zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
A lot of smart people in this forum.

Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus.

I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths.

Covid presents like the flu, so much so you need a test, but early on a test was not available. So the symptoms are not unique.

Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest.

Early on there was not a significant uptick in flu cases turning to to pneumonia, so that would not have sparked interest.

Early on there was not a spike in deaths, so that would not have e sparked an interest.

In fact when the Chinese discovered covid, there was absolutely no evidence that anything out of the ordinary was taking place.

But somehow the Chinese knew that they had a very contagious, bat based virus circulating, based on no information.

Everyone is focused on the wrong thing, I want to know how they discovered it with no information?

I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong.

They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense.

>>watert+r32
> I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong.

Really drove me nuts how early on everyone, everyone was working overtime to try and dismiss the possibility that this was some sort of lab leak. I’m sorry but the way China went absolutely DEFCON 1 (welding people into their apartments, blocking the roads out of town, nightly fumigations of public spaces) within a short period of time strongly suggests that they had a “oh crap, _that thing we were working on got out_” moment. Never understood why people were so eager to dismiss this possibility.

>>xienze+f72
Absolutely.

You don't just lock up a city full of 11 million people because they have the sniffles.

The western world really dropped the ball with this one.

>>Beyond+D92
You don't go defcon 1 over the sniffles but you do go defcon 1 over an unknown virus that closely matches a highly lethal virus we encountered about ten years earlier (SARS classic).

There is nothing in china's outbreak response that suggests guilt.

>>kennyw+mk2
I think a lot of westerners want to believe the conspiracy theories in part because it’s hard to admit how much more we could have learned from SARS. Ignoring China, the Taiwanese government doesn’t take orders from them and certainly wouldn’t help with a cover up but because of SARS all it took was Li Wenliang‘s post leaking for them to activate a comprehensive response. The key part was recent memory overriding the “it’ll be awfully inconvenient” reflex which is hard to avoid when you’ve been comfortable for many years.

>>acdha+KH2
It wasn't Li Wenliang's post that activated the Taiwanese response. It was the Chinese government's public alert on 30 December 2019 about a cluster of patients with "pneumonia of unknown etiology" that triggered the response.