You know, I already wrote an article predicting China was on track for an epidemic early in 2020. The only thing I got wrong was what the disease would be.
I haven't written about the outbreak of the Wuhan Coronavirus yet for a few reasons. For one, every day when I've set out to write an article based on the previous day's accumulation of sources, information comes out that renders my research outdated. For another, frankly, most of what I would say has already been said. Media sources in the West have, of course, latched onto the crisis because disasters sell papers, while China, just as predictably, has tried to downplay it because disasters tend to topple regimes. Conspiracy theorists and tabloids, of course, have zeroed in on nearly every single one of the elephants in the room (and there is quite a herd of them).
For example, the virus broke out in Wuhan, the site of a lab dedicated to research on... you guessed it: SARS-like coronaviruses (Cyranoski), and right here on Steemit, the blogger Politicus pointed out numerous causes for suspicion on this score, including the proximity of the lab to the suspected outbreak site, and the fact that experts warned against this lab's construction. Other sources have commented on the timing, noting that the outbreak began less than a month after "Event 201," a scenario in global outbreak response by Johns Hopkins University, funded in a large part by the Pilbright Foundation, where the pathogen at the center of the simulation was, in fact, a (hypothetical at the time) previously unknown strain of Coronavirus. The simulation's end result, by the way, was a prediction of 65 million deaths. (Center for Health Security).
Xin Nian Kuai Le, right?
The fact that this event was bankrolled by the Pilbright Institute, to whom Bill and Melinda Gates (known and outspoken advocates of population control) are major donors, was not lost on the tabloids either (Infowars), nor was the fact that the same foundation which funded this event, happens to own the patent (!?) on the Coronavirus (Pilbright Institute), and is currently researching a vaccine (Dunn).
And finally, of course, Chinese social media (with the Party's blessing I would almost bet a year's salary) began circulating claims that the coronavirus "must be" an American weapon against China. What makes this ironic is that the poster's solution was to create a version of it that was tailored to "American genes" and "send it over."
So, who wants the task of explaining to this mental midget that America is polyethnic, meaning there is no such thing as "American genes?"
Frankly, these must be taken with a grain of salt, given their source, but it doesn't change the fact that this is, quite clearly, a crisis of catastrophic proportions. Information, misinformation, suspicion and rumor are flying so fast and furious that it's hard to sort them out for analysis. Yet as the situation begins to take shape (and it's a fearsome shape indeed), some pieces can be put together into a picture that is far grimmer than what we're being told.
The first thing I find odd about this outbreak is the timing, and not because of "Event 201," mentioned above. I first became aware of the outbreak shortly after landing in the States after being compelled to leave Beijing (ironically enough). I found it because ever since my second entry about the Yrisnia Pestis (Bubonic Plague) scare in Inner Mongolia and Beijing at the end of 2019, I have made it a point to do a Google search every day for "plague, China" and "pneumonia, China," since "atypical pneumonia" is the diagnosis China used to cover up several cases of Plague. As a reader may recall, I predicted after that scare (and I'm not the only one) that China would ring in 2020 with a major respiratory plague. When I read a headline on 3 January about "mystery pneumonia" in Wuhan (BBC Staff (2)), it stood out for this reason, but I didn't discover until later that the story actually began before that. I'd like to present some of these events as a timeline, for perspective.
31 December: 27 Confirmed Cases
Hong Kong, which was still reeling from months of protests, took emergency measures including restricting travel from the city of Wuhan (Zuo et. al.), which at that point was the only city where anyone had been infected. Two things are worth noting. The first is that Hong Kong took this measure WEEKS before any Mainland government entity took any containment measures at all (as I'll show later), and the second is that the outbreak, which began between 12 and 19 December (Feder), was already more than 2 weeks old at this point . This, also, was the first day the Chinese government reported the outbreak, which, despite being two weeks old at this point, had not been identified until a day prior (Belluz) to the World Health Organization (BBS staff (1)).
