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To me it seems WHO was downplaying it the whole time. First lie is China will be able to contain it and now they don't even call it a pandemic. Also R0 is much

by pezo1919 7y ago

To me it seems WHO was downplaying it the whole time. First lie is China will be able to contain it and now they don't even call it a pandemic. Also R0 is much higher then for flu. I really hope the new idea about transmissability is true but if it is I don't get why China treats it as they do. Wuhan is locked for 40+ days. I can't trust WHO now related to Covid-19, especially after what happened to stock. Of course they have to lie more if that avoids "panic". Truth is underrated in our civilization at the moment.

blackrock 7y ago
China’s authorities, nor the WHO, never claimed that China could contain the virus. China’s goal with the Wuhan lockdown, then Hubei, then all of China, was to slow down the spread of the virus. In order to give themselves, and humanity, a chance to fight it. And to understand it, and devise a cure or vaccine for it. The escape of the virus was inevitable. This was a known fact. To believe otherwise is naive. The only thing you can buy with the lockdown, is time. And to make matters worse, the governments of the world, flew all their citizens out of Wuhan and China. Then, they screwed up the decontamination and quarantine process. The incompetence of the American CDC shipped out faulty test kits all over the world. Then they released someone infected into San Antonio, before their quarantine was over, and before the positive test results came back. Then, news came out that the flight attendants and pilots flying the chartered planes, weren’t even properly protected from airborne transmissions of the virus. Then, the Princess cruise ship quarantine was a disaster, which is entirely the fault of the Western governments. So now, the responsibility of the spread of the virus outside of China, lays in the respective governments, and their inability to monitor and contain it. So the blame goes all around. It really is illogical to blame the China government for a virus that arose out of nature.
eli 7y ago
Did they really say China would be able to contain it?
- pezo1919 7y ago
  Could not find the exact reference, but here are some other bullshit from that time: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178015.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178015.shtml That "transparency" and "openness" were quoted a lot but it was not the case at all. Many chinese doctors and journalists were shut down.
  - knzhou 7y ago
    A month ago I took a lot of flak for saying that China's numbers were probably faithfully reported, as accurately as their logistics permitted. This was a claim that literally nobody could make anywhere on the Western internet without being downvoted to hell and called a shill. Everybody agreed that all numbers were completely made up, because somebody was able to fit a quadratic curve through 3 of their data points. I still can't say China's data was real without being called a shill, but it's getting increasingly obvious that this was the case. China's numbers line up perfectly with what visiting WHO observers saw (as stated in their latest report), their hospital occupancy, their rate of exported cases, economic activity in the country, and the day to day experience of hundreds of millions of actual human beings. Anybody who still says it's all fake is just jacking off on nationalism.
    - RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 7y ago
      > Anybody who still says it's all fake is just jacking off on nationalism. I mean, they're hoarding toilet paper for a reason...
    - fspeech 7y ago
      There is definitely opaqueness and one needs to know how to read the data. For example China does not report people who test positive but do not develop pneumonia. The criteria for classification is clearly listed in the national guideline but is easy to escape notice because the daily report is terse and does not reference the definitions. It may not be a big deal in terms of assessing mortality (WHO explained the percentage of asympotamaic cases that test positive is small), but it can make a significant difference when assessing risk for a particular region. If a region reports zero case but there is actually a postive test, the risk outlook is quite different even though the report is technically correct. But it would be unfortunate to then disregard all Chinese data. That would be like throwing out the baby with bath water. If we don't study their experience we will be bound to repeat their mistakes. Fortunately this does not appear to be the case with medical professionals and scientists, judging from the volume of peer reviewed publications coming out of China.
cyphar 7y ago
> I can't trust WHO now related to Covid-19, especially after what happened to stock. The stock market is an indicator of investor confidence. How investors feel about a particular event is not necessarily accurate, and has basically no direct relation to the WHO.
- notahacker 7y ago
  Also, even a perfectly successful way of containing Covid-19 would depress stock values [against a benchmark of the virus not existing] if it involved containment actions such as isolating significant numbers of people and cancelling events and flights.
- cm2187 7y ago
  Also stocks react to the economic impact of the panic, not necessarily to the disease itself. I also wouldn’t overplay the market correction. We are back to where stocks were in Oct last year, when there were no concern about the virus.
FabHK 7y ago
Well, the conventional wisdom, as it were, was that R0 is much higher than with influenza, but here the WHO appears to contradict that. I don’t see what’s gained by just repeating the conventional wisdom.
isaaafc 7y ago
Well said. I don't get why people are so optimistic and keep trusting the WHO, given they have downplayed the situation multiple times, and that China was doing a brilliant job to contain the Wuhan Corona Virus. Look at the spread of the corona virus in South Korea and Italy now. Then look at Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose people don't trust China for even a bit. The first thing China did was to detain whistle blowers. One of them died from this virus. What they did was to conceal the outbreak, not tackling it.

