Quite depressing that foxy, who is - after all - a doctor, is so weirdly and unscientifically credulous when it comes to China.
It's not hard.
It's all about Brexit for him. He thinks he sees Brexiteers (or people that look or sound like them) criticising China, so he goes in to bat for China. Because he suspects they secretly might be little bit racial and it really won't do to even vaguely agree with them.
It really is that simple.
It might be worth mentioning in this context the devastation caused to African wildlife by Chinese so-called "medicine".
My disgust of China's behaviour stems from its treatment of animals, its barbaric wet live wildlife markets and its medieval traditional "medicine" which, as you say, is at the root of most of the poaching and illegal butchering of wildlife in Africa and elsewhere.
If that wasn't enough those actions have gone on to cause the worst pandemic in recent history and is bringing the world economy to its knees.
And the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang Province.
Apart from giving us cheap tat and unhealthy food - what has China done for us in the last 200 years ?
They can’t even invent decent alcohol.
Sold you mountains of finest tea for opium, voluntarily.
If that is the case, and no one will quetion the fact that Andrew Neil has it right every single time, where was the massive reaction from the US. And here I mean the response to the pandemic. If it were true what the CIA is saying now, the US has underreacted by several orders of magnitude.
I don't think anyone denies the latter point. Their (and our) reaction to the crisis has been lamentable.
I think it's a mixed picture.
Their initial containment efforts were lamentably inefficient, but they learned. Their recent reporting, through May has been lamentably implausible, agreed.
But the point of contention was whether their early reporting was, willfully or inadvertantly, insufficient to the point that we could say with justification that "we weren't warned", so that we innocently stumbled into the Coronavirus trap.
And that's nonsense. In January a lot of red lights went on. We just didn't react accordingly, because the threat seemed too enormous to be believable, that's our fault.
We have no right to say "it's China's fault, they must pay for it, they must be brought to heel".
Even if we had such a right, we have no power to enact it which makes it a moot point anyway. The US will do whatever Trump wants and is clearly not a reliable ally for anyone, and we have just left the EU. Combined the US & EU might have had some chance of bringing China to heel, divided they have no hope. As for the idea that the UK can do this, well......
The UK is not alone.
It has no reliable significant allies. Not just because of Brexit, but mainly because of Trump and America first means no-one has any reliable allies in geo politics any more (including the US).
As examples just today the US is stealing kits from Germany and blocking them from being sold to Canada. France is doing similar within the EU.
Countries don't have reliable allies they have interests.
Brexit has nothing to do with that, the EU never had a meaningful foreign influence. Where did the EU stand on the Iraq War?
If our allies and us determine we can and should stand up to China then the UK in or out of the EU will have not be relevant.
I don't believe a word the Chinese government says...
...but then again, I think it's important to understand *why* I don't believe them.
Firstly, their policies (like ours) seem designed not to find out the true number of cases. If you're not allowed to leave your apartment unless you have symptoms serious enough to require hospitalisaton, then you effectively have a public policy of underreporting.
(Add to which, of course, only deaths in hospital are counted.)
Secondly, you have a system where regional Governors are promoted not because they serve their people well, but because they produce results that central government likes. Central government wants few CV-19 deaths? By gosh, you'll deliver fewer CV-19 deaths.
(Add to which, there's little free press to keep the local politicians honest.)
The truth is that we don't know how many deaths from CV-19 there are in China, nor how many cases.
But nor does anyone else. The Chinese government, I suspect, doesn't know the true numbers. And therefore we have intelligence agencies (who Trump is suddenly listening to...) telling politicians that the numbers could be 5 to 50 times worse than reported. And I'm sure that range is broadly right. But we don't know where in that range the Chinese are.
However. Actions speak louder than words. Despite rumours of a flare up in Beijing, more restrictions are being loosened. Cinemas have just been re-opened. Mask wearing has gone from compulsory to advisory. These are all signs that the government thinks they have this under control, and that they can limit the speed at which any outbreak grows.
You believe that then? Not that people are scared shitless?
I have friends who have returned to China from the UK because they think it's safer.
You have how many "friends" who think like this? They must be entirely representative of the Chinese people to have any significance at all and to be here at all disqualifies them from that status.
Most of us engage in a bit of casual empiricism on here. But let me give you specifics:
My sister (OGH's daughter) is at an educational instution with many Chinese students. They have almost entirely gone home because they regard China as safer.
One of my former Goldman colleagues now quite senior at the Asia Development Bank. He and his family live their and have been pretty open on Facebook about conditions there - both before, during and after lockdowbn. He's not commenting in an official capacity, but I see no reason why he'd lie.
So, your sister is in education and is related to OGH and you work/ worked at Goldman Sachs and know a Chinese man who has posted something on Facebook. Very apposite.
He's not Chinese.
