magduf
I really have to wonder if the people pushing this have some kind of agenda.
There's a reason masks have been commonplace in Asia for many years now: they're meant to protect society, not the wearer. When someone thinks they're sick in Japan, they're supposed to wear a mask to keep everyone else from getting sick: it's good manners. It only works when lots of people are doing the same thing.
Similarly, the cloth masks are actually called "surgical masks", because they're normally used in surgery. They have absolutely nothing to do with keeping the surgeon safe from the patient; they're in place to keep the patient, who has a huge gaping wound in his body, from being infected by droplets from the surgeon as the surgeon bends over the wound site, and is breathing and talking to other people.
If you look farther back in Ireland's history, it seems like Ireland's independence from UK was achieved mostly by violent resistance. After there was too much violence, England finally decided it wasn't worth it, and came up with an agreement allowing most of the island to become independent, with the exception of a handful of northern counties.
We've had cases of nutjobs getting their hands on tanks, or building their own armored bulldozers, and going on rampages. It's a pain, but it's not a complete disaster. These vehicles aren't invincible. They generally get stuck somewhere, and then the police break open the hatch and shoot the nutjob. Tanks really can't do much by themselves besides drive around and run into some things (or over them, but again, you have to be careful or it can get stuck, break a tread, etc.). Tanks armed with 120mm cannon rounds, of course, can do some serious damage, but private individuals aren't allowed to own that kind of weaponry at all.
It's the same with an older fighter jet. What are you going to do with it? Fly it into a building? Sure, that'll be worse than flying a Cessna into a building, but still, it's not like a WMD. Even if you could fully load the 20mm cannon, you're not going to do that much damage; they don't hold that much ammo anyway (only enough for something like 5-10 seconds of sustained fire I think). Yeah, being able to drop a bunch of 500lb bombs would be a disaster, but again, you can't get that stuff.
Yes, if Elon or Jeff wanted a nuclear-armed ICBM, the government would certainly stop them. Building a rocket is one thing, building a nuclear warhead is something else entirely, and is not something trivial that just anyone can do. Iran (an actual nation-state) has been trying for some time and still hasn't succeeded as far as we know. It takes a lot of facilities and special materials to build something like that.
Do foreign militaries also have these policies?
It's just like how so many car dealerships will tell you that getting your car serviced anywhere else will "void your warranty" even though that's blatantly illegal.
Anyway, the WHO/Taiwan debacle seems to resulted in Taiwan handling this pandemic better than anyone else, considering their proximity to China and the huge amount of trade and travel between them. Taiwan just ignored the WHO and did their own thing, which was the best thing.
The Chinese government is the last entity I'd be worried about with this kind of information (unless, of course, you live in China). Certain criminals in your own country are a much bigger concern.
But I wouldn't use it for work meetings.
Why is that? It seems like the opposite would be the best advice: make sure to use something from a company not headquartered in your country. Most people probably have more to worry about from their own government than anyone else.
You've obviously never used a proper washlet.
Remember, younger people aren't as affected by this as older people. So these dumb churchgoers (who I believe tend to be younger, if these are megachurches) will be catching it, then spreading it to their older relatives, who will then be flooding the hospitals.
No, the problem is that America has an incompetent government. China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have shown how to handle this thing with reasonable degrees of competence. We have not.
Plagues and diseases have been around since long before humans. Dealing with them is one of the functions of civilized society, and ours is failing, while other nations are doing far better jobs. But of course, Americans never want to look outside their borders at how other countries do things.
Notice how Trump's story changes rapidly. Early on, he was saying it was a liberal hoax or something. Now he's taking it seriously because he wants to look like a great leader in a time of crisis. The only thing he's consistent about is wanting to make himself look good. Luckily, for now, that's moved to actually doing the right things for the most part to deal with this (though it would have been a lot better if he hadn't screwed up so much earlier). True conservatives aren't like this: they are very principled, even if I don't agree with their principles at all. Somehow, they just haven't figured him out yet, or they're just using him for their own ends.
Actually, probably not, which is why "megachurches" is an important qualifier here. From my observations, megachurches tend heavily to be independent and evangelical, and tend to have much younger members. They also tend to have a lot of (Christian) rock music as part of the services. The old people don't join those churches; those people are still in the mainline Protestant churches they've been going to for many decades, which have traditional service, and don't preach to you that God loves rich people more.
Why not? From my observations, megachurches tend to be very different from many other Christian churches, including in theology. Christians aren't all the same, but there are some definite things that many, if not most, megachurches have in common, that they don't share with other denominations. (Starting with "denominations", in fact: megachurches usually don't belong to one.)
Meanwhile, China is able to build an emergency pandemic hospital in 10 days.
For European countries and the US, the curve looks asymptotic. There's no telling how high it'll go at this point.