I’m sure they know, even though they won’t ever admit it, what is going to happen even as they open up.
I’m just glad that NYS has turned the corner and hope people will behave, because if we don’t it’s just going to get bad here again - and that means so will the whole North East/mid Atlantic - because the virus doesn’t stop at state lines.
And at least NY has as well thought a re-opening strategy as possible, and shut down “valves” in place to be able to react as quickly as possible. But everyone has to stick with the program for it to work.
I don’t have a source other than my eyes having watched and read video and stories of people who were in China when both the Chinese and the American travel bans/lockdowns happened in China. I don’t think China allowed any Chinese people out of Wuhan after the shut down except maybe international flights. I remember that people were trying to get out after the shut down Jan 23 and Trump brought out several planeloads of Americans. There was a woman in the news who couldn’t find her daughter’s passport so missed the plane and was trying to get out. I believe she was allowed to leave not that long after but had to have advocates at the embassy help her or something like that. chinese were not getting out. they were not even getting out of their own buildings or neighborhoods except for one person per family or a few per building to get food a limited number of times a week or month. They put up physical barricades and guarded roads, preventing people from traveling from one part of China to another. They took temp checks of anyone traveling. Pretty close to 100% of people were wearing masks. However, the city of Ningbo, which is maybe 550 miles from Wuhan, was in lockdown before Feb 1. On Feb 2 this vlogger who lives in Ningbo who I watch arrived in Chicago from Ningbo via Hong Kong. He was not screened at all when he arrived in Chicago and the airport workers appeared unaware that Ningo was in lock down and that Hong Kong also had cases. My friend went to Beijing in December, returned in January, then went back in early Feb or so and returned mid-February. She only had to go through Tokyo to do so. And going through Tokyo is pretty normal when you fly from China to the east coast of the US, so the blockade didn’t really stop people from traveling back and forth from areas with outbreaks. The Chinese blockade very much locked down Wuhan and many surrounding areas in a super strict lockdown way beyond what we had here. There were horrible things done to people to implement that type of lockdown but it was effective at stopping the spread. Took a very long time to stop the spread. Our much less strict lock down here for less time (I believe less time) helped but won’t leave us where Wuhan is now after coming out of lock down. It’s amazing that Wuhan is quite safe now compared to the US. And it’s very sad, too.
Not sure if this is connected to the pandemic, but we got a notice today from the Maine Department of Labor that “Mr MaineLonghorn” has “filed an application for unemployment compensation and has named you as a former employer.” ?!? DH and I are the owners and only employees. So is someone impersonating DH? The “Effective Date” is listed as March 8, well before we applied for PPP funds or EIDL. I guess I’ll call the DOL tomorrow and hold for hours.
I checked the Maine DOL site and read this: “Maine, like many other states, is seeing an increase of intentionally fraudulent unemployment claims over the past two months amid the rise in overall unemployment insurance claims due to COVID-19. This practice, known as impostor fraud, occurs when a person’s Personally Identifiable Information, or PII, is used illegally to apply for unemployment benefits.”
I was following multiple vloggers talk about what it was like inside Wuhan leading up to the shut down of the city and for weeks afterward. People were not getting out of their apartments except to get food and their opportunity to do that was very limited. They were not leaving Wuhan except a very few who escaped out. There was one woman from Wuhan found in Beijing and at first no one could figure out how she got there (and spread the virus there) and then they learned her family had snuck her in their car under a blanket or something. Another person ran all the way from Wuhan to Tibet, I believe, and spread the virus there in the early days. Mostly the residents were trapped in their apartments. The country made a guarantee that they would prioritize providing food to the people of Wuhan in order to make people less panicked at the thought of running out of food, etc. There were people assigned to check on each resident in each section of each part of the city. These people asked residents to report their temperatures, made sure those with diabetes, etc had medicine, made sure all people had food, etc. They also reported anyone having gatherings and those people sometimes got violently dragged from their homes and beaten or put in cages and brought to detention centers. At least two independent reporters were taken into custody. One was released a few weeks ago talking about how well he was treated because he was fed. I don’t know what happened to the other one. Anyone sick was taken to an infection hospital (often makeshift). They made two hospitals from scratch in a few days, a marvel of engineering, planning, and coorperation. the hospitals opened and were up and running immediately.
