Now you're splitting hairs. You know who the first politician in the USA who was banging the drums in alarm about Wuhan and the coronavirus? Tom Cotton. Republican Senator. Do you support him now? Does his early conviction of the severity of this event put you behind him and everyone who echoed his concerns? Are you likewise now opposed to the people who were ridiculing him as a conspiracy theorist and fear-monger?
I think that’s great, I don’t agree with all their politics but they didn’t let themselves be blinded by optimism and looked at what was actually going on here. And the theory that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab where they were studying bat coronaviruses always seemed credible to me (Reminder, the 1977 flu likely escaped from a Russian or Chinese lab but this was never admitted either).
The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought (Hannity, etc.) Edit: again, he was calling it “their new hoax” so you really can’t deny that he was behind on this one :-)
How did you come to that conclusion? What about the Democrats in New York, which is the epicenter of the virus outbreak right now (certainly the US and probably the world)? I remember hearing someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close.
This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. Without those programs, many students have little to eat at home. It's a little disingenuous to represent it in another light. If anything, it highlights yet another weakness in our society.
But did people die because of that decision? Probably. Maybe a lot.
Tough calls. It comes down to who made those tough calls earlier. And that's not a partisan thing, or a smart/dumb thing.
Plenty of bad decisions to go around, but we probably shouldn't lay the blame to thick anywhere. Because it's chaos and people are adapting and changing in real time.
Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people and he has to shut down the state to slow down the virus. I guarantee he's going to be a different person in 12 months.
“The next minute” is off by something more than 6 orders of magnitude.
You kind of skipped over ~4.2 million minutes he spent as Lieutenant Governor between those jobs.
California schools pretty much immediately set up daily meal pickup when they closed (often, for anyone under 18 at any school site.) And this was already happening when they said that.
Now WaPo seems to be admitting that we should at least consider the possibility that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://archive.vn/UP6dx#selection-1801.148-1801.176
(To be clear, Tom Cotton himself says the bio-weapon thing was just a hypothesis[1].)
[1] https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126
On the other hand the fact that they were researching bat coronaviruses in the lab in the city where the outbreak began certainly is suggestive of a possible lab accident. I doubt we’ll ever find certainty of this though just like the 1977 outbreak of H1N1. Not impossible it’s just a coincidence either (after all SARS and MERS jumped to humans without any help).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-...
However, I will note that a colleague of mine saw the virology institute's location change on Google Maps around this time. Free software legend Eric S Raymond mentioned this on his blog as well [4].
I'm pretty sure the Google Maps thing is a sign that the Chinese leadership heard these bioweapon rumors, and figured the best way to combat them was to require Google to lie about the institute's reported location.
There are plenty of ridiculous rumors on the Internet, why would the Chinese government react so strongly to this particular one?
It could be because the Chinese leadership has something they're trying to hide. But in China things are often censored all over the place with little rhyme or reason as well. "We know this rumor's false and ridiculous, any serious scientist knows it came from some country bumpkin eating an improperly cooked bat, but this rumor could potentially be destabilizing, so let's force Google to tell this lie for us" is certainly a way the Chinese government might think.
Is it created in a lab?
The Google maps thing is pretty weak evidence. It could be explained by the "oh crap people are catching on, we'd better make Google help with the coverup" hypothesis, but it's equally well explained by the "we know it's false, but we'll censor things willy-nilly because we're China and that's what we do" hypothesis.
I don't know enough about mol bio to really understand the genetic sequences.
To summarize: The evidence seems to be inconclusive, but certainly consistent with the possibility the virus is a Chinese bio-weapon. "Coronavirus is a Chinese bio-weapon that somehow accidentally escaped" is a possibly true hypothesis. There's not nearly enough evidence to say for sure. But it's a reasonable possibility, not tin-foil hat territory.
Suggesting it was let out on purpose probably does get pretty close to tin-foil hat territory; it seems hard to figure out a sane and reasonable motive for unleashing this on the world, without also requiring some much bigger, more complex conspiracy (which greatly weakens the prior probability of the hypothesis).
If it is lab-created, it probably escaped by a mistake, or someone not following the rules (e.g. the janitor who's supposed to burn the dead infected research bats sold them to a market instead to make an extra buck).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146446
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22147320
They react to all kinds of irrelevant bullshit strongly all the time. It's a gigantic unimaginative bureaucracy. It could very well be some peon 18 levels down doing something done 200 times prior, in response to some news article some other peon has classified as western propaganda.
Are they going to come out and admit that?
The epicenter in the United States in in New York.
This is what was happening in NY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uNKatrJgw&feature=emb_logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyNXZ8v8sY&feature=emb_logo
The POTUS was still publicly pushing the coronavirus = flu comparison in early March even after we saw what happened in Iran and Italy. Remember, he said on February 28 that being worried about the coronavirus was “their new hoax” from the media and his political opponents, so he himself recognized his political opponents were pointing out the severity by late February.
Edit: i don’t want to get too deep in the politics with this, I do agree with your ultimate point that most won’t learn from this and will simply return to their team’s side regardless of who got this one more right.