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"especially given China's clampdown on information outflow" Come on. By late December, China's response was so drastic (including when measured against all pre

"especially given China's clampdown on information outflow" Come on. By late December, China's response was so drastic (including when measured against all previous coronavirus outbreaks) that the question of "suppressing" information about it was completely moot. The CDC completely dropped the ball on this. Yes, in part because Trump slashed their pandemic response budget, but they did a piss-poor job even for the resources at their disposal. Fox News and Trump being a source of constant disinformation and incompetence is, to me, kind of a constant of the universe. The same ought not to be true of the rest of our institutions, and yet it seems that it is.

gamblor956 7y ago
Your memory is highly selective and simply wrong. On Dec 31, China informed WHO about a mysterious cluster of respiratory ailments clustered around a seafood market in Wuhan. China didn't even close the seafood restaurant until 2020. The first confirmed death wasn't reported until January 11. China didn't begin a lockdown of Wuhan until January 23. Yes, the CDC dropped the ball, but evidence coming out in March indicates that China knew about COVID19 in early December and didn't bother to tell the rest of the world about it for another month, and even then downplayed the seriousness of the virus until the end of January. To this day China is still blocking the release of information about the severity of COVID19. WaPo reported last week that there may have been more than 40,000 COVID19 fatalities in Wuhan alone (based on manually counting the number of urns distributed by morticians) which is at more than 13x the official number of deaths reported for the entire country. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timeline-history-major-events-2020-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timelin...

gamblor956 7y ago

Your memory is highly selective and simply wrong. On Dec 31, China informed WHO about a mysterious cluster of respiratory ailments clustered around a seafood market in Wuhan. China didn't even close the seafood restaurant until 2020. The first confirmed death wasn't reported until January 11. China didn't begin a lockdown of Wuhan until January 23. Yes, the CDC dropped the ball, but evidence coming out in March indicates that China knew about COVID19 in early December and didn't bother to tell the rest of the world about it for another month, and even then downplayed the seriousness of the virus until the end of January. To this day China is still blocking the release of information about the severity of COVID19. WaPo reported last week that there may have been more than 40,000 COVID19 fatalities in Wuhan alone (based on manually counting the number of urns distributed by morticians) which is at more than 13x the official number of deaths reported for the entire country. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timeline-history-major-events-2020-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timelin...