‘Thank God Coronavirus didn’t start in India,’ prominent British economist Jim O’Neill praises China, gets global backlash

The world has been rocked by the coronavirus as the novel virus continues to spread unabated. Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro and  Canada PM Justin Trudeau’s wife have been diagnosed with coronavirus while renowned actor Tom Hanks and his wife have also contacted the deadly virus while their stay in Australia. The Australian Grand Prix slated to be held this weekend has also been cancelled after one of the team members of McLaren had contacted the virus. In football, London based club Arsenal FC has seen its head coach Mikel Arteta be infected with the virus while Chelsea FC player Callum Hudson Odoi has also been infected while Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus teammate Daniel Rugani has also been infected forcing the superstar to go into isolation.

As the world collectively battles the virus, India has remarkably resisted the virus till now. However, in a peculiar statement which lacks logic and substance, Jim O’Neill, the chair of U.K. think tank Chatham House sighed, “Thank God this didn’t start in somewhere like India, because there’s absolutely no way that the quality of Indian governance could move to react in the way that the Chinese have done.”

The former Goldman Sachs chief economist and the man who coined the acronym BRICS, Jim O’Neill also commended the Chinese government for its “fast, aggressive” response to the coronavirus outbreak. “That’s the good side of the Chinese model, and I think you could probably say the same about Brazil too,” he added.

O’Neill who was also the commercial secretary to the UK Treasury couldn’t stop expressing his blind love for Communist China as he asked the western world to emulate China. He said, “That said — and it’s often like a lot of other things when China got hit with a crisis over the last 30 years — once they realized the scale of it, the system seems to be capable of dealing with it pretty quickly, relative to other places, and pretty decisively.”

Contrary to O’Neil’s comments, it was the Chinese government’s initial denial of the virus’s existence coupled with its lethargic handling which has resulted in the virus becoming a global pandemic. The Xi Jinping government ignored the warning signs and allowed the Lunar New Year celebrations to take place. 

The airborne virus has virtually spread across the entire country as during the Lunar New Year celebrations on January 25, mass-scale travels took place in China after which Coronavirus has been spread to nearly every part of the country and also Hong Kong where Chinese patients were being taken to receive free and better healthcare until the Hong Kong leadership was pressurised to close the border. The virus has been the most fatal in the eastern part of the country which constitutes some of the most densely populated cities in the world.

O’Neil’s decision to pat China’s back displays his gross ignorance as China muzzled the early voices who tried to warn about the impending pandemic. Dr Li Wenliang’s voice was muzzled by the Chinese authorities and as China erupted in grief and anger, the state-run media squarely pinned the blame on local authorities.

When Wenliang on December 30, sent a message to fellow doctors in a chat group warning them to wear protective clothing to avoid infection, four days later he was summoned to the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter. In the letter, he was accused of “making false comments” that had “severely disturbed the social order”. He was one of eight people who police said were being investigated for “spreading rumours”.

In his Weibo post he describes how on 10 January he started coughing, the next day he had a fever and two days later he was in the hospital. He was diagnosed with the Coronavirus on 30 January, of which he later died.

While O’Neil commends China for taking exemplary measures, in reality, the government has taken bizarre measures. The province of Hubei, where the impact of the virus is the most severe, has switched off lifts in high-rise buildings to discourage residents from going outside while Beijing has banned group dining for events such as birthdays and weddings while cities such as Hangzhou and Nanchang are limiting how many family members can leave home each day. Such measures are unlikely to contain the virus.

In a recent development, after successfully exporting the virus to the world, China has now attempted to wash its hands off the virus. The Chinese propaganda machinery is currently claiming that it was the US Military that brought the virus to Wuhan during the Wuhan Military games — a claim which is devoid of any proof.

The daring journalists who exposed the Communist government’s false claims on containing the virus have mysteriously gone missing as people in Wuhan have been left to die. While the Chinese government was successfully able to fool the world over how it built a hospital in 10 days, turns out, it’s not a hospital but a quarantine where infected people can go and just die. China continues to lie to its citizens and the world as it refuses to aid in containing the coronavirus.

