Coronavirus and ugly Chinese nationalism, part 2

I have a feeling that, like my separating out coronavirus news from other Texas Progressives items the past five weeks, this Part 2 may not be the only entry after Part 1.

First, China has revised upward death numbers from Wuhan. By 50 percent.

They've only tweaked cases numbers, but researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (surely about to be bigfooted by Beijing) insist that this is off by a factor of four. Researchers there also question how quickly Beijing was able to revise its numbers. The NYT at the link notes that in pandemics, revisions in cases and fatalities aren't uncommon.

As for Beijing refusing outside help, whether from the WHO it tried to bully, then bypass, or from the CDC? There's probably a reason for that.

State Department leakers claimed earlier this week that the Wuhan Institute of Virology badly bungled research into coronaviruses in general. So says a Washington Post op-ed. Again, it notes this is a maybe, not a definite. That said, the Bezos Post's hard paywall and my refusal to pay means linking to a blog. I'll be looking at this in detail in a separate post.

And, China attacking Taiwan and accusing IT of fomenting nationalism? Risible.

This is going to dent globalization. (Fact is, actually, that global trade as an overall percentage of the world economy had peaked nearly a decade ago. That's not so much because globalization itself collapsed as it is the continued rise [at least on paper] of the economy of China, and lesser degrees that of other East Asian nations.)

The last time global trade was badly dented, it exacerbated the Depression.