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Thursday, February 6, 2020

Coronavirus: The Human Rights of People in Quarantine


Woman gets forced intro Quarantine, gets put into a box and begins screaming. (6 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube. Anons put up an online poll: "Do you really think this is a mobile kill box?" The results at time of writing of those polled (roughly 160 respondents) were 50-50.

Once you are admitted to hospital for any major concern, you begin to lose fundamental rights over your physical security. Medical staff can abuse their authority, and cannot easily be held accountable, because the outcomes of their recommended courses of treatment lie in a grey area, based on their professional judgement. When hospital staff in Wuhan, China have worked so valiantly, let us not say that medics intend to cause harm; indeed, they are sworn not to do so.


Hospitals in coronavirus-hit Wuhan use medicine delivery robots (1 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

However, doctors are socially conditioned within a professional culture to follow certain decision-making processes, which prioritize and justify rigorous, dictated courses of action, especially in times of stress. They are allowed to make life and death choices, based on hypothesized consensuses about likelihoods and percentages. Institutional and professional safeguards protect them from being externally scrutinized. Hospital staff face an internal professional checklist of accountability; but after that, the decision-making process is allowed to run its course.

Drug contracts and scientific research allow further blurring of boundaries around what is considered physically harmful and what is not. Medical staff can be trained so that they may not even have the rational or emotional space left within their world view to reevaluate their judgement calls, given what is practically necessary, and bearable costwise, for the good of all.

There are philosophical shortcomings in any professional culture because the intensive training required must cut out large areas of knowledge beyond immediate specialties. In this case, medical school does not have time to turn doctors into monks. Those on a scientific research track with corporate or military contracts will be even more loyal to an abstract morality, underscored by pretty basic motivations. What matters - as we saw with the recently-arrested Harvard professor Dr. Charles Lieber - is that researchers score their funding.


This is the reality for medical professionals and scientists who do their best and really care about their jobs. As for hospital staff who secretly do not mean well, the medical environment offers plenty of room for abuse. It is a model for covert, finely-tuned coercion. Moral attitude and corresponding medical approaches and choices made by doctors can mean the difference between life and death for patients. You can see a Vox investigation on how different hospitals respond to infections here, with results mapped onto a map of the United States here. This is the case at the best of times, when things are running normally.

The Chinese physician, Dr. Li Wenliang tried to raise the alarm about the coronavirus with his former medical school classmates on WeChat social media. Shortly after, he was harassed by the police and forced to sign a state gag order. Eight doctors in all were arrested and intimidated. Dr. Li then came down with the virus and died on 6 February 2020. Image Source: CNN.

Now imagine a raging pandemic, with an overarching authoritarian political system, from which the medics take their orders. And if these hospital staff will not cooperate and obey certain dictates because those orders violate their Hippocratic Oaths, they may be crushed by the very apparatus they agreed to serve. They may coincidentally succumb to the virus themselves, and be hospitalized, and tragically die. As the wheel of coercion turns, doctors will become as vulnerable as patients. Independently-minded doctors will lose their authority, and will be replaced by colleagues and military medics who will do as they are told. I am not saying that this is what is generally happening; I am saying this potential exists.


In China, we are seeing smartphone footage of people being scooped up into vans and being driven away for quarantine against their will. While this may be merely an insensitive or inhumane way to enforce containment measures in an out-of-control pandemic, there is a lot of room for abuse of this practice. Beyond fear of infection, there may be other reasons why the woman in the video at the top of this post started screaming.


Where is the secondary level of authority to check the decisions of the HAZMAT-suited men who collected the screaming woman? Was she really infected? How would we know? She has just lost all personal autonomy and could die and be erased without a trace. Just in case you thought this was about public health, take note that top party members in the Chinese system are not subject to the same indignities and threats by quarantine checkers on the streets.




It will not be long before citizen journalists and politically inconvenient people could be spirited away and 'disappear,' with no way of checking what has happened to them. The Chinese government is burning bodies, and not keeping records of all who die. The government is also not necessarily categorizing all those who die as having coronavirus. In new Chinese quarantine facilities, some new hospital wards look like maximum security prisons. Other areas look like there is no quarantine at all, as patients are herded together into mass dormitories.

New hospitals are not hospitals: they have no medical equipment, no medicine, no medical staff available in the quarantine building in Wuhan: WUHAN Huge quarantine area. (6 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube.


NTD claims that the new Chinese 'super-fast' hospitals are a "black hole" of information; these facilities could easily use unvetted experimental treatments on patients, who have no way of escaping:
"U.S.–based China affairs commentator Jingyuan Tang said with the new military-controlled hospital, even such anecdotal evidence would be hard to come by.

