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I was on personal leave to spend Chinese New Years in my hometown, Fuzhou, aka F U city, or happy city by direct translation.

The situation here isn’t as bad as reported elsewhere, civil workers still cleans the streets and keeps the grocery store open; only the self small businesses are all shut down, needless to say the restaurant and public gathering areas, though some small shops are open.

We did have a scare though(about 7-10 days ago) a resident on 12th floor came back from Wuhan at one of my uncle’s building; we visited his place a few days earlier, so we potentially shared the same elevator. How did we know? My uncle’s wife came back one day and saw hazmat suit guys going up and stopped at the 12th floor, she was awestruck, they said she can keep going up, apparently they have already cleaned the path.

The worst part about this is that it ends my potential travel elsewhere, finishing up personal paperwork in Xiamen; delay my travel home, and spending time browsing and buying stuff on evilbay! $500+ and counting...

Beast of luck and good health to you.

To help you: stop staring at evilbay. I challenge to watch all of youtube instead.

Bran Dawri wrote:
To help you: stop staring at evilbay. I challenge to watch all of youtube instead.

That’s just it, I don’t have access to some of App and websites I normally visit, like YouTube, Gmail cannot read new mail, no Imgur, no Facebook, no instagram, cannot pay my PayPal MasterCard due to server restrictions, lists goes on..

Some things I did get is setup a Chinese bank account, I now have WeChat pay, a lot easier than using cash; toys like LEGO are extremely cheap, I bought a giant armor car kit(for my cousin’s kids)with crew for only 220 rmb, about $32; in the US it would of been $200+

Deals I’ve bit on so far:
DE Mandrakes(metal new sculpt) NIB- $24+6 shipping+tax
Deathwatch Corvus Blackstar NIB- $50+tax
Bretonnia Gamesday 1998 LE knight with greatsword- $37+ 8.5 shipping +tax
Bretonnia Battle Pilgrims x10 NIB- $28+ 5 shipping +tax
IK Perceptor upgrade sprue NIB- $13+ 3 shipping +tax
OOP Bretonnia decals(12 sheets) NIB- $28+ 8 shipping +tax
3 Ork buggies(Snazzwagon, Scrapjet, Squigbuggy) NIB- $110 after eBay code
Skyshield Landing Pad NIB- $47+ 5 shipping +tax
Dkok heavy mortar and thudd gun with crew- $48+ 7 shipping +tax

So long as you can actually afford all that, what is the problem. Maybe +tax is the problem, Getting good Bretonnia stuff is a step towards fixing up a difficult army to collect.
There are Brets I need to buy, because I have not been able to find all of my army and key units are missing, it is a cost I have put off many times.

On a related note: The flu season in the U.S. seems to have been particularly bad. Some 140,000 cases requiring hospitalization and 4000 confirmed dead.

On the unrelated note: Bretonnia is actually fairly easy to collect so long as you're not dead set on using GW minis. LOTS of historical mini companies make historical knights and men-at-arms you can use instead.

Huh. I actually have a bunch of old Brets (~4th/5th edition) in the attic I've been meaning to sell but haven't gotten around to sorting, much less selling yet.

Good to know they're hard to get. If anyone's interested, PM me or something. It might give me the kick in the pants I need to actually do something about that.
Also, maybe TOR browser can get around some of those blocks? Otherwise I suggest just going on a gaming spree of those 400 Steam games everyone has that they've never played, much less finished. Or a bingewatch of epic proportions, say all 17 or so seasons of Stargate.

...

Enough derailing the thread. How far has Heineken, err, corona spread today?
As I will be travelling to Angola soon, which has a sizeable population of both Indians and Chinese it is a point of interest to me.
(Even so, I'm more worried about malaria, but I admit, it is an extra concern.)

 Vulcan wrote:
On a related note: The flu season in the U.S. seems to have been particularly bad. Some 140,000 cases requiring hospitalization and 4000 confirmed dead.

