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aprossi

Scientists probe whether West Africa's recent Ebola outbreak was from man who survived ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Ebola scientists epidemic outbreak knowledge research education

shared by aprossi on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Scientists probe whether West Africa's recent Ebola outbreak was from man who survived epidemic five years ago
  • Scientists and global health officials are investigating whether the current Ebola outbreak in Guinea may have been triggered by a person who was first infected with the virus during the Ebola epidemic in the region five years ago.
  • The World Health Organization (WHO) is carrying out further investigations into the individual who appears to have had the virus lay dormant in their body.
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  • This would suggest infections may persist once people recover and have the potential to start a future outbreak.
  • The results suggest the latest outbreak "is the result of the resurgence of a strain that previously circulated in the West African outbreak
  • They decided to be extremely careful and continue sequencing on additional samples to obtain more complete sequences that will provide a safer answer, he added.
  • A sexually transmitted virus?
johnsonel7

How News Coverage of Coronavirus Compares to Ebola | Time - 0 views

time.com/...oronavirus-ebola-news-coverage

news bias west China coronavirus

shared by johnsonel7 on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A novel coronavirus that originated in China and has since spread to more than 20 other countries has dominated headlines across the globe since it was first announced in December 2019, as scientists and media outlets (including this one) scramble to understand the virus’ origins, trajectory and impact. The wall-to-wall coverage of the virus, known has 2019-nCoV, has been unusually heavy, even in comparison to other recent health threats, such as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that began in August 2018 and continues to this day.
  • Throughout January 2020, the first full month of the 2019-nCoV outbreak, more than 41,000 English-language print news articles mentioned the word “coronavirus,” and almost 19,000 included it in their headlines, LexisNexis data show. By contrast, only about 1,800 English-language print news articles published in August 2018, the first month of the DRC outbreak, mentioned “Ebola,” and only about 700 headlines mentioned the disease.
  • The two viruses have also produced two very different outbreaks. Ebola, which causes a hemorrhagic fever that’s deadly in about half of cases, is incredibly potent but has been mostly contained to the DRC, where it has killed 2,246 of the roughly 3,500 people who have contracted it, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. While the WHO declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern” last year, Ebola has not spread far beyond the DRC. (The earlier West African outbreak was more widespread: It killed more than 11,000 people and spread to multiple continents.)
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  • Meanwhile, 2019-nCoV, which causes symptoms similar to the flu, has killed about 2% of the 31,500 people it has infected so far, but has spread to more than 20 countries—including, crucially (at least in terms of understanding media coverage), the U.S. Any time an issue affects the U.S., the Western press kicks into high gear, Miller says.
  • After the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, the U.S. press was criticized for overstating the possible threat to Americans.
tongoscar

In Hong Kong, the coronavirus outbreak is deepening the political divide from the 2019 ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Rumors had spread that toilet paper supply would be cut off due to new border closures with mainland China, implemented in an effort to contain the novel coronavirus outbreak.
  • The government's reassurances and calls for order went unheeded as millions of residents, gripped by fear and suspicion, descended on stores citywide to panic buy.The novel coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, was first detected in Hong Kong on January 22. Since then, there have been 62 confirmed cases and two deaths in the city.
  • The numbers are far lower than in mainland China, where at least 1,868 people have died so far -- but Hong Kong carries the memories of the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, and people aren't taking any chances.
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  • By the time she withdrew the bill -- that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited across the border to mainland China -- protesters' demands had expanded to include action on deeper social grievances.
  • In January, many Hong Kongers across various sectors, including elected lawmakers, called to shut Hong Kong's borders with mainland China to contain the virus. But these demands also reintroduced familiar strands of localism, an ideology focused on preserving Hong Kong's autonomy.
  • This is why closing the Chinese borders is a politically significant and symbolic act -- and perhaps why Lam resisted doing so for weeks.
  • The 2019 protest movement may appear to have fizzled out -- but it educated an entire city and generation of youth on organized resistance. Now, this spirit of political action has been redirected toward the outbreak, as people protest for a stronger government response.More than 7,000 health care workers participated in a week-long union strike in early February to demand closed borders; that's nearly 10% of all medical staff of Hong Kong's Hospital Authority.The labor union that organized the strike was one of several born from the 2019 unrest, founded during the tail end of the protests.
  • Hong Kong's schools are shut until at least mid-March, and many businesses have closed or have instructed employees to work from home.With cases of community transmission confirmed, many people are staying at home for weeks at a time to avoid infection, only venturing out for groceries or quick strolls.
  • Fear and anger are palpable in the city, especially earlier this week with the disappearance of two people who violated quarantine after returning from mainland China. They were found after being added to a police wanted list.
anonymous

