Author: BigGuy

There are now 42,968 confirmed coronavirus cases and at least 1,018 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. The 13th case of coronavirus in the U.S. was reported Monday in San Diego. Health officials told The Wall Street Journal that the individual had been evacuated to San Diego on a U.S. flight out of Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. She had first tested negative for the virus, then later tested positive after developing symptoms. The novel coronavirus has slowed China’s economic output and has since been declared a public health emergency by U.S. officials.

The coronavirus epidemic could spread to about two-thirds of the world’s population if it cannot be controlled, according to Hong Kong’s leading public health epidemiologist.

https://youtu.be/T-kRknJVafk

His warning came after the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said recent cases of coronavirus patients who had never visited China could be the “tip of the iceberg”. Prof Gabriel Leung, the chair of public health medicine at Hong Kong University, said the overriding question was to figure out the size and shape of the iceberg. Most experts thought that each person infected would go on to transmit the virus to about 2.5 other people. That gave an “attack rate” of 60-80%. “Sixty per cent of the world’s population is an awfully big number,” Leung told the Guardian in London, en route to an expert meeting at the WHO in Geneva on Tuesday. Even if the general fatality rate is as low as 1%, which Leung thinks is possible once milder cases are taken into account, the death toll would be massive. He will tell the WHO meeting that the main issue is the scale of the growing worldwide epidemic and the second priority is to find out whether the drastic measures taken by China to prevent the spread have worked – because if so, other countries should think about adopting them. The Geneva meeting brings together more than 400 researchers and national authorities, including some participating by video conference from mainland China and Taiwan. “With 99% of cases in China, this remains very much an emergency for that country, but one that holds a very grave threat for the rest of the world,” the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in his opening remarks. To date China has reported 42,708 confirmed cases, including 1,017 deaths, Tedros said. Leung – one of the world’s experts on coronavirus epidemics, who played a major role in the Sars outbreak in 2002-03 – works closely with other leading scientists such as counterparts at Imperial College London and Oxford University. At the end of January, he warned in a paper in the Lancet that outbreaks were likely to be “growing exponentially” in cities in China, lagging just one to two weeks behind Wuhan. Elsewhere, “independent self-sustaining outbreaks in major cities globally could become inevitable” because of the substantial movement of people who were infected but had not yet developed symptoms, and the absence of public health measures to stop the spread. Epidemiologists and modellers were trying to figure out what was likely to happen, said Leung. “Is 60-80% of the world’s population going to get infected? Maybe not. Maybe this will come in waves. Maybe the virus is going to attenuate its lethality because it certainly doesn’t help it if it kills everybody in its path, because it will get killed as well,” he said. Experts also need to know whether the restrictions in the centre of Wuhan and other cities have reduced infections. “Have these massive public health interventions, social distancing, and mobility restrictions worked in China?” he asked. “If so, how can we roll them out, or is it not possible?” There would be difficulties. “Let’s assume that they have worked. But how long can you close schools for? How long can you lock down an entire city for? How long can you keep people away from shopping malls? And if you remove those [restrictions], then is it all going to come right back and rage again? So those are very real questions,” he said. If China’s lockdown has not worked, there is another unpalatable truth to face: that the coronavirus might not be possible to contain. Then the world will have to switch tracks: instead of trying to contain the virus, it will have to work to mitigate its effects. For now, containment measures are essential. Leung said the period of time when people were infected but showed no symptoms remained a huge problem. Quarantine was necessary, but to ensure people were not still carrying the virus when they left, everybody should ideally be tested every couple of days. If anyone within a quarantine camp or on a stricken cruise ship tested positive, the clock should be reset to 14 days more for all the others. Some countries at risk because of the movement of people to and from China have taken precautions. On a visit to Thailand three weeks ago, Leung talked to the health minister and advised the setting up of quarantine camps, which the government has done. But other countries with links to China appear, inexplicably, to have no cases – such as Indonesia. “Where are they?” he asked.

BEIJING (AP) — After nearly a week of roaming China’s epidemic-struck city, filming the dead and the sickened in overwhelmed hospitals, the strain of being hounded by both the new virus and the country’s dissent-quelling police started to tell. Chen Qiushi looked haggard and disheveled in his online posts, an almost unrecognizable shadow of the energetic young man who had rolled into Wuhan on a self-assigned mission to tell its inhabitants’ stories, just as authorities locked the city down almost three weeks ago.

Until he disappeared last week, the 34-year-old lawyer-turned-video blogger was one of the most visible pioneers in a small but dogged movement that is defying the ruling Communist Party’s tightly policed monopoly on information.

Armed with smart phones and social media accounts, these citizen-journalists are telling their stories and those of others from Wuhan and other locked-down virus zones in Hubei province. The scale of this non-sanctioned storytelling is unprecedented in any previous major outbreak or disaster in China. It presents a challenge to the Communist Party, which wants to control the narrative of China, as it always has since taking power in 1949. “It’s very different from anything we have witnessed,” said Maria Repnikova, a communications professor at Georgia State University who researches Chinese media. Never have so many Chinese, including victims and health care workers, used their phones to televise their experiences of a disaster, she said. That’s partly because the more than 50 million people locked down in cities under quarantine are “really anxious and bored and their lives have pretty much stopped.” Official state media extol the Communist Party’s massive efforts to build new hospitals in a flash, send in thousands of medical workers and ramp up production of face masks without detailing the underlying conditions that are driving these efforts. Chen did just that in more than 100 posts from Wuhan over two weeks. He showed the sick crammed into hospital corridors and the struggles of residents to get treatment.

