No Excuses

The IC knew about a likely viral outbreak happening in Wuhan at that time, but characteristics of the virus wouldn't have been known unless you had to access to good medical data, which may or not have been available by then. If even medical professionals in China were being silenced and threatened around that time, I doubt that they were being allowed to collect and share data to understand what is happening. The CCP even reprimanded the research group that sequenced the genome of the virus and released it to the global scientific community.

Yes Trump is incompetent and he wasted an entire month that we are paying for dearly now. No, that does not change the fact that this virus had spread globally by the time China was still lying to the world about the magnitude of the issue. For one, if the outbreak started in America and doctors started sounding the alarm bells, our government doesn't have the authority to send police to reprimand and silence medical professionals. That’s exactly what happened in China. These things matter. Had the world known by December that a new highly contagious respiratory virus is spreading, we would be in a much different place right now and that accounts for our more than pathetic government response.

This exactly. This was the worst, biggest piece of horse**** that came out of China and that the WHO for whatever reason, decided to spread. There is absolutely zero chance that China didn't know about human-to-human transmission by mid-January, considering that doctors and hospitals in Wuhan were sending warnings of huge numbers of patients showing up at hospitals with a "mysterious illness" by then. One of the key lessons out of this for anyone, international organizations and news media, should be to never ever report anything the CCP puts out at face value. It's the same thing we ask of our news media in the US now, that anything Trump says should be vetted first and reported later. Stop giving headlines to blatant propaganda and disinformation. By the time corrections roll in, it is almost always too late to counter false info.

Again, I'm not sure that I would believe their data on how widespread this was in China just yet. If our intelligence community was picking up signals of a new viral outbreak in Wuhan by November, that means they already had enough community transmission by then that foreign intelligence was able to pick up signals that separated COVID-19 from other seasonal respiratory illnesses. Lockdowns in China didn't really start until ~January 20th. What we don't know is how bad the situation had already gotten by then, but we know that this virus spreads very easily without behavior changes and if an outbreak was already underway in Wuhan by November, then it's just highly unlikely that it hadn't already spread and seeded many other parts of China by January. I don't think you can counter-argue that it's our fault we had it in more than one state. We know that the NY outbreak primarily occurred due to arrivals from Europe. We know that most of the west coast clusters came from China. This thing entered the US from all over the world. And we know it arrived in the US, in Europe and in other parts of the world around the time that China was still lying to everyone that there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission, while being opaque about what's really happening within its borders. We failed at acting fast enough, when we did have warning signs in early February about how bad this truly is. We lost about a month (basically all of February). But in reality, we lost about 3 months if you count when the first alarm bells should have been rung. China should have notified the international medical community by December when it's doctors were blowing the whistle on Chinese social media about a SARS-like infection spreading uncontrollably. Some reports even trace social media chatter about this back to November, which might also be the signals our intelligence community intercepted. And the CCP responded by silencing and threatening whistleblowers and gaslighting the world for a solid two months until it was too late and SARS-Cov2 was already in Europe, Asia and North America.

At this point I’m not sure that they handled it better than anyone else. They are far more capable of taking draconian measures but that’s easy when your citizens don’t really have any basic rights to begin with. I think their most egregious crime is that they have not reported their mortality numbers honestly. There’s a ton of medical data that we will likely never know and see, which has left almost every country that came after them to kind of figure it out on the fly. But it has allowed the CCP to generate headlines like “the US is doing so much worse than China!”. The fact that you and me can spend hours of our time dunking on our government for its lying and manipulation already separates us from the kind of lying and deception that the CCP engages. Ours is a problem of a few people In government. Theirs is an entire apparatus that will overnight make dissenters, academics, whistleblowers etc disappear for not toying the party line.

This is a long stream of nonsense. We’re in this mess because China knew of a new viral disease outbreak as early as November and failed to notify anyone outside its borders. And then into mid-January lied about no evidence of human to human transmission until cases started popping up internationally. Calling a country that suppresses every aspect of human freedom, sends millions into forced labor camps and spent two months covering up a serious issue that is now a global pandemic “humane” is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read on this board.

The GOP is the diet coke version of the CCP. The GOP is full of idiots, who even on their best day, are too dumb to carry out some of their worst ideas. The CCP is what the GOP would be if it were staffed with technocrats with PhD's and a deep understanding of how technology can be used to oppress and control the population.

Doesn’t really apply here. China has been uniquely awful in kneecapping the WHO while being a hot zone for zoonotic diseases. They’ve taken the approach that they’ll readily allow practices that have now lead to multiple infectious disease outbreaks while being as opaque as possible to prevent anyone outside from really knowing what’s going on until it’s too late. The CCP is the most dangerous political entity in the entire world. Just a dumpster fire of human rights abuse and the worst suppressors of human freedom.

He’s not wrong. Wet markets are operational again in Wuhan and other parts of China. They seem to be taking the same exact approach as the last time we had SARS. Temporary bans and regulations and then it’s back to business.

The gay but not gay dudes is easily explained by a drug addiction and no other prospects in life. The chick who got her arm ripped off.. who knows.

