Dafuq...Context?
Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)
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Let's go and meet me in Siargao lolAnyway if there are any people here in Singapore or Hong Kong who want to race me in sea sports, let me know. I can even do scuba diving racing since a member here keeps arguing scuba is a competitive sport.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Yeah, I advised all relatives in China a few weeks back, when all the bodies in river stories started to surface (no pun intended!) to be extra careful with frozen seafood, paying especial attention to origin and categorically avoid any seafood sourced from the Indian Ocean.
I swear these Indians are literally going to cause a literal zombie outbreak one of these days. On the bad side, it means that the world needs to clean up after India screwed up to infinity bit on a rather dark good side, the majority of Indians will probably kick it meaning that it will be engraved into everyone memory that India is a nation no worth saving at all. That is if such a thing happened, hopefully it won't but with all these strains and diseases out there in India and in there waters, I won't be surprised at all if something this f*()ed up happened
Thanks. Deleting post.
The real story is complicated and the defects were partly due to perception, partly due to problems all along the supply chain.
I know because I was in China last year working with a mask factory. I exported several hundred thousand masks for them.
On one hand there was a demand-vs-supply imbalance. It was easy to procure medical (K)N95s pre-pandemic, but when COVID broke out they were the first to sell out. It is easy to increase production BUT the medical-grade certification is extremely difficult to get. NIOSH certification for N95 (any grade) was also difficult. So almost all factories did not bother making them, as non-medical KN95s did not require certification, they only needed a simple test report to show they meet certain filtration and fitting standards.
This caused a large supply of KN95 to flood the market but buyers kept refusing them as they believed KN95s to be defective or inferior to N95s. The only options were to buy non-medical KN95s, or go maskless. You know all the stories about hospitals running out of masks in the US? Not because there was no supply, but because importers refused to buy KN95s. In July 2020, the waiting list to buy N95s from 3M extended all the way to March 2021. Yet there were millions of surplus, "inferior" KN95s in Chinese warehouses that could have saved thousands of lives abroad if they had been purchased instead of being ignored because the media called them inferior.
Some of the "defective" reports are true. Because of the insane increase in mask production, melt-blown filtration fabric (especially high-grade melt-blown for KN95s) became impossible to find. At one point in June 2020, a lot of people claimed to sell 90% or 95% PFE melt-blown, but when we tested the fabric samples, they reached only 20 to 30%. Several batches of masks were made (all across China) with this low-grade, uncertified melt-blown before factories realized they were being scammed.
But for the most part, the masks were perfectly fine. Western media completely blown the defects out of proportion, and incorrectly compared non-medical KN95s with medical N95s. Chinese customs went to incredible lengths to only allow certified masks to be exported. At one point, for every shipment going out, I had to submit over 20 pages of documents and certificates for customs clearance and hope that it doesn't get impounded. By August 2020, unless you were a dedicated medical supplies company, you were prohibited from exporting PPE.
Yeah the risk benefits analysis is such that they recommend it only for those over 50. Given the relatively safe situation in Australia
Thanks for your post. Some of my additional observations.
As you said, this kind of interruption really threw people into unfamiliar territory. Inexperience definitely played a part.
Add onto this many well-meaning, but unqualified people trying to help. Something like this old episode of the Simpsons:
People who had business connections in China and bought masks, not really asking "what kind of masks are these?" because they assume they are all the same. Suddenly when they realize they are not what they thought, they are "defective".
Finally on top of this, you might have communications issues between people who aren't natively speaking the same language.
Of course bad actors on both sides played a role, but definitely the whole story was overblown to the detriment of the general population.
coolieno99
Junior Member
An Indian man rape an Indian girl at a Covid-19 treatment ward in Delhi. My only comment on this, is the girl shouldn't have to worry about being infected with Covid-19 since both of them are already infected with Covid-19.