NBC, NYT, Atlantic critiques, and reading between the lines

No media reports under the shadow of politics satisfy everybody.  People can take issue with the facts, logic, or tones.  The first two are the deadly sins.  

NBC and reporter Janis Frayer just visited and produced a segment on the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its P4 lab made famous by the COVID-19 conspiracy theories in the West.  Frayer had conducted other interviews in China, including one in April 2020.  In the aired segment on NBC and interviews Frayer was largely professional; even when she asked “tough” questions, it can be understood as getting answers for other people.  While the lab might still be of interest to the public, scientists have moved on, after concluding that COVID-19 was natural months earlier. 

It is what Frayer said, unprompted, on MSNBC today, however, that reveals unconscious bias or the false application of objectivity in reporting: there must be two sides of a story, so when one says the Earth is round, he must also include the opinion, no matter how silly it is, that the Earth is flat.

One is that while she mentioned the American government accused the Wuhan lab of making the virus, she also stated that the Chinese government charged the US of doing the same.  This is false equivalence.  Trump, Pompeo, Cotton, and many American officials all made the charges multiple times, some since Jan.  Xi Jinping and Wang Yi have never said anything in return, and I am not aware of any Chinese Congressperson ever commenting on the issue either.  What the Chinese side did was the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman retorted in tweets, in response to constant American accusations and calls for investigation, that why didn’t the US explain, and the world investigate certain US military labs?  Since when are a foreign ministry spokesman’s tweets considered a state position?  When he was just asking questions, unlike what Trump and Pompeo said: I know it is true, I have seen the evidence, I just can’t tell you?  Are the tweets by WH and DOS spokespeople US positions now?  All these become more unforgivable when Frayer already asked the Chinese Vice Foreign Minister whether China thinks the US made the virus during the April interview, which he didn’t concur.  Frayer must have also known that the Chinese Ambassador to the US had stated it was not an official view long ago.  The hypocrisy reaches the highest decibel when those Chinese retorts become the Chinese misinformation campaign, according to the EU and US, while a blind eye is turned to what the US said from a much higher level and much longer.

    

The other is Frayer sort of implied that China still needs to explain that it didn’t hide sth.  She may be repeating DOS’ statements to NBC regarding her lab visit, and the example she gave was the Wuhan market: where did the animals go?  Here she might err by not following science and news.  The Wuhan market was closed by Jan 1, 2020 after many cases were linked to it.  But it was for shutting down transmission, not for any coverup, because who needs to hide a zoonotic jump, the sole interest on the market?  Media have reported that the Chinese CDC found viral RNA in the environment but not in animals from the market.  WHO likely has received the information.  Mounting evidence since Jan has all but ruled out the market as the origin of COVID-19 (see 7/7/2020 and 8/6/2020 blogs).  The Beijing Xinfadi market bears the most resemblance-it was the source of Beijing outbreak in June: again, environmental contamination, but no viral RNA from animals.  Nobody thinks Xinfadi is special.  Clinging onto the Wuhan market won’t get you anywhere, neither COVID-19 origin, nor Chinese coverup. 

On print media, two recent articles extensively summarized why the US fares poorly during the pandemic (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/, and https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html#commentsContainer).  Not surprisingly, to balance the listed American shortcomings, both felt obliged to hit out at China for a bonus.  This practice has become media SOP for months-even when the overwhelming or only focus is the US, China the bogeyman must be dragged in as well.

Certainly China can be criticized, but on solid grounds.  Both articles cited China’s “silencing” doctors.  And the Atlantic article claimed China downplayed human-to-human transmission and even ridiculed WHO for “parroting China’s line”.  Debunking both points is like beating a dead horse (examples: 3/16/2020, 6/3/2020, and 8/6/2020 blogs), and repeating the falsehood only reflects the authors’ knowledge deficit, intellectual sloppiness, and/or ingrained WCEV.  At least they no longer said China arrested the doctors, so that much is improved.  But if what China did was to hide sth, why didn’t the reports mention, and what does one call, what the US did later (4/3/2020 blog)?  

But the backhand slap at WHO “parroting China’s line” was out of the blue.  At the time only China was looking at COVID-19, so from where else could WHO get information?  If not “parroting China’s line”, whose line should WHO “parrot”?  Besides, China was still gathering evidence, a normal discovery process; when China noted human-to-human transmission a whopping 6 days later (8/6/2020 blog), should WHO parrot or not parrot “China’s line”, again?    

The authors might be pandering to the American audience's psyche to maintain credibility as well as saving their skin for fear of pro-China accusation, and their half-baked ideas led them to mindlessly toe the official lines in the West.  In truth, WHO is not guilty of parroting anything, but the Atlantic and NYT authors were guilty of parroting Trump’s lines of blaming China and WHO.  

Stupidities aside, reading between the lines in the articles reveals additional meanings, even if they were not the authors’ original intentions. 

