US President Joe Biden Calls For Further Investigation Into Virus Origin

[club]

11 hours ago, CRUNCHER said:

A well reasoned argument with which I fully agree.

 

China can rightly be criticized for its handling of the initial stages, but if they informed the world on 30th December 2019 that there was a new strain of SARS which could have person to person transmission, would it have made a difference? In theory it should, but the way the developed world did respond later (God forbid we should miss our holidays) I think we would still have the disaster we are now in.

China made sure to take care of themselves . When they knew they had a deadly virus in Wuhan They immediately locked it down. Well maybe not all of it. To me it doesn't matter if it came from a wet market or lab leak. What does matter is they have never explained why they stopped air travel domestically but not internationally. This was how the world was infected so quickly . I have never heard them even asked that question. When you lockdown a city because of a deadly virus , nobody should come in or go out.   

[CRUNCHER]

4 hours ago, club said:

China made sure to take care of themselves . When they knew they had a deadly virus in Wuhan They immediately locked it down. Well maybe not all of it. To me it doesn't matter if it came from a wet market or lab leak. What does matter is they have never explained why they stopped air travel domestically but not internationally. This was how the world was infected so quickly . I have never heard them even asked that question. When you lockdown a city because of a deadly virus , nobody should come in or go out.   

Actually they did not "immediately" lock down.  That was on or about 22nd January; fully 3 weeks after they knew, or should have known, that they had a big problem.

[club]

7 minutes ago, CRUNCHER said:

Actually they did not "immediately" lock down.  That was on or about 22nd January; fully 3 weeks after they knew, or should have known, that they had a big problem.

You're correct , that's why i said not all of it was locked down. My point is why didn't they ground all flights instead of just domestic flights . How do you explain how fast this virus spread all over the world.

[mikebike]

6 minutes ago, club said:

How do you explain how fast this virus spread all over the world.

It's a virus and everyone was woefully prepared?

[cmarshall]

17 hours ago, mikebike said:

It's a virus and everyone was woefully prepared?

 

Not everyone.  The Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency had done a poor job containing MERS in 2015, even though the number of deaths looks tiny now by comparison with Covid.  But then the government revamped their whole approach to epidemic control from top to bottom.  So, by 2019 they had a plan and were ready.  The plan was to implement the WHO's standard recommendation thoroughly:  test, isolate positives, and trace contacts.  This plan only works if started early enough before the scale of infection overwhelms the bureaucracy.  The crucial step was to monitor closely the possible emergence of novel viruses in China, which Korea did without waiting for either WHO or China to announce any pandemic.  So, the Korean knew by Dec. 2019, that a new virus was loose in China.  The head of the KDCPA called a meeting of twenty of the companies in Korea capable of producing test kits for Dec. 31, 2019 in Seoul.  But the need for urgency was so great that they held the meeting in a conference room of the Seoul train station so that they wouldn't have to waste time travelling across town.  And they ordered the production of the vast number of test kits that would be necessary.  This is just one step that indicates how effective the public health agencies in S. Korea were.

 

https://www.brynmawr.edu/news/how-south-korea-went-being-super-spreader-mers-super-stopper-covid-19

 

By contrast, the British government also had a plan against a new epidemic which they decided to test with a three-day exercise in 2016 called "Operation Cygnus."   

 

 

The results of the report have never been made public. At the time, however, the British government’s then chief medical officer, Professor Sally Davies, told a health conference, World Innovation in Health, that the exercise “killed a lot of people.”   She explained, starkly, “It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies, for instance. It becomes very worrying about the deaths, and what that will do to society as you start to get all those deaths ...”

 

Unlike the Koreans the demonstrated failure of the British plan did not result the wholesale reform of the NHS' epidemic response.  Instead, the Tory government buried the report  

 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/28/cygn-m28.html

 

The US Center for Disease Control and other US agencies such as USAID established offices in Chinathe purposes of which included surveilling China for emergent pathogens.  The CDC office in Beijing, for example, had forty-seven staff members including epidemiologists, but the Trump administration gutted it in 2017, reducing the staff count to fourteen without any epidemiologists.  The US put its own eyes out.

https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-u-slashed-cdc-staff-221848731.html

 

So, how has everyone done so far?  Here's the scorecard in Covid deaths per one hundred thousand.  Keep in mind the actual death count is undercounted in virtually every country.  The true death toll is closer to double the confirmed count.

