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A lot of smart people in this forum. Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus. I’ve done pandemic drills w

A lot of smart people in this forum. Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus. I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths. Covid presents like the flu, so much so you need a test, but early on a test was not available. So the symptoms are not unique. Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest. Early on there was not a significant uptick in flu cases turning to to pneumonia, so that would not have sparked interest. Early on there was not a spike in deaths, so that would not have e sparked an interest. In fact when the Chinese discovered covid, there was absolutely no evidence that anything out of the ordinary was taking place. But somehow the Chinese knew that they had a very contagious, bat based virus circulating, based on no information. Everyone is focused on the wrong thing, I want to know how they discovered it with no information? I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong. They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense.

dillondoyle 6y ago
So many great replies answer/correct some of these assumptions. Want to add that I highly recommend the frontline doc it has so much great reporting that gives the background needed here. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...
miemo23 6y ago
but there was a spike in pneumonia related cases... didn't a doctor sound the alarm on this (and was reprimanded for it)
- esja 6y ago
  Several doctors were discussing it in a WeChat group in December 2019 and were basically arrested and forced to apologise for spreading “misinformation”. The main person who became famous for sounding the alarm (Li Wenjiang, an ophthalmologist) later died of the disease.
  - throwfaraway552 6y ago
    How could an ophthalmologist know anything about a virus? It doesn’t pass the smell test.
hfjfktkrkf 6y ago
From what I've read when you have pneumonia you receive antibiotics. If that doesn't work, they test a lung wash sample against the usual bacterias/viruses. If that doesn't match anything, it's called unexplained pneumonia, and that gets escalated and the sample is sent to top labs for sequencing. When they did this, they got a 90% match to SARS and raised the alarm.
m0llusk 6y ago
You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet. There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street. That was the freak out that led to the Communist Party not being able to keep a lid on the whole mess. It wasn't just sick people showing up in hospitals in huge numbers, it was dead bodies lying in the streets. The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance. Viruses have been hopping from animal hosts from humans for a while and if anything this one was late and long expected. Either way the kind of preparations we need to make for future events are the same.
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  > There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street Wasn't this happening well after they knew the virus existed? From my understanding, they knew the virus existed very early on. Much early than when people were dropping dead in the streets or getting dragged out of their apartments.
- IAmGraydon 6y ago
  >You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet. There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street. Which is also weird because we all know Covid doesn't make people suddenly drop dead in the street.
  - TremendousJudge 6y ago
    >Covid doesn't make people suddenly drop dead in the street They do if they don't get treatment. Usual course for deadly covid is, high fevers, feeling terrible, then there's an improvement in symptoms for a couple of days, then blood oxygen levels drop and the person drops dead
    - mardifoufs 6y ago
      Any source on that? Genuinely curious as I seem to have completely forgotten about the early videos from china until now and what they pictured was very at odds with what we now know the virus can do. Wouldn't everything you described happen gradually? as in people wouldn't be able to walk normally before reaching the point where they drop dead from oxygen levels low enough to be immediately lethal? From my own experience and based on what I've read, covid can cause a quick deterioration in respiratory function but across at least hours or days. The videos also pictured people that weren't really showing any trouble breathing, it felt more like the plague than any respiratory illness. But maybe the videos were meant as "PSA's" for local consumption to get people to treat the disease more seriously? Because they were really over the top
VivaCascadia 6y ago
This episode of Frontline does a really good job of walking through the timeline of what was discovered and when, and how long they sat on that information before taking action. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...
xienze 6y ago
> I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong. Really drove me nuts how early on everyone, everyone was working overtime to try and dismiss the possibility that this was some sort of lab leak. I’m sorry but the way China went absolutely DEFCON 1 (welding people into their apartments, blocking the roads out of town, nightly fumigations of public spaces) within a short period of time strongly suggests that they had a “oh crap, _that thing we were working on got out_” moment. Never understood why people were so eager to dismiss this possibility.
- BeyondLimits99 6y ago
  Absolutely. You don't just lock up a city full of 11 million people because they have the sniffles. The western world really dropped the ball with this one.
