
Current Wuhan Situation - sturza
https://twitter.com/heylauragao/status/1241620966762938370
======
yumraj
Doesn't this put into question the whole premise that _China had defeated the
Covid-19_ and things are beginning to come to normal?

The lockdown is in effect and the moment it's taken down, we'll see a second
wave. No?

~~~
glofish
> The lockdown is in effect and the moment it's taken down, we'll see a second
> wave. No?

Who knows, I think they have no idea and are just keeping things as they are
to avoid having Wuhan in the news. Would make awful press to admit to any new
cases in Wuhan.

Are other major metropolises locked down similarly? Beijing, Shanghai?

In general, is it credible that China has had no new cases other than those so
called "imported from outside"? Sounds like propaganda to me.

~~~
vanniv
This is the thing that is so crazy about the economic suicide and
authoritarian lockdowns we are all doing.

Evidence from China and Italy is that they don't actually work. It's been
three months, and China still can't let people leave their front door or the
virus will return full force, with no expectations that another month or even
another year of lockdown will help.

In Italy, with two weeks of lockdown, the exponential growth of new infections
hasn't even slowed. Now they are predicting that "just three more weeks" and
the exponential growth might start to slightly decline.

Wealth and freedom are declining around the world, but it doesn't even slow
the virus' spread.

Meanwhile, places like Korea have no trouble stopping the virus without the
authoritarianism.

And yet, all people here call for is ever-more economic destruction, and ever
more authoritarian controls, all to no detectable effect. Except, of course,
the end of our free and prosperous societies.

~~~
jacobolus
> _Evidence from China and Italy is that they don 't actually work._

Don’t work for what purpose? They work well at shutting down the virus in the
short term. In Wuhan the reproductive number of the virus is estimated to have
dropped from above 3 to ~0.3 after the lockdown.

> _In Italy, with two weeks of lockdown, the exponential growth of new
> infections hasn 't even slowed_

This is definitely not true. If you plot Italian cases or deaths on a
logarithmic scale it’s easy to see the curve slowly bending down. Keep in mind
it takes ~2 weeks for public health interventions to start showing up in data
about identified cases, and ~3 weeks for them to show up in data about deaths.

> _places like Korea have no trouble stopping the virus without the
> authoritarianism_

Places like South Korea have had plenty of “trouble”, but have stopped
transmission through nationwide testing, contact tracing, isolation, and
quarantine, along with early school closures and a mass social distancing
effort among the public, pervasive use of face masks, etc.

The South Korean public health response (and we might add also Taiwan, Hong
Kong, Singapore) was much faster and more decisive than the response in the US
or Europe. As a result they have avoided the situation of widespread community
spread, and not needed to undertake a total societal shutdown as became
necessary in Hubei or Italy.

What other countries should be learning from South Korea is to act quickly and
stay on top of the virus before it gets out of control.

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gdubs
“For context, most people live in "neighborhoods" comprised of several high
rise apartments in a compact area w/ a shared green space (see pic).”

Off-topic I know, but this is a pretty good description of the Sim City
“donut” shape that was essential to building a megalopolis and winning the
game. You built residential units around a park center, and with the right
conditions that developed into white high-rises like those in her linked
picture.

~~~
natmaka
[https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-
machine/](https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-machine/)

------
eric_b
Let me make sure I have my timeline right.

For years experts have warned that another SARS-like virus is going to come
out of China, due to their animal husbandry practices and culture of eating
certain animals.

Then this disease appears, and China initially tries to suppress news of it.
They deny it's an issue. Wasting valuable time and allowing it spread
unchecked to the rest of the world.

Then, about three months ago they lock down Wuhan to contain it (an area with
millions of people I think?) This means, based on this Twitter thread, that
residents can't even walk outside. So, like being incarcerated?

And, people's wages are getting paid still, but as loans they'll owe when this
is all over. So, like debt?

What boggles my mind is all the positive news coverage of this. Why are people
fawning over this?

~~~
dirtyid
Strip away media narrative on both sides, an impartial timeline would be:

Wuhan medical community recognized a new pneumonia of unclear cause in late
December during winter and the height of influenza season. The novel Corona
Virus was identified, WHO was notified, the genome was sequenced. This took
roughly 1 week. Then it took 3 more weeks of "stability management" before
central government quarantined WuHan and essentially shutdown the entire
country right before the most important holiday of the year and the largest
annual human migration.

4 weeks for identification to evaluation to 3 months of aggressive techno-
authoritarian quarantine, and assuming 2nd wave and import cases can be
managed until the vaccine - China just demonstrated the first civilization
model in human history to be able to suppress a virus of this magnitude in
large countries. Other countries are only recently adopting the war analogy,
China executed it on a dime. How they'll fair in rebooting society is unknown.

Was there missteps? Yes. Could they have done better? Not by much IMO. Every
misstep with Chinese characteristics is being repeated just as worst in other
countries with their cultural characteristics. The overall response as been
not as agile (if there a response at all), despite having ample notice and
more information.

The retrospect of this global health crisis is going to be interesting, China
and a handful of islands managed to successful crush the curve, complacent
developed countries may or may not successful spread the curve, and all the
developing countries get rapid herd immunity because like the Spanish flu,
they have no other choice. 1.4 billion people without herd immunity among a
globalized world with immunity is going to be a conundrum though.

