The Word from Wuhan | Hacker News Reader

The Word from Wuhan

lrb.co.uk

238 pointsyarapavan48 comments

The most fun anecdote:

Zhang Wenhong, director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital, became a national hero for a press conference speech:

The first-aid team put themselves in great danger. They are tired and need to rest. We shouldn’t take advantage of good people. From now on, I’ll replace all the frontline medics with party members from different sectors. Didn’t you all swear to put the people’s interest first when you joined the party, whatever the difficulties? I don’t care what you were actually thinking when you joined the party. Now it’s time to live up to what you promised. I don’t care if you personally agree or not: it’s non-negotiable.

But good article - read the whole thing.

>with party members from different sectors

Pretty sure that was mis-translated ( Intentional or not ). What he meant was party member from within the Medics and Hospital. He didn't just suggest to put any party member in the frontline because they wouldn't be qualify in the first place.

No no no.. translating is to put them in the 'headlights' of transparency of accountability. It's quite an angry comment.

> There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy ‘throwing woks’.

I appreciate learning idioms of countries foreign to me, and in this case it makes for a great article.

There was an great episode on this topic on CBC a week ago: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/the-life-giving-nature-of-... (Available on most Podcast apps too https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/tapestry-from-cbc-radi...)

You can count on the states that have an official number of infected people of about 100 to have about 10000. You can count on US states that have 0 cases for those to have about 1000. We've passed containment options when we didn't do anything about 2 months ago.

People just don't go to the doctors, especially with the news of how people are being treated on the boats.

Deductible of several thousand per person in our household. Good ol’ HSA plan (our other options guaranteed higher spending than that every year on premiums). Bet your ass we’re not going to the hospital unless we absolutely have to. And we’re lucky enough to have insurance and the means to pay if we have to (though it’ll hurt a hell of a lot).

> Deductible of several thousand per person in our household

Call your insurer. Many are waiving testing and treatment, including for HDHPs, in respect of SARS-Covid-2.

I would be shocked if that turned out to be true. At best I’d expect some part of treatment very specific to COVID-19 to be free but everything else around it to be normal price. Insurance companies and hospital billing departments screw you and screw up constantly in the best of circumstances—no way I’m trusting them any more than I would a used car salesman.

> I would be shocked if that turned out to be true

It’s a call. Not that hard. My insurer, a major Californian one, confirmed affirmatively within minutes.

Not sure why you're being downvoted because that's what they've been announcing. Whether they uphold their agreement is a different story but this what we're being told by the insurers.

Don't just call, get it in writing if you're in the USA. At the very least record that call if it's legal to do so in your state, but that's problematic for other reasons.

When the hospital decides after the fact to bill you thousands of dollars you won't have much of a recourse besides telling your family members to ignore the calls from aggressive medical collection agencies at 3am.

Insurers are proven to live when you call them (source: personal experience in the past).

Lie you mean ?

I'm on a HSA plan with an absurd deductible. The crazy thing is that the HSA plan is still cheaper given that my family does not have any critical event in the next three years. HSA was a great idea (one of my employer had low premium + low deductible + good HSA account subsidy). But way too many employers and insurance company abuse it where people are afraid of using their insurance because of the out of pocket cost.

Is your deductible higher than what you can put into the HSA? I’m putting about $7k into my HSA each year, but my deductible is only about $3.5k. The first year sucked because we had to pay out of pocket until we had enough in the HSA to be reimbursed. But by the end of the year we had enough to pay off the next year’s deductible. Now I have enough in the HSA to pay a few years worth of deductibles. We typically burn through the deductible by March of each year, but we get it all back from the HSA and all of our medications and visits are incredibly cheap for the remainder of the year.

I figured there are probably a LOT of unreported cases in the US because most are not severe and never get diagnosed. But if that were true, we should see a small number of deaths all over the country rather than a few pockets of them.

I think you’re correct that the OP is overestimating somewhat. That said, it’s worth bearing in mind that not all deaths are recorded. You have to test for those too.

In places without testing there could be an uptick in unexplained pneumonia deaths. We don’t really have any overall stats on that. But this is fertile ground for an investigative journalist. Calling hospitals in places with little testing and seeing if they have anomalies.

Not going to the doctors (unless you are a person at risk like and elderly person) is the smart move anyways. Here in Austria the current reaction for a patient testing positive at a doctors office is to close it down for two weeks. The official guideline when you suspect you have the virus is to call a number and a doctor will visit you.

Is there anything that can really be done? Given a reasonable budget, how could the spread of corona be stopped?

Expecting local officials to deal effectively with extraordinary circumstances is unrealistic. A wealthy populous nation should be able to support a team of national experts to assist in times and places of particular need, in a variety of fields including that of infectious disease. The system described in TFA seems rather more like a struggle among competing cults of personality. "Your mayor sucks! Now you will be ruled by our super-mayor!" "Does he know a single thing about health?" "Who knows?! Who cares!? He has a take-charge personality!"

Leadership is exactly about organizing groups of experts to fight against specific threats to the common good.

The point isn't that local officials should have been working in the hospitals, it is that they should have been collecting the infectious disease experts and executing against a containment and mitigation plan.