Basic flu will 100% kill orders of magnitude more poeple this year than this latest light beer virus that's only in the news to distract from global warming, as has been the case with every fad virus so far.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
On a related note: The flu season in the U.S. seems to have been particularly bad. Some 140,000 cases requiring hospitalization and 4000 confirmed dead.

Basic flu will 100% kill orders of magnitude more poeple this year than this latest light beer virus that's only in the news to distract from global warming, as has been the case with every fad virus so far.

NOTHING will distract the media from... what are they calling it now? Oh yeah, the climate crisis.

Nah, media just has a strong tendency to overreact with events like these. No scheme required, only stupidity.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Nah, media just has a strong tendency to overreact with events like these. No scheme required, only stupidity.

Well, to repost something I said in an Ebola thread:

Ouze wrote:
This isn't really directed at the OP, but it's got me thinking - why do we, as a society, worry about the wrong thing all the time, over and over again?

We worry about sharks, but let our kids play near pools unsupervised. We worry about terrorism even as we bite into 1500 calorie cheeseburgers. We buy guns to guard our houses which don't have smoke alarms or fire extinguishers. We panic about airport security, but drive to work tired, or home from the bar tipsy.

We seem as a people wholly oblivious to the most dangerous things around us.

Blaming "the media for this is wrongheaded, I think. The media are a disparate group of business entities designed to sell advertising and they don't exist in a vacuum; they are delivering what delivers clicks or viewers, and that overwhelmingly is Celebrity Trash, White Women in Trouble, Things That Might Kill You (but statistically absolutely won't), and so on.

Blaming "the media" is essentially handwaving away and abdicating the general public's appetite for the dumb stuff they want, just like we blame narcotics traffickers in different countries and not the domestic citizens hoovering up however many tons of blow per year.

Finally Thais trapped in Wuhan was evacuated via AirAsia

Oh, I see how it looks like I am BLAMING the media. I'm not, the other half of this is that I feel the media (and politics) is only crappy because the population consuming it's output is. They are just producing what the people consume.

Primarily I was dismissing Tony's climate change conspiracy nonsense.

People were always the same tho, it's the media that have abandoned their responsibilities as "the 4th branch of government" and started serving easily consumable dreck and putting ad revenue above truth and journalistic integrity.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
On a related note: The flu season in the U.S. seems to have been particularly bad. Some 140,000 cases requiring hospitalization and 4000 confirmed dead.

Basic flu will 100% kill orders of magnitude more poeple this year than this latest light beer virus that's only in the news to distract from global warming, as has been the case with every fad virus so far.

The western world has a high rate of vaccination for the seasonal flu. Flu deaths would be a lot higher without that. The coronavirus is at least as deadly as your average flu, and we've got no vaccine. This is the problem.

Fortunately we learned some lessons from SARS in 2003 and most countries are locking things down a lot quicker. Modern medicine can handle this, provided it doesn't get overwhelmed with too many cases too quickly. Wuhan doesn't have the capacity to deal with the number of cases right now, either in terms of doctors, hospital beds, or medicine.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
People were always the same tho, it's the media that have abandoned their responsibilities as "the 4th branch of government" and started serving easily consumable dreck and putting ad revenue above truth and journalistic integrity.

I disagree that the media has such a responsibility. We tell the media via ratings that we (on average) want it to produce sensationalist crap, it's incredibly irresponsible to then turn and say 'well the media has a responsibility to not do what we ask of it!'

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Oh, I see how it looks like I am BLAMING the media. I'm not, the other half of this is that I feel the media (and politics) is only crappy because the population consuming it's output is. They are just producing what the people consume.

Primarily I was dismissing Tony's climate change conspiracy nonsense.

I'd be elated if you can point to a single element of conspiracy nonsense in my post. If not, we can consider this a slanderous personal attack.

