Category Archives: China

What Canada’s Outbreak Scientists Knew About WuFlu By December 31 (And The US Was Too Callous and Incurious To Find Out)

Canada, China, COVID-19, Intelligence, Technology

It’s telling that, not the US, but a Canadian company, Blue Dot, was among the first to raise the alarm about WuFlu in late December. It uses an Artificial Intelligence algorithm, which pointed to the suspect wetmarket, then lit up as the infection spread therefrom. Anybody could have purchased this program.

The company, Blue Dot, had no clients in the [intellectually incurious?] U.S.

Come to think of it, the US’s formidable Surveillance State should have known about Blue Dot technology, but I guess the program doesn’t appear to harvest personal data, only anonymized data, thus holding no appeal to the opportunistic overlords referred to reverentially as “the U.S. intelligence community.”

Neither does the Blue Dot computer rely on official statements from state actors in tracking an outbreak. It seems to be a mighty analyst and information aggregator. Thus, by the dates mentioned, “Their algorithm was already churning through data, including medical bulletins, even livestock reports, to predict where the virus would go next.’

Canada should certainly have even fewer deaths from coronvirus given that one of its companies had some of this most sophisticated, foolproof methods to track a pandemic before it hits (Canada likely chose not to stop flights from China, even though it knew the score well before our covidiots):

When you’re fighting a pandemic, almost nothing matters more than speed. A little-known band of doctors and hi-tech wizards say they were able to find the vital speed needed to attack the coronavirus: the computing power of artificial intelligence. They call their new weapon “outbreak science.” It could change the way we fight another contagion. Already it has led to calls for an overhaul of how the federal government does things. But first, we’ll take you inside BlueDot, a small Canadian company with an algorithm that scours the world for outbreaks of infectious disease. It’s a digital early warning system, and it was among the first to raise alarms about this lethal outbreak.

It was New Year’s Eve when BlueDot’s computer spat out an alert: a Chinese business paper had just reported 27 cases of a mysterious flu-like disease in Wuhan, a city of 11 million. The signs were ominous. Seven people were already in hospitals.

Almost all the cases came from the city’s sprawling market, where live animals are packed in cages and slaughtered on-site. Medical detectives are now investigating if this is where the epidemic began, when the virus made the leap from animals to us.

… Chinese officials were secretive about what was happening. But BlueDot’s computer doesn’t rely on official statements. Their algorithm was already churning through data, including medical bulletins, even livestock reports, to predict where the virus would go next.

It was also scanning the ticket data from 4,000 airports.

BlueDot wasn’t just tracking flights, but calculating the cities at greatest risk. On December 31, there were more than 800,000 travellers leaving Wuhan, some likely carrying the disease.

In a matter of a just seconds, the Blue Dot computer can “analyze and visualize all this information across the globe in just a few seconds.”

“The virus wasn’t just spreading to east Asia. Thousands of travelers were heading to the United States too. … Most of the travel came into California and San Francisco and Los Angeles. Uh, also, into New York City. And we analyzed that way back on December 31. Our surveillance system that picked up the outbreak of Wuhan automatically talks to the system that is looking at how travelers might go to various airports around Wuhan.”

The virus spread across Asia with a vengeance. BlueDot has licensed access to the anonymized location data from millions of cellphones. And with that data it identified 12 of the 20 cities that would suffer first.

Dr. Kamran Khan: What we’re looking at here are mobile devices that were in Wuhan in the previous 14 days and where are they now across East Asia. Places like Tokyo have a lot of devices, Seoul in South Korea–

Bill Whitaker: So you’re following those devices from Wuhan to these other cities?

Dr. Kamran Khan: That’s correct. I do wanna point out these are also anonymized data. But they allow us to understand population movements. That is how we can understand how this virus will spread.

To build their algorithm, Dr. Khan told us he deliberately hired an eclectic mix: engineers, ecologists, geographers, veterinarians all under one roof. They spent a year teaching the computer to detect 150 deadly pathogens.