You're engaging in a little bit of cognitive dissonance. You choose to believe those anecdotes that match your preconceptions and ignore those that do not.
In addition, I don't think my views on the situation in Beijing are that far out. There was an article in the Guardian written by someone at the Pasteur Institute (who may have been in Shanghai, I don't remember) that was similar.
There are many hundreds of thousands of ex-pats in Shanghai/Beijing, and I think we'd know if the reports of the lockdown being relaxed were completely untrue.
I don't believe a word the Chinese government says...
...but then again, I think it's important to understand *why* I don't believe them.
Firstly, their policies (like ours) seem designed not to find out the true number of cases. If you're not allowed to leave your apartment unless you have symptoms serious enough to require hospitalisaton, then you effectively have a public policy of underreporting.
(Add to which, of course, only deaths in hospital are counted.)
Secondly, you have a system where regional Governors are promoted not because they serve their people well, but because they produce results that central government likes. Central government wants few CV-19 deaths? By gosh, you'll deliver fewer CV-19 deaths.
(Add to which, there's little free press to keep the local politicians honest.)
The truth is that we don't know how many deaths from CV-19 there are in China, nor how many cases.
But nor does anyone else. The Chinese government, I suspect, doesn't know the true numbers. And therefore we have intelligence agencies (who Trump is suddenly listening to...) telling politicians that the numbers could be 5 to 50 times worse than reported. And I'm sure that range is broadly right. But we don't know where in that range the Chinese are.
However. Actions speak louder than words. Despite rumours of a flare up in Beijing, more restrictions are being loosened. Cinemas have just been re-opened. Mask wearing has gone from compulsory to advisory. These are all signs that the government thinks they have this under control, and that they can limit the speed at which any outbreak grows.
You believe that then? Not that people are scared shitless?
I have friends who have returned to China from the UK because they think it's safer.
You have how many "friends" who think like this? They must be entirely representative of the Chinese people to have any significance at all and to be here at all disqualifies them from that status.
Most of us engage in a bit of casual empiricism on here. But let me give you specifics:
My sister (OGH's daughter) is at an educational instution with many Chinese students. They have almost entirely gone home because they regard China as safer.
One of my former Goldman colleagues now quite senior at the Asia Development Bank. He and his family live their and have been pretty open on Facebook about conditions there - both before, during and after lockdowbn. He's not commenting in an official capacity, but I see no reason why he'd lie.
Does your third paragraph endorse or contradict the second?
No. I'm just giving specifics behind some of the comments I've made today.
Ah, Georgia, that's where they have a system where you can end up with 2 people from the same party in the runoff?
It's where I live. Don't think it's a jungle primary. Along with every other Georgia voter I got my absentee ballot form in the mail. One of the questions is whether you want a dem or rep ballot sent to you.
Trump is going to destroy him in the debates. Which is saying something because Trump is terrible at debates. But it's too late now, the Dems have made they're pick.
Charisma tends to wins US elections not IQ nor debate ability, Kerry, Romney and Hillary all did well in the debates and all lost as they lacked charisma in large part
He has about the same charisma as a lost grandma asking for directions on the middle of a motorway.
A blanket 'down with China' policy is silly and destructive, and the sort of thing that leads to wars. There should be economic sanctions against the wet markets if nothing happens.
If that is the case, and no one will quetion the fact that Andrew Neil has it right every single time, where was the massive reaction from the US. And here I mean the response to the pandemic. If it were true what the CIA is saying now, the US has underreacted by several orders of magnitude.
I don't think anyone denies the latter point. Their (and our) reaction to the crisis has been lamentable.
I think it's a mixed picture.
Their initial containment efforts were lamentably inefficient, but they learned. Their recent reporting, through May, has been lamentably implausible, agreed.
But the point of contention was whether their early reporting was, willfully or inadvertantly, insufficient to the point that we could say with justification that "we weren't warned", so that we innocently stumbled into the Coronavirus trap.
And that's nonsense. In January a lot of red lights went on. We just didn't react accordingly, because the threat seemed too enormous to be believable, that's our fault.
We have no right to say "it's China's fault, they must pay for it, they must be brought to heel".
This is simply not true. The advice from the WHO and NERVTAG up until 21st January was that there was no human to human transmission. This is in spite of the fact that Taiwan had warned the WHO 2 weeks earlier and the WHO had ignored them. The Chinese knew this. There is no way they could have not.
Governments act on the advice of their scientific teams. They can do nothing else. If those scientists ae being misled by false data then that is when things go wrong. The Government has made plenty of mistakes but I can't think of a single sane person in this country who would have said, on 19th January, that it was a mistake to follow the follow the advice of the experts in this.
Did the WHO advise that there was categorically no h/h transmission, or did they say that the picture was unclear, that there was no conclusive evidence yet. That's what I remember.
