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cvanderloo

WHO Team Arrives In Wuhan To Investigate Coronavirus Pandemic Origins | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...ins_n_600022c6c5b63642b7022404

covid wuhan pandemic origins research WHO

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Scientists suspect the virus that has killed more than 1.9 million people since late 2019 jumped to humans from bats or other animals, most likely in China’s southwest.
  • Fifteen team members were to arrive in Wuhan on Thursday, but two tested positive for coronavirus antibodies before leaving Singapore
  • The team includes virus and other experts from the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, Qatar and Vietnam.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      They all will have different perspectives which is crucial.
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  • China rejected demands for an international investigation after the Trump administration blamed Beijing for the virus’s spread, which plunged the global economy into its deepest slump since the 1930s.
  • The coronavirus’s exact origin may never be traced because viruses change quickly, Woolhouse said
  • pinning down an outbreak’s animal reservoir is typically an exhaustive endeavor that takes years of research including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.
  • he incident “raises the question if the Chinese authorities were trying to interfere,”
  • Beijing retaliated by blocking imports of Australian beef, wine and other goods.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      This feels very petty to me.
  • A year after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, the city is now bustling, with few signs that it was once the epicenter of the outbreak in China. But some residents say they’re still eager to learn about its origin.
  • covering closely related viruses might help explain how the disease first jumped from animals and clarify what preventive measures are needed to avoid future epidemics.
  • “Now is not the time to blame anyone,” Shih said. “We shouldn’t say, it’s your fault
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 travel industry in Asia has been upended.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 arts world, too, is feeling the squeeze.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.
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.
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

17 More People Diagnosed With Viral Pneumonia in China | Time - 0 views

time.com/...iral-pneumonia-illness-spreads

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • (BEIJING) — Seventeen more people in central China have been diagnosed with a new form of viral pneumonia that has killed two patients and placed other countries on alert as millions of Chinese travel for Lunar New Year holidays.
  • In total, 62 cases of the novel coronavirus have been identified in the city of Wuhan, where the virus appears to have originated. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported the new cases in a statement Sunday.
  • Nineteen of those individuals have been discharged from the hospital, while two men in their 60s — one with severe preexisting conditions — have died from the illness. Eight are in critical condition.
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  • At least a half-dozen countries in Asia and three U.S. airports have started screening incoming airline passengers from central China.
  • In the most recently diagnosed group, ages ranged between 30 and 79, Wuhan’s health commission said. Their initial symptoms were fever and cough.
  • The health commission’s statement did not say whether these patients had visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which has been suspended after many infected individuals reported having either worked at or visited the venue.
  • Most patients are experiencing mild symptoms, Li said, and no related cases have been found in more than 700 people who came into close contact with infected patients.
  • The Chinese government is keen to avoid a repeat of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, another coronavirus that started in southern China in late 2002 and spread to more than two dozen countries, killing nearly 800 people.
tongoscar

Live Updates: Economic Fallout From Coronavirus Grows - The New York Times - 0 views

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

shared by tongoscar on 18 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Reports from manufacturing, banking and other sectors showed the worsening impact of the epidemic, which has brought much of China’s economy to a standstill.
  • Right NowJapan plans to release about 500 cruise ships passengers on Wednesday.
  • Economic fallout from the new coronavirus epidemic continued to spread on Tuesday, with new evidence emerging in manufacturing, financial markets, commodities, banking and other sectors.
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  • U.S. stocks declined on Tuesday, a day after Apple warned that it would miss its sales forecasts due to disruption in China, as concerns about the impact of the outbreak weighed on the outlook for the global economy.
  • Half of China’s population is facing new travel restrictions.Image
  • At least 150 million people in China — over 10 percent of the country’s population — are living under government restrictions on how often they can leave their homes, The New York Times found in examining dozens of local government announcements and reports from state-run news outlets.
  • Japan says 500 people will be released from cruise ship after more cases confirmed.
  • Australia plans to repatriate about 200 of its citizens aboard the ship on Wednesday, and other countries have similar plans, but Japanese officials did not say whether any of those people were among the 500 who would be allowed to disembark.
  • Britain prepares to evacuate citizens from cruise ship.
  • The new virus is deadlier than the one that causes the flu, Chinese figures suggest.Image
  • The director of a hospital in Wuhan has died from the virus.
  • Stigma surrounding virus impacts communities in Europe.
  • Domestic workers from the Philippines will be permitted to return to Hong Kong.Image
  • South Korea’s leader warns of a dire impact on economy.
  • Cruise ship passengers blocked from leaving Cambodia.
Javier E

What Does Coronavirus Do to the Body? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-body-symptoms.html