The first point is the touted China travel ban, which the articles and countless others had examined.  The deeper insight, explained in my 7/18/2020 blog, is that travel ban, which many Americans take as the best weapon against pandemics, is not.  1. People could retort: doesn’t the ban save lives?  Yes, but lockdown also saves lives: why do you want to end lockdown?  2. All reports correctly pointed out the ban exempts citizens and residents, so in Feb and March only those people could enter the US, which likely outnumbered Chinese tourists in Jan, and travelers’ ratio of positives in Jan was no doubt much lower than later.  3. It is morally indefensible to ban citizens and residents.  Since you can’t ban them, and the virus doesn’t discriminate, the ban is of token value.  4. Don’t shame the travelers though: citizens or not, the vast majority were not infected.  5. If travelers are so dangerous, and China outside Wuhan received the most travelers from Wuhan, hundreds of times or more than the rest of the world, China must be >100x worse than the world, right (8/6/2020 blog)?  6. Ban or no ban, what is essential is to screen and isolate arrivals carefully, which the US never did or does.  This deficiency is the weakest link.  The travel ban is the most talked about and visible, yet hollow without the other steps.  The NYT article cited Australia as an example with a ban.  South Korea is an example without a blanket ban.  

NYT said “Traditionally, public health experts had not seen travel restrictions as central to fighting a pandemic, given their economic costs and the availability of other options, like testing, quarantining and contact tracing”.  This is precisely why WHO advised against travel bans in Jan but is hammered by the West as evidence that WHO is in China's pocket.  Hopefully from now on regarding WHO NYT remembers what itself wrote.  

The second is that NYT wrote that China allowed COVID-19 to escape from Wuhan.  This is so funny (6/3/2020 blog) that the authors might not even know what they were talking about, except, of course, parroting another Trump’s line.  What does it even mean allowing it to escape?  The virus is invisible, not a tiger.  Before one knows it, it might already have spread widely: there are indications of early viruses in Europe and Brazil, and how can anyone be ever certain COVID-19 originated in Wuhan (7/7/2020 blog)?  And what could China have done to prevent it from escaping?  Banning international travels?  When should have China done that?  How is the human right situation?  Remember China did lock down Wuhan.  Could China ban American expats from leaving, too?  If not, what good would it do, given the first point above?  If what NYT really meant was that China didn’t contain it well so it spilled over, consider: 1. China was learning about a brand new disease for the first time, 2. individual Chinese provinces outside of Hubei coped with COVID-19 as well as, if not better than, the best of the rest of the world, 3. the West got a head start of at least one month, and did it do any better than Wuhan or Hubei?  Last nail to the coffin, is there a historic precedent that a disease similar to COVID-19 was ever limited to one country (6/3/2020 blog)? 

  

NYT also mentioned Germany described the world’s first test kit on Jan 16, 2020.  This has long been reported and taken as truth, but it requires professional knowledge to discern.  Once a sequence is known, designing a test kit takes only minutes, and testing it 1-2 days at most; one typically designs and tests several systems at once.  Since China published the genome on Jan 11, it would be extremely odd that China, with the utmost urgency, didn’t produce the first kits, even if unpublished.  Indeed, countless Chinese institutes and companies made test kits.  WHO publicized the German information, but there is no sign of China needing it.  This is an inconsequential point, but fits the mindset that if don’t have negative things to say about China, pretend China doesn’t exist.  Any mentioning of the total Chinese cases, deaths (both in the middle of the pack), and tests, well over 100 million counting the people tested and times by July, has largely disappeared from Western reports since April.  Which, in the current milieu, is not the worst thing that happens.

The third, NYT wrote: “Early in the pandemic, Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist and former Obama administration official, proposed what he called the first rule of virus economics: “The best way to fix the economy is to get control of the virus,” he said. Until the virus was under control, many people would be afraid to resume normal life and the economy would not function normally”.  Goolsbee wrote it on Mar 22, 2020.  So life first, work later, definitely true, and well borne out in the US and Sweden (7/13/2020 blog).  But wasn’t that the purpose of Wuhan lockdown on Jan 23, 2020 and other measures soon followed in China?   Didn’t China just lead by example, applying the first rule, two months earlier than Goolsbee wrote it?  And when he did, 95% of China was already emerging from the lockdowns (Wuhan on Apr 8, 2020).  What else was new here?  Most readers of NYT and Atlantic wouldn’t be able to think deep, make the connections, and realize the implications, but this is obvious to any historian and one with a memory and reason.   

