Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666
The news posted last week for the Wuhan coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, has been surveyed and articles are summarized here. Although there are indications the spread of the disease may be slowing in China, there are concerns that hotspots developing in other countries – Japan, South Korea, and Italy topping that list at present – may be the cause of another widespread explosion of the disease globally. News items about economic affects of the virus are reported separately in a companion article.
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11 Of 13 People Quarantined At Nebraska Hospital Test Positive For Coronavirus — The Nebraska Medical Center (NMC) is designated as one of the safest places in the United States, and possibly even the world, for people who are infected with rare illnesses.In fact, this is the same facility that American patients infected with Ebola were sent a few years back, and it is now the place where some of the first COVID-19 coronavirus patients are being treated in the midst of the most recent outbreak. The facility houses a special containment unit that is only used every few years and is specifically designed to handle patients inflicted with the most dangerous and deadly illnesses.The containment facility was built shortly after September 11, 2001, and the subsequent Anthrax scare, because US officials were concerned that there was no place to deal with sick patients who have been infected with a virus or other biological threat.13 Americans who were evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship where they were exposed to the new coronavirus were also taken to the containment facility at NMC. It was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today that 11 of those 13 people have tested positive for the new coronavirus.University of Nebraska Medical Center currently has ten people in the National Quarantine Unit while three are in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. Most people aren’t showing symptoms of the disease, however, several others are showing some minor symptoms, and at least two are extremely ill. A Nebraska Medicine spokesperson told reporters that anyone who has a positive test has to have two negative tests 24 hours apart before being released.
Don’t Send Them Here: Local Officials Resist Plans to House Coronavirus Patients NYT – The scramble to find places to quarantine American coronavirus patients is beginning to run into resistance from local officials who do not want the patients housed in their backyards.The city of Costa Mesa, Calif., has gone to court to block state and federal officials, at least temporarily, from placing dozens of people evacuated from Asia in a state-owned residential center in their community. A hearing on the issue in federal court is scheduled for 2 p.m. Pacific time on Monday.And Alabama officials have reacted with alarm to news that coronavirus patients could be sent as early as Wednesday to a Federal Emergency Management building on a former army base in Anniston, Ala., about 90 miles west of Atlanta.Uncertainty and distrust are stymieing federal attempts to plan for quarantining Americans who are infected with the coronavirus. At least 34 people in the United States have tested positive for the virus, most of them after traveling abroad, and the authorities have warned of the seriousness of the threat.So far, no one in the United States has died of the disease, and at least four patients in this country are said to have fully recovered. Yet local officials have expressed concerns that little is being done to prepare for a potential influx of patients, and that much is still unknown about the virus, which has killed at least 2,461 people, all but 19 of them in mainland China. “We’re a compassionate community,” said the city’s mayor, Katrina Foley. “But we are not going to continue to be the place where everybody drops off their crises and expects us to correct it.”The patients involved would be people now quarantined at Travis Air Force Base who have tested positive for the coronavirus but do not have severe symptoms requiring hospital care. Several people confirmed to have the virus are quarantined in their homes across the United States, but that is not an option for some, including people who do not live alone; the authorities are trying to find a secure place for them to stay. Wherever they go, they would be kept away from contact with the public until the danger of contagion passes.Local officials in Costa Mesa were told of the plan on Thursday night, and filed a request for an emergency injunction in federal court on Friday. The court issued a temporary injunction, pending the hearing on Monday, when a judge will consider whether to extend it.
Trump ‘Furious’ At Rogue Bureaucrats Who Let Coronavirus Patients Fly Home Without Telling Him – President Trump was reportedly livid after 14 Diamond Princess passengers infected with coronavirus were flown back to the United States without notifying him and against his wishes, according to the Washington Post. Trump and his coronavirus task force were told last Saturday that Americans quarantined for weeks aboard the luxury cruise ship would be brought home on two chartered planes, but that infected patients or those with symptoms would remain in Japan. That decision was overruled without Trump’s knowledge, according to the report. Trump was briefed on the decision and agreed that healthy passengers should not be on the plane with sick ones, three senior administration officials said. But the State Department and a top U.S. health official ultimately decided to bring back the 14 Americans who tested positive for the virus on the planes and place them in isolation – without informing the president first. Trump learned of the decision after the fact and was reportedly angry that he wasn’t consulted first – as the decision “could damage his administration’s handling of the response,” according to the report. “Some members of the task force were not told in advance that the infected people would be placed on the plane and learned that only after the plane was on its way back to the United States.” “It’s important to remember this was an emerging and unusual circumstance,” said Principal Deputy Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Ian Brownlee. “We had 328 people on buses, a plan to execute and we received lab results on people who were otherwise asymptomatic, un-ill people on a bus on the way to the airport,” he added. “The people on the ground did exactly the right thing…in bringing them home.”
Coronavirus outbreak could cause shortages of 150 drugs: report –A worsening coronavirus outbreak reportedly could threaten shortages of about 150 prescription drugs, several of them with no alternatives. China’s role in supplying the ingredients used in medications means that decreased Chinese production capability amid the outbreaks could threaten supplies of the drugs, which include antibiotics, generics, and branded drugs, two sources familiar with a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) list of at-risk drugs told Axios. The FDA did not directly comment on the list but said it was “keenly aware that the outbreak could impact the medical product supply chain” and is working to identify potential vulnerabilities connected with it, according to Axios.The agency is also coordinating with other regulators such as the European Medicines Agency, and said that while no FDA-approved vaccines, blood derivatives or gene-therapies, it is monitoring any raw materials for such products manufactured in China and other southeastern Asian nations.”If a potential shortage or disruption of medical products is identified by the FDA, we will use all available tools to react swiftly and mitigate the impact to U.S. patients and health care professionals,” an FDA spokesperson told Axios. The Trump administration has assembled a task force to respond to the coronavirus, but FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn is not among its appointees.
CDC prepares for possibility coronavirus becomes a pandemic and businesses, schools need to be closed – U.S. health officials are preparing for the COVID-19 coronavirus, which has killed at least 2,249 people and sickened more than 76,700 worldwide, to become a pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. “We’re not seeing community spread here in the United States, yet, but it’s very possible, even likely, that it may eventually happen,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters on a conference call. “Our goal continues to be slowing the introduction of the virus into the U.S. This buys us more time to prepare communities for more cases and possibly sustained spread.”Messonnier said the CDC is working with state and local health departments “to ready our public health workforce to respond to local cases and the possibility this outbreak could become a pandemic.” The CDC is collaborating with supply chain partners, hospitals, pharmacies and manufacturers to understand what medical supplies are needed, she said.”This will help CDC understand when we may need to take more aggressive measures to ensure that health-care workers on the front lines have access to the supplies that they need,” she said. “We are reviewing all of our pandemic materials and adapting them to COVID-19.” Messonnier pointed to China, where schools and businesses have been shuttered for weeks to contain the outbreak there, saying the U.S. may eventually need to do the same.”The day may come where we may need to implement such measures in this country,” she said.
The coronavirus is picking up steam outside China, narrowing chances of eliminating it – Stat – There are worrying signs the coronavirus outbreak is entering a new phase, with spread outside of China – until recently at low levels – beginning to rapidly pick up steam. Experts point to the sharp rise of the number of cases in South Korea, which went from 30 on Monday to 204 by Friday, and in Italy, which had no cases at the start of Friday and 16 at the end of it. Five of the infected people in Italy are health workers. Iran – which began the week with no confirmed cases and ended it with 18, four of whom have already died – is a particular source of concern, having exported two cases within 36 hours of announcing it had found two patients infected with the virus. A traveler from Canada and another from Lebanon tested positive for the virus after returning home from Iran. The fact that Iran is already exporting cases suggests transmission there is far more widespread than the official numbers would indicate, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. “I think people are missing the importance of a case like the Canadian traveler to Iran,” he said, referring to a case reported by health officials in British Columbia on Thursday. “This tells us that there has to be a much larger number of people infected in Iran and we’re literally just detecting the tip of the iceberg.” Even Iranian health officials acknowledged that likelihood. “It’s possible that it exists in all cities in Iran,” health ministry official Minou Mohrez said, according to the official IRNA news agency. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, resisted the notion Friday that the outbreak was at a tipping point. But he did tell reporters that the “window of opportunity” to stop spread of the virus is shrinking. “Our window of opportunity is narrowing,” said Tedros, as he is known. “We need to act quickly before it closes completely.” The WHO has been seeking funding to help developing countries prepare to cope with the outbreak and has been urging countries to prepare their health systems to respond, if efforts to stop spread of the virus fail. “This outbreak could go in any direction. It could even be messy,” he warned. “What I’m saying is: It’s in our hands now. If we do well within the narrowing window of opportunity, we can avert any serious crisis. If we squander the opportunity, then there will be a serious problem on our hands.” As of Friday there were nearly 77,000 cases reported globally, with all but 1,200 reported by China. There were also roughly 2,350 deaths. The growth in the daily case count in China has been tamped down of late by the country’s extraordinary quarantine effort. Cities that are home to tens of millions of people have been on virtual lockdown for several weeks. While the apparent impact of those measures has instilled hope in some that there is still time to stop circulation of the virus, skeptics warn that disease levels in China could rebound when the country eases its movement restrictions and allows people to return to their jobs.