'All of the medical staff will be from the military,' Tang said, 'In that case, all the data and information in the hospital could become a military secret. The outside won’t know it. The internal staff won’t disclose it. Because whoever did so could be charged with disclosing military information and could be sent to military courts.'

'It’s like a black hole. People on the outside won’t know how many patients went in there—won’t know how many people have disappeared,' he said.

The human rights records of China’s military-run hospitals are not reassuring. Multiple former physicians have disclosed the presence of illegal organ transplantation and trade inside China’s military hospitals. One physician said the phenomena were 'common.'"
The new Wuhan hospital is staffed and patrolled by the Chinese army. Isolation cells have bars outside the windows and locks on the outside of patients' doors. People who resist going into quarantine off the street are now being arrested and taken there by force. There are unconfirmed rumours of rioting in Wuhan.




Man not wanting to go into quarantine tries to escape (5 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

If you are outside China and think, 'it couldn't happen here,' notice that in east and west alike, quarantine facilities are being set up at military bases. No one questions this. They think it's a good idea! This is a very dangerous course of events, and Amnesty International should be monitoring and taking action on this trend. You can see Amnesty's info page on the coronavirus here; under the circumstances, it needs expansion and deeper consideration.






It doesn't take much imagination to understand why those being carted off to quarantines are suddenly frightened. A female Austrian patient escaped a hospital in Salzburg and fled home at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, 5 February 2020, causing local panic.

CORONAVIRUS AUS CHINA: Nach Tests - Zwei Rückkehrer sind infiziert (2 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

Coronavirus: DW spricht mit Rückkehrer in Quarantäne | DW Deutsch (4 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

Meanwhile, on the officially derided, racist, and discredited site 4chan, /pol/ anons argued over whether quarantines in Germany and on cruise ships off the coasts of Japan and Hong Kong are being used as experiments. They suspect that non-Chinese scientific researchers are trying to determine the true nature and spread rate of the virus, given that the Chinese government is concealing true numbers; the anons were unsure as to how long the virus could survive on physical surfaces:
"HOLY SHIT. MY mind just blew into bits.

German citizen were brought back to Germany. There are a few tv reports about it and I really didn't get it why they split all the people into 4 separate groups and let each group have a communal area.

Germany is doing fucking research on living fucking human beings. I know it will save lives and I too want to know the R0 and mortality rate but HOW THE FUCK is this even legal?

They tested everyone and knew the result within hours and placed sick people among healthy ones in 4 separate groups and they are watching the distance between them, how fast they show symptoms, how sick they get etc All people have to go to the doctor daily for checks.

WHAT IN THE FUCK. I NEVER THOUGHT they would do that. HOLY SHIT."
The response from a German anon:
"Yeah. Who would have thought that Germans could be capable of something like that, huh?"

Rumours about German quarantine facilities describe one clothes washing machine per quarantined person. Image Source: 4chan.

A Swiss anon responded in several posts:
"Another hint. Each person in the quarantine is getting his own wash machine.

This fucker of a virus seems to survive in clothes! Remember the Chinese are disinfecting the roads and buildings and we all were wondering why.

A normal virus doesn't survive on objects and non living surfaces. It looks like if you sweat you contaminate the fucking textiles!! And they are telling us that packages from China are fucking safe!

... We are talking sweat and Airborne contaminating textiles. So if you walk out with your precious mask and goggles and you walk back home you contaminate your entire home. 
So even if you have a bug out home in the mountains, you would need to strip naked 100meters before your home considering the wind direction, walk into your home, have a few showers, get dressed and go back out and burn your old stuff you took off. 
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THAT THING."

A Finnish anon commented:
"I have a feeling they're doing this kind of testing with the cruise ships too. It makes zero sense keeping people locked up together by the thousands on a ship like that. They're all guaranteed to get infected. I guess they're trying to see how a disease would spread in high population density areas.

Ship is a pretty good comparison to an apartment complex in one of those high population countries, like India, Japan or China"

And an American anon:
"My exact thoughts. They can learn the true rate of spread with this ship. Also, monitor human behavior meaning when you tell them to self quarantine, stay away from others....and they just can't do it. They get out of rooms, chit chat with neighbors, etc. The cruise ship is a great experiment since we will never know exactly what is going on in China or if numbers are real."

ADDENDUM (6 February 2020): A leaked video shows life inside the quarantine zone in Wuhan. Fairly quiet markets, but there are fights at the grocery stores. Frightened people resist removal into quarantine facilities.

INSIDE WUHAN VIDEO LEAK :17 HOURS AGO (6 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

ADDENDUM (6 February 2020): Chen Qiushi, the well-known citizen journalist in Wuhan, has gone missing.

Chen Qiushi, Wuhan's best known citizen journalist. Image Source: Quartz.

Chinese reporter Qiushi Chen has gone missing from r/Coronavirus



See all my posts on Epidemics here and here.


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