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US Anger at China Grows; Class Action Lawsuits Filed for COVID-19 Damages

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Edited by: JV Staff

Americans are increasingly hostile to China as the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc on the U.S. and global economies, according to a nationwide poll released on Tuesday, as was reported by the AP.

The poll, conducted last month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, found that two-thirds of those surveyed, or 66%, had an unfavorable view of China. That’s the most since the center first asked the question 15 years ago and a significant jump of 20 percentage points since President Trump entered the White House in 2017. The results suggest that Americans are receptive to the Trump administration’s perspective on China which has increased in recent weeks over criticism of Beijing’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak that originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, according to the AP report.

The survey also found that about 90% of Americans see growing Chinese influence and power as a threat, with 62% of those saying it is a “major threat.” And, while the total seeing China as a threat has not changed since 2018, the percentage viewing China as a “major threat” has jumped 14 percentage points in the past two years, according to the results.

AP reported that the poll was conducted throughout March when the impact of the virus pandemic was beginning to be recognized around the world, with countries shutting down their borders, issuing stay-at-home orders and closing off vast sections of their economies. However, the findings do not suggest that Americans’ opinions of China worsened as the month went on, with the negative views expressed early in the month matching those later in the month, according to the authors.

“While China’s handling of the virus may have made an impression on some Americans, it does not appear that escalating conditions in the U.S. over the course of March shifted attitudes toward China during that period,” they said.

ABC News reported on Monday that thousands of Americans have reportedly signed onto a class action lawsuit in the state of Florida which seeks compensation from the Chinese Government for COVID-19 damages, as Western politicians increasingly call for accountability.

Medical workers step over bodies as they search a refrigerated trailer at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, April 3, 2020, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

According to a statement from the Miami-based Berman Law Group, the lawsuit “seeks billions of dollars in compensatory damages for those who have suffered personal injuries, wrongful deaths, property damage and other damages due to China’s failure to contain the COVID-19 virus, despite their ability to have stopped the spread of the virus in its early stages”.

The firm said it “looks forward to fighting for the rights of people and businesses across Florida and the rest of the country, who are now becoming sick or caring for loved ones, dealing with financial calamity, and navigating this new world of panic and social distancing and isolation”.

A separate class action lodged on behalf of Las Vegas businesses is seeking billions of dollars in damages on behalf of five local businesses.

The lawsuit claims that China’s Government should have shared more information about the virus but intimidated doctors, scientists, journalists and lawyers while allowing the COVID-19 respiratory illness to spread.

On April 3rd, it was reported that an Illinois lawmaker wants to remove China’s sovereign immunity and sue for damages incurred from the coronavirus (COVID-19).

Assistant Republican Leader C.D. Davidsmeyer, R-Jacksonville, introduced two House Resolutions that would compel China to pay the State of Illinois for the damages.

In order to do this, Rep. Davidsmeyer wants the United States Congress to waive China’s sovereign immunity.

Davidsmeyer is calling for Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul to start the litigation against China for damages caused to the State of Illinois and its citizens by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rep. Davidsmeyer cited a Bloomberg report that said the U. S. intelligence community found that “China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease.”

AP reported that Missouri’s attorney general on Tuesday sued the Chinese government over the coronavirus, claiming Chinese officials are to blame for the global pandemic.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Missouri, alleges Chinese officials are “responsible for the enormous death, suffering, and economic losses they inflicted on the world, including Missourians.”

“The Chinese government lied to the world about the danger and contagious nature of COVID-19, silenced whistleblowers, and did little to stop the spread of the disease,” Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s office said in a written statement. “They must be held accountable for their actions.”

Schmitt’s office is seeking unspecified damages for deaths in Missouri and the hit the virus has taken on the state’s economy, according to the AP report.

The number of Missouri deaths statewide rose by 16 Tuesday to 215, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering. The number of cases rose by 156 to 5,963.

The DailyMail of the UK reported on April 18th that the legal challenges – set to be followed by another from Israeli human rights lawyers who specialize in suing states for terrorism – ramp up the pressure on Chinese President Xi Jinping to account fully for his country’s actions.

In this Feb. 21, 2020, photo, patients rest at a temporary hospital at Tazihu Gymnasium in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province. Top Chinese officials secretly determined they were likely facing a pandemic from a novel coronavirus in mid-January, ordering preparations even as they downplayed it in public. Internal documents obtained by the AP show that because warnings were muffled inside China, it took a confirmed case in Thailand to jolt Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. (Chinatopix via AP)

The DailyMail also reported that there are calls also for the United Nations to set up an inquiry to establish how the coronavirus broke out in the city of Wuhan and then spread so fast around the world.

This follows a warning last week from UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who is running the Government while Boris Johnson recovers from the virus, that it could not be ‘business as usual’ after the crisis.

‘We will have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier,’ he said.

Also on Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the World Health Organization rejected theories that coronavirus was created in a lab, saying that all known evidence points to the pathogen emerging from animals in China late last year.

WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said that it’s “probable, likely, that the virus is of animal origin.”

“All available evidence suggests the virus has an animal origin and is not manipulated or constructed in a lab or somewhere else,” Chaib told a Geneva news briefing.

However, she said that more research was necessary to determine how the virus jumped from animals to humans.

Bats have been eyed as one of the possible hosts of the contagion, which has been linked to the animal markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

On April 15th it was reported that in the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.

That delay from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China’s attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected more than 2 million people and taken more than 133,000 lives.

“This is tremendous,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.”

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan. 5 to Jan. 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

It’s uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It’s also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.

But what is clear, experts say, is that China’s rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for “rumor-mongering,” broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city’s hospitals.

“Doctors in Wuhan were afraid,” said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. “It was truly intimidation of an entire profession.”

Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan. 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases — distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients. They also instructed officials in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, to begin temperature checks at transportation hubs and cut down on large public gatherings. And they did it all without telling the public.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.

“Those accusing China of lacking transparency and openness are unfair,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday when asked about the AP story.

On April 17th, it was reported that China’s official death toll from the coronavirus pandemic jumped sharply as the city of Wuhan announced a major revision that added nearly 1,300 fatalities.

The new figures resulted from an in-depth review of deaths during a response that was chaotic in the early days. They raised the official toll in Wuhan by 50% to 3,869 deaths. While China has yet to update its national totals, the revised numbers push up China’s total to 4,632 deaths from a previously reported 3,342.

The higher numbers are not a surprise — it is virtually impossible to get an accurate count when health systems are overwhelmed at the height of a crisis — and they confirm suspicions that many more people died than the official figures had showed.

The review found 1,454 additional deaths, as well as 164 that had been double-counted or misclassified as coronavirus cases, resulting in a net increase of 1,290. The number of confirmed cases in the city of 11 million people was revised up slightly to 50,333.

Questions have long swirled around the accuracy of China’s case reporting, with Wuhan in particular going several days in January without reporting new cases or deaths. That has led to accusations that Chinese officials were seeking to minimize the impact of the outbreak and could have brought it under control sooner.

             (Associated Press)

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