How long until this Pandemic ceases?

Dwarvenhobble

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Will blaming China somehow make people who died from the disease less dead?
No.
Will blaming China help prevent another incident like this or at least make it less severe by making them actually stop trying to cover up such things, be transparent and not try to hinder attempts to contain it or prevent deaths? Yes yes it will.
 

lil devils x

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And didn't admit it could spread person to person until February.



Based mostly on info from Chinese authorities


Yeh weren't keen on ending international flights though were they?



Considering we don't know how often a new virus is reported and claims of preparation being needed it's not a great indication of how out of the ordinary this was or how much prep was believed to be needed vs what the information from groups like the WHO was saying at the time.



The first reported death was the 11th of January but presumably they'd have had some serious cases come in already needing additional care and likely would have taken a sample of the virus at the time to start analysing. Hell as you pointed out there was already claims of a new virus about so some-one (the doctor who tried to raise the alarm but was silenced) knew about it so no that wasn't just China thinking it was the flu or something.

As for not knowing about it in the USA well they caught Swine flu thanks to cases in the USA in two children
It was a novel coronavirus, it takes time to study the virus after it's discovery. Initially they thought it might have been spread through food, or by animals. They were unsure and had to confirm the method transmission to be sure. US intelligence however, had already suspected it was spread from person to person in late November. Suspecting and confirming are entirely different things here. Due to the earlier strains of the virus not being as contagious as the strain in Europe means it would also likely take longer in the lab to determine all it's possible methods of transmission. This is also why they initially didn't think you could give it to your pets, but found out that too was inaccurate once it mutated to the much more contagious strain. China was not testing the same strain that we were dealing with in the rest of the world, and thus would have different lab results.


It was Initially the strain of SARS-CoV-2 that was in Wuhan was not as contagious as the strain that was taking over Europe and the US. The US was primarily infected from Europe by a variant, not directly rom China and not by the same strain of the virus. The earlier strains that were in China are not the primary strains in the rest of the world.


We actually have unknown viruses pop up all the time all over the world, but they usually fizzle out or are not serious so we do not pay much attention to them. The 2009 swine flu outbreak was circulating for months prior to being discovered. They actually think it could have been circulating as far back as September before being discovered in late March:

“The limited sampling so far gives rise to considerable uncertainty in the estimate,” cautions Rambaut. But if the rate at which genes mutate is about the same for this virus as for other H1N1 viruses, the number of mutations that have accumulated so far suggests it has been circulating since January – or even September 2008."



It took them a very long time to discover it circulating.
 
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lil devils x

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No.
Will blaming China help prevent another incident like this or at least make it less severe by making them actually stop trying to cover up such things, be transparent and not try to hinder attempts to contain it or prevent deaths? Yes yes it will.
Likely not at all. China was faster at detecting this than the US was with Swine Flu. We were lucky with COVID-19 they detected it when they did. Our best chance for doing a better job next time is to have an adequately funded universal international preparation and agreed response. We need nations to come together and solve this on a global scale with a united front in order to save lives and not this every part of the machine working on it's own and nothing working very well together at all making a bigger mess of everything.
 

Trunkage

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No.
Will blaming China help prevent another incident like this or at least make it less severe by making them actually stop trying to cover up such things, be transparent and not try to hinder attempts to contain it or prevent deaths? Yes yes it will.
Yeah. I'd start with them and the UK and US all together. They've all been doing the same stuff and pretending its not a problem.

At least China has stopped lying. Still waiting on the other two
 

Dalisclock

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Yeah... anywhere health and safety standards aren't being followed, like keeping live animals in close proximity to food and in unsanitary conditions... which only certain countries do...
Packing people into crowded poltiical rallies on a daily basis.....mocking and demonizing masks.....Pretending COVID is defeated when it clearly isn't.....
 