~~~
YZF
Lots of people left Wuhan before the lockdown though. Also lots of people
still travelled for the Chinese New Year internally. January 10th is the
beginning of travel season, Wuhan was locked down on the 23rd:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_in_November_2019_%E2%80%93_January_2020)

~~~
dirtyid
Locking down Hubei after 600 cases / ~3weeks is extremely expedient for an
utterly unprecedented response. NYC was at 10k+ cases before they implement a
light lock down, 60 days after Hubei, they're still meandering through half-
measures. That's a comparatively severe response outside of China.

Many considerations in a region of 60million, i.e Jan 17th was the regional
two sessions meeting. The early migration and WuHan being regional hub no
doubt precipitated the decision to lock-down that fast. China locked down most
of the country after ~30 days. Outside of a few city-states or island nations,
we have ample counter-examples that no other country has responded as agile as
China. Many don't even have a meaning response plan in place.

------
gruez
> the govt mandated employers must still pay salaries while [the workers are]
> in quarantine. As a reaction, some employers are requiring workers to make
> up this pay once they come back... effectively a loan.

So how are the workers going to pay it back? I presume it's going to be a pay
cut for the next _n_ months until it's all made up for. While that's better
than not getting paid at all, the unexpected pay cut might be problematic for
households that live paycheck to paycheck (not sure how prevalent that is in
china), and for the consumer economy. Also, are what happens if the employee
simply quits? Are those debts legal debts?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
For employees on the edge making 5-10 RMB/hour, that will be a huge burden for
them. In China you need a signed/stamped release from your previous employer
before you can take a new job, so they could just hold that back if there are
any debts to make up.

------
troughway
Here is a video that better describes the situation -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM&feature=youtu.be)

------
raywu
If you're interested in seeing the organized grocery run by neighborhood in
Wuhan, this video interview[1] did an excellent job capturing the gist.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU2ut5Ark3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU2ut5Ark3Q)

------
dang
Url changed from
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241620966762938370.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241620966762938370.html),
which points to this.

~~~
Shoop
What’s the ruling on using threadreaderapp? Would a good submission post the
original twitter source and link threadreaderapp in a comment?

~~~
dang
"Ruling" is too strong a word but that's probably the best way. HN's
guidelines call for original sources: " _Please submit the original source. If
a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._ "

If there were a community consensus that threadreaderapp.com links are better
than the equivalent twitter.com links, we could maybe override that, but
there's no such consensus.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
ignoramous
threadreaderapp is fast and almost always works unlike Twitter links that
simply show "try again" because I block referer headers from being sent to
their servers.

> _Our CSRF protection mechanism for POST requests checks that the origin and
> referer headers of the request are sourced from Twitter. Since we knew this
> to be effective for POSTs, we considered how we could implement this for GET
> requests._

> _This proved effective in addressing the vulnerability, but it prevented
> this initial load of the website. You might load Twitter from a Google
> search result or by typing the url into the browser. To address this case,
> we created a blank page on twitter.com which did nothing but reload itself.
> Upon reload, the referer would be set to twitter.com, and so it would load
> correctly._

[https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2018/twitter_silhouette.html)

~~~
kohtatsu
Wow that's actually horrid.

------
nashashmi
Taxis are repurposed for hospital visits! How dangerous for taxi drivers.

~~~
ipsum2
From what I've seen, taxi drivers have put up barriers between them and their
passengers. Example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXJHp_zmgTE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXJHp_zmgTE)

Not sure how they disinfect the taxi afterwards though. Anyone more
knowledgable on this?

~~~
dchyrdvh
A/C knows no barriers.

~~~
gruez
Depends on whether the cars have passenger air vents.

------
fg6hr
Didn't the virus start from the Wuhan virus lab?

~~~
overeater
no

~~~
ColanR
There's a decent amount of evidence to suggest it did, and China has already
shown themselves unreliable (putting it mildly) regarding information about
the virus. I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you propose to speak
with such certainty.

~~~
bigbluedots
I'd be interested in reading any evidence, could you provide some links?

~~~
emmelaich
No evidence here, but it shouldn't be dismissed either.

From Wikipedia ..

> _Coronavirus research In 2005, a group including researchers from the Wuhan
> Institute of Virology published research into the origin of the SARS
> coronavirus, finding that China 's horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of
> SARS-like coronaviruses.[6] Continuing this work over a period of years,
> researchers from the Institute sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in
> locations across China, isolating over 300 bat coronavirus sequences.[7]

In 2015, the Institute published successful research on whether a bat
coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. A team from the Institute engineered
a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been
adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to
infect human cells.[8][9]_

------
unclesaamm
In response to people who are saying, "it's just because Chinese people eat
weird food that the virus started in Wuhan," here's a much more thoughtful
article about how the shape of the global markets contributed to the shape of
this pandemic:

[https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/chinese-
viru...](https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/chinese-virus-world-
market/)