  - kennywinker 6y ago
    You don't go defcon 1 over the sniffles but you do go defcon 1 over an unknown virus that closely matches a highly lethal virus we encountered about ten years earlier (SARS classic). There is nothing in china's outbreak response that suggests guilt.
    - acdha 6y ago
      I think a lot of westerners want to believe the conspiracy theories in part because it’s hard to admit how much more we could have learned from SARS. Ignoring China, the Taiwanese government doesn’t take orders from them and certainly wouldn’t help with a cover up but because of SARS all it took was Li Wenliang‘s post leaking for them to activate a comprehensive response. The key part was recent memory overriding the “it’ll be awfully inconvenient” reflex which is hard to avoid when you’ve been comfortable for many years.
      - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
sjg007 6y ago
>They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense. This is because you don't know how pathology works and what technologies (specifically sequencing) are available to identify pathogens of unknown origin.
agumonkey 6y ago
I'm just a dude, but early videos showed people collapsing on the streets. If you have a few people like that in one area you start to think it's more than a flu I guess.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
krallja 6y ago
Please read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
- oliv__ 6y ago
  Oh gee, what a shame that he died of Covid, at the young age of 33. A tragic coincidence
aeturnum 6y ago
> Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest. My understanding on this was that doctors local to Wuhan noticed a surprising and sudden uptick in pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. The Chinese government managed this badly[1]. Your timeline doesn't reflect how things happened at the time - there was a "slowly" (over two months?) growing problem in Wuhan that locals noticed and authorities suppressed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_2019%E2%80%9320_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_2019%E2%80...
- ping_pong 6y ago
  Pneumonia is both bacterial and viral. It wouldn't be surprising if it didn't respond to antibiotics. It was the CT scans of the lungs that showed glassy nodules that was the new symptoms.
  - bgandrew 6y ago
    Majority of pneumonia cases are caused by bacteria though (see https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/differentiating-viral-from-bacterial-pneumonia/ https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/differentiating-viral-from-bac... )
    - ping_pong 6y ago
      Your statement is completely orthogonal to the point. Doctors know that pneumonia is both bacterial and viral. If it didn't respond to antibiotics, it wouldn't be surprising at all and wouldn't indicate that a new disease was causing it.
- wuwuno 6y ago
  Not in November when the Chinese first discovered the virus.
  - acdha 6y ago
    You’re repeating this claim as if it’s well established - do you have a citation? There are some indications that it might have been spreading possibly as early as September but the coverage I’ve seen was preliminary and researchers were cautious about concluding anything without more comprehensive tests to rule out things like cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses. The generally accepted patient 0 for the outbreak must have been infected in November to be symptomatic in early December but I haven’t seen any credible claims that anyone in China had identified this as a new disease until late December.
ping_pong 6y ago
This isn't correct. It wasn't just looked upon like the flu. In December there were reports of an uptick of people dying of pneumonia. When they did CT scans, they saw that their lungs had glassy nodules which was not normal. This was the way that they identified something new was spreading.
sparrc 6y ago
Flagged for misinformation. There definitely was an uptick in deaths and pneumonia. Scans of patient's lungs showed new symptoms not normally associated with pneumonia. This happened over the course of a few months and is what tipped off doctors in Wuhan that there was something new spreading.
- jackweirdy 6y ago
  And another point that cements this was the Reddit “china_flu” subreddit’s creation in December 2019, when word was spreading outside China that _something_ was spreading, probably flu, and nobody knew what
- wuwuno 6y ago
  Not enough, and not in November when the Chinese first discovered the cases. flu cases year to year have a very wide variety. In the U.S. the low number of cases one year was 16M two years later it was 68 Million cases.
rfoo 6y ago
> I want to know how they discovered it with no information? tl;dr: mNGS [1] Longer answer as I think you may need to be mansplained because you wrote a long post which could be answered by a simple Google search and Wikipedia article: Step 1: Doctor wonder why their patients were so sick, looks like infection but no pathogens identified, this is actually not that rare as there are many obscure pathogens even for experienced doctors. Step 2: Patients agrees to pay for mNGS. Nurse draw their blood, send to lab. Step 3: mNGS matches every DNA "pieces" from the patients' blood against a database. One of those pieces matched the original SARS with about 90% similarity. Step 4: Chaos in the lab, the hospital and the government. Step 5: "We've detected a new virus" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_metagenomic_sequencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_metagenomic_sequencin...

