6 ms·

The Word from Wuhan

238 points by yarapavan 7y ago

baal80spam 7y ago
You can use the Reader View in Firefox to work around the paywall.
- kerng 7y ago
  That always works like a charm!
  - generalpass 7y ago
    Firefox has hardwired me to enter Ctrl+Alt+R whenever something even slightly interferes with reading the content.
- saurik 7y ago
  Or just press stop before the paywall executes.
- neonate 7y ago
  That only shows me the first few paragraphs.
- antepodius 7y ago
  Noscript usually works pretty well for this sort of thing, as well. Also very interesting to see what domains a site is grabbing its javascript from (and which sites are calling from 20+ different domains for a simple news website...!)
dragonshed 7y ago
> There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy ‘throwing woks’. I appreciate learning idioms of countries foreign to me, and in this case it makes for a great article.
- kohtatsu 7y ago
  There was an great episode on this topic on CBC a week ago: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/the-life-giving-nature-of-language-1.5476924 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/the-life-giving-nature-of-... (Available on most Podcast apps too https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/tapestry-from-cbc-radio/id250082526?i=1000466998731 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/tapestry-from-cbc-radi...)
aaron695 7y ago
Little more about the student lead DDOS attack here - https://technode.com/2020/03/02/dingtalk-begs-for-stars-on-chinas-app-stores/ https://technode.com/2020/03/02/dingtalk-begs-for-stars-on-c...
- JCharante 7y ago
  <quote>On the first day back to school, DingTalk saw over 50 million students and 600,000 teachers in China using its live-streaming feature to hold online classes.</quote> OMG! Their infrastructure team must be so proud, I can't imagine the app saw even a one-hundrenth of that much traffic before then.
  - carltonf 7y ago
    DingTalk is a product from Alibaba, which also owns Taobao and Alibaba Cloud. DingTalk celebrated 200 million registered users back in August 2019. So this online course surge is probably not that a big stretch for them.
  - techslave 7y ago
    obviously it did. you cannot scale 100x at a moment’s notice
zepearl 7y ago
I liked the article, thx :)
jessaustin 7y ago
Expecting local officials to deal effectively with extraordinary circumstances is unrealistic. A wealthy populous nation should be able to support a team of national experts to assist in times and places of particular need, in a variety of fields including that of infectious disease. The system described in TFA seems rather more like a struggle among competing cults of personality. "Your mayor sucks! Now you will be ruled by our super-mayor!" "Does he know a single thing about health?" "Who knows?! Who cares!? He has a take-charge personality!"
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Leadership is exactly about organizing groups of experts to fight against specific threats to the common good. The point isn't that local officials should have been working in the hospitals, it is that they should have been collecting the infectious disease experts and executing against a containment and mitigation plan.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Are you a "West Wing" fan? The whole point of a unitary centrally-controlled state apparatus like that in China is that leadership of the type you describe does not exist. If it did exist, it would not exist locally. Local officials are to follow directions, which come from more central authorities. Sometimes they follow directions poorly, because they're more concerned with their personal well-being than that of their subjects. That's understandable, because those orders themselves came from the same motivation on their bosses' parts. Am I criticizing the form of government that the Chinese people endure? Yes! It is much like most other forms of government endured by humanity.
- michaelt 7y ago
  If your problem is “the division of responsibility and authority is disputed” or “collected resources aren’t being distributed due to confusion” or “key workers are distracted by CYA” a respected, competent leader might be just what they need.
  - 7y ago
williesleg 7y ago
The Wu Tang Flu!
jpster 7y ago
The question remains: what will happen when everyone returns to work and school? I would expect infections to flare up again. What then?
- sgt101 7y ago
  Deal with each new outbreak quickly and efficiently. The problem in Italy and China was that the outbreak got out of hand before measures to deal were in place, the big deal here seems to be that if people in critical conditions get support with breathing they often pull through, if they don't they die. If you are dealing with 1000's of cases providing supported ventilation is not possible. If you are dealing with 10's then it can be done.
  - jpster 7y ago
    Practically speaking, I think this means e.g. temperature checks at every school, place of work, subway, train, airport, and large residential building. At entry/exit, like metal detectors. Routine swabs / testing. Ideally could swap, put into an envelope and send off to a central testing facility. What else? Given the reports of asymptomatic testing, not sure we can confine to small size flare-ups in the absence of this.
- tsomctl 7y ago
  In terms of human suffering/death, it's better to spread out the number of sick people over a longer period of time. There's a finite number of hospital beds and doctors, and you'll get better care if there are fewer other people sick at the same time. It's better for the economy, though, if everyone gets sick as soon as possible, so that everyone gets better at the same time and factories can spin back up.
