China: Quarantine for 60 million, concentration camps for the sick. From the way China is reacting, coronavirus is way more lethal than the flu. This shows no signs yet of blowing over, as with SARS, Ebola, or the swine flu.

NYT:

A senior Chinese official has ordered the authorities in the city of Wuhan to immediately round up all residents who have been infected with the coronavirus and place them in isolation, quarantine or designated hospitals. …

The city’s authorities have raced to meet these instructions by setting up makeshift mass quarantine shelters this week. But concerns are growing about whether the centers, which will house thousands of people in large spaces, will be able to provide even basic care to patients and protect against the risk of further infection.

Sounds like death camps for people to die. The Government really doesn’t want uninfected people catching this virus.

The whistleblower doctor who fell victim to China’s coronavirus, by Emma Graham-Harrison.

Otherwise healthy, 34-year-old doctor died of coronavirus, despite treatment

Li Wenliang was a successful but anonymous ophthalmologist, father and husband, based in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. But over the past two months, the 34-year-old had become a household name in China, known to hundreds of millions of people as the face and conscience of its spiralling coronavirus crisis. …

Li tried to warn fellow doctors in the early days of the outbreak, posting a message alerting them to a mystery new disease at his hospital in late December. Seven people were in quarantine, the symptoms were similar to Sars, and doctors should consider wearing protective equipment to prevent infection, he said.

Security forces came to his house four days after he sent that public health warning and accused him of “making false comments” and acting illegally to disturb social order. He signed a statement agreeing not to discuss the disease further.

Yet within a week he would be infected himself, and within two weeks, China and the world would be talking of little else beyond the new disease, now identified as a coronavirus.

Li himself was infected when he operated on a patient with glaucoma, who he did not know was carrying the virus. On 10 January he started to feel sick, and his symptoms worsened over the rest of the month.

Hospitalised with fever and breathing problems, as he fought the illness, he also decided to fight the government, going public with details of how he had been silenced in the name of stability. …

Local authorities did eventually apologise to him and seven others investigated for “spreading rumours”, as public anger about the cover-up spread, and the central government admitted that the crisis had been mishandled in its early days. …

His parents have also been reported as having contracted the virus. The health status of his wife and children is not clear.

Stories Coming Out of China are Unverified but Troubling. By Daisy Luther.

Hospital staff are so overwhelmed they’ve begun wearing adult diapers – not only because they don’t have time to go to the bathroom but also because they don’t want to run the risk of damaging their hazmat suits. Meanwhile, hospitals have been turning away patients for weeks because there are no tests and there are no beds. …

Corpses are stacked up amidst living patients in a hospital.

Sick people are being referred to as “The Infected” [and rounded up]:

The government is rounding people up sick people in door-to-door searches, and apartments doors are being welded to keep people in.

To ask the obvious that no one in our mainstream media is asking:

Would China be resorting to these extreme and dystopian measures if only 300 people or so had died? Would crematoriums be running non-stop if only 300 people had died? Would they be willing to take this massive hit to their economy and their global reputation if only 300 or so people out of 1.3 billion had died?

Meanwhile financial markets are surging to record highs on a wave of new money. But if the world’s second largest economy and manufacturing center is cracking up, and disease might soon cripple other countries too, are the markets a tad too optimistic? Interesting times.

hat-tip Lion of the Blogosphere