France will provide an update in just over one and a half hours so I expect this to jump quite a bit again.
Italy update coming in about 6 minutes, expecting the worst.
Looks like some people in France are trying to ensure that the people responsible for the situation will be held accountable (archive) Today 600 doctors filed a complaint against the PM and former minister of health for not having taken the necessary measures to curb the arrival of the epidemic in France, even though they were aware of the danger. The complaint relates to article 223-7 of the penal code, according to which “whoever voluntarily refrains from taking or provoking measures allowing, without risk for him or for the thirds, to fight a disaster likely to create a danger for personal safety is punished by two years' imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros ”.
So the general consensus from the pundits so far seems to be "fuck the middle class" then? They sure seem angry that the most productive segment of the population (that actually pays in more than it takes out) might be getting a hand staying afloat so they stand some chance of remaining productive while those already accustomed to bread & water get a stipend for more and the rich get told to dig through their own pockets for change.
I mean the feds can't even pump money into the stock market fast enough to keep up with the deflation of the dollar. They need to encourage buying, continuing to give trillions of dollars to rich people right now who are simply fleeing to gold and treasury bonds is dumb as fuck. and people who have low-income jobs aren't leaches, the companies who don't pay them a livable wage are the leaches, forcing the middle class to pay for their ineptitude. these are necessary jobs, someone needs to do them.
people act all stingy about poor people like "oh we have no money to do anything about it" but we pump huge sums of money directly into the hands of ridiculously wealthy people and act all confused about why people aren't buying things.
Slight powerlevel but one of my family members works as a primary school librarian and is using the online app the kids are learning with now to do recorded videos of her reading for story time. The kids seem to really like it, and they're glad they still get to enjoy story time during the week even when they're stuck at home.
It has more people in a confined space. Say what you will about California and especially LA, even the shittiest places have a lot of square footage between you and the next person. If you dont believe me look at Friday, ice cube spends most of the film more than 6 ft away from everyone sitting on his porch. You cant really infect people if you arent in coughing distence.
Meanwhile in new york you either go up tight stairs or crampted elevators or subway cars
Assisted Suicide...especially since opiates suppress respiration. That being said, if nothing else can be done for the patient, bring on the morphine for me, please. I'd rather go out on the wings of Morpheus than to be caught in the horror of not being able to draw a breath.
I wonder, would it be helpful to bring back the practice of innoculatuin for those in isolation using virus samples from less dangerous casses. Like we used to do with small pox to build herd immunity?
IL is going into lockdown, starting tonight I believe. Stores here in southern IL were beginning to level out but everyone's out in force again. Waited 50 minutes at my pharmacy drive up and I was second in line when they opened. I have meals, meds, cat supplies, and entertainment. Let's get this over with.
Just for perspective on how necessary some of these closures are, just one of my teams for one of my
classes in university had one person in quarantine from travelling overseas, another one that was in contact with 5 others who tested positive, and a Frenchman international student who is totally MIA after our scheduled spring break.
Yep, that's Wuhan officials for you. You made some very good points on how authoritarian states become fragile. The example is great too.
I made a massive analytical post in the thread regarding to China's internal politics and aftermath of the virus. It's very long and incredibly autistic, but I did put a lot of thought into it.
It's not just officials of Wuhan being stupid spaydos, the upper power-structure of the entire province of Hubei have been complacent, they were in shambles. Of course, Wuhan is the capital of Hubei where all the powers of the province are found. So in this case, Wuhan is effectively Hubei in terms of power structure.
The correct response would be this...
The police gets the documents Dr Li produced, the CT scan footage, and send it all straight to universities/departments that handle this stuff, instead of just reprimanding the man.
A strong one party state require strong bonds and communication, one rotting point will render the entire structure in shambles. That's what we're seeing now. One fuck up by Wuhan, Hubei the province the city is in didn't care much, entire China gets fucked. China got fucked, the world will follow sooner or later, then everyone gets fucked unless the leadership did something as early as possible.