From what I have read, the virus probably started at least in November in China and maybe earlier. My doctor told me we now know the virus was almost certainly in our state in New England in December. Once the virus existed in a place as modern as Wuhan, with residents who travel so much, it could have been literally anywhere in the world a short number of days later. My husband said that both Iceland and Argentina or two countries in similar geographic areas had tests that showed people had the virus in December. This thing spread at low levels many places in the world, seeding itself and then super spreaders and the exponential growth over time kicked things up into big numbers seemingly suddenly but not sudden.
I believe China wanted to keep American companies out of China and the WHO because it wanted to develop a vaccine that would make money for China. It didn’t want to invite in companies that would compete with their vaccine. I could be wrong, but that’s what it seemed to me. And I don’t think they are the only country doing things like that. I think many wealthy and powerful people see this pandemic as an opportunity to make money.
Business Insider dated April 14. Story about the concern 2 years ago on the lack of training etc at the lab in Wuhan which was studying bat viruses. This followed by the complete lack of tranparency of the CCP leads to the questions of where the virus originated.
This is a CNN story about someone in Wuhan in early Feb talking about the lockdown. He mentions that a small number of people from Wuhan snuck onto planes and spread the virus and now all of Wuhan is being blamed by the rest of China.
‘Now the American teacher is desperately trying to find a way to get his family out of the city and back to the United States. The US consulate in Wuhan has already evacuated all of its staff.
Four evacuation flights left Wuhan for the US this week carrying US citizens who were considered most at risk of contracting the virus. No more evacuation flights are expected to be scheduled, a State Department official said Tuesday.
Steece was trying get his son and wife on board an evacuation flight, but had difficulties getting the right paperwork.
“The issue is the fact I need to register him as a US citizen but I couldn’t do (that) because of the lockdown,” he told CNN from his Wuhan apartment. “I couldn’t get everything taken care of in time.”’
It also had a small story about someone being suddenly caught in the lockdown. ‘A student at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Ping had returned home to be with his family for the Lunar New Year holiday. But on the morning of January 24, the local government began shutting down public transport.
The next day, no one could leave Sandouping.’
According to the Chinese Government the virus did not originate in Wuhan and there were 83K cases and 4634 deaths total in all of China. Do they not have many people older than 80? Are there not many people with serious health issues?
The same type of situation can occur in other jurisdictions. The first COVID-19 death in the US occurred on February 6 in California, but that was not known as such until April 21 due to testing shortages. So the US at the time believed that the first COVID-19 death in the US occurred on February 26 in Washington. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/First-U-S-COVID-19-death-was-57-year-old-Santa-15218813.php
They had a strictly enforced lockdown which greatly cut down transmission. Everyone in affected areas was forced to stay home almost all the time. They separated sick people from healthy, had massive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine, had temp scans at all train stations, busses, businesses, people in areas where there was little virus also practiced a lot of social distancing with most everyone in the country staying home all the time unless they absolutely had to go out. They have medical-grade and KN95 and surgical masks for the public in a lot greater numbers than most other countries. They tracked and traced spread via cell phones and notified people if they had been around someone who was later found to have the virus so they knew to stay home and quarantine 14 days. That worked to control the spread. It took a long time in Wuhan but it greatly stopped the spread elsewhere.
I also think China lied about their numbers and that more people died and more people had the virus. But they were pretty successful and now even the areas that were most impacted are opened up with people eating in restaurants, businesses running. there is video of life there now and it is a lot more normal than things here with far fewer cases.
Too bad they didn’t start taking care of things sooner but it is very fortunate they did get things under control there so well or things would be even worse elsewhere.