Taiwan always takes a contrarian position to anything China says or does. Difficult to rely exclusively on them, without corroborating evidence.
Given Taiwan immediately acted on the evidence and enacted their emergency plan on 2nd January I would say there is little doubt they believed it to be true even if no one else did.
Oh and I was wrong in my last posting. They didn't warn the WHO 2 weeks before the WHO acted. It was 3 weeks. Taiwan CDC warned the WHO there was human to human transmission on 31st December but the WHO ignored them and did not pass on the information to any other member states as is shown by the NERVTAG minutes of 13th and 21st January.
Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-health-soft-power/
If that is the case, and no one will quetion the fact that Andrew Neil has it right every single time, where was the massive reaction from the US. And here I mean the response to the pandemic. If it were true what the CIA is saying now, the US has underreacted by several orders of magnitude.
I don't think anyone denies the latter point. Their (and our) reaction to the crisis has been lamentable.
I think it's a mixed picture.
Their initial containment efforts were lamentably inefficient, but they learned. Their recent reporting, through May, has been lamentably implausible, agreed.
But the point of contention was whether their early reporting was, willfully or inadvertantly, insufficient to the point that we could say with justification that "we weren't warned", so that we innocently stumbled into the Coronavirus trap.
And that's nonsense. In January a lot of red lights went on. We just didn't react accordingly, because the threat seemed too enormous to be believable, that's our fault.
We have no right to say "it's China's fault, they must pay for it, they must be brought to heel".
This is simply not true. The advice from the WHO and NERVTAG up until 21st January was that there was no human to human transmission. This is in spite of the fact that Taiwan had warned the WHO 2 weeks earlier and the WHO had ignored them. The Chinese knew this. There is no way they could have not.
Governments act on the advice of their scientific teams. They can do nothing else. If those scientists ae being misled by false data then that is when things go wrong. The Government has made plenty of mistakes but I can't think of a single sane person in this country who would have said, on 19th January, that it was a mistake to follow the follow the advice of the experts in this.
Did the WHO advise that there was categorically no h/h transmission, or did they say that the picture was unclear, that there was no conclusive evidence yet. That's what I remember.
Taiwan always takes a contrarian position to anything China says or does. Difficult to rely exclusively on them, without corroborating evidence.
Given Taiwan immediately acted on the evidence and enacted their emergency plan on 2nd January I would say there is little doubt they believed it to be true even if no one else did.
Oh and I was wrong in my last posting. They didn't warn the WHO 2 weeks before the WHO acted. It was 3 weeks. Taiwan CDC warned the WHO there was human to human transmission on 31st December but the WHO ignored them and did not pass on the information to any other member states as is shown by the NERVTAG minutes of 13th and 21st January.
I think you're correct on that, but my point is that 22nd January was still early enough for any other country to react, and not a reason to "bring China to heel".
"A week ago it had been thought that intensive care units in London would be overflowing by this point, but political sources said they had been told the capital’s hospitals were three-quarters full, which is better than expected."
That’s excellent news. And we are only two weeks from the peak.
It looks like we might do this. Without crashing the NHS. God willing.
Personally I am not convinced we are only two weeks from the peak. Is there any convincing evidence? Aren't we all just guessing at this point.
(PS I very much hope I am wrong)
I believe - I haven’t checked lately - that our curve is slowly flattening. Consistent with a peak in a fortnight or less. But after that we plateau. For how long who knows.
The answer will decide whether 15,000 die, or 50,000, in this first wave
My simple R value has reached 2.01 today*, down from 2.31 yesterday and 2.58 the day before. The 2.31 was pretty much in line with the number expected from school closures but before lockdown according to Imperial, and that is pretty much in line with the time window I expect the infections took place. As we reflect lockdown I expect that R will move quite quickly towards 1, as elsewhere, the question is whether it then settles slightly above 1 for time, as did Italy, meaning daily cases numbers edge up and accumulate large numbers for a while, or whether it edges quickly below 1 and we start to see cases reduce. The is a hell of a lot of variation in outcome in the difference between settling at 1.1 and 0.9, and Imperial has some lockdowns on either side for different countries, with their error bars spanning. * Ratio of Weds-Fri published case figures this week: Weds-Fri last week.
I don't think R was really above 1 in Italy in the aftermath of the lockdown. I think it merely appeared to be so because number of tests per day went from under 10,000 to close to 50,000.
I think it was close to 1, but was not forced consistently under until early last week (showing up.in the figures this week). If you're looking at reported figures and trying to roughly work out what is going on, then methodology change is your enemy, so catching up testing doesn't help work out. But the death numbers, an indicator that lags yet further, have been bouncing around really flat in the 700-900 / day.range for a couple of weeks. Even here there is the possibility of post mortem and certification catching up. But I think taking everything together, I do believe Italy struggled to suppress R below 1 for a while, and as a result their peak more closely resembled Table Mountain than Scheihallion, with the additional deaths that a flat top suggests.