But instead China has some draconian rumour laws that was a consequence of one single fucking outlier crime, and these tiny players would be far too scared to challenge it. They can't do shit either since obviously Dr Li is far right on the IQ bellcurve while these dipshit coppers are probably on the left side (ie low IQ). Their response to not being able to comprehend the scope of Li's findings are to assume it's fake, typical low IQ response. Correct response as I've said, would be to get knowledgeable people involved.
Here's the timeline, I've encased dates in rectangles to illustrate the levels of danger.
Green: This is weird, but it's pretty normal it seems
Orange: This is worrying and it must be addressed
Red: It's severe and the consequences are unimaginable
Dried blood: Catastrophe View attachment 1196737
It's similar to this: View attachment 1196738
The measures of control should be placed somewhere in the orange rectangle before everything just blows up. Which makes the ideal timeline look like this:
Dec. 10:Wei Guixian, one of the earliest known coronavirus patients, starts feeling ill. Dec. 16: Patient admitted to Wuhan Central Hospital with infection in both lungs but resistant to anti-flu drugs. Staff later learned he worked at a wildlife market connected to the outbreak. Dec. 27: Wuhan health officials are told that a new coronavirus is causing the illness. Dec. 30:
Ai Fen, a top director at Wuhan Central Hospital, posts information on WeChat about the new virus. She was reprimanded for doing so and told not to spread information about it.
Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang also shares information on WeChat about the new SARS-like virus. He is called in for questioning shortly afterward.
Wuhan health commission notifies hospitals of a “pneumonia of unclear cause” and orders them to report any related information.
All information currently know is sent straight to Beijing, and select patients diagnosed with the unknown virus are transported to Shanghai for treatment and analysis [1]
Dec. 31:
Wuhan health officials confirm 27 cases of illness and close a market they think is related to the virus' spread.
Chinese researches start mapping the new coronavirus' complete genetic information. [2]
China tells the World Health Organization’s China office about the cases of an unknown illness.
Jan. 1: Beijing (and Xi Jinping) becomes involved in the response [3]
Jan. 2:China announces it has mapped the coronavirus genome. [4]
Jan. 3–6:Important prescheduled CCP meeting held in Wuhan. During that time, since the Wuhan Health Commission insists there are no new cases, they are all rounded up and shot. [5]
Jan. 7-14:
Beijing announces that all CNY gatherings are strictly banned, people who breach the ban will be fed to crocodiles. [6]
Beijing sends epidemiologists to Wuhan.
Zhong Nanshan involvement
People's Daily reports on the virus to inform the masses in China
Wuhan is locked down, no one is allowed to leave, those who dare to will leave in a coffin or a jar
[1]: It took the P3 lab in Shanghai and P4 superlab in Wuhan 1 day to analyse the genome of the virus
[2]: Same as above
[3]: This is critical, since Wuhan houses politicians that don't have a penis... they do but it should be taken away now
[4]: 30th of Dec - 2nd of Jan, 3 days is more than enough, since Shanghai and Wuhan only took one day
[5]: At this time, all the politicians of Wuhan who knows the issue but was ignoring it or actively trying to hide it should have been jailed for treason
[6]: 7-10 days is more than enough for all this to happen, China showed us that only one week is enough for all this happen already.
So I believe if the officials of Wuhan weren't utter fucking exceptional individuals, the combating of the virus could have been executed 10 days earlier, which should theoretically reduce at least 80% of infections. We can see in original the timeline, Xi was involved on the 7th, the genome is mapped out on the 9th, and 11-17 would be CPC visiting Wuhan, and 18th is when Wuhan had their Coronachan festival. Epidemiologists were only sent there on the 19th, and on the 21st, Beijing reigns down power and warns the masses. There simply wasn't enough time to decisively act and control. The gathering was the most damning part for these reasons:
It was a PRE-CNY!!!!! gathering. CNY is on the 5th of February. That's 18 days later.
