Interesting read on what may or may not be going on in N. Korea.
And an unexpected benefit from it.
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I hope not. I’ll be on my way over there in 4 weeks time.
From what I’ve read, most of their “cases” are patients from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. (There are a few scattered around the country, true. But they are all in hospital now and under observation / treatment).
However, the Oz government is looking at removing the current travel ban on mainland Chinese. Hey, you know, start of University for the year, and all those Chinese students have to be looked after. Never you worry about the rest of the country… 
And they have imaginative ways to avoid travel bans as well - they first travel to somewhere else, then make the hop over to Australia. Direct flights from China is verboten but flights from other countries are not.
Money do talks, but for the wrong reasons.
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For your sake (and theirs) I hope they got it contained 100% before then. Good luck.
The US has similar issues with Chinese students. It’s also coming out more and more how many US universities are taking Chinese money to even stay in business.
But you guys aren’t anywhere near as vulnerable as we are.
I think your “worst” University has 11% Chinese students. We have multiple Universities where Chinese students make up more than 40% of the student population.
On the one forum the following suggestions was made regarding the absence of COVID-19 in South Africa :
- Lots of HIV-positive people on anti-retrovirals, which may inhibit (or prevent) the spread of Coronachan.
- Awesome health department (who doesn’t know its butt from its elbow) is not detecting and reporting on all possible Coronachan infections as they should.
There was a suspect case in Botswana on the 3rd of February. I have decided to use that as a “marker” and set 24 days’ time as the incubation period, which ends the 27th February.
Today is the 24th, which means we have 4 days left (counting today). If there are no reports of Coronachan, we may be almost out of the woods, but we cannot assume that.
Given the fact that it’s started to spread in Italy, we may have to re-assess the situation.
Read an article today on this, there haven’t been enough test kits made to even verify every case reported today, so even these counts are suspect. It’s all guess work and lots of symptomatic people, especially in China, are just staying home and hoping they get better.
Great. Now I want to watch Sahara again.
Well, we have one in my county now that hasn’t traveled recently and we don’t know where he/she got it.
from the Wuhan virus Updates telegram feed : Telegram: Contact @wuhappening
gives you a feeling of dread…
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I’m thinking that the original Mad Max trilogy would be more accurate - a post-apocalypse desert landscape inhabited by insane gangs.
Only it’s not a nuclear war but COVID-19 and climate change that wipe us all out.
Back in 1980 I watched Mad Max for the first time. At that time we had the lovely Film and Publications Board who tend to censor a lot of things.
Of course Mad Max got censored.
Fast forward to 2020. I watched the original (uncensored) version, when the second rape scene came up, I was like WTF and stopped watching.
But I hear you. The way things are going, Mad Max looks like a possible future.
Maybe 12 Monkeys is more appropriate.
In certain aspects.
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12 Monkeys was weird, but interesting.
Spotted a pretty good article in The Atlantic earlier this week: How the Coronavirus Revealed Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw. Some of the highlights:
- The high levels of surveillance and censorship in China may have had the opposite effect of making it more difficult to know what was going on. If you’re afraid of saying things due to retaliation, the critical piece of information you might have that could lead to a solution is kept to yourself.
- Mao Zedong was told in 1958 that they had an excess of some grains, so he said everyone should eat five meals a day to help get rid of it. They did and threw away a lot of food. The reports had been exaggerated. The apparatchiks “engaged in competitive exaggeration” because they were afraid of reporting bad news and wanted to please their superiors. It backfired. A famine happened months later that killed tens of millions because there was no excess food.
- China has allowed posts on Weibo (their version of Twitter) to stay up that have complaints about government as a way of being responsive to what citizens are saying without giving them any actual power. Some government employees have been fired as a result of various complaints.
- China used to have “deliberative polls” where citizens debated various issues that was actually pretty useful, but that ended even before Xi Jinping came into power.
There’s more, but the system of not being able to say things the government doesn’t like means Xi either didn’t get the information he needed to start dealing with this disease, or what he did get was lies and exaggerations/downplayed and it didn’t seem to be a big deal at the time. The disease has a free hand for two months and then he shuts everything down overnight is a big problem, especially since he was a part of the Central Committee of the Communist Party when the SARS outbreak occurred and should have known better. But apparently Xi started giving orders for fighting this disease back on January 7th, so he must have known what was going on all along, right?
Chinese Emperor Zhu Di found out that the system where anyone could petition the Emperor wasn’t working because the middlemen were blocking some of the petitions. He said, “Stability depends on superior and inferior communicating; there is none when they do not. From ancient times, many a state has fallen because a ruler did not know the affairs of the people.” Even six hundred years ago, at least one guy knew the problems caused by trying to silence your citizens.
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It’s kind of amazing to me that Mad Max became this very ironic 80s franchies. The first movie is a pretty horrible drama with a bit of action… Then the sequels become the standard we’re accustomed to that became a definite stereotype from the 80s that persists.
The first movie was this punk rock representation of the end of man being a slide into nothing. Or something.
But, if COVID19 kills a whole shitload of people that will decide the climate change question one way or the other. In theory once the cities stop burning pollutants should go way down. Yay, planet saved!
I’ve also seen more than one report saying the number of Chinese entering our southern border illegally is way up. I’m sure it wasn’t a huge baseline number so it’s not thousands of them or anything, but it wouldn’t take many to make things rough, especially in places with large homeless populations.