Most Patients In South Korean Psychiatric Ward Infected With Coronavirus – South Korea reported 229 new confirmed cases on Saturday, as the number of infections more than doubled in a day to 433, an eightfold jump in just four days. As the chart below shows, the number of new cases in South Korea has now doubled each day for the past 4 days, a true exponential increase. The country’s prime minister, Chung Sye-kyun, called the situation “grave,” according to The Korea Times, while the country’s Vice Health and Welfare Minister Kim Kang-lip told reporters that “The situation is entering a new phase.” But the high number of confirmed cases is also because the country’s medical industry has high diagnostic capability, according to experts; with the implication that the real number of Chinese cases is orders of magnitude higher than officially disclosed. Daegu, South Korea’s fourth-largest city, is where the initial cluster of cases of emerged; it has since been designated a “special management zone.” The central government is channeling medical support to the zone with more staff, hospital beds and equipment. In Daegu, more than half of South Korea’s cases have been among members of a secretive religious sect who often crowd together in worship, and their relatives or contacts. Another 111 are patients or staff members at the Daenam Hospital in Cheongdo, where the two South Koreans who have died of the virus had been admitted. It gets worse: more than 1,250 members of the sect, the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, have reported potential symptoms, and officials are still trying to locate 700 members so they can be screened. “In accordance with law and principles, the government will sternly deal with acts that interfere with quarantine efforts, illegal hoarding of medical goods and acts that spark uneasiness through massive rallies,” Chung said, pointing out just how convenient the coronavirus will be when government seek to squash all future protests.It gets even worse: Samsung, the world’s biggest smartphone maker, shut down a factory after a worker tested positive. The factory, located in the city of Gumi, about an hour north of Cheongdo, is expected to resume operations on Monday morning, Samsung said. But the floor of the factory where the patient has worked will be closed until Tuesday morning, it said. We wonder how long until it truly reopens. But the scariest development in the past 24 hours is that almost all patients at a psychiatric ward of a South Korean hospital tested positive for the coronavirus, with local reports saying members of the abovementioned Shincheonji Church of Jesus sect which has rapidly emerged as the single biggest cluster of new S. Korean cases, had attended a funeral in the same complex.
Coronavirus: South Korea declares highest alert as infections surge – South Korea has raised its coronavirus alert to the “highest level” as confirmed case numbers keep rising. President Moon Jae-in said the country faced “a grave turning point”, and the next few days would be crucial in the battle to contain the outbreak. Six people have died from the virus in South Korea and more than 600 have been infected. Meanwhile, Italy and Iran have announced steps to try to contain worrying outbreaks of the virus. In Italy, strict quarantine restrictions are in force in two northern “hotspot” regions close to Milan and Venice. Around 50,000 people cannot enter or leave several towns in Veneto and Lombardy for the next two weeks without special permission. Even outside the zone, many businesses and schools have suspended activities, and sporting events have been cancelled including several top-flight football matches. Amid the growing restrictions, the last two days of the Venice Carnival, on Monday and Tuesday, were cancelled. Italy has seen two deaths and the number of confirmed cases has risen to more than 100 – 89 of them in Lombardy. “The contagiousness of this virus is very strong and pretty virulent,” said Lombardy’s health chief, Giulio Gallera. Iran’s outbreak of coronavirus has significantly worsened, with the death toll rising to eight on Sunday. The government has acknowledged 43 confirmed cases although officials have warned the virus may have spread to “all cities”. Schools, universities and cultural centres across 14 Iranian provinces have been closed from Sunday. The new strain of coronavirus, which originated last year in Hubei province in China, causes a respiratory disease called Covid-19. China has seen more than 76,000 infections and 2,442 deaths. On Sunday, China’s President Xi Jinping described the outbreak as the “largest public health emergency” in the country’s recent history. He acknowledged “shortcomings” in China’s response and said lessons must be learned. The combined situation in South Korea, Iran and Italy points to the early stages of pandemic. This means a global outbreak, with the coronavirus spreading in the community in multiple parts of the world. In each of these countries we are seeing spread of the virus with no connection to China. The lockdown efforts in Italy mirror those that have happened in China. The situation in Iran is especially worrying because the health authorities have reportedly said the virus has spread to multiple cities, and it appears the first case in Lebanon is linked to a traveller from Iran. If we have a pandemic, it will still be important to limit the speed of spread of the virus. If countries could hold it somewhat at bay until the end of winter, there is a hope that warmer temperatures will reduce the time the virus can survive in the air, as we see with seasonal flu. But this may not be certain.
Citi says fear of coronavirus in South Korea is spreading ‘at a much faster rate’ than the virus itself – South Korea is on high alert after the number of reported coronavirus infections surged past 760 cases on Monday, and Cit economists warn economic difficulties for the country will be imminent. “Fear of the virus is spreading throughout the country, at a much faster rate than the virus itself,” Marie Kim and Jeeho Yoon from Citi wrote. “We expect the economic fallout to not be limited to certain regions (and) cities.” The total number of cases rose to 833 on Monday afternoon, compared to 31 cases reported as of Feb. 18, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a jump that’s nearly 27 times higher – within about one week. Most of the new cases were detected in the city of Daegu and the surrounding Gyeongbuk area. The country’s death toll rose to seven on Monday morning and remained unchanged in the afternoon update. In a Monday morning note, the Citi economists explained that consumption in the country is declining as part of people’s efforts to minimize human contact. Stores and factories are also shutting down for various reasons, including fear of exposure to the virus, lack of supply inputs or due to continuing loss, the Citi economists said. Chart: South Korea virus spread 200224 On Sunday, the government raised the virus alert to its highest level – red – and stepped up quarantine measures to slow the virus’ spread. The same day, the education minister also said the new school year, due to start next month, will be postponed, Yonhap reported. More such measures are likely to be announced, experts said. Kim and Yoon said they expect the government to introduce a large supplementary budget to mitigate the economic fallout ahead of April elections. “Previous events suggest that the government tends to respond quickly to natural disasters or virus outbreaks,” the Citi economists said.
Iran’s holy city Qom sends SOS as virus spreads – The Iranian city of Qom, a center for Islamic studies and pilgrims, has been flagged as a new danger point for the coronavirus, with at least one traveler taking it back with her to Lebanon. “If I can say one thing, it is help Qom,” said Mohammadreza Ghadir, head of the city’s medical sciences university. “We are on the frontlines, we need help,” he told state TV. Iran’s health ministry said tests had been carried out on 785 suspected coronavirus cases since the outbreak began. “Most of the cases are either Qom residents or have a history of coming and going from Qom to other cities,” its spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said. The Covid-19 outbreak in Iran first surfaced on Wednesday, when authorities said it claimed the lives of two elderly people in Qom. They were the first confirmed deaths from the virus in the Middle East. Iran reported two more deaths on Friday. The latest cases take to 28 the total number of confirmed infections in Iran. All of those who lost their lives are believed to be Iranian citizens. Neighboring Iraq on Thursday clamped down on travel to and from the Islamic republic. The Iraqi health ministry announced that people in Iran were barred from entering the country “until further notice”. Kuwait’s national carrier Kuwait Airways, meanwhile, announced it would suspend all flights to Iran.
Iran shuts schools, cultural centres as coronavirus kills six – A sixth death from the coronavirus has been reported in Iran as authorities in more than a dozen affected provinces ordered the closure of schools, universities and cultural centres in a bid to contain the outbreak. Ali Aghazadeh, governor of the Markazi province, said late on Saturday that tests of a patient who recently died in the central city of Arak were positive for the virus. The person was also suffering from a heart problem, he told the official IRNA news agency. So far, 28 cases have been confirmed in Iran, but it was not immediately clear if the sixth fatality was among those cases. All of those who lost their lives are believed to be Iranian citizens, and the deaths in Iran account for the most in any country outside China. Since the new coronavirus emerged in December, it has killed 2,345 people in China, the epicentre of the epidemic, and more than a dozen people elsewhere in the world. Officially known as COVID-19, the infection first surfaced in Iran on Wednesday, when authorities said it claimed the lives of two elderly people in Qom, a Shia holy city south of the capital. The Ministry of Health said most of the confirmed cases are either “Qom residents or have a history of coming and going from Qom to other cities”. As a “preventive measure”, authorities ordered the closure of schools, universities and other educational centres in 14 provinces across the country from Sunday, according to state television. They include Qom, Markazi, Gilan, Ardabil, Kermanshah, Qazvin, Zanjan, Mazandaran, Golestan, Hamedan, Alborz, Semnan, Kurdistan and the capital, Tehran. The government also announced that “all art and cinema events in halls across the country have been cancelled until the end of the week” in order to stop infections. “We are on the frontlines, we need help,” head of Qom’s medical sciences university said on state TV. “If I can say one thing, it is, ‘help Qom,'” said Mohammadreza Ghadir.
