I still got the the firewall round the Times article, but the article has been copied and commented on a lot.
The rebuttal - if I go through it painstakingly analysing who said what when I might get some more clarity, but what can I do with that? It's the trouble with competing narratives. How much effort do you put in, or do you just go with the source you have the most trust in? And since everyone is trying to sell something, no-one is entirely trustworthy.
Interesting that the editor of the Lancet, who is so damning of the govt response now, said on the 23rd January: ‘In truth, from what we currently know, 2019-nCoV has moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity. There is no reason to foster panic with exaggerated language.’
That would have been an excellent time to panic, when there was so little to contain that it could have been contained. Except with the degree of uncertainty about the danger, it wouldn't have been possible politically to close down airports and bring in quarantine for travellers. Bit like climate change - by the time people are starving and the world is being clearly trashed and the cause is proven without doubt to be man made, it'll be too late to hit reverse.
Once preparing a yacht delivery, I had a lot of work to do on the engines, and I had a crew member who'd never been on a boat before. There was a lot to do, but he didn't know how to do much of it. So I gave him the task of preparing a grab bag to take in the life-raft. He asked what I wanted putting in the bag, and not having the time or inclination to write a list, I asked him to imagine we're going down, and taking with us whatever might be most useful, for the next few hours, days, maybe a week.
That kept him busy for a surprisingly long time. He'd made a bag up containing bandages, flares, water etc. Then a second bag of useful stuff, then a third. A fourth contained a Walkman and music tapes, books and other luxuries. Couldn't fault his logic, and he became the go to man if you needed to know where anything was. We were almost disappointed not to sink slowly somewhere remote.
