Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)

[SpicySichuan]

Doctors shouldn't alert public about epidemic. Not even in western countries that were allowed to do so. It is the job of the government to alert the public and coordinate resources to fight any epidemic. Wuhan government has failed to alert the public in the timely matter doesn't mean doctors are qualified to do so themselves. I don't have a problem with the government tried to discipline Dr Li but I do see that CCTV shouldn't have broadcasted it. It has a unnecessary chilly effect for people who want to speak out. And I think the Wuhan government should be more forthcoming even if they still don't have much idea about the new virus in the beginning.

Falun Gong, overseas liberals, and Chinese Christian organizations have lost much of their supports over the years. They don't pose much of a threat to the CCP anymore. Xinjiang issue has been deal with. Unlike Russia, China is trying to resolve Xinjiang issue permanently instead of passing the problem to the next generation. As for HK, HK doesn't pose much of a threat to China either. What happened in HK not only emboldened Chinese nationalism but also strengthen CCP argument of fallacy of democracy.

Chinese liberal intellectuals have always been a problem. But they don't have backbone to do anything. They can whine and moan all they want. They think they are better. They think regular Chinese are inferior. That is why nobody is going to listen to them. As for why well-educated Chinese left China, it is simply economy. Most of our parents, grandparents left China for a better future in the west. At the time, China is a poor place and people were having a great difficulty to make a living. A decade or two from now, China would become more prosper than ever. Then China would become a magnet for immigrants and intellectuals.

Thank you for your well-articulated reply. In your opinion, how do you incentivize lower-level bureaucrats to alert the public at the onset of an incoming crisis? What are the appropriate institutions? I am asking this because PRC bureaucrats have a stability-maintenance mandate (which incentivizes bureaucrats to hide the depth of problems rather than confronting them head-on ASAP), alerting the public at the onset on a crisis could easily conflict with the former, as shown in Wuhan this time.

 

[solarz]

The only thing China needs to most urgently learn and take away from Covid19 is to develop a state of the art early warning and detection system against all threats of virus, disease etc, one that is systematic and doesnt depend on the whistleblowing of doctors on wechat alone.

The fact is China's health care system detected this viral outbreak extremely quickly.

Li Wenliang wasn't a whistleblower, he was an ophthalmologist who shared his suspicions of a new SARS outbreak privately on WeChat, but someone took a screenshot of his chat and spread it to the general public. Tragically, Dr. Li contracted the virus and died from it.

This turned Dr. Li into a martyr, and the truth of what actually happened has been quickly forgotten. Dr. Li was one of the few doctors who suspected that the few cases of pneumonia in December 2019 had the potential to become a viral outbreak. Some of them shared their concerns with the relevant authorities, others, like Dr. Li, shared them privately. Those are perfectly normal and expected behaviors in the early stage of a viral outbreak!

Public authorities, both the civil authority of Wuhan and the public health authority of China CDC, can only act with the information they have. A few dire warnings among other contradictory reassurances does not constitute enough evidence to immediately quarantine an entire city of 14 million people, especially shortly before the most important holiday of the nation. Once conclusive evidence came out of the seriousness of the virus, Chinese authorities took immediate and decisive action.

It took less than two weeks for the Chinese authorities to lock down Wuhan after researchers confirmed the nature of this new virus. It is now February 12 and we are already seeing a drop in the number of new confirmed infections. It has only been one month since COVID-19 was first discovered!

Realistically speaking, it would be extremely difficult to be anymore efficient in a country the size of China.

What it can do, as I mentioned before, is to ban the operation of wet markets and step up on the enforcement of health regulations for meat vendors.

 

[solarz]

Can the mods please delete those posts with irrelevant politics?

 

[SpicySichuan]

Just curious if Josh is one of those Hong Kong rioters paid by NED to burn and burn and destroy and burn.
Did Josh wave bravely USA flag or UK flag?
And how much $$$$ did he get from NED or 5eyes?

Did his father , or grandfather, volunteered to work for the KempeiTai in WW2?

Not a cent. Also, I'm neither a HKer nor have travelled to HK since the rebellion started in June 2019.

 

[supersnoop]

Thank you for your well-articulated reply. In your opinion, how do you incentivize lower-level bureaucrats to alert the public at the onset of an incoming crisis? What are the appropriate institutions? I am asking this because PRC bureaucrats have a stability-maintenance mandate (which incentivizes bureaucrats to hide the depth of problems rather than confronting them head-on ASAP), alerting the public at the onset on a crisis could easily conflict with the former, as shown in Wuhan this time.

Your own post Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!) acknowledges the issue as a systematic one, not necessarily political one.

Regardless of what system of government, you will have huge failures every now and then because we are human beings. Such was the case with Hurricane Katrina in the US.

The real issue is whether these people have actual expertise in the field or are just doing this job as some kind of political stepping stone. This is a problem in all governments, not just PRC. In HK, there was a recent councilor elected who can't understand English, didn't graduate high school or whatever, can he honestly do a good job for his district?

I don't think there is a real method to "solve" this, only that the system should value technical ability over political value in positions that require it.

 

[localizer]

Not a cent. Also, I'm neither a HKer nor have travelled to HK since the rebellion started in June 2019.

Bread and circuses

Capitalism provides the bread.

HK rioters provide the circus.

Thus CCP will keep living on.

 

[Deleted member 13312]

Perhaps a compromise would be better in the form of a public health forum which is freely accessible by the public in each city. The forum in question will contain only the basic findings of any recent disease that is considered noteworthy including symptoms and how many people in a city is suddenly down with a disease that shows corresponding symptoms but 0 personal opinions from doctors regarding what kind of disease it might be until an accurate assessment is done. In this way public panic can be lessen as people are less likely to panic compared to if the information is released as a sudden government notice or a lone doctor posting a video online whereby he is free to make his own assessments and at the same time they can be made aware of potential outbreaks and take preliminary precautions which will help in containing the initial outbreak.

 

[lightmap]

The fact is China's health care system detected this viral outbreak extremely quickly.

Li Wenliang wasn't a whistleblower, he was an ophthalmologist who shared his suspicions of a new SARS outbreak privately on WeChat, but someone took a screenshot of his chat and spread it to the general public. Tragically, Dr. Li contracted the virus and died from it.

This turned Dr. Li into a martyr, and the truth of what actually happened has been quickly forgotten. Dr. Li was one of the few doctors who suspected that the few cases of pneumonia in December 2019 had the potential to become a viral outbreak. Some of them shared their concerns with the relevant authorities, others, like Dr. Li, shared them privately. Those are perfectly normal and expected behaviors in the early stage of a viral outbreak!

Public authorities, both the civil authority of Wuhan and the public health authority of China CDC, can only act with the information they have. A few dire warnings among other contradictory reassurances does not constitute enough evidence to immediately quarantine an entire city of 14 million people, especially shortly before the most important holiday of the nation. Once conclusive evidence came out of the seriousness of the virus, Chinese authorities took immediate and decisive action.

It took less than two weeks for the Chinese authorities to lock down Wuhan after researchers confirmed the nature of this new virus. It is now February 12 and we are already seeing a drop in the number of new confirmed infections. It has only been one month since COVID-19 was first discovered!

Realistically speaking, it would be extremely difficult to be anymore efficient in a country the size of China.

What it can do, as I mentioned before, is to ban the operation of wet markets and step up on the enforcement of health regulations for meat vendors.

Random blood sampling of people at hospitals, airports, train stations, hotels, mass events, etc on a continous basis for any novel diseases or re-occuring outbreaks. The nation should maintain a database of volunteers that have signed up for the random blood sampling list and these people can be given a voucher or gift card for signing up, and when they were actually selected to give a sample then they will be given even more to compensate their time and troubles. or Send out free bloodkits that to random citizens in the population to have them send blood samples back to a CCDC labs if they feel something is wrong. Wuhan being a major city, if something like this existed at the major Wuhan hospitals this thing COVID19 would have been detected and properly determined giving China much more lead time to react.

Have city wide and province wide quarantine and lockdown plans implemented in place for all major Chinese cities and provinences, and have the government authorities practice drills and get proficient at it if the need ever arises again that a city has to be cut off at moments notice out of abundance of caution.

Leverage AI, Huawei, 5G, WeChat, TenCent, etc to predict and watch for early signs before something goes wrong or at the very earliest of stages so that it can be mitigated easily. The whistleblower doctor posted stuff to other doctors on WeChat concerning what he thought was a new SARs... WeChat AI should have datamined the content of the post, tie it to the idenity of the poster (doctor) and his gps location (Wuhan hospital) and the fact that Wuhan had a number of mysteries cases and this AI should have alerted someone in the CCDC as an anomaly that needs to be further looked into by a human. AI is scalable in that it can be trained to find that needle in the haystack and detect patterns that humans cannot see. Now that Chinese is a leader in AI, has 5G, and everyone uses WeChat all the tools are in place to effectuate something like this.

China needs a "See something Say something" micro app that is fully confidential but gives all Chinese citizens the freedom to report things directly to their govenment without fear getting into trouble. This is nothing to do with being democratic or freedom of speech, but merely crowd sourcing the Chinese public to report things early on before things get out of control. Certain population such as scientiests, doctors, lawyers, people in critical infrastructure etc their report will be given higher weight and more priority. This can be for any disaster prevention like terrorisms, etc and not restricted to disease control. Train AI to find the pertinent alerts and assign the manpower to effectively look into things. It can even be used to analysis the mood swings of a nation, had a system like this been in place for much of Hong Kong, the CCP could have predicted the outcome of the extradiction bill with AI, then withdrew the bill much earlier, early enough that the whole year long roit/protest might never have caught fire etc...

A big brother AI system would have caught this thing before it even started.

 

[solarz]

Perhaps a compromise would be better in the form of a public health forum which is freely accessible by the public in each city. The forum in question will contain only the basic findings of any recent disease that is considered noteworthy including symptoms and how many people in a city is suddenly down with a disease that shows corresponding symptoms but 0 personal opinions from doctors regarding what kind of disease it might be until an accurate assessment is done. In this way public panic can be lessen as people are less likely to panic if the information does not take place as a sudden government notice and at the same time they can be made aware of potential outbreaks and take preliminary precautions.

I'm sure such a forum exists already. It's not as if the Chinese government was censoring stories about COVID-19 back in December. There were stories circulating here and there about a new SARS-like virus. Problem is, you normally get dozens of stories like this every day.

People become irrational when their safety is threatened. I have a neighbor who has stopped sending her son to school for three weeks now over COVID-19 concerns, and there are literally only 3 cases here in Ontario.

 

[solarz]

Random blood sampling of people at hospitals, airports, train stations, hotels, mass events, etc on a continous basis for any novel diseases or re-occuring outbreaks.

I don't think this would work. Blood samples are not going to magically tell you someone has a previously unknown virus, you need to know what you are testing for!

Leverage AI, Huawei, 5G, WeChat, TenCent, etc to predict and watch for early signs before something goes wrong or at the very earliest of stages so that it can be mitigated easily.

We're a long way yet from AI being able to make these kinds of judgments.

Current AI technology relies on extremely large datasets for training. They are good for predicting things that happen all the time, useless for black swan events like COVID-19.