A skull filled with sand. Total morons, everyone who signed up for this movement and still aligns with it.

Nothing screams the Republican contempt for science better than their amazing president proudly declaring that this virus is so dangerous, that even antibiotics don’t work against it. Absolute ****s for brains, everyone who voted for this and everyone who continues to defend this.

The American public isn’t very good at long term thinking. People celebrating a bump in his approval did so when we had barely started feeling the effects of his disastrous response.

Probably the most promising anti-viral I’ve seen so far for COVID-19. Works broadly against coronaviruses and can be taken orally. Could work as both treatment and prophylactic. Only issue is that it can’t be tested in mice against this specific coronavirus since we don’t have a useful model yet. Primate studies would take time that we don’t have. Will be interesting to see how the FDA approaches setting up its clinical trials.

There’s about to be light speed gaslighting in the midst of a dangerous pandemic, that will 100% make the situation worse when the second wave arrives. This is the evolving consensus on right wing media:

We’re co-existing with millions of sociopaths who agree with this drivel:

It's not even just the piling death toll in the deranged MAGA talking point of "cure worse than the disease". They can open up the economy and tell everyone to go eat at restaurants and go shop at malls and book flights, go on a cruise. Everything is wonderful and death is a part of life! And you know what would happen? At least 60-70% of the population that isn't a brain dead MAGA cultist will sit their ass at home when they see body bags piling outside of hospitals and when they hear stories of people in their communities getting sick of a virus, for which most people can't even get tested. The inevitable scenes of crowded hospitals are going to scare the living **** out of everyone. Maybe 30% of the sociopaths in this country will decide that owning the libs by getting violently sick is the most patriotic thing you can do. They'll go to AppleBees and down 20 margaritas a day and eat all of the freedom fries in the world to stick it to the lying fake news media. And businesses would still go out of business because most operate on margins that require the entire general population to be actively participating in the economy. This is a crisis where the only answer is actually listening to your experts. And right now this federal government isn't doing diddly squad with the time that the current lockdown has bought us. I am at a loss of words for the federal government cutting funding for nationwide testing. Right now we need to be pushing contact tracing programs all over the country like every other developed country that has this under control enough to open some sectors of the economy.

I don't know which sources you were reading but this was reported on! It's why we enacted these measures, because in every public health report the recommendation was to enact physical distancing as soon as possible to limit the spread of the virus and save lives.

These "guesses" were estimates on worst case scenarios from the best public health agencies we have in the Western developed world. Without social distancing measures, we were headed for these worst case scenarios. This kind of revisionism is very dangerous if we actually want to be prepared for a second wave. Don't do it.

I posted in this thread a few days ago about rumors floating around that China was aware of this as early as mid-November. It's already semi-confirmed that the first positive tests can be traced to mid-November, although this was reported as people who went back and tested old samples. And in a lot of non-Chinese media, there were reports like Chinese social media having increased chatter about "SARS" and public panic over a health emergency in November. Today we learned that our intelligence community was aware of a new viral outbreak in Wuhan by Thanksgiving. Given what we know about how infectious this is, if our intelligence agencies were picking up signals in November, that means the outbreak probably started before that. And again, this is a very infectious virus so most likely it had started spreading around the world last year already. I am becoming more and more confident that China is a lot more culpable than we think in the spread of this outbreak because of their incessant desire to censor information. We may have lost a lot of valuable time in preparing and fighting this thing because the pandemic started in a modern-day dystopian hellscape that the CCP has created.

We don't blink an eye about the flu because we vaccinate against it, have anti-virals to treat people and we factor it into hospital capacity because we know typically how many flu cases require hospital care each season. We blink an eye about a new virus that is according to data 5x more contagious than the flu, it doesn't have a vaccine, does not have anti-virals and our hospitals aren't equipped to deal with a sudden surge of patients beyond capacity. Not very hard to understand.

The flu season is like 4-6 months and life goes on as normal. We’ll have close to that many deaths in ~1-2 months and with the economy shutdown. We’re looking at a catastrophic loss of life if you let this run rampant. And it won’t just be corona patients, but also everyone else who can’t receive adequate healthcare after hospitals are overcrowded and past peak capacity. Serious question, how do you still not get this? Why do you think we’re under essentially a global lockdown?

The original projections had a range as well. The two million projection was the worst case scenario if no behavior changes happened in the public (i.e. physical distancing etc). We are now on the trajectory for some of the lower end of the projections because public behavior did change.

Many dense parts of the country started physical distancing as early as the first week of March. California and Washington State for instance started shutting down quite early. The official orders didn't come down in the DMV for a while, but I know a lot of people here also started working from home in the first week of March. The IHMI just revised the US death estimates down by at least 50% to 60,000 estimated deaths now. It seems like even though we got off to a slow start, the physical distancing policies helped us dampen how bad this could have been. And I'm still not convinced that we've gotten to the point that this thing doesn't surge as soon as we reduce physical distancing. We aren't seeing too many nationwide efforts to enact contact tracing programs.