I saw a ridiculous Linkedin post about the Novel Coronavirus today which 2 of my Facebook friends had shared.
In "Something's Not Right Here Folks", Mario Cavolo claims that:
- 2009's H1N1 was from "the United States"
- The US took a long time to declare an emergency
- 2009's H1N1 was terrible
- "bizarrely negative forces are attacking China and Chinese people" and there are "vicious, political, xenophobic racist attacks and smearing of all things China"
- Claims that the Chinese government are intentionally under-reporting infections are "hateful vicious attacks" because 2009's H1N1's full extent also was under-reported, and the same thing is happening here
- It's purely the fault of "a few local government officials in Wuhan" that news of the Novel Coronavirus was suppressed (this is the only point at which he admits any Chinese culpability for the outbreak at any level)
- ""What about..." reactions don't help"
- China, Germany, Japan and other countries didn't close their borders to Americans in 2009
- "if you don't have anything good, anything supportive to say about China or Chinese people", you should "just keep your mouth shut"
Strangely, most of these claims are wrong to varying extents.
Depressingly, almost all of the comments are supportive. Perhaps that is the nature of LinkedIn, and many seem to come from ethnic Chinese.
And the author, naturally, does not respond well to being corrected on facts and confused popularity with truth:
Jeremy S.: The ignorance here is remarkable. We abuse some for strict and swift quarantine while celebrating China for swift quarantine? We say not to call it a Chinese virus and in the same article call a virus that arose in Mexico a US virus. Ironically in that case China was the only country that closed its borders to Mexico and impounded Mexican travellers.
For some extra irony we are choosing to see the worst of 'the west' while complaining about seeing only the worst of China.
Moreover, as much as people love to bang the drum, this is not a racial issue. Well for some morons it is,but they are not representative. There is antipathy towards China right now from all races and religions. Some is valid and some isn't. Criticism should not be conflated with hate - people are just afraid and frankly a lot of people in China are worried too.
People loving this article are part of the problem. We are all people, people. Stop fanning racial and nationalistic division and tapping into Chinese xenophobia to get lIkes or showing your popular prejudice and ignorance via misled virtue signalling
Mario Cavolo: Wow, really Jeremy? Here's what you do. You mix some good intelligent thoughts with your abusive shit. I wrote this article just for YOU and 99.9% of the comments support what i wrote for the accuracy and meaning of the intended narrative. So go ahead and troll elsewhere. 250,000 people agree with me, not you. Thanks, Mario
Other things OP got wrong not that were not pointed out by Jeremy S.:
- The US government certified a public health emergency on April 26, 2009
- H1N1's mortality rate was 0.02% (vs 0.05% for the seasonal flu this flu season in the US - which actually makes it *less* deadly). This makes it much less serious than the current coronavirus which, from what we know, has a 2% mortality rate. Incidentally, inconveniently for those alleging it is deadly and the Chinese government is covering deaths up, the mortality rate outside mainland China is 0.7% and excluding Hong Kong as well it is 0.4% as of February 6, 2020, 19:50 GMT (Source: Countries where Coronavirus has spread - Worldometer). Obviously these figures are subject to revision but that there don't seem to be good grounds for panic for now.
- While Chinese citizens are "victims" of "racist" and "xenophobic" border closures, he ignores the plight of the residents of 34 cities in China, who are victims too - of the Chinese government's racist and xenophobic lockdowns of their cities. Apparently 45 million people are affected by "the largest quarantine in modern public-health history".
- ""What about..." reactions don't help"... in a post full of "What about..." reactions
- Many Chinese people are also critical of their country's response to the virus. There sure are a lot of self-loathing racist Chinese nationals out there
- The Wuhan mayor himself blamed Beijing's rules for the lack of transparency (this is a phenomenon one often sees in totalitarian regimes - absolving the top of the hierarchy by blaming those at the bottom; this isn't helped by the Xi Jinping personality cult [again - totalitarian regimes], which means one cannot say anything negative about him)
- A Chinese respiratory medicine expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong thinks that the Chinese government is under-reporting cases and China has a culture of false reporting; Liaoning admitted cooking the books from 2011 to 2014 (i.e. this is not under-reporting due to the full extent of the disease not being known, as with 2009's H1N1)