We (well, everybody but me) can choose a hypothesis.
[ol]
[li] It was an intentional attack by a foreign interest.[/li][li] It was an accidental leak from a Chinese biowar lab.[/li][li] It was sloppy sanitation at an illegal wildlife market.[/li][li] Whatever the cause, an official coverup ensued.[/li][/ol]
The first two are exciting fodder for conspiracy theorists, who need very little (if any) actual facts from which to weave nervous webs. (Think of a garden spider given LSD.) #4 could cover the other three but it didn’t happen, which won’t dissuade conspiratorialists. Anyone with a calculator can estimate the damages that some element may or may not be liable for. Good fucking luck there. How about Chinese officials call the pandemic an “act of god” and fine domestic religious groups for damages? “YOUR god did it - YOU pay for it!”
It’s always someone else’s fault. I’m not responsible. Really. Well, I could have washed my hands better…
Actually, there was the anticipation of a tsunami as a possible result of an earthquake. That was why a 30 foot defensive seawall was constructed to protect the nuclear plant. Unfortunately, the tsunami turned out to be 20 feet taller than anticipated. This phenomena of Japan building protective seawalls that turned out to be inadequate was repeated through the country. This was not some deliberate short-cutting or negligence, this was the worst-case scenario exceeding calculated worst-case events throughout the entire nation.
We now know that 30 foot seawalls are inadequate. Lesson learned.
Also, another lesson is that don’t put back-up power generators in low-lying spots in places where tsunamis are a real possibility (or other flooding). If those generators had been elevated they might have continued to function well enough to provide adequate cooling. Not just nuclear power plants but many other facilities are now elevating back-up generators to guard against flooding.
According to XT the evil Chinese are bad since they took some time to recognise a new and previously unencountered virus, whose initial symptoms looked just like that of a bad version of viral pneumonia, which is a somewhat common illness in that place and season. So,much so that there are random ALL CAPS.
And in light of this thread, here’s a confounding problem: on the brink of this being considered a pandemic, when international cooperation is paramount, people are seeing fit to vilify China.
They would refuse, and I think they would have a good case for refusal. A viral outbreak is an “Act of God”. No one has control over that. They reacted to it quickly and have done all the right things in terms of trying to bottle it up, so there isn’t any negligence on their part. What would be the basis of the lawsuit?
Who knows where it originated? There are lots of theories.
The Spanish flu originated somewhere in northern China in late 1917 and swiftly moved to western Europe with the 140,000 Chinese laborers the French and British governments recruited to perform manual labor to free up troops for wartime duty.
I vehemently disagree with this. There has always been concern regarding the ability to safely shut down a nuclear plant in the event of natural disaster. And Japan had an entire infrastructure dedicated to dealing with earthquakes and tsunamis because of their location to fault lines. All that was needed in this case was the relocation of backup generators or a rewire for external connection to generators. had they put the generators on the roof it would have been a non-story. There was plenty of time to review the safety design of the plant over the years and upgrade it as needed.
to the op, the idea of being responsible for a viral outbreak would only make sense if they created virus or allowed it to escape from a lab. If that were true then I could see a legal case to be made.
I’m not saying this is what happened but it would explain the herculean efforts China has gone through to contain it.
A country shouldn’t be held liable because a catastrophe that originated from natural causes occurred in their territory. As far as I know, nobody sued Iceland after the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in 2010.
Some people are making the argument that China should be held liable because it didn’t respond appropriately after the outbreak occurred. There may be an argument to be made on this point, but from what I have heard, China’s response does not sink to this level.
Even if you accept the idea of liability and feel that the Chinese response justifies it, you’re not going to enforce a judgement against China by any means short of a war. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
The reason Spanish flu was called Spanish flu is that the combatants in WWI considered the existence of the flu a military secret, and since Spain was neutral they didn’t suppress the existence of the flu.
My wife wrote a book on the flu when we expected the avian flu to be a big deal. When it wasn’t the publisher canceled the book though she still got paid. Every silver cloud has a dark lining …
Ah the racist card. I’m militantly unsurprising. I did see your ‘According to XT the evil Chinese are bad …’, where you are equating my hammering of the CCP with ‘the evil Chinese’, as if the CCP represents the Chinese people and is interchangeable. Yes, ‘the evil Chinese’ in the form of the CCP fucked up…by the numbers. And to you, that seem to be racist.
At any rate, I think what I wrote is being born out, and we are finding that the coverups in China by their government continue. We really don’t know the extent of how bad things are even now…