Covid-19 symptom process

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • the virus appears to start in peripheral areas on both sides of the lung and can take a while to reach the upper respiratory tract, the trachea and other central airways.
  • that pattern helps explain why in Wuhan, where the outbreak began, many of the earliest cases were not identified immediately.
  • The initial testing regimen in many Chinese hospitals did not always detect infection in the peripheral lungs, so some people with symptoms were sent home without treatment.
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  • it’s unclear whether infectious virus can persist in blood or stool
  • the infection can spread through the mucous membranes, from the nose down to the rectum.
  • while the virus appears to zero in on the lungs, it may also be able to infect cells in the gastrointestinal system, experts say. This may be why some patients have symptoms like diarrhea or indigestion
  • “The virus will actually land on organs like the heart, the kidney, the liver, and may cause some direct damage to those organs,
  • some patients in China recovered but got sick again, apparently because they had damaged and vulnerable lung tissue that was subsequently attacked by bacteria in their body.
  • As the body’s immune system shifts into high gear to battle the infection, the resulting inflammation may cause those organs to malfunction, he said.
  • About 80 percent of people infected with the new coronavirus have relatively mild symptoms. But about 20 percent of people become more seriously ill and in about 2 percent of patients in China, which has had the most cases, the disease has been fatal.
  • the effects appear to depend on how robust or weakened a person’s immune system is. Older people or those with underlying health issues, like diabetes or another chronic illness, are more likely to develop severe symptoms
  • the course a patient’s coronavirus will take is not yet fully understood.
  • Some patients can remain stable for over a week and then suddenly develop pneumonia, Dr. Diaz said. Some patients seem to recover but then develop symptoms again.
  • more than half of 121 patients in China had normal CT scans early in their disease.
  • Coronavirus particles have spiked proteins sticking out from their surfaces, and these spikes hook onto cell membranes, allowing the virus’s genetic material to enter the human cell.
  • That genetic material proceeds to “hijack the metabolism of the cell and say, in effect, ‘Don’t do your usual job. Your job now is to help me multiply and make the virus,’
  • As copies of the virus multiply, they burst out and infect neighboring cells. The symptoms often start in the back of the throat with a sore throat and a dry cough.
  • The virus then “crawls progressively down the bronchial tubes,”
  • That can damage the alveoli or lung sacs and they have to work harder to carry out their function of supplying oxygen to the blood
  • The swelling and the impaired flow of oxygen can cause those areas in the lungs to fill with fluid, pus and dead cells. Pneumonia, an infection in the lung, can occur
  • Some people have so much trouble breathing they need to be put on a ventilator
Javier E

Five months on, what scientists now know about the coronavirus | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...now-know-about-the-coronavirus

Covid-19 theory results research science Knowledge

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The Sars-CoV-2 virus almost certainly originated in bats, which have evolved fierce immune responses to viruses, researchers have discovered. These defences drive viruses to replicate faster so that they can get past bats’ immune defences. In turn, that transforms the bat into a reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly transmissible viruses
  • “This virus probably jumped from a bat into another animal, and that other animal was probably near a human, maybe in a market,
  • Virus-ridden particles are inhaled by others and come into contact with cells lining the throat and larynx. These cells have large numbers of receptors – known as Ace-2 receptors – on their surfaces. (Cell receptors play a key role in passing chemicals into cells and in triggering signals between cells.
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  • “This virus has a surface protein that is primed to lock on that receptor and slip its RNA into the cell,”
  • Once inside, that RNA inserts itself into the cell’s own replication machinery and makes multiple copies of the virus. These burst out of the cell, and the infection spreads. Antibodies generated by the body’s immune system eventually target the virus and in most cases halt its progress.
  • “A Covid-19 infection is generally mild, and that really is the secret of the virus’s success,” adds Ball. “Many people don’t even notice they have got an infection and so go around their work, homes and supermarkets infecting others.”
  • the virus can cause severe problems. This happens when it moves down the respiratory tract and infects the lungs, which are even richer in cells with Ace-2 receptors. Many of these cells are destroyed, and lungs become congested with bits of broken cell. In these cases, patients will require treatment in intensive care.
  • Even worse, in some cases, a person’s immune system goes into overdrive, attracting cells to the lungs in order to attack the virus, resulting in inflammation
  • This process can run out of control, more immune cells pour in, and the inflammation gets worse. This is known as a cytokine storm.
  • Just why cytokine storms occur in some patients but not in the vast majority is unclear
  • Doctors examining patients recovering from a Covid-19 infection are finding fairly high levels of neutralising antibodies in their blood. These antibodies are made by the immune system, and they coat an invading virus at specific points, blocking its ability to break into cells.
  • Instead, most virologists believe that immunity against Covid-19 will last only a year or two. “That is in line with other coronaviruses that infect humans,
  • “It is clear that immune responses are being mounted against Covid-19 in infected people,” says virologist Mike Skinner of Imperial College London. “And the antibodies created by that response will provide protection against future infections – but we should note that it is unlikely this protection will be for life.”
  • “That means that even if most people do eventually become exposed to the virus, it is still likely to become endemic – which means we would see seasonal peaks of infection of this disease. We will have reached a steady state with regard to Covid-19.”
  • Skinner is doubtful. “We have got to consider this pandemic from the virus’s position,” he says. “It is spreading round the world very nicely. It is doing OK. Change brings it no benefit.”
  • In the end, it will be the development and roll-out of an effective vaccine that will free us from the threat of Covid-19,
  • the journal Nature reported that 78 vaccine projects had been launched round the globe – with a further 37 in development.
  • vaccines require large-scale safety and efficacy studies. Thousands of people would receive either the vaccine itself or a placebo to determine if the former were effective at preventing infection from the virus which they would have encountered naturally. That, inevitably, is a lengthy process.
  • some scientists have proposed a way to speed up the process – by deliberately exposing volunteers to the virus to determine a vaccine’s efficacy.
  • Volunteers would have to be young and healthy, he stresses: “Their health would also be closely monitored, and they would have access to intensive care and any available medicines.”
  • The result could be a vaccine that would save millions of lives by being ready for use in a much shorter time than one that went through standard phase three trials.
  • phase-three trials are still some way off, so we have time to consider the idea carefully.”
Javier E

