Our favourite website during this crisis has become the Worldometer, or the Death-o-meter, as it is fondly known in our house. Every day, it shows the new numbers of cases of Covid-19, including deaths, in every country in the world. We have been watching New Zealand climbing up the leaderboard at a depressingly rapid rate. Yes, our numbers are low, but so is our population, and our rate of cases, being 107 per million of population, is an average rate for most countries and is significantly higher than the rate per million in both India and China.
Yes, that’s right. We have more cases per million of population than China, the country where the virus started, where the truth about it was suppressed for weeks, where doctors were punished for discussing the virus and where the authorities actually welded up the doorways of apartment buildings to make people stay home.
Doesn’t seem very likely, does it? These are cumulative numbers, not simply the numbers today, or this week.
I wish to make it clear that I am not anti-Chinese. I lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years in the 1980s and loved the place, and developed a fondness for the local people; but some of their practices, particularly from those who were recent immigrants from China, were disgusting. They had ‘wet markets’ there too, and they were absolutely stomach heaving places. The animal handling was cruel, and the hygiene was non-existent, with recently butchered animals lying in all sorts of mixed fluids on the pavements. There were no exotic animals, like pangolins or civets, but no one in their right mind would touch anything from these markets. Yet, the locals, particularly the older ones, loved them.
They also engaged in weird practices, such as drinking snake’s blood. This practice was supposed to increase virility, where a handler would slit the throat of a live snake and the purchaser would drink it… warm. I do remember vomiting after witnessing this practice, and none of the ex-pats could imagine for one second why anyone would want to do that.
As the Chinese immigrants got older and the younger people of Hong Kong took over, those practices have mostly disappeared from Hong Kong, but they still go on in China. We all understand that different cultures have different practices, but the CCP should have stamped out these wet markets a long time ago, for the health and safety of their citizens, if for no other reason. However, they continue, often because it is considered a sign of wealth if you own, or can afford to eat, wild animals. Asians love to be able to show off their wealth. It is a classic Asian trait. Another classic Asian trait is that they never, ever like to ‘lose face’.
And therein lies the problem. The CCP shows a double whammy of not wanting a communist country to look bad to countries in the West, and also, they absolutely hate to look bad in any way. The Russians certainly demonstrate the first trait, as we found out after Chernobyl, but maybe not the latter quite so much.
So, with our 589 cases, and the numbers going up (as is to be expected, as we are some way behind China), China apparently has 31 new cases today. They have a total of 81,439 cases, with 3,300 deaths. Italy has 97,689 cases, 10,779 deaths and a population of 60 million. There is considerable evidence that Italy’s numbers are so high because of a large number of Chinese residents, but again that begs the question – why does Italy have 1,616 cases per million, and China only has 57 cases per million?
And now the USA has climbed to the top of the leaderboard, with 142,000 cases and 2484 deaths. With a population of 327 million, we would expect their numbers to be high, although they do have 429 cases per million, compared to China’s 57 cases per million.
Ridiculous isn’t it? Something simply does not stack up here.
My knowledge of statistics is limited, but one thing I do know is that statistics are heavily dependent on probabilities. So what is the probability that the country where the virus started, with 1 billion people, many of whom have some extremely unhealthy habits, who mostly live in overcrowded cities, who had no advance warning of the disease, unlike countries like New Zealand, can possibly have fewer cases than we do?
Something is very wrong here. Maybe this has something to do with it.
Yes. China has had over 21 million cellphone accounts cancelled.
There can be lots of explanations for cancelling a cellphone account, but when you realise that the Chinese do everything by cellphone, this makes no sense. Even assuming there are legitimate reasons for cancelling many accounts, we are still left with the question of what has happened to at least 6 million cellphone users.
Like Chernobyl, incriminating evidence comes out eventually. Unlike the Russians though, the Chinese are very unlikely to admit that they have been falsifying their numbers because they will lose face if they do.
Once the worst of the pandemic is over, trading nations must look very hard at their relationships with China. If a country is prepared to allow a pandemic to sweep the world, cover up the truth and even accuse the USA of causing it, the relationship is going nowhere. We will all be much safer if we cut ties with the dragon nation and sell our goods elsewhere.
Another thing we must do when all this is over is disband some of the bloated organisations that contribute nothing to the world but cost us all millions. The UN is the most obvious candidate, and so must the EU be, as most European nations can finally see a very good reason for keeping control over their own borders. It is interesting to note that those members of the EU that have kept strict border controls are the ones with few Covid-19 cases – Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia among them.
The other organisation we need to disband is the World Health Organisation.
And as the coronavirus swept across the Chinese heartland and jumped to other nations, the WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, applauded the “transparency” of the Chinese response.
Even as evidence mounted that Chinese officials had silenced whistleblowers and undercounted cases, Tedros took a moment to extol the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Washington Post
Transparency? Tedros is obviously on the Chinese payroll.
China has had plenty of chances. First, there was SARS, also believed to have started in the wet markets of China, but they blamed civets. Then there was the swine flu epidemic of 2009, and don’t forget that the Hong Kong flu of 1968 also originated in China. We were all lucky that those pandemics did not crash around the globe like Covid-19. But this time must be the last. If we cannot trust a trading partner to tell the truth and avoid endangering huge swathes of the world population as a result, our future has to be in our own hands.
They will never tell the truth. They simply cannot tell the truth. Because they must never lose face.
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