Italy towns wake to quarantine, queue for food in coronavirus outbreak Tens of thousands of Italians prepared for a weeks-long quarantine in the country’s north on Sunday as nerves began to fray among the locals faced with new lockdown measures. Two people have died from the virus since Friday and more than a hundred cases have now been reported in Italy, most of them centred around the small town of Codogno, about 70 kilometres (43 miles) southeast of Milan. Over 50,000 residents in eleven towns — 10 in Lombardy and one in the neighbouring region of Veneto — now face what Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Saturday could be weeks of lockdown. Locals wearing face masks were already lined up outside a supermarket in the town of Casalpusterlengo, a 10 minute drive from Codogno, on Sunday morning. Shoppers were made to wait, then allowed to enter in groups of 40 inside the store to stock up on provisions. “It’s inhuman,” said one man who gave his name as Sante. “Fighting over four sandwiches is just disgusting.” Another woman, Emanuela, told AFP-TV that residents including her were nervous. “I’m really scared, we’re going through a really tough situation,” said the woman, a nurse who works in the area. Blockades were not yet erected, and cars could be seen driving in and around the area of Codogno and Casalpusterlengo, although police cars patrolled the area. The quarantine appears to be largely dependent on individuals to respect the system but the government said those found in violation could face fines and even three months in jail It was not clear how authorities would impose the travel restrictions and whether residents would still be allowed to travel from town to town within the affected zones, without surpassing an outer limit. “We’re preparing to set up the checkpoints for the containment zone,” a policewoman told AFP, saying that initially the perimeter would be narrow but could widen over time.
Italy Virus Cases Jump Even After Lockdown in North – The number of coronavirus cases continued to jump in the north of Italy even after the government imposed a lockdown and banned travel to and from an area near Milan of about 50,000 people. The number of cases in the Lombardy region jumped overnight to 89 from 54, leaving the country with more than 100 confirmed infections, about five times that of Germany, the European country second in the ranking. Two people have died in Italy from the virus, the first non-tourist deaths in Europe. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte late Saturday announced the travel ban and other emergency measures in response to the surge in cases that have occurred since a man sought medical treatment at a hospital in Lombardy on Feb. 18. He is believe to have infected dozens of patients and medical staff who then carried the virus further afield. “When doctors are infected, that means the right practices were not put into place, apart from the fact that the virus is very contagious,” Walter Ricciardi, a member of the executive council of the World Health Organization, told newspaper La Stampa. Ricciardi also criticized the government for banning flights to and from China, saying that stopped authorities from tracing arrivals as travelers could use stopovers to reach Italy. relates to Italy Virus Cases Jump Even After Lockdown in North Italy won’t seek a suspension of the Schengen agreement, which has eliminated border controls between 26 European countries. Even so, the virus surge illustrates the potential threat to borderless travel and commerce in Europe, which last came under pressure during the continent’s refugee crisis in 2015-16. The rapid number of new cases in less than a week and Italy’s inability to stem the spread from a hospitalized patient is fueling fears of broader contagion. Italy has implemented emergency measures in towns along its frontier with Slovenia. French Heath Minister Olivier Veran told Le Parisien Dimanche newspaper that “it’s very likely” the country will now face new cases and laboratories are being supplied with additional test kits. Italy asked other major economies to “work immediately on economic measures at an international level that are coordinated and sufficient to deal with the economic consequences of the virus in a timely and effective way in case the crisis worsens,” Finance Minister Roberto Gualtieri said on the sidelines of a Group of 20 meeting in Riyadh. Italy’s government also plans to introduce measures to support the economy in virus-affected areas, Conte told reporters in Rome.
Coronavirus: sixth person dies in Italy amid confusion over death toll in Iran – Here’s a summary of what we know about the coronavirus outbreak so far on Monday:
- Six people are now confirmed to have died from coronavirus in Italy, which has had the worst outbreak in Europe with 219 confirmed cases. The Italian government has introduced stringent internal travel restrictions, closing off the worst-hit areas in the northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto.
- Several European countries including Croatia, Hungary, Ireland and Serbia have advised their citizens against travelling to the affected areas in Italy. Austria is considering reintroducing border controls with Italy. Stock markets in Europe closed the day more than 3.5% down amid virus fears.
- Iran has denied trying to cover up the full extent of the outbreak after a reformist website reported 50 deaths from the virus. The deputy health minister said 12 people had died from the virus.
- South Korean cases spiked to over 760, as several countries imposed travel bans, and some airlines cancelled routes to Seoul. Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq reported their first cases – all involving people who had come from Iran.
- A team from the World Health Organization was due to visit Iran on Tuesday. The WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described the sudden increase in cases in Italy, Iran and South Korea as “deeply concerning”.
- China reported 150 new deaths from the virus, with one outside Hubei province. Infections rose by 409 (398 in Hubei) to 77,150.Four Chinese provinces lowered their alert levels on the virus, including Yunnan, Guangdong, Shanxi and Guizhou. The WHO said it was encouraged by the decline in new cases in China.
Austria to close border for those suspected of carrying coronavirus – Austria has said it will stop people suspected of carrying the coronavirus from crossing its border, after parts of northern Italy were put into lockdown over the weekend following a surge in cases. The Austrian government released a travel warning for affected places in Lombardy and Veneto, following a meeting of the government’s coronavirus taskforce that included the chancellor, Sebastian Kurz. “As far as the borders and cross-border traffic are concerned, we will proceed as follows: we will further tighten warning systems with our neighbours, we will immediately order a stop in the event of suspected cases, as happened last night,” Kurz said on Monday. Austria suspended train services to and from Italy for about four hours on Sunday evening to test two passengers for the coronavirus. The train, carrying about 300 passengers from Venice to Munich, was stopped on the Italian side of the Brenner pass before being allowed to continue its journey after the two passengers tested negative. Government sources said this did not amount to a reintroduction of border controls inside the European Union’s passport-free Schengen zone. “There are no general border controls. Right now we don’t think that is the way forward,” an Austrian diplomat said. “If we do have a confirmed case, then we will check that again.” Austrian travellers in affected parts of northern Italy are being advised to avoid crowds and follow instructions of local authorities. Italian authorities have said they will impose fines on anyone entering or leaving restricted areas. By Monday, the number of cases of the virus in Italy had risen to 229 and six people had died. Health ministers from Austria, France, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia and Croatia are due to attend a meeting in Rome on Tuesday to discuss containing the virus. Italy’s government is urging its neighbours not to impose border controls, which it argues would be ineffective.
“Tsunami-Like” Coronavirus Floods South Korea With New Cases; Europe Begins To Isolate Italy: Live Updates In a release that was about 4 hours late, China’s Hubei province said it has 398 New Coronavirus Cases As Of Feb 23 and 149 New Coronavirus Deaths. Overall, China reported an additional 409 coronavirus cases across the entire nation, and 150 additional deaths as of February 23 vs. 648 additional cases and 97 deaths on February 22. This brings the total number of cases across China to 77,150, and total deaths to 2592. None of these numbers are even remotely credible any more, and serve merely the propaganda purpose of giving the impression that Beijing is winning the war against the spread of the Coronavirus, when in reality nobody has any idea anymore what is going on on the ground in China, and is why workers refuse to show up to their place of business. Consider this: two days ago, WaPo reporters pointed to a clear case of manipulation where the authorities suppressed the true number of cases.
- South Korea raised its national threat level to “red alert” for the first time since the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009. The total number of confirmed cases in the country reached 763, a jump of 161 overnight, and a 25-fold increase in the past week.
- The Italian government said it has 152 confirmed cases, up from three in a matter of days. Three people have died. Authorities have locked down about a dozen small towns and canceled events across the north, including Venice’s Carnival.
- Iran has confirmed eight deaths related to the coronavirus, the most outside of China, media reported Sunday. South Korea confirmed its seventh death.
- 4 more cases confirmed in UK
- 200 Israelis quarantined
- Japan confirms more cases; Japanese Emperor expresses hope for Tokyo Games
- Trump says US has everything ‘under control’ as he asks Congress for more money
- EU’s Gentiloni says he has ‘full confidence’ In Italian health officials
- Turkey, Pakistan close borders with Iran as confirmed cases soar
- Global Times says virus may not have originated at Hunan seafood market
- Axios reports shortages of 150 essential drugs likely.
World is approaching coronavirus tipping point, say experts – The world is fast approaching a tipping point in the spread of the coronavirus, according to experts, who warn that the disease is outpacing efforts to contain it, after major outbreaks forced Italy and Iran to introduce stringent internal travel restrictions and South Korea’s president placed the country on red alert.Some of the countries most affected by the virus are scrambling to halt its progress two days after Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), said the international community needed to act quickly before the narrowing “window of opportunity” closed completely.With almost 78,000 cases of Covid-19 now confirmed across the globe, experts say the situation will soon reach a critical threshold.In 11 north Italian towns, 50,000 people have been in lockdown since Friday night, with police patrolling the streets and fines imposed on anyone caught entering or leaving outbreak areas. In Iran, the authorities have ordered the closure of schools, universities and other educational centres in 14 provinces as “a preventative measure”.On Sunday, South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, placed the country on “red alert” after it reported its sixth death and more than 600 infections. And four of the 32 British and Irish Diamond Princess cruise ship passengers flown to the UK on Saturday have tested positive for Covid-19, the Chief Medical Officer for England said on Sunday. It brings the total number of confirmed cases in the UK to 13.While the number of patients worldwide is increasing, some virus clusters have shown no obvious link to China, leaving experts struggling to determine where they started.Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia and an authority on the new coronavirus infection, echoed Tedros’s warning and said the time for containing the disease was running out. “The director general of the WHO has recently spoken of a narrowing of the window of opportunity to control the current epidemic,” he said. “The tipping point after which our ability to prevent a global pandemic ends seems a lot closer after the past 24 hours.”