What happens after the gathering? People leave Wuhan, back home, and infect everyone there.
Being Pre-CNY, people from all over China are gathered before they GO HOME.
The pre-CNY gathering on the 18th was the ultimate catalyst of the virus, and since it was held in Wuhan despite a clear epidemic being brewed, the officials of Wuhan and consequentely Hubei must be held accountable
Basically, one massive pocket taken over by Coronachan sprung into smaller pockets, and this is only possible during the months of CNY.
The gathering being just one day after the meeting ended, means Beijing can't really be blamed in this entire fucking mess, at least within China. Globally, Beijing represents China, which means Wuhan's fuck up will be blamed on them rightfully so.
The response after Beijing came in, in my opinion, was solid. Hear me out though, it's solid but it was almost as good as doing nothing, for China only [7]. The virus has an incubation period of 2-14-20-40 days. People show symptoms as soon as 2 days, some in a week or two, and the longest known currently is 40 days. Because of this, and the nature of responding rather than prevention when epidemics happen (no one can predict the future), locking down as soon as possible is vital. It would be unfair to ask China to respond when absolutely no signs of a major epidemic is shown, given the fucked up long and ambiguous incubation period, and the fucking season being winter where colds are rampant, all combined with the CNY where people are looking forward to gathering with their families, once a year only. This simply cannot be done, it's impossible, it's utopian, just like the ideology of Communism. This incubation period is just damning, which is why the virus seems very unnatural to normies. What could have been done of course as I've illustrated, officials of Wuhan asking Beijing to get involved 10 days earlier.
10 Dec: First known case
+6
16 Dec: Patient treated
+11
27 Dec: A wild Coronachan appears!
So we have 17 days here. Tightly matches up with the typical incubation period of 2-14 days.
After knowing it's a new virus, Wuhan officials should have started to cautiously monitor the situation, get the virus analysed and the gnome sequenced with their P4 top-notch fucking lab that they don't deserve to have, and get Beijing involved.
My timeline grants 5 days for Beijing to come in, I think it's reasonable.
If CPC locked down Wuhan before the gathering and before people started leaving the city to celebrate CNY, much of China wouldn't be affected at all. It's going to suck for these people, but China can always make arrangements, such as extending the holiday. Then it would be entire China assisting one city, rather than each province blowing up at different fucking times, provinces keeping medical supplies to their own out of fear, people being utterly paranoid and start flying all over the country and out of the country. Wuhan officials are entirely to blame for not letting Beijing know as soon as possible. Even if there's a mass Exodus after Wuhan is locked in my timeline, it wouldn't matter too much. Nobody in Wuhan shall escape, Ching Chong from Beijing flying to Tianjing or Ling Long from Shanghai escaping to Nanjing won't fucking matter, there is no hotspots of virusus outside of Wuhan. They can fly around all they like.
Of course, not only Wuhan should be locked. Wuhan should be encased. Like this: View attachment 1196777
Wuhan is geographically a disaster for epidemics. It's in the middle of China, connected to the most provinces possible, which renders it the biggest blue collar middle class working city.
All the surrounding provinces should have their borders secured, and strict testing measures implemented. This is how China responded after Beijing was involved, albeit too late.
After Beijing was involved, in 6 days, Wuhan gets locked down. This means that in an authoritarian state, it takes just 6 days to lock the city up. So the ideal time of Beijing's involvement should be 6 days prior to the Wuhan gathering on the 18th, making it around the 16th. Then since it took CPC a week of ground work at Wuhan, this is is subtracted, making the response time around the 8th-9th. So my timeline makes it a bit early. We can thus conclude that China could have responded up to 2 weeks earlier if the officials of Wuhan weren't corrupted as shit.
Some might ask, why didn't China just lock itself entirely?
1. Economical war. Many western powers want China dead, why would they just self-immolate? Locking down a major city, followed by many provinces isn't enough? I can't see how countries that's as big and not a dictatorship will be able to do this at all. Taiwan is an island, they were able to shield themselves. Singapore is a dictatorship, they got shit done quick. Australia is an island just like Taiwan, yet we fucked up big time.
