Originally Posted by ugleeual

Compare total deaths (all causes) in 2018 and 2019 with the current total deaths (so far) in 2020... the US is on track to match the previous two years even with CV19. Less people are dying of cardiovascular disease, cancer and influenza ... better overall healthcare this year or CV19 death tracking f’d up?

Originally Posted by Seneca Pilot

I know you aren't interested but here is some background and a link to the entire story.

President Xi Jinping, born in 1953, has indicated his intent to rule indefinitely after China’s legislature amended the constitution in March 2018 to scrap term limits for the presidency. This move was also emblematic of the increasing repression under Xi’s rule.



The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also strengthened its power over the government bureaucracy in a major overhaul of central government structure in March. The party oversees a powerful new government body, the National Supervisory Commission, which is empowered to detain incommunicado anyone exercising public authority for up to six months without fair trial procedures in a system called “liuzhi.”



In October, Meng Hongwei, then-president of Interpol, the international police organization, and China’s vice minister for Public Security, disappeared upon return to China and was assumed to be held in “liuzhi.” The CCP also subsumed state bodies in charge of religious, ethnic, and overseas Chinese affairs under a party agency, the United Front Work Department.



Authorities dramatically stepped up repression and systematic abuses against the 13 million Turkic Muslims, including Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. Authorities have carried out mass arbitrary detention, torture, and mistreatment of some of them in various detention facilities, and increasingly imposed pervasive controls on daily life. New regulations in Tibet now criminalize even traditional forms of social action, including community mediation by religious figures. In Hong Kong, a region promised “a high degree of autonomy” under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the Chinese and Hong Kong governments hastened their efforts in 2018 to undermine people’s rights to free speech and political participation.



Human rights defenders continue to endure arbitrary detention, imprisonment, and enforced disappearance. The government maintains tight control over the internet, mass media, and academia. Authorities stepped up their persecution of religious communities, including prohibitions on Islam in Xinjiang, suppression of Christians in Henan province, and increasing scrutiny of Hui Muslims in Ningxia.



Authorities increasingly deploy mass surveillance systems to tighten control over society. In 2018, the government continued to collect, on a mass scale, biometrics including DNA and voice samples; use such biometrics for automated surveillance purposes; develop a nationwide reward and punishment system known as the “social credit system”; and develop and apply “big data” policing programs aimed at preventing dissent. All of these systems are being deployed without effective privacy protections in law or in practice, and often people are unaware that their data is being gathered, or how it is used or stored.



In 2018, animated by the global #MeToo movement, a number of Chinese women stepped forward exposing people who they said had sexually harassed them. Government censorship dampened subsequent public outrage.



In one of its only human rights concessions all year, Chinese authorities allowed Liu Xia, an artist and the widow of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, to leave for Germany in July after eight years of legally baseless house arrest. However, the decision of authorities to bar her family members from also leaving reflects Beijing’s campaign to punish dissent and restrict expression globally.



China’s growing global power makes it an exporter of human rights violations, including at the United Nations, where in 2018 it sought to block participation of its critics. China again ranked among countries singled out for reprisals against human rights defenders, and in March successfully advanced a Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution on a retrograde approach that it calls “win-win” or “mutually beneficial” cooperation. In this view, states do not pursue accountability for serious human rights violations but engage merely in “dialogue”; moreover, there is no role for independent civil society, only governments, and a narrow role for the UN itself.



Few governments spoke forcefully against these developments, even in the face of Chinese government harassment of people in their own countries or pressure on foreign companies to publicly support Chinese government positions.

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/201...ina-and-tibet#

Originally Posted by All Bizniz

I'm not disinterested.. It just seems like you went off on a tangent.

Originally Posted by Wingedbeast

More proof that this won't end until there is a vaccine.

Originally Posted by spirited

I typed it into a search engine, got the result in .00012 seconds. but, I will save you the effort
“So if the scientists say shut it down?” asked ABC’s David Muir. Biden responded, “I would shut it down, I would listen to the scientists.” Biden’s commitment begs a series of questions, chief among which is, how would he even do that?

Originally Posted by All Bizniz

We know the protocols work because China used lockdowns along with masks, testing, social distancing, quarantining, etc to effectively combat the virus and return to normalcy. Yes, normalcy... without a vaccine....

https://www.businessinsider.com/coro...ruggle-2020-10

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Originally Posted by Seneca Pilot

You can't point to Chinese handling of the virus to say we are screwing it up. Nothing from Chinese sources is trustworthy.

Originally Posted by All Bizniz

That China is opening up, and people are getting on with their lives, is something that's easily verifiable because, even if you don't trust the "commies", there are plenty of foreign news outlets that have reported that fact.

I think you're insulting your own intelligence with a statement like that.

Originally Posted by Seneca Pilot

The foreign news source you showed quoted Chinese state media. You'll need a better source to sway anyone's opinions that China is humming along like nothing happened. I have no doubt that their lockdowns were effective. When you live in a society where your neighbor will turn you in for leaving your apartment, enforcing a lockdown is easy. It doesn't mean they aren't just as human as the rest of us. When they start to go back to normal they will see cases rise just like the rest of us. You just won't know because the state media controls the information flow.