Democracy Now! this morning- China Coronavirus SARS and HIV

Democracy Now! this morning

LAURIE GARRETT: Well, they covered up. I mean, this is typical, what I’ve seen every time in China, every outbreak I’ve been in there, is that — you know, outsiders don’t understand. China really has two governments that run in parallel. One is the official government, with people with titles, you know, minister of whatever. And the other is the party, the Communist Party. And one trumps the other, and that’s the Communist Party. And it’s essentially kind of a shadow government, in the sense that not everybody knows who the party official is in charge of X, Y or Z. But the mode of the party is to always strive for stability. And that’s the most common word in the Chinese political lexicon, you know, “stability,” “stability.” So nothing can rock the boat. Nothing can upset the order of society.

Well, what’s upsetting to order of society more than an epidemic? And so the initial response of party officials whenever there’s an outbreak is to stifle it as quickly as possible and stifle all news and information about it and spend as much time arresting, as I wrote about several weeks ago when this was first starting, that they were spending more energy arresting people for talking about this epidemic — almost all of them healthcare workers, by the way — than they were in dealing with it and confronting it. So, by the time they actually put out honest numbers and actually start telling the world the true toll, we’re several weeks in, and we have a huge problem on our hands. And then, now they’re just racing to keep up. The Hong Kong University has a spectacular team of epidemiology statisticians, who’ve been through SARS, been through bird flu, on and on down there, and they’ve been analyzing the numbers of cases and reports through a variety of means. And they’ve shown the underreporting rate is pretty consistently by more than 50% — in fact, considerably more — so that they say this currently reported toll total of about 17,000-and-change cases in mainland China, actually, that’s the number it probably was about 10 days ago. And the true number at this moment is significantly larger.


LAURIE GARRETT: Well, when you ask, “Why did SARS end?” you know, you get different answers. In China, one of the most common responses is to say, “Because the weather changed,” as if the virus somehow was related to cold weather, and that as summer approached and it got hotter, the virus disappeared. That makes no sense to me biologically at all. It may make sense in terms of surfaces. Certain cooler surfaces may harbor virus longer than a hot surface. But other than that, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

What I observed was that China basically stopped it by doing a massive fever and quarantine program across the entire nation. So it was brought to a stop by a level of vigorous and robust action. But, you see, they’re doing the same thing now. And as I mentioned before, it’s all based on fever checks, and we now know this virus can spread from people who don’t have fevers. So, they’re building a policy that biologically is flawed, won’t work. So, when people ask me, “Where is this all going?” I say, “Look, this is much worse than SARS.” It is not as terrifically dangerous as a virulent flu epidemic. But it’s far more dangerous than anything we’ve seen on our horizon since the arrival of HIV.

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/7/laurie_garrett_china_coronavirus_response