Coronavirus Megathread Part I

This is the thread for all coronavirus discussions, in order to avoid cluttering the forum with 100+ different coronavirus updates.

I will update the OP with news as it comes in.

Why should you be concerned? Isn't it less bad than the flu?


Where did this come from?


Where has it spread?


What are governments doing about it?

France braces for ‘epidemic’ as cases double in a day to 38
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3052750/coronavirus-france-braces-epidemic-switzerland-uk-record-new

So far there are around 600 diagnosed cases in Europe, with the majority in Italy. A week ago there weren't even 50 cases in total.

are you finnaly going to admit that this whole problem was made exponentially worse by the Chinese government

Worse? China moved heaven and earth to destroy the virus. Can you imagine any other country locking down cities of 60 million people? Wuhan itself is almost the size of London, and was under the most extreme quarantine measures any city has ever been in modern times. China sacrificed a great deal of its economic growth in order to protect its citizens and citizens of the world from this terrifying virus - and it was largely successful, as new infections have now slowed to a crawl in China.

China's new concern is actually the threat of importing the virus from other countries that are too weak to implement such extreme containment measures, such as South Korea and Japan.

Wow cant believed you finally replied btw im gonna make a post debunking all your propagandan and informing people how dire of a situation china has left the world with.

Things china did to cause this
- arrested all the journalist who first reported on this
- waited like a month to report the outbreak
- consistently and are still lying about the number of people infected and died
- waited even longer to let the WHO in to the country to help with the situation and to inform the rest of the world.
- hold a huge village/town open seafood banquet a couple miles from the epicenter of the outbreak
- arrest journalist that have continued to actually do real reporting on the issue on the basis of "miss information" but allows rumours like dogs and cats are the cause the Chinese bat flu to spread like wild fire, which has resulted in thousands of animals being brutally beaten to death
- literally jail people inside their houses
- tell doctors when the epidemic first started that they shouldn't tell anyone and to just send patients they think might be infected home without informing them

And honestly I could go on, so tell me how can the ccp do all this and then you can say "oh they have handled this well". At every point they have sacrificed lives to preserve their economy, at every point they have been opaque they have played the problem down to preserve trust in china. The only silver lining to this is that hopefully it will tank the Chinese economy for long enough that the people take this as their mandate from heaven to oust the CCP and actually have a democracy.

your confusing two stages of the outbreak. During the initial phase, december to mid january - yes China can rightfully be critisised for its actions. You can put them in context, and say that most nations try and downplay things like these, but in the end their efforts made it harder to deal with.

But then you get to the second phase, late janunary and onwards. This is where China flicked on, accepted reality, and since has acted perfectly. This is the stage where they put their citizens before the economy, locked down the nation, and as someone who lives in China, and has family here.. took huge steps to combat this. People on the ground in China are rightfully critical of the initial response.. but they are also respectful of how ruthless but effective China has been in dealing with this. You have no idea of the measures and sacrifices made by the goverment, local goverments and the people here. They have given up everything including their freedom to combat this, and at the moment it seems to have worked.

Your comment is just purely ill-informed when it comes to the outbreak as a whole, and isn't at all a reflection of what has been going on for the last month or more. I have been in China, listening to the news both local and international, and it was clear when China gave up the pretence that it was all fine and ok. I was in shanghai airport, and the the shift was sudden and people felt it. In a day they changed their tune and the after that the whole goverment response and public attitude shifted. Before that - your post is pretty spot on, but it only still stands if you don't count what has happened since.

For your list of bad things - you can make a list of good measures. The lockdowns have worked, the travel restrictions have worked, the new hospitals (eventually) worked, increased production worked, neighborhood quarentines, like in my area, worked, they have been far more cooperative internationally than at any point in their history, including sars.. and have actually managed to work closely with Japan and korea, despite regional difficulties. The numbers coming out of China now are not lies, they have been open about diagnosed cases and clear about the criteria they are using to count cases.. when they noticed a backlog of cases that were not fully diagnosed, they changed their counting method to better reflect the problem. I can tell you that deaths are being correctly reported because my family here are watching the local online coverage that plays every local event, illness and death, and they do reflect the national total.

Your post is about as accurate as someone saying that China acted 100% perfectly at every turn.

Usually i would say you are jsut wrong but here you are just being a immoral person you are playing defense for a totalitarian authoritarian government. They didnt down play what was happening, they actively suppressed information, arrested journalist, told doctors to give patients bad advice and lied about the amount of people infected.

There is no 2nd phase to this, the virus didn't change. China did not flick on, the virus simply spread too far for them to not take drastic measures. Also saying "China flicked on, accepted reality, and since has acted perfectly. " is like saying oh my doctor wasn't paying attention during the first 20 mins of my brain surgery but after that they did great. It doenst matter if you act well late controlling viruses is time sensitive if you mess it up in he beginning you have handled the whole situation poorly. But even that isnt true throughout this whole ordeal they have still been arresting journalist, giving out obviously low numbers and perpetuating this idea that enacting a travel ban on Chinese tourist is racist. Also during this "2nd stage" 5 million people left wuhan before the quarantine, aand during this stage you had two new epicentres for the virus in cities that weren't quarantined.

