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[COVID-19 Virus] The PRC Situation Thread

The authorities should just end the quarantine n go in biz as usual. All this shit for a flu virus
Sealed in: Chinese trapped at home by COVID-19 feel the strain
FILE PHOTO: A man wearing a face mask keeps watch at an entrance to a residential community that has been fenced in with temporary barriers, in Yichang city of Hubei, the province hit hardest by the novel coronavirus outbreak, China February 10, 2020. China Daily via REUTERS/File Photo
22 Feb 2020 07:33PM
(Updated: 22 Feb 2020 07:40PM)
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BEIJING: During weeks holed up in her grandmother's apartment with 10 relatives and eating a restricted diet, Chinese teenager Li Yuxuan says tempers have frayed.
Li and her family are among the millions of people across China's Hubei province, epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, who are subject to official orders to stay at home amid attempts to contain the spread of the disease.
READ: Drop in new China COVID-19 cases as toll reaches 2,345
Officials and volunteers have sealed off buildings, erected barricades and stepped up surveillance to ensure compliance with the ban on movement, measures that are taking a toll on many in the community.
"Every day there's fighting. Every day we sigh. Every day I'm scolded," Li, 19, told Reuters by WeChat from the apartment in Ezhou, a city near the provincial capital of Wuhan.
Li said the family had eaten the same combination of white rice, cabbage and peanuts for three weeks, since gathering to celebrate the Lunar New Year last month, stinting on portions due to limits on the numbers of people from each household allowed out to shop.
Cities and villages across China have taken measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 76,000 people in the country, killing 2,345, but the protocols in Hubei are the most extreme.
FILE PHOTO: A resident uses a mobile phone to pay for vegetables purchased through group orders at a collection point set up at the entrance of a residential compound in Wuhan, the epicentre of the novel coronavirus outbreak, Hubei province, China February 21, 2020. REUTERS/Stringer/File PhotoREAD: Wuhan woman with no symptoms infects five relatives with COVID-19: Study
The province, which is home to 60 million people, announced a "sealed management" policy a week ago that effectively prevents residents from leaving their homes, further isolating a population that has been living under a transport lockdown since late January.
"We bought vegetables today, but I don't know when we will go out again," Li said by WeChat on Friday, adding the family could now only buy food at the gate of their compound.
Officials have promised to ensure sufficient food and medicine for residents and have also warned against hoarding or price-gouging.
"Sealed management will continue so that no one will go outside, but they must still be able to buy their daily necessities," Wuhan's newly appointed Communist Party chief, Wang Zhonglin, said last Sunday.
READ: 'Verge of tears': Residents of virus-hit Wuhan call for support amid worries of food shortages
COMMUNITY ENFORCEMENT
Hubei's sealed management policy depends heavily on residential committees, a network of volunteers who carry out government and Communist Party orders at the grassroots level in coordination with private employees of residential compounds.
One day last week, before her compound in Jingzhou city was completely sealed, 31-year old Vicky Yi said she was stopped at the gate by a volunteer when she tried to go out for groceries.
Minutes later, an elderly woman walked past and out of the compound. Yi argued with the volunteer to let her out. He eventually yielded.
"These people in the compound, when they get even a little bit of power, they will use all their energy to try to get in your way," she said.
"It's like the Stanford prison experiment," she added, referring to the 1971 psychology experiment to investigate perceptions of power that assigned a group of the university's students to be either prisoners or guards.
The Jingzhou government could not be reached by Reuters for comment.
FILE PHOTO: Volunteers and community workers deliver vegetables and goods to residents inside a residential compound at its entrance, in Xiangyang city of Hubei, the province hit hardest by the novel coronavirus outbreak, China February 20, 2020. China Daily via REUTERS/File PhotoREAD: Hospital director dies in China's Wuhan, epicentre of COVID-19 outbreak
Online videos have shown police and volunteers using force to penalise residents for even gathering in groups. In one that went viral, and which caught the attention of the official People's Daily, volunteers flipped over a table where a family was playing mah-jong, and hit one of the players.
"There are some things, no matter how pressing the epidemic is, that should not be done," the People's Daily noted on social media of the incident, and the Xiaogang city government issued an apology.
PUBLIC HEALTH CONCERNS
Non-residents are also caught in the Hubei net, with many who were in the province to visit relatives over Lunar New Year now stuck far from their homes and livelihoods.
"The rent, the water bill, the electricity bill, I still have to pay them," said 28-year old Cao Dezhao, who owns a small IT business in Jinan, in eastern Shandong province, but is stuck in Wuhan after he came to visit his in-laws. "I could be bankrupt at the end of this epidemic."
Experts say that essential needs, including monitoring of mental health, should be ensured for people under quarantine or containment measures.
"You have to address the basic rights and well-being of people: can they get their food and water? What is their mental health status?" said Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University.
READ: Commentary: Stop calling COVID-19 the 'Wuhan coronavirus
Hundreds of official 24-hour telephone hotlines for psychological support have been launched since the beginning of the outbreak, but many are overwhelmed.
Wuhan, the Hubei city hardest hit in the epidemic, says it will ensure food and other necessities through group orders as supermarkets stopped selling to individuals. Some communities have arranged for vendors to come to the their compounds gates. Hubei has said drugs and other necessities must be delivered to residents.
FILE PHOTO: Workers in protective suits are seen at a checkpoint for registration and body temperature measurement, at an entrance to a residential compound in Wuhan, the epicentre of the novel coronavirus outbreak, in Hubei province, China February 13, 2020. China Daily via REUTERS/File Photo
But Song Chunlin, whose daughter has psoriasis, a painful chronic skin condition, said she has been unable to receive delivery of the medication her daughter needs in the village where her parents live in Yichang, in western Hubei, while she herself has not been able to receive her allergy medication.
The Yichang government did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
"I'm really in a difficult situation," Song told Reuters.
 
Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab
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Chinese women and a child all wear protective masks as they walk under decorations in a park after celebrations for the Chinese New Year and Spring Festival were cancelled by authorities on January 25, 2020 in Beijing, China.
At an emergency meeting in Beijing held last Friday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke about the need to contain the coronavirus and set up a system to prevent similar epidemics in the future.
A national system to control biosecurity risks must be put in place “to protect the people’s health,” Xi said, because lab safety is a “national security” issue.
Xi didn’t actually admit that the coronavirus now devastating large swathes of China had escaped from one of the country’s bioresearch labs. But the very next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is exactly what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive entitled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”
Read that again. It sure sounds like China has a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes where they belong, doesn’t it? And just how many “microbiology labs” are there in China that handle “advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus”?
It turns out that in all of China there is only one. And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan that just happens to be . . . the epicenter of the epidemic.
That’s right. China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab that is equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
What’s more, the People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, a Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.
According to the PLA Daily, Gen. Chen has been researching coronaviruses since the SARS outbreak of 2003, as well as Ebola and anthrax. This would not be her first trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology either, since it is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China.
Does that suggest to you that the novel coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, may have escaped from that very lab, and that Gen. Chen’s job is to try and put the genie back in the bottle, as it were? It does to me.
Add to this China’s history of similar incidents. Even the deadly SARS virus has escaped — twice — from the Beijing lab where it was — and probably is — being used in experiments. Both “man-made” epidemics were quickly contained, but neither would have happened at all if proper safety precautions had been taken.
And then there is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.
You heard me right.
Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach.
Also fueling suspicions about SARS-CoV-2’s origins is the series of increasingly lame excuses offered by the Chinese authorities as people began to sicken and die.
They first blamed a seafood market not far from the Institute of Virology, even though the first documented cases of Covid-19 (the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2) involved people who had never set foot there. Then they pointed to snakes, bats and even a cute little scaly anteater called a pangolin as the source of the virus.
I don’t buy any of this. It turns out that snakes don’t carry coronaviruses and that bats aren’t sold at a seafood market. Neither are pangolins, for that matter, an endangered species valued for their scales as much as for their meat.
The evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus may have been carried out of the lab by an infected worker or crossed over into humans when they unknowingly dined on a lab animal. Whatever the vector, Beijing authorities are now clearly scrambling to correct the serious problems with the way their labs handle deadly pathogens.
China has unleashed a plague on its own people. It’s too early to say how many in China and other countries will ultimately die for the failures of their country’s state-run microbiology labs, but the human cost will be high.
But not to worry. Xi has assured us that he is controlling biosecurity risks “to protect the people’s health.” PLA bioweapons experts are in charge.
I doubt the Chinese people will find that very reassuring. Neither should we.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s ‘Dream’ is the New Threat to World Order.”m
 
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