Which is also weird because we all know Covid doesn't make people suddenly drop dead in the street.
They do if they don't get treatment. Usual course for deadly covid is, high fevers, feeling terrible, then there's an improvement in symptoms for a couple of days, then blood oxygen levels drop and the person drops dead
Wouldn't everything you described happen gradually? as in people wouldn't be able to walk normally before reaching the point where they drop dead from oxygen levels low enough to be immediately lethal? From my own experience and based on what I've read, covid can cause a quick deterioration in respiratory function but across at least hours or days.
The videos also pictured people that weren't really showing any trouble breathing, it felt more like the plague than any respiratory illness. But maybe the videos were meant as "PSA's" for local consumption to get people to treat the disease more seriously? Because they were really over the top
What happened politically should be straightforward to anyone who's worked in a corporation: Wuhan mayor and Hubei governor tried to keep a lid on it, counterproductively, so their reports upstairs wouldn't look bad. They couldn't, higher authorities noticed, blew up the visibility on it, instituted nationwide programs to counter it, and fired the afore-mentioned mayor and governor.
It has plenty of relevance. If lab leaks are the source of the virus, any serious solution will need to include improvements to lab containment and practices. Knowing what happened in a hypothetical lab leak could also help identify the original animal to study. Understanding how viruses hop & adapt from animal hosts to humans begins by studying specific cases of it.
For example, past US lab virus leaks including SARS have led the Obama administration to temporarily suspend and investigate the risks of Gain of Function research in 2014. At least one of the Wuhan labs were conducting Gain of Function research at the time of the outbreak.
Wasn't this happening well after they knew the virus existed? From my understanding, they knew the virus existed very early on. Much early than when people were dropping dead in the streets or getting dragged out of their apartments.
I remember seeing these videos in January 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. Young, healthy-looking people, too. I'm very surprised that there were not similar instances outside of China.
The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance. Viruses have been hopping from animal hosts from humans for a while and if anything this one was late and long expected. Either way the kind of preparations we need to make for future events are the same.