Wuhan Coronavirus: Megathread - Got too big

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Just wrote this and sent this to friends. I offer this for your consideration.

Emperor Xi Has No Clothes

Bottom line up front: The ongoing and worsening debacle in Wuhan has damaged China's reputation and Xi's reputation, possibly irreparably. This will affect not just foreign relations, but internal conditions.

What we have here in Wuhan is a typical case of the historic model of Chinese rule. Whether the ruler is called an emperor, the chairman, or the general secretary, it's all the same. Political parties don't matter, either.

Under this system everything is driven from the top down. Underlings who deviate from this can face consequences such as losing their jobs, freedom, or even their lives. Underlings that bring bad news to the Emperor can and have faced similar consequences. So there was a real incentive for the Wuhan mayor/government to not inform Beijing that things were getting rapidly out of control.

To the Chinese, and like a lot of people in general, saving face is vital. Have heard that China refused aid (masks) from Japan and Thailand. Okay, don't want the masks? Then how about cracking open the People's Liberation Army's extensive war reserve stocks of masks and other medical gear? Far as I know ONE plane is being dispatched from the USA to pick up Americans. Bet the State Department asked to be allowed to send more than one plane. Nope, no way does Xi want to see a number of airliners, or even worse, military transport planes from other countries, descending upon Chinese airports to get their people out. Would be fairly easy for us to send in a bunch of USAF C-17s, for example. Got 'em in the Pacific, ready to go.

There's a lot of info going around. Have heard that the Chinese first started looking for the people who passed the word of the budding epidemic. Saw a video from someone in Wuhan describing the chaos there. If he's caught, curtains for him. Now just heard that the Chinese are looking for people who have illegally left Wuhan. Why? That horse is long gone. And no way can you effectively "lock down" a city of ten million. If you want out, you can get out.

Folks, consider this. Over the last thirty years or so China has made some tremendous strides. They've built an incredible amount of infrastructure/housing/industrial plants/etc. Many shiny and glittering cities. But go twenty miles outside those fancy cities and you go back fifty or sixty years. Got millions and millions of people who live at a much lower standard of living than the city dwellers.

Here's an anus-clenching question. If things are so chaotic in major cities, which ostensibly have large, supposedly capable medical systems, then what is happening in the thousands upon thousands of smaller towns and villages? With the Chinese New Year, chances are many infected people went to see family in the country/smaller towns. These places simply will not have the capability to care for large numbers of sick people flooding in. If lucky, the sick will get a place on the floor and a blanket. If not, they are sent home.

Another anus-clenching question. I am not a doctor or an epidemiologist. But if this virus supposedly went from bats to people, could this virus later go from people to other animals, such as pigs, cows, or chickens, mutate, and come back to humans? Keep in mind China has been fighting a major outbreak of African swine flu, resulting in the loss of millions of pigs. Still ongoing. That's one reason they now want to buy pork from us.

Have also heard this virus could have escaped from a biological warfare facility in the Wuhan area. I can believe it. People don't always follow procedures.

Now, why a relatively muted international outcry over this outbreak? Yup, you guessed it. Don't want to offend the Chinese. Well, that horse needs to leave the barn, as well. Xi has demonstrated his "face" is more important than people's health. His actions are morally bankrupt. China, for the glittering facade the emperor wants us to accept, is little more than a house of cards in the face of what could be another 1918-like pandemic.

Emperor Xi has no clothes. And if I believe this, think how many others, world-wide, believe the same thing.


Uncle Joe
 
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Discord chat with friend about this brought up something interesting:

So if the coronavirus is indeed from an animal, what if it's not from a bat or a snake but from a sick dog they ate? Don't forget they chow down on dogs over there as much as they slurp down bat soup.
 
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Otterly said:
There are plenty of epidemiologists and geneticists who think that the Black Death and the plagues mentioned previously may actually have been a haemorrhagic virus like Crimean Congo fever/Ebola. The epidemiology does not fit a rat bourne vector at all.
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We have very good descriptions of the illness... also killing all the rats and jews worked....
 