 

S. Korea            3.85

Viet Nam          0.06

Thailand           2.11

US                       182.78

UK                       191.77

Germany          108.19

Norway              14.75

Sweden             141.70

Taiwan              0.000017

PROC                 0.35

Australia           3.59

 

The worst part of the whole criminal failure of nearly all the Western governments is that the most conspicuous failures, the US and the UK, are incapable of self-reform of the kind that the S. Koreans carried out so magnificently.  The reason is that they are too corrupt.  The vested interests are too powerful.

 

For fifty billion dollars the rich countries, or the US alone, could eradicate SARS-Cov2 the way the WHO eradicated smallpox at the suggestion of the Soviet government.  But it doesn't look likely now.

[AnnieSeek]

22 hours ago, club said:

You're correct , that's why i said not all of it was locked down. My point is why didn't they ground all flights instead of just domestic flights . How do you explain how fast this virus spread all over the world.

 

Wasn't just China. The WHO also insisted travel should not stop. That never made any sense to me. China supposedly have done a good job in containing this virus - why then could they not close borders, and contain it?

[placeholder]

5 hours ago, cmarshall said:

 

Not everyone.  The Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency had done a poor job containing MERS in 2015, even though the number of deaths looks tiny now by comparison with Covid.  But then the government revamped their whole approach to epidemic control from top to bottom.  So, by 2019 they had a plan and were ready.  The plan was to implement the WHO's standard recommendation thoroughly:  test, isolate positives, and trace contacts.  This plan only works if started early enough before the scale of infection overwhelms the bureaucracy.  The crucial step was to monitor closely the possible emergence of novel viruses in China, which Korea did without waiting for either WHO or China to announce any pandemic.  So, the Korean knew by Dec. 2019, that a new virus was loose in China.  The head of the KDCPA called a meeting of twenty of the companies in Korea capable of producing test kits for Dec. 31, 2019 in Seoul.  But the need for urgency was so great that they held the meeting in a conference room of the Seoul train station so that they wouldn't have to waste time travelling across town.  And they ordered the production of the vast number of test kits that would be necessary.  This is just one step that indicates how effective the public health agencies in S. Korea were.

 

https://www.brynmawr.edu/news/how-south-korea-went-being-super-spreader-mers-super-stopper-covid-19

 

By contrast, the British government also had a plan against a new epidemic which they decided to test with a three-day exercise in 2016 called "Operation Cygnus."   

 

 

The results of the report have never been made public. At the time, however, the British government’s then chief medical officer, Professor Sally Davies, told a health conference, World Innovation in Health, that the exercise “killed a lot of people.”   She explained, starkly, “It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies, for instance. It becomes very worrying about the deaths, and what that will do to society as you start to get all those deaths ...”

 

Unlike the Koreans the demonstrated failure of the British plan did not result the wholesale reform of the NHS' epidemic response.  Instead, the Tory government buried the report  

 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/28/cygn-m28.html

 

The US Center for Disease Control and other US agencies such as USAID established offices in Chinathe purposes of which included surveilling China for emergent pathogens.  The CDC office in Beijing, for example, had forty-seven staff members including epidemiologists, but the Trump administration gutted it in 2017, reducing the staff count to fourteen without any epidemiologists.  The US put its own eyes out.

https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-u-slashed-cdc-staff-221848731.html

 

So, how has everyone done so far?  Here's the scorecard in Covid deaths per one hundred thousand.  Keep in mind the actual death count is undercounted in virtually every country.  The true death toll is closer to double the confirmed count.

 

S. Korea            3.85

Viet Nam          0.06

Thailand           2.11

US                       182.78

UK                       191.77

Germany          108.19

Norway              14.75

Sweden             141.70

Taiwan              0.000017

PROC                 0.35

Australia           3.59

 

The worst part of the whole criminal failure of nearly all the Western governments is that the most conspicuous failures, the US and the UK, are incapable of self-reform of the kind that the S. Koreans carried out so magnificently.  The reason is that they are too corrupt.  The vested interests are too powerful.

 

For fifty billion dollars the rich countries, or the US alone, could eradicate SARS-Cov2 the way the WHO eradicated smallpox at the suggestion of the Soviet government.  But it doesn't look likely now.

AS for the US, under the Obama administratin, a plan was made. In fact, the US was judged to be the most ready of any nation for the pandemic. The US just had the bad luck to have Donald Trump as its President when the pandemic arose.

[placeholder]

1 hour ago, AnnieSeek said:

 

Wasn't just China. The WHO also insisted travel should not stop. That never made any sense to me. China supposedly have done a good job in containing this virus - why then could they not close borders, and contain it?