blackrock 7y ago

China’s authorities, nor the WHO, never claimed that China could contain the virus. China’s goal with the Wuhan lockdown, then Hubei, then all of China, was to slow down the spread of the virus. In order to give themselves, and humanity, a chance to fight it. And to understand it, and devise a cure or vaccine for it. The escape of the virus was inevitable. This was a known fact. To believe otherwise is naive. The only thing you can buy with the lockdown, is time. And to make matters worse, the governments of the world, flew all their citizens out of Wuhan and China. Then, they screwed up the decontamination and quarantine process. The incompetence of the American CDC shipped out faulty test kits all over the world. Then they released someone infected into San Antonio, before their quarantine was over, and before the positive test results came back. Then, news came out that the flight attendants and pilots flying the chartered planes, weren’t even properly protected from airborne transmissions of the virus. Then, the Princess cruise ship quarantine was a disaster, which is entirely the fault of the Western governments. So now, the responsibility of the spread of the virus outside of China, lays in the respective governments, and their inability to monitor and contain it. So the blame goes all around. It really is illogical to blame the China government for a virus that arose out of nature.

eli 7y ago

Did they really say China would be able to contain it?

pezo1919 7y ago
Could not find the exact reference, but here are some other bullshit from that time: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178015.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178015.shtml That "transparency" and "openness" were quoted a lot but it was not the case at all. Many chinese doctors and journalists were shut down.
- knzhou 7y ago
  A month ago I took a lot of flak for saying that China's numbers were probably faithfully reported, as accurately as their logistics permitted. This was a claim that literally nobody could make anywhere on the Western internet without being downvoted to hell and called a shill. Everybody agreed that all numbers were completely made up, because somebody was able to fit a quadratic curve through 3 of their data points. I still can't say China's data was real without being called a shill, but it's getting increasingly obvious that this was the case. China's numbers line up perfectly with what visiting WHO observers saw (as stated in their latest report), their hospital occupancy, their rate of exported cases, economic activity in the country, and the day to day experience of hundreds of millions of actual human beings. Anybody who still says it's all fake is just jacking off on nationalism.
  - RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 7y ago
    > Anybody who still says it's all fake is just jacking off on nationalism. I mean, they're hoarding toilet paper for a reason...
  - fspeech 7y ago
    There is definitely opaqueness and one needs to know how to read the data. For example China does not report people who test positive but do not develop pneumonia. The criteria for classification is clearly listed in the national guideline but is easy to escape notice because the daily report is terse and does not reference the definitions. It may not be a big deal in terms of assessing mortality (WHO explained the percentage of asympotamaic cases that test positive is small), but it can make a significant difference when assessing risk for a particular region. If a region reports zero case but there is actually a postive test, the risk outlook is quite different even though the report is technically correct. But it would be unfortunate to then disregard all Chinese data. That would be like throwing out the baby with bath water. If we don't study their experience we will be bound to repeat their mistakes. Fortunately this does not appear to be the case with medical professionals and scientists, judging from the volume of peer reviewed publications coming out of China.

cyphar 7y ago

> I can't trust WHO now related to Covid-19, especially after what happened to stock. The stock market is an indicator of investor confidence. How investors feel about a particular event is not necessarily accurate, and has basically no direct relation to the WHO.

notahacker 7y ago
Also, even a perfectly successful way of containing Covid-19 would depress stock values [against a benchmark of the virus not existing] if it involved containment actions such as isolating significant numbers of people and cancelling events and flights.
cm2187 7y ago
Also stocks react to the economic impact of the panic, not necessarily to the disease itself. I also wouldn’t overplay the market correction. We are back to where stocks were in Oct last year, when there were no concern about the virus.

FabHK 7y ago

Well, the conventional wisdom, as it were, was that R0 is much higher than with influenza, but here the WHO appears to contradict that. I don’t see what’s gained by just repeating the conventional wisdom.

isaaafc 7y ago

Well said. I don't get why people are so optimistic and keep trusting the WHO, given they have downplayed the situation multiple times, and that China was doing a brilliant job to contain the Wuhan Corona Virus. Look at the spread of the corona virus in South Korea and Italy now. Then look at Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose people don't trust China for even a bit. The first thing China did was to detain whistle blowers. One of them died from this virus. What they did was to conceal the outbreak, not tackling it.