Chat message

Slack / Private Message Drop, p.49 [SLACK_000263] · slack_pm:msg:00485

Date: 2020-06-03 07:02
Type: chat message · slack
recipient: Robert F. Garry, Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut
speaker: Kristian G. Andersen
Topics: China relations and data access

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Agreed. What's really frustrating is that people writing about China's 'slow response' have no clue about outbreak response or what is involved. Plus, in hindsight it's easy to see that it transmits really easily, but we/they didn't know that in the beginning and it was a reasonable assumption that it didn't. China definitely isn't innocent, but no matter how you look at it, they reacted exceptionally fast - all the delays that totally changed the course of this pandemic happened outside of China.

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2020-06-03 07:02 Kristian G. Andersen

Agreed. What's really frustrating is that people writing about China's 'slow response' have no clue about outbreak response or what is involved. Plus, in hindsight it's easy to see that it transmits really easily, but we/they didn't know that in the beginning and it was a reasonable assumption that it didn't. China definitely isn't innocent, but no matter how you look at it, they reacted exceptionally fast - all the delays that totally changed the course of this pandemic happened outside of China.
2020-06-03 07:08 Andrew Rambaut open

There was definitely the rush to publish in Nature that probably resulted in some hiding of data. The posting tovirological put a stop to that I think. But I seem to remember that Zhang had a Nature paper ready by the time the sequence was uploaded to Genbank (and before the Virological post) - Eddie persuaded him to release the data first which probably saved China generally from much greater embarrassment.
2020-06-03 07:24 Kristian G. Andersen open

Yup, that last bit is definitely true. And yes, there were (short) delays no doubt - but they were inconsequential in the grand scheme of things (my main issue here is that especially in the US is that people can't uncouple the two - i.e.(1) the delay and (2) the consequences from that delay. People immediately jump to the conclusion that this could all have been stopped if there hadn't been a week delay, which is obviously rubbish)

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