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The giant institution vs the virus
[PJ] - Without much fanfare one of the most dramatic changes in modern history occurred. Britain left the European Union. Boris Johnson tweeted, "the Withdrawal Agreement has received Royal Assent and is now law. We will leave the EU on January 31st".

A similar resolution has eluded America. Yet while the US Senate is preparing to begin what will probably be a failed impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the old global world continues to be shaken by unforeseen developments. China's lunar new year -- its most festive occasion -- was ruined by the outbreak of a new coronavirus, 2019-nCoV. A quarantine zone has encloses more than 10 cities and a population the size of Canada.

But its impact was global. Canada already teetering on the edge of an economic slowdown "would face a major test if the disease spreads into the North American country, economists said." Skynews described how a virus that may have started in a local wild animal fresh meat market in central China's Wuhan spread around the world.

...It was an example of 'No Borders' but not in a good way. The pathogen got on a plane abetted by a delay in acknowledgement. "The Chinese government failed to act quickly enough to curb the spread of the Wuhan virus, risking further outbreaks," Guan Yi, the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong told the Asia Times. The Chinese government's own data, hosted on Wikipedia, confirms this. It shows how at the beginning the numbers were small, the infection still all in one place. After a week it blew up.

This illustrates how giant totalitarian governments like China's can be at a disadvantage in dealing with emergent events. What it gains in ruthless response cannot always make up for lost response time caused by the official denial of embarrassing facts. That explains why establishments are often surprised by events like Brexit and Hillary Clinton's shock loss. They are unexpected because they were not in the 5 year plan. They arrive like a bolt from the blue.

When the unexpected happens the official Narrative often increases the reaction time of the system. While events are slow moving there may be no penalty but in the fast moving global world threats like the coronavirus may hit the public even before institutions admit it exists. The old model of globalization has paradoxically both speeded up the rate at which events occur and slowed the rate at which behemoth transnational institutions can respond.

...Even the mighty Chinese state has conceded it has to surrender some control to achieve results. The Washington Post reports on Beijing's new openness:

    Just 10 days after a pneumonia-like illness was first reported among people who attended a seafood market in Wuhan, China, scientists released the genetic sequence of the coronavirus that sickened them. That precious bit of data, freely available to any researcher who wanted to study it, unleashed a massive collaborative effort to understand the mysterious new pathogen that has been rapidly spreading in China and beyond.

    The genome was posted on a Friday night on an open-access repository for genetic information. By Saturday morning, Andrew Mesecar, a professor in cancer structural biology at Purdue University, had redirected his laboratory to start analyzing the DNA sequence, which bore a striking resemblance to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the 2002 viral outbreak that sickened more than 8,000 people and killed nearly 800. Scientists at the federal Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana asked a company to turn the information from a string of letters on a computer screen into actual DNA they could study in lab dishes.

    At unprecedented speed, scientists are starting experiments, sharing data and revealing the secrets of the pathogen ‐ a race that is made possible by new scientific tools and cultural norms in the face of a public health emergency.

    "The pace is unmatched," said Karla Satchell, a professor of microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "This is really new. Lots of people [in science] still try to hide what they’re doing, don’t want to talk about what they’re doing, and everybody out there is like: This is the case where we don’t worry about egos, we don’t worry about who’s first, we just care about solving the problem. The information flow has been really fast."

The obvious question is how the Chinese had the complete DNA sequence in 10 days - please spare me the story of a virus jumping from snakes to bats to humans.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2020-01-25
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=561919