How should the world make China pay for Coronavirus?

[GRALISTAIR]

Our archives are full of the government denying things which later turn out to be true.
In WW1 we suppressed information about the flu pandemic as it "would have damaged morale".

And I am damn sure Churchill took secrets to the grave with him too.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

As a global supplier, China will already be paying heavily due to reduced global economic activity.

Indeed so

 

[Camden]

Don't buy anything made in China?

Oh wait, much of the world's consumer goods are made in China...

In fairness, if you really felt that strongly, you could always just not buy useless crap from Amazon. If everyone did that, that would make a dent!!

 

[GRALISTAIR]

——-insight into why they've been spending so much time and attention on building binding relationships with African nations, from where so many valuable raw materials originate.

Totally agree.
Apart from Lithium what else goes into batteries - answer - Cobalt. Care to guess how much of the worlds cobalt comes from Zambia and Zaire?

 

[Mojo]

I think the reality is that we (as in the Western world, and I could myself in that) have become addicted to buying cheap consumer goods and in reality there is probably no better nation than China that makes that happen.

 

[nidave]

Well seeing as China deliberately tried to cover up the virus outbreak, I feel it's only fair that they are held solely responsible for the outbreak.

Indeed when the doctor who first discovered it had tried to warn his fellow medical professionals, the first reaction of China was to not to ask for assistance from the worldwide community and potentially carry out actions to contain the virus but to send police around and force him to sign a document accusing him of spreading lies and disturbing the social order.

The Chinese doctor who tried to warn others about coronavirus

When Li Wenliang warned about a Sars-like virus at his hospital in Wuhan, authorities tried to silence him.

www.bbc.co.uk

The fact that the worldwide community offered their assistance THREE times which was refused by China before China decided to accept the help is not the sign of a helpless country.

China turned down US offer to send scientists to fight coronavirus

The US made two direct offers and a third indirect one via the WHO to send scientists to China to help address the coronavirus outbreak - but China only accepted after the HHS revealed this on Tuesday.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Even going as far as blaming the US for a virus outbreak that their OWN doctors tried to warn them about.

China accuses US of bringing coronavirus to Wuhan

Beijing has suggested that coronavirus was brought to China by the US military and has claimed that Washington has something to hide.“It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent!” tweeted Zhao Lijian, the foreign ministry spokesman. “Make public your data! US owe us an ex

www.thetimes.co.uk

As to the economy, well it might have escaped some people's notice but there is a country called Taiwan near China and I'm sure they be only too happy to agree to trade deals in return for official recognition in the international community.

China needs the world more then we need it because there's other countries who would be happy to produce the goods we need.

The very least that China should do is offer a public apology not only to its doctors that it silenced but to the world for

This. I think now is the time for the rest of the world to recognise Taiwan either as an independent nation, or as the legitimate Chinese government. In fact, I think the KMT are back in power in Taipei so it would make sense to do it sooner rather than later...

 

[cuccir]

The population of China is 1.4 billion. The population of the world is 7.8 billion. Even if healthcare, safety, data, monitoring etc standards were equal in every single country, there'd be an 18% chance that any new pandemic would emerge in China. Other than India (17.5% of population) that's over 4 times more likely than any other country in the world. That population of China is more than the population of any single continent, other (obviously) than Asia.

 

[kieron]

Any element of reasonable doubt about the viruses origins will make it easier for China to procrastinate in removing the circumstances that enabled it to jump species to humans in the first place.

The real question should be, why would anyone not want to know the full circumstances of the emergence of the virus ?

If it was easy for people to find out how it spread to humans, we'd probably already know. As it's a disease which has few, or no, symptoms for most people who catch it, it's likely that the first person who caught the virus doesn't realise he or she had it. We may never be able to trace the disease back further than the market in Huanan.

And I'm not sure if you're aware, but China banned the sale of bushmeat for human consumption in February.

I don't know what you feel China isn't doing now.

 

[yorksrob]

If it was easy for people to find out how it spread to humans, we'd probably already know. As it's a disease which has few, or no, symptoms for most people who catch it, it's likely that the first person who caught the virus doesn't realise he or she had it. We may never be able to trace the disease back further than the market in Huanan.

And I'm not sure if you're aware, but China banned the sale of bushmeat for human consumption in February.

I don't know what you feel China isn't doing now.

And how do we know that China is actually enforcing that ban in the local markets etc ?

We trusted China to clean up its act after SARS and look where that got us.

What isn't China doing now ? It's clearly not allowing an independant, open investigation into the origins of the virus. If we had one, I expect we'd find what we expect to find - transmission from an animal via bushmeat. However, the fact that the country still seems more interested in saving face and sidelining Taiwan, suggests to me that it still doesn't take the issue seriously and is more interested in national self-aggrandisement than bio-security.

 

[Aictos]

Well, shall we blame the US for the ills of globalisation, or ourselves for the slave trade and the evils of colonisation?
There's plenty to do to clear up our own mess of virus mis-management before blaming others.
Our archives are full of the government denying things which later turn out to be true.
In WW1 we suppressed information about the flu pandemic as it "would have damaged morale".

Umm obviously you haven't read my post carefully otherwise you would have seen why I hold China responsible for the outbreak, who was it again who tried to silence the medical staff who discovered the virus and did their best to advise their Government by accusing them of 'breaking the social order' and denying the virus actually existed?

It surely couldn't have been China who sent their police in to take action against their own people who's only crime was to warn their superiors of the virus now could it?

