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China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus
- platz 7y agoWell 2019-ncov is probably here to stay permanently, so while I appreciate the effort to slow it down, they're not going to save the world from it quite yet.
- xbmcuser 7y agoIf they delay the spread it gives the world time to produce vaccines.
- Taniwha 7y agoWe don't have a SARS (a related coronavirus) vaccine yet .... it's likely going to take a while, why we need to be even more careful about keeping it contained
- bitbrewer 7y agoIt is very much possible that this virus does, in the end, spread to most corners of the world. However, the fact is that by locking down Hubei, China contributed to the fight against the virus by delaying the spread of the virus greatly. So China is to be applauded for doing this.
- huxflux 7y agoWhat are you basing this statement on? or is it just the flu of Reddit-inspired speculations on HN?
- dehrmann 7y agoFeels like some version of Pandora's Box/life (or non-life, in this case) will find a way. We haven't wiped out Polio yet. Actually, there are more coronavirus cases than polio.
- greatpatton 7y agoI think that this article (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/06/hidden-coronavirus-cases-could-thwart-containment-efforts-experts-warn https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/06/h...) illustrate that it is very likely that the symptoms in most people are mild and these people are not seeking medical advice while spreading it around them. If this is really the case, it is going to be very difficult to contain it.
- cycop 7y agoThe sacrifice is only self-interest to save their own economy
- bitbrewer 7y agoDo not agree. It is like saying doctors work only to earn money. The fact is that China is helping itself and other countries at the same time.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIt's been a while since the West had the capability and know-how to manufacture most of the trinkets it uses, so Chinese economy going belly-up is going to have profound consequences on our own.
- sillycube 7y agoSacrifices? The officers who announced the fact were punished for making rumors. If they didn't hide the truth of Wuhan at the beginning, everyone will be aware of the issue. China is just paying for the price due to prohibiting freedom of speech
- markdown 7y agoMeanwhile, https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/408915/chinese-embassy-in-suva-hits-out-at-fiji-govt-over-border-closure https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/408915/chin...
- bitbrewer 7y agoWHO clearly does not recommend travel bans. https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on-the-second-meeting-of-the-international-health-regulations-(2005)-emergency-committee-regarding-the-outbreak-of-novel-coronavirus-(2019-ncov) https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on... : The Committee does not recommend any travel or trade restriction based on the current information available.
- droithomme 7y agoWhich is yet another reason why nothing the WHO proclaims can possibly be taken seriously by any sane, rational, or informed person.
- paganel 7y agoSome people still do believe them for what they have to say on this, for whatever reason. When you’ve got your quasi-ally (Russia) closing the 2000 km land border you know something is not right (especially as Russia is not known for caring that much for its citizens), but maybe the WHO officials know better from half a world away. On top of that the actual videos that come out of Wuhan are really heart-breaking.
- unityByFreedom 7y agoI imagine the only people who take the WHO, aka China, at their word are paid to comment. China has no free press, arrested doctors who warned of this pandemic, and the WHO is a political tool for the CCP. This whole situation comes from a lack of sharing information which is right in their wheelhouse.
- 7y ago
- rado 7y agoBloomberg didn't get the memo to report only negatively on China?
- LoSboccacc 7y agonot that they created the virus, but they keep maintaining a standard of living that promotes the rapid hybridization and diffusion of viruses. so no, they don't get to be painted as saviors after being responsible for the issue to begin with.
- macewindu 7y ago> they keep maintaining a standard of living that promotes the rapid hybridization and diffusion of viruses. Please elaborate on what you mean by "standard of living". I couldn't follow how the former leads to the latter.
- LoSboccacc 7y agowet markets? overcrowded cities? hukou preventing internal economic migrant from healthcare access?
- bitbrewer 7y agoAgree that markets selling live animals should be banned or at least monitored more strictly. Do not think the other two points are relevant. Regarding cities, if you look at Chinese society and economy, urbanization is a very positive force that contributed hugely to people's wellbeing, including health. Also BTW Chinese cities are probably the safest cities in the world. Regarding hukou, it limits access to education and house/car buying, much more than healthcare access. Actually a lot of rural residents routines go to big cities to get healthcare service.
- inimino 7y agoWhat a breathtakingly ignorant anti-Chinese comment.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 7y ago> Two new hospitals, with 2,600 beds in total, were completed in 10 days, built by more than 2,000 migrant workers China.
- Synaesthesia 7y agoIt's mighty impressive
- MaxfordAndSons 7y agoPer another HN thread on that, they're really not hospitals so much as warehouses with beds in them. Not that they necessarily need fully equipped hospital facilities for the purpose of housing and treating the infected, but it's still a mischaracterization to call them hospitals.