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Dwarvenhobble

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It was a novel coronavirus, it takes time to study the virus after it's discovery. Initially they thought it might have been spread through food, or by animals. They were unsure and had to confirm the method transmission to be sure. US intelligence however, had already suspected it was spread from person to person in late November. Suspecting and confirming are entirely different things here. Due to the earlier strains of the virus not being as contagious as the strain in Europe means it would also likely take longer in the lab to determine all it's possible methods of transmission. This is also why they initially didn't think you could give it to your pets, but found out that too was inaccurate once it mutated to the much more contagious strain. China was not testing the same strain that we were dealing with in the rest of the world, and thus would have different lab results.


It was Initially the strain of SARS-CoV-2 that was in Wuhan was not as contagious as the strain that was taking over Europe and the US. The US was primarily infected from Europe by a variant, not directly rom China and not by the same strain of the virus. The earlier strains that were in China are not the primary strains in the rest of the world.


We actually have unknown viruses pop up all the time all over the world, but they usually fizzle out or are not serious so we do not pay much attention to them. The 2009 swine flue outbreak was circulating for months prior to being discovered. They actually think it could have been circulating as far back as September before being discovered in late March:

“The limited sampling so far gives rise to considerable uncertainty in the estimate,” cautions Rambaut. But if the rate at which genes mutate is about the same for this virus as for other H1N1 viruses, the number of mutations that have accumulated so far suggests it has been circulating since January – or even September 2008."



It took them a very long time to discover it circulating.
Yes it takes time to study but some Chinese doctors including the one who originally tried to break the news recognised it was something different and tried to warn people.


Hell the doctor who was one of the first to try and blow the whistle suggested it spread person to person as did a number of doctors in Taiwan who were able to get info out.

It's true the US and other places aren't dealing with the same strain as China, they're dealing with a mutant strain that came about because the original strain spread and was able to mutate which without the original strain being able to spread so far there would be no mutant strain. The new strains didn't appear by spontaneous generation


Yes the issues is the Swine flu has likely been going round in Mexico not the USA for a good while before being detected

Likely not at all. China was faster at detecting this than the US was with Swine Flu. We were lucky with COVID-19 they detected it when they did. Our best chance for doing a better job next time is to have an adequately funded universal international preparation and agreed response. We need nations to come together and solve this on a global scale with a united front in order to save lives and not this every part of the machine working on it's own and nothing working very well together at all making a bigger mess of everything.
Detection is only useful if they do something with it rather than try to cover it up.

China could have shut down as best as it could and limited the spread. The virus wouldn't then not have got into Europe so easily. not mutated and not spread as much and as far. China decided to keep flights going.

There's evidence China pressured the WHO to delay the response


Hell even now they're trying to pressure people on talking about their response



Yeah. I'd start with them and the UK and US all together. They've all been doing the same stuff and pretending its not a problem.

At least China has stopped lying. Still waiting on the other two
The US maybe but the UK not so much. The UK is doing regional lockdowns but it looks like a national one may be on the cards again. Also the UK has the Oxford Labs developing a vaccine which apparently is now estimated to be ready for deployment in December assuming everything goes well.

The UK definitely isn't pretending there no problem, what with government ads on basically every platform reminding people o socially distance, wash hands, wear masks and everything else.
 

Agema

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Frankly, its pretty hard for me to not blame the Chinese.
I would say in defence of China that when we think how badly many of our countries have handled covid-19, did China - which is a less developed state that was working with far less information - really do so bad a job? I mean, for heaven's sakes, the Trump administration has spent months undermining public trust in the best basic infection control method, never mind all the other failings.

China certainly needs to get its act together in many ways of course - clearly its wet markets are a risk and at least some level of government was dragging its heels deciding that secrecy was more important than warning the world. Of course, one important reason to criticise China is that it will hate the embarrassment so much (it really hurts when trying to present itself as the new global power), and that will probably spur it to make substantial improvements in case of a next time. It's response to covid-19, for instance, whilst flawed, was leagues better than it was to SARS.

Yeh weren't keen on ending international flights though were they?
Why didn't we?