The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ce-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic

pandemic profit economic response opportunity financial

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have,” he said over the phone. No argument here. He wouldn’t specify an amount, but reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year.
  • He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech, one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks, with the expectation that when the virus made it across the Pacific the company would get government contracts to produce more. The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share, and so, for cents on the dollar, he bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars: he was betting that it would go up much more than that. By the end of February, the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share
  • He quickly put some money to work
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  • He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.
  • Last October, he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and plagues in my head,” the Australian said. “In December, I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China, and then in early January there was a lot on Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family, and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find.
  • The Australian, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty.
  • The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path.
  • perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.
  • I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s
  • they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus
  • They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program “Mad Money,” on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.
  • it’s hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings.
  • This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the virus’s victims, the economy had a preëxisting condition—debt, instead of pulmonary disease.
  • “It’s as if the virus is almost beside the point,” a trader I know told me. “This was all set up to happen.”
  • the “smart money,” like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by March’s end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit lines
  • In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down “just” $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.
  • It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapses—haircuts for baldheads—leading to more defaults.
  • In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.
  • As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didn’t have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions
  • On March 20th, Goldman Sachs spooked the world, by predicting a twenty-four-per-cent decline in G.D.P. in the second quarter, a falloff in activity that seemed at once both unthinkable and inevitable. Subsequent predictions grew even more disma
clairemann

How the U.S. Could Sleepwalk into a War with China | Time - 0 views

time.com/...sleepwalk-war-with-china

world war history thinking

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Our assessment is that both nations are rapidly ascending the slope of that metaphorical mountain, and will likely find themselves in a full-blown, Cold War-like status in the near future
  • The two nations are significantly at odds over the status of the South China Sea, which China claims as territorial waters, potentially giving them control over rich oil and gas deposits and dominance over the 40% of the world’s trade that passes through these strategic seas.
  • China; offensive cyber activities undertaken by both sides; widespread human rights violations against the Muslim Uighur population within China; and the status of Hong Kong, where the U.S. believes China to be in violation of the treaty which returned the former British colony to a “special status” within China.
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  • American companies in China who refuse to toe the line on Chinese policy issues (such as the status of Taiwan and the treatment of Uighurs); the devastating results of COVID-19 in the U.S. originating from a virus that first started to spread in Wuhan; and the freedom of Taiwan to decide whether or not to eventually unify politically with China.
  • If such an incident occurred, perhaps in the Taiwan Straits adding in the additional factor of extreme Chinese pride and nationalism over their view of Taiwan as a sovereign part of China, it could easily spark a far larger military exchange than the warning shots and close approaches we have seen thus far.
  • Larger strikes from either side could follow, as could a far broader cyberattack, perhaps against critical infrastructure. Carrier strike groups on both sides could deploy head-to-head. With even more significant losses, the temptation to employ a tactical nuclear weapons – perhaps at sea, thinking it could never then escalate to a strategic exchange – might rise.
  • The chances of the U.S. and China stumbling into a war are real and increasing.
jmfinizio