You're right. It didn't make any sense. Big international airports turned out to be the epicenters of the pandemic.

[placeholder]

On 6/15/2021 at 8:18 AM, club said:

China made sure to take care of themselves . When they knew they had a deadly virus in Wuhan They immediately locked it down. Well maybe not all of it. To me it doesn't matter if it came from a wet market or lab leak. What does matter is they have never explained why they stopped air travel domestically but not internationally. This was how the world was infected so quickly . I have never heard them even asked that question. When you lockdown a city because of a deadly virus , nobody should come in or go out.   

Even if China had shut down international travel when it shut down domestic travel, it would have been too late. The virus was already abroad. Some countries like Taiwan were closely following events and took them seriously. They managed to control the spread. Most others weren't taking it seriously enough.

[CRUNCHER]

5 minutes ago, placeholder said:

Even if China had shut down international travel when it shut down domestic travel, it would have been too late. The virus was already abroad. Some countries like Taiwan were closely following events and took them seriously. They managed to control the spread. Most others weren't taking it seriously enough.

You are right. The first case outside of China was 8th January 2020 in Thailand - a woman arriving from Wuhan.

By the time China stopped flights the horse was well and truly out of the stable.

[cmarshall]

2 minutes ago, placeholder said:

AS for the US, under the Obama administratin, a plan was made. In fact, the US was judged to be the most ready of any nation for the pandemic. The US just had the bad luck to have Donald Trump as its President when the pandemic arose.

 

You are referring to the Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which was published in 2019.  It's true that the report found the US to be the most prepared, but nevertheless not actually adequately prepared.   Indeed, it found that no country was adequately prepared.  Thailand, by the way, scored as the fourth most prepared nation in that study, and as we know has far surpassed the US outcome even though Thailand is otherwise not a model of good governance.

 

We won't ever know just how the Hillary Clinton administration would have performed.  Certainly, a Clinton administration would have been a vast improvement over Trump's determined nonfeasance.  However, my own opinion is that the likeliest outcome would be that the US would have performed about as well as Germany, i.e. more like 100 Covid deaths per hundred thousand instead of the 182 that Americans have suffered so far.  The reason for that assessment is that someone like Fauci was saying in January, 2020 that the US did not have to worry and that Covid was not a major threat to the US, a disclaimer for which there could have been no evidence.  At that time it was probably already too late to stop the outbreak.  As the WHO representative said around that time a policy of wait-and-see would guarantee a large loss of life.  

 

Notice how poorly the American government has performed when the pressure is on?  During the 9/11 attack the USAF somehow couldn't manage to get combat aircraft into the air, because well, they were busy elsewhere.   Not a single general lost his job or pension as a result of that abject failure.  Then on Jan. 6 it takes five hours to summon the National Guard down the road to protect the Congress of the United States against armed attack?  Americans pay 40% of the total global military budget and this is what we get?

[placeholder]

6 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

 

You are referring to the Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which was published in 2019.  It's true that the report found the US to be the most prepared, but nevertheless not actually adequately prepared.   Indeed, it found that no country was adequately prepared.  Thailand, by the way, scored as the fourth most prepared nation in that study, and as we know has far surpassed the US outcome even though Thailand is otherwise not a model of good governance.

 

We won't ever know just how the Hillary Clinton administration would have performed.  Certainly, a Clinton administration would have been a vast improvement over Trump's determined nonfeasance.  However, my own opinion is that the likeliest outcome would be that the US would have performed about as well as Germany, i.e. more like 100 Covid deaths per hundred thousand instead of the 182 that Americans have suffered so far.  The reason for that assessment is that someone like Fauci was saying in January, 2020 that the US did not have to worry and that Covid was not a major threat to the US, a disclaimer for which there could have been no evidence.  At that time it was probably already too late to stop the outbreak.  As the WHO representative said around that time a policy of wait-and-see would guarantee a large loss of life.  

 

Notice how poorly the American government has performed when the pressure is on?  During the 9/11 attack the USAF somehow couldn't manage to get combat aircraft into the air, because well, they were busy elsewhere.   Not a single general lost his job or pension as a result of that abject failure.  Then on Jan. 6 it takes five hours to summon the National Guard down the road to protect the Congress of the United States against armed attack?  Americans pay 40% of the total global military budget and this is what we get?

Thanks for the correction. I think we can agree that the results would have been less disastrous.