Thousands of Americans voluntarily self-quarantine after returning from China

NBC ^ | 19 February 2020 | Erika Edwards

[Zhang Fei]

[Companies don’t o business...... people do business]

---

This is doubly true in the current Chinese economic environment, where the rate of foreign businesses getting gypped is up significantly from previous levels. You need boots on the ground. New production facilities don’t materialize overnight. And locating in a new country comes with its own costs and headaches.

https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/11/how-to-conduct-business-with-chinese-companies-that-see-a-dark-future.html

[jstolzen]

If I was POTUS, I’d be tempted to ban ALL international flights coming in. Because as has been noted, just banning flights from infected countries won’t cut it - people can just fly from an infected country to an intermediate country, then come in anyway.

Unfortunately, that’s not practical, either - much as I wish it was.

So, Trump is in a tough spot here. Not sure WHAT the solution is, and as much as I hate to say it - globalization is going to wind up spreading this thing EVERYWHERE.

[Capt. Tom]

globalization is going to wind up spreading this thing EVERYWHERE.

That's the unsolvable problem today that countries face. -Tom

[null and void]

globalization is going to wind up spreading this thing EVERYWHERE.

I think you are correct, jstolzen

Bring Out Your Dead

Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.

The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.

So far the false positive rate is 100%.

At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.

*sigh* Such is life, and death...

If a quarantine saves just one child's life, it's worth it.

[catnipman]

“Trump better wake up and get tough.”

i don’t disagree ... put President Trump did indicate yesterday that other travel bans are on the table ...

[Fury]

I’ve been self quarantining for a long time now.

But have you been self-medicating?

[ncalburt]

Trump needs to stop talking and DO IT

[nuconvert]

My “Why” had more to do with the timing. It says, “The past few weeks”. Why did they wait so long to leave China? And if it was 3-4 wks ago, why are they in self quarantine?

[Zhang Fei]

[My “Why” had more to do with the timing. It says, “The past few weeks”. Why did they wait so long to leave China? And if it was 3-4 wks ago, why are they in self quarantine?]

---

It may have seemed like a long time, but the Wuhan quarantine began only 4 weeks ago. Even after the quarantine began, it wasn’t clear that people outside of Wuhan had anything to worry about.

Even today, we’re not exactly sure we have anything to worry about. People are panicked because they’re afraid the Chinese government is lying big time about mortality and infection rates. The thinking is that there must be some nefarious reason why they’re not letting foreign researchers in. Maybe we need to add zeroes to the end of the death or infected numbers.

[nuconvert]

“It may have seemed like a long time, but the Wuhan quarantine began only 4 weeks ago.”

I guess it seems like it’s been in the news for more like 6 wks.

[Zhang Fei]

[I guess it seems like it’s been in the news for more like 6 wks.]

---

It seems like it’s been running for months. Except events have moved very quickly, like one of those commercials with speeded-up voices. Every year, we get some notification about some new variant of the swine flu or some such, and we shrug. I thought the Chinese government reaction was extreme. If their numbers are accurate, it is extreme. Maybe they have hypochondriacs running the show there, and the emperor really has no clothes. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

[Eleutheria5]

RUN! HIDE!

[nuconvert]

” I thought the Chinese government reaction was extreme.”

I don't think it was extreme. People started getting sick the beginning of Dec, some virologists say Nov, & a few say possibly end of Oct.

I think this got out of a lab somehow - either accidentally through people working there, or through lab animals. I think it took a while before word got back to Beijing and they sat on the information waiting to see what would happen. When they realized it was getting bad & news was getting out around the world, they started the quarantine of Wuhan.

I'm not sure we'll ever know the real numbers of sick & dead in China.

[Lazamataz]

Hey bro. Are you in the thick of it over there? Can you tell us, without jeopardizing yourself, what is REALLY going on? Are the cases and death counts accurate or do you see more activity than you would expect?

And most importantly, if you were one of the bioweapon researchers, can you tell us the lab number and the BS-4 Lab location that someone dropped the test tube in?

Ok, that last question was joking. The other ones, if you can answer, I’d like to actually know.

[Zhang Fei]

[Hey bro. Are you in the thick of it over there? Can you tell us, without jeopardizing yourself, what is REALLY going on? Are the cases and death counts accurate or do you see more activity than you would expect?]

---

I’m neither Chinese nor in China. My feeling, though, based on personal contacts with acquaintances is that, based on the numbers so far (including places outside of Italy), this is mass hysteria in action. And now the hysteria has spread beyond the Chinese leadership. I don’t want to sound racist, but based on personal observation of my Chinese acquaintances, IMHO, they are a weird combo of compulsive hypochondriacs and believers in traditional pre-scientific medical treatments not too far removed from quackery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_medicine

To the extent that the infection numbers in China are accurate, I expect they have been exacerbated by the Chinese preference for communal dining, using chopsticks to touch the food directly instead of spoons/ladles as an intermediate utensil. Then there’s the custom of substituting Chinese quackery for modern medicine because of a sincere belief that double blind-tested modern drugs with decades of user feedback are harmful, whereas baggies of unfamiliar-looking herbal combos are balanced because traditional Chinese medical “expertise” has thousands of years of recorded history behind it. (And yet somehow this “expertise” somehow failed to cure smallpox, TB, polio or measles). Bottom line? There might be unique elements in the Chinese mix that have made the outbreak worse than it should be, including a sincere belief that modern medical methods are literally life-threatening.

On the other hand, there’s what’s happening in Italy and Iran, where random people are getting infected who should not be infected. They presumably aren’t personally-invested in the idea that modern medicine will get them killed, and Chinese-style communal dining is presumably foreign to their traditions. And yet people are getting infected, and some are dying. What’s more - random people who shouldn’t be getting infected are now showing symptoms.

Even so, the numbers outside of China just don’t seem to justify the hysteria. Maybe we’re in a zero defect society. Stalin is alleged to have said “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic”. It’s possible that the hysteria is focused on the coronavirus because people can’t comprehend that statistic that 80,000 people stateside are alleged to have died of the flu in 2019, whereas the dozens of people infected by this coronavirus (and the common cold is just a grab bag of random coronaviruses) are a number with comprehensible dimensions such that it’s taking up everyone’s attention at the expense of the much bigger danger that is the flu. It’s like when a single mass shooting by a white guy with a long arm drowns out the daily handgun carnage involving aspiring rappers that, in total, kill 100x the people per year.