Quote from: stompix on April 27, 2020, 03:41:25 PM

Same for Mexico, sooner or later almost all of the working force will think of crossing the border.

Maybe. The number of illegal immigrants in the US (who are mostly from Mexico) is down ~7.5% since 2007. Migration from Mexico to the US has drastically declined in recent years in general. It all depends on the US labor market and economic conditions in Mexico. Increased border enforcement in recent years will probably continue pressuring those numbers down too.

Quote from: stompix on April 27, 2020, 03:41:25 PM

What you need is a workforce that is a prisoner in its country, where there is an insane reservoir of workers that move only by the approval of the state, the 300 million migrant workers of China, and ....a country where as long as you pay you can beak the law (forget labor laws, pollution, and everything that comes with them) One of my friends has worked for 10 years in a petrochemical factory in a 3rd world country, they were dumping all the waste as certain hours, and after that, they would call the inspectors and they would give them, yeah, they would give them the samples of water that they have to test!!

Apart from car manufacturers or electronics, low-cost manufacturing will never leave south asia and then only to head for Africa..
You simply need nothing more than a cheap workforce with no unions and a government that can be bribed for everything....or ...robots! Grin

Yep, how capital intensive an industry is would be a big determining factor. It's obvious any exodus from China would be limited, although that may be enough to affect their growth model.

Quote from: stompix on April 27, 2020, 03:41:25 PM

Start the timeline in December, don't forget about the US soldiers that bought the virus in November Grin

, don't forget about the death of Li, and the hot pot celebrating the communist party achievements in Wuhan.

In December, the corona virus was literally unknown, yet to be isolated or understood. It's extremely unfair to compare that period to January, when Western countries were fully apprised about the pathogen and the risks involved.

Even still, the time from December 1st to Hubei lockdown on January 23rd = 53 days.

Meanwhile, Western officials were aware of the risk in late December. What did they do? Trump told everyone there was nothing to worry about for months, no travel restrictions until February, no lockdowns until the third week of March, leading to massive public gatherings such as this one which underpinned NYC's explosion in cases a few weeks later.

CDC/NIH informed on December 31st to first US lockdown on March 19th = 79 days.

In late February, notable Italian officials were engaging in publicized handshaking, encouraging the public not to socially distance. National lockdown occurred on March 9th, so that's 69 days.

If the Chinese had not handed Western countries the SARS-CoV-2 genome and informed them of the likelihood of human-to-human transmission, Western countries would have taken even longer to react since their policy was to do absolutely nothing until a local epidemic had already appeared.

If the outbreak occurred in the West, the response would have been much, much slower than China. That much is obvious.

Quote from: stompix on April 27, 2020, 03:41:25 PM

Quote from: exstasie on April 26, 2020, 11:25:18 PM

There are millions of atypical pneumonia cases per year in China. Because of that, it would have been very difficult to recognize the possibility of novel infectious pathogen until a sufficiently large surge of cases triggered detection

Hihi, stop here!
There are only 7 types of known IIP which is one of the 32 types of pneumonia by cause, compared to more than one thousand for infectious ones.

How does that make singular cases (such as the December 1st case you mention) easier to identify as the potential source of a novel epidemic, when the pathogen is unknown and can't be readily tested for? Comparing the number of types of infectious vs. noninfectious is meaningless. What matters is actual prevalence.

In one off cases of pneumonitis, if a patient doesn't respond to antibiotics or test positive for known pathogens, the evidence points to a noninfectious condition unless some actual epidemiologic data suggests otherwise.

This epidemiologic data did not obviously appear until around December 30th, when doctors including Li Wenliang recognized and reported 7 confirmed cases of SARS-like coronavirus seemingly associated with the Huanan Seafood Market.

It sounds like you expect any patient who ever develops ILI or pneumonia to be rigorously studied for the possibility of a novel pathogen. That's not done in any country, and certainly not in China. In most ILI cases, doctors don't even do laboratory testing to determine the actual cause!

Quote from: stompix on April 27, 2020, 03:41:25 PM

Common, they have bullshiting us for months, and nobody trusts a thing they say. Well...except for some around here!

Not the point:

Quote

There is a prevailing assumption that China could have prevented the pandemic after the outbreak occurred. I think that's naive, given everything we now know. Did China make mistakes, could they have been more forthright? Absolutely! That doesn't change the fact that the pathogen had already widely spread (beyond China) before China had even begun to understand it. At that point, western countries still did almost nothing to stop its spread until national epidemics had already appeared.

Sure, China is untrustworthy. That doesn't mean China could have prevented the pandemic, as you have been asserting. Every step of the way, Western governments acted as if they were determined to worsen the pandemic. And that's exactly what happened.

I don't bother playing the blame game. It instills irrational anger and hatred and accomplishes nothing. China and the West are both to blame, but Western countries handled the pandemic decidedly worse than China, which makes the China finger pointing all the more ridiculous.