Businesses May Benefit From Sharing Covid Testing Resources, Study Suggests - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sting-universities-sabeti.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Why It Pays to Think Outside the Box on Coronavirus Tests
  • Universities and other institutions looking to protect themselves from Covid-19 may benefit from sharing their testing resources with the wider community, a new study suggests.
  • Last year, when the National Football League decided to stage its season in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it went all-in on testing
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  • Between Aug. 1 and the Super Bowl in early February, the N.F.L. administered almost one million tests to players and staff.
  • Many other organizations have sought safety in mass testing.
  • When the coronavirus closed down the country last spring, many colleges and universities sought her advice on how to safely reopen.
  • Now, a new analysis suggests that schools, businesses and other organizations that want to keep themselves safe should think beyond strictly themselves.
  • By dedicating a substantial proportion of their tests to people in the surrounding community, institutions could reduce the number of Covid-19 cases among their members by as much as 25 percent, researchers report in a new paper, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
  • “It’s natural in an outbreak for people to become self-serving, self-focused,”
  • “If you’ve been in enough outbreaks you just understand that testing in a box doesn’t makes sense. These things are communicable, and they’re coming in from the community.”
  • “really profound implications, especially if others can replicate it,” said David O’Connor
  • “We want to start using more sophisticated modeling and probably economic theory to inform what an optimal testing program would look like.”
  • Dr. Sabeti is an epidemic veteran, part of teams that responded to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and a mumps outbreak in the Boston area a few years later.
  • The University of Illinois is testing its students, faculty and staff twice a week and has conducted more than 1.6 million tests since July.
  • At a time when testing resources were in short supply, many of these institutions were proposing intensive, expensive testing regimens focused entirely on their own members
  • ‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
  • ‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
  • Using real-world data from C.M.U., the researchers created a baseline scenario in which 1 percent of people at the school, and 6 percent of those in the surrounding county, were infected by the coronavirus, and the university was testing 12 percent of its members every day.
  • Under these conditions, the researchers found, if the university used all of its tests on its own members, it would have roughly 200 Covid-19 cases after 40 days
  • The researchers then tweaked the model’s parameters in various ways: What if the virus were more prevalent? What if students and staff did not report all their contacts? What if they were better about mask-wearing and social distancing? What if the university deployed more tests, or fewer?
  • Unsurprisingly, the more testing the university did, and the more information it had about its members’ close contacts, the fewer Covid-19 cases there were
  • But in virtually every scenario, sharing at least some tests with the broader community led to fewer cases than hoarding them.
  • Some universities are beginning to adopt this outlook.
  • “A virus does not respect geographic boundaries,” Dr. Pollock said. “It is ludicrous to think that you can get control of an acute infectious respiratory disease like Covid-19, in a city like Davis that hosts a very large university, without coordinated public health measures that connect both the university and the community.”
  • There are barriers to the more altruistic approach, including internal political pressure to use testing resources in house and concerns about legal liability.
  • the researchers hope that their model convinces at least some institutions to rethink their strategy, not only during this epidemic but also in future ones.
  • “An outbreak is an opportunity to buy a lot of community good will, or to burn a lot of community good will,” Dr. Sabeti said. “We could have spent an entire year building up that relationship between organizations and institutions and their communities. And we would have done all that hard work together, as opposed to everybody turning inward.”
  • anonymous on 26 Mar 21
     
    "'You're in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,'" she recalled. "'And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you'll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it's burning to the ground.'"
Javier E

Covid-19 pandemic and chaos theory: Why the future is impossible to precisely predict -... - 0 views