 Just Tony wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Oh, I see how it looks like I am BLAMING the media. I'm not, the other half of this is that I feel the media (and politics) is only crappy because the population consuming it's output is. They are just producing what the people consume.

Primarily I was dismissing Tony's climate change conspiracy nonsense.

I'd be elated if you can point to a single element of conspiracy nonsense in my post. If not, we can consider this a slanderous personal attack.

Oh, you accept the validity of the climate change crisis then? My apologies, I misinterpreted.

Once again, you responded condescendingly to comments that didn't exist. Do I think there is a considerable shift in climate happening? Of course. Do I think it's manmade? Not entirely. Do I think CO2 is going to be the magic fix? No, not at all. CO2 is not the most plentiful greenhouse gas, NOR is it the most affective of the gasses, yet it has been latched on to as the magic bullet that will fix everything. Without addressing the gases that are causing the majority of the warming all we will be doing by eliminating carbon emissions is castrating industry in all countries except those that have no intention of abiding by any accords such as Russia and China, and watch as they take an industrial lead to the rest of the civilized world.

You missed my point entirely.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Basic flu will 100% kill orders of magnitude more poeple this year than this latest light beer virus that's only in the news to distract from global warming, as has been the case with every fad virus so far.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to put much faith in the official numbers released by the CCP. This is a visual representation of the numbers that have presented.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

If you look at the Hubei province (where Wuhan is located,) there's about a 2% mortality rate. Look at any of the surrounding provinces. I can't find one with more than a 0.02% mortality rate.

Viruses don't care where you live, trying to explain differences based on environmental factors seems odd. Just under half the population of Wuhan escaped the city prior to the quarantine. It's reasonable to expect some of the people who left would be carriers.

A possible cause: there are substantial differences in how morbidity is reported in the West and in China. If you die from the flu in the West, doctors report it as the flu. If you die from the flu in China and you suffer from a pre-existing condition, the cause of death is reported as the pre-existing condition. Something like 60% of Chinese nationals have a pre-existing condition, asthma is one of the biggest.

If you follow the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, the CCP injected about $340B into the markets last week to avoid a crash. They are starting to dip back down again, my guess it we are going to see $1T in liquidity injected before the month is over. The Shenzhen Composite Index is an interesting measure of sentiment, it's primarily a measure of Series A and B shares, which can only be owned by Chinese nationals and are often handed out to high-level party members.

Without going too far into the numbers, healthcare stocks in these exchanges rallied last week to keep first-day losses to around 8%. Were it not for that sector, losses would have been around 18%. In addition, there are limits in how much someone can sell off on protected class stocks over a 10 day period. While it's not possible to measure how much people would have sold without these limits, one gets the sense the markets would have totally crashed in their absence.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I do find reasons to question the numbers being described by authorities. Large stock market swings don't happen in the absence of a triggering event, large investments of capital in stock markets don't occur in the absence of predictable behavior. Differences in how mortality are reported between the East and the West are well known, I've been very surprised to hear the rhetoric about how the flu kills more people annually than NCP (the official name for the virus is now Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia.) Anyone who reads the Lancent would understand that's a very dubious claim.

Regardless, the true impact of NCP is probably not best measured in mortality rates, but in economic impact. China reported 6% growth last year, a figure many people find reason to question. Cities the size of Chicago are being shut down right now, Beijing is under partial lock down as a preventative measure. This event has already cost China Billions, if the quarantines drag onto March that number will likely balloon into the Trillions (plural.) China's GDP is around $12T USD and this is the second major health event in the last 6 months (swine flu being the first.)

It will be interesting understanding the economic impact and how that relates to morality rates. Currently, for each reported case of NCP, the Chinese economy has lost close to $1.5 Bil. If the number are correct, that sounds very expensive for something that's less lethal than the flu.