Are you a "West Wing" fan?

The whole point of a unitary centrally-controlled state apparatus like that in China is that leadership of the type you describe does not exist. If it did exist, it would not exist locally. Local officials are to follow directions, which come from more central authorities. Sometimes they follow directions poorly, because they're more concerned with their personal well-being than that of their subjects. That's understandable, because those orders themselves came from the same motivation on their bosses' parts.

Am I criticizing the form of government that the Chinese people endure? Yes! It is much like most other forms of government endured by humanity.

If your problem is “the division of responsibility and authority is disputed” or “collected resources aren’t being distributed due to confusion” or “key workers are distracted by CYA” a respected, competent leader might be just what they need.

I can't imagine a situation in which a revolving cast of new bosses imposed top-down from the more fashionable parts of the nation will make anyone local less "distracted by CYA". That situation certainly doesn't exist in Wuhan right now. If China has a CDC-equivalent, they should take the lead. Hiring another ceremonial head-to-roll at the local health department would be a waste of time.

>Teams of doctors arrived from every province in China to join the effort and an army of engineers was deployed to build two new hospitals in ten days. Millions of people watched the buildings go up.

That's unbelievable.

Where can I read or see more about that?

EDIT: Found something https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-ho...

I am still in disbelief.

Wendover Productions in the topic: https://youtu.be/3Sh7hghljuQ

https://youtu.be/XU9FVqwO4TM

Little more about the student lead DDOS attack here -

https://technode.com/2020/03/02/dingtalk-begs-for-stars-on-c...

<quote>On the first day back to school, DingTalk saw over 50 million students and 600,000 teachers in China using its live-streaming feature to hold online classes.</quote>

OMG! Their infrastructure team must be so proud, I can't imagine the app saw even a one-hundrenth of that much traffic before then.

DingTalk is a product from Alibaba, which also owns Taobao and Alibaba Cloud. DingTalk celebrated 200 million registered users back in August 2019. So this online course surge is probably not that a big stretch for them.

obviously it did. you cannot scale 100x at a moment’s notice

The question remains: what will happen when everyone returns to work and school? I would expect infections to flare up again. What then?

In terms of human suffering/death, it's better to spread out the number of sick people over a longer period of time. There's a finite number of hospital beds and doctors, and you'll get better care if there are fewer other people sick at the same time. It's better for the economy, though, if everyone gets sick as soon as possible, so that everyone gets better at the same time and factories can spin back up.

Deal with each new outbreak quickly and efficiently. The problem in Italy and China was that the outbreak got out of hand before measures to deal were in place, the big deal here seems to be that if people in critical conditions get support with breathing they often pull through, if they don't they die. If you are dealing with 1000's of cases providing supported ventilation is not possible. If you are dealing with 10's then it can be done.

Practically speaking, I think this means e.g. temperature checks at every school, place of work, subway, train, airport, and large residential building. At entry/exit, like metal detectors. Routine swabs / testing. Ideally could swap, put into an envelope and send off to a central testing facility. What else?

Given the reports of asymptomatic testing, not sure we can confine to small size flare-ups in the absence of this.

“The censor machine is working tirelessly too. Public mood is constantly monitored and analysed by AI, with countermeasures devised to match it. Take the case of Li Wenliang. Li, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, was one of the first to warn people about the new virus. On 30 December he messaged a group of colleagues about a possible outbreak; a few days later he was summoned by police and reprimanded for ‘making false statements that disturbed the public order’. Li continued his work at the hospital and on 10 January started experiencing symptoms of infection. On 6 February, his heart stopped.“

What a completely different world these people live in.

> What a completely different world these people live in.

- No Wikipedia.

- No user generated yelp reviews.

- No non-government approved news articles.

- Every message you write online can affect your credit-worthiness and your children's access to schools.

- Buggy face recognition technology that routinely implicates the innocent

- Secret detentions if you are "deemed" a scofflaw, with no clear process to challenge it.

- Non-existent property rights unless you have connections to power.

I love the Chinese people and culture, but the Chinese government is one of the worst ever. It doesn't just effect the way you live, it effects your ability to even think.

http://archive.md/6g6nO

Amazing. Thanks to the author.

You can use the Reader View in Firefox to work around the paywall.

Noscript usually works pretty well for this sort of thing, as well. Also very interesting to see what domains a site is grabbing its javascript from (and which sites are calling from 20+ different domains for a simple news website...!)

Or just press stop before the paywall executes.

That only shows me the first few paragraphs.

That always works like a charm!

Firefox has hardwired me to enter Ctrl+Alt+R whenever something even slightly interferes with reading the content.

This is how authoritarian socialism/communism pits people against each other. Imagine a massively broad and deep bureaucracy which controls every aspect of your life. Where so many things are illegal that practically everyone is breaking some law - and the government (or your personal enemies) just need a reason to get you reprimanded - piss off the wrong boss and your life is turned upside down.

Our system in the West isn't perfect but at least your mistakes (real and otherwise) typically don't follow you for the rest of your life, excluding extreme cases.

I liked the article, thx :)

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