www.vox.com/...covid-19-future-pandemic-chaos

pandemic chaos theory future modeling model

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • In Washington state, a person with the virus attended a choir practice, and more than half of the other singers subsequently got sick. In South Korea, a 29-year-old man went out to nightclubs; he was Covid-19 positive, and he has since been linked to at least 54 new cases. In China, nine people sitting in the path of an air conditioning vent in a restaurant all got sick, most likely from one person, as the duct blew viral particles across their faces.
  • Small things could have changed these outcomes. The clubber could have decided to watch TV instead of going out dancing. If the choir practice was rescheduled for the next day, maybe the person would have felt sick and stayed home. The air conditioner in the restaurant could have been turned off.
  • “Little shifts can have really disproportionately sized impacts” in a pandemic. And scientists have a name for systems that operate like this: chaos.
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  • An outbreak isn’t a double pendulum; it’s much more convoluted. Myriad chains of events, operating in overlapping networks, conspire to chart its course.
  • It’s the double pendulum, and as a physical object, it’s very simple: A pendulum (a string and a weight) is attached to the bottom of another. Its movement is explained by the laws of motion written by Isaac Newton hundreds of years ago.
  • But slight changes in the initial condition of the pendulum — say it starts its swing from a little higher up, or if the weight of the pendulum balls is a little heavier, or one of the pendulum arms is a bit longer than the other — lead to wildly different outcomes that are very hard to predict.
  • The double pendulum is chaotic because the motion of the first pendulum influences the motion of the second, which then influences the entire apparatus. There isn’t a simple scale or ratio to describe how the inputs relate to the outputs. A one-gram change to the weight of a pendulum ball can result in a very different swing pattern than a two-gram change.
  • It teaches us to understand the mechanics of a system — the science of how it works — without being able to precisely predict its future. It helps us visualize how something that seems like it should be linear and predictable just isn’t.
  • That’s why, when pressed, epidemiologists have to say they don’t know what’s going to happen.
  • Climate scientists clearly tell us adding CO2 to the air will increase global temperatures. Yet they argue about when the worst effects of climate change will be felt and how bad it will be
  • Still, they know the mechanics of outbreaks. The chaos “doesn’t necessarily mean we know nothing,” Kissler says. They understand the conditions that make an outbreak worse and the conditions that make it better.
  • There is a tough tension of the current moment that we all need to work through: The future is clouded in chaos, but we know the mechanics of this system
  • Here are the mechanics. Scientists know that if we let up on social distancing, without an alternative plan in place, the virus can infect more people. They know this virus is likely to persist for at least a few years without a vaccine. They know it’s very contagious. That it’s very deadly. They also know that its pandemic potential is hardly spent, and that most of the population of the United States and the world is still vulnerable to it.
  • Will residents keep up with mask-wearing and social distancing, even when their leaders relax regulations? Plus, there are scientific questions about the virus still not understood: Will it diminish transmission in a seasonal pattern? Do children contribute greatly to its spread? How long does immunity last after an infection? Why do some people breathe out more of the virus than others? The answers to these questions will influence the future, and we do not know the answers.
  • Scientists are still unraveling what makes the difference between a sprawling outbreak in one city and a more manageable one in another. Some of it is the result of policy, some is the result of demographics, some is about structural inequality and racism, and some comes down to individual behavior. Some of it is just luck. That’s chaos for you.
  • “I don’t see uncertainty as a lack of knowledge,” says Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a physicist who studies the chaos of a different sort of viral dynamics. “I think it’s a fundamental part of how our world works. It’s not our fault we do not know where this all will go.”
  • Newton clearly told us what happens when an object drops from the sky. But follow his laws, and find that the path of a double pendulum is very, very difficult to predict.
  • There’s a simple mechanism that is helping me understand the many possible futures we face with the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Epidemiologists are clearly telling us what happens when you bring masses of people together during a pandemic. But they can’t tell us the exact shape this outbreak will take.
grayton downing

Mapping Disease | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/35349/title/Mapping-Disease/

mapping disease science research social media

shared by grayton downing on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • researchers and journalists have scrambled to map the spread of H7N9 bird flu through China to identify its source and highlight at risk areas. Mapping is a common response to outbreaks, especially of new diseases, but some scientists believe it must become a more proactive part of disease control
  • efforts to plot the locations of infectious diseases still tend to be reactive rather than proactive.
  • only 4 percent of important infectious diseases have been comprehensively mapped at a global scale. The rest are plagued by patchy data.
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  • audited existing maps for 174 infectious diseases of clinical importance. Following a huge systematic review, they scored the maps for each disease according to how much of the known global range is covered and the quality of the data—whether they were up-to-date and whether they relied on accurate measures like molecular diagnostics or GPS coordinates, rather than unverified expert opinion.
  • even the highest-scoring diseases have room for improvement.
  • . They argue that technology can help to plug the gaps in our maps in the future, and they point to several untapped sources of data. For example, both PubMed and GenBank, which collect biomedical literature and gene sequences respectively, contain geospatial information for the majority of diseases that the team reviewed. And social networks like Twitter can provide invaluable real-time clues about spreading symptoms and illnesses, often tagged with geographical information. During the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 swine flu, for example, Twitter predicted outbreaks 1 or 2 weeks ahead of traditional surveillance measures.
  • I struggled because governments or researchers wouldn’t share their information,” he said. “But there was all this incredible knowledge on the web being discussed through professional networks or news media.”
  • believes that the problem now is not a lack of data but a deluge of it. Sites like HealthMap and BioCaster are already using learning algorithms to filter online sources for information relevant to infections. They are also using crowdsourcing tools that ask online volunteers to check if flagged social media chatter actually relates to the disease of interest.
johnsonel7