richk449 7y ago
The most fun anecdote: Zhang Wenhong, director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital, became a national hero for a press conference speech: The first-aid team put themselves in great danger. They are tired and need to rest. We shouldn’t take advantage of good people. From now on, I’ll replace all the frontline medics with party members from different sectors. Didn’t you all swear to put the people’s interest first when you joined the party, whatever the difficulties? I don’t care what you were actually thinking when you joined the party. Now it’s time to live up to what you promised. I don’t care if you personally agree or not: it’s non-negotiable. But good article - read the whole thing.
- ksec 7y ago
  >with party members from different sectors Pretty sure that was mis-translated ( Intentional or not ). What he meant was party member from within the Medics and Hospital. He didn't just suggest to put any party member in the frontline because they wouldn't be qualify in the first place.
  - zhte415 7y ago
    No no no.. translating is to put them in the 'headlights' of transparency of accountability. It's quite an angry comment.
coding123 7y ago
You can count on the states that have an official number of infected people of about 100 to have about 10000. You can count on US states that have 0 cases for those to have about 1000. We've passed containment options when we didn't do anything about 2 months ago. People just don't go to the doctors, especially with the news of how people are being treated on the boats.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Deductible of several thousand per person in our household. Good ol’ HSA plan (our other options guaranteed higher spending than that every year on premiums). Bet your ass we’re not going to the hospital unless we absolutely have to. And we’re lucky enough to have insurance and the means to pay if we have to (though it’ll hurt a hell of a lot).
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > Deductible of several thousand per person in our household Call your insurer. Many are waiving testing and treatment, including for HDHPs, in respect of SARS-Covid-2.
    - dboreham 7y ago
      Insurers are proven to live when you call them (source: personal experience in the past).
      - nojvek 7y ago
        Lie you mean ?
    - syntaxing 7y ago
      Not sure why you're being downvoted because that's what they've been announcing. Whether they uphold their agreement is a different story but this what we're being told by the insurers.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
allovernow 7y ago
This is how authoritarian socialism/communism pits people against each other. Imagine a massively broad and deep bureaucracy which controls every aspect of your life. Where so many things are illegal that practically everyone is breaking some law - and the government (or your personal enemies) just need a reason to get you reprimanded - piss off the wrong boss and your life is turned upside down. Our system in the West isn't perfect but at least your mistakes (real and otherwise) typically don't follow you for the rest of your life, excluding extreme cases.
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
>Teams of doctors arrived from every province in China to join the effort and an army of engineers was deployed to build two new hospitals in ten days. Millions of people watched the buildings go up. That's unbelievable. Where can I read or see more about that? EDIT: Found something https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-hospitals-in-days-to-combat-coronavirus.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-ho... I am still in disbelief.
- wilbeibi 7y ago
  https://youtu.be/XU9FVqwO4TM https://youtu.be/XU9FVqwO4TM
- positr0n 7y ago
  Wendover Productions in the topic: https://youtu.be/3Sh7hghljuQ https://youtu.be/3Sh7hghljuQ
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.md/6g6nO http://archive.md/6g6nO
RickJWagner 7y ago
Amazing. Thanks to the author.
webninja 7y ago
“The censor machine is working tirelessly too. Public mood is constantly monitored and analysed by AI, with countermeasures devised to match it. Take the case of Li Wenliang. Li, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, was one of the first to warn people about the new virus. On 30 December he messaged a group of colleagues about a possible outbreak; a few days later he was summoned by police and reprimanded for ‘making false statements that disturbed the public order’. Li continued his work at the hospital and on 10 January started experiencing symptoms of infection. On 6 February, his heart stopped.“ What a completely different world these people live in.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > What a completely different world these people live in. - No Wikipedia. - No user generated yelp reviews. - No non-government approved news articles. - Every message you write online can affect your credit-worthiness and your children's access to schools. - Buggy face recognition technology that routinely implicates the innocent - Secret detentions if you are "deemed" a scofflaw, with no clear process to challenge it. - Non-existent property rights unless you have connections to power. I love the Chinese people and culture, but the Chinese government is one of the worst ever. It doesn't just effect the way you live, it effects your ability to even think.