dillondoyle 6y ago

So many great replies answer/correct some of these assumptions. Want to add that I highly recommend the frontline doc it has so much great reporting that gives the background needed here. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...

miemo23 6y ago

but there was a spike in pneumonia related cases... didn't a doctor sound the alarm on this (and was reprimanded for it)

esja 6y ago
Several doctors were discussing it in a WeChat group in December 2019 and were basically arrested and forced to apologise for spreading “misinformation”. The main person who became famous for sounding the alarm (Li Wenjiang, an ophthalmologist) later died of the disease.
- throwfaraway552 6y ago
  How could an ophthalmologist know anything about a virus? It doesn’t pass the smell test.

hfjfktkrkf 6y ago

From what I've read when you have pneumonia you receive antibiotics. If that doesn't work, they test a lung wash sample against the usual bacterias/viruses. If that doesn't match anything, it's called unexplained pneumonia, and that gets escalated and the sample is sent to top labs for sequencing. When they did this, they got a 90% match to SARS and raised the alarm.

m0llusk 6y ago

You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet. There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street. That was the freak out that led to the Communist Party not being able to keep a lid on the whole mess. It wasn't just sick people showing up in hospitals in huge numbers, it was dead bodies lying in the streets. The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance. Viruses have been hopping from animal hosts from humans for a while and if anything this one was late and long expected. Either way the kind of preparations we need to make for future events are the same.

ryanSrich 6y ago
> There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street Wasn't this happening well after they knew the virus existed? From my understanding, they knew the virus existed very early on. Much early than when people were dropping dead in the streets or getting dragged out of their apartments.
IAmGraydon 6y ago
>You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet. There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street. Which is also weird because we all know Covid doesn't make people suddenly drop dead in the street.
- TremendousJudge 6y ago
  >Covid doesn't make people suddenly drop dead in the street They do if they don't get treatment. Usual course for deadly covid is, high fevers, feeling terrible, then there's an improvement in symptoms for a couple of days, then blood oxygen levels drop and the person drops dead
  - mardifoufs 6y ago
    Any source on that? Genuinely curious as I seem to have completely forgotten about the early videos from china until now and what they pictured was very at odds with what we now know the virus can do. Wouldn't everything you described happen gradually? as in people wouldn't be able to walk normally before reaching the point where they drop dead from oxygen levels low enough to be immediately lethal? From my own experience and based on what I've read, covid can cause a quick deterioration in respiratory function but across at least hours or days. The videos also pictured people that weren't really showing any trouble breathing, it felt more like the plague than any respiratory illness. But maybe the videos were meant as "PSA's" for local consumption to get people to treat the disease more seriously? Because they were really over the top

VivaCascadia 6y ago

This episode of Frontline does a really good job of walking through the timeline of what was discovered and when, and how long they sat on that information before taking action. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...

xienze 6y ago

> I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong. Really drove me nuts how early on everyone, everyone was working overtime to try and dismiss the possibility that this was some sort of lab leak. I’m sorry but the way China went absolutely DEFCON 1 (welding people into their apartments, blocking the roads out of town, nightly fumigations of public spaces) within a short period of time strongly suggests that they had a “oh crap, _that thing we were working on got out_” moment. Never understood why people were so eager to dismiss this possibility.