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GnomeofDoc said:
Air soft guns my dudes, but I give them an A for effort with the spears. Spears are the ultimate Chad weapon
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Nothing says respect my personal space like a good old spear.

Question for the biomedical and virology people here: what evidence would have see to get to accept or reject (or at least move your opinion one way or another regarding) the bio-weapon hypothesis (i.e. that this virus escape from the Wuhan Level 4 lab)? Because my layman opinion is that this is most likely jumped completely naturally from animal-human contact - my trust in the Chinese government is low enough that idea this was an accident from the bioweapon program - a biological Chernobyl, if you will - is not that insane to me. But it seems to me that it very hard to prove one way or another without dox from the lab or the government, which ... I really doubt will be forthcoming. Probably will join all the other conspiracy theories floating around, sadly.
 
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Fareal said:
So, if the information being reported here from (probably) fairly reliable sources is correct:

We have a virus, which is airborne/droplet borne, with an 83% infection rate after exposure. It has up to 14 days incubation time, and it's contagious during then. Symptoms can be mild - similar to a heavy cold - and there's at least one child who was reported as an asymptomatic carrier.

Every parent knows what this means: this virus is going to look exactly like the 'current' nursery/school cold that goes round every childcare facility/school about once a month. Your kid won't seem too sick, you will whack some Calpol/baby Tylenol/etc into them to keep their temp down, tell them to wash their hands and use a hankie.

And then that afternoon you will let their grandparents in their sixties or seventies collect them from school, because you're at work. And it's only a cold. Sure, grandma has a touch of asthma in the winter, but it's not like she's old or sick, is it? It's only a sniffle.
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Where was the guy who wanted an official theme song for the thread? I think I've just found it.
 
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Glad I couldn't help said:
Nothing says respect my personal space like a good old spear.

Question for the biomedical and virology people here: what evidence would have see to get to accept or reject (or at least move your opinion one way or another regarding) the bio-weapon hypothesis (i.e. that this virus escape from the Wuhan Level 4 lab)? Because my layman opinion is that this is most likely jumped completely naturally from animal-human contact - my trust in the Chinese government is low enough that idea this was an accident from the bioweapon program - a biological Chernobyl, if you will - is that insane to me. But it seems to me that it very hard to prove one way or another without dox from lab or the government, which ... I really doubt will be forthcoming. Probably will join all the other conspiracy theories floating around, sadly.
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If they confirm its insanely contagious before showing any signs id certainly not dismiss the bioweapon theory as crazy, but I still think it's more likely people were just eating things they shouldn't.
 
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Glad I couldn't help said:
Nothing says respect my personal space like a good old spear.

Question for the biomedical and virology people here: what evidence would have see to get to accept or reject (or at least move your opinion one way or another regarding) the bio-weapon hypothesis (i.e. that this virus escape from the Wuhan Level 4 lab)? Because my layman opinion is that this is most likely jumped completely naturally from animal-human contact - my trust in the Chinese government is low enough that idea this was an accident from the bioweapon program - a biological Chernobyl, if you will - is that insane to me. But it seems to me that it very hard to prove one way or another without dox from lab or the government, which ... I really doubt will be forthcoming. Probably will join all the other conspiracy theories floating around, sadly.
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I guess hypothetically if there were signs in the viral genome that there were bits of multiple common (for lab purposes) gene cassettes it might indicate it was modified rather than natural. But it can be hard to tell with viruses anyway since they tend to snap up random crap from time to time. It really doesn't have to be a bioweapon to be extremely contagious and bad. Viruses do just fine without help. And China is a focal point for crossover like this precisely because it's got a very high population density and plenty of animals living close to humans, sometimes in less than sanitary conditions. Really, this is just what you expect to see come out of the place.
 
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For the record you guys, it *is* really hard keeping up with when someone should be worried, newfag or not and I've been following (probably a little too neurotically) for the past few days.

Also here's my contribution to the music playlist. "And now for something completely different":

 
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Agent Nahman Jayden said:
For the record you guys, it *is* really hard keeping up with when someone should be worried, newfag or not and I've been following (probably a little too neurotically) for the past few days.
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Only time you'd probably be worried is if a young and healthy person that's not from a shithole like China got the virus and died. Otherwise it's wise to keep an eye on the situation.
 
