If the root cause of the problem is not resolved, even we overcome this virus, then now what? What's next? If the next virus hit us again, would Chinese government still try to cover up the problem and stop people from speaking up? Would WHO stop down playing the problem and advice not taking actions? It's a wake up call, while it's nice to have some heartwarming help from internet, I am more concern about COVID-19 is not the worst case, it's just a test, next thing could be way worse if we only try to look away from the root problem, like all the time we did.
The root cause of this Outbreak in North America is we have a president call it a HOAX, a flu. The incompetency of the government resulted this disaster in here. Even now when we have thousands in isolation. They are still trying to down play it. They have no idea how many people are infected, they have no idea how many possible contact s are out there spreading the virus. No matter how much they blame others, the root cause is right here in North America!
I mean he did say it was not serious that it was just the flu and that it will soon be gone, just disappear. He also said he would have a press conference yesterday to announce major financial moves to help the economy which did not happen. He is also still insisting via his new budget that funding for the cdc be cut by 15%. He also fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs.
You are right though, he did not directly call it a hoax.
No he didn't. He characterized the criticism as a hoax. That is an entirely different thing. By perpetuating the lie that he considered the outbreak as a hoax you are adding to the problem. If you disagree, please link to some sort of news account that backs up your statement.
It isn't really hard to understand what he meant either. The President's critics say all sorts of things that aren't true. He is constantly calling them out on it. He has used the term 'hoax' for a long time to refer to the misleading stories his critics tell.
Doesn't mean that there aren't valid criticisms. Just means that much of the back and forth is just hot air. There is no reason to add to the madness though by spreading more misleading information.
It is very clear. He uses it to refer to the unfounded conspiracy theories and accusations directed at him. What is so difficult to understand about that usage?
No, nothing that he says is very clear. The things he labels hoaxes do not correspond to what other people would call a hoax in subtle but significant ways. It doesn't seem that he understands what the word actually means.
Approximately 0% of this discussion should be occurring right now. Presidents should not be throwing around words like this in a middle of a crisis. Period. Recognize this for what it is. This is shit leadership. This is a shit show. I don't give a crap which finely parsed definition to the word "hoax" you give. Don't defend this.
What nonsense. It isn't hard to understand what the President is saying. And the idea that there are particular words that shouldn't be used because we are in a crisis is just weird.
Yes we should strive for clear communication but that doesn't happen by declaring particular words as off limits.
And what exactly am I defending other than accurate reporting?
> It isn't hard to understand what the President is saying.
The most generous interpretation of his words is that he meant it's a political attack from his political opponents.
The fact that his first instinct is his own political fortunes and has to preemptly whine like a baby about it is evidence of shit leadership.
The President and all leadership should be focused on the right response that minimizes loss of life, political fortunes be damned. I mean, seriously. If a sheriff's first instincts in every crisis were his reelection chances, he'd be out on his ass. But sadly, yes, here we are, arguing stupid shit, in the middle of a completely unnecessary distraction because he felt threatened and needed to lash out. So he pitted us against each other at the least opportune time. It is the one of the worst possible things to do in a crisis. Find a way to divide us!
> It isn't hard to understand what the President is saying
The problem is that the public at large will internalise the first interpretation they are presented with, whether this be their own understanding or their favourite news outlet's. Past presidents were smart enough to realise this and therefore appointed professionals (whom they listened to!) to help them craft their messaging to be as precise as possible. Trump, for some reason, has failed to learn this lesson in his first three years on the job. It is because he continues to use inprecise language that his messaging gets corrupted like this.
“Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus," and, "One of my people came up to me and said, 'Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.' That didn't work out too well. They couldn't do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. And this is their new hoax.”
It's hard to parse that, but a reasonable interpretation is to say "this" refers to coronavirus. Notably he didn't say "criticism" at all, and referring to "politicizing" as a hoax doesn't make grammatical or logical sense (which of course doesn't mean it isn't what he meant. He said "the impeachment hoax", and he was impeached so clearly his interpretation of "hoax" is different to the normal interpretation).
Not american here, so didn't read/listen to this, but in all honesty, I would read the last part not as 'calling' the corona virus a hoax, but that democrats were using the corona virus as an attack, as they did with russia or the impeachment (not passing judgement about russia/impeachment, just I would read that as an attack on democrats and not as they calling COVID a hoax)
My initial reading was that he meant the severity of the virus is a hoax (which goes along with his "the flu kills more people" narrative).
Your reading sort of makes sense if "hoax" was a synonym for "attack". It's not, but Trump seems to use it as one, so yes I could see that could be what he meant.
