Two emergency medicine doctors, in New Jersey and Washington State, are in critical condition

We might have to start calling up med students.

 

Sure, but the people they infect with their cavalier actions may not be.

 

Trump's hostility to China is one reason he didn't let the CDC help them more to contain the virus before it escaped the country. This is the main reason we should be concerned about diseases overseas. Left alone, they come here, they are always deadly and they are no respecters of Walls.

 

Scapegoating us for your government's lax response? I expect better from my favorite foreign interloper...

 

Back with this tripe again? So tell us what medical response capabilities the NSC has? Oh right, NONE. All they could do is get in the way of CDC...

 

You act as though that hostility is a one way street. Romney brought it up, before Trump ever came into the political arena. Hell, as it regarded the Peace Corps, the Chinese government effectively said "good riddance."

The US was not leading the rest of the world in our "Post-WW2 order." The reality is, that order was changing swiftly after 9/11, swiftly after geopolitical blunders and the consolidation of political power in the Far/Middle East and we sat here thinking we still dealt with Gorbachev.

The only thing we were doing, is allowing Chinese spies to infiltrate the US(and they got as high as Congresswoman Feinstein) meanwhile, we chased invisible Russians.

China is our #1 geopolitical foe today in reality. China has made no secret of its opposition to the US. And now Germany feigns offense when the American government tries to buy vaccines from it, as though that's some offensive thing to Germany(I thought the Germans would like that their product would be used in the US.)

The world of 1989 also doesn't exist anymore.(And no, it's not thanks to Trump. It's the shift in power that's happened since then.) The EU is both stubborn and one-track minded, making it the furthest thing from an ally. China has grown in geopolitical clout and has ambitions towards swallowing Asia. Because we adapted the old British policy of containment, none of our allies are strong enough to deal with this threat.

Then there's us, who may be a military power but is the furthest thing from a NATIONAL power. And the Chinese know it.

Reversing this, we have to start by building our national unity, accepting our losses and building a similar defense pact in Asia, but with the notable difference of having the Asian countries vested in their own defense, rather than being obligated for it and forced into another hotbed area.

 

As far as disease is concerned outside the county is exactly where the emphasis should be. Once we have cases here it's too late for containment and you have to go straight to mitigation, wherein the country is damaged and our citizens die.

 

And CDC and NIH can do that working with those agencies in other countries and then there is the WHO. We cannot go into to China and take care of Chinese.

 

But don't you hate people who miss the military in order to stay in school?

 

UNTRUE!

 

Sorry? China stealing our IP and making it near impossible to sell reasonably priced goods in their country is them being friendly. Or how about the back doors they place in their electronics to spy on people or steal anything on a network using their servers?

 

China can eat a bag of something.

I agree with the Imam...

 

I believe in God, but I’m not a fanatic. Very, very few believers are.

We don’t believe everyone else is evil, unless they commit some evil act (mass shootings, etc.).

And we don’t believe in moral relativism (“Islamic radicals are no better or worse than the American Military”).

 

So now it's our IP and our ability to sell them cars that are worth our lives? Conservatives just get better and better on this.

What I've heard, and no, I can't back it up, is this. The Chinese have this literally huge population and it coughs up epidemics about 3x a year, they're usually able to contain them pretty fast and they develop treatments and vaccines even faster

But every once in a while, like every 2-3 years, something comes up that doesn't respond well. Here's where the American CDC pandemic branch steps in, and working with the somewhat stricter Chinese social controls, they put the kibosh on it right quick. (It seems having the best hospitals and med schools in the world is worth something after all.) Or at least they used to until our erstwhile painted President put the kibosh on the CDC's Pandemic Branch, canceling it totally in 2017 "Uh....we don' need to go curing no Chinese diseases. they stole our latest way to make Christmas lights, we have to strike back"

And the upshot is, this disease should never have gotten out of China but Corporal Bonespurs has done it again.

Think about this the next time you're wondering what are healthy (and comfortable) substitutes for toilet paper, and you've just noticed Grampa has this nagging cough. Is deporting your gardener really worth it?

