The Left wants to lay the blame of everything that goes wrong squarely on Trump’s shoulders. Are there not even a few crumbs of blame to spare for a regime of Chinese Tyrants?
Of course not. It’s not Xi from whom they’re trying to wrest back power. It’s a Republican President who’s interrupted their plans of fundamentally transforming America.
Whenever the conversation turns to the Chinese Coronavirus, they love looking for reasons to explain why everything that went wrong is Trump’s fault… and China gets to walk away scott-free.
But this crisis was China’s baby right from the beginning. It was their Chernobyl. The same way the Soviet party apparatchiks in the 80s hid the facts while they looked for people to blame, played out again under China’s Communist Party.
Catastrophic crises are not a bug of communism — they’re a feature, springing directly out of the corruption and centralization of power.
On January 20th, the world learned about the virus. But, importantly, there is a window of time between when the government learned about the coming pandemic, and when the world learned about it.
What happened in those intervening 6 days made all the difference. There was an event in which thousands of people became exposed. Their silence was the difference between containing this threat, dooming thousands around the world to miserable and lonely deaths.
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.
…But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China’s actions set the stage for a pandemic that has infected more than 2 million people and taken more than 128,000 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. — WorldIsraelNews
Eight Chinese doctors were punished on January 2.
The first case showed up outside of China on January 13th.
By then the threat was already growing.
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. They also instructed officials in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, to begin temperature checks at transportation hubs and cut down on large public gatherings. And they did it all without telling the public.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.
“Those accusing China of lacking transparency and openness are unfair,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday when asked about the AP story.
The documents show that the head of China’s National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials. A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.
“The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event,” the memo cites Ma as saying. — WorldIsraelNews
They KNEW on January 14th… and they did nothing to stop what happened next.
HERE is the critical event that turned a local epidemic into a global plague:
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. — WorldIsraelNews