Coronavirus May Be ‘Disease X’ Health Experts Warned About – The World Health Organization cautioned years ago that a mysterious “disease X” could spark an international contagion. The new coronavirus illness, with its ability to quickly morph from mild to deadly, is emerging as a contender.From recent reports about the stealthy ways the so-called Covid-19 virus spreads and maims, a picture is emerging of an enigmatic pathogen whose effects are mainly mild, but which occasionally — and unpredictably — turns deadly in the second week. Emerging hot spots in South Korea, Iran and Italy have stoked further alarm.”Whether it will be contained or not, this outbreak is rapidly becoming the first true pandemic challenge that fits the disease X category,” Marion Koopmans, head of viroscience at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, and a member of the WHO’s emergency committee, wrote Wednesday in the journal Cell. The disease has now spread to more than two dozen countries and territories. Some of those infected caught the virus in their local community and have no known link to China, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. “We are not seeing community spread here in the United States yet, but it’s very possible — even likely — that it may eventually happen,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters Friday. Unlike SARS, its viral cousin, the Covid-19 virus replicates at high concentrations in thenose and throat akin to the common cold, and appears capable of spreading from those who show no, or mild, symptoms. That makes it impossible to control using the fever-checking measures that helped stop SARS 17 years ago. A cluster of cases within a family living in the Chinese city of Anyang is presumed to have begun when a 20-year-old woman carried the virus from Wuhan, the outbreak’s epicenter, on Jan. 10 and spread it while experiencing no illness, researchers said Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Five relatives subsequently developed fever and respiratory symptoms. Covid-19 is less deadly than SARS, which had a case fatality rate of 9.5%, but appears more contagious. Both viruses attack the respiratory andgastrointestinal tracts, via which they can potentially spread. While more than 80% of patients are reported to have a mild version of the disease and will recover, about one in seven develops pneumonia, difficulty breathing and other severe symptoms. About 5% of patients have critical illness, including respiratory failure, septic shock and multi-organ failure. “Unlike SARS, Covid-19 infection has a broader spectrum of severity ranging from asymptomatic to mildly symptomatic to severe illness that requiresmechanical ventilation,” doctors in Singapore said in a paper in the same medical journal Thursday. “Clinical progression of the illness appears similar to SARS: patients developed pneumonia around the end of the first week to the beginning of the second week of illness.”
Coronavirus: cases have not yet peaked, Xi Jinping tells Politburo — Chinese President Xi Jinping said the coronavirus epidemic had not reached its peak despite a drop in the daily number of infections. State broadcaster CCTV quoted Xi as saying at a meeting of the Communist Party’s Politburo on Friday that the situation in Hubei was still serious. “The battles to defend Hubei province and Wuhan should be well fought, and measures should be taken to contain the spread of the outbreak,” he said. The meeting also said prevention measures should be properly implemented in Beijing. He Ping, director for prison administration at the Ministry of Justice, said on Friday that in Hubei province, there were 230 cases confirmed at Wuhan Women’s Prison, 41 confirmed and nine suspected cases at Hanjin Prison, and one case at the provincial centre for minors. Two prison officials were removed. In Shandong province, there were 200 confirmed cases, and 10 suspected at Rencheng Prison, and in 34 confirmed cases in Zhejiang province’s Shilifeng Prison. He added that cases were imported into prisons, and that there were no deaths in custody due to the virus. Prisoners with the disease were kept in isolation for treatment. Meanwhile, the Communist Party’s Political and Legal Affairs Commission has sent a team to investigate the Rencheng Prison cases. The team is headed by commission deputy secretary general Lei Dongsheng, and includes officials from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Justice. According to Shandong authorities, a prison guard at the Rencheng jail in Jining started coughing and showing other symptoms in early February. All 2,077 people held or working at the prison were given the nucleic acid test and, as of Thursday, 200 prisoners and seven prison officers had tested positive for the virus.
Xi defends China’s efforts to stop ‘grim and complex’ coronavirus epidemic -Chinese President Xi Jinping defended China’s efforts to contain the “grim and complex” coronavirus epidemic in the country Sunday. The Chinese president addressed officials leading anti-disease efforts in a video conference calling for them to take more steps to prevent the virus, revitalize the economy and stop the disease from affecting the planting of spring crops, according to the the Xinhua News Agency, The Associated Press reported. The president called for officials to “deploy medical forces” to “cut off the source of infection,” according to the news agency. Xi reportedly said during the conference that the Communist Party’s response to the “still grim and complex” epidemic was “timely and effective,” despite criticism from the public that officials did not act fast enough.The Chinese president also warned that the situation is in a “critical stage,” as people around the world hope the disease is contained. “The current epidemic situation is still grim and complex,” Chinese news agency Xinhua cited Xi as saying. “Prevention and control are at the most critical stage.”China faces the challenge of attempting to stop the virus, while still maintaining a functioning economy, which has effectively been shut down since late January. Xi called for “low-risk areas” to “fully restore production” while higher-risk areas continue to deal with the epidemic.”We must promptly solve the outstanding problems that affect spring plowing and organize production, circulation and supply of materials to ensure production does not miss the farming time,” Xi was cited by Xinhua as saying, according to AP. Xi called the coronavirus the “fastest spread” disease and the “most difficult prevention and control” since the Communist Party took control in 1949. The coronavirus has infected more than 78,000 people worldwide and caused almost 2,500 deaths, most of which are in mainland China, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Coronavirus did not originate in Wuhan seafood market, Chinese scientists say — The novel coronavirus that has claimed the lives of more than 2,400 people did not originate at a seafood market in the central China city of Wuhan as was first thought, according to a new study by a team of Chinese scientists. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was instead imported from elsewhere, said researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Institute for Brain Research. The team, led by Dr Yu Wenbin, sequenced the genomic data of 93 SARS-CoV-2 samples provided by 12 countries in a bid to track down the source of the infection and understand how it spreads. What they found was that while the virus had spread rapidly within the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, there had also been two major population expansions on December 8 and January 6.According to the study, which was published on the institute’s website on Thursday, analysis suggested that the coronavirus was introduced from outside the market. “The crowded market then boosted SARS-CoV-2 circulation and spread it to the whole city in early December 2019,” it said. Earlier reports by Chinese health authorities and the World Health Organisation said that the first known patient showed symptoms on December 8, and that most of the subsequent cases had links to the seafood market, which was closed on January 1. The research went on to say that based on the genome data it was possible that the virus began spreading from person to person in early December or even as early as late November.
Tom Cotton demands ‘answers’ after China state newspaper says coronavirus originated outside wildlife market – A Republican senator says it’s time for the Chinese Communist Party to reveal what it knows about the new coronavirus after the country’s state-run newspaper reported that the mystery illness may not have originated from a seafood market in Wuhan. On Saturday, Sen. Tom Cotton demanded “answers” while sharing a report from the Global Times, a Chinese daily newspaper operated by the CCP, citing new research that claims the virus is transmitted from human to human and didn’t originate from animals at the seafood market. Although early reports claimed the illness was spread through food such as bat soup, snakes, or pangolins, researchers now believe “patient zero,” the original person with the infection, brought the disease to the Wuhan market from “another location.” The English-language Global Times confirmed the data show the infection was “introduced” to the market, adding fuel to skeptics who believe the CCP is failing to explain the full scope of the epidemic. Cotton has repeatedly challenged the prevailing narrative surrounding the coronavirus outbreak as it has infected and killed patients in countries as widespread as Iran, Italy, and Japan. In January, the Washington Times reported that Wuhan is home to China’s most advanced virus research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The New York Post reported Saturday that Chinese Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, the country’s top expert in biological warfare, was sent to Wuhan last month to deal with the crisis. Cotton has noted on several occasions that Wuhan contains the only biosafety level 4 superlaboratory in China that deals with serious infectious diseases. The Arkansas senator has led calls to ban travel with China and on Friday told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham the country’s leaders were “lying to the world.” “The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda rag finally admits what I’ve said for a month: coronavirus didn’t start in Wuhan food market. So where did it originate? Time for answers from CCP,” Cotton tweeted late on Saturday.
Hundreds of Animals Drop Dead After Being Exposed to Virus Disinfectant -State-run media reported at least 135 animals were found dead in one discovery near the city of Chongqing. At least 17 pieces were found to have died – including wild boar, weasels, and a number of birds.Communist Party officials have blamed the deaths on massive disinfecting efforts carried out by Chinese authorities. Videos have previously been released showing trucks driving around coronavirus hit cities spraying huge plumes of toxic liquid to kill the infection.Chinese state media said Chongqing has mobilized a force of 5,300 forest rangers to monitor wildlife in the area.They have also enlisted 200 “full-time supervisors.”It is reported that animals will be buried and the sites were they were found will also be disinfected.Authorities have also insisted the animals have not died due to the coronavirus, or any other disease due to bird flu. Scepticism remains over whether or not the Chinese government is withholding information about the coronavirus outbreak. The mysterious animal death comes after at least 40 incinerators were shipped to the coronavirus ravaged city of Wuhan.Officials had said the furnaces were to be used to burn medical supplies and animal carcasses. It comes after Chinese crematorium workers claimed they were burning bodies 24/7 in Wuhan.
