lack of confidence in the presumably responsible agencies to give us bad news makes rumor/less verified reports much harder to dismiss.
who/cdc/et al aren’t acting to try to keep each of us healthy. any and all of us can be collateral damage for the cdc. above all it is control panic at all levels.
the virus has odd features. there are preliminary reports that suggest some things that are more frightening than what is already out there. if any of these things are true we will never hear it from the cdc until it is blatantly obvious. I am very interested to see western ‘recovered’ studies after a while. it is still very early.
if we have annual pandemic from this, it staggers the mind to even imagine how it changes this country and the world. death rates could be higher next year due to survivors with permanent damage (the ‘serious/criticals’ that survive the first year), and so on each year.
there are local factors that may make the chinese have the worst outbreak stats (real stats not funny numbers) - sars vaccination and every chinese effectively having smokers lungs from the pollution.
this has worried me since mid-late january when I started paying attention, at first due to the apparent contagion and then due to china’s economic suicide reaction - meaning this was really bad. everything that has followed isn’t a surprise in the broad concepts, unfortunately. we are 4-8 weeks from something anyone not from a very different country cannot imagine.
Western Europe has handled this badly as well.
I think they weren’t sure what would happen, so they were trying to keep a happy face on for as long as they could...
They don’t want to wreck the world economy—the tradeoffs are _not_ pretty.