China will pay dearly for the SARS debacle

International Herald Tribunal ^ | April 22, 2003 | Bates Gill

[Eric in the Ozarks]

What if they held the Olympic Games and nobody came to play ?

[uncbob]

I wonder how all those businesses that couldn't wait to set up shop in Cjhina feel about traveling the ere on business these days

[FreepForever]

Worry about the World Expo in Shanghai, 2006 first.

[Nagual]

"They'll just keep on erroding out manufacturing base until nobody has a job to buy the junk. Yes, I expect the US government will really punish them. For sure. Really."

I have been saying that for years. Since the Japs and Germans began sending their junk here. I was mad at our Government for letting this happen. But, you know it is us that buys that junk. We are throwing our jobs away because we keep buying their crap. Now, China is doing the same to the Japs that the Japs did to us.

We need to stop buying!

[ArcLight]

This guy's name is Bates Gill? Gee, I thought Microsoft was doing just fine. Too bad Bill Gates is having to pick up extra cash freelancing....lousy pen name, too.

[FreepForever]

Don't worry, there are lots of vacancies for incoming flights.
Oh! The outgoing flights are overbooked though.

[ContemptofCourt]

A catastrophe is when a quarter of the city is lying dead on the streets. Taking precautions to stop the spread of a virus is hardly a catastrophe.

Please look at a map of China....it is a big place, and I have a feeling that peasants in the Xinjiang or Yunnan Province don't even know where Bejing is, let alone give a crap about the people there.

[battlecry]

Eric: Years ago my wife qualified for the Olympic trials in the marathon event. We had to fly into Atlanta, then take a hop into Columbia, SC. When we entered the Columbia-bound plane, we thought we were in som twilight zone episode. Most of the women were wearing hospital masks. We sat down in the plane calmly thinking how unprepared we were for what was coming ahead... It will probably be more common now

[FreepForever]

Economic and political impact are more important than body counts. When daily lives, productions and commercial activities are affected, it can bring down governments.

[js1138]

Isn't Gill Bates the founder of Sicromoft?

[FreepForever]

The epidemic is even more dangerous in rural China where the medical infrastructure is very primitive. In remote towns and villages, there's no hospitals barring dismal clinics. Peasants can get sick, take some herbal medication, infect others, die at home and buried without the government knowing it. Therefore, even when all health officials come clean with the number of cases, the present data does not necessarily reflect the magnitude of the situation in all of China.

[Carry_Okie]

The United States government doesn't attempt to fraudulently underreport the occurrence of a disease as China did with SARS. That it has caved in to pressure from homosexual groups and their allies to "do more" about AIDS (when our parents and grandparents are more likely to die from cancer or heart disease) is another matter.

You have a poor memory. Public health officials failed to quarrantine HIV when it first appeared, when it was thought to be a disease associated with the use of poppers. The reporting requirements were a joke. Sexual partners were never interviewed or isolated or placed under observation when a classic application of public health laws might have greatly slowed the spread of the disease. There was a constant downplaying of the severity of the disease and its prognosis. Even in 1985, the Memorial Sloan Kettering docs were telling congress that what was then called HTLV-III was only 35% fatal. Classic public health laws concerning communicability have been routinely ignored for political correctness. The Irwin Memorial Blood Bank was still collecting blood in the Castro district even after they understood it was a blood borne pathogen!

What disturbs me about this article is that the author is clicking his tongue like a shill for the WHO (UN), as if global socialism was any more likely to deliver constructive results than Chinese communism is.

[Grut]

Since the Japs and Germans began sending their junk here...

My '93 Civic just hit 200,000 miles, still driving like a new car and with basically no maintainance problems. Do you remember what US autos were like back in the '70s?

[HamiltonJay]

Frankly, no it can't. Hong Kong is an incredibly overpopulated island that is a throughport for thousands if not hundreds of thousands every day.. HK goes into hysteria every time the bird flu comes through.

Beijing is not HK, not even close. Sars will not cause the economic collapse of China, and it surely will not cause the abandonment of its manufacturing. Sars is not instant death, as originally believed, in fact last things I saw on it was mortality for it was under 25% and falling fast the more people infected that were being tracked.

China is a nation of over a BILLION people and has all sorts of true problems... THe government cannot even effectively feed its people, it has a large HIV/AIDS problem because of government denial and coverup, SARS is just one more thing. It will no more bring about the collapse of China economically than the current starvation problems or AIDS problems. A few thousand dead, hell even a few million dead from a disease would not cause the total collapse of the Chinese nation or economy. Wouldn't be a good thing, but belief that it will destroy it as a manufacturing base is naive.

Anyone believing a disease like SARS is going to collapse China in my opinion is incredibly ignorant of just exactly how things are in China day to day. They see pictures of Beijing and think China is a modern nation, reality could not be farther from the truth. China is largely a 3rd world country with a few urban centers.

More people are dying in N. Korea from starvation and in China too daily than SARS will ever kill. Yet the governments are no less stable than they ever were. If anything SARS will force a long overdue reinvestment and policy evaluation of the Chinese public health system, but it won't destroy the nation.

[kinghorse]

I had to chuckle when I saw the street scene in anytown China this morning on the news. All the chinese with their face masks and one overweight American Businessman breezing through the crowd mask free. I love it. I am always filled with pride when I see American chutzpah in action.

Has anything been established with respect to SARS and it's probability of spreading within one races vs another?

[HamiltonJay]

If no one did come to their hosted Olympics, you think that would tank their manufacturing base? Hardly. It would be an embarrassment for the government, but it would not spell the end of the nation or its manufacturing.

[ContemptofCourt]

I don't think that you comprehend the big picture.

Lets assume that every person in the US gets infected with SARS and, lets say 10% die...thats what, 22 million dead?

Kill off 10% of China's population and you are still left with 1 Billion people. That is still 5 times the population of the US. That is still alot of people clamoring to make $15 a week to bang out some Barbie dolls.

[Nagual]

I'll still not buy that Jap junk!

[Illbay]

The United States government doesn't attempt to fraudulently underreport the occurrence of a disease as China did with SARS.

N-o-o-o, because they have a DIFFERENT agenda.

Which is why the fraudulently OVERREPORT the incidence of AIDS in the U.S., and trump up this false myth of a "heterosexual AIDS epidemic" that never materialized, based on non-existent "indcators."

All this to justify throwing grossly disproportionate amounts of funding at a problem that was a concern only to that tiny but politically powerful minority, male homosexuals.

[FreepForever]

No, there's no statistic regarding inter-racial spread of the decease. But, the decease is only a few months old and the virus is still mutating. Some just take the infected countries as an indicator. You can say that Asian genes are more prove to get infected. But there's no scientific proof at all.