Coronavirus and the Collapse of China

Last December a "novel strain" of coronavirus (officially "2019-nCoV") popped up allegedly in a fish market in Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million people. The city also has a biohazard laboratory that was set up in 2018 to study diseases such as SARS and Ebola. Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory was, in fact, the only such lab in China that the CCP wanted us to know about that was designed to research Biosafety Level 4 pathogens in the whole country. Prior to its creation real scientists in real institutes, not party apparatchiks chosen for their loyalty, warned that Chinese labs were notorious for diseases escaping and that the Wuhan facility was about as safe as a wet paper bag.

Of course, if you believe that this fact is anything more than a coincidence you are a conspiracy theorist and a racist, but those words mean nothing to me, so fuck it, I'm saying it, that's a pretty big fucking coincidence.

"Officially" there are as of right now (Midnight EST, 26 January) 2,028 infected with 56 deaths. However, seven hours ago I checked and it said there were 57 deaths and just a few minutes later when I refreshed the page the number changed to 42, so either 15 people came back to life or China is censoring the Internet. The disease has an "official" fatality rate of about 3%, but boots on the ground citizen journalists are reporting a fatality rate of about 15% (see above video). Leaked videos are showing people collapsing in the streets, and one nurse in the area claims the real number of infected has already reached 90,000.

Lunar New Year celebrations have been canceled. This is huge, as this is by far the largest holiday in China. Wuhan and 11 other cities in Hubei Province have been quarantined, travel throughout the whole country is being restricted, the US is pulling officials out of China. The hospital system is already starting to collapse as the number of sick are rapidly outnumbering the available staff and supplies.

We've seen something like this happen before. In 2000 the Department of Justice (Homeland Security didn't exist yet), the CDC, and a number of other organizations got together and ran a sort of wargame involving disaster preparedness to see what would happen if bioterrorists attacked the United States. It was called "TOPOFF" for "Top Officials". The exercise ran for four days, by which time the simulated disease that was released in Denver had spread to the UK and Japan and infected 3,700 people and killed 950. By that point the health infrastructure had ceased to function and the entire state of Colorado was quarantined and the ten day exercise was ended early. No country in the world is prepared for a major epidemic of the sort that was seen in 1918 when H1N1 infected a quarter of the world's population and killed up to 100 million people.

This is real. A potential 0.1 degree increase in global temperatures by 2100 and "glaciers disappearing by 2020" are nothing to worry about, a disease that has already spread to 13 countries with a rate of infection at least equivalent to the flu and a fatality at least twice as high really is something to be concerned about. There's the potential for millions to become infected before this burns itself out, and even with a 3% fatality that's tens of thousands of deaths. The 2014 Ebola outbreak killed at least 11,000 people (more likely double or triple that), and Ebola is very difficult to transmit. Coronavirus could kill ten times as many people before people start to take this seriously, and by that point it will be too late.