Seems like they are reporting numbers that may be technically true but misleading by reporting only confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths, and not also producing at least an estimate of probable (but untested / undiagnosed) COVID-19 cases and deaths.
I think the Chinese actively covered up the number of deaths for a number of reasons. I used to think I knew why but now I’m not sure. I think partly they wanted to present to the world the idea that they had things under control and to hide their delayed response. Esp given their big delay in responding to SARS not that many years ago, they probably wanted to appear on top of things. I think they also wanted to protect China’s business dealings. having an out of control virus in your country isn’t helpful to business. i think there was some saving face going on. The government system there makes it more likely lower level officials such as those in Wuhan who covered things up initially will feel pressure to not bring up problems to officials above them. A few years back China made a super high speed train. The train was going to be this super big deal but on one of its first runs it went off the track and make were hurt or killed inside. Local officials set about digging a massive trench in which to bury the train to cover up the fact that the accident happened immediately after the crash, without checking to see if there were survivors! The only reason this stopped was that chinese were video taping it and it was all over the internet there. the national leaders condemned the local officials. Had there not been an internet, the whole thing would have been covered over (literally and figuratively).
I think America is quite different from that! However, we certainly have many who died of Covid who have pneumonia listed as their cause of death from back in January, Feb, March, and maybe even December of last year. How many I don’t know. We also have people who have died since March who are not counted because of lack of testing, they died at home, etc. I think both the case count and fatality count are much higher than official numbers here.
I also think there isn’t big motivation by TPTB to have an accurate count of things.
I think at the very least that is true but i think they knowingly lied about their numbers. DH was able to predict within about 2-3% what the daily numbers would be from January through mid-Feb. He made a program that graphed exponential growth and was very accurate. This really made my husband feel the Chinese numbers were too perfect because in the real world, it wouldn’t work that perfectly, in this beautiful graph. He felt that someone in Beijing had been tasked with coming up with numbers and was using a similar equation to claim what the daily cases were. We were both pretty sure that the actually numbers were at least ten times higher but thought more likely more and maybe 100 times higher. Who knows. China didn’t lock down that many people for kicks. The doctors were struggling hard for months, completely overwhelmed by cases. They seemed to have gotten much more overwhelmed than places like NYC, so the fatality rates and case counts do not seem accurate to me. Who knows, though. They were doing pretty massive testing there. People had to test negative three times to get out of quarantine because they found they had a lot who tested neg twice but went on to infect others or still be sick. They were not rationing tests but using massive amounts.
If the actual numbers were 100x higher they would have been more overwhelmed than they were. 400,000 dead in six weeks? You can’t hide that many bodies. Crematoria aren’t that fast.
I could try to summarize this fairly recent interview but could not do it justice. There is no substitute for hearing from Michael Levitt, Stanford biophysicist and Nobel Laureate (in Chemistry) on just how absurd the collective governmental and media response to COVID-19 has been. Worth taking 35 minutes out of one’s life to listen to him, especially for the “exponential math” and the “I trust the scientists” posters on here.
Other posters on here are conflating genetic sequencing data that purport to show that the C19 strains that (simultaneously) appeared within the population of China are natural in origin with proof that they did not escape from a bio lab that was specifically engaged in isolating and studying coronaviruses of non-human origin.
It was likely a lab accident in my opinion, and the Chinese authorities early on understood the danger because the specific strains had already been studied. China recently admitted that it ordered early samples of the virus destroyed allegedly because of fear that “unauthorized” labs (really, gene sequencing labs trying to identify what the pathogens were) could lead to inadvertent spread.
I also find it difficult to believe that China locked down an entire province of 60 million people because a few hundred people had died from a disease that supposedly had never been seen before.
While I think an inadvertent leak of a naturally occurring virus or viruses from the Level 4 Wuhan lab is the most likely explanation, at least a few scientists have now started to question whether this virus was “engineered” based on its apparent affinity to bind with human ACE2 receptors:
