Words only. You keep everyone at home or send them to a quarantine site and of course there is no "community" infection. In fact, on my street, two people on the 15th still tested positive for COVID, which is certainly not "community" infection. What they said in the Shanghai release（上海发布） was never really implemented by the streets below.
Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)
- Thread starter localizer
- Start date
Is your area within the quarantine zone?
我属于预防区，新发现的病例是在静默期发现的（我不知道怎么翻译这个SH政府创造的新词），我很困惑他们是怎么被感染的，因为他们不能去出去取货。
Quickie
Colonel
Ming China is very different from Bolivia in terms of numbers and substance. Ming army had lots of ancient firearms, guns, cannons etc. It's their overreliance on the ancient firearms rather than backing it up sufficiently with traditional weapons that didn't work out when facing the fast advancing Manchu cavalry with bows and arrows. End of off-topic.
I am in Pudong, I can go out since 5th. When they say open, it means gradually unless your area still. Has asymptomatic cases. Your area must be the remaining 1.5mil under quarantined zone. I think the rest is either free or controlled zone.
Western countries’ knowledge about pandemic prevention remained stuck at the 1918 level: Austrian scholar
By GT staff reporters Published: May 15, 2022 05:40 PM
Editor's Note:
Austrian scholar Otto Kolbl (Kolbl) has received attacks from right-wing extremists and several Western media outlets after publishing, in March 2020, a paper calling European countries to learn from China in containing the coronavirus disease. While Kolbl was later appointed as a member of the expert committee of the German Interior Ministry and co-penned a strategic report on how to contain the COVID-19, his views were not taken seriously in the West. One year on and many Westerns countries have given up their efforts to contain the virus while the US marked a tragic pandemic milestone after the loss of 1 million lives to the COVID-19. Global Times reporter Xia Xue (GT) talked with Kolbl again after to understand how he perceived changes in pandemic prevention over the past year and the problems in the West.
Medical staff assist a patient infected with COVID-19 in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Bochum, Germany, on December 16, 2021. Photo: VCG
GT: What is your biggest impression of the epidemic response in China and in Europe over the past year?
Kolbl: What impressed me most is the way China managed the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. In the middle of the Omicron variant wave, a massive sporting event attracting teams from all over the world did not lead to any significant local transmissions. The infection rate was kept extremely low. This shows the way to the future of fighting future epidemics.
Of course, measures implemented at great cost for one single major event cannot directly and universally be applied to a whole country. However, using the valuable experience acquired from the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics can certainly be adapted through adequate research and development to help us learn how to contain respiratory illnesses in the future at a lower socioeconomic cost than what we had to do for COVID-19.
China and many other Asian countries already had plans in place; in Western countries, the concept of "herd immunity" ruled supreme to the point where even research regarding the efficiency of face masks in the context of a global pandemic was simply not done.
GT: Have your views persuaded some influential experts, scholars, and government officials to recognize their erroneous views regarding the global pandemic and made some changes?
Kolbl: Within the Western academic community, the "academic consensus" rules supreme. Nowadays, the academic consensus is often determined by what influential members of the academic community consider to be "desirable"; research or opinions which go against the consensus will not be tolerated.
This can be shown at the example of the general strategy adopted when facing a pandemic caused by a respiratory illness. Over the past decade, various documents by influential Western virologists and epidemiologists stated that even with a much more deadly virus than SARS-CoV-2 which causes the present pandemic, containment or eradication of the virus should not be attempted. Governments and society should let the virus spread through the population. This consensus basically prevented academic researchers from doing the necessary research about how a respiratory pandemic can be efficiently contained.
The state of knowledge in Western countries about pandemic prevention remains stuck at the level of 1918, when the Spanish Flu epidemic forced authorities to improvise various measures. Actually, in 1918, the efficiency of face masks was commonly accepted, whereas in 2020, Western virologists initially advised against the use of face masks by the population and they were forced by pressure from public opinion to revise their position.
Before the outbreak of the pandemic, an "academic consensus" favoring "herd immunity" determined the thinking and behavior of the academic community. It was so strong that virtually not one single researcher dared going against it and no relevant bodies were doing the necessary research to find out how a pandemic could be contained. When the epidemic hit, people who were neither virologists nor epidemiologists, all too often not even doctors, were often the first ones to sound the alarm and to push for the established experts to change their catastrophically wrong advice.
