Posted on 04/20/2003 12:33:20 AM PDT by sarcasm
BEIJING — Chinese authorities ordered doctors in Beijing to hide patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, from World Health Organization (WHO) experts last week in an attempt to downplay the epidemic, Chinese doctors and other sources said yesterday.
Authorities transferred about 40 SARS patients to a hotel on the grounds of one hospital and at another facility bundled more than 30 SARS patients into ambulances to prevent the WHO team from finding them, the sources said.
A worker at the Zihuachun Hotel, on the grounds of Hospital No. 309, said several dozen patients were taken to the hotel Tuesday morning, the day WHO officials visited two military hospitals. The patients were moved back to the hospital that evening, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
In spite of your generally acerbic statements about Canada, one can't equate the left-wing statist politics in Canada with the barbarism of China. Of course, one's expectations and standards are higher for a Western democracy.
"Old story"
... and they start moving citizens into the formerly empty Y2K Internment Camps and people who youy used to talk to on a daily basis start disappearing and the city streets become deserted and no one can be reached on CB Channel 19 and the skies darken and the depths of hell open up ...
Don't you think you'll *know* there's a problem when your neighbors, friends, co-workers or the checkout girm down at the super market start feeling ill - how is that sort of think hidden able to be absolutely hidden?
Uhh - on second thought - do you have any neighbors, friends, co-workers or any girls down at the super market check out?
My point being that it's a sad state of affairs when a government risks the lives of its citizens and the citizens of other countries while whisling in the wind, hoping it will all go away.
This technique will eventually backfire. I hope that this is not the real call.
Standard bureaucratic policy - they were undoubtedly simply administratively erased AKA 'taken off the books'.
WORD already has it they have 'snapped to' - butts were fired - their careers and futures were ended in the Communist Politburo ...
A democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's best to have for dinner.
Meanwhile, the deadly virus is spreading.
I think it would be better for people to take action now even if the threat isn't real in order to prepare for the real thing, because if this isn't it, we will be prepared.
But there's been no Tiananmen Square massacre in Canada. Canada is much freer, politically, than China; there's no comparison. One could argue, I suppose, that Canada is headed in the wrong direction, while China is headed in the right direction from an abysmal low (since things have improved since the so-called Cultural Revolution) -- but China has a long way to go before it meets even minimal standards of human rights, and it's not clear that it's even really on a path in that direction.
True, but that doesn't help matters very much now, if the the disease has already escaped a particular area.
The world has a vested interest in being more prepared to prevent millions of deaths worldwide, I would think. We need a strong authority to protect our citizens, after all.
Where?
Here in the states?
Say it isn't true!
(The CDC stats don't say any such thing!)
I know this is rocket science for a lot of people, but, the defensive barrier (so to speak) needs to be set up further back now. It's *not* like we've passed some sort of 'point' that marks 'the end of the world' in terms of the spread of this disease. We are the *best* prepared we've ever been in history for such 'contagion'. So is the world for that matter ...
My fear is that they will succeed, not fail.
For one, it's easier to pacify the populace with a bit of economic freedom and no political freedom than to acqknowledge both the former and the latter.
Honestly Jim, I don't see how. The only way to be truly prepared is to have thousands of hospital beds at the ready for such a case as an epidemic, which is not what we, or anybody else, has now, or can afford.
In the event that the disease became widespread, the hospitals would be quickly filled, as they are right now in Hong Kong and Toronto, leaving the rest to their own devices.
I especially like your tagline.
I think the experiment could fail due to a SARS epidemic. Freedom of speech would undoubtedly help the medical community fight an epidemic; absence of such political freedom (resulting in a propaganda cover-up) may ultimately cost thousands of Chinese lives. The lesson is about to be driven home that political freedom isn't a 'threat to political stability,' it's a vital feedback mechanism to prevent a society's government from doing something really, really stupid.
What date do you have showing on YOUR calendar?
Do you *honestly* think we were better prepared medically and scientifically in 1950 to track down, to isolate this contagion?
You've got some 'splainin to do!
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