How Our Modern World Creates Outbreaks Like Coronavirus | Time - 0 views

time.com/...rn-world-epidemics-coronavirus

Technology coronavirus

shared by johnsonel7 on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • “Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,” observes Albert Camus in his novel The Plague. “Yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people by surprise.”
  • Whether the Wuhan outbreak turns out to be a mild pandemic like the 2009 swine flu, or a more severe one like the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide, at present no one can say.
  • But the big game-changer has been international jet travel and the greater global connectivity that has come with it. Located at the centre of China’s airline network, Wuhan is both a domestic and international hub, with more than 100 non-stop flights to 22 countries worldwide. The result is that whereas during the 2002 SARS outbreak it took five months for the coronavirus to spread worldwide, this time it has taken just four weeks for the world to catch China’s cold.
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  • Bats are also thought to be the ultimate reservoir of coronaviruses, but the virus has also been isolated from snakes and palm civets, a game animal resembling a cat prized by the Chinese for its heat-giving energy. The SARS epidemic was almost certainly sparked by civets traded at a wild animal market in Shenzhen in southeast China. Likewise, the Wuhan outbreak appears to have begun at a wholesale seafood market which, despite its name, also sold wild animals, including wolf cubs, crocodiles, snakes and bats.
  • But perhaps the biggest lesson from the recent run of epidemics is that while scientific knowledge is always advancing, it can also be a trap, blinding us to the epidemic just around the corner ­­– the so-called Disease X’s. Thus, in the case of SARS, our delay in realizing we were dealing with a dangerous new respiratory pathogen, was due in no small part to the WHO’s conviction that the world was on the brink of a pandemic of H5N1 avian influenza—a view that seemed to be confirmed when ducks, geese, and swans suddenly began dying in two Hong Kong parks.
ilanaprincilus06

How Soon Will The U.K. Variant Be Widespread In The U.S.? : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-surge-in-the-u-s-experts-warn

B.1.1.7 Covid-19 UK

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Scientists are sending the U.S. a warning: What's happening right now in the United Kingdom with the new coronavirus variant could likely happen in the U.S., and the country has a short window to prepare.
  • "I think a lot of countries are looking at the U.K. right now and saying, 'Oh, isn't that too bad that it's happening there, just like we did with Italy in February.
  • "But we've seen in this pandemic a few times that, if the virus can happen somewhere else, it can probably happen in your country, too."
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  • The new variant, called B.1.1.7
  • Last week, the U.K. reported a record-breaking 419,000 cases.
  • Studies suggest the new variant increases the transmissibility by about 50%.
  • Now scientists say the virus is already here in the U.S., and circulating widely-- albeit at very low levels
  • "A rough estimate, for across the U.S., would be a frequency of about 1 in 1000,"
  • In England, B.1.1.7 took about three month to take over and become the dominant strain in the outbreak.
  • having this new variant dominant outbreak could be very problematic, researchers say. It could fuel another surge on top of the already staggering surge the country is struggling to stop.
  • What's going to happen if a more contagious form starts to circulate widely, even dominate the outbreak?
  • Right now scientists don't believe the new variant is more deadly. But its increased transmissibility could, in the end, be even more dangerous
  • "Perhaps counterintuitively, I think that increased transmissibility is probably the worst of these two scenarios, because if something is more transmissible, then you just get it into a larger population,"
  • that each sick person could infect 1.8 people, on average.
  • the U.S. still has about two months to prepare for — and slow down — the variant.
  • Each week, more than 1.5 million people test positive for the virus across the country.
  • The U.S. needs to be thinking about how to minimize damage from this new variant, right now, Hodcroft says. "This is our early warning. Because by the time you have something spreading exponentially in your country, it is much harder to get it under control."
sanderk

Why the Coronavirus Could Threaten the U.S. Economy Even More Than China's - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-economy-us-china.html

