The sad thing is that the damage has been done.
The unreliability of the news has had a devastating effect on public health.
1. No one trusts the vaccine(s)
2. People not wearing masks,
3. People purposefully flouting public health laws thinking they are making some kind of political statement. They think they are giving the middle finger to either Democrats, "liberals", China, communists, whatever.
The same (mis)information is constantly being repeated because it's already been in heavy circulation. People are still talking about bats even now, when pretty much the actual scientific community has moved on from that a long time ago.
However, the average person is not reading some scientific journal, but the Daily Mail or whatever.
Remember all those US stories about dodgy KN95's not being suitable for health workers? Now it is the recommended mask for the NBA (along with Korean KF94) and NFL. I posted about this before, but most exported KN95 were for "civilian use", never for doctors/hospitals. Just like in North America, the maximum protection health grade masks use the behind the head elastics, not earloops, to create the tighter fit needed for risky environments. This can be seen in photos from China, I didn't need to launch a special investigative report to learn it. The reason why earloops are used for the "civilian" masks is simple, they are easy to put on and put on relatively properly. Anecdotally, at the beginning of the pandemic (~Feb.) I was at a Chinese supermarket and a lady there had a medical-grade 3M N95 on sideways. Totally useless and a waste.
It is really disappointing to see the news today become more and more like Indian news. You obviously can't totally eliminate biases, but this has been absolutely brutal. Not totally surprising since Matthew Pottinger (former WSJ Journalist and then-Trump sycophant) was actively trying to seed narratives to form an anti-China consensus. The lab leak theory was created by him and Pompeo, with the "lab leak dossier". A few days later there was a release by the US' own Office of the Director of National Intelligence that basically refuted this idea, but it doesn't matter now, it's too late.
Anyway, ranting aside...
With the emergence of numerous outbreaks around China, can we make a hypothesis that the behavior of the virus is very similar to Cold and Flu where it seems to be more active in the winter? It might spread quietly in the summer months?
