Yes, you should blame China for the Wuhan coronavirus

Two things could be true: It could be a contagious disease that should be taken seriously, and the reports could be massively exaggerated. The latter is based on the liberal media’s blatant hatred of Trump and its eagerness to weaponize anything it can to hasten his departure from Washington. And it shouldn’t shock us that much of the media’s coverage of the Wuhan coronavirus is garbage. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a key figure in the government’s response and an immunologist at the NIH, had to scold CNN for its stupidity, telling anchor Brianna Keilar to basically get her act together. On MSNBC, Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin, a noted anti-Trump campaigner, said fewer Democrats will die from the Wuhan coronavirus than Republicans because some political rallies have been canceled. You can’t make this up. And in a time when unity is needed, the media will be the ones to throw up obstacles because unity would mean victory for this administration.

Dr. Anthony Fauci Calls Out CNN for Answer on Touching Same Mic as POTUS: ‘Let’s Be Honest’ photo: twitter.com/J5hy5cOgKP

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) March 15, 2020

Viruses are apolitical. They don’t care about Democrats or Republicans. They don’t care about race, gender, or religious affiliation. They will kill anything they infect. For those who fear Trump will start a nuclear war, those fears are unfounded. The virus is the greatest existential threat to man.

The spread of the Wuhan coronavirus, which has become a global pandemic and is devastating Europe, especially Italy, can be traced back to China, where it originated. And yes, you can call it the Wuhan flu. And you can blame China for this mess, because they screwed up the response terribly. Here’s the key to all this: don’t believe Chinese propaganda. Unfortunately, some reporters from the opposition press I was just selling this to attack the Trump White House. China knew about this virus and its authoritarian bureaucracy decided DO NOT inform the public. It allowed Chinese New Year celebrations to go ahead, exposing tens of thousands of people. It allowed about five million people to leave Wuhan unchecked. That’s it. Forget about the mass quarantine that followed. That’s it. The spread was inevitable, because China, like any authoritarian regime, doesn’t admit when it’s screwed up for obvious reasons. Wall Street Journal actually has a long piece about how “it all started” in China:

On Dec. 10, Wei Guixian, a seafood vendor at the Hua’nan City Market, first felt unwell. Thinking she had a cool, she went to a diminutive local clinic for treatment and then went back to work. Eight days later, the 57-year-old lay barely conscious in a hospital bed, one of the first suspected cases in the coronavirus epidemic that has paralyzed China and engulfed the global economy. The virus has spread around the world, sickening more than 100,000 people.

For nearly three weeks, doctors tried to connect the dots between Ms. Wei and other early cases, many of them Hua’nan vendors. Patient after patient reported similar symptoms, but many, like her, visited diminutive, poorly equipped clinics and hospitals. Some patients balked at paying for chest scans; others, including Ms. Wei, refused to be transferred to larger facilities that were better equipped to identify infectious diseases.

One of the first doctors to alert Chinese authorities has been criticized for “spreading rumors” after sharing a test result with a former medical school colleague that showed a patient had coronavirus. Another doctor was forced to write a self-criticism letter, saying his warnings “had a negative impact.”

Even after Chinese President Xi Jinping personally ordered officials to contain the outbreak on Jan. 7, authorities denied that the disease could spread from person to person — something doctors had known since delayed December — and held a Chinese Lunar New Year banquet in Wuhan that was attended by tens of thousands of families.

China has rejected criticism of its response to the epidemic, saying it bought time for the rest of the world. Mr. Xi told 170,000 officials in a Feb. 23 teleconference that the country’s leaders had acted quickly and coherently from the start.

A reconstruction of the situation published in the Wall Street Journal paints a different picture, revealing how a series of early mistakes, dating back to the first patients, were made worse by political leaders who waited to inform the public of the risks and take powerful control measures.

Last week, Zhong Nanshan, one of China’s most respected epidemiology experts and a leader of the National Health Commission’s epidemic task force, said officials had identified the coronavirus by Dec. 31 and had taken too long to publicly confirm human-to-human transmission. If action had been taken earlier, in December or even early January, “the number of cases would have been much lower,” he said.

[…]

It now appears that, based on a speech by Mr. Xi published in a Communist Party magazine in February, he led the response to the epidemic as Wuhan continued to celebrate the New Year despite the risk of a wider spread of infection. He also led the response as authorities allowed some five million people to leave Wuhan without screening and waited until Jan. 20 to declare that the virus was spreading between people.

As a result, the virus spread far more widely than it could have when Beijing locked down Wuhan and three other cities on Jan. 23 in the largest quarantine in history. Those and other subsequent measures appear to have slowed the spread within China’s borders, but the global consequences of the early mistakes were grave. “A lot fewer people would have died” in China if the government had acted sooner, Ms. Wei said in a Feb. 16 interview.

Now she is fully recovered and back home, to the two-room apartment she had been confined to for almost two months. Her daughter, who was infected in mid-January, is still in a field hospital, she said.

As for Ms. Wei, that’s a good sign. She’s actually one of more than 75,000 people who have recovered from the Wuhan coronavirus. But who’s to blame? People, there’s blame here. There’s no doubt about it. This isn’t racism. It’s a fact. China screwed this up—even its own government officials are saying so now. If we can’t call a spade a spade for political correctness, then pathogens should be the end of us. The 2009 swine flu pandemic infected 60 million Americans and killed at least 12,000. The seasonal flu this year is expected to infect 32 to 49 million, kill 18,000 to 50,000, and hospitalize at least 560,000 people this year. That’s just a perspective. This isn’t the Andromeda strain we’re dealing with, but now that it’s here, we all need to take extra precautions to stay vigorous and hygienic. This virus is not as deadly to younger populations. Some may get very infirmed, but most will have delicate symptoms. Many will be asymptomatic. That’s the key. It’s not that you’re going to get it and die. It’s that you, as a adolescent person, get it, you’re not going to have any symptoms, and then two to three weeks later you touch surfaces that older people exploit, you visit your grandparents or your parents (if they’re over 60), you’re going to get them infirmed and probably kill them.

It really is a team effort. And we have these clowns filling the bars and beaches while all this is going on. Unfortunately, the government has had to step in in states like Pennsylvania, Maryland, Nevada, California, and Ohio to make sure we are all practicing some social distancing. Yesterday, the market dropped 10 percent, about 3,000 points. We can’t take this kind of constant beating when trillions of dollars are leaving the market. This disease is highly contagious. It’s stern, but it’s not apocalyptic. At the same time, this is not the time to party. For at least two weeks, people should be working from home, avoiding bars, restaurants, and movie theaters. In some of the states listed above, this has already been mandated. DC has also closed its bar scene. It sucks, but a few weeks at home will save lives and lend a hand contain this virus as test kits are distributed to those who need them.