Posted on 02/03/2020 9:09:06 AM PST by SeekAndFind
To refresh our memories, it was in 1986 when the No. 4 nuclear reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded and was burning as the solid fuel rods of Uranium melted down. The smoke and steam from the fire and firefighting spread across Northern Europe and the Russian steppes. The number of deaths attributed to this disaster could be as high as 100,000 but accepted estimates are closer to 27,000.
It was the failure of the Soviet system in dealing with a coordinated response that shook the faith of the people. They began to question whether the Soviet government had abandoned the interests of the people in favor of propaganda. The conclusion was that it certainly was not the health and welfare of the people which was first and foremost in Soviet governmental policy. Gorbachev himself wrote in 2006:
“The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl… was perhaps the true cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
It is clear that Gorbachev could not bring himself to admit that it was Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy which was the underlying cause. Regardless of the causes of the collapse, it seems history is about to repeat itself.
The outbreak in People’s Republic of China (PRC) has led to a declaration of a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO). In the 2019 WHO report of the ten most likely threats to global health, an influenza pandemic was in the top three. In light if recent events, it seems that it should have been listed as the number one threat.
Just as with the Chernobyl cover-up, there are indications that the outbreak of the corona virus is much more severe than has been admitted by the communist government.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
We’ve been successful at importing the disease, now infecting 11 Americans, so in a week, we should get a good data point on survivability in the USA. If all 11 kick the bucket, I will be worried. If none of them do, I will treat it like any other flu.
Just adding some perspective here.
Best way to gage the magnitude of the problem is to gauge the actions of the people who actually have access to hard facts.
They are taking this very seriously and , while adopting a wait and see posture, they are quietly getting their ducks in a row to act quickly and decisively in case things break bad in a big way.
When a guy like Tom Cotton explicitly makes the kind of statements he has been making, very good chance that this is a huge bio engineering problem manufactured by the Chinese and not some random event
China has some amazingly brilliant people, but China is culturally and ethically very poorly suited to safely working on virulent and deadly pathogens
In all fairness, I doubt any government could have handled either Chernobyl or Hunan any better. There are realities of nuclear and biological catastrophes that can neither be planned for or responded to.
This being said, response is also situational, that is Chernobyl was very different from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. And the Coronavirus response is a lot different from the anticipated H5N1 influenza epidemic that didn’t happen but could have been as bad as a thermonuclear war.
What is that chance it could mutate into something more deadly before they arrest it?
Heck, who knows. But summer kills a lot of viruses too. High temp and humidity kills this thing off quick. It survives a lot longer in dry air and cooler environment.
With a vaccine on its way, treatment for severely infected working, and warmer, dryer weather of the summer, this thing might be an afterthought in a couple months.
*estimate
The information available suggests it could be anywhere from a hundredth that, to ten times that - primarily because information is severely lacking, and because it is still very early in the cycle. How many cohorts of infected have gone completely through the infection/recovery cycle?
They have discovered in the last few days that an HIV cocktail heals the critical patients. Makes the virus disappear out of their system in two days. China plus a lot of the other countries are using this method now.
Cost, stock on hand, time to manufacture, distribution, prioritization.
Your cavalier response makes it sound like none of those factors matter.
Yes, actually, in July. Bought FRDM.
Thanks for that reference.
.
Um, no.
Party politics caused mishandling of the incident at Chernobyl top to bottom.
One of the worst things was “pass the buck” and CYA. Yeah that happens in the USA too, but not to the extent of the USSR.
Remember they saw the core “burning”, and DID NOT EVACTUATE Pripyat. IN truth the core was not burning as we know it, nor was it critical (sustaining a reaction), but it was the waste products creating decay heat keeping the core incandescent and causing the waste products themselves to burn off with the airflow passing through the core.
Even worse, the reactor’s instability was covered up repeatedly until Chernobyl occurred! All to save the USSR’s image as atomic masters, and to belittle the US Nuclear industry (in truth Russia had melted cores REPEATEDLY before Chernobyl).
Yes, I think once they sort-of-came-clean to the West, they did begin to handle it as well as a country of their backwardness could. Backwardness directly caused by communism.
Even then, GE, Westinghouse, etc. would have had it contained in mere days to the point where planning could take place for a better solution. The amount of capital our country can command in a blink of a eye is mind blowing. And it wouldn’t even bankrupt us.
” Xi cannot blame this outbreak on foreign powers”
there have been reports that they already have been doing that ...
“There are reports that the PRC is digging mass graves and burning bodies to deal with the death toll”
no doubt, 4th hand blog “reports” “leaking” out of the PRC are even more reliable than “reports” of “sources” that we see published all the time from such stalwarts as WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC ...
AV aren’t in much use for anything but HIV and these are $14 to 20k per cycle in US or $400k lifetime cost.
I understand why Russia or Thailand with under a dozen cases might use it on coronavirus now but not the poorer nations with thousands infected.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.