Dr. Kamran Khan: We can ultimately train a machine to be reading through all the text and picking out components that this is talking about an outbreak of anthrax and this is talking about the heavy metal band Anthrax. And as you do this thousands and thousands and thousands of times, the machine starts to get smarter and smarter.

Bill Whitaker: And how many different languages does the computer understand?

Dr. Kamran Khan: So it’s reading this currently in 65 languages, and processing this information every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. So it’s a lotta data to go through.

Within two hours of detecting the outbreak on December 31, BlueDot had sent a warning of the potential threat to its clients: public health officials in 12 countries, airlines and frontline hospitals, like Humber River in Toronto.

The US was too dumb and callous to buy Blue Dot’s AI program.

MORE: “The computer algorithm that was among the first to detect the coronavirus outbreak.”

American Leaders, Political and Corporate, Outsourced Life To China

China, Donald Trump, Economy, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Healthcare, Homeland Security, Labor, libertarianism, Outsourcing, Trade

Unless major shifts are taken by the West to stop outsourcing life to China—it is Western leaders who must be considered traitors to their people. China is just being China. Ultimate retributive action against China must come from our leaders. Ire must be directed at our leaders if they continue to outsource life to China, which includes manufacturing as well as energetically replacing American workers with Chinese workers.

It’s not enough to agonize “aloud, about how [the West] found [itself] so dependent on a country like China.

Via The Economist’s Chaguan column:

“On March 29th the Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, quoted government ministers blaming Chinese secrecy over covid-19 for ruining the world economy. How could Britain [and the U.S.] not now review Sino-British [and Sino-American] ties?”

Easily, unless the people hold their leaders responsible for reckless endangerment …

European and American elites “were [so] confident of ‘change through trade’; that commerce with China will nudge that country towards openness and democracy.”

a propaganda campaign [is] under way inside China to stress that most new infections involve cases imported from abroad. Though almost all of these involve Chinese nationals, curbs on foreigners are tightening. The border has been shut to most of them. On March 27th the government shocked embassies in Beijing by declaring a halt to the issuing of new identity cards for most grades of diplomat. This was apparently in response to the flouting of virus controls by a Western envoy. Embassies, in effect, face a ban on staff rotations until at least mid-May.

…during this pandemic, POTUS seems strikingly unmoved by ethical questions about China’s conduct. Asked about Chinese propaganda accusing America of infecting China with covid-19, which his own aides have angrily denounced, Mr Trump shrugged. “Hey, every country does it,” he told Fox News

On April 19, Trump suggested that Chinese culpability for mass murder would depend on the presence of intent: “If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they deliberately carried responsibility for it, that’s what I mean, then there must be consequences.”

I agree with President Trump that the “autocracy called China” is characterized by “ruthless self-interest” that is praise-worthy. More so than America is China likely to act in the interest of its own people.

UPDATED: HOW COVID-19 WAS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN (Or, ‘Pass The Biscuits,’ My Lips Are Sealed’)

China, Critique, Ethics, Healthcare, History, WMD

This is a remarkable account, by LA Times’ James Rainey and Kiera Feldman, of how killer COVID19 was loosed on the world. Terrific writing. (What a change from Washington-Examiner type syntactical tics and grammatical infelicities, not to mention “Dear Leader” adulation):

“Impeachment. Primaries. Kobe. Coronavirus rushed in while our focus was elsewhere“:

It began for Peter Daszak, a British American scientist, a couple of days after Christmas. While the rest of the world trundled along, the president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance was in his office in lower Manhattan, picking up the first clues of something amiss.

Weibo, China’s Twitter, carried the warning signals: An odd illness in the city of Wuhan. Patients in respiratory distress. Some developing pneumonia. A few dying, or so said the reports, unconfirmed. Most of the sick had worked in, or visited, a “wet” market in the central Chinese city, where live fish, crabs and livestock are sold, gill-by-jowl, alongside more exotic fare, such as snakes, hedgehogs and bamboo rats.