economy education science research

shared by sanderk on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • After a string of deaths, some heart-stopping plunges in the stock market and an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve, there is reason to be concerned about the ultimate economic impact of the coronavirus in the United States.
  • Advanced economies like the United States are hardly immune to these effects. To the contrary, a broad outbreak of the disease in them could be even worse for their economies than in China. That is because face-to-face service industries — the kind of businesses that go into a tailspin when fearful people withdraw from one another — tend to dominate economies in high-income countries more than they do in China.
  • If people stay home from school, stop traveling and don’t go to sporting events, the gym or the dentist, the economic consequence would be worse
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  • With shortages of everything from auto parts to generic medicines and production delays in things like iPhones and Diet Coke, a great deal of pain is coming from the closing of Chinese factories. That proliferating damage has central banks and financial analysts talking about a global recession in the coming months.
  • As a baseline, several factors work against the United States. China’s authoritarian government can quarantine entire cities or order people off the streets in a way that would be hard to imagine in America, presumably giving China an advantage in slowing the spread of the disease. In addition, a large share of American workers lack paid sick days and millions lack health care coverage, so people may be less likely to stay home or to get proper medical care. And 41 percent of China’s population lives outside urban areas, more than twice the share in the United States. Diseases generally spread faster in urban areas.
  • When people pull back from interacting with others because of their fear of disease, the things they stop doing will frequently affect much bigger industries in the United States.
  • People may stop attending American sporting events. There have even been calls for the N.C.A.A. to play its March Madness college basketball tournament without an audience. But sports is a huge business in the United States. People spend upward of 10 times as much on sporting events as they do in China.
  • Who wants to go to the dentist or the hospital during an outbreak if a visit isn’t necessary? Yet health spending is 17 percent of the U.S. economy — more than triple the proportion spent in China.
  • But over all, the United States is substantially more reliant on services than China is.
  • A major coronavirus epidemic in the United States might be like a big snowstorm that shuts down most economic activity and social interaction only until the snow is cleared away. But the coronavirus could be a “Snowmaggedon-style storm” that hits the whole country and lasts for months.
tongoscar

Coronavirus Cases Seemed to Be Leveling Off. Not Anymore. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-cases-china.html

shared by tongoscar on 14 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • On Thursday, health officials in China reported more than 14,000 new cases in Hubei Province alone. A change in diagnostic criteria may be the reason.
  • The news seemed to be positive: The number of new coronavirus cases reported in China over the past week suggested that the outbreak might be slowing — that containment efforts were working.
  • The sharp rise in reported cases illustrates how hard it has been for scientists to grasp the extent and severity of the coronavirus outbreak in China, particularly inside the epicenter, where thousands of sick people remain untested for the illness.
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  • Hospitals in Wuhan, China — the largest city in Hubei Province and the center of the epidemic — have struggled to diagnose infections with scarce and complicated tests that detect the virus’s genetic signature directly. Other countries, too, have had such issues.
  • In China, health officials have been under exceptional strain. Hospitals are overwhelmed, and huge new shelters are being erected to warehouse patients. Medical resources are in short supply. It’s never been clear who is being tested.
  • The push to prioritize lung scans seems to have begun with a social media campaign by a physician in Wuhan, who last week called for using the scans to simplify the screening of patients and to accelerate their hospitalization and treatment.
  • The new coronavirus is highly transmissible and will be difficult to squelch. A single infected “super-spreader” can infect dozens of others. Outbreaks can seem to recede, only to rebound in short order, as the weather or conditions change.
  • In Hong Kong, people living 10 floors apart were infected, and an unsealed pipe was blamed. A British citizen apparently infected 10 people, including some at a ski chalet, before he even knew he was sick.
  • Unlike MERS and SARS, both diseases caused by coronaviruses, the virus spreading from China appears to be highly contagious, though it is probably less often fatal.
  • The country is so central to the world economy that it can easily “seed” epidemics everywhere, he said.
tongoscar

Coronavirus Live Updates: China Is Tracking Travelers From Hubei - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-coronavirus.html

shared by tongoscar on 14 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • To combat the spread of the coronavirus, Chinese officials are using a combination of technology and policing to track movements of citizens who may have visited Hubei Province.
  • Mobile phone owners in China get their service from one of three state-run telecommunications firms, which this week introduced a feature for subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited. That has created a new way for the authorities to see where citizens have traveled.At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu on Tuesday, officials in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages and then show their location information to the authorities before being permitted to leave the station. Those who had passed through Hubei were unlikely to be allowed entry.
  • Top officials in Beijing on Thursday expanded their mass roundup of sick or possibly infected people beyond Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, to include other cities in Hubei Province that have been hit hard by the crisis, according to the state-run CCTV broadcaster.
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  • Chinese officials reported Friday that a surge in new infections was continuing, though not as markedly as the day before, when the number of people confirmed to have the virus in Hubei Province skyrocketed by 14,840 cases.
  • Japan has confirmed its first death from the virus.
  • For a moment on Thursday, it seemed as if there might be some good news from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship being held in the port of Yokohama in Japan, when the authorities said they would release some passengers to shore to finish their quarantine.Instead, Japanese health officials announced the first death from the virus in the country, of a woman in her 80s. It was third death from the virus outside mainland China. The woman had no record of travel there.
  • The Centers for Disease Control said Thursday that a person under quarantine at a military base in San Antonio had tested positive for the virus, bringing the number of confirmed coronavirus patients in the United States to 15.
  • For the first time in a decade, global oil demand is expected to fall.
  • The arts world, too, is feeling the squeeze.Image
  • Movie releases have been canceled in China and symphony tours suspended. A major art fair in Hong Kong was called off. And spring art auctions half a world away in New York have been postponed because well-heeled Chinese buyers may find it difficult to travel to them.
  • The U.S. reported its 15th case after a person under quarantine tested positive.
  • The travel industry in Asia has been upended.Image
  • China ousted a provincial leader at the center of the outbreak.
  • China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday summarily fired two top Communist Party officials from Hubei Province, exacting political punishment for the regional government’s handling of the crisis.
  • A second citizen-journalist in Wuhan has disappeared.
  • A video blogger in the city of Wuhan who had been documenting conditions at overcrowded hospitals at the heart of the outbreak has disappeared, raising concerns among his supporters that he may have been detained by the authorities.The blogger, Fang Bin, is the second citizen journalist in the city to have gone missing in a week after criticizing the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic.Mr. Fang began posting videos from hospitals in Wuhan on YouTube last month, including one that showed a pile of body bags in a minibus. In early February, Mr. Fang said he had been briefly detained and questioned. A few days later, he filmed an exchange he had with strangers who showed up at his apartment claiming to bring him food.Mr. Fang’s last video, posted on Sunday, was a message written on a piece of paper: “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”Last week, Chen Qiushi, a citizen-journalist and lawyer in Wuhan who recorded the plight of patients and the shortage of hospital supplies, vanished, according to his friends.
  • South Korea quarantined hundreds of soldiers who visited China.
tongoscar