“Why am I here? I have stated that it’s my duty to be a citizen-journalist,” he said, filming himself with a selfie stick outside a train station. “What sort of a journalist are you if you don’t dare rush to the front line in a disaster?”

A video posted Jan. 25 showed what Chen said was a body left under a blanket outside an emergency ward. Inside another hospital, he filmed a dead man propped up on a wheelchair, head hanging down and face deathly pale. “What’s wrong with him?” he asked a woman holding the man up with an arm across the chest. “He has already passed,” she said. Chen’s posts and vlogs, or video blogs, garnered millions of views — and police attention. In an anguished video post near the end of his first week in Wuhan, he said police had called him, wanting to know where he was, and questioned his parents.

“I am scared,” he said. “I have the virus in front of me, and on my back, I have the legal and administrative power of China. His voice trembling with emotion and tears welling in his eyes, he vowed to continue “as long as I am alive in this city.” “Even death doesn’t scare me!” he said. “So you think I’m scared of the Communist Party?” Last week, Chen’s posts dried up. His mother broke the silence with a video post in the small hours of Friday. She said Chen was unreachable and appealed for help in finding him. Police also came knocking last week for Fang Bin, who has been posting videos from Wuhan hospitals, including footage of body bags piled in a minibus, waiting to be carted to a crematorium. Fang, a seller of traditional Chinese clothing, filmed a testy exchange through the metal grill of his door with a group of four or five officers. The footage posted on YouTube offered a glimpse into how the security apparatus is working overtime to keep a lid on public anger about the spread of the virus. “Why are there so many of you?” Fang asked. “If I open the door, you’ll take me away!” Chen re-posted that video on his Twitter feed — one of his last tweets before his disappearance. The death of a Wuhan doctor last week focused attention on earlier attempts to suppress speech, and its consequences. Police had accused Dr. Li Wenliang of spreading rumors after he raised alarm in December about the outbreak. He succumbed to the virus, bringing an outpouring of grief, along with anger at authorities for how he had been treated.

Republican senator suggests ‘worse than Chernobyl’ coronavirus could’ve come from Chinese ‘superlaboratory’

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton suggested that Chinese officials misled the public on the origins of the novel coronavirus that has killed at least 362 people and infected more than 17,400 others, saying it may have originated in a “superlaboratory.” At a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing with US military leaders on Thursday, Cotton described the coronavirus as the “biggest and most important story in the world” and “worse than Chernobyl.” Cotton, a longtime China hawk, suggested Beijing had not been as forthcoming about the number of infections and was “lying about it from the very beginning” to downplay the seriousness of the epidemic. Chinese officials have been accused of lowering the number of cases and tamping down on reports weeks before it was formally acknowledged by the government. “They also claimed, for almost two months until earlier this week, that it originated in a seafood market in Wuhan,” Cotton said, referring to a study published by The Lancet. “That is not the case.”

Initial studies linked the virus to various sources, including a seafood market in Wuhan, China, and bats. In one of the studies from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, six of the seven virus samples were from patients who worked at the Huanan wholesale seafood market

“Of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including patient zero,” Cotton said. “I would note that Wuhan also has China’s only bio-safety level four ‘superlaboratory’ that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.” Cotton was referring to China’s first Biosafety Level 4 lab, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which investigates “the most dangerous pathogens,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While Cotton qualified his remarks by saying “we still don’t know where” the virus originated, his comments come amid numerous conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins — including one that says the virus “originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” The amount of false information spreading across social-media platforms has prompted several companies, including Facebook, to limit the reach of such posts. In a statement, Facebook said it would display “accurate information” and notify users if they are suspected of sharing false or misleading information.

Video: Wuhan, China – people quarantined in their houses screaming out their windows that they have no food. There are 50 million of them.

Declaration gives UK government additional powers as death toll inside China jumps to 908 with more than 40,000 infections

Li’s death was a “tragic reminder” of how China’s preoccupation with maintaining stability drives it to suppress vital information, Nicholas Bequelin, Southeast Asia regional director for Amnesty International said.

“China must learn the lesson from Li’s case and adopt a rights-respecting approach to combating the epidemic,” he said.