It's interesting, because we end up in situations like this where you can try to read into it what he meant but that really requires guessing!
The Verge has got good, non-political coverage of the issue. Needless to say it isn't clear cut:
Trump surrogates said after the rally that he wasn’t calling coronavirus a hoax. “He was referring to the way he had been treated by the opposite party … in terms of taking every opportunity to bring him down,” said Surgeon General Jerome Adams on SiriusXM’s The Black Eagle with Joe Madison. And you can argue that Trump is limiting his claim to Democrats arguing he’s not prepared for the coronavirus. But the speech simply compares coronavirus to the “impeachment hoax” (which Trump describes as a “perfect conversation” that Democrats twisted into something negative), so it’s also easy to argue that Trump is saying the coronavirus itself is similarly overblown.
It isn't hard to parse at all. He has been using the word "hoax" to refer to false narratives and accusations for months if not years. He is clearly pushing back on the criticisms as being false, as being a "hoax".
There is also the fact that his actions don't make any sense at all if it were true that the President thinks the outbreak is a hoax.
Trumps's actions at the time (28 Feb) were things that indicated exactly that he thought coronavirus wasn't a threat and would go away soon:
Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.... Hopefully, we’re not going to have to spend so much because we really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. And again, we’ve had tremendous success — tremendous success — beyond what people would have thought.
and
So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.
I really think he is using "hoax" as a synonym for "bad" and is referring to coronavirus, criticisms of his response and the Democrats all at the same time.
I mean we can do 2 things at once. Its like when there is a mass shooting and when someone suggests gun control as a solution the other side yells that people just died and their families are grieving and this is no time to be discussing taking guns away.
I'm failing to see how the "root cause", as you suggested, China, of the problem can somewhat solve the problem. It always us against the virus. Last I recall, they don't take orders from any one. Not even Trump.
I've been watching COVID-19 very closely since 2019 Dec it, I also witnessed how WHO responses to this Pandemic. If you were me, you will notice that WHO tried very hard to please China, rather than taking people's health into consideration. Many things they did:
- Advice not to ban flight to China after China locked down hubei lockdown (yes, many country trust WHO, like Japan and Korea)
- Met and praised Xi many times, admire how wonderful they did
- Keep down playing how serious the problem can be, and didn't advice any action
Why would the WHO try to please China? It's an international organization. It's not a charity. It doesn't rely on donation. Its membership were to countries, it's operations were maintained based on membership dues. I find it revolting as the OP seems to be insinuating there were financial interest for WHO to please China, which is bizarre and outrageous based on how it's organized.
WHO does rely in large part on donations. See http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA72/A72_35-en.pdf page 82. It could certainly be argued that they have an interest in convincing China to boost the voluntary portion of its contribution to match that of some of the other nations on that list.
WHO has "assessed contribution", which is its lifeline upon which it relies. I'm not saying it doesn't accept donation. just that WHO doesn't need donations to survive. It's clearly shown in the pdf which you linked here that China doesn't even make it to the top 10 donor list. Donation from the United States comprised of 76% of WHO total voluntary contribution. Why would WHO risk angering its major donors and pleasing to one specific small donor? Even if finance were taken into consideration, it still doesn't make any sense.
No one really said that. The reasons that international organizations are more trustworthy is that a heck lot more people are watching them and they are mostly composed of delegates from ideally all countries in this world.
Because China threaten them. If they don't bend over backwards for them, China will accuse them of "Sinophobia" and being agents of the CIA all the rest.
See it yourself, not China. They hide data from the world, beat people up on street. How come that now becomes a model for the world? Taiwan is a free country, and yet they did a great job there.
Taiwan has not even been permitted membership to the WHO and is excluded from WHO participation. Maybe it was Taiwan that the WHO was praising when they were talking of China.
People who are so "sinophobic" that they spent their best years in china, learning the language, marrying locals, and creating multiple documentaries about Chinese culture, and only left China because the recent xenophobia of China has become too much for them to continue living there.
I disagree. I haven't lived in China (for more than two months at a time), but traveled there multiple times, which was an eye-opening experience. I've met several foreigners living in China, some of them since before 2010. There is no raise in xenophobia according to those people.
The clickbait that these two Youtubers spread on their channels creates a very, very biased picture of China, and Chinese society (to the negative). Things are blown out of proportion or presented with misleading or no context. Even when they pretend to make a positive video about China, they can't help but add a few dismissive comments here and there.
All of the aforementioned people I know dislike their content, because they feel it misrepresents China as a whole.