Wuhan: Two WHO team members blocked from entering China over failed coronavirus antibod... - 0 views

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

china covid19 cnn

shared by jmfinizio on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Two members of a World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic have been blocked from flying to China after failing a coronavirus antibody test.
  • IgM antibodies are among the earliest potential signs of a coronavirus infection,
  • False positives are also possible with such tests.
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  • Since November 2020, travelers flying into China have to show neg
  • had previously been tested and found negative for coronavirus multiple times,
  • "I have been in contact with senior Chinese officials and I have once again made clear that the mission is a priority for WHO and the international team."
  • nothing is off limits
  • "We really need to have patience and not judge. It's meticulous work, it will take time,
  • the US would terminate its relationship with WHO,
  • "the investigation itself appears to be inconsistent" with its mandate.
  • As countries around the world struggle with new infection surges and outbreaks, China appears to be rebounding.
  • "more and more research suggests that the pandemic was likely to have been caused by separate outbreaks in multiple places in the world."
huffem4

Trump's "Chinese Virus" and What's at Stake in the Coronavirus's Name | The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...hats-at-stake-in-a-viruss-name

COVID-19 knowledge racism

shared by huffem4 on 26 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • In another part of the study, the researchers determined that defining vaccination in terms of contamination—“the seasonal flu vaccine involves injecting people with the seasonal flu virus”—increased prejudice in subjects concerned about disease, whereas defining it in terms of protection—“the seasonal flu vaccine protects people from the seasonal flu virus”—had no such effect. Initiatives that minimize disease, the researchers concluded, might also end up minimizing discrimination.
  • It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump enlisted such language to serve his nativist agenda. Although COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has killed more than twenty thousand people and affected countries around the world, Trump’s fixation on its origins in Wuhan, China, has encouraged a rash of anti-Asian bigotry in the United States.
  • This month, Trump has taken to referring to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus,” presenting the label as a corrective to Beijing officials’ claims that the American military was the source of the outbreak.
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  • Much of the old nomenclature has turned out to be not only stigmatizing but inaccurate. The Ebola virus, for instance, gets its name from a river that sits about forty miles from Yambuku, the Congolese village where researchers first investigated the disease, in 1976.
  • Still, it’s hard not to see a similarity between the recent reports of harassment against Asian-Americans and the stigmatization that gay people suffered in the wake of the AIDS outbreak.
  • Evolutionary psychologists refer to a “behavioral immune system” that attunes humans to physical differences or unfamiliar behavior, even when it poses no risk.
  • Last week, an Asian-American journalist reported that a member of the President’s staff called COVID-19 the “kung flu” to her face.
  • This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected
  • no disease better illustrates the perils of disease naming than AIDS, which, in its early days, was sometimes called “gay cancer.”
tongoscar

Chinese economy clobbered by coronavirus but set to recover soon: Reuters poll - 0 views

finance.yahoo.com/...coronavirus-set-001922711.html

shared by tongoscar on 14 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus-hit Chinese economy will grow at its slowest rate since the financial crisis in the current quarter, according to a Reuters poll of economists who said the downturn will be short-lived if the outbreak is contained.
  • However, economists were optimistic the economy would bounce back as soon as the second quarter, with growth then forecast to recover to a median 5.7%, according to the poll.
  • That figure was pushed higher by several optimistic forecasts from economists based in mainland China. The range was 2.9%-6.5%.
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  • "I think the virus will be under control by April. However, in the worst-case scenario, growth may fall to 2-3% in the first quarter and to 5% in (full-year) 2020," said Bingnan Ye, senior macroeconomic analyst at Bank of China International in Beijing.
  • China's share of the global economy has quadrupled to 16% since the SARS outbreak, so any major disruption to economic activity is likely to have a bigger impact on the world economy now.
  • "Every day is a deadline in February as Wuhan coronavirus data roll in," noted Lee Hardman, currency strategist at MUFG, the most accurate forecaster for Asian currencies in 2019. "For the yuan, the overall depreciation story continues."
tongoscar

U.S. prepares for coronavirus pandemic, school and business closures: health officials ... - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...health-officials-idUSKBN20F2GS