   

In essence, instead of blaming China any means possible, the West might have been better off by learning from it.  Even suppose the West knew nothing before Jan 23, 2020, because of the fabled Chinese coverup, but was jolted by the unprecedented Wuhan lockdown on Jan 23, 2020, because not even China could cover that up, with the unmistakable seriousness towards COVID-19.  By Jan 23, 2020, the virus was published, transmission routes known (no more harping on the gigantic 6-day-delay), so was how to deal with it the Chinese way.  These understandings are more than enough for the West, with plenty of time to spare, to mount a good preparation and defense against COVID-19.  Not to mention all the papers published in Lancet and other journals by Chinese scientists and doctors before and after Jan 23.  Yet what happened from Jan 23 to late Feb-mid March?  What more did the West need to know in order to act?  Germany did well, then why couldn’t the UK and US?  No wonder Richard Horton, the Editor-in-chief at Lancet, has railed against the UK and US (in)actions.  But Horton and Bill Gates seem to be the only Westerners who display a strong position. 

Fourth, the conflicting messages on masks from the doctors, then the officials in the West.  The articles failed to stress how people can be so dogmatic to the point of ideological inflexibility, instead of being evidence-based, and such mentality actually has a much wider negative impact than mere mask wearing.  Wearing masks prevent infection.  End of story.  For the latest see https://www.rawstory.com/2020/08/what-will-it-take-to-prove-masks-slow-the-spread-of-19/, but nothing has not been said, e.g., in my 4/28/2020 and 5/23/2020 blogs. One reason against masks, according to the Western medical establishment, is that the public don’t know how to wear masks.  How hard can it be to teach proper mask wearing?  Nobody ever says wear a mask, and you are all set.  Everybody doesn’t wear a mask all the time because when the number of infections is very low, it is a waste to do so.  As infection increases, with many unknowing carriers, of course the tide turns.

 

East and SE Asians started wearing masks in Jan 2020.  Is it necessary?  It depends.  In Wuhan and Hubei, China, 50K total cases in 10 million people, and 20K in 50 million, respectively, it likely was.  In other Chinese provinces, where typically 50 million people had only 500 total confirmed cases, it was not, unless in communities with known infections or very crowded space.  So here are real grounds for valid criticisms of the Chinese responses: the Wuhan lockdown, local quarantines, nationwide mask mandate, and saturated testing, are too strict, incur economic and social costs higher than necessary, and often waste time, money, and materials.  For example, Wuhan lockdown reduced spread to the outside, but the resultant panicking increased transmission at Wuhan hospitals on and right after Jan 23, 2020, while too much testing nowadays produces excessive wastes and pollution.  One could even throw in the initial, in hindsight misguided effort to search COVID-19 patients for SARS severity and symptoms (7/20/2020 blog).  But it was the new learning curve, not some thankless plot to mislead or cover up.  And it lasted an eternity of 6 days!  Things evolve.  People learn.  China could have done better, but who couldn’t have?

The fifth and last, NYT wrote: “What may not have been avoidable was the initial surge of the virus: The world’s success in containing previous viruses, like SARS, had lulled many people into thinking a devastating pandemic was unlikely”.  Here lies the only novel part of that article, as the rest is either wrong, or correct but trite.  My 7/20/2020 blog analyzed how the SARS saga influences COVID-19 responses, but the subject has received no attention until perhaps now, albeit fleeting, in NYT.  Still, it is a good thing people start thinking about it.  Nobody knows why the day and night difference between SARS and COVID-19 outcomes.  Is the fact that COVID-19 causes many asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and mildly symptomatic infections enough to explain?  Coupled with some COVID-19 bad luck, like initial superspreading events?  Or the globe blinded by the SARS experience (7/20/2020 blog)?  China-West relationship poorer in 2020 than in 2003, such that the West seems more eager to fight China than the virus?  

In relative terms, COVID-19 vs SARS, China’s response has been better, but the West’s has been much worse.  Nobody could have predicted that in late Feb.  To refute the most wacky notion that China used COVID-19 to destroy the world economy feels like having to talk to a Martian. 1. Why would China ever want to do that?  Whoever makes the absurd accusation is the one yearning to destroy the world.  2. How could China be certain that COVID-19 would turn out in its “favor”, when the only historical lesson was from SARS, which hit China the hardest by far, and COVID-19 timing not even on China’s side?  3. If China could have predicted how COVID-19 would turn out, China must have a crystal ball.  Then either China could have concocted a better scheme, or everybody just surrenders already.   

To be fair, COVID-19 has upended many predictions.  A major, early concern was India and African countries might suffer terribly under COVID-19.  But comparatively speaking (granted, the West drags the world down), India might be on par globally.  Case number is high but not too high, partly due to the lack of testing, which is catching up.  Deaths may be undercounted, but since the official figure is very low, it is hard to see how high a correction could be reasonably to make it worse than the world’s average.  But most African countries do admirably.  Even allowing for potential undercounting, there is simply no sign of a disaster previously feared.  This is due to the fact that COVID-19 arrived later, and governments were alert and ready.  A warmer weather and younger population help too.  But contrast Africa to South America.  Then at the opposite end of the spectrum sits the US: ideology and politicization are the Achilles heel.

So the moral of COVID-19 is that the fight is a systemic project, with many interdependent components and steps.  A country can have so-so performances throughout yet still comes out ahead of a country with the best hardware and performances in some but critical holes in one aspect or two.