 

Well, they could have at one time:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

 

I know of literally no Christians who think that. This virus is another manifestation of the Fall, which effects everybody. As Solzenhitzen said, the line between good and evil runs not through political systems, but every human heart.

A good essay by CS Lewis on a similar situation, substitute Cornoavirus for nuclear war:

“We think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb,” Lewis begins. To those who wonder how it’s possible to go on in the face of such a threat, Lewis recalls that theirs was not the first generation to live under a threatening shadow. In fact, if we’re honest, we all live under a sentence of death, and for some of us, that death could even be “unpleasant.”

The important question, says Lewis, is not whether or how we will die but if in the meantime we will be doing “sensible” and “human” things like “praying, working . . . reading, listening to music, bathing the children.”

Lewis asks his readers to consider the important but unsettling truth that “Nature does not, in the long run, favor life.” It’s an ominous observation that points to an essential worldview truth: “If Nature is all that exists—in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside of Nature—then all stories “will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without the hope of return.”

How do we respond to this unsettling truth? Lewis saw only three options: The first is suicide, something not uncommon in Britain of the 1940s and 50s. The second, “simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can.”

Of course, as Lewis noted, “there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab—only the coarsest sensual pleasures.” Whether we’re talking about sex or listening to music, the pleasure is diminished by the knowledge that any enjoyment we might derive are merely “illusions,” the product of “irrational conditioning” determined by our genes.

The third response, Lewis said, is to “go down fighting,” to live as if the universe has meaning. We can insist on being rational and merciful even when the universe is not. Of course, if we choose that option, there’s no way to actually prevail against the “idiocy” of the universe—it would still win. Our insistence on being rational and merciful has no real justification.

The hopelessness of those three options should instead lead us to a different conclusion: “We must simply accept . . .,” said Lewis, “that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it.”

In other words, we must reject naturalism and embrace “a much earlier view:” biblical theism. It’s the only grounds on which we can avoid the despair brought on by the knowing that we are under a “sentence of death,” whatever form that death takes."

 

Got anything to back that wild assertion up?

From everything I have read MOST of your cases have originated in China and Iran!

 

It's also about viral load. The reason we see anomalous risk in young doctors and nurses is the amounts of virus they are exposed to. The constant emersion is a never ending assault that overwhelmes an otherwise capable immune system.

More than a few young Chinese doctors died from this virus.

 

I was simply responding to your comment about Trump not being “friendly”. China has been ****ing us over ever since Clinton signed the deal with them and allowed them to enter the 1st world. Trump has been the only president that has stood up to them.

 

I have no doubt the Chinese would have behaved just as they are now.

 

So basically a belief in God is based on wishful thinking? (The Universe is just so bleak without God).

And why is "Biblical theism" the only alternative. Buddhism and Hindi aren't even considered?

I never did like Lewis. His stories always had me siding with the villains, and that really lessens their entertainment value when you're an adolescent. (Tolkien did that too but not as much.)

OTOH Lewis was the only theologian who seemed to understand how Christianity is unique. It is the only religion whose God is also fully a man. Other religions come close but none that I know of so well resolve the problems that come about when your God is this all-powerful being and at the same time a man who can feel pain and die. Christianity also incorporates its mythos with history better than any other and Lewis was the first I read who also noted this.

 

And ****ed us royally in the process. You don't manifest your enmity with people by refusing to help them fight diseases in their country, not unless you want those diseases to come on over to yours

 

It's not the behavior of the Chinese that is the problem here. It's the fact that Trump abolished the Branch of the CDC that helped foreign countries to keep epidemics from spreading to this country. He probably needed the money for his Wall. So now thousands of us will die to build Trump's useless monument to bigotry

I swear to god, if anyone ever votes for a Republican for anything ever again then I will know that the depths of pure American idiocy and wooden headedness truly know no bounds.

 

It is definitely the behavior of the Chinese for withholding vital information from WHO for a month or more whilst millions of Chinese were willy nilly flying all over the world.

That put everyone behind the ball.