Not to mention general damage to Xi's prestige.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Basic flu will 100% kill orders of magnitude more poeple this year than this latest light beer virus that's only in the news to distract from global warming, as has been the case with every fad virus so far.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to put much faith in the official numbers released by the CCP. This is a visual representation of the numbers that have presented.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

If you look at the Hubei province (where Wuhan is located,) there's about a 2% mortality rate. Look at any of the surrounding provinces. I can't find one with more than a 0.02% mortality rate.

Viruses don't care where you live, trying to explain differences based on environmental factors seems odd. Just under half the population of Wuhan escaped the city prior to the quarantine. It's reasonable to expect some of the people who left would be carriers.

A possible cause: there are substantial differences in how morbidity is reported in the West and in China. If you die from the flu in the West, doctors report it as the flu. If you die from the flu in China and you suffer from a pre-existing condition, the cause of death is reported as the pre-existing condition. Something like 60% of Chinese nationals have a pre-existing condition, asthma is one of the biggest.

If you follow the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, the CCP injected about $340B into the markets last week to avoid a crash. They are starting to dip back down again, my guess it we are going to see $1T in liquidity injected before the month is over. The Shenzhen Composite Index is an interesting measure of sentiment, it's primarily a measure of Series A and B shares, which can only be owned by Chinese nationals and are often handed out to high-level party members.

Without going too far into the numbers, healthcare stocks in these exchanges rallied last week to keep first-day losses to around 8%. Were it not for that sector, losses would have been around 18%. In addition, there are limits in how much someone can sell off on protected class stocks over a 10 day period. While it's not possible to measure how much people would have sold without these limits, one gets the sense the markets would have totally crashed in their absence.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I do find reasons to question the numbers being described by authorities. Large stock market swings don't happen in the absence of a triggering event, large investments of capital in stock markets don't occur in the absence of predictable behavior. Differences in how mortality are reported between the East and the West are well known, I've been very surprised to hear the rhetoric about how the flu kills more people annually than NCP (the official name for the virus is now Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia.) Anyone who reads the Lancent would understand that's a very dubious claim.

Regardless, the true impact of NCP is probably not best measured in mortality rates, but in economic impact. China reported 6% growth last year, a figure many people find reason to question. Cities the size of Chicago are being shut down right now, Beijing is under partial lock down as a preventative measure. This event has already cost China Billions, if the quarantines drag onto March that number will likely balloon into the Trillions (plural.) China's GDP is around $12T USD and this is the second major health event in the last 6 months (swine flu being the first.)

It will be interesting understanding the economic impact and how that relates to morality rates. Currently, for each reported case of NCP, the Chinese economy has lost close to $1.5 Bil. If the number are correct, that sounds very expensive for something that's less lethal than the flu.

I can see eeasons why mortality would vary by region- differing levels of air pollution and deprivation could make a huge impact. Virus do care if it affects the underlying health of the population- I will be far less susceptible than someone my age who has asthma, smokes, has poorer nutrition, drinks heavily etc. The fact that most cases are also quarantined means that the Wuhan healthcare services will be seeing the majority of cases, and will be overloaded with a corresponding increase in mortality. Whether that could explain the disparity you mention, I have no idea. It is well documented that mortality rises when services are overloaded.

The differences in reporting between China and the West is interesting. At least in the UK, you get a degree of both with the somewhat archaic* "1a 1b 1c 2" system of reporting causes of death. The above example would be 1a Novel coronavirus pneumonia 2 Asthma, and both would be recorded on the mortality statistics.

*Archaic because the format hasn't been updated to match the large volume of very co-morbid patients in the modern age. It is getting increasingly difficult to pin the cause of death on one condition for patients in chronic multi-organ failure.