I could go on about how and why I think these two guys are toxic, but the gist of it is that I actually used to watch their channel regularly before they became full-time youtubers, which was a turning point. Over the following 6-12 months their content slowly became more clickbaity and generally negative towards China. But I guess once you depend on youtube financially, you simply make videos that get the most clicks. Their comment section slowly turned from "sometimes filled with Chinese trolls and otherwise cool people" to a cesspool of people living in their echo chamber of "murica is awesome, teh commies are evil", and obviously still a lot of Chinese trolls.
Their content doesn't help to get insight into China. It helps you to strengthen the bubble you live in.
I have followed ADVChina for quite some time. The creators provide a unique lens into Chinese culture that is hard to find elsewhere. They are very open about talking about Chinese culture and why it is the way it is. They talk about what they like and don't like about the culture but not in a racist way. The titles of their Youtube videos are click-baity, but the content is informative.
What they say in the channel are all true, they have been traveling in China and living there for long time, they married Chinese wife. If you really look closely, you will notice that they pointed out many problems in China, which I don't think it's Sinophobia. If you point out problems in any country makes you something phobia, then there's no freedom of speech....
Vietnam has done similarly well too. China deserves some blame for not having investigated complaints seriously and allowing it to have spread at least for a month before the alarm bells were rung.
I think most people can agree that no one country has done a stellar job (including the US) to contain and mitigate the virus but given that China was the first to be hit, it gets a larger share of the blame for letting it spread to the rest of the world. If you look at the timeline of the events that transpired in China since December [1], it shows a clear pattern of ignorance and favoring politics over public health. You know things have gone completely wrong when you decide to arrest doctors that have called out the disease. Anybody that says "China has done the best to control this disease" is either a CCP shill or massively uninformed or misled by propaganda. Remember, the only news we get out of China comes from state-sanctioned media.
You've been using HN repeatedly for nationalistic flamewar, which is not a legit use of the site. We've had to ask you more than once to stop doing this since long before Covid-19. Please stop now.
Edit: turns out you've been using HN pretty much exclusively for that. That is a bannable offense as the site guidelines make clear. I'm not going to ban you now, but if you don't stop then we will.
Taiwan have done a stellar job. Pre-prepared, acted quickly (starting on 31st of Dec), and have got the results to show they were doing it right. For more information, see: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
Edit: This also shows up the lie that China’s suppression of information was the critical factor in delaying everyone’s actions: Taiwan had the information and acted, it is just that other countries chose not to act on the information they had. Li Wenliang (one of the whistleblower doctors) on 30 December he “sent a message to fellow doctors in a chat group warning them to wear protective clothing to avoid infection.
Four days later he was summoned to the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter.”
Yes, I noticed too that Taiwan did an amazing job at protecting its citizens. It’s even more remarkable because of how close geographically, culturally and economically it is to China.
China has also silenced those who detected it in early stages. China should pay a dear price for doing so as that is the main reason it got out of control. Stay safe folks!
You want visas to go into china and research a pandemic? This is how it is done. Not by throwing people under the bus, but by maintaining a very narrow bandwidth of comment and showing appreciation to the powers that be, for allowing you to enter the country and go about your business. I appreciate Xi Jinping and other chinese official's efforts to contain the disease and assist the WHO on their research mission. That's all I have to say about that.
Yes, I've been saying this from the start as well. Also note that they used China's severely misleading statistics from day 1 with no disclaimer. The WHO is incompetent and/or corrupt.
In what way were China's statistics severely misleading. For a long time, they reported lab-confirmed cases and were upfront that this was limited by the amount of tests they could perform. In addition, they reported how many people were tested and how many tests were still being processed.
Today in the US, the US is reporting only lab-confirmed cases. They are also upfront that this is limited by the amount of tests they can perform. Unlike China, the US is __not__ reporting how many people are tested or how many tests are being processed. They are also not upfront about the fact that testing is severely limited by a very strict policy on who to test.
I'll take China's statistics (which I've not seen to be misleading) over the US's complete censoring of any information about the outbreak, and the CDC preventing people from getting testing.
At this point, all flights from the US should be terminated. Your government is a danger to your own country and to the world.
Random people signing an internet petition is not cause to remove an international health expert. The only legitimate votes could come from doctors or foreign affairs/other experts
Well, NYT also accused him a few years ago of covering up 3 Cholera outbreaks in his home country of Ethiopia.
Given the display across the world right now I don't know if the experts are that much more informed than the collective wisdom of online society at this point, at least for this matter.
