China PCR test orders soared before first reported Covid case

Well. It leaked, they kept quiet as they always do. We will keep finding the smoking gun forever and they will never admit it. It was an accident though. Let’s hope they learned their lesson.

I&#x27;m not sure if this discovery will ever amount to a &quot;beyond reasonable doubt&quot; standard of proof of a cover-up, especially in an internationally accepted judicial setting, but I do wonder if, in general, there needs to be a legal principle that hiding evidence of something has to be punished as harshly as the worst plausible crime that the evidence could be hiding.<p>Such a principle would, admittedly, lead to many defendants being punished for crimes they didn&#x27;t actually commit (i.e. they were only covering up lesser crimes), but without such a principle, a guilty person will always face a rational choice of covering up their crime and risking only an additional &quot;destruction of evidence&quot; charge (for example), as opposed to being caught for the actual crime and incurring the (presumably harsher) punishment for that.<p>For such a principle to pass the smell test, though, it should first and foremost apply to government record laws, covering everything from politician&#x27;s official emails to police body-cam footage. A society which elects politicians willing to be held to that standard can be assumed to be mature enough to have this principle applied to other criminals.

The article says this was &quot;according to a report from researchers in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.&quot; I wish it included a link.

This is about as reliable as the reports claiming that 20 million Chinese people had died because of a dip in the number of cell phone contracts early on in the pandemic.<p>The idea that the virus was spreading to any significant extent in Wuhan in May 2019 is absurd. The outbreak only reached sufficient proportion to be noticed in late December 2019, when hospitals first started noticing clusters of pneumonia patients. And by all appearances, the Chinese government was completely unprepared for the outbreak - the response in late December 2019 through mid-January 2020 was chaotic and ineffective. The idea that the government had been secretly preparing for more than half a year in advance of the first known outbreak in Wuhan just doesn&#x27;t make any sense at all.<p>It&#x27;s a sad statement on the state of journalism that this sort of nonsense gets any traction in mainstream media, and it&#x27;s an even sadder statement on the level of anti-Chinese paranoia that people buy it.