What We Know Today about Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and Where Do We Go from Here - 0 views

www.genengnews.com/...2-and-where-do-we-go-from-here

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (2019-nCoV) outbreak is an important reminder that the global community must strengthen national and international programs for early detection and response to future disease outbreaks.
  • Sequencing novel viruses helps remove the fear of the unknown by defining the viral genomic sequence for dissection and interpretation. While we are within the first two months of the first report to the World Health Organization (WHO) of SARS-CoV-21, and there remains much to learn, modern technology has identified and characterized the virus, sequenced its full genome, and started to describe the genetic evolution of the virus over a short time period.
  • On January 24, the first SARS-CoV-2 genome was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.2 To our knowledge, this is the first time a complete genome of a novel infectious agent has been publicly available in such a short time after the first case was reported to the WHO.
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  • As of February 7, over 80 SARS-CoV-2 genomes have been shared through the Global Initiative to Share All Influenza Data (GISAID) and GenBank, which will catalyze the research to understanding of the origin of the new virus, the epidemiology and transmission routes, and facilitate development of diagnostic and treatment strategies.3 Understanding the genome of SARS-CoV-2 early, provided unprecedented insight into dynamics of viral spread and impacted response strategies.
  • Within less than 60 days of reporting, global scientists know the likely origin of the virus, how similar it is to related viruses that are better understood, and what therapies may be applicable.
  • Analysis of the genomic information currently available, indicates SARS-CoV-2 is most closely related to a known bat SARS-like Coronavirus, indicating bats as the likely origin.
  • While this is early in the outbreak, there are no specific drugs available to treat SARS-CoV-2. There is high sequence conservation between SARS-CoV-2 and related SARS-CoV in viral drug targets, such as in protease and polymerase enzymes.
  • Reports from Africa indicate no positive cases of SARS-CoV-2 thus far. However, the lack of confirmed diagnoses may be due to a limited capacity for in-country testing rather than the true epidemiology of the virus.
tongoscar

'SARS-like damage' seen in dead coronavirus patient in China, report says | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...s-patient-in-china-report-says

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A lung biopsy found that a man who died in China from the new coronavirus last month had lung damage reminiscent of two prior coronavirus-related outbreaks, SARS and MERS.
  • “The pathological features of COVID-19 greatly resemble those seen in SARS and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus infection. In addition, the liver biopsy specimens of the patient with COVID-19 showed moderate microvascular steatosis and mild lobular and portal activity (figure 2C), indicating the injury could have been caused by either SARS-CoV-2 infection or drug-induced liver injury,” the new report published in The Lancet concluded.
  • The new coronavirus, COVID-19, has infected more than 72,000 people and killed over 1,868, far larger numbers than those who suffered from the SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, or MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, two other coronavirus epidemics of the past two decades.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In late 2002, a coronavirus nicknamed SARS broke out in Southern China, causing severe pneumonia and rapidly spreading to other countries. SARS infected more than 8,000 and killed 774, before disappearing altogether after a number of public health measures. In 2012, a similar outbreak known as MERS began infecting people in Saudi Arabia. It still causes infections in a small number of people each year, and in total has caused around 2,500 infections and more than 850 deaths.
  • The SARS disease appeared to be more deadly, however, killing around 10 percent of those infected.
tongoscar