- evidencebased 7y agoThere are plenty of videos on Youtube showing that they are in fact not just warehouses with beds. What would they need to contain to qualify as hospitals in your opinion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDIcWkjCKIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDIcWkjCKIg
- mucholove 7y agoSacrifice my ass. Their incompetence led to a province and its people being hung out to dry. They let this problem get out of hand—and now the people there suffer. How? They ignored the doctors who attempted to report the problem on New Year’s day. They (the CCP) take no precautionary measures until their political regime is threatened. So many things done wrong—including maintaining wet market controls up a few years after H1N1.
- bitbrewer 7y agoDo not agree. Government everywhere makes mistakes under emergencies. Just look at past responses to hurricanes in the US and the current wildfire in Australia. Maybe you could say every government is incompetent. But the fact is that China reported the cases very early to WHO, get the genes mapped very quickly, and decisively locked down Hebei. So I would say so far China has shown competence and resolve, against a tough virus.
- chance_state 7y agoDid you create your account specifically to parrot CCP propaganda, or is that just a coincidence? Literally every single comment on your profile is pro-CCP, anti-US.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
- zozbot234 7y agoPlease don't do this here.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoDon’t post an explanation for why that account only comments on articles about China and tries to paint the CCP and Huawei in a favorable light? Don’t you think a real account would sometimes talk about something else?
- gdm85 7y agoFeels like the story of Dying Light
- JackPoach 7y agoThat
- apatters 7y agoJust dropping a link here, anyone who is concerned about the coronavirus and has opinions about it should imo read the daily situation reports from the WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2... In 5 minutes a day you will have a better informed perspective than what any news sites provide, my own alarm has lessened considerably after reading these.
- droithomme 7y ago> my own alarm has lessened considerably That that is the case speaks poorly of the WHO as a reliable source of information. Run the numbers. Run a regression on Hubei's spread. I did. That's the two-weeks out future for the virus outside of Hubei (unless the speculation that there was a secretive inoculation program in Hubei that went wrong). Presuming Hubei's population is normal, then this is spreading badly and is not contained. It describes the future. My future, your future. Our future. Psychotic downvoters suppressing the verifiable mathematical reality. Enjoy your apocalypse and mass death. Evil. Better to work on a fix rather than Chinese Communist State Suppression of facts here on HN. You can't suppress a virus using propaganda tactics. All you bring is death.
- jdc 7y agoWhen disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." [...] Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- droithomme 7y agoI hope you enjoy the mass death you are bringing about. I don't enjoy it at all. But philosophically, I respect your right to be a Satanist working hard to bring on the elimination of life.
- Joe-Z 7y ago
- canada_dry 7y agoWhen the dust settles from this event I suspect one positive will be that China will throw technology at the problem of more rapidly detecting viral outbreaks and more quickly locking down the affected areas.
- tim333 7y agoAnd maybe refrain from arresting doctors reporting the problem?
- backupcavalry 7y agoCorrection: China makes a show out of sacrificing a province to demonstrate to the world that no, they really are being serious about it this time, honest!
- droithomme 7y agoThis psychotic article is so biased and misrepresentative it's borderline criminal.
- hurrdurr2 7y agoThe amount of virulent (pun intended) hatred of the Chinese government really shows here. Can't say it's not well deserved but you can at least give them some credit for the quarantine.
- sliken 7y agoThey new about it for weeks, 5M people left Wuhan, and then they started the quarantine. You think that should be praised?
- hurrdurr2 7y agoIt's so easy to simply arm chair general this kind of event isn't it? Right now most of China is locked down... look at it this way, people are genuinely suffering and dying over there in droves and not so much over here. I can at least be appreciative of their sacrifice.
- lazylizard 7y agoAnd i imagine nobody wanted to tell everyone not to come home for lunar new year...
- dragonwriter 7y ago> look at it this way, people are genuinely suffering and dying over there in droves and not so much over here. I can at least be appreciative of their sacrifice. They aren't being sacrificed by the central government for us, they are being sacrificed to protect the rest of China. That has incidental benefits for not-China, but its not China sacrificing for not-China, its China sacrificing parts of China for China.
- evidencebased 7y agoCompared to the US response to H1N1 in 2009, a resounding YES! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-look-usa-2009-h1n1-virus-compared-cavolo/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-l...
- deleted 7y ago
- raxxorrax 7y agoYou can only lock down a city in a dictatorship. So I certainly would not approve of this behavior. Additionally any speculation about the effectiveness of the quarantine is futile in my opinion.