The collective wisdom of some online societies is saying that Covid is being played up in a conspiracy to lose Trump an election. We should be skeptical or online wisdom
This is a lot of media. Bizarrely no skepticism, just writing articles matter of factly using dubious (or at the very least opaque/unverifiable) figures from foreign governments.
And a surprising lack of reporting on the dozens of side channel leaks from China - videos of dead bodies, videos from leakers including the young doctor who was admonished and succumbed to the disease...
Yeah a lot of it was rumor and hard to verify but...nothing? You'd almost start to wonder whether our journalists were cooperating with the Chinese government or something in censoring everything. I struggle to come up with a legitimate excuse other than total incompetence. It was all over the internet and a lot of it (first hand accounts from Chinese citizens within China) would have been reasonably easy to verify for a journalist who knew a Chinese speaker.
The name of this virus with respect to the naming convention mentioned above is literally "A/California/7/2009(H1N1)pdm", which you'll note has two specific places in it, one abbreviated and one not.
For the Northern Hemisphere this flu season they recommend strains like A/Brisbane/02/2018(H1N1), A/Kansas/14/2017(H3N2), B/Colorado/06/2017, and B/Phuket/3073/2013.
Those are virus strain identifier names, not disease common names. IN that case the disease is called influenza.
The WHO advice applies to the common usage:
As these best practices only apply to disease names for common usage, they also do not affect the work of existing international authoritative bodies responsible for scientific taxonomy and nomenclature of microorganisms.
Ebola would be one exception, as it is a river. But Spanish flu was not so named (if that's even a formal name) because of anything Spanish in origin; it was named that way because Spain was the only country reporting on it due to suppression of journalists around the world, including in the U.S., due to WWI. People got all their news on the flu from Spain, so it came to be called the Spanish flu.
Totally, and also it is very important. In some Turkish-speaking forums I follow, some people already blame the "Chinese way of living" for such a disaster. This disassociation has been even too late, I'd say.
Covid-19 virus originated in Wuhan "wet market", where freshly-slaughtered wild meat is preferred. It's a perfect setting to facilitate virus movement from animal to animal and from animal to human.
Even if it is so, Chinese way of living is not just that market and people are just being racist. If there is a specific thing wrong with that environment (I'm not the one to tell), it needs to be dealt as a single case, not by talking down the way of living of billions.
Just in one single section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norovirus#Classification we find Norwalk virus (its original namesake), Southampton virus, Bristol virus, Lordsdale virus, Toronto virus, Mexico virus, Hawaii virus, Snow Mountain virus, US95/96-US strain, and Farmington Hills virus.
None of these are common-usage disease names, which the WHO advice applies to:
As these best practices only apply to disease names for common usage, they also do not affect the work of existing international authoritative bodies responsible for scientific taxonomy and nomenclature of microorganisms.
The name coronavirus doesn't refer to China at all. And it had to get a better name, because "coronavirus" properly refers to a whole class of viruses than include both the common cold and COVID-19.
WHO is an organization with no real power; it was necessary to kiss China's ass so that they could gain access to the country and get early data on the virus. The alternative was that the rest of the world would have had to rely solely on the manipulated Chinese stats.
Why is gaining access a good idea? If China's being dishonest WHO should just recommend zero travel from/to China and let them stew in it -- they can manipulate their stats internally all they want.
Suppose the WHO did recommend a zero travel ban from/to China, what do you think would happen?
Nothing would have changed. It's still in the hands of the politicians in those countries to enact it. And let's be fair, in each country there's at least one politician in the parliament, congress,... that mocked the current, mild, response to the outbreak. Some said they would, or did in fact, defy quarantine rules to stop spreading the disease.
Countries are also running out of reagents to test for this virus so analysis of the situation is already going to be complex. If China is being dishonest, they'll see it in the data. If country X or Y are dishonest in reporting figures about infection, mortality rates and what not, they will also see it.
To summarize and put it bluntly:
1) I doubt China was the only superpower on the planet that used political force on the WHO to change their messaging.
2) The virus is new and currently raw data in any form is more important than issuing a medical recommendation that will be ignored because of country specific politics.
>I doubt China was the only superpower on the planet that used political force on the WHO to change their messaging
China is the only superpower who prioritizes "saving face" over world health. Nobody else would be stupid enough to falsify health data in the face of a pandemic to make themselves look better.
Otherwise, yeah, you have a point about having data about a new disease. But if we can't trust China to provide accurate data anyway, what did we gain? Arguably, the entire reason we saw such a delayed international response to the outbreak outside of China was their "only 300 infected! whoops it's actually 5k lol" campaign.
> China is the only superpower who prioritizes "saving face" over world health. Nobody else would be stupid enough to falsify health data in the face of a pandemic to make themselves look better.