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Pinot Pierrot said:
A lot of people do business in China. If you are clever and know your way around the market, the country and its people are essentially money pinatas waiting to be cracked open. You might have to give them several good shakes to deal with their... idiosyncrasies, which probably isn't worth the stress for many, but there's some serious dough involved. A family friend told me how one of his associates dropped his programming job to go traveling around the world, then returned back to the mainland to operate his own freelance travel agency. Except, "travel agency" implies what he's doing is official; he does it all through WeChat groups and cash only to avoid pesky things like regulations and taxes, and now he's making more money than he could have ever made from doing code.

Seriously, the amount of money middle-to-upper class Chinese folk are willing to just throw away is nothing to cough at.
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Yeah, you can make a lot of money in China.

Downside is you can also lose all of it very quickly. They've been throwing foreigners out of the Country left and right, university professors, engineers, others. Several close friends are dealing with the tail end of the dragon right now.

Resisting urge to powerlevel, but you don't get to bring your RMB with you. You don't get to bring back your personal property, except for stuff like clothes and pictures. When they decide your business partners now own the business and you made enough, you get nothing and have no way to sue. In one case, your girlfriend of 5 years, who has been traveling throughout the US introducing herself as your finance, leaves you the moment the party says white people go home (and you suspect she was told to get with you in the first place.)
 
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Glad I couldn't help said:
Question for the biomedical and virology people here: what evidence would have see to get to accept or reject (or at least move your opinion one way or another regarding) the bio-weapon hypothesis
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absolute accept or reject is almost impossible unless someone ‘fesses up.

moving towards rejection would be finding this virus, or more specifically a clade of very similar versions circulating in wild vectors away from the market in places unlikely to have been infected. And/ Or better phylogenetic data which shows a clear path to create this version from other versions, along with minor variations that indicate that it has mutated as it went. And/or archive samples showing circulation in humans/vectors from years past. Anything that shows it evolving in the wild basically.

the only thing that’s going to convince me it’s definitely a bio weapon is solid lab evidence (a paper trail), whistleblowing from site, etc. If I saw sequences around the rearranged bits that looked suspiciously like the remains of a recombinase target, it’d lend evidence to it being tinkered with. Crispr doesn’t leave so many traces as previous technologies like cre/lox etc though.

this virus could well have emerged naturally - no tinkering is needed to make viruses rearrange and recombine, it’s just what they do. If it has been released, it’s most likely a screw up. They do happen, just hypothetically if contractors reverse the airflow for an entirely non real world example I have never ever seen ;) . I’ve never worked anywhere which had lab mice that hasn’t lost a few either. Life finds a way, and all that.

if I have time one day I’ll sit down and comb through it,
Edited to add: if it is indeed contagious before symptoms that is very unusual, to the point it raises questions on why and how it does that. But again, not a smoking gun. Just a weirdness
 
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bigoogabaloogas said:
Only time you'd probably be worried is if a young and healthy person that's not from a shithole like China got the virus and died. Otherwise it's wise to keep an eye on the situation.
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Basically this, once people in the US that have never been to China who may have come into contact with an infected person gets it and falls over bleeding from the mouth/nose that's when the panic sets in.
 
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afternoon_tea said:
Is it corydalis? I know that's popular for pain and it's one of the only tcm things I tried where I actually felt like it did something. Oyster shell seemed to help with muscle spasms too, I figure there's probably magnesium in it or something.

I'm curious if anyone has ever separated the wheat from the chaff to see if there is some merit to some of the single ingredients. So much of TCM is like "you MUST make the exact formula, in this exact way for it to work" when I suspect if any of it does anything outside of placebo effect it's down to the properties of one single ingredient. I always wonder if it's the esoteric nature that draws people to it though, like "well this seems complicated and specific and magical, there must be something to it!"
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I have no idea what's in it but it's a Dit Da Jow made specifically for finger joints.
 
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