Wuhan will also have had the highest level of infected who didn't get any care, or if they did got care that was inappropriate as nobody knew what they had from the beginning of the outbreak

by the time significant numbers were infected and showing symptoms elsewhere medics & hospitals were on alert and would have tried to provide the right care

i'm sure that's responsible for at least some of the difference, how much I guess we'll find out in time



Oh, and the UK has now implemented laws for mandatory quarantine for sufferers & those that are thought to be exposed after one of the folk evacuated from China tried to leave before their 14 days was up

I know NHS nurses' accomodation isn't that great, but surely you can stick it for a fortnight to avound the danger of infecting everyone else/

Read an interesting article that claimed some of the Coronavirus hype is actually thinly veiled racism against Asians and Chinese in particular.

I will see if I can dig it up and link it here.

 Easy E wrote:
Read an interesting article that claimed some of the Coronavirus hype is actually thinly veiled racism against Asians and Chinese in particular.

I will see if I can dig it up and link it here.

On January 21, over 7,000 articles were published worldwide claiming talking about the Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia is racist.

That's not journalism, that's a public relations campaign. And it's a bad idea not to discuss a potential pandemic.

Talking about the virus isn't racist.

There are a lot of people using this as an opportunity to be racist though, but that is a whole different topic.

The only area I can see skirting close to racism when discussing the epidemic directly is when looking at the factors that lead to China being the source of so many epidemics.

The problem is that there are a lot of false things being spread around like claiming the virus came from Chinese eating bats alive that is grounded in racism more than truth. It excuses people to revel in showing contempt for the chinese rather than serving any valid discussion about their sanitation and food practices.

I’m currently stuck in China somewhere between Tianjin and Beijing. Got stuck between holidays, returned from Mariana islands and was going to travel across China when this blew up. Holiday was cancelled and then things locked down.

I think my experience is pretty normal for here. There has been the first reported case in my province though I’m likely at little personal risk. But long distance travel is now heavily restricted or impossible, some trains have started to operate but, taxis and buses into the cities are not running and roads are closed. There’s nowhere to go anyway, all tourist places are closed and most shops shut.

Shops that closed for new year have extended their closure, so who knows when they’ll open, postal services are still closed. Shops running out of bread and a lot of dairy, alcohol hand wash and face-masks are gone. Drinking water ran out today and if that doesn’t get a delivery in the next couple weeks things will be interesting. If you order a delivery from one of the few services available, you have to meet them at the gate of the housing estate to collect, but most aren’t operating anyway. Everyone gets a temperature check being entering the estate, they record you name, address, phone number etc. In some areas, they are turning people away from areas where they don’t live, so just trying to visit someone is not allowed. My girlfriend went back to Beijing and has a card dated upon arrival, she cannot leave the estate for a fortnight, until when she will get another card that allows her out. The estate has a couple tiny shops for food and that’s it. Jeeze.

My school’s opening has been suspended until further notice. People outside the area, such as staff abroad, are not allowed to return by authorities. We have to run ‘online lessons’ but despite collecting a computer from work the internet is so slow as to be unusable. I will have to send materials to pupils via wechat. Which would be my preference anyway, it’s much easier. This will put real pressure on my AS-level classes who will lose at least ~12 hours class time assuming we open in March. And there’s no indication if that will happen.

I’m not exactly happy with the UK Foreign Office giving no help or advice whatsoever, and I see little indication from them as to whether they have confidence in either the Chinese data being published or their methods to control. Telling us to ‘leave if we can’ is not good enough. For a start, most transport options are restricted. I could get on public transport going by rail and metro, but frankly that has hazards of its own. Further, if I leave the area but had to turn back for some reason, I might find that quite difficult. What do I do if they refuse me entry? For now I feel more secure just holed up and waiting for it to blow over.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
Read an interesting article that claimed some of the Coronavirus hype is actually thinly veiled racism against Asians and Chinese in particular.

I will see if I can dig it up and link it here.

On January 21, over 7,000 articles were published worldwide claiming talking about the Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia is racist.

That's not journalism, that's a public relations campaign. And it's a bad idea not to discuss a potential pandemic.

The CCP loves to use crybully tactics. Try being non-Han Chinese inside China if you want to see racism.