The Word from Wuhan

238 points by yarapavan 7y ago

baal80spam 7y ago

You can use the Reader View in Firefox to work around the paywall.

kerng 7y ago
That always works like a charm!
- generalpass 7y ago
  Firefox has hardwired me to enter Ctrl+Alt+R whenever something even slightly interferes with reading the content.
saurik 7y ago
Or just press stop before the paywall executes.
neonate 7y ago
That only shows me the first few paragraphs.
antepodius 7y ago
Noscript usually works pretty well for this sort of thing, as well. Also very interesting to see what domains a site is grabbing its javascript from (and which sites are calling from 20+ different domains for a simple news website...!)

dragonshed 7y ago

> There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy ‘throwing woks’. I appreciate learning idioms of countries foreign to me, and in this case it makes for a great article.

kohtatsu 7y ago
There was an great episode on this topic on CBC a week ago: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/the-life-giving-nature-of-language-1.5476924 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/the-life-giving-nature-of-... (Available on most Podcast apps too https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/tapestry-from-cbc-radio/id250082526?i=1000466998731 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/tapestry-from-cbc-radi...)

aaron695 7y ago

Little more about the student lead DDOS attack here - https://technode.com/2020/03/02/dingtalk-begs-for-stars-on-chinas-app-stores/ https://technode.com/2020/03/02/dingtalk-begs-for-stars-on-c...

JCharante 7y ago
<quote>On the first day back to school, DingTalk saw over 50 million students and 600,000 teachers in China using its live-streaming feature to hold online classes.</quote> OMG! Their infrastructure team must be so proud, I can't imagine the app saw even a one-hundrenth of that much traffic before then.
- carltonf 7y ago
  DingTalk is a product from Alibaba, which also owns Taobao and Alibaba Cloud. DingTalk celebrated 200 million registered users back in August 2019. So this online course surge is probably not that a big stretch for them.
- techslave 7y ago
  obviously it did. you cannot scale 100x at a moment’s notice

zepearl 7y ago

I liked the article, thx :)

jessaustin 7y ago

Expecting local officials to deal effectively with extraordinary circumstances is unrealistic. A wealthy populous nation should be able to support a team of national experts to assist in times and places of particular need, in a variety of fields including that of infectious disease. The system described in TFA seems rather more like a struggle among competing cults of personality. "Your mayor sucks! Now you will be ruled by our super-mayor!" "Does he know a single thing about health?" "Who knows?! Who cares!? He has a take-charge personality!"

koheripbal 7y ago
Leadership is exactly about organizing groups of experts to fight against specific threats to the common good. The point isn't that local officials should have been working in the hospitals, it is that they should have been collecting the infectious disease experts and executing against a containment and mitigation plan.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Are you a "West Wing" fan? The whole point of a unitary centrally-controlled state apparatus like that in China is that leadership of the type you describe does not exist. If it did exist, it would not exist locally. Local officials are to follow directions, which come from more central authorities. Sometimes they follow directions poorly, because they're more concerned with their personal well-being than that of their subjects. That's understandable, because those orders themselves came from the same motivation on their bosses' parts. Am I criticizing the form of government that the Chinese people endure? Yes! It is much like most other forms of government endured by humanity.
michaelt 7y ago
If your problem is “the division of responsibility and authority is disputed” or “collected resources aren’t being distributed due to confusion” or “key workers are distracted by CYA” a respected, competent leader might be just what they need.
- 7y ago

williesleg 7y ago

The Wu Tang Flu!

jpster 7y ago

The question remains: what will happen when everyone returns to work and school? I would expect infections to flare up again. What then?

sgt101 7y ago
Deal with each new outbreak quickly and efficiently. The problem in Italy and China was that the outbreak got out of hand before measures to deal were in place, the big deal here seems to be that if people in critical conditions get support with breathing they often pull through, if they don't they die. If you are dealing with 1000's of cases providing supported ventilation is not possible. If you are dealing with 10's then it can be done.
- jpster 7y ago
  Practically speaking, I think this means e.g. temperature checks at every school, place of work, subway, train, airport, and large residential building. At entry/exit, like metal detectors. Routine swabs / testing. Ideally could swap, put into an envelope and send off to a central testing facility. What else? Given the reports of asymptomatic testing, not sure we can confine to small size flare-ups in the absence of this.
tsomctl 7y ago
In terms of human suffering/death, it's better to spread out the number of sick people over a longer period of time. There's a finite number of hospital beds and doctors, and you'll get better care if there are fewer other people sick at the same time. It's better for the economy, though, if everyone gets sick as soon as possible, so that everyone gets better at the same time and factories can spin back up.