Coronavirus: Panic Starting – Yves Smith – Despite what the unprecedented lockdown of areas in China that produced 70% of its GDP, and the use of hazmat suits, revealed about what Chinese officials were seeing, the rest of the world remained oddly complacent about what the novel coronavirus meant for them. How reassuring was it really if the disease had moderated as a result of the effective quarantining of the population, a condition that was clearly not sustainable? And there was the oddly optimistic view that a country of 1.2 billion could effectively be cordoned off from the rest of the world … particularly after it became clear the lockdown was implemented after the cornoavirus was meaningfully underway? As our Ignacio has pointed out, it is disconcerting how much we still don’t know about this disease. It has a troublingly long incubation period, raising the possibility that some can harbor low level infections for a long time by normal contagion standards. Individuals can repeatedly test negative yet later develop the coronavirus. The Journal of Hospital Infection reported that human coronaviruses can live as long as nine days on surfaces … but alcohol will kill it in a minute. The rapid spread of the coronavirus in Italy, on top of clusters in South Korea and Japan, has finally kicked officials in some countries into panic, even if they aren’t sure what to do. And this follows shortly on the mishandling of the two cruise ships with infected passengers and crew. But outside the business press in the US, there’s not much evidence of concern.And on the business front, the reality is sinking in that it isn’t clear when China might get back to a semblance of normal operation. For instance, insiders leaked that the FDA had prepared a list of 150 medications, including some with no substitute, that were at risk of shortages. Equity markets, which had been complacent, are now looking rattled. South Korean averages are down more than 3.3%, the Hang Seng is off nearly 1.5%, US and European stock futures are off, and oil fell by over 3%.
Fears grow of pandemic as coronavirus takes hold internationally – Health officials sounded the alarm over the weekend due to the sudden and rapid rise of new cases of COVID-19 infections in South Korea, Italy and Iran. Of particular concern to the World Health Organization (WHO) and other agencies, many of the cases lack an epidemiologic link to China, where the virus outbreak began last December in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province. In response, global stock markets plummeted on opening yesterday. The Dow fell over 1,000 points by closing. The Nikkei 225 fell 4 percent on opening. Among the stocks that suffered the largest falls were those of airlines and technology companies. The price of Brent crude fell almost 5 percent to slightly over 55 dollars a barrel. The market turbulence provoked by fear over the impact of the virus spread came on the heels of the sour economic news that Japan’s GDP has fallen 6.3 percent and Eurozone growth has slow to 0.1 percent. The 2019-nCoV virus has proven to be a much more complex pathogen than virologists have experienced in the past. Scientists are still attempting to understand why it is so highly contagious and whether the virus is being transmitted via surfaces, water pipes, and ventilation ducts. The SARS epidemic in 2003 infected 8,000 people in 10 months. In contrast COVID-19 has caused 80,000 infections in just over two months – and many cases may have been undiagnosed. Though the overall fatality index is much lower that SARS, registering at between 1 to 2 percent of people infected, COVID-19 deaths are already triple the number caused by the 2003 outbreak. The incubation period of the virus is estimated at around 14 days, but there have been confirmed cases of people not displaying symptoms for as long as three to four weeks. Further confounding health authorities, there are indications that people who have recovered may continue to carry and spread the virus. China’s efforts to contain the virus through unprecedented quarantine measures and harsh travel restrictions appear to have brought the epidemic in Hubei and surrounding provinces under a degree of control. On Monday, 509 new cases were reported across China, of which 499 are in Hubei. The number of confirmed cases in mainland China stood at 77,658 as of yesterday and the number of deaths at 2,663. But as the WHO warned, the actions of the Chinese government only bought the world some time to prepare. That time appears to have run out, as infections rates accelerate dramatically in countries like Iran, Italy and South Korea. Though the WHO has still not classified COVID-19 as a global pandemic, it appears likely it will make that decision in the near future.
Iran rejects reported Qom death toll of 50 from new virus— Iran’s government said Monday that 12 people had died nationwide from the new coronavirus, rejecting claims of a much higher death toll by a lawmaker from the city of Qom that has been at the epicenter of the virus in the country. The conflicting reports raised questions about the Iranian government’s transparency concerning the scale of the outbreak. Five neighboring countries reported their first cases of the virus, with those infected all having links to Iran, including direct travel from a city where authorities have not even reported a confirmed case. Iran’s Health Ministry said the total number of infections have risen to 61 while deaths stood at 12. But a lawmaker from Qom, Ahmad Amirabadi Farahani, was quoted by the semi-official ILNA news agency as saying that the death toll was 50. Even with the lower toll of 12, the number of deaths compared to the number of confirmed infections from the virus is higher in Iran than in any other country, including China and South Korea, where the outbreak is far more widespread. The World Health Organization said last week that in 2% of infected cases, the virus has been fatal. In Iran, according to the Health Ministry’s figures, the death toll represents nearly 20% of total infections. There are concerns that clusters of the new coronavirus in Iran, as well as in Italy and South Korea, could signal a serious new stage in its global spread. Authorities in Iraq and Afghanistan, which closed their borders with Iran, announced their first confirmed coronavirus cases on Monday. Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman also announced their first cases. In all five countries, the infected patients had links with Iran.
Battle against coronavirus turns to Italy; Wall Street falls on pandemic fears –(Reuters) – The coronavirus death toll climbed to seven in Italy on Monday and several Middle East countries were dealing with their first infections, sending markets into a tailspin over fears of a global pandemic even as China eased curbs with no new cases reported in Beijing and other cities. While health experts have expected limited outbreaks beyond China, the rapid acceleration of cases in Italy going from three on Friday to 220 on Monday is concerning, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement. Just as China put cities on lockdown, Italian authorities sealed off the worst-affected towns, closed schools and halted the carnival in Venice, where there were two cases. Shops are shut, bars are closed and people speak to each other from a safe distance in northern Italy. Markets are nervous that Europe could experience disruptions similar to China, where air traffic has been disrupted and global supply chains rattled for everything from medicine to cars to smartphones. But China’s actions, especially in Wuhan – the epicenter of the outbreak – probably prevented hundreds of thousands of cases, said the head of the WHO delegation in China, Bruce Aylward, urging the rest of the world to learn the lesson of acting fast. “They’re at a point now where the number of cured people coming out of hospitals each day is much more than the sick going in,” he said. The surge of cases outside mainland China triggered sharp falls in global markets as investors fled to safe havens. European equities markets suffered their biggest slump since mid-2016, gold soared to a seven-year high and oil tumbled 4%. The Dow Jones Industrials and S&P 500 posted their biggest one-day percentage drops in over two years and Nasdaq had one of its worst days since December 2018. All three indexes closed down more than 3% after notching record highs last week on optimism the coronavirus would not seriously hurt global economies.
Researchers Find 61.5% Of Coronavirus Patients With Severe Pneumonia Won’t Survive – Since the Wuhan coronavirus first appeared late last year, researchers have been studying it, t hough for the first month or so, only Chinese scientists had access to the data.But now that China has shared its data with the world, research has been appearing more quickly, with more opportunities for peer review. According to a study published in the Lancet on Friday, patients who are especially vulnerable to severe COVID-19 infections – a group that includes the very old, very young and those with co-occurring conditions – die at a higher rate from COVID-19 than they did from SARS and MERS.A study of 52 critically ill adults at Wuhan Jin Yin-tan hospital found that 61.5% of patients requiring hospitalization and intense monitoring ended up becoming “non-survivors”, to borrow some of the researchers’ terminology. The researchers concluded that COVID-19 – or SARS-CoV-2, as they call it – is more lethal for vulnerable patients than SARS or MERS was. Like SARS-CoV and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus that can be transmitted to humans, and these viruses are all related to high mortality in critically ill patients.12 However, the mortality rate in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection in our cohort is higher than that previously seen in critically ill patients with SARS. In a cohort of 38 critically ill patients with SARS from 13 hospitals in Canada, 29 (76%) patients required mechanical ventilation, 13 (43%) patients had died at 28 days, and six (16%) patients remained on mechanical ventilation. 17 (38%) of 45 patients and 14 (26%) of 54 patients who were critically ill with SARS infection were also reported to have died at 28 days in a Singapore cohort13 and a Hong Kong cohort,14 respectively. The mortality rate in our cohort is likely to be higher than that seen in critically ill patients with MERS infection. In a cohort of 12 patients with MERS from two hospitals in Saudi Arabia, seven (58%) patients had died at 90 days.15 Since the follow-up time is shorter in our cohort, we postulate that the mortality rate would be higher after 28 days than that seen in patients with MERS-CoV.