China floods economy with cash with coronavirus outbreak set to hit economic growth har... - 0 views

www.scmp.com/...h-coronavirus-outbreak-set-hit

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The influx of credit is part of the country’s overall plan to kick-start production and bring the national economy back on track after the virus forced an extended Lunar New Year holiday.
  • The world’s second largest economy is widely estimated to suffer a decline of around a few percentage points in the first quarter of 2020 as the virus forced the vast majority of Chinese business activities to a standstill.A large decline from last year’s 6.1 per cent gross domestic product growth rate could threaten the long-pursued goal of building a “comprehensive well-off society”, which demands an increase of at least 5.6 per cent this year.
  • “Will this lead to a historical high this year? Does it mean an end to the deleveraging campaign? Debt concerns will certainly return from a long-term perspective,” he said. “If the nominal [gross domestic product] won’t be able to grow fast [upon the boost], the country is easy to fall into a liquidity trap like Japan,” Yeung warned.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Commercial banks extended 3.34 trillion yuan (US$477 billion) of credit in January, an all-time high for bank lending in a single month, the People’s Bank of China said Aggregate financing also reached a new high of 5.07 trillion yuan (US$724 billion)
  • Chinese banks flooded the economy with a record amount of bank credit at the start of 2020, a move aimed at protecting fragile growth amid the coronavirus outbreak.
johnsonel7

No Crowds at the Mona Lisa: Coronavirus Fears Hammer European Tourism - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-tourism-industry-11583404843

economics europe tourism

shared by johnsonel7 on 06 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus outbreak in Europe is scaring away travelers and hammering tourism just as the high season is getting under way. Thousands of people have canceled their trips to the region since the disease began to spread in Italy last month, drying up revenue for hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and conference planners across the continent. Those businesses are the economic lifeblood of many regions in Europe, clustered around its famed cultural attractions. The outbreak is costing the European Union’s tourism industry €1 billion ($1.1 billion) a month, said Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner.
  • In Paris, some cafes and nightclubs have seen a 40% drop in sales, he said.
  • Flight bookings to Europe the last week of February, when the Italian outbreak emerged, fell 79% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to ForwardKeys, which tracks travel data. In Italy, cancellations have exceeded new bookings over that time, the firm said
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  • The Vatican is facing a sharp drop in visitors to the Vatican Museums, which bring in €40 million in profit in a normal year and are a key revenue source for the church. Vatican officials declined to comment on a report in an Italian newspaper saying the museums had experienced a 60% drop in attendance
katherineharron

Supreme Court justices meet privately amid coronavirus outbreak - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court justices met privately on Friday to discuss pending cases and presumably how they will handle the rest of a blockbuster term as the nation and the world self-quarantine in the midst of a pandemic.
  • At the regularly scheduled conference a "number of justices" participated remotely by phone according to Kathy Arberg, the Court's public information officer. That's because six of them are 65 or older. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are in their 80s -- well within the government's standard for individuals at a higher risk.
  • The move to postpone is exceedingly rare, but there is precedent. In 1918, arguments were postponed in response to the Spanish flu epidemic. The calendar was shortened in 1793 and 1798 in response to yellow fever outbreaks.
Javier E

G.O.P. Theme in Fall Election: It's a Dark and Unsafe World - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trategy-midterm-elections.html

fear hysteria partisan demagogues GOP campaign

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • With four weeks to go before the midterm elections, Republicans have made questions of how safe we are – from disease, terrorism or something unspoken and perhaps more ominous – central in their attacks against Democrats. Their message is decidedly grim: Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party run a government that is so fundamentally broken it cannot offer its people the most basic protection from harm.
  • Republicans believe they have found the sentiment that will tie Congressional races together with a single national theme.
  • When Republicans picked up seats in the House and Senate in 2010, they did so by running on burning emotional issues like unemployment and anger over the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
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  • While anger and economic unease have subsided, polls suggest that people are anxious. A recent survey by The Associated Press found that 53 percent of Americans believe the risk of another terrorist attack inside the country is extremely high or very high. In a new Pew poll, 41 percent said they had “not too much confidence” or “no confidence at all” that the government could prevent a major Ebola outbreak in the United States.
  • That lack of confidence in the government is a sentiment Republicans are trying to tether to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party.
  • Republicans said the hyperbole highlighted the perception that the president, with his no-drama air, often plays down the seriousness of the problems facing the country.
Javier E