Some media described Li as a hero “willing to speak the truth” but there were signs that discussion of his death was being censored. The topics “the Wuhan government owes doctor Li Wenliang an apology” and “we want free speech” briefly trended on Weibo late on Thursday, but yielded no search results on Friday. The virus has spread around the world, with 320 cases in 27 countries and regions outside mainland China, a Reuters tally of official statements shows. Mike Ryan, WHO’s top emergency expert, told the Executive Board in Geneva he was worried about stigma being attached to the virus amid reports of Asians being shunned in the West. “The unnecessary, unhelpful profiling of individuals based on ethnicity is utterly and completely unacceptable and it needs to stop,” he said. The outbreak could have spread from bats to humans through the illegal traffic of pangolins, the world’s only scaly mammals, Chinese researchers said, sparking some scepticism. “This is not scientific evidence,” said James Wood, head of the University of Cambridge’s veterinary medicine department. Two deaths have been reported outside mainland China, in Hong Kong and the Philippines, but how deadly and contagious the virus is remains unclear, prompting countries to quarantine hundreds of people and cut travel links with China. There were 41 new cases among about 3,700 people quarantined in a cruise ship moored off Japan, taking the total on board to 61. Chinese-ruled Hong Kong quarantined for a third day a cruise ship with 3,600 on board after three people who had been on the vessel proved infected. Singapore reported three more coronavirus cases not linked to previous infections or travel to China, prompting it to raise its alert to orange, the level reached during the SARS outbreak in 2003. China has sealed off cities, cancelled flights and closed factories, cutting supply lines to global businesses, so that Beijing resembles a ghost town. Virus concerns swiped world markets on Friday but failed to stand in the way of the best week for stocks since June and the strongest for the dollar since August. As Trump praised China’s discipline, the head of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice, Li Fuying, told reporters that people deliberately concealing contacts or refusing to go into isolation could be punished with death.

American companies in China said they are likely to see a direct impact of the coronavirus in their 2020 revenues figures, the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Shanghai announced on Friday. In a survey conducted among 127 companies, 87% of the respondents said their revenues will be impacted while as many as 24% stated that they now foresee a drop of 16% or more in revenues as a result of the outbreak.

Additionally, almost one third stated corporate headquarters aren’t taking potential economic consequences of the virus enough into account.

Furthermore, 16% of the poll participants stated that they expect Chinese gross domestic product (GDP) to fall by 2% or more because of the disease. Earlier, reports said companies across China are extending work from home or holiday periods. Meanwhile, work at a number of companies, including Fiat Chrysler, Foxconn, Hyundai, Kia and Apple, has been impacted by the coronavirus.

Dr. Gregory Poland, professor of medicine and infectious diseases and the director of the Vaccine Research Group at Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Pfizer board member and former FDA Commissioner, join “Squawk Box” to discuss the spread of misinformation on the coronavirus. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned on Monday that the world may be “dangerously” unprepared for the next pandemic as the flu-like coronavirus that emerged from China about a month ago spreads rapidly to new countries. At an executive board meeting in Geneva, Tedros urged the World Health Organization’s 196 member countries to “invest in preparedness,” not “panic.” He added that funding for outbreak preparedness in surrounding countries “has remained grossly inadequate” in the past. “For too long, the world has operated on a cycle of panic and neglect,” Tedros said, according to a transcript of his remarks. “We throw money at an outbreak, and when it’s over, we forget about it and do nothing to prevent the next one.” “If we fail to prepare, we are preparing to fail,” he added. Tedros said more than $1 billion has been spent trying to stop the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By comparison, he added, just $18 million was spent on preparedness in Congo’s neighbor Uganda before the virus crossed the border. “This must be a lesson for the rest of the world,” he said. The plea from WHO’s top official comes as the deadly coronavirus has now killed at least 362 people and sickened more than 17,400 worldwide, including patients in the U.S. and Europe. The respiratory illness, which is capable of spreading through human-to-human contact, is not yet considered a pandemic. A pandemic is “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people,” according to WHO. While the new virus has spread to almost two dozen countries, the majority of the cases remain in mainland China. Nevertheless, many global health experts expect the virus will become a pandemic. Since emerging about a month ago in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has infected more people than the 2003 SARS epidemic, which sickened roughly 8,100 people across the globe over nine months. As of Monday, there are nearly 200 cases in at least 23 countries, outside of China, a handful of which have been transmitted from human contact within those countries. On Thursday, WHO declared the virus a global health emergency after declining to do so at two previous meetings. Tedros said the “continued increase in cases and the evidence of human-to-human transmission outside of China” were “most deeply disturbing.”

“During these wartime conditions, there must be no deserters, or they will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever.”

A senior official in the Chinese government has instructed authorities in Wuhan, the city where the ongoing coronavirus outbreak originated, to round up the sick and quarantine them in isolated hospitals and shelters.The vice premier leading the government’s response to the 2019-nCoV epidemic, Sun Chunlan, has instructed Wuhan officials to go door to door, according to The New York Times. She told them to check residents’ temperatures and investigate anyone who came in contact with known patients.

“Set up a 24-hour duty system,” Sun said, according to the NYT. “During these wartime conditions, there must be no deserters, or they will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever.”

It’s an extreme, authoritarian move: rounding up and isolating thousands of residents in makeshift shelters that are being hastily assembled per the government’s order. Some of the shelters, which are being assembled in sports arenas and other large facilities, opened up on Thursday. Social media posts are already showing grim, cramped situations, the NYT reports. Doctors and medical supplies are reportedly in short supply. It’s difficult to be optimistic that this roundup will improve conditions within the city, which has been under lockdown for weeks.