> I expect any evidence whatsoever. As it is, you have no evidence one way or another, so it's neither proven nor disproven, nor is it officially denied. > I

> I expect any evidence whatsoever. As it is, you have no evidence one way or another, so it's neither proven nor disproven, nor is it officially denied. > I correctly pointed out that the WHCDC is located 3 km away. You incorrectly claimed that the WHCDC is not located at that spot. The WHCDC is an organization with several facilities in Wuhan, one being at that location. > I still haven't seen any evidence that any WHCDC lab keeps bats, much less that they keep bats at a small satellite office away from the main campus. The papers on sample collection state that samples are brought back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Here's the paper regarding the bats collected by the CDC: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1003159 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... They report that they collected bats, not samples from bats. You can tell that it must have been live bats, because surgery under anesthesia was performed on them. All of the authors have CDC-affiliation, none have affiliation with the Institute of Virology. > Because it plays into American anti-Communist hysteria, a very powerful force going back to the McCarthy era in the 1950s. I don't think so, especially considering that China is better at capitalism than the US these days. How else am I supposed to refer to the ruling party, when they are called the Communist Party of China? > What specific actions should have been taken by which specific Party organs in order to contain the outbreak at the source? I'm interested in your detailed knowledge of how the Party organs function. What difference does it make? Like I said, the government is subordinate to the party, not the other way around. > The reports were that once they discovered that patient samples contained a SARS-like coronavirus, the government ordered low-security labs to either transfer their samples to high-security labs or to destroy them. They also quickly shared the genome with the international scientific community, which doesn't align with your depiction of their behavior. "On 1 January 2020, a genetic sequencing company was notified by the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee that further sequencing of novel coronavirus samples were no longer allowed, existing samples must be destroyed and all data must be kept secret." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_January_2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande... "Must be kept secret", in other words, covered up. It's true that that nine days later - a long time during an outbreak of a novel disease - the genome was posted online. That was only after the higher-ups at the CCP decided that a coverup was no longer feasible. > This is what the quarantine centers looked like: [1][2]. That's where people with mild cases were sent. Describing that as "open-floor internment centers where people had no protection" strikes me as inaccurate and really just an attempt at demonization. Your pictures show people in an open-floor facility, close to each other, with no protection. We know that these people were interned there against their will and by force, if necessary. Not just mild cases, suspected cases. So, what part exactly strikes you as "inaccurate"? > Coupled with universal symptom checks, centralized quarantine is very effective at reducing the reproductive number of the virus. That's how they got down to R ~ 0.3 in Wuhan. Of course, totalitarian measures were successful and the numbers, which are above suspicion, prove it. Pardon my sarcasm. > I think the country whose leadership decided to sacrifice 70,000+ of its citizens' lives to the economy has no moral standing to criticize others' handling of the outbreak. I'm not "the country". You're having a conversation with an individual. I can criticize anything I want, I don't need moral license. You're free to condemn the Trump administration's handling of the situation, but perhaps you should take into account that the US is a free country and the president has limited powers. I'm sure that with totalitarian measures, we could achieve an amazing R, a tremendous R, the best R in the world! It only would take Trump to become a dictator. Would that make you happy? > ...the President is fine with people dying. Every government is fine with people dying, even if it doesn't have a loudmouth president to actually say it. Many countries are easing their lockdowns now. Does that mean more people will die? Of course! It's a trade-off.