2-23-20 How Lies Helped Spread the Coronavirus
Nearing Midnight: How Lies Helped Spread the Coronavirus - Todd Strandberg -
With each passing day, we seem to know less and less about what is actually going on with the Coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese hot zone. China's ruling Communist Party is facing public anger and recrimination over how it has handled the crisis. Each day the Chinese government puts out numbers that don't seem to match observation from people on the ground.
One of the first persons to recognize the Coronavirus was Dr. Li Wenliang. In December, Li was treating a cluster of patients suffering from a virus apparently picked up at a meat and poultry market in Wuhan, a city in central China with a population greater than metropolitan Chicago. Li sent messages to a chat group of medical school alumni wondering if SARS-the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that killed nearly 800 people worldwide in 2002 and 2003-had returned.
Li, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist, contracted the virus while treating patients, and his death was confirmed Feb 7th. Li, one of eight medical professionals in Wuhan who tried to warn colleagues and others when the government did not, had said that police forced him to sign a statement admitting he spread falsehoods.
Even the staunchly pro-government Global Times newspaper said the whistleblowers' treatment was "evidence of local authorities' incompetence to tackle a contagious and deadly virus."
When Dr. Li became a fatality, there were only 450 reported deaths. The current death rate of 2 percent would make it very unlikely that a healthy 34-year-old man would die from the virus.
Every few days, a city would report numbers that were greater than the global total, and then they would be quickly changed to match an official data. Even in some official numbers, the death rate is greater than 4 percent.
The rapid construction of two massive hospitals that can bed 10,000 patients had the global news media expressing confidence that China had things under control. I see a couple red flags. First, that is a lot of money being spent for a virus that is reported to only have the same spread factor as the common flu. Secondly, these so-called hospitals are just giant buildings with rows of beds.
The massive increase in beds has not made it any easier to check a loved one into a real hospital. Chen Jiaxin, 22, said by telephone from Wuhan that his father fell ill, but had to return home because no hospital would accept him. When he called for an ambulance after his father's fever spiked, Chen said, he was told 400 people were ahead of him and "we were just told to wait and wait."
Mother-of-two Rong Qin, 32, said that her 67-year-old father is feeling sick and is awaiting test results, but that she was told by local officials that even those with a positive diagnosis have to wait for a bed. "What I am hoping now is to put my father in a public quarantine facility so that he doesn't pass the infection on to other family members," she said.
The official quarantine zone is of some 50 million residents, but the actual number on lockdown may be vastly larger. One estimate has the number around 400 million. If true, it would show the government is in full-scale panic over a virus that is extremely easy to pass from person to person.
It was reported by the NY Times that in one city, authorities were going house to house to find sick people. Anyone sent to a quarantine center with a lack of proper medical equipment will be a death sentence for many patients. People with pneumonia would die unless they were put on oxygen or a respirator.
I still maintain that the virus will level out at some point and spare the western world from a tide of death that we haven't seen in 75 years. Terry and I were talking the other day, and we both wondered if current events were part of a final push for the rapture. We will just have to watch.
"For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words" (1 Thessalonians 4:16-18
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