*”‘Cover up’ claims from US are all sound and fury”, by Ian Goodrum
“The newest round of absurdities comes courtesy of a government and media struggling to find a scapegoat for their disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. As China emerges from lockdown after successful containment of the virus — though concern remains over a possible second wave — a furious US populace, with tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands infected, is demanding to know why those in charge did not act sooner. Rather than provide an apology or real solutions, some are alleging China deliberately undercounted its infections and deaths in an effort to “cover up” the scale of the outbreak and mislead the world.”
United States of America’s President Donald Trump may be undeterred as he continues to escalate his fight against everybody or institution within and outside the country over the coronavirus pandemic.
This was coming one week after an African source, who said he sympathized with present condition of America, lamented that the country has suffered serious setback under Trump and that it might be consumed by the current health attack believed to be solely American and nothing less than that, if care is not taken he pushes ahead for whatever he meant by ‘consequences’ to be faced by China which, to him, is understood to be war.
President Trump said China should face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for the coronavirus pandemic.
“If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, I mean, then sure there should be consequences,” Trump told reporters at a daily briefing.
The US-China relationship was good “until they did this”, he said, citing a recent first-phase agricultural deal aimed at quelling a trade war between the two countries. The US President however did not mention what he meant by good relationship between US and China until the outbreak when weeks before it, he sent out his Secretary of State, who travelled across Asia and Europe destroying China and urging those continents to stop alliances of any form with China.
In addition, The DEFENDER had recently reported how Donald Trump ordered shutdown of its Army laboratory on August 6, 2019 so viruses produced in the country would not escape. What were those viruses like and what was assurance that they did not escape and how would Trump convince the world that the claim by China of how he brought coronavirus into his country via Wuhan was a farce? These questions were asked but Trump provided no single answer until the recent threat of showing Chine consequence of its action, which China dismissed.
It will be recalled that the outbreak of coronavirus was first reported to World Health Organisation (WHO) by China end of December 2019 when it said that its Wuhan province had been attacked with disease killing its people.
The question now was whether what happened with the coronavirus was “a mistake that got out of control, or was it done deliberately?” he said, adding: “There’s a big difference between those two.”
Trump previously said his government is seeking to determine whether the virus emanated from a Chinese lab.
In the meantime, an article by Ian Goodrum published Saturday April 18, 2020 by China Daily says “‘Cover up’ claims from US are sound and fury”. Quoting an adage further explained in the starting paragraph of the article, the author said, “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics” adding that, “Mark Twain is often credited for this well-worn adage about the power of numbers to deceive. He didn’t come up with it, but it sure sounds like something he’d say. Some in the United States have studied this expression well, given their latest attacks on China. They’ve made it a little simpler, though: In the absence of statistics, all they have to throw around are lies.”
He continued: “The newest round of absurdities comes courtesy of a government and media struggling to find a scapegoat for their disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. As China emerges from lockdown after successful containment of the virus — though concern remains over a possible second wave — a furious US populace, with tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands infected, is demanding to know why those in charge did not act sooner. Rather than provide an apology or real solutions, some are alleging China deliberately undercounted its infections and deaths in an effort to “cover up” the scale of the outbreak and mislead the world.
“This is, of course, an utter falsehood. Ask any of these people to substantiate their claims and they’ll come up empty, maybe mumble something about their gut tells them they’re right. At most, they will cite poorly sourced reports that should never have been published in the first place. One, which got play in major media outlets, relied on back-of-the-napkin estimates of cremations in Wuhan from anonymous social media accounts. Talk about due diligence! For this theory to even be entertained you have to assume people stop dying from other causes during an epidemic. Do these charlatans honestly believe heart disease is taking a break right now? Is cancer?
“Another story, even more ludicrous than the last, contends that millions of mobile phone accounts deactivating during the outbreak indicates an astronomically larger death toll than what’s been reported. Again, common sense flies in the face of such outrageous charges. Has it never occurred to the rumor-mongers that when a country of over a billion people is locked down, some of them might choose to rely on home internet? Many migrant workers have multiple SIM cards to take advantage of lower rates when traveling through provinces. These considerations were either ignored or brushed off — all to point the finger at a country that has minimized its people’s suffering despite being the site of the first large-scale outbreak.
“Friday’s revision of Wuhan’s death toll has thrown fuel on the conspiratorial fire. Already the hyenas in the Western press are salivating, drawing the worst possible conclusions from what would be commended if it happened in any other country. Now that the worst of the outbreak has passed, Wuhan has been able to take a breath and audit its data to ensure an accurate count. One would think this is the very behavior critics want to see. But since they’re continuing to take potshots at China anyway, we can guess how genuine their commitment to transparency really is.
“The uptick in numbers has several perfectly reasonable explanations. When the virus was at its apex, health systems were stretched to their absolute limits. This was remedied with the swift construction of temporary hospitals, but those Herculean efforts could not save everyone and some sadly passed away at home. Testing infrastructure also took time to catch up to the spread of the epidemic, meaning some who died of the virus were previously uncounted.Any increase in death tolls is cause for heartbreak, of course. But it’s better in the long run to have as precise as possible — and the 1,290 Wuhan revised yesterday is a far cry from the tens of thousands or millions some were twisting themselves into pretzels to make sound plausible.
“Putting all that nonsense aside, basic arithmetic calls the whole “cover-up” thesis into question. Though it has a large urbanized population, China’s proportional death rate falls well within a reasonable range; China’s per-million rate falls below the Republic of Korea’s and above Japan’s, for instance. Strangely enough, no one is accusing Japan of falsifying its numbers. I’m sure its economic and strategic relationship with the US has nothing to do with that.
What appears to be the determining factor in whether a country can minimize infections and deaths is the level of its outbreak response, and how rapidly that response is implemented. Countries that acted quickly have seen exponential infection growth rates flatline; like a fire without oxygen, a virus with no new hosts is eventually snuffed out. Countries that dragged their feet, on the other hand, are seeing devastating consequences.
“With that in mind, let’s again review China’s methods to see if the country passes muster. Days after sustained human-to-human transmission was confirmed, China enacted an unprecedented outbreak control regime. Among other measures, it included near-universal temperature checks, a leveled system of screening and clearly partitioned levels of quarantine. In particular, the centralized isolation of patients with mild symptoms away from home was singled out by the World Health Organization as the most effective method of curbing the spread of the virus — something the United States has yet to implement on a wide scale,” he said in the article.