Chinese Workers Refuse To Go Back To Work Despite Beijing’s Demands – When we commented earlier that the coronavirus pandemic means that the vast majority of Chinese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have at most 2-3 months of cash left, a potentially catastrophic outcome that will not only crippled China’s economy but its $40 trillion financial system, we summarized the circular quandary in which Beijing finds itself, to wit: … unless China reboots its economy, it faces an economic shock the likes of which it has never seen before in modern times. Yet it can’t reboot the economy unless it truly stops the viral pandemic, something it will never be able to do if it lies to the population that the pandemic is almost over in hopes of forcing people to get back to work. Hence the most diabolic Catch 22 for China’s social and economic system, because whereas until now China could easily lie its way out of any problem, in this case lying will only make the underlying (viral pandemic) problem worse as sick people return to work, only to infect even more co-workers, forcing even more businesses to be quarantined. Shockingly (or perhaps not at all in light of China’s tremendous human rights record), Beijing has picked output over life expectancy, and in a furious scramble to restart its economy, which as we showed earlier remains flatlined… … according to most high-frequency metrics, it has been “advising” people to get back to work, even as new coronavirus cases are still coming in, in the process threatening to blow out the current epidemic with orders of magnitude more cases as places of employment become the new hubs of viral distribution. As Bloomberg picked up late on Sunday, following what we said earlier namely that “local governments around the country face a daunting question of whether to focus on staving off the virus or encourage factory reopenings” China’s central and local governments are one again easing the criteria for factories to resume operations “as they walk a tightrope between containing a virus that has killed more than 2,400 people and preventing a slump in the world’s second-largest economy.” This schizophrenic dilemma for a government which faces two equally terrible choices, was best summarized by the following two banners observed in China:
- Banner 1 says: “If you go out messing around now, expect grass on your grave to grow soon.”
- Banner 2 says, “Sitting at home eats up all your have, hurry up go out & find a job.”
Indeed, a perfectly schizophrenic message from the government to the people:
Virus epicenter Wuhan revokes announcement easing lockdown (Reuters) – An announcement that the Chinese city of Wuhan would relax some of its travel restrictions and allow some people to leave was made without authorization and has been revoked, the local government said on Monday. The city at the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak that has already killed more than 2,500 people said it would continue to impose strict controls over its borders in order to prevent the virus from spreading further. It said it had reprimanded the people responsible for the earlier announcement that healthy people would be allowed to leave if they had vital business. The earlier announcement came amid signs that the spread of the virus in China was slowing, with more than 20 province-level jurisdictions reporting zero new infections on Sunday and several regions lowering their emergency response levels. Wuhan, where the virus is believed to have originated, has been under lockdown for a month. It reported 348 new infections on Sunday, and 131 deaths. The city alone has seen an accumulated 46,607 cases of infection, amounting to around 60% of China’s national total.
Coronavirus updates: Death toll in China hits 2,663 as pandemic fears grow – China’s health officials said Tuesday the number of deaths from novel coronavirus in mainland China had reached 2,663. The number of dead stood at 2,592 a day earlier. There was an increase of 71 deaths, almost all of them in Hubei province, the center of the outbreak. More than 500 new cases have also been reported as the total number of confirmed cases across the country reached more than 77,600. The coronavirus epidemic in China is not yet a pandemic but has the potential to become one if countries don’t work together to slow its spread, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday. A team of experts with the WHO has concluded its mission in China, reporting that the epidemic there reached its peak between Jan. 23 and Feb. 2 and that the number of cases have since been steadily declining. However, “the sudden increases of cases in Italy, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Korea are deeply concerning,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a media briefing. Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi has tested positive for coronavirus, according to a tweet posted by his adviser Ali Vahabzadeh. Harirchi held a joint press conference on Monday with the government spokesman Ali Rabiee.Italian authorities have confirmed a total number of 283 cases nationwide, up from the 229 cases on Monday. Seven people have died and one person has recovered, according to Italy’s civil protection agency. Lombardy is the most affected region with 212 cases, up from 172 on Monday, followed by Veneto with 38 cases, up from 33 on Monday, the agency said. President Donald Trump said at a business forum in New Delhi on Tuesday that the urgent $2.5 billion plan he sent to lawmakers will prepare the U.S. in case of an outbreak.Trump also said at the forum that the money will help other nations that “really aren’t equipped to do it”.
Why some experts are questioning China’s coronavirus claims The number of novel coronavirus cases in China has expanded dramatically, with 77,042 people having contracted the disease as of Sunday, according to the World Health Organization, and 2,445 deaths – a 3.0 per cent mortality rate. And while there are indications the rate of infection within the country might be slowing, the flu-like illness continues its spread in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Iran and beyond, with 1,769 cases and 17 associated deaths across 28 countries. Canada accounted for eight of those confirmed illnesses, with a ninth presumptive case, but none of the fatalities. This, against a backdrop of unprecedented measures to contain the disease. A staggering 60 million people in Hubei province remain on lockdown, largely confined to their homes, with schools and businesses closed. A total of 780 million people across China are under strict travel restrictions. And almost two dozen airlines have severely curtailed, or flat-out cancelled, their flights in and out of the country. But questions now swirl about what the Chinese knew during the first, crucial few weeks of the outbreak, and if information about the severity and spread of the disease was being suppressed instead of shared. A possible repeat of what happened during the early days of the SARS crisis in 2002-03, when the country’s Communist leadership downplayed a similar illness that eventually moved around the world, infecting more than 8,000 people, and killing 774, including 44 in Canada. ” “When you started seeing this long period where the numbers either didn’t budge, or even one day went backwards, to me that just looked like completely fabricated figures,” says Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author who has tracked global outbreaks and epidemics for decades. “There was absolutely no reason to believe that was true, especially if this was a SARS-related virus.” Yanzhong Huang, a professor of global health studies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that China’s early reports on the illness were severely flawed. “It seems very clear that either local government officials or the health authorities messed up in their response to the outbreak,” he says. Low-balled case numbers and inaccurate information about how the disease was spreading meant that health-care workers failed to take adequate precautions to isolate patients or even protect themselves, he says.
Shocking State Media Report Exposes Widespread Undercounting Of Coronavirus Deaths In Wuhan’s Nursing Homes – Despite the WHO’s refusal to even consider the question during its press conference on Monday, evidence continues to mount that officials in Beijing and Hubei are seriously massaging the stats to conform to Beijing’s narrative that the outbreak is under control, and is finally starting to recede.Yesterday, we shared the story of a doctor in Hunan who said out of 50 deaths at his hospital that day, authorities only counted one in the official stats.Then in the early hours of Tuesday morning, state-controlled business publication Caixin published a shocking scoop that exposed officials’ undercounting, and also suggested that the exaggerations are about as bad as critics feared.It’s hard to image that this wasn’t a deliberate act of defiance by a journalist who was finally fed up with official lies. The death of Dr. Li Wenliang earlier this month inspired a nascent free-speech movement that just might outlast the outbreak, unless authorities move to brutally crush it.The reporters claim that a pattern of discrepancies that has emerged in the official statistics surrounding cases tied to nursing homes and other facilities specializing in elder care. The elderly are, of course, one of several vulnerable populations singled out by the WHO and the governor of Hubei for special care.But after it came to light late last week that Chinese authorities missed 500 cases in several prisons in and outside of Hubei, journalists and local officials got curious to see what else was being overlooked. One nursing home situated just blocks from the seafood market where the outbreak allegedly began reported 19 deaths recently all of which are believed to have been caused by the virus. However, a doctor told the paper that only one death was counted in the official statistics.
Exclusive: Cluster of Death Found at Wuhan Nursing Home Near Seafood Market – At least 19 people, mostly seniors, died in a social welfare facility in Wuhan located just one block away from the seafood market where the deadly Covid-19 outbreak is suspected to have originated, even though the local government acknowledged only one death from the virus. Unexplained deaths from lung ailments among the elderly at the Wuhan Social Welfare Institute and similar facilities suggest that nursing homes may be another blind spot as the government’s epidemic-fighting efforts have focused on hospitals and other communities. Last week it came to light that Chinese prisons reported more than 500 previously uncounted Covid-19 cases among guards and inmates.
Protecting the Truth About the Coronavirus in China – Since February 3, censors have deleted eight posts that I’ve shared on Weibo – all of them about the COVID-19 outbreak. Gone is an analysis of China’s governance written by high school students; a desperate message from a Wuhan resident to the rest of China: “Even if you don’t care about politics, politics will come after you”; screenshots of diary entries from a Wuhan native on how her parents’ health deteriorated and they eventually died from infection; and a plea from a rural Hubei health clinic for medical supplies. As China clamps back down on speech, it saddens me that there are human stories about the crisis that might never be seen again. But I’m relieved to know that volunteers worked together to save so many accounts and so much of the courageous reporting. If the evidence always disappears, there can never be any accountability. As of February 18, the pneumonia-causing virus that emerged in December in Wuhan, China, has killed more than 1,870 and sickened 72,528 in China. The World Health Organization reports 804 confirmed cases in 25 other countries. Getting around censorship on Weibo and Douban is a familiar cat-and-mouse game. But the outrage on these social media platforms is on a scale I’ve never seen before. The death of Li Wenliang, a doctor reprimanded for warning about a dangerous new virus that would later kill him, led to an outpouring of grief and rage and sparked demands for freedom of speech. Authorities responded by increasing censorship and launching propaganda campaigns.