- cjslep 7y agoWhat? US state and federal emergency responders have plans and tools for locking down a city, too.
- zozbot234 7y agoYup. Specifically, many people have speculated that FEMA has contingency plans where they would even be able to set up internment camps for as many people as needed, if required to quarantine an epidemic or other national emergency. Not too far from what's going on in Wuhan.
- EForEndeavour 7y agoWhich people have speculated, and on what grounds? Anyone can speculate anything about FEMA's disaster plans to make internment of arbitrarily large numbers of people sound like a totally normal thing.
- zozbot234 7y agoLook, there's a lot of material on this already, I'm not making up anything. Just google FEMA internment camps.
- netsharc 7y agoIf you google that, you get right wing propaganda, the kind of sites which also claim Obama is a Kenyan-Muslim-time-travelling-terrorist. But maybe you are one of them, now you're going to jump and down telling us FEMA is the Waffen-SS.
- 7y ago
- coconut_crab 7y agoBack in the 60s, my father went to China to continue his study (our country was being ravaged by B52s every days). Just after he arrived, he and his classmates were put under quarantine for 1 month as a Meningitis epidemic was spreading. They spent the every days locked in the house, with a serving of guanzhong medicine in the morning. It was a shock to all the Vietnamese there, as it's basically house arrest. China has been using quarantine as a tool to prevent epidemic spreading for a long time, ignoring all the hardships of the people inside. Oh and it was during the Cultural Revolution too, so they were executing counter revolutionary people behind the school every afternoon (this was after the epidemic). Needless to say it left a very bad impression of China gov on my father.
- pritovido 7y agoNot really. China has the highest population on the world on absolute and relative basis. It it very dangerous for China letting a new virus spread. They have lots of 5 Million inhabitants cities. On Norway or any low density country in which people live isolated in Winter anyway not so much. China is not trying to save the world, it is trying to save itself.
- bhanhfo 7y agoThe amount of up- and downvoting on anything China related feels insane. I wish someone at Hackernews will write a blog post about this some day (accounts, IP addresses, and whatever other data they have). From a casual reader perspective, I feel I have not seen this pattern on other controversial topics that sometimes show up here, e. g. gun control.
- yorwba 7y agoDang posts explanations about this perception once in a while: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20brigading&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- aaron695 7y ago> China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus Bullshit. The world would have been like exactly like Hubei, and Hubei no different if they didn't lock it down. There was no "Sacrifices" Putting in curfew reduced deaths if anything, they also added doctors and built hospitals. If the 'sacrifice' is economic because of curfews, then fair enough, but they do not have deaths or illness worse because of the lock down.
- zhongjiewu 7y agoIt is not entirely true. This sacrifice entails two things. On one side, without a lockdown, people in Human can seek medical help in other cities and provinces when they get sick. After a lockdown, local medical resources are in severe shortage hence higher death rate. On the other side, it limits the spread of the disease for the good of other provinces and hence the rest of the world. If this isn't sacrifice, I'm not sure what sacrifice is.
- aaron695 7y ago> After a lockdown, local medical resources are in severe shortage hence higher death rate No, this is false. Supplies and doctors still came in after lock down. Lots of them because they were not needed elsewhere. > On one side, without a lockdown, people in Human can seek medical help in other cities and provinces when they get sick. This is also false. As soon as they leave they spread the virus any other hospital will become swamped and just the same. There sacrifice is they don't get to spread the virus and make everyone else as bad as they have it. Not quite true.... They would have it worse since they will lose resources if it spreads. But they do miss the comfort of being the same by not spreading it. That is all.
- zhongjiewu 7y ago> Supplies and doctors still came in after lock down. You mean the government get doctors from other cities to Wuhan because they are not needed, regardless if Wuhan is in medical shortage? This is a weird logic that I cannot agree. IMO, mobilizing doctors from hundreds of miles away, which costs a lot money and management effort, is exactly an attempt to solve the shortage issue. There are various video materials showing super crowded hospitals in Wuhan and other Hubei cities. It is also consistent with building not one, but two temporary hospitals with thousands of workers at much pricier cost. Based on the activity data from TV news, fever related medical visit stays in single digit nationwide. If lock down are not announced and enforced, people in Hunan that are richer will flood to other cities such as Shanghai and Beijing for better medical services, as this happens from several news reports. People would choose to travel since their immediate action will not cause medical shortage elsewhere before they are handled. The idea of seeking medical help elsewhere will make matters worse is correct, but it is a macro level insight and will not change these people's mind to grasp these resources before they are gone. It is not deniable that without a lockdown, people in Hubei province will on average get medical help in the short run and everybody else is much worse off. This is why it's not a sacrifice.