mcgruff10 said:

https://apnews.com/68a9e1b91de4ffc166acd6012d82c2f9

China didn’t warn public of likely pandemic for 6 key days

In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.

Six days.

That delay from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China’s attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost 2 million people and taken more than 126,000 lives.

“This is tremendous,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.”

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan. 5 to Jan. 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

It’s uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It’s also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.

But what is clear, experts say, is that China’s rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for “rumor-mongering,” broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city’s hospitals.

“Doctors in Wuhan were afraid,” said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. “It was truly intimidation of an entire profession.”

Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan. 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases — distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients, all without telling the public.

article continues here https://apnews.com/68a9e1b91de4ffc166acd6012d82c2f9

josevolution said:

Today is not a good day in this hospital ughh 😞

brianlux said:

Smellyman said:

My guess is that Fauci would LOVE to tell the world what he thinks of Trump but doesn't because it would cost him his job- an important one in thees time of COVID-19.  Trump should stay off the air and just let Fauci do the press conferences.  But, of course, that won't happen because Trump is the expert on everything!

RoleModelsinBlood31 said:

brianlux said:

Smellyman said:

My guess is that Fauci would LOVE to tell the world what he thinks of Trump but doesn't because it would cost him his job- an important one in thees time of COVID-19.  Trump should stay off the air and just let Fauci do the press conferences.  But, of course, that won't happen because Trump is the expert on everything!

I disagree- I think he’d like to tell everyone how good trump has been on all of this and how shocked he is at the gall of the reporters/media during those press conferences every day. He’s seen how they spin things and ask those “gotcha” kind of questions all the time to try to “get” trump.  He shut down the idea that trump was trying g to silence him the other day- I’m sure he’s just sick of the attempts to spin hard work into a failure.

dignin said:

josevolution said:

Today is not a good day in this hospital ughh 😞

Sorry to hear that. Keep your chin up Jose, what your doing is admirable.

josevolution said:

Today is not a good day in this hospital ughh 😞

josevolution said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

josevolution said:

Today is not a good day in this hospital ughh 😞

Wait, what? Team Trump Treason stated just yesterday that the hospitals were doing fine? I don’t get it. What gives?

Now we’re onto the stage when patients that have been on ventilator for 8-10days are dying % are high on those, new admissions are slowing down but the death counts are not !