Moscow targets Chinese with raids amid virus fears Since the outbreak of the new virus that has infected more than 76,000 people and killed more than 2,300 in mainland China, Russia has reported two cases. Both patients, Chinese nationals hospitalized in Siberia, recovered quickly. Russian authorities nevertheless are going to significant – some argue discriminatory – lengths to keep the virus from resurfacing and spreading. Moscow officials ordered police raids of hotels, dormitories, apartment buildings and businesses to track down the shrinking number of Chinese people remaining in the city. They also authorized the use of facial recognition technology to find those suspected of evading a 14-day self-quarantine period upon their arrival in Russia. “Conducting raids is an unpleasant task, but it is necessary, for the potential carriers of the virus as well,” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a statement outlining various methods to find and track Chinese people the city approved as a virus prevention strategy. The effort to identify Chinese citizens on public transportation applies not only to buses, but underground trains and street trams in Moscow, Russian media reported Wednesday. Metro workers were instructed to stop riders from China and ask them to fill out questionnaires asking why they were in Russia and whether they observed the two-week quarantine, the reports said. The forms also ask respondents for their health condition and the address of where they are were staying. In Yekaterinburg, a city located 1,790 kilometers (1,112 miles) away from Moscow in the Urals Mountains, members of the local Chinese community also are under watch. Self-styled Cossack patrols in the city hand out medical masks along with strong recommendations to visit a health clinic to Chinese residents.
Coronavirus: infected health official leading South Korea’s fight against Covid-19 is member of Shincheonji Church of Jesus – A senior health official at the forefront of South Korea’s fight against Covid-19 has tested positive for the coronavirus – and identified himself as a member of the religious group linked to hundreds of other cases. The official, whose name has been kept from the public, is the head of the Infection Preventive Medicine Department in the western district of Daegu City, which is at the epicentre of the outbreak in South Korea. Daegu, population 2.2 million, and its surrounding province of North Gyeongbuk, account for 681 of the 833 infections confirmed in the country as of Monday afternoon. More than 450 of those cases have already been identified as followers of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, which mainstream churches regard as a doomsday cult, and experts believe this number is likely to rise. The official, who was in charge of the district’s fight against the virus, identified himself as belonging to the controversial Christian sect after he tested positive for the virus, said Daegu City Mayor Kwon Young-jin. Consequently, 50 other health officials who worked with him have been quarantined at their homes as a precautionary measure.The news came as a police officer in Daegu diagnosed with the virus subsequently revealed himself to be a member of the sect, too, as did a female teacher at a children’s cram school in Gumi City, near Daegu. Also on Monday, Korean Air announced it was stopping all flights to Daegu until March 28, while Asiana Airlines said it would suspend all flights to the city until March 9. Citing coronavirus concerns, Vietnam’s Bamboo Airways said it would suspend all flights to South Korea from February 26.
The coronavirus is wreaking havoc across European health services as Italy becomes the most-infected area outside of Asia – With hospitals pushed to the brink, doctors in short supply, and emergency phone lines tied up due to non-stop calls, the coronavirus isn’t just putting a strain on Asian healthcare systems. It’s wreaking havoc across Europe too. In Italy, the most-infected country outside of Asia, a dozen cities have been put on lockdown. Business Insider spoke with a young Italian woman from Milan who was presenting flu-like symptoms and suffering from a fever. She tried to seek advice from healthcare facilities but was unable to reach anyone. “I’ve had a fever for three days,” the woman told Business Insider. “I haven’t had any direct contact with anyone from China but I can’t be sure that those with whom I’ve come into contact in the last 14 days haven’t. Or that they haven’t had contact with people in Lodigiano, for that matter.” According to The Guardian, the first man in the Italian region confirmed to have contracted COVID-19 was a 38-year-old passing through Lodi. The Milanese woman works in the communication services sector so she meets dozens of people every day. She explained that she felt compelled by her sense of civic responsibility to call 112, the emergency number suggested for people with symptoms in Milan, as she planned on taking “a couple of flights next week.” “I waited on hold for 20 minutes,” the woman said. “When I reached the operator, I was patient when I stopped and thought about the volume of calls that must need filtering. But before I’d had the chance to say anything about my flu, I was told to call an official ‘1500’ number.”She tried to call the number she’d been given, but the line was busy.”Then the line went dead,” she explained. “I continuously tried to get through for 24 hours but there was no answer. I called the general practitioner – their phone was also disconnected. I had to give up. I sat on the couch and watched television.” It’s impossible to get through to someone using the official 1500 number – Business Insider tried to get through several times, without success.
Italy’s Far-Right Seeks to Gain from Coronavirus Outbreak – AsItaly scrambles to contain the largest coronavirus outbreak outside of Asia, the country’s powerful far-right opposition party has used the virus to attack its fragile government, attempting to tie COVID-19’s spread to wider issues of border controls and migration.The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 surged in Italy over the weekend from three on Friday to more than 200 on Monday morning. The rapid spread, so far confined mostly to the country’s north, has raised international fears that the world is on the cusp of a pandemic.Italian authorities have begun to implement drastic measures to contain their outbreak, locking down an area of about 50,000 people near Milan that has become the center of Italy’s outbreak and imposing fines on those who try to enter or leave restricted zones. Schools and universities have been closed across the north. A dozen towns in northern Italy effectively went into lockdown Saturday after the deaths of two people infected with the new virus from China and a growing cluster of cases with no direct links to the origin of the outbreak abroad. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said Sunday in an interview with public broadcaster RAI that the surge in cases had “surprised” him. The far-right League party, which until August was in a coalition government with Conte’s populist Five Star movement, seized on the prime minister’s comment, calling on him to resign.League leader Matteo Salvini, who served as deputy leader in the coalition government last year, sought to link COVID-19’s spread to Italy’s acceptance of migrants and refugees – the issue that has fuelled his political rise.Salvini shared a video across his social media accounts of a migrant rescue ship arriving in Pozzallo, on the Italian island of Sicily on Sunday, with the comment: “It is simply insane that the landings continue as if nothing had happened, this government is every day more reckless and deplorable. And Conte has the courage to go and say on TV: “I’m surprised.”” He added that Italy ought to “make our borders armor-plated” in response to the coronavirus.
Coronavirus: Worst-hit countries boost containment efforts – The worst-hit countries are intensifying their efforts to contain the deadly coronavirus as the number of cases globally surpassed 80,000.In South Korea, infections have risen again, taking the total to 977. Americans have been warned against all but essential travel to the nation.Italy and Iran are both battling to contain outbreaks of the virus.In Japan shares slumped on Tuesday, reacting to a global plunge on Monday sparked by fear of further outbreaks.Wall Street and London had both suffered big drops.The World Health Organization said on Monday the world should do more to prepare for a possible pandemic – a situation where an infectious disease spreads easily between people in many countries.The WHO said it was too early to label the outbreak as such, but countries should be “in a phase of preparedness”. More cases of the virus, which causes respiratory disease Covid-19, continue to emerge, with the vast majority still in China. The proportion of infected people who die appears to be between 1% and 2%, although the WHO cautions that the mortality rate is not known yet. The Chinese government has announced a ban on the consumption of wild animals and a crackdown on the hunting, transportation and trade of prohibited species, state media say. It is thought that the outbreak originated at a market in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province, selling wild animals.
US soldier in South Korea tests positive for coronavirus – A U.S. soldier stationed in South Korea has tested positive for the new coronavirus, the first such case involving a U.S. service member. United States Forces Korea said in a statement Tuesday that a soldier stationed in Camp Carroll had tested positive and is currently in quarantine at his off-base residence. “USFK is implementing all appropriate control measures to help control the spread of COVID-19 and remains at risk level ‘high’ for USFK peninsula-wide as a prudent measure to protect the force,” the military said in its statement. COVID-19 refers to the disease caused by the coronavirus. The outbreak has spread from China to other parts of the world in a span of several months. The latest development comes a day after a U.S. military dependent in South Korea tested positive for the virus after visiting a store on Camp Walker, a military base in the southeast city fo Daegu, prompting the USFK to raise its risk level from moderate to high. The Trump administration has come under fire from public health officials and lawmakers alike over its response to the outbreak. Trump himself tweeted on Monday night that the virus was “very much under control.” But as stocks plunged for the second day in a row on Tuesday amid a tidal wave of concerns over the outbreak, Republican and Democratic lawmakers chided the White House for its apparent lack of preparation. Their remarks came the same day a top U.S. health official warned the spread of the virus in the U.S. was inevitable. Still, other Trump officials on Tuesday sought to quell concerns, with White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow claiming the the administration had contained it.
San Francisco declares state of emergency over coronavirus – San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D) declared a state of emergency for the city on Tuesday amid concerns over the international coronavirus outbreak.While no coronavirus cases have been confirmed in San Francisco, “the global picture is changing rapidly, and we need to step-up preparedness,” Breed said in a statement.”We see the virus spreading in new parts of the world every day, and we are taking the necessary steps to protect San Franciscans from harm,” she added. The new state of emergency will allow city officials to assemble resources and personnel to expedite emergency planning measures and boost the ability to deploy a rapid response to a potential coronavirus case in the city.The move follows a similar declaration from Santa Clara County earlier this month. The declaration is effective immediately for seven days and will be voted on by the board of supervisors on March 3. The statement from Breed comes amid stark warnings from U.S. health officials over the chances of an outbreak of the virus in the U.S. “As more and more countries experience community spread, successful containment at our borders becomes harder and harder,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said Tuesday. “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” she added. “Disruption to everyday life might be severe.”
