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News-Nugget About The Coronavirus Pandemic
Excerpts from three current pieces about the novel coronavirus pandemic.
NPR: White House Knew Coronavirus Would Be A 'Major Threat' — But Response Fell Short
In the case of Alex Azar, [the head of Health and Human Services], he did go to the president in January. He did push past resistance from the president's political aides to warn the president the new coronavirus could be a major problem. There were aides around Trump – Kellyanne Conway had some skepticism at times that this was something that needed to be a presidential priority.
But at the same time, Secretary Azar has not always given the president the worst-case scenario of what could happen. My understanding is he did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that's partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear – the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.
So how did that worst-case scenario look?
NYT: The Worst-Case Estimate for U.S. Coronavirus Deaths
Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and epidemic experts from universities around the world conferred last month about what might happen if the new coronavirus gained a foothold in the United States. How many people might die? How many would be infected and need hospitalization?
One of the agency’s top disease modelers, Matthew Biggerstaff, presented the group on the phone call with four possible scenarios — A, B, C and D — based on characteristics of the virus, including estimates of how transmissible it is and the severity of the illness it can cause. The assumptions, reviewed by The New York Times, were shared with about 50 expert teams to model how the virus could tear through the population — and what might stop it.
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Between 160 million and 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to one projection. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.
And, the calculations based on the C.D.C.’s scenarios suggested, 2.4 million to 21 million people in the U.S. could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. Fewer than a tenth of those are for people who are critically ill.
That is why we argued that only an early and lasting lockdown can prevent that the health care system goes into overload and that many people who would ordinarily survive would otherwise unnecessarily die.
A U.S. op-ed writer, who was in China during the lockdown, repeats our criticism of the racism that led to the still sluggish response in 'western' countries.
NYT: China Bought the West Time. The West Squandered It.
[F]or weeks now, the attitude toward the coronavirus outbreak in the United States and much of Europe has been bizarrely reactive, if not outright passive — or that the governments in those regions have let pass their best chance to contain the virus’s spread. Having seen a kind of initial denial play out already in China, I feel a sense of déjà vu. But while China had to contend with a nasty, sudden surprise, governments in the West have been on notice for weeks.
It’s as if China’s experience hadn’t given Western countries a warning of the perils of inaction. Instead, many governments seem to have imitated some of the worst measures China put in place, while often turning a blind eye to the best of them, or its successes.
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In my experience living in China for weeks during the peak period of the lockdown and talking to various groups beyond the disgruntled elites, people were frustrated, even exasperated, by the containment measures — but they largely supported them, too.
And while some in the West fixated on how China’s system failed to stem the outbreak at first, they were ignoring the aspects of it that worked. There’s nothing authoritarian about checking temperatures at airports, enforcing social distancing or offering free medical care to anyone with Covid-19.
Your host is currently working on a piece about the social, political and geopolitical consequences the pandemic is likely to have. My first outline says that these will be huge and will reverb over several decades. I will have to tone that down.
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Previous Moon of Alabama posts on the issue:
December 29, according to Caixin the industry leader Huada Gene (Shenzhen, China) completed a case of gene sequencing, and the results showed that the virus and SARS gene sequence similarity was as high as 80%.
On December 31, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health and Health Commission announced multiple cases of pneumonia were related to the South China seafood market.
On December 31, the first expert group of the National Health Commission on December 31, 2019. Peng Zhiyong, director of Critical Care Medicine confirmed the diagnostic criteria was 1)have a history of exposure to the South China seafood market; 2) have a fever Symptoms; 3) whole genome sequencing. All three criteria are required to confirm the diagnosis.
On January 1, 2020, the South China Seafood Market was closed for a environmental sanitation rectification.
Presumably the confiscated all live animals and tested them. They have not reported which animals if any tested positive. No bats are sold in the market.
On January 1, Huida Genes three sample test reports were reported to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.
On Jan 2 , Wang Yanyi, director of Wuhan Institute of Virology, issued a notice to researchers, forbidding anyone to release info the virus without permission.