Measles Cases Linked to Disneyland Rise, and Debate Over Vaccinations Intensifies - NYT... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-vaccinations-intensifies.html

science denial vaccine

shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • This is a serious contagious disease that is preventable. The message is absolutely critical that if you are not vaccinated, you need to get vaccinated.”
  • The vaccination exemption rate among kindergarten students in California — cases in which parents said they did not want their children vaccinated for health, religious or other reasons — was 3.1 percent in the 2013-14 school year, according to the C.D.C. report. Oregon had an exemption rate of 7.1 percent, the nation’s highest, the report found. Health officials said the vaccination rate needed to be above 95 percent in all communities to prevent outbreaks.
  • Health officials said there were pockets across the state, including wealthy neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Orange Counties and enclaves in Northern California, where the exemption rate jumped into the double digits.
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  • “The problem is that there are these pockets with low vaccination rates,” said Dr. Jane Seward, the deputy director of the viral diseases division at the C.D.C. “If a case comes into a population where a lot of people are unvaccinated, that’s where you get the outbreak and where you get the spread.”
  • “It’s premature to blame the increase in reports of measles on the unvaccinated when we don’t have all the facts yet,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a group raising concerns about inoculations. “I do know this: Fifty-seven cases of measles coming out of Disneyland in a country with a population of 317 million people is not a lot of cases. We should all take a deep breath and wait to see and get more information.”
carolinewren

Journalists debunk vaccine science denial - 0 views

scitation.aip.org/...PT.5.8096

vaccines science denial science

shared by carolinewren on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • extra difficulties imposed irrationally by antiscience.
  • Large outbreaks in the U.S. of the highly infectious disease have become more common in the past two years, even though measles hasn’t been indigenous since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • difficult because concerns about a possible link between vaccines and autism—now debunked by science—have expanded to more general, and equally groundless, worries about the effects of multiple shots on a child’s immune system, vaccine experts and doctors say.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • It summarized and condemned the scientific and medical fraud that the British researcher Andrew Wakefield perpetrated. Years earlier, he had falsely linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. The editorial lamented that “the damage to public health continues, fuelled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals, and the medical profession.”
  • Reporters also seek to ensure that viewers, listeners, or readers understand that measles can afflict a victim more powerfully than does a mere passing ailment.
  • Measles doesn’t spread in most U.S. communities because people are protected by “herd immunity,” meaning that 92% to 94% of the population is vaccinated or immune. That level of protection makes it hard for one case of measles to spread even from one unvaccinated person to another without direct contact.
  • a study that “found that only 51 percent of Americans were confident that vaccines are safe and effective, which is similar to the proportion who believe that houses can be haunted by ghosts.”
  • In some parts of California, resistance to vaccinations including the MMR shot is stronger than ever, despite cases of measles hitting five US states.
  • “Vaccines are a great idea, but they are poisoning us, adding things that kick in later in life so they can sell us more drugs.”
  • Health professionals say those claims are unfounded or vastly overstated.
  • “the anti-vaccination movement is fueled by an over-privileged group of rich people grouped together who swear they won’t put any chemicals in their kids (food or vaccines or whatever else), either because it’s trendy to be all-natural or they don’t understand or accept the science of vaccinations. Their science denying has been propelled further by celebrities
  • the outbreak “should worry and enrage the public.” It indicted the anti-vaxxers’ “ignorant and self-absorbed rejection of science” and declared, “Getting vaccinated is good for the health of the inoculated person and also part of one’s public responsibility to help protect the health of others.”
  • “It’s wrong,” the editors emphasized, “to allow public health to be threatened while everyone else waits for these science-denying parents to open their eyes.”
  • “It’s because these people are highly educated and they get on the Internet and read things and think they can figure things out better than their physician.”
  • linked vaccination opposition to the “political left, which has long been suspicious of the lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry and its influence on government regulators, and also the fringe political right, which has at different times seen vaccination, fluoridisation and other public-health initiatives as attempts by big government to impose tyrannical limits on personal freedom.”
  • Attempts to increase concerns about communicable diseases or correct false claims about vaccines may be especially likely to be counterproductive.
  • “attempting balance by giving vaccine skeptics and pro-vaccine advocates equal weight in news stories leads people to believe the evidence for and against vaccination is equally strong.”
  • A recent edition of the Washington Post carried a letter defending anti-vaxxers as “people who generally are pro-science and highly educated, who have high incomes and who have studied this issue carefully before coming to the conclusion that the risk to their children is greater than the slim possibility of contracting a childhood disease that [in many cases leaves] little or no residual consequences.”
  • anecdotal evidence suggests that some journalists, rather than omitting anti-vaxxers’ views, prefer to expose them and then oppose them.
  • “unwarranted fear . . . an assault on one of the greatest public-health inventions in world history.”
maddieireland334

Has Ebola focus led to other killer diseases being ignored? - 0 views

diigo.com/07h3h4

health social media science ebola

shared by maddieireland334 on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 29 Mar 15
     
    The world is focusing on the Ebola outbreak in three West African states but what about malaria and measles? A year of battling Ebola in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea has seen unprecedented effort and resources poured into one outbreak over such a short time.
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