It may have been; I don’t see the origin date as a horse worth flogging.
Just had a discussion a couple of days ago with a friend, who is a frontline doctor in Europe. Consensus seems to be that the virus circulated much, much earlier than generally acknowledged. I’m sure our resident medicos will weigh in that.
Peter wrote:
It may have been; I don’t see the origin date as a horse worth flogging.
Well, yes and no. It just shows how the Chinese government tried to keep it under wraps for as long as possible. Today they revised the Wuhan death figures upwards by something like 50%. I call BS on that, they’re still lying through their teeth.
Peter wrote:
It may have been; I don’t see the origin date as a horse worth flogging.
Of course it is, if the virus strain has been spreading around the world before it was ‘discovered’ in China, the whole ‘deadly virus’ story collapses instantaneously.
It does’t really matter to me, it’s just another unproven thing. More important is the serious or not of the threat and if measures are adequate or disproportional.
172driver wrote:
I call BS on that, they’re still lying through their teeth.
I agree with you there. It’s pretty clear nothing coming out of china can be trusted. It’s exactly their attempts to cover it up that have got things to spread around as they have.
It could well have been around months before, because at low density it will spread slowly. And with most having mild symptoms, it would be missed by the national bodies responsible for epidemic identification. Those who get serious symptoms would correlate with those who don’t get out as much; especially the old people who would catch it several incubation periods after lots of other people have it because they are retired, don’t use mass transport, etc. And a lot of those are dying normally from “flu” anyway (~10k/year in every country) so that’s another curveball preventing it being noticed.
If this virus caused your balls to fall off it would be noticed immediately.
China suppressing it would be SOP. No debate there…
Peter wrote:
Sounds like Boris had a close escape.
I think that article is largely fiction and speculation.
Everything it says is either just a speculative statement with no source – the writer’s assessment of what must have been happening, or else attributed to an anonymous source at Number 10, or else complete weasel words. Well, they can write anything when they hide it behind an anonymous source. Yes of course a newspaper needs to be able to protect its sources of information, but the anonymity also gives them room to modify what a source said or just completely fabricate it. A source says “who knows, maybe Boris is really ill?” and it gets written up as “Boris is really ill”.
I favour the explanation that requires the fewest additional conspiratorial assumptions. The most likely explanation is that he was hospitalised at a less serious stage and ICUd at a less serious stage than other patients because he’s the Prime Minister.
The last part of the article even hints towards that. They note that he was up and about in the grounds of Chequers sooner than might be expected.
because he’s the Prime Minister.
Sure; nobody is going to openly state the obvious: that the head of State gets medical priority 
Everybody has to dance around that one.
“There is a reason we have never shut down for car wrecks, swimming pool deaths, or the flu, but have shut down for this”:
(one picture is worth more than thousand words)
While people’s normal lives and productivity are much impacted in some areas of the country, the best US solution does not involve shutting the country down. Regional differences are huge, so that in some areas (specifically New York and surroundings) COVID-19 has become overwhelmingly the leading cause of death, while for example in California (about 4,000 km away with population of 40 million), heart disease and cancer are both individually remaining about 3.5 times higher. The United States is quite a large single country, more than twice as large in land area as all EU countries combined, with even greater variations in infection rate to those within the entire EU, so from both economic and health related perspectives there is scope within the US to pick up the slack for those areas in the country which are suffering dramatically, and cannot be productive. I think its a very valid point.
