
China covered up coronavirus, costing the world “two months,” says Trump's NSA - sahin-boydas
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-obrien-china-covered-up-coronavirus-costing-world-two-months-national-security-adviser/
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freen
What did refusing to use the WHO approved test cost the US?

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allovernow
You realize both countries can screw up, right? And the fact that the NSA
belongs to a country that screwed up doesn't prevent them criticizing other
responses?

Moreover, the Chinese government has still to my knowledge not cleanly
released true figures for lethality, R0, total infection count, etc, as would
have been responsible. Instead the world has had to rely on side channels like
whatever publications from Chinese scientists made it past censorship. If
other world powers were relying on official government numbers, like the WHO,
they can't entirely be faulted for the slow response, though I'd like to think
government agencies were competent enough to pick up on everything legit and
unofficial that started flooding Reddit and 4chan in early January.

The CCP in typical fashion put the CCP first, and that will cost the world
many lives.

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Gibbon1
China started from day zero with a small cluster of cases. Over all they've
been moving mountains to squash this.

Meanwhile US three months in doesn't have anywhere near enough testing kits
available. The first community aquired case was found by a hospital going
around the CDC by developing their own in house tests. At the leadership level
the US is still acting like the problem is with outsiders. Senator Lamar just
blocked emergency relief for workers impacted by the virus.

The CCP quickly got on top of things. Meanwhile in the US at the leadership
level it's all failure. Every State, City, Hospital, and Business is having to
fend from themselves.

So yeah no one but people like you are buying this.

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allovernow
This was clear from the start. In typical authoritarian communist fashion,
China clamped down on the spread of information both internally and
externally. Here's probably the best known example[0], but the most egregious
manipulation came in the form of outbreak numbers, which are allegedly at
least 10x underreported[1]. This was a deliberate combination of lack of
testing, lockdown preventing citizens from seeking treatment at hospitals,
misreporting cause of death by listing E.G. pneumonia, and other issues. When
an authoritarian dictatorship orders no new cases, the people report no new
cases.

I don't understand how people are so shocked to hear of China's manipulation.
There's evidence for this kind of trickery from every major socialist state,
_especially_ the Soviet Union, which formed the mold the the initial CCP.

An authoritarian state can only exist so long as the people are too respectful
and/or afraid to revolt. This creates perverse incentives to save face by,
say, controlling information or spreading disinformation even at the cost of
citizens' lives. And speaking of perverse incentives, like any massive
bureaucracy, they are pervasive in states like China. For example, factor
output is measured by the government by tracking electricity production. So if
the government orders factories to come back online, but you don't have goods
or employees to produce anything, you run the machines empty to run up the
numbers.

0\. [https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/china-li-wenliang-
whistl...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/china-li-wenliang-
whistleblower-death-timeline-intl-hnk/index.html)

1\.
[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v1.full.pdf)