Sorry, but it's just feeble to put that on China. Our countries didn't need permission from China or the WHO to block flights. We chose not to do so for the same reason China didn't want to, because we didn't want to interrupt trade and the economy. When we take a look back at covid-19, I absolutely would not want Western countries to hide their own, many, manifest failings through blame of China.
 
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Iron

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One more year. I'm looking at the Spanish flu, and if the stars align, the current flu would mutate into a more contagious but less deadly virus.
 

stroopwafel

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Probably be atleast a decade. Partially efficient vaccines and anti-inflammatory/immunosuppressant medication will hopefully atleast provide some protection for those most at risk. Vaccines still come with the downside that for those most at-risk like obese people they are inefficient because inflammation in belly fat suppresses production of antigens and old people might still only be 30-40% immunized and would need a yearly shot together with the flu vaccine. Healthy, younger people are hardly at risk so it's pointless for them to risk the potential side-effects like bone marrow inflammation and paralysis in one trial, a comatose effect or that one Brazilian doctor who mysteriously dropped dead after taking a covid vaccine.

Ultimately nature must just run it's course. The more people get infected the more a less harmful variant will become dominant through natural selection. It's inevatible everyone will come into contact with the virus sooner or later. It already found it's reservoir in humans and even if, by miracle, the virus would be eradicated it has already proven to jump species quite easily. So it will absolutely never go away. But I guess in time it will just be another coronavirus.
 

Trunkage

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The US maybe but the UK not so much. The UK is doing regional lockdowns but it looks like a national one may be on the cards again. Also the UK has the Oxford Labs developing a vaccine which apparently is now estimated to be ready for deployment in December assuming everything goes well.

The UK definitely isn't pretending there no problem, what with government ads on basically every platform reminding people o socially distance, wash hands, wear masks and everything else.
I'll give you this, I don't think they played it as bad as the US. They did Coumo it, killing tens of thousands. They also keep wanting to build things at home (eg. the Track and Trace... app? It never came out so I dont want to pretend to know what they final product was going to be). Just.. Look BoJo, use someone else's effective system until you build your own. Steal it, buy it, copy it. Stop trying to start things from scratch. Time isn't on your side. As to pretending, its done some number fudging. But it hasn't redefined terms like Trump to try and make him look better.
 

Agema

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Just.. Look BoJo, use someone else's effective system until you build your own. Steal it, buy it, copy it. Stop trying to start things from scratch. Time isn't on your side. As to pretending, its done some number fudging. But it hasn't redefined terms like Trump to try and make him look better.
BoJo didn't give a shit about getting a working system going. The covid-19 response in the UK was an exercise in Tory ministers shovelling public funds at their mates and party donors as hard and fast as they could. Any Oxbridge twat who'd previously done work with Johnson, Gove etc. turned up as some sort of dilettante fixer who could make something the government wanted, despite no experience or expertise in the area. And thus these people got contracts over better suited companies with track records, and millions was wasted on PPE that never arrived (or was not up to scratch) and software that didn't work.

If anyone ever goes through and does a proper accounting of the money spent in these months, I think the stench of corruption will be unbearable. It is all legal, however, because the emergency allowed for suspension of normal rules for goverment tenders.
 

Samtemdo8

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Probably be atleast a decade. Partially efficient vaccines and anti-inflammatory/immunosuppressant medication will hopefully atleast provide some protection for those most at risk. Vaccines still come with the downside that for those most at-risk like obese people they are inefficient because inflammation in belly fat suppresses production of antigens and old people might still only be 30-40% immunized and would need a yearly shot together with the flu vaccine. Healthy, younger people are hardly at risk so it's pointless for them to risk the potential side-effects like bone marrow inflammation and paralysis in one trial, a comatose effect or that one Brazilian doctor who mysteriously dropped dead after taking a covid vaccine.

Ultimately nature must just run it's course. The more people get infected the more a less harmful variant will become dominant through natural selection. It's inevatible everyone will come into contact with the virus sooner or later. It already found it's reservoir in humans and even if, by miracle, the virus would be eradicated it has already proven to jump species quite easily. So it will absolutely never go away. But I guess in time it will just be another coronavirus.
Is it still the same kind of feeling you get as a Cold or Flu? Just way more infectious then those other diseases?
 