BeyondLimits99 6y ago
Absolutely. You don't just lock up a city full of 11 million people because they have the sniffles. The western world really dropped the ball with this one.
- kennywinker 6y ago
  You don't go defcon 1 over the sniffles but you do go defcon 1 over an unknown virus that closely matches a highly lethal virus we encountered about ten years earlier (SARS classic). There is nothing in china's outbreak response that suggests guilt.
  - acdha 6y ago
    I think a lot of westerners want to believe the conspiracy theories in part because it’s hard to admit how much more we could have learned from SARS. Ignoring China, the Taiwanese government doesn’t take orders from them and certainly wouldn’t help with a cover up but because of SARS all it took was Li Wenliang‘s post leaking for them to activate a comprehensive response. The key part was recent memory overriding the “it’ll be awfully inconvenient” reflex which is hard to avoid when you’ve been comfortable for many years.
    - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago

sjg007 6y ago

>They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense. This is because you don't know how pathology works and what technologies (specifically sequencing) are available to identify pathogens of unknown origin.

agumonkey 6y ago

I'm just a dude, but early videos showed people collapsing on the streets. If you have a few people like that in one area you start to think it's more than a flu I guess.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

krallja 6y ago

Please read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

oliv__ 6y ago
Oh gee, what a shame that he died of Covid, at the young age of 33. A tragic coincidence

aeturnum 6y ago

> Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest. My understanding on this was that doctors local to Wuhan noticed a surprising and sudden uptick in pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. The Chinese government managed this badly[1]. Your timeline doesn't reflect how things happened at the time - there was a "slowly" (over two months?) growing problem in Wuhan that locals noticed and authorities suppressed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_2019%E2%80%9320_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_2019%E2%80...

ping_pong 6y ago
Pneumonia is both bacterial and viral. It wouldn't be surprising if it didn't respond to antibiotics. It was the CT scans of the lungs that showed glassy nodules that was the new symptoms.
- bgandrew 6y ago
  Majority of pneumonia cases are caused by bacteria though (see https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/differentiating-viral-from-bacterial-pneumonia/ https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/differentiating-viral-from-bac... )
  - ping_pong 6y ago
    Your statement is completely orthogonal to the point. Doctors know that pneumonia is both bacterial and viral. If it didn't respond to antibiotics, it wouldn't be surprising at all and wouldn't indicate that a new disease was causing it.
wuwuno 6y ago
Not in November when the Chinese first discovered the virus.
- acdha 6y ago
  You’re repeating this claim as if it’s well established - do you have a citation? There are some indications that it might have been spreading possibly as early as September but the coverage I’ve seen was preliminary and researchers were cautious about concluding anything without more comprehensive tests to rule out things like cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses. The generally accepted patient 0 for the outbreak must have been infected in November to be symptomatic in early December but I haven’t seen any credible claims that anyone in China had identified this as a new disease until late December.

ping_pong 6y ago

This isn't correct. It wasn't just looked upon like the flu. In December there were reports of an uptick of people dying of pneumonia. When they did CT scans, they saw that their lungs had glassy nodules which was not normal. This was the way that they identified something new was spreading.

sparrc 6y ago

Flagged for misinformation. There definitely was an uptick in deaths and pneumonia. Scans of patient's lungs showed new symptoms not normally associated with pneumonia. This happened over the course of a few months and is what tipped off doctors in Wuhan that there was something new spreading.

jackweirdy 6y ago
And another point that cements this was the Reddit “china_flu” subreddit’s creation in December 2019, when word was spreading outside China that _something_ was spreading, probably flu, and nobody knew what
wuwuno 6y ago
Not enough, and not in November when the Chinese first discovered the cases. flu cases year to year have a very wide variety. In the U.S. the low number of cases one year was 16M two years later it was 68 Million cases.

rfoo 6y ago

> I want to know how they discovered it with no information? tl;dr: mNGS [1] Longer answer as I think you may need to be mansplained because you wrote a long post which could be answered by a simple Google search and Wikipedia article: Step 1: Doctor wonder why their patients were so sick, looks like infection but no pathogens identified, this is actually not that rare as there are many obscure pathogens even for experienced doctors. Step 2: Patients agrees to pay for mNGS. Nurse draw their blood, send to lab. Step 3: mNGS matches every DNA "pieces" from the patients' blood against a database. One of those pieces matched the original SARS with about 90% similarity. Step 4: Chaos in the lab, the hospital and the government. Step 5: "We've detected a new virus" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_metagenomic_sequencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_metagenomic_sequencin...