As someone with no deep knowledge in virology, epidemiology or even biology, I tend to agree with you. However I also understand how having the virus originating from China , maybe, or maybe not, from a lab leak, and having china so hell bent on a 0 covid policy going so far as boarding and ceiling the doors of appartment buildings might be frightening even if the virus has been well studied.
Let's say you're the head of a fancy lab with all the equipment and a team that does everything you ask gratis. You go to have lunch and get some soup. The owner comes to you with your soup and say " Here is you soup, nothing's wrong with it, just a normal, regular soup I can assured you that nobody dipper their balls in it or added anything dubious to it haha, go ahead and eat" and then turns around and yell at the kitchen staff that they better not eat the soup .
You decide not to eat the soup, you take it back with you and run every possible test on it. All the tests come back normal you can't find anything weird in it. Do you eat the soup ? More importantly do you brush the weird behavior of the owner off or do you keep wondering what the hell have they done to the soup ?
I'm not saying this is a perfect analogy but just trying to explain why some things might make us uneasy even if logic tells us we shouldn't.
That is quite a terrible analogy. In the real world, one can logically guess why the CCP's acting "weird" (general political cluelessness, wanting to save face), but in your analogy there are not a lot of other possible explanations to the weird behaviors.
God, the last few days HN has disappointed me more and more...
That being said I disagree. the CCP going as far as chaining/nailing doors seems more than excessive (remember that officially there has been about 5000 deaths from covid in China) and not as esaily explainable as you suggest.
The explanations you give make sense but they wouldn't be unique to China. A lot of authoriatian countries share the same concerns and want to show they have things under control and to save face. Yet no other country went as far as china did. When you add together the fact that the virus originated from China, that a lab leak can't be completely excluded and that there response to it is unique and seems irrational , I can't blame people for having a bad gut feeling about it. It doesn't mean that the suspicions of the people that find it fishy are founded, just that them feeling that way is somewhat understandable.
Let's say you're the head of a fancy lab with all the equipment and a team that does everything you ask gratis. You go to have lunch and get some soup. The owner comes to you with your soup and say " Here is you soup, nothing's wrong with it, just a normal, regular soup I can assured you that nobody dipper their balls in it or added anything dubious to it haha, go ahead and eat" and then turns around and yell at the kitchen staff that they better not eat the soup .
You decide not to eat the soup, you take it back with you and run every possible test on it. All the tests come back normal you can't find anything weird in it. Do you eat the soup ? More importantly do you brush the weird behavior of the owner off or do you keep wondering what the hell have they done to the soup ?
I'm not saying this is a perfect analogy but just trying to explain why some things might make us uneasy even if logic tells us we shouldn't.