On Jan 5, Zhang’s Yongzhens team at Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre isolated and finished the genome sequence of the then-unknown virus on January 5. The Shanghai centre reported its discovery to the National Health Commission on the same day
Jan 9, China’s officially announces that mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan were caused by a hitherto unknown coronavirus.
Jan 11. Zhangs team made the finding public after it saw that the authorities had taken no obvious action to warn the public about the coronavirus.
Jan 12. According to an article in SCMP today the laboratory at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre was ordered to close for “rectification” on January 12, a day after Professor Zhang Yongzhen’s team published the genome sequence on open platforms.
January 18, the second group of experts such as Zhong Nanshan of the National Health Commission on December 31, 2019 revised the diagnostic criteria after 16 consecutive days of NO NEW CASES (clearly impossible)
On January 22, Gao Fu, director of the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that the source of the New Coronavirus in Wuhan was wild animals illegally sold in a seafood market in Wuhan.
On January 23, 2020, Wuhan declared lockdown. Subsequent cities and provinces followed in the next days but a few million people had already departed Wuhan by this time for the weeklong New Year Holidays .
Also on January 23, the Shi Zhengli team published an article on bioRxiv preprinted version of the platform titled, “A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin.” The report proposed that the new Wuhan Coronavirus was derived from bats. The paper was subsequently published in the journal Nature on February 3.
The article stated that they found that the sequence of the novel Coronavirus was 96.2% identical to that of the Coronavirus numbered RaTG13 derived from Yunnan horseshoe bats
January 24, Netflix releases Pandemic series, a documentary about a future pandemic, funded by Bill Gates and obviously production began well before the Wuhan pandemic
On January 26, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said that 33 samples tested positive for the New Coronavirus nucleic acid out of 585 environmental samples taken from the South China Seafood Market . They announced that the virus originated from wild animals sold in the South China Seafood Market but did not identify which animals.
On Jan 27th, Shi Zhengli submitted the registration information of RaTG13 bat virus referred to in her Jan 23 preprint article, showing that the virus was isolated from the feces of Yunnan horseshoe bats (chrysanthemum bat) as early as July 24, 2013. It was never mentioned in any of her previous papers. Must of been locked away in an ice box for 7 years or something.
On January 27th a report published online by Science cited a paper in the medical journal The Lancet, suggesting that the source of the New Coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan may not be the South China seafood market.
The paper, titled “Clinical Features of New Coronavirus Infected Patients“, was published in The Lancet on January 24. The first author of the paper was Huang Chao Lin, the deputy director of Jinyintan Hospital, the first designated hospital for unknown pneumonia in Wuhan. The rest of the authors included other clinicians in the hospital and members of several research institutions.
This paper revealed the following key information:
* The first patient had an onset of disease on December 1st, which was not associated with the seafood market.
* The first patient had no epidemic association with subsequent patients.
* On December 10th, another 3 cases had occurred, of which 2 were not related to South China seafood market.
* Starting from December 15th, cases with a history of exposure to the seafood market are concentrated.
* The paper counts a total of 41 patients, and 14 cases are not related to the seafood market, the proportion exceeds 1/3.
* No bats are sold in the seafood market and no trace of bats has been found.
On January 29 a study in The Lancet analyzed 99 confirmed cases at Jinyintan Hospital, 50 of which had no history of contact with the seafood market.
The New England Journal of Medicine also published a paper showing that: Of the 425 cases, 45% of those affected before January 1 had no history of exposure to the seafood market.
Why did China require that the “history of seafood market contact” be included in the diagnosis criteria up until January 18 when it knew that at least one third of the cases are not related to the seafood market?
On February 7th, Liu Yahong, President of South China Agricultural University, revealed that researchers from South China Agricultural University, Lingnan Guangdong Provincial Laboratory of Modern Agriculture, Shen Yongyi, Xiao Lihua and other researchers analyzed a thousand metagenome samples and found a β-crown on pangolins. The virus they said may be closely related to Wuhan Coronavirus.
Shen Yongyi of Huanong Veterinary College Research Institute stated in an interview that the pangolin samples found to carry the virus did not come from Guangdong, and were “obtained from certain institutions.” He admits that no such virus was found in the samples of common Chinese pangolins collected by themselves. As to why “a specific agency” took the initiative to provide them with these special samples, it was not mentioned in the report.