Oh wait it was so why shouldn't China be held responsible?

 

[An_Engineer]

I dislike having to defend China, but stones and glass houses come to mind. What exactly are they accused of?

A poor response to whistleblowing? They reversed policy pretty quick. Luckily we have done much better:
NHS whistleblowers ‘threatened with job loss’ for speaking out on PPE

Or slow response? From outbreak knowledge to lockdown in Wuhan was approx 20-25 days. In comparison, the UK has known about it since early January and we only entered lockdown in late March. The USA still haven't properly got a set of measures. Brazil denies it even exists.

Or the existence of Wet Markets? Even though this is probably the most valid criticism, wet markets of this type are common throughout east and south-east Asia, and also common in a lot of Africa. To say that China has been particularly bad is disingenuous at best. What would you like, a world food standards police?

To judge China on any of these areas, we would need to show that a typical country would do better. And considering the slow response to COVID-19 by most western governments I think that many would do worse/significantly worse, especially UK and USA.

 

[carlberry]

Well seeing as China deliberately tried to cover up the virus outbreak, I feel it's only fair that they are held solely responsible for the outbreak.

Indeed when the doctor who first discovered it had tried to warn his fellow medical professionals, the first reaction of China was to not to ask for assistance from the worldwide community and potentially carry out actions to contain the virus but to send police around and force him to sign a document accusing him of spreading lies and disturbing the social order.

The Chinese doctor who tried to warn others about coronavirus

When Li Wenliang warned about a Sars-like virus at his hospital in Wuhan, authorities tried to silence him.

www.bbc.co.uk

The fact that the worldwide community offered their assistance THREE times which was refused by China before China decided to accept the help is not the sign of a helpless country.

China turned down US offer to send scientists to fight coronavirus

The US made two direct offers and a third indirect one via the WHO to send scientists to China to help address the coronavirus outbreak - but China only accepted after the HHS revealed this on Tuesday.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Even going as far as blaming the US for a virus outbreak that their OWN doctors tried to warn them about.

China accuses US of bringing coronavirus to Wuhan

Beijing has suggested that coronavirus was brought to China by the US military and has claimed that Washington has something to hide.“It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent!” tweeted Zhao Lijian, the foreign ministry spokesman. “Make public your data! US owe us an ex

www.thetimes.co.uk

As to the economy, well it might have escaped some people's notice but there is a country called Taiwan near China and I'm sure they be only too happy to agree to trade deals in return for official recognition in the international community.

China needs the world more then we need it because there's other countries who would be happy to produce the goods we need.

The very least that China should do is offer a public apology not only to its doctors that it silenced but to the world for

China fairly quickly realised their mistake, released the DNA details of the virus and started giving details. Taiwan and South Korea (countries that had plans to deal with a pandemic as they'd see the risk previously) both dealt with it, most other countries ignored it and decided it wasnt an issue until it was too late to contain. Theres no doubt that China could have done better, however it could have done far worse; ignoring the problem and telling people to inject themselves with disenfectant perhaps?

 

[yorksrob]

The nearest equivalent that springs to mind in the UK is the BSE crisis some years back. However poor the circumstances that led to the crisis were, concrete steps were instituted afterwards, including restrictions the use of animal protein in feed and the banning of the use of mechanically recovered meat in foodstuffs.

I feel that it's reasonable to ask what steps were taken after previous outbreaks such as SARS. As for wet markets, I read that Singapore for example, banned the sale and preparation of bush meat at these after the SARS outbreak, which would seem to have been a sensible hygeine measure.

At the very least, China should accede to the calls by the international community for an independant investigation, then we can at least remove all ambiguity about what needs to happen to prevent further outbreaks.

 

[Bantamzen]

The population of China is 1.4 billion. The population of the world is 7.8 billion. Even if healthcare, safety, data, monitoring etc standards were equal in every single country, there'd be an 18% chance that any new pandemic would emerge in China. Other than India (17.5% of population) that's over 4 times more likely than any other country in the world. That population of China is more than the population of any single continent, other (obviously) than Asia.

I'm glad someone picked up on this rather important detail. Being such a huge country, with a huge population, the chances of a virus jumping from animals to humans is considerably greater in a country that has something like 20% of the world's population.

 

[carlberry]

At the very least, China should accede to the calls by the international community for an independant investigation, then we can at least remove all ambiguity about what needs to happen to prevent further outbreaks.

There is NOTHING that can prevent further outbreaks. There will be another pandemic, we just don't know where or when. Sharing information, having a plan and having sufficient resilience in the health care system to deal with it are what needs to happen.

 

[yorksrob]

There is NOTHING that can prevent further outbreaks. There will be another pandemic, we just don't know where or when. Sharing information, having a plan and having sufficient resilience in the health care system to deal with it are what needs to happen.

In truth, you probably can never eliminate the risk of another outbreak.

But you can minimise the risk. If you know the circumstances that caused a previous outbreak, then do nothing to mitigate those circumstances, you are more or less asking for another outbreak.

If SARS had happened in a Western country and had been found to have been facilitated by poor food production conditions, and nothing had been done to mitigatate those conditions leading to a further outbreak in remarkably similar conditions twenty years later, I have no doubt that everybody on here would be all over that country, calling it out for its negligence. But because people have an outdated notion of China as some poor downtrodden third world country, they are keen to make allowances for it.

That doesn't mean that countries shouldn't have a resilient healthcare system. But countries should learn from previous mistakes, particularly to assist those countries that can't afford a resilient healthcare system.