The reason, as I've suggested a few times is probably that the major populous cities were slower to.peak than less heavily populated areas, and this prevented case numbers topping out earlier. The location of new cases in the last fortnight does not suggest a mere tidying up exercise (e.g. Turin a few hundred at lockdown to over 4000 now iirc). I agree with a lot of your later mail, and an extra note. The number of people in hospital and in ICU is still increasing, albeit fractionally, even at this stage. Capacity may play a large part in this, but not everywhere. Perhaps they are admitting milder but still serious cases as they can?
Quite depressing that foxy, who is - after all - a doctor, is so weirdly and unscientifically credulous when it comes to China.
It's not hard.
It's all about Brexit for him. He thinks he sees Brexiteers (or people that look or sound like them) criticising China, so he goes in to bat for China. Because he suspects they secretly might be little bit racial and it really won't do to even vaguely agree with them.
It really is that simple.
No, I would much rather we remained closely integrated with the European than the Chinese economy, it is the Brexiteers who think the converse.
That's ridiculous. Who the fuck wants to integrate with China?
Well, the Conservative government did agree Hinkley point and Huawei 5g, and there was quite a trade outreach there, for example Ms Truss was keen on pork markets. It was all reported in the papers and never denied.
Approving Hinkley C nuclear plant while not agreeing to Swansea Bay tidal lagoon was arguably the most stupid thing that Theresa May did in her term as PM. The argument (from the civil servants) was that Swansea was too expensive. Yet the electricity price required for Swansea was cheaper than Hinkley C (£92 v £95). The total subsidy for Hinkley C was £34 billion. Hinkley lasts for 60 years (tops) and then requires £7bn to dismantle it. And then needs replacing for the next 60 years. Presumably with another massive number of billions in subsidy. With another £7bn to dismantle THAT plant. Swansea Lagoon in comparison lasts for 120 years with relatively tiny abandonment costs.
The recently announced 15% cost over-run of £2.7 bn would have built the "too expensive" zero carbon Swansea Bay.
More than twice over.
Boris can still remedy Swansea. That then immediately opens up the development of the Cardiff Lagoon - by the private sector. Almost identical in power output to Hinkley C, it will be the worlds largest renewable power plant. It powers 1.6 million homes - more than there are in Wales. And Cardiff's electricity price is much closer to the price for offshore wind. Which offshore wind still needs replacing every 30-40 years.
The changes people are now seeing in the planet can be continued by having the tides power our country.
I think people tend to magnify the examples where there has been a relative lack of clarity as representative, when the basic messages have been pretty clear overall, and I maintain the belief that concern at some messages being confused ignores that while that will happen with a few, there are those who might claim confusion even at pretty clear messages because they do not wish to comply.
I think there is a pattern where we can plot the perception of "clarity" vs the opinion of the observer of the source.
Comments
Brexit has nothing to do with that, the EU never had a meaningful foreign influence. Where did the EU stand on the Iraq War?
If our allies and us determine we can and should stand up to China then the UK in or out of the EU will have not be relevant.
You're engaging in a little bit of cognitive dissonance. You choose to believe those anecdotes that match your preconceptions and ignore those that do not.
In addition, I don't think my views on the situation in Beijing are that far out. There was an article in the Guardian written by someone at the Pasteur Institute (who may have been in Shanghai, I don't remember) that was similar.
There are many hundreds of thousands of ex-pats in Shanghai/Beijing, and I think we'd know if the reports of the lockdown being relaxed were completely untrue.
https://twitter.com/alliehbnews/status/1246175983809564672?s=21
Oh and I was wrong in my last posting. They didn't warn the WHO 2 weeks before the WHO acted. It was 3 weeks. Taiwan CDC warned the WHO there was human to human transmission on 31st December but the WHO ignored them and did not pass on the information to any other member states as is shown by the NERVTAG minutes of 13th and 21st January.
Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-health-soft-power/
see also, among others:
https://www.cfr.org/blog/who-and-china-dereliction-duty
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/china-trolling-world-and-avoiding-blame/608332/
The reason, as I've suggested a few times is probably that the major populous cities were slower to.peak than less heavily populated areas, and this prevented case numbers topping out earlier. The location of new cases in the last fortnight does not suggest a mere tidying up exercise (e.g. Turin a few hundred at lockdown to over 4000 now iirc).
I agree with a lot of your later mail, and an extra note. The number of people in hospital and in ICU is still increasing, albeit fractionally, even at this stage. Capacity may play a large part in this, but not everywhere. Perhaps they are admitting milder but still serious cases as they can?
One for a social science paper, perhaps.