3 January: 44 Confirmed Cases
At this point, the total number of diagnosed cases was 44, with 11 considered "severe." Of course, even at this early stage, the article notes that the Chinese government had already lapsed into their tried and true "silence anyone who spreads information too fast" tactic, arresting anyone who spread "rumors (read 'information deemed inconvenient to the Party')" about the virus. Though, while containing information was at the top of their priority list, containing the virus itself was fourth or fifth at best, as I'll show later.
5 January: 44 Confirmed Cases (still)
The World Health Organization concluded that the virus was not spreading person-to-person (Disease Outbreak News). It is not clear how they came to this conclusion, but it would later be debunked.
7 January: 59 Confirmed Cases
In an attempt to squelch the memory of the 2003 SARS outbreak, which was horribly mishandled by Beijing (Guardian Staff), the Chinese government took the time to issue a press conference to assure the world "it's not SARS (Gan, Agence-France Presse)."
9 January: 59 Confirmed Cases (still)
Two days after insisting they had ruled out SARS, the Chinese government announced that the illness is caused by a member of the cononavirus family, the same family of virus that caused SARS and MERS. Also, this is the first time anyone in the media mentioned the glaringly obvious reason for concern: namely, that the outbreak occurred immediately before the Chinese New Year, which is the largest annual Human migration on the planet. Health authorities admitted that they were not yet certain how the disease was transmitted, though they hearkened back to the WHO's statement (albeit with less certainty) saying Human-to-Human transmission "had not been confirmed yet (BBC Staff (3))."
14 January: 60 Confirmed Cases
As predicted and so often warned of, Chinese tourist in Bangkok becomes the 60th confirmed case, and the 1st one outside of China (Muramatsu).
15 January: 60 Confirmed Cases (still)
This is the first time China reported a death from the virus (Feder).
17 January: 62 Confirmed Cases
This is the point where there first came to be a marked distinction between the number of confirmed cases according to the Chinese Ministry of Health, and the number of estimated cases according to world authorities. According to Wikipedia (as of 26 January 2020):
On 17 January, an Imperial College group in the UK published a Fermi estimate that there had been 1,723 cases (95% confidence interval, 427–4,471) with onset of symptoms by 12 January 2020. This was based on the pattern of the initial spread to Thailand and Japan. They also concluded that "self-sustaining human-to-human transmission should not be ruled out (BBC Staff (3), Natsuko et. al.)", which has since been confirmed as happening. As further cases came to light, they later recalculated that "4,000 cases of 2019-nCoV in Wuhan City... had onset of symptoms by 18 January 2020". A Hong Kong University group has reached a similar conclusion as the earlier study, with additional detail on transport within China (Leung et. al.).
18 January: 121 Confirmed Cases
This is the point where the spread began to accelerate, as it has thus far continued to do, as the graph below (charted by Wikipedia based on reports cited there) shows.
21 January: 440 Confirmed Cases
China finally adopts containment measures, and those measures are to seal off the entire city of Wuhan, locking 11 million people inside and basically leaving them to die. (Amos). The news comes on the same day that human-to-human transmission is finally confirmed, rendering containment almost a moot point (Watanabe).
And that brings us to...
26 Jan, 2020: 2,790 Confirmed Cases
2,744 confirmed cases in 30 provinces in China plus another 8 in Hong Kong and 5 in Macau (461 severe cases, 80 deaths, 51 recoveries; it's unclear from the translation whether the death and recovery numbers are global, or only within China), with 5794 suspected cases.
37 confirmed cases outside of China (4 in Taiwan, 7 in Thailand, 3 in Japan, 3 in South Korea, 3 in the United States, 2 in Vietnam, 4 in Singapore, 3 in Malaysia, 1 in Nepal, 3 in France, and 4 in Australia).
As this data is provided by a Chinese source and the Chinese government tends to alter data it finds inconvenient, I've included a screenshot of the Chinese National Health Commission's report at the time of this publication, in both Chinese and English.