Contrary to O’Neill’s comments on India which is a country of 1.3 billion people at the time of writing has only 73 positive cases of the virus with one death being recorded yesterday, despite the country’s close proximity with China.

India has largely resisted the virus thanks to the government’s quick thinking. India evacuated over 700 of its citizens from China.  All evacuated citizens from China were screened, and any positive cases were quarantined and cured. The first few cases of the virus in India resulted due to the influx of tourists from Italy who brought the virus to India and then patients from America caused some issues too. India has also evacuated 58 Indians from Iran has sent a medical team to Italy to screen its citizens post which they will be evacuated.

India has quarantined itself from the world by cancelling all unofficial visas for a month and curbing outgoing travel as well.

India’s screening systems have performed relatively well that’s why no real outbreak could take place despite the millions that arrive in India monthly.

Indian airports check in 80,000 international arrivals daily. India’s busiest airport, Delhi’s IGI Airport, witnesses anywhere from 850 to 2,100 international passengers flying every hour during lean and peak hours. “The maximum rush is from 11pm to 3am when IGI Airport sees about 6,000 international arrivals from 35 flights in these four hours,” said Delhi airport sources.

Expectedly, O’Neill was panned right and left by all sections of media over his sheer ignorance and gross negligence of facts. Zakka Jacob writing for News 18 pointed out how “China is the reason why the world is battling with this massive pandemic of proportions” as its government tried to downplay the virus in its initial stages.

Jacobs pointed out that not just coronavirus but all the major diseases in recent times from SARS to swine flu can be traced back to China’s grossly unsanitary wet markets.

China has on an average about 80,000 flu deaths every year. The Wuhan wet market where the virus is believed to have originated is a place where live animals are slaughtered for consumption.

Experts believe that just like Ebola, the coronavirus originated from the bats. While the intermediate source is yet unknown, it is widely believed that the virus travelled to pangolins from the bats and then finally to the humans. Wuhan wet market is one of the rare places were bats, pangolins and humans are found in one place, thus resulting in the outbreak of the virus.

The menu of Wuhan’s wet market includes the likes of tiger, camel, snakes, rabbits, bats, bears, foxes and many more varieties of exotic wildlife. The wet markets of China were emboldened by the Communist Party’s decision in 1998 to term wildlife as “resources owned by the state” and protected people engaged in the “utilization of wildlife resources”.

With this law, an industry was born and Just four years later, the SARS outbreak originated in a wet market in South China. When one connects COVID-19 with SARS, you have a simple fact – China refuses to take responsibility for its wet market business, illegal wildlife trade and refuses to crack down on the wet market economy.

Jacobs rightly pointed out that, “Instead of China, had India or any democratic country clamped down like the way Chinese authorities have, the same Jim O’Neills of the world would be crying infringement of human rights and conspiracy by an authoritarian government to shut down voices.”

India’s case was also advocated by the Russian media. Sputnik news slammed O’Neill’s racist comments on India. The publication wrote how India has managed to rescue its citizens from China and also helped the friendly neighbourhood countries in evacuating their citizens. It also added how India had supplied 15,00 kgs of medical equipment to virus’s epicentre in Wuhan.

Another globally popular Russian media outlet rt.com slammed O’Neill for his ignorance. The publication wrote: “Incredibly, with a population of around 1.3 billion people, India has only 73 confirmed cases of coronavirus — and at the time of writing, zero deaths. The United States, which has less than 330 million people, has around 1,300 infections, with more than 30 deaths.”

O’Neill was schooled by the Indian Twitterati as he was schooled on facts.

O’Neill’s propaganda and ignorance won’t change the fact that while China gave birth to this pandemic, the West’s lax approach led to outbreaks all from France, Germany, Italy to the USA, a densely populated India has dealt with the virus remarkably well.