2. Why aren't we locking ourselves up? Reason is the same.
3. Who's gonna help China with borders all shut? Japan will give some help as they've shown right from the beginning, some other tiny political allies will... and... then? Should China expect people outside to give a shit? No, as we shouldn't expect China to give a shit about us, because they don't.
4. China makes 50% of the world's masks. I hate globalism as much as the next guy, but this will trickle down.
5. Locking down the world's most populated country that's the 3rd largest, during CNY of all time? This isn't Hogwarts. Would it be possible to completely lock America down during Christmas? How about 4 of those?
6. All this wouldn't even matter if Wuhan politicians didn't only care about their position. If the 5 million mass Exodus from Wuhan was prevented, the virus would be prevented. I personally think it's at least a 10 million mass Exodus, I do not believe the numbers uttered from the mouths of Wuhan's politicians.
To summarise, here are my opinions on why the virus blew up in China.
- Wuhan politicians being shit
- Virus being spawned pre-CNY
- Wuhan politicians being shit
- Not repeating myself
- Beijing involvement was timed right when Wuhan had their Coronachan Festival
- Demonic incubation periods and false-positives. A 17yo in Korea recently died from the virus. He was tested 7 fucking times, and only when he died, he was tested positive. Korean doctors went WTF over this, they are now analysing the case.
- Wuhan hospitals having inadequate equipment, (Wuhan politicians are shit)
- Wuhan's geography
- Wuhan is one of the few "Supercities" in China. A supercity is defined as having more than 10 million people. Wuhan is home to 19,000,000 people in 2015. Yeah, that's a 2015 statistic.
- Wuhan despite being a supercity, is only a sub-tier-1 city, lacking sufficient medical equipment, healthcare etc.
There's this old saying in the ancient times in China. When faced with an epidemic, the people will be able to see if their politicians (upper powers during that time) care about the people, or their hats (metaphor for their position, 烏紗帽 which is a black hat Chinese politicians/powers wore to indicate their position). It's fair to say that the politicians of Wuhan only cares about their powerful position.
Globally, of course for the spread of the virus, it would be China taking a sizeable chunk of blame. The officials of Wuhan are likely appointed by Hubei as a province, however, Wuhan is also the capital of Hubei, where all the powers of Hubei are expected to reside in. Therefore, Wuhan cannot escape the blame here.
As for WHO, fuck them.
Their initial response was as shit as Wuhan's. Of course they are licking the butt of China, their incompetence assisted in the spread of the virus in China and most Chinese I've talked to wants their HQ firebombed. China can use Wuhan's shitbags as an excuse, WHO's jumpy actions and negligence is inexcusable. They can lick China's butt and say their response is solid from the beginning (no it's not) blah all they fucking want, I don't care about their opinion. The average Chinese in mainland China that's sensible should dislike WHO as much as the politicians of Wuhan.
Ego and weak leadership at any spot from bottom to the top gets in the way of good dictatorships, two more tripping stones would be inexperienced (Deng Xiaoping) and shot sighted (Wuhan). This is perfectly illustrated by China this time. Weakness and corruption fucked up the entire nation's most important celebration and took the lives of 3000+ people, and subsequently dragged the world into the mess.
Jiang and Hu were not strong leaders, however they got shit done because they asked for help. Massive panels of the world's best economists helped China's growth. Singapore helped plan out areas in Jiangsu, China did ask far more successful economies for help. However the 2 leaders weren't exactly strong. There weren't any of their mantras pasted everywhere, news wasn't 24/7 about their politics etc. Party members weren't required to share news relating to them on Wechat daily. Plenty people made memes of the two leaders and they didn't give too much of a fuck. Posts were deleted and what not, but we didn't see Pooh levels of epic memes being created, View attachment 1197000View attachment 1197004View attachment 1197005
(Chinese text in the middle: Hu's despise, effect is if he looks at you, you're sent to jail for all Eternity)
Xi is a very strong leader, but he has a massive fucking ego, just look at how they handled Winnie the Pooh. A stupid cartoon triggered him so badly. Worse, it was meant to be a light hearted joke, where Obama was Tigga (which rhymes with... yeah), can anyone imagine Obama getting trigga'd at being compared to Pooh's nigga tigga?