By the way, to put this in perspective, the outbreak was recognized less than a month ago and the count has already risen to nearly 3,000. The 2002-03 SARS outbreak lasted from November 2002 until July 2003, and affected 8273 over the span of nearly a year. Comparing the rate of spread of SARS to the rate of spread of 2019nCoV, it's plain that this strain is far more contagious. The only good news is that the new coronavirus has a far lower fatality rate...
...so far.
But look again.
80 fatalities, 51 recoveries. That means that at the present, the number of people who have died from the virus exceeds the number who have recovered from it. And the other nearly 3,000 people who have contracted it?
Well, they're still lying in hospital beds puking up blood as their lungs cover with pustules and the doctors inject random drugs into their system hoping one will actually do something, and their families are waiting to see which of those two categories they'll eventually fall into. It's like Saw: "live or die," except that you don't get to make the choice.
Of course, we have been repeatedly assured by Beijing authorities that the disease is "preventable and controllable (BBC Staff (4))."
Frankly though, if the Chinese government told me water is wet, I'd have to go jump in a pool to be sure.
It's Almost Assuredly Worse Than We're Being Told
First of all, there are all the reports from inside of China.
- A 65-year-old woman develops symptoms identical to coronavirus, dies swiftly, and the family is pressured (by doctors who privately tell the family that the woman probably had the virus) to cremate the body without testing (Fifield, Kuo & Yang)
- A 53-year-old man dies of coronavirus-like symptoms and a death certificate is issued with no test that reads "severe pneumonia" as the cause of death (Fan)
- A Chinese woman in hazmat gear who claims to be a medical professional in Wuhan named Jin Hui (I'll acknowledge that this has not been verified at time of post), claims 90,000 people have been infected (Italiano).
Then, there is the fact that Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, a Harvard epidemologist, has pointed out the contagion level of the Coronavirus is higher than SARS, or even Spanish Flu (Satherley).
This high rate of transmission, coupled with the fact that it can be transmitted by someone who has not even shown symptoms yet (Zheng) makes isolating infected individuals virtually impossible. You can catch it from someone who doesn't know they have it, and transmit it to three or four more people before you know you have it.
Yeah, remember all those assurances from the Chinese government that it didn't spread from Human to Human?
And of course, there is SerpentZSA and LaoWhy's Youtube video, which, frankly, goes into far more detail than the 60K character limit of a Steemit article will allow me to even attempt to match.
But frankly, the main thing that convinced me that this virus is far worse than Beijing admits, was simply this.
The fact that Beijing is admitting they have a problem.
It was the blogger Dandesign86, right here on Steemit, who pointed out the one thing that every China expat knew but didn't want to say.
He said, “yes, but there is more, now they are canceling all large scale new year celebrations in Beijing." The country has run out of face masks for protection and therefore the government has asked the people working in this industry to go back from holiday and start up production again. It might seem weird that I reacted so much to this as opposed to news that Wuhan got travel restrictions. The reason why it made me scared is because, nothing is bigger than the New Year in China, if they cancel these new year events in the countries capital, I get a feeling that the virus is much more dangerous than we might know.
China's knee-jerk reaction to everything is deny, deny, deny, cover-up, cover-up, cover-up. This was shown in the 2003 SARS outbreak, as well as their earlier responses to this disaster. It's all about saving "face." The Golden Rule is NEVER admit that anything is wrong. The Party must always, always, ALWAYS appear to have everything under control.
And they are in full-scale panic mode right now.
...This is not going to get out of hand.
This is not getting out of hand.
This has already gotten WAY out of hand!
And the Chinese Party-State is running out of ways to hide that.
On one hand, I think I got out of China just in time. On the other, I wonder if it matters at this point. A global spread of this thing is virtually a foregone conclusion at this point, and we're still not sure what the lethality rate is yet because most people who have gotten it are still being treated for it, but as I said, so far the lethality rate is higher than the recovery rate. Just remember as you lie dying, "it came from China."
And indeed, God help us all.
Works Cited
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