Sinophobia Muffles All Discourse Around Coronavirus
Western media outlets continue to allow anti-Chinese prejudice to muddy the waters of public health within China and abroad.
Australia’s wildfire crisis has been handled in an appalling manner. Over 3000 homes have been damaged or destroyed entirely. The air quality in New South Wales peaked at over 11 times higher than the hazardous level, to the point that residential smoke detectors and businesses’ fire alarms were going off due to the air quality.
This disaster occurred under the guidance of the Liberal Party and Gladys Berejiklian, who cut the Fire and Rescue budget by 35% — which is bad — but is nothing compared to the over 75% budget cut the Rural Fire Service had to withstand. Unsurprisingly the majority of the fires took place in the rural areas where budget cuts were extreme. While the Australian Liberals were concerned with making the government more efficient by reducing spending on seemingly unimportant matters such as rural infrastructure, they seem characteristically unconcerned with the projected 6.5 billion AUD deficit that is going to accumulate over the next two years due to the government issuing fewer bonds.
The fact that deficit concerns were the party’s entire line of argumentation during the last round of elections seems to be entirely lost on them. The fact that rural firefighting infrastructure was cut in order to supposedly manage the aforementioned budget seems lost on nearly everyone.
It is interesting that throughout the Australian government’s horrific actions leading up to and during their wildfire situation, no western media outlet has called for a regime change. Which is weird, since this seems like the perfect pitch to make: 28 dead, thousands injured, millions of wild animals killed and displaced, thousands of homes destroyed, not to mention the unknowable number of humans and animals affected by the long-term effects of smoke inhalation. Thousands of untrained people volunteered or were essentially forced by nature to fight the fires approaching their homes with whatever they had laying around. Most had no formal training, no understanding of proper precautions, and most importantly no equipment suitable to fight brush fires; all because of the incompetence of regional and national government officials. Yet no western media outlet is calling the Australian government irresponsible. There is no hysteria nor any real concern for the situation among the media class.
Australia is a good example here because the absurdity of the situation is clear, it is fresh on the global mind, and the situation is clearly being handled poorly — at best. Meanwhile China seems to be handling their epidemic rather well, but no matter what actions are taken, the English speaking media seem incapable of useful commentary.
Why is it that viral outbreaks in China call into question the validity of the state when egregious budget mismanagement in Australia goes unchecked?
Brian Becker from Radio Sputnik captured the issue well during his interview with Ian Goodrum:
In the articles in the last couple of days the coverage went like this: “Why isn’t China imposing a quarantine on Wuhan? Why isn’t it mandating the stopping of travel in and out of the city?”
And then China did that and then the articles switched to: “What are the ethical concerns when a whole city is quarantined?”
Or the New York Times is sending a reporter out to people who have gone to emergency rooms and then having been checked, it turns out they had the sniffles and not the coronavirus, and they were sent home and they’re not happy.
Now they’re talking to people from Wuhan who are upset that they can’t leave.
Ian goes on to add, “China can’t do anything right. […] Coverage will change according to the best possible negative line of attack.”
According to any objective measurement the Chinese are handling the viral outbreak well, or even above average expectations. Within two weeks a full peer reviewed article — a joint effort of 29 individuals — has been released which goes into extreme detail regarding the newly discovered strain of virus.
[…A] large number of severe acute respiratory syndrome related coronaviruses have been discovered in their natural reservoir host, bats. Previous studies indicated that some of those bat SARSr-CoVs have the potential to infect humans. Here we report the identification and characterization of a novel coronavirus (nCoV-2019) which caused an epidemic of acute respiratory syndrome in humans, in Wuhan, China. The epidemic, started from December 12th, 2019, has caused 198 laboratory confirmed infections with three fatal cases by January 20th, 2020. Full-length genome sequences were obtained from five patients at the early stage of the outbreak. They are almost identical to each other and share 79.5% sequence identify to SARS-CoV. Furthermore, it was found that nCoV-2019 is 96% identical at the whole genome level to a bat coronavirus. The virus was then isolated from the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of a critically ill patient, which can be neutralized by sera from several patients. Importantly, we have confirmed that this novel CoV uses the same cell entry receptor, ACE2, as SARS-CoV. [ paraphrasing/emphasis mine]
So in only two weeks time the Chinese researchers have identified; sequenced; hypothesized, tested, and proven a diagnostic procedure; completed full serologic lab work on the newly identified strain; and isolated the strain — not to mention the fact the researchers also sequenced the entire genome of a related virus in bats to see if the new strain of coronavirus used the same cell receptors, such that it might be treatable in a similar way.
The response in the immunology and microbiology community seems overwhelmingly positive, but that attitude is not reflected in western media.
The Chinese government is also putting tons of resources into infrastructure. On January 24th, this past Friday, it was announced that four separate construction firms will immediately begin working together around-the-clock to build a brand-new, state-of-the-art, military hospital in just 12 days. There are reportedly a little over 1,000 individuals working on the project which will bed approximately 1,000 patients. Barely 20 hours later the Central Committee for Public Health announced that work is beginning on a second treatment hospital located just a few miles north. The second hospital will be completed in only 14 days and reportedly will bed 1,300 patients.
The BBC interviewed Yanzhong Huang, a senior member of on the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Huang correctly pointed out, “China has a record of getting things done fast even for monumental projects like this. This authoritarian country relies on this top down mobilisation approach. They can overcome bureaucratic nature and financial constraints and are able to mobilise all of the resources. The engineering work is what China is good at. They have records of building skyscrapers at speed. This is very hard for westerners to imagine. It can be done.”
The Chinese government is clearly doing everything within their power to ensure expedient, careful planning around the virus. The same cannot be said for the Australian government during its continued wildfire epidemic. So what does the shocking research speed warrent from the western media class? What is the commentary on the intense infrastructural planning? Widespread praise? Hopeful envy? No. It seems the most positive way they can frame China’s fervent efforts is this headline from Foriegn Policy: China Deserves Some Credit for Its Handling of the Wuhan Pneumonia.
Yeah… some credit.
Jan. 30 update: The World Health Organization has issued a statement “declaring the new coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern”, which is obivously getting lots of media attention and fear-mongering. Interestingly, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ — the Director General of WHO — own personal statement regarding the official context is not receiving the same level of attention.
I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern over the global outbreak of 2019nCoV, not because of what is happening in China, but because of what is happening in other countries.
In many ways, China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response. Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it.
We must act now to help countries prepare for that possibility. This is the time for facts, not fear. This is the time for science, not rumours. This is the time for solidarity, not stigma.
