HN is a much larger and more diverse community than it seems. People are coming here from all sorts of different backgrounds—a much wider range than most readers assume. When we judge comments by our own range of familiarity, many of those comments end up sounding "...odd to say the least". This is an artifact in the perceiver, not the perceived. We all have a more parochial perspective than we imagine we do. When our sensibilities get hit by what to us is an outlier, a flying internet object of obnoxious opinion, we immediately feel anger and fear. Those feelings suck, so we defend against them by reframing the provocation as not-in-good-faith: a spy, a shill, a sinister manipulator.
The solution is to have one's default reaction to these outlier ("...odd to say the least") comments become expansion rather than protection: that is, to allow the encounter to expand our mental model of what the community is and whom it contains. To do that is to practice the site guideline, "Assume good faith". This isn't easy, because it means you have to tolerate the initial hit of pain and anger and wait for it to subside before settling on a reaction. That's the hard work of tolerance.
It doesn't follow there's no such thing as manipulation, of course. It simply means that one no longer reaches for manipulation as a first explanation for what one finds "odd", instead requiring that there be additional evidence before entertaining such a charge.
This is not an abstract issue for HN, it's an existential one. People have been hounded off this site simply for representing their backgrounds and expressing sincere views. I'm sure the users who did the hounding would be horrified if they knew what they were doing, but it all happens so easily on the internet, at such great distance, where we're all talking not to living humans but to little bits of text that we flesh out with our imagination.
respect
I agree with what you're saying, and appreciate the point, but there's a practical basis to the frustration as well:
Sometimes seemingly banal comments are down-voted with no explanation or reply, and this starts the "You're posting too fast" chain, and next thing you know any slightly contrarian view (which, apparently, I hold in spades) is prevented from being presented. (It's literally happening to me as I attempted to post this comment).
If people want to down-vote, that's their prerogative; I'm not interested in accumulating points. But the mechanism of throttling people with down-voted comments contributes to an echo chamber, even if it serves a higher purpose. I've been hanging around here for a long time, and it feels like it's gotten a lot worse, especially for someone on the less common side of the political spectrum. It's hard to participate sometimes.
I realize even the discussion of voting is against guidelines, and I have no solution, so I'll bow out. I appreciate the thoughtful reply.
But what makes me worried is how china tends to always shift blame of their mess-ups on western countries and tends to display them (especial the USA) as that "evil" states which constantly wants to harm them. This, weather intentionally or accidentally, is setting the ground work for a far reaching economical and military escalation: I.e. for a war with strong racist tendencies. This can long term be far more dangerous then the SARS-Cov-2 virus or climate change as it could me a fully escalated third world war.
EDIT: Be aware that some other comments imply that the context is quite different then show in the article and china might have acted very responsible.
Why must we always have a foreign enemy? Be it soviets, muslims, mexicans or now China.
Also seems a lot of folks takes a stance on China and view anything they do through that lens only. Those that are anti China seems unable to find anything China does to be positive. Similarly those that defend China seems unable to criticize China at all. Because of these default positions take, more nuanced discussions become ideological ones.
However, at places like HN, usually people and discussions are more rational and fact-based.
I've seen this happening in other circumstances and on other topics, that people who are educated and respected becoming mindless drones, or loss a significant portion of their reasoning ability and rationality whenever a certain note is played. Sometimes decency is lost too.
But then, I expect better on HN and I'm glad the moderator(s?) is doing something about it.
Cheers.
I don't know what the solution is. Maybe we should all strive to understand the other side better instead of casting quick judgement. Environmental and other issues aside, perhaps this is one of the benefits of the recent increase (not counting the current issue with COVID19) of global travel and tourism.
A non-trivial part of the tension between these two powers centers on and around technology, science and industries on the cutting edge. The sensitive topics touch on many of the readers' primary domains.
I don't know? Why must "we"? Can't China just get it's shit in order? Is it too much to ask for?
But this response is the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm sure you have legitimate reasons to have a negative view of China, but discussions just devolve into emotionally charged rhetoric that doesn't go anywhere. How am I supposed to respond to this in a constructive way?
I think it is okay to get a bit emotional if the whole world economy is plunged into the gutter because Xi Jinping conducts himself like insolent prissy spoilt child in need of a good talking to by an adult. And maybe if his parents did their job the whole world would not be in this state now. So yes, I am fucking emotional about this. Billions of people have to suffer because of Xi Jinping and his party.
Nearly all government leaders' first reaction is try to downplay disasters.. after all they are politicians, not science experts.
Did you not watch Chernobyl? It's literally the same plot.
Even in this particular case, the Chinese govt. wasn't the only one trying to downplay this. The US government did the exact same thing even after China had already come to its senses.
There is a difference between the capacity of US and EU to suppress information and the capacity of authoritarian Chinese State to do this. The media in US and EU does not take direction from the Government.
> The US government did the exact same thing even after China had already come to its senses.
Did the US govt allow wet markets with live wild animals to operate in China for the political gain of Xi Jinping and China? Did the US govt downplaying this change the reporting of the media? Did the US order samples destroyed and ordered laboratories to not release information? No?
Stop running cover for Xi Jinping.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html