Yes. This situation is different then SARS due to the political situation. Xi wishes for a complete grasp on power, but there is significant opposition in the CCP about it due to his handling of US-China relations. The whole I want to be Caesar does not help him.titan said:erudite,erudite said:Part of the reason this is overreacting was the SARS epidemic had a lot of public discontent due to the way the government handled it.Zemira said:
The hysteria of the Chinese government just doesn't match the numbers.
They seem to be underreporting. A combination of state number fudging and a lack of test kits. The deaths are also underreported in relationship to their response. We heard days ago that people had their deaths classified as pneumonia, but likely had the virus. I don't really believe the dropping in the streets videos, but there has to be more to this.
We have seen cases pop up outside of China, but mostly from people who visited Wuhan. There doesn't seem to be a rash of people getting sick from those people, yet.
The pathway that was discussed early the virus took that is present in the Asian population, but less likely in others may be the key to the spread.
Currently my theory is they were working on vaccination of sorts to only protect their people. Somehow the vaccine backfired and did the opposite. It either escaped the lab through poor practices, was actually given to humans or some other way I have no clue if because my knowledge of biology and genetics is absolute crap.
An aside: One of the few classes that grossed me out was biology and our teacher also taught anatomy on the class before us. After that I refused to take biology or anatomy ever. All the other science classes I look in high school and college where chemistry and physics. I also took an atmospheric science class, but so determined it wasn't so much science as guesstimated models of the weather.
Brings back lots of memories for many Chinese about SARS, and that panic was mostly hysteria and fingerpointing.
This is the new way of fudging numbers, before they just would blanket censor.
You mean the italics does have some weight in China? The public can pressure the government and it not just get very ugly right away and they have a way to express ire that the Great Hall will listen to.
The political situation is not good for Xi in my opinon. If someone wants to push him out it would be now over his handling of the issue. The last time the CCP was this fragment was in 1989 when they almost went to war with India but the student protests happened (Which caused a split between between reformers and hardliners). Deng was a hardliner and he was pushed out because of it by Jiang Zemin.
Another good example is the instability of the Cultural Revolution and the red guards - army - civilian - intellectual conflicts after the death of Mao. Hua Guofeng pushed out the gang of four but himself lost to Deng due to not having enough influence (Hua was pushed out due to being associated with the hard left and thus the gang of four).