[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?]

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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.