Posted by: Pft | Mar 14 2020 6:56 utc | 218
Clipping:
China report says human rights situation deteriorating in U.S.
China is stepping up in the propaganda warfare front. It’s finally realized playing nice is not enough against the West’s very big and very well-oiled propaganda machine.
Abe can now declare a state of emergency over COVID-19 — but will he?
Japan’s fascist capitalist system is simply a thing to behold, isn’t it? When the Diamond debacle happened, the country simply begun to enforce blatant censorship. When it became clear Tokyo was infected to the core with the COVID-19, they simply enforced your pure, unadultered, censorship: the circa 1,300 cases we register now are the same circa 1,300 cases of one month ago, they simply classified the real number and stopped the updates. Then, under the cover of darkness, they evacuated the imperial family from Tokyo. Then, the same day (!!) they declare the 2020 Olympics will “definitely happen”.
Because this is what fascists do: when reality doesn’t conform with their tiny little imaginary world, they simply deny it – that is, as long as their elites are safe in a bunker (pun intended).
If you want an example of a people kept in the dark, look to Japan, not to China (where daily updates, with easy-to-read graphics, are available in many news outlets, including official and extraofficial ones).
Washington Post hypes fake news on coronavirus ‘burial pits’ in Iran
That piece of garbage of a story didn’t come from a random local American tabloid, but from the sanctified Washington Post. Iran debunked it.
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Two stories about the same issue came out these last days. One op-ed in the NYT and two new op-eds in the SCMP.
The NYT op-ed said that Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong contained the virus better than China, in a much more “democratic” way. They forgot to look at the map: Taiwan and Singapore are islands to the south of China, Hong Kong is practically an island, and is also to the south of Wuhan. Also, they didn’t have to face the surprise factor Wuhan had, also. Also, they didn’t face the “war on two fronts” problem the CCP faced (since Wuhan menaced both the north, Beijing and Shanghai, and the south, Shenzhen – which borders Hong Kong, by the way). Speaking of which, Shanghai’s containment of the epidemic was much more efficient and much more “democratic” than all those examples the authors of the op-ed mentioned. Shenzhen – a much bigger city than Hong Kong – has just 420 cases. Why not include it in the discussion?
The SCMP pieces go the same route, with the exception they use South Korea as the anti-China example. Ignoring the fact I don’t trust S. Korea’s official numbers at all (they are still closing schools, still declaring new disaster zones, the epidemic still shows signs of approaching Seul, etc. etc.), you have that the government is simply too impotent to do anything beyond what it’s doing. And South Korea indeed enfoced mass surveilance and quarantine on individuals with symptoms, it’s not true they aren’t enforcing the “draconic” measures of China.
The situation is clear: in regions “democratic” measures can be taken, they are being taken; in regions the situation is very grave, they are enforcing the “draconic” measures because those “draconic” measures are what work. Western journalists must understand this virus doesn’t understand human societal rules, and that it’s not up to them to decide what works and what doesn’t work – leave that to the scientists.
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@ SharonM
But I thought Puerto Rico’s problem was that it wasn’t considered a pure American territory. But yes, I agree with you that Puero Rico was a blatant attempt to enforce “disaster capitalism” on the island.
But, whatever, if FEMA is now as corrupt and inefficient as the rest, I can live with that. Say bye-bye to those USD 50 billion then.
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@ Posted by: Barovsky | Mar 14 2020 9:37 utc | 233
Pure “random” doesn’t exist in reality. I’m using the term in the casual sense (precisely in the sense of absence of teleology, consciousness).
The elegance of Evolution Theory is that it explains almost everything while requiring mutations to be random. If mutations weren’t 100% random, there would be no way for the environment (ecosystem) could 100% determine which mutations would survive and which would be weeded out. Therefore, there wouldn’t be natural selection. In other words, Evolution requires the Abrahamic God to not exist – that’s why the Catholic Church and the evangelicals in teh USA are so against it.
Posted by: vk | Mar 14 2020 13:57 utc | 265
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