The problem is, I'm not sure you can trust any news out of china to be the 100% unvarnished truth anymore. Seems the only way you hear any bad news out of china is when it gets 'too big to hide'.
And you'd trust the news out of ... where, exactly?
I think it's pretty clear from the last decade that the major journalism providers in the US (for example) are also corrupt, and that's true of every country I've experienced.
Which is not to say that everywhere suffers this problem to the same degree, but just that the notion of a "trusted source of news" is demonstrably naive.
Nah, that’s a false equivalency because you’re equating “some corruption exists” like in the US to ~99% corruption as it exists in China w.r.t how it seems you are defining corruption in the mainstream press.
Because unlike China there exists enough of a free press, from institutions down to individual bloggers and professors, who can jump on the Internet and write almost anything without repercussion and if they write something very good or very important it’ll be spread.
I think you're both over-estimating the situation in the US, and under-estimating the situation in China, but you're right: there's a difference.
My point is that _trusting_ news organizations is dumb. None is trustworthy. Whether their coverage is manufactured/absent/biased because it's required by the government, required by the owners, required by the editor, required by the organizational culture, or even a side-effect of their workload, nothing is trustworthy.
I'm not sure there was ever a time that the press could be trusted, but it absolutely cannot be trusted now.
Personally I don’t find “trust nothing” to be very useful or practical. My local TV news reported that the Ohio Senate introduced a bill to do X and they reported that an estimated 26 people died the other day due to a tornado or series of tornadoes in Mississippi. I’m supposed to not trust that reporting?
Everything is information. It might be accurate, it might not. Personally I would not _trust_ the tornado report: maybe it was 25 people or 27? What motivations might there be to exaggerate or diminish the number? Disaster reporting often exaggerates during the initial phase, and then corrects (or not) later. In that case, perhaps errors are more likely to be a lack of knowledge, to reflect hearsay and confusion between agencies?
I think it’s an important to maintain an attitude of skepticism, to be aware of sources of error, and biases that might be at play. Blind _trust_ in information sources is foolhardy.
I read that before replying. That was the type cope that come attached to these sorts of distracting replies to redirect attention to the amateur leagues while the NBA tier players run rampant.
Are there any variants that can spread from birds to humans but not from humans to humans? Definitely not an expert in this at all, but it seems like the virus wouldn't care where it was before it got in to someone's mucous membranes. I can certainly imagine some modes of transfer will be less likely because maybe this variant causes chickens to sneeze, but not people, greatly reducing transmissivity, but seems unlikely to me to be impossible.
Most bird flu in the past only spreads from birds to humans, or is like MERS in that it can technically spread human to human but with an R0 far less than 1.
Depends on which membranes. I think I remember reading that the reason these can transfer bird-to-human but not human-to-human is that they can only infect us if it gets so deep into the lungs we can't actually expel it from breathing or coughing.
"Although the virus has caused severe illness in some patients, Chinese authorities say there's no evidence so far that the disease can be passed through human contact."