richk449 7y ago

The most fun anecdote: Zhang Wenhong, director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital, became a national hero for a press conference speech: The first-aid team put themselves in great danger. They are tired and need to rest. We shouldn’t take advantage of good people. From now on, I’ll replace all the frontline medics with party members from different sectors. Didn’t you all swear to put the people’s interest first when you joined the party, whatever the difficulties? I don’t care what you were actually thinking when you joined the party. Now it’s time to live up to what you promised. I don’t care if you personally agree or not: it’s non-negotiable. But good article - read the whole thing.

ksec 7y ago
>with party members from different sectors Pretty sure that was mis-translated ( Intentional or not ). What he meant was party member from within the Medics and Hospital. He didn't just suggest to put any party member in the frontline because they wouldn't be qualify in the first place.
- zhte415 7y ago
  No no no.. translating is to put them in the 'headlights' of transparency of accountability. It's quite an angry comment.

coding123 7y ago

You can count on the states that have an official number of infected people of about 100 to have about 10000. You can count on US states that have 0 cases for those to have about 1000. We've passed containment options when we didn't do anything about 2 months ago. People just don't go to the doctors, especially with the news of how people are being treated on the boats.

karatestomp 7y ago
Deductible of several thousand per person in our household. Good ol’ HSA plan (our other options guaranteed higher spending than that every year on premiums). Bet your ass we’re not going to the hospital unless we absolutely have to. And we’re lucky enough to have insurance and the means to pay if we have to (though it’ll hurt a hell of a lot).
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > Deductible of several thousand per person in our household Call your insurer. Many are waiving testing and treatment, including for HDHPs, in respect of SARS-Covid-2.
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Insurers are proven to live when you call them (source: personal experience in the past).
    - nojvek 7y ago
      Lie you mean ?
  - syntaxing 7y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted because that's what they've been announcing. Whether they uphold their agreement is a different story but this what we're being told by the insurers.
  - karatestomp 7y ago

allovernow 7y ago

This is how authoritarian socialism/communism pits people against each other. Imagine a massively broad and deep bureaucracy which controls every aspect of your life. Where so many things are illegal that practically everyone is breaking some law - and the government (or your personal enemies) just need a reason to get you reprimanded - piss off the wrong boss and your life is turned upside down. Our system in the West isn't perfect but at least your mistakes (real and otherwise) typically don't follow you for the rest of your life, excluding extreme cases.

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

>Teams of doctors arrived from every province in China to join the effort and an army of engineers was deployed to build two new hospitals in ten days. Millions of people watched the buildings go up. That's unbelievable. Where can I read or see more about that? EDIT: Found something https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-hospitals-in-days-to-combat-coronavirus.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-ho... I am still in disbelief.

wilbeibi 7y ago
https://youtu.be/XU9FVqwO4TM https://youtu.be/XU9FVqwO4TM
positr0n 7y ago
Wendover Productions in the topic: https://youtu.be/3Sh7hghljuQ https://youtu.be/3Sh7hghljuQ

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.md/6g6nO http://archive.md/6g6nO

RickJWagner 7y ago

Amazing. Thanks to the author.

webninja 7y ago

“The censor machine is working tirelessly too. Public mood is constantly monitored and analysed by AI, with countermeasures devised to match it. Take the case of Li Wenliang. Li, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, was one of the first to warn people about the new virus. On 30 December he messaged a group of colleagues about a possible outbreak; a few days later he was summoned by police and reprimanded for ‘making false statements that disturbed the public order’. Li continued his work at the hospital and on 10 January started experiencing symptoms of infection. On 6 February, his heart stopped.“ What a completely different world these people live in.

speedplane 7y ago
> What a completely different world these people live in. - No Wikipedia. - No user generated yelp reviews. - No non-government approved news articles. - Every message you write online can affect your credit-worthiness and your children's access to schools. - Buggy face recognition technology that routinely implicates the innocent - Secret detentions if you are "deemed" a scofflaw, with no clear process to challenge it. - Non-existent property rights unless you have connections to power. I love the Chinese people and culture, but the Chinese government is one of the worst ever. It doesn't just effect the way you live, it effects your ability to even think.