An ebullient zoologist and parasitologist, Daszak had associates around the globe in the One Health movement — the professional community trying to prevent the spread of disease between the animal and human worlds. But, as New Year’s approached, his colleagues in China suddenly went mum.

“They were all saying ‘I’m sorry, I can’t talk. We’re very busy. We’ll talk to you soon.’ They wouldn’t respond, even to a ‘Happy New Year’s’ message. That wasn’t normal,” Daszak recalled. “That’s when you know, you just know, something serious is going down.”

Those fleeting days of 2019 and the first three months of 2020 have passed in a blur for America and the world, turned upside down by a virus previously not identified by humankind and now responsible for a death toll that has climbed past 100,000.

For the 54-year-old Daszak and his fellow germ trackers, it’s been a period of long hours and roiling emotions — anxiety about the trajectory of the killer they spotted in its first days, a queasy satisfaction that their years of warnings had not been misplaced and a stolid determination to do more to prepare the world for the pandemics yet to come.

There’s also frustration, and some anger, as they watch world leaders move too slowly to marshal healthcare workers, set aside medical supplies and, especially, to isolate millions of people with no immunity to the new invader. …

MORE.

UPDATE: “China didn’t warn public of likely pandemic for 6 key days.”

UPDATED (4/18): Con Inc. And Their Vintage Neocon, COVID Culpability Theories

China, Communism, Conservatism, Critique, Culture, Democracy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Iraq

Without fail, American pundits and pols, especially Con Inc., apply to COVID the same theories of culpability that have undergirded U.S. invasions of backward people in the Middle East: It’s the Chinese government, not the people. Free the Chinese and they’ll show their Jeffersonian propensities and their capacity for enlightened self-interest (not to mention a cuisine less craven and cruel).

What I wrote in 2006 about Iraqis applies in spades to the Chinese and their culpability for COVID (I’ve substituted Iraq with China):

“The government of [China] doesn’t stand apart from the governed; it reflects them.”—ILANA (November 6, 2006)

We’re accustomed to the Dysnified depiction of neocons or neoliberals intent on interventions that damage America. Accordingly, a noble Chinese people, a freedom-loving civilized nation, was set up by their scheming government.

Look, the Chinese government is no good, but the people get the government they deserve. My guess is that, if anything, the Chinese government here is likely covering for the people’s despicable habits. These caused previous epidemics and have brought us the coronavirus.

Here are the excellent points published in my friend Christopher DeGroot’s journal, The Agonist:

Rightists were happy making bat eating jokes and mocking the “filthy” Chinese back when Covid was an Asian problem. But now that it’s become an epochal event, only the grandest of explanations will suffice. Surely Covid was cooked up in a commie mad scientist’s lab, or perhaps in the lair of a genocidal James Bond villain like Ernst Blofeld or Hugo Drax. But a bunch of common Chinese selling wild animals in a stinking, filthy market slum? A bunch of scummy gluttons who take pride in the fact that they’ll eat anything that moves, and they’ll eat it raw? These people ravaged the world, just by eating animal testicles and anuses? No way, man. Next you’ll tell me that the entire course of history was nearly altered by a college dropout failed songwriter who wanted to impress a dyke actress.

* Image: Asia’s Busiest Wet Markets Courtesy Jo-Anne McArthur

UPDATE (4/18): RNA doesn’t lie. Dr Fauci rejects claim that disease escaped lab.

Dr Fauci also rejected a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab.

The precise origins of the novel coronavirus are still unknown, leading some to question whether it was developed by scientists in a lab.

However, Dr Fauci said studies of the virus’ genome have strongly indicated that it was transmitted from an animal to a human.

While speaking at the daily White House press briefing Dr Fauci was asked if COVID-19 was “man-made” and may have originated in a laboratory.

He said a study by a group of evolutionary virologists examined the genome sequences of the coronavirus and other bat viruses that evolved.

Dr Fauci said: “The mutations that took to get where it is now is totally consistent with a jump from a species to an animal to a human,” he said.

However there are some in the Trump administration, including the president, who are investigating the claims.

MORE.