Bob_McMillan

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I would say in defence of China that when we think how badly many of our countries have handled covid-19, did China - which is a less developed state that was working with far less information - really do so bad a job? I mean, for heaven's sakes, the Trump administration has spent months undermining public trust in the best basic infection control method, never mind all the other failings.
I don't think that's much of a defense. What's the point of comparing China's "performance" to other countries? They all fucked up, in various degrees of fuckery. I'll condemn China, the US, and especially my own country for all their bullshit. I think there's plenty enough outrage to go around.
 

stroopwafel

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Is it still the same kind of feeling you get as a Cold or Flu? Just way more infectious then those other diseases?
There is some speculation that coronaviruses like the common cold started similarly like covid-19. Gradually that virus became benign but I have no idea how long that takes. From what I understand covid is just as infectious as every other respiratory virus but it only requires more hospitalizations.
 

Baffle

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Yeah. I'd start with them and the UK and US all together. They've all been doing the same stuff and pretending its not a problem.

At least China has stopped lying. Still waiting on the other two
Mate, we're just getting into our liar-liar-pants-on-fire groove. We've barely even started lying yet.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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I'll give you this, I don't think they played it as bad as the US. They did Coumo it, killing tens of thousands. They also keep wanting to build things at home (eg. the Track and Trace... app? It never came out so I dont want to pretend to know what they final product was going to be). Just.. Look BoJo, use someone else's effective system until you build your own. Steal it, buy it, copy it. Stop trying to start things from scratch. Time isn't on your side. As to pretending, its done some number fudging. But it hasn't redefined terms like Trump to try and make him look better.
The app is out and running now


Also the UK has a bit of an issue with it coming out it's possible they've managed to count the same infections twice meaning the numbers could have been as low as half the reported ones. Also issues with Coronavirus deaths being reported as any death with coronavirus. So dying in car crash would be deemed as a coronavirus death.


Why didn't we?

Sorry, but it's just feeble to put that on China. Our countries didn't need permission from China or the WHO to block flights. We chose not to do so for the same reason China didn't want to, because we didn't want to interrupt trade and the economy. When we take a look back at covid-19, I absolutely would not want Western countries to hide their own, many, manifest failings through blame of China.
Because initially we thought it was contained and quarantined with flights from hot spot areas stopped and most airlines refusing to fly to and from China anyway. Once it was found out in the community it was in 3 different areas at once and by that point it would be trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

We should have shut down all flights but we didn't need the government to shut down flights to and from China when almost every major airline had already refused to fly from the UK to there or back again anyway.
 

Agema

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There is some speculation that coronaviruses like the common cold started similarly like covid-19. Gradually that virus became benign but I have no idea how long that takes. From what I understand covid is just as infectious as every other respiratory virus but it only requires more hospitalizations.
Very possibly.

Viruses and their hosts co-evolve. It's not much use to a virus to kill its host, and it's not much use for the host to be killed by the virus. Consequently, viruses tend to evolve to be less lethal and their hosts evolve resistance.

The major problem with new infections is that neither the virus nor host are remotely prepared for each other. A lot of the more unusual effects of infection (think "long covid") are probably the result of this. Over time, its effects very likely will gradually decline into something more like influenza or the common cold. But we'll be talking a years to decades scale for this to occur.
 

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Likely not at all. China was faster at detecting this than the US was with Swine Flu. We were lucky with COVID-19 they detected it when they did. Our best chance for doing a better job next time is to have an adequately funded universal international preparation and agreed response. We need nations to come together and solve this on a global scale with a united front in order to save lives and not this every part of the machine working on it's own and nothing working very well together at all making a bigger mess of everything.
International preparation and agreed response, eh? Sounds to me like we need some kind of Organisation.... to look after Health... but for all the World.