When this double failure became apparent, the academic community did not even try to understand its causes. Instead, everybody in academia and the media agreed on trying to find a couple of scapegoats, in particular Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and China. Under these circumstances, a fact-based dialogue with individual members of the academic community is even more unlikely than before the epidemic.
We must try by all means to understand the causes of these failures within the Western academic community, because they threaten not only the stability of Western societies, but also the stability of international relations and world peace. However, we cannot count on collaboration by the Western academic community. China must see to it that the necessary academic research is done and communicated in an efficient way to the population of the whole world. In this way, we can build up the necessary pressure on the West to reflect on its own failures, instead of blaming other countries for all its problems.
GT: Have you encountered a new round of smear campaigns and attacks from Western media outlets with regards to your views on China's epidemic prevention measures over the past year?
Kolbl: On May 9, the German daily newspaper Die Welt published another article in which they had tried to discredit me and China's dynamic zero-COVID policy. As a result, I was again spammed on Twitter by a massive wave of hate speech. All I tried to do in the interview with the journalist from this newspaper was to explain that in China, the result of letting the virus spread through society would have more serious consequences than, for example, in Western countries for a variety of reasons.
I also mentioned the problem of long COVID, explaining that according to Western academic consensus, China would see at least 35 million people suffering from long COVID in the case of a strategy aiming at "herd immunity." These arguments were simply ignored by the journalist who wrote the article. The result was yet another among many other articles from this newspaper and other Western media outlets which present China's dynamic zero-COVID strategy as some kind of "authoritarian madness." The public health and socioeconomic cost of letting the virus spread through the whole society is simply ignored. This fits into a pattern into which China is increasingly lumped by Western academia, media, and even the population, as a threat or even as "evil."
GT: Some Western countries blamed China for their ineffective epidemic prevention. What's your reaction to this?
Kolbl: Despite China's exemplary reaction to the epidemic, Western experts, media, and governments have been able to convince the huge majority of the Western population that China is to blame for the whole pandemic in one way or another. This communication is based mostly on fake news; however, in the absence of an efficient communication effort by China to counter Western disinformation, the West has, so far, been able to spread its lies unimpeded.
Various polls show that even in the absence of renewed massive anti-China media campaigns, public opinion toward China in Western countries has sharply deteriorated over the past year. Unfortunately, Chinese experts and leadership seem to be unaware of this fact and of the imminent threat arising from this situation.
The past year has shown that the US is likely to use all possible means to squeeze money out of other countries, even from poor war-ravaged countries like Afghanistan. They might try to force China to pay [for the epidemic] in a variety of ways. The socioeconomic situation in the US is deteriorating fast anyway; within such a context, lashing out against China will seem, to many people, to be the right thing to do.
China needs to engage in an efficient communication campaign to properly inform the world on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and about the reaction of Chinese experts and authorities in the first weeks of the epidemic. With a group of virologists and biologists, after many months of work, we got an academic paper published in the British Medical Journal Global Health about the available academic research regarding early transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Europe. Much more research is needed, not only in Europe, but also in all other regions of the globe where the virus could have spread before it was identified in Wuhan at the end of December 2019.
See link for rest of the article.
The Dutch were defeated from 1622 to 1624. After Battle of Tunmen and Battle of Sincouwaan, the Dutch dared not attacked Ming. During Battle of Liaoluo Bay, Koxinga was able to defeat the Dutch again and capture Taiwan. At that time, Spain in Philippines was actually prepared from an attack from Koxinga and its likely defeat. That's why any suggestion of Spain conquering China at that time is delusional. Ming Dynasty is far greater power than Spain could ever be defeated. Seriously, this is off topic.
solarz
Brigadier
Ming dynasty's fall had more to do with internal pressures than the Manchu invasion. In fact, the Manchu could not breach Ming defenses until after Ming had fallen. They pretty much took advantage of the ensuing chaos to build their empire.
Seeing senior members at the Colonel and Brigadier level, many of them I highly respect, continue an OT discussion is very disappointing.