The US has criminally undertested and is actively hiding information (classifying meetings) by order of the current administration.
Please remember that "China" is not one person, and that the dishonest actions of some in their government should not be used to condemn thousands of innocent others to danger or death.
Instead thousands of innocents not in China have been condemned to danger or death. Last I checked, there are way more people not in China than in China. The classic trolley car problem would have made the call easy: seal off China.
Then we saw China locked down all major city themselves. Now you tell me it's fine not to ban flights from China?
And they also keep mentioning it's not a big deal. Obviously they don't want to hurt Chinese economy. I won't trust anything they say, as their interest is China government's interest, not people's health.
Hindsight. At the time, nobody had travel restrictions. Were they all influenced by China? No, with the then current information travel or trade restrictions didn’t make sense.
This is the same lazy argument as with the 737 MAX - why wasn’t it immediately grounded? Well, you can’t just shut down the world at any sign of trouble. You have to make an informed judgement call with the information you have at the time. Sometimes, ex post, it will turn out to have been the wrong call. Doesn’t mean you need to revise or impugn the decision procedure.
> On 23 January 2020, the central government of the People's Republic of China imposed a lockdown in Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province in an effort to quarantine the epicentre of an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
What do you mean nobody had travel restrictions? The report from WHO date was on 30 January 2020, when they saw this and yet suggest not to put any restrictions?
Imagine if Israel had taken the opportunity to lock-down West Bank in the name of health, specifically prevention of novel coronavirus.
My artificial example is perhaps not accurate on its face, but I hope you can see the principle. WHO was trying to prevent unnecessary border restrictions in the world, until such time as they became justified for health reasons. In China that was already the case.
Many of the footage are before the Jan 30 WHO announcement, like the many body moving in front of hospital.
WHO probably already know what's really happening there, but still given wrong advice, so that many countries, like Korean, Japan follow the instruction by WHO, not imposing the restriction on China. And now people in these countries are suffering from the misinformation provided by WHO.
Another evidence WHO is controlled by China, that is when Taiwanese people want to join WHO to get latest update about the virus and help from the world, Chinese government doesn't want this to happen.
So basically Taiwan was excluded from the global health system for long time because that.
I am from Taiwan, I don't feel surprise at all that WHO is controlled by China, as they have shown it that way long time ago on the issue of excluding people from Taiwan. So that's obviously political over people's health in the world.
The 737 Max is actually a great analogy, but you and I come to different conclusions. The FAA shot themselves in the foot by not grounding the Max after the second crash. They were previously so trusted that their standards were the default for other countries. The widespread trust made it easier and faster for American planes to go to market. That trust took decades to build up and will not be easily restored.
like I mentioned in the article, I found no solution for iPad, so I built one for myself. So I am not really sure what's the solution out there for devices other than iPad.
However, there is smart whiteboard device out there in market, like
Yeah, docker is god damn slow. The layer file system is a great idea, but its implementation sucks. When you push an image which its base image is already pushed, you will see tons of
This is really stupid, it just cannot compare the list of layer image and push or pull the missing parts. And the pushing and pulling operations are slow like hell. It's really painful to use it in production. It slows down your whole deployment process, and it eventually becomes the bottleneck. It's really funny they pick go language which advertises for performance, but they failed to make very basic task works efficiently.
After world war II, people in Germany burn paper money in winter. Because, by that time, fiat money is cheaper than coal and wood.
That's funny it seems that this economist thinks fiat money can't never be valueless. Well, look Cyprus, and look Ukraine now. I am not saying Bitcoin won't never be valueless, but apparently fiat money is not completely invulnerable.
You know how Bitcoin prices spiked after Cyprus had it's banking issues? You do realize that that happened, and could only happen, because a large number of people believed the Cypriot currency was in fact not likely to remain "valueless" seeing as how it was still the sovereign currency of Cyprus, and were willing to exchange at least Bitcoin to hold it.
The examples you give, are not examples where just fiat money fails. They're examples of the entire architecture of a society falling apart (the government is being overthrown in the Ukraine, post WW1 Germany was in the midst of a massive recession). These are all situations where no currency retains a stable value since no currency allows you to eat, fuel vehicles or defend yourself. In those situations, Bitcoin is as valueless as anything else (more so, by virtue of being unusable without the internet).
Except there was no such thing as a sovereign currency of Cyprus as Cyprus is using the euro, but only balances in bank accounts in Cyprus were at risk, so people with euro bank accounts outside Cyprus selling bitcoins for euros were simply profiting from that risk asymmetry.