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The United States has yet to see community spread of the virus that emerged in central China in late December. But health authorities are preparing medical personnel for the risk, Nancy Messonnier, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told reporters on a conference call.
  • The World Health Organization has warned that the window of opportunity to contain the international spread of the epidemic that has killed more than 2,200 people was closing, as the virus has spread to some 26 countries with a large cluster in South Korea and recent outbreaks in Iran, Lebanon and Italy
  • “Our goal continues to be to slow the introduction of the virus into the U.S. This buys us more time to prepare communities for more cases and possibly sustained spread.”
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  • “We’re not seeing community spread here in the United States yet, but it’s very possible, even likely, that it may eventually happen,” Messonnier said.
  • “If we do well, we can avert any serious crisis, but if we squander the opportunity then we will have a serious problem on our hands,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva.
  • The United States currently has 13 cases of people diagnosed with the virus within the country and 21 cases among Americans repatriated on evacuation flights from Wuhan, China, and from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, CDC said.
tongoscar

Coronavirus economic impact: Australia could be among world's hardest hit nations | Wor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ong-worlds-hardest-hit-nations

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Australia could be one of the countries worst affected by the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak as factories in China remain shuttered and millions of people are confined to their homes and banned from travelling.
  • But evidence is mounting that China is suffering a significant slowdown. S&P has downgraded its growth forecast for the world’s second biggest economy to 5% this year from 5.75%, predicting that the impact would spread around the world, while it seems clear that China’s lockdown is set to deprive Australia of billions of dollars in revenue from big spending tourists and students.
  • “When you look at how this will affect other countries, what their exposure is to China, how big the economy is, what type of companies it has, then Australia ticks a lot of the boxes,” he said. “In terms of which countries will be most affected, we’re right up there.”
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  • “It’s not just the numbers of tourists – it’s that they spend quite a lot because of the way they travel with packages, how they get around and spending on shopping,” he says. “If that gets cut off it’s a material impact on the economy in Australia.”
  • However, some partial data released on Friday suggests the scale of the problem that is emerging, with figures showing that property sales in China’s so-called first-tier cities fell by 93% on 3-5 February compared with the same days last year. Railway passenger traffic was down 89% on 5 February.
tongoscar

Coronavirus infection cases spread further in Japan - Japan Today - 0 views

japantoday.com/...-cases-spread-further-in-Japan

shared by tongoscar on 18 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The latest cases in Tokyo and Hokkaido involved people with no recent travel history to China and came on the heels of Japan's first coronavirus death -- that of a woman in her 80s in Kanagawa Prefecture, whose son-in-law, a taxi driver, was also found to be infected with the virus.
  • One was a worker on a traditional yakatabune roofed party boat on which the taxi driver attended a New Year's party held Jan. 18 with his wife, while the other did not attend the party but is a staffer of a taxi union the driver belongs to, the Tokyo government said.
  • So far, more than 250 people in Japan -- 218 of whom are passengers and crew from a cruise ship quarantined in Yokohama -- have been found to be infected with the pneumonia-causing virus.
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  • While health minister Katsunobu Kato said there is "no reason for changing the government position that it has yet to reach a state of epidemic in Japan," infection of a Hokkaido resident in his 50s with no recent history of traveling abroad has been confirmed, the Hokkaido government said. The man is being treated at a hospital where he remains in serious condition.
  • Elsewhere in Japan, a female taxi driver in her 60s in Okinawa tested positive for the virus, becoming the first confirmed case of infection in the country's southernmost island prefecture or the Kyushu region, local authorities said.
  • The government has already sent four chartered planes and repatriated a total of 763 people from Wuhan and other areas of Hubei Province amid a wide-scale lockdown of the area. It is planning to send a fifth plane on Sunday to bring home more Japanese and family members who wish to leave the city, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said.
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.
katherineharron

The US is asking other countries for everything from hand sanitizer to ventilators to h... - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration is appealing to countries around the world to give or sell the US items as basic as hand sanitizer and as complex as respirators to combat the surging coronavirus pandemic.
  • The requests come as President Donald Trump touts his domestic response and declines to deploy the full power of the federal government's Defense Production Act to produce and funnel crucial supplies to struggling states and hospitals. It's not clear how many countries the US has appealed to.
  • The administration is making these private appeals as Trump is striking a starkly different note in public. At Tuesday's daily coronavirus briefing from the White House, not long after he had called the South Korean leader, the President veered into campaign-style rhetoric, declaring that, "America will never be a supplicant nation."
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  • "My job at the White House right now is to help find whatever the American people need and buy it from wherever we can, and if we need to send a plane to go get it, we'll get that done using the full force of government and private enterprise," Mr. Navarro said
  • "If China or any other country has some masks, gloves or other products we need for the American people, we welcome that with open arms," he said.
  • "Hopefully we can match up external suppliers, external sources with states and entities in the US that actually need them," they said.
  • New York alone had over 25,000 known infections on Tuesday and 210 dead. Its governor, Andrew Cuomo, angrily told reporters that he needed "30,000" ventilators.
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