Strong leaders with huge egos will scare people into submission, or rather "I'll just keep quite". Weak leaders are easily kicked around which I think is worse. An ideal dictator has strong leadership, yet humble, being open-minded to criticism, and won't hesitate when asking for help.
Having Ex-military as a leader means strong leadership, however a country isn't an army, and can't be ran as an army. Let's name 2 of China's military leaders that became the president... hmmmm...
Mao Zedong
Oh, and Xi Jinping.
Deng Xiaoping is a military leader as well, but he was smart enough to understand economics. However, he handled Tiananmen Square protests like a military leader, smack it down with barbaric force when it got out of hand with the army. Jiang's approach was different, he looked at how other countries handle protests and formed "armed police", police that are military-styled, but not as brutal. If Deng actually had access to armed police, then most would probably learn about protesters setting public transport facilities on fire, throwing molotov cocktails at police and the military killing them, and some explosion that killed a bunch of soldiers. Of course, none of these excuse the brutal handling, but China would have a legitimate case if they didn't just roll in the tanks and used PLA at the end.
Wuhan's politicians manages to be the worst case scenario:
Corruption: cover ups, arresting whistle blowers, ordering samples to be destroyed
Short-sighted: What are the consequences of the virus? Meh, I want to keep my position.
Weakness: look at how they locked down the city and how millions were able to run away when and even afterwards
Ego: Oh hey Xi Jinping.... nothing to see here, it's totally fine, evidence is lacking..... eehh...
Inexperienced: Until 27th of Jan, the biggest hospitals weren't even able to adequately test for the virus because the equipment is shit.
All this combined with the reasoning in my long post above is the recipe of a catastrophe.
I thought Deng Xiaoping had no choice because the hardliners controlling massive segments of the PLA gave him an ultimatum stating that if he allowed the protests to continue then they would take control of the situation. This would have meant civil war and the last thing Xiaoping wanted was for China to descend back into warlords and anarchy like it had under Mao's leadership. I do not believe he did the right thing but look at the few choices laid before him.
I mean that only happens to like .05% of people and if you have doctors around they can treat it. China’s main weirdness to ketamine stemmed from people do like to abuse it, but it is so helpful in the medical field that most countries just kind of accept that. Then, you saw an explosion in designer ketamine analogs (which ketamine is already an analog of PCP just seems to be the only one that’s decently safe) and they were all being produced in... China.
They seemed to have an agreement and eventually just banned the precursors and end product with no room to bribe due to social stigma and harsh penalties. They don’t give a fuck about the “fentalogs” because the CCP is behind that despite some being insanely dangerous to even handle.
Fuck it minor powerlevel - I researched the shit quality of illicit drugs China was pumping out and its insane. The fent/whatever they’ve moved on to now was always way better quality compared to some drugs that they literally forced to crystallized so shitty that they contained fucking petroleum byproducts. Really was eye opening, but also made it easy to tell which drugs had the OK from the CCP or just were by some group that bribed an official.
Anyways, putting the infected into kholes would be better for the patients, doctors, and nurses it just looks bad to have everyone put into a medical coma IMO. You wouldn’t have patients panicking which fucks moral for doctors and nurses. They wouldn’t wake up thrashing with a tube down their mouth. Again, it looks bad, but it would ease the collective burden on hospital staff.
My business is pretty much fucked right now. Got a big bump in business last month for people stocking up, now its just dead. Besides repairs and an occassional refill winter is alwas super slow, but it always picks up around April. Lean times ahead folks, hope everyone is hanging in.
