> I can't trust WHO now related to Covid-19, especially after what happened to stock.

The stock market is an indicator of investor confidence. How investors feel about a particular event is not necessarily accurate, and has basically no direct relation to the WHO.

Also, even a perfectly successful way of containing Covid-19 would depress stock values [against a benchmark of the virus not existing] if it involved containment actions such as isolating significant numbers of people and cancelling events and flights.

Also stocks react to the economic impact of the panic, not necessarily to the disease itself.

I also wouldn’t overplay the market correction. We are back to where stocks were in Oct last year, when there were no concern about the virus.

Well, the conventional wisdom, as it were, was that R0 is much higher than with influenza, but here the WHO appears to contradict that. I don’t see what’s gained by just repeating the conventional wisdom.

Did they really say China would be able to contain it?

Could not find the exact reference, but here are some other bullshit from that time: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178015.shtml That "transparency" and "openness" were quoted a lot but it was not the case at all. Many chinese doctors and journalists were shut down.

A month ago I took a lot of flak for saying that China's numbers were probably faithfully reported, as accurately as their logistics permitted. This was a claim that literally nobody could make anywhere on the Western internet without being downvoted to hell and called a shill. Everybody agreed that all numbers were completely made up, because somebody was able to fit a quadratic curve through 3 of their data points.

I still can't say China's data was real without being called a shill, but it's getting increasingly obvious that this was the case. China's numbers line up perfectly with what visiting WHO observers saw (as stated in their latest report), their hospital occupancy, their rate of exported cases, economic activity in the country, and the day to day experience of hundreds of millions of actual human beings. Anybody who still says it's all fake is just jacking off on nationalism.

There is definitely opaqueness and one needs to know how to read the data. For example China does not report people who test positive but do not develop pneumonia. The criteria for classification is clearly listed in the national guideline but is easy to escape notice because the daily report is terse and does not reference the definitions. It may not be a big deal in terms of assessing mortality (WHO explained the percentage of asympotamaic cases that test positive is small), but it can make a significant difference when assessing risk for a particular region. If a region reports zero case but there is actually a postive test, the risk outlook is quite different even though the report is technically correct.

But it would be unfortunate to then disregard all Chinese data. That would be like throwing out the baby with bath water. If we don't study their experience we will be bound to repeat their mistakes. Fortunately this does not appear to be the case with medical professionals and scientists, judging from the volume of peer reviewed publications coming out of China.

> jacking off on nationalism

Please don't comment like this here, regardless of how frustrating you find some other comments.

Are you agreeing with me that people shouldn't do that? Or are you saying that calling out people that do that is the real problem?

I'm outnumbered 100:1 here by users that flood almost all of these threads and never say anything actually correct, following blind nationalistic instinct.

There's more than one "the real problem". Moderating one doesn't preclude moderating others.

Lashing out with phrases like "jacking off on nationalism" is flamebait and therefore against the site guidelines. You need to follow the rules regardless of how outnumbered you are, or how wrong others are or you feel they are. I know the experience and I know it's frustrating, but that's the way it is when you're representing a contrarian view. When someone possesses a truth that others don't, they need to hold themselves to a higher standard, because if you sink to a degraded level in presenting that truth, you end up discrediting it, which harms the minority cause you're trying to serve, and harms other people by driving them further from the truth.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Sigh. Alright, understood, thanks for modding.

I know it's not easy.

Well said. I don't get why people are so optimistic and keep trusting the WHO, given they have downplayed the situation multiple times, and that China was doing a brilliant job to contain the Wuhan Corona Virus.

Look at the spread of the corona virus in South Korea and Italy now. Then look at Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose people don't trust China for even a bit.

The first thing China did was to detain whistle blowers. One of them died from this virus. What they did was to conceal the outbreak, not tackling it.

China’s authorities, nor the WHO, never claimed that China could contain the virus.

China’s goal with the Wuhan lockdown, then Hubei, then all of China, was to slow down the spread of the virus. In order to give themselves, and humanity, a chance to fight it. And to understand it, and devise a cure or vaccine for it.

The escape of the virus was inevitable. This was a known fact. To believe otherwise is naive.

The only thing you can buy with the lockdown, is time.

And to make matters worse, the governments of the world, flew all their citizens out of Wuhan and China. Then, they screwed up the decontamination and quarantine process. The incompetence of the American CDC shipped out faulty test kits all over the world. Then they released someone infected into San Antonio, before their quarantine was over, and before the positive test results came back. Then, news came out that the flight attendants and pilots flying the chartered planes, weren’t even properly protected from airborne transmissions of the virus. Then, the Princess cruise ship quarantine was a disaster, which is entirely the fault of the Western governments.

So now, the responsibility of the spread of the virus outside of China, lays in the respective governments, and their inability to monitor and contain it. So the blame goes all around. It really is illogical to blame the China government for a virus that arose out of nature.