Coronavirus - International stories and thoughts

We knew anyway. And we knew early enough to prepare and do something about it. We have intelligence, both human and signals. And the China boogeyman is not an excuse for the handling starting in May.

 

When Donald Trump became president and lied to his unshakable supporters? He never really released the IC reports. Just accused China of lying.

 

Perhaps when the idiot Trump, started listening to dictators and believing them over our intelligent services? A serious answer is our intelligence services are looking for many things. One of those things isn't a new virus. Maybe we should but Trump slashed cdc funding.

 

New Zealand immediately responds to 4 new covid cases. Quarantines the patients, tests contacts, issues lock down for Auckland and a lesser lockdown status for the rest of the country.

Boom.

 

And our president helped them do it.

 

More on China's use of propaganda in the public health arena to control their population. An interesting article about how an out-of-control rural disease (schistosomiasis) in the 1950's got the attention of Chairman Mao, who demanded good news about it being solved. The problem turned out to be more difficult than he thought (the West struggled with this disease also). Failure to report good numbers could be fatal for the local authorities. After a while, local authorities realized that Mao only wanted the good news, and did not care so much about public health. Soon, all local officials were in a race to proclaim the problem solved. Mao wrote a poem about this great success in 1962, the year it was supposed to be solved. A movie was also made in '62. China made a "documentary" hailing the great success of this campaign . . . in 2018. The problem was never solved, and persists today (mitigated only by advancements in farming technology that require fewer people standing barefoot in flooded fields).

Mao's China falsely claimed it had eradicated schistosomiasis – and it's still celebrating that 'success' in propaganda today

 

The Chinese lie. The Russians lie. Film at 11!

The US had a consulate in Wuhan, which means intelligence on the ground in addition to the reduced CDC staff. But what good is intelligence if the president doesn’t believe his intelligence services? Or read the PDB, even with lots of pictures and articles praising him as incentive to get him to read it?

The coverage of the Wuhan outbreak was worldwide. During the first week of February, China finished a massive 1,000 bed Coronavirus hospital in Wuhan in only 10 days. The time-lapse video was on TV everywhere, as were articles about the millions who traveled from Wuhan over Chinese New Year, including thousands who came to the US.

We knew what was going on in Wuhan. Blaming the Chinese for not informing us is deflection.

Either the CIA, NSA, State Department intel, the army specialists at Fort Rucker, and the CDC were spectacularly incompetent, or we had a POTUS who just didn’t want to listen.

Our world-leading intelligence and disease control capabilities aren’t much use if the guy in charge is incompetent.

 

Does "callousness, deceitfulness, hostility, impulsivity, manipulativeness" describe anyone we know?

Read more about a Brazilian study on never-maskers...

https://www.psypost.org/2020/08/sociopathic-traits-linked-to-non-compliance-with-mask-guidelines-and-other-covid-19-containment-measures-57773

 

I am still afraid to go in public places :/ and use public transport

 

Well, if you think the Trumpers are crazy, wait until you see what's going on in South Korea. Once a country held up as a model for controlling Covid-19, they appear to be on the verge of a massive new outbreak, and are having trouble tracking it. Religious conservatives are helping out, however, by providing conspiracy theories involving North Korea and China. They are on the verge of "Making Korea Great Again".

South Korea on brink of nationwide virus outbreak, officials warn

 

A Hong Kong man is the first confirmed case of second infection with coronavirus. So trying to get Covid-19 to get immunity to it might be a huge mistake.

Researchers report 1st confirmed cases of coronavirus reinfection

 

Ugh. Antigenic drift?

 

It does seem to be related to visiting a location with a different strain of coronavirus running around. So he might have been immune to his local strain of coronavirus, but the virus in Europe mutated enough that he was not immune to it. It doesn't help if your country has a lot of international travel, and people coming and going with different strains of the virus. For a while, the U.S. appeared to have two major strains of coronavirus; one on the east coast (from Europe), and one on the west coast (from China).

 

What they define as an outbreak we define South Korea as having the disease under countries. It is expected they there will be outbreaks (Second waves). It is the response to those waves that defines how a country handles it.