Overall China didnt have to do this if they would have contained this in the beginning how 10s if not hundreds of thousands would still be alive. It also hasnt worked, then numbers coming out of china come from the government which has both incentive and a history of lying. They continually run out of test kits, or they do things like not reporting corona virus as pneumonia if they patient has no connection to wuhan.

No you are missinformed, you cant trust the your local news its all Ccp propaganda and lies. Think about it if they lied in the begining and no one is calling them out for lying, why would they not just continue. The reality is they have never stoped lying or down playing the situation, its just that the real situation is 10x worse than we think it is. I mean for god sake its been like how many years now and we still dont know how many Chinease died from sars, all we have is numbers from hk.

the lockdowns dont work, ive seen countless videos of people screaming at night because they are locked into thier house. They are also the absolute last resort but are bing used as the 1st option.

As i said the travel restrictions didnt work either, 5 million people left Wuhan before that quarantine, and after it was quarantined two more province developed new epicentres of people who had the disease that had not come into contact with anyone from Hubei province which suggest the too little to late.

Hospitals also dont work at all the chinease medical aparatus is treched almost to breaking point, also ive seen the inside of them they aren't super effecitve, and now that we know you can get reinfected and it can be worse i dread to think of how many people recovered nd got reinfected and died.

The numbers are lies, those numbers are not verified by any 3rd party at all are you seriously going to sit there and tell me the CCP are trust worthy.

My post is accurate China has literally acted incredibly slow and dishonest throughout this entire process to protect its economy as much as possible, thye only started really combating this disease when they just couldnt hide it anymore, and even when they did they dragged their feet. On top of that the whole reason they got into this mess was because of top down authoritarian immoral structure of the CCP.

Worse? China moved heaven and earth to destroy the virus. Can you imagine any other country locking down cities of 60 million people? Wuhan itself is almost the size of London, and was under the most extreme quarantine measures any city has ever been in modern times. China sacrificed a great deal of its economic growth in order to protect its citizens and citizens of the world from this terrifying virus - and it was largely successful, as new infections have now slowed to a crawl in China.

China's new concern is actually the threat of importing the virus from other countries that are too weak to implement such extreme containment measures, such as South Korea and Japan.

The Chinese propaganda megathread

If China had contained the virus then it wouldn't have spread. China failed to contain it.

Is there cause for concern? No. Those worst effected are the old, the smokers and the sick. It is not surprising that Chinese health workers have died considering how run down they are. They are struggling to cope with the work load and it is well recognised that being overworked and stressed increases your chances of illness.

Do I trust China? Not at all. They went Chernobyl on the whole thing and they may well still be doing so. Based on the reports we are getting from Chinese medical staff calling for international aid it stands to reason that China isn't doing all that they can because asking for help could be seen as a weakness to them.

American bioweapon? Classic propaganda to shift blame

japan and south korea are actually far superior to china in terms of medicine etc. so i wouldn't worry

I think Penguin is wrong here.. I get the point he's making, its common thought in China that other nations won't be able to match the diciplined and severe measures that China have taken. Not medically, but socially. Locking everything down, relying on everyone to stay indoors for months including their kids, restricting all social meetings even between family, only going out once every 2 days. They don't believe other nations will be able to do this, and as such won't be able to stop the spread.

But to pick Japan and Korea as your examples is just silly.. they are both highly diciplined and socially structured nations, that come from the same line of cultural development as China, and are more developed and more capable of implimenting these measures. There is no reason to think that they won't be able to do what China did.

The real nations to worry about are the developing nations like Iran, who has no ability to manage it like China did, and the western nations who do have the wealth/infrastructure to handle it, but maybe not the culture that pust the nation above the individual.

If they had contained virus, obviously it wouldn't spread. But how do you contain it? In hindsight its easy to say, if they had locked down wuhan when there were only 100 cases, and treated it as serriously as a global pandemic that early on, then yes.. it would have been solved. But really, no nation does that.. no nation locks down a city the size of london, until they are absolutely forced to do so. Even italy isn't managing to stop it spreading at the moment, nor iran or korea.. they are all struggling because none of them want to take the massively disproportionate and harsh actions required, before they are forced to do so. If Italy had locked down the region, banned all fights/trains/travel, after 10 cases.. it wouldn't have spread to 10+ european countries as it now has.. but back then they weren't treating it as they are now.

As for Chinese health workers, its really tough on them, but there isn't a lot else that China can do for them right now. They imported thousand of medical workers from other parts of China to Wuhan, and brought in the military medical workers, but its still not enough. They can't import many more because other areas of China still need their own medical workers, especially to combat their own outbreaks, and there isn't a magical surplus of nurses/doctors in China. They have reached out though, and accepted plenty of help in the form of medical supplies from other nations, including cooperating with Japan, which is highly unusual.

As for the bioweapon stuff, that's not the official Chinese line, or one being spread by any of the media or social media there. In fact the more common conspiracy theory in China is that it came from the Chiense virus-research lab in Wuhan, not from america.

Where they are critical of america, is that they felt in early februrary america were encouraging other nations to react with more severity, as a means of pushing back in the trade war. I personally don't think this is true, I think its just america reacting in the sensationalist way they always do.. but that's been the main critisim from China.