8,000 Californians Under “Self-Imposed Quarantine”, South Korea Locks Down City Of 2.5 Million People: Virus Updates – As we mentioned earlier, the state of California has thousands of individuals under a ‘self-imposed quarantine’. But what, exactly, does this mean? As the SF Chronicle points out, this figure is up from 6,700 last week. The Press Democrat reports that all of the people under self-imposed quarantine recently visited China, but have no other connection to a sick individual, and have shown no other signs of the virus. These people returned to the US either on or after Feb. 2 as countries started tightening borders. While making a case for full-on quarantine might be difficult, Italy and SK have identified cases where the chain of infection is murky. Some haven’t traveled abroad. Some visited hot zones weeks ago and are just beginning to show symptoms. It’s certainly something to think about consider that, as we reported earlier, the CDC only has only tested about 400 individuals. In the latest virus-related update out of Europe, Spain just reported its third case, according to Spanish newspaper El Pais. According the report, the individual is a “traveler” from Italy. In their latest update, South Korea has admitted 60 more cases, making a total of 893. And, as the virus spreads, South Korea is about to go ‘full China’ on its people as Yonhap reports the cities of Daegu and Gyeongbuk, where the virus is spreading rapidly, have been designated as special disease management areas for infectious diseases. Simply put, this means that, as Democratic Party spokesman Hong Ik-pyo explained, “A blockade is being considered by the government, and we are considering using some administrative power in areas such as movement.” Locals have called this a strategy to “enforce the maximum containment policy” – in other words, full lockdown of a city of 2.5 million people (the 4th largest in the country).
Lawmakers raise alarms over Trump coronavirus response – Lawmakers in both parties on Tuesday expressed growing alarm that the threat of coronavirus in the United States is serious, and that the Trump administration is not doing enough to fight it. Two Cabinet members at separate hearings were grilled over what lawmakers described as an insufficient response so far, while Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said the White House’s budget request to handle the disease was lackluster. “It seems to me at the outset that this request for the money, the supplemental, is lowballing it, possibly, and you can’t afford to do that,” Shelby told Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar during a hearing on the agency’s budget request. “If you lowball something like this, you’ll pay for it later,” he added, telling reporters he planned to recommend a “higher” amount without offering details. Democrats were unsparing on their criticism, with Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) saying the administration was showing “towering and dangerous incompetence” in its response to the virus. He called for at least $3.1 billion in funding and for the administration to appoint a czar to oversee the response. The broadsides from lawmakers came against the backdrop of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issuing a warning for the country to prepare for an outbreak of cases in the U.S., and another difficult day on Wall Street, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 879 points. The index lost more than 1,000 points the previous day. Messages from the White House diverged throughout Tuesday, with White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow raising eyebrows with remarks in an CNBC interview stating that the virus was “contained” and that it was pretty close to “air-tight.” His remarks came the same day the CDC warned of an inevitable outbreak in the United States. “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters. “Disruption to everyday life might be severe.” The widely different messages from administration officials coming the same day invited criticism from Democrats. “It is clear this administration is in total disarray when it comes to this crisis of the coronavirus,” Schumer said Tuesday. He also ripped the administration for budget cuts to the CDC.
CDC Tells Americans to Start Readying for Outbreak: Virus Update -The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Americans to prepare for a coronavirus outbreak at home that could lead to significant disruptions of daily life, though the warnings were downplayed by the White House. Congress was told that there’s shortage of masks needed for health workers if one occurs. New cases were reported in Europe, prompting worries of a widening outbreak there. Iran reported a total of 15 deaths, the most fatalities outside China, and a top health official tested positive. Chinese President Xi Jinpingsaid his country was confident of limiting the impact, though new cases continue to be identified elsewhere in Asia.Moderna Inc. shipped a first vaccine for testing in humans. The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is also starting a trial of Gilead Sciences Inc. drug.White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow called for calm after U.S. health officials said that an outbreak inside the U.S. could cause significant disruptions to daily life if emergency plans were put into place.”I think people should be as calm as possible in assessing this,” Kudlow said at the White House. “Emergency plans don’t necessarily mean they’ll have to be put into place.”There have been fewer than 20 coronavirus cases diagnosed in the U.S., though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it expects the pathogen to eventually spread locally.”We have contained this, I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight,” Kudlow said. He called it a human tragedy because of the toll in China, but said it was not an economic one.
If CDC Believes US Coronavirus Outbreak Is “Imminent”, Why Have Only 400 People Been Tested? -As the CDC and the State Department continue their blame game over who was responsible for breaking quarantine during the evacuation of more than 300 American passengers aboard the ‘Diamond Princess’, a Rutgers professor is raising interesting questions about the federal government’s response to the outbreak on Twitter. Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology, pointed out that only 426 Americans have been tested for the coronavirus since the outbreak began. That’s compared with nearly 200,000 tests in China, and 28,000 tests in South Korea. No question each of those countries has a more serious outbreak. But it seems like there have been enough scares across the US to warrant more tests, especially as authorities promised to trace contacts and isolate them. As of Monday, the CDC has reported 39 cases among people returning from Wuhan or the Diamond Princess, 12 additional ‘travel related’ cases, as well as two cases of human-to-human transmission involving family members of those infected abroad. So, why hasn’t the US taken the initiative to test more cases? It’s true that the CDC warned about a shortage of quality test kids last week. And on Monday, senior White House officials warned about the vulnerable supply chain for health-care products needed to combat the outbreak, as we noted earlier. Does this mean the federal government and the CDC have obscured the seriousness of a shortage of virus tests and other medical gear? Or is this another example of the federal agency dragging its feet for some reason probably related to bureaucratic politics.
Trump spent the past 2 years slashing the government agencies responsible for handling the coronavirus outbreak President Donald Trump spent much of Tuesday reassuring the public that the coronavirus is under control. “China is working very, very hard,” Trump told reporters at a business roundtable at the US embassy in New Delhi. “I have spoken to President Xi, and they are working very hard. If you know anything about him, I think he will be in pretty good shape. They have had a rough patch, but now it looks like they are getting it more and more under control. I think that is a problem that is going to go away.”Trump’s comments are at odds with reality. The coronavirus, or the COVID-19 virus, originated in Wuhan, China, and has killed 2,700 people and spread to 30 countries. There are at least 36 confirmed cases in the US, including repatriated citizens.On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it expected the virus to spread further within the US.”It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen in this country any more but a question of when this will happen,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during a press call on Tuesday. “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad.”Messonnier also said the agency was “preparing as if we are going to see community spread in the near term,” adding that the outbreak could soon lead to a “disruption to everyday life.”Fears of a pandemic come after the Trump administration spent the past several years gutting the very government programs that are tasked with combatting such a crisis.In 2018, for instance, the CDC cut 80% of its efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks because it was running out of money. Ultimately, the department went from working in 49 countries to just 10. Here are some other actions the Trump administration undertook to dismantle government-spending programs related to fighting the spread of global diseases, according to Foreign Policy:
Harvard Professor Says 40-70% Of People Worldwide Will Be Infected With Covid-19 – Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch says that the coronavirus will not be containable and that 40-70 of people worldwide will be infected. In an article entitled You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus, the Atlantic explains how the coronavirus is particularly dangerous because it may cause cause no symptoms at all in many carriers of the infection. According to Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch, this contributes to his prediction that coronavirus “will ultimately not be containable.” “Lipsitch predicts that, within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19,” reports the Atlantic. The professor clarifies that this doesn’t mean all of those victims will become seriously ill and that “many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic.” Lipsitch’s “very, very rough” estimate (banking on “multiple assumptions piled on top of each other”) was that 100 or 200 people in the U.S. were infected. That’s all it would take to seed the disease widely… As The Atlantic noted, even if Lipsitch’s estimates were off by orders of magnitude, they wouldn’t likely change the overall prognosis. “Two hundred cases of a flu-like illness during flu season – when you’re not testing for it – is very hard to detect,” Lipsitch said. “But it would be really good to know sooner rather than later whether that’s correct, or whether we’ve miscalculated something. The only way to do that is by testing.” However, given the increasingly stringent measures being taken outside of China to stop the spread of the virus, including in Italy where people are being prevented from leaving towns, one wonders how severe the panic will be if there is a massive global pandemic.
Harvard Scientist Predicts Up to 70% of World Will Get COVID-19 Coronavirus – Cases of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus are now popping up all over the world, with full-blown outbreaks and quarantines taking place in Iran, Italy, Japan, and South Korea, with numerous deaths in each area. The World Health Organization (WHO) has been hesitant to officially call this outbreak a pandemic, but at a press conference this week, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that nations around the world should start preparing as if they were dealing with an active pandemic. Meanwhile, Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch has predicted in an interview with the Atlantic, that the virus will eventually infect somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of the entire world, because it has now become “uncontainable.” However, Lipsitch does not believe that the virus will be deadly to all of these people, because some cases of the illness will be mild or nonsymptomatic. A case study published this week by Chinese researchers in the journal JAMA has shown that a 20-year-old woman from Wuhan passed the illness on to five of her family members but never became sick herself. To make matters even more confusing, the young woman initially tested negative for the illness before testing positive days later. Doctors believe that the woman from the recent case study had an incubation period of 19 days. Other studies have suggested that the time of incubation could be up to 24 or even 27 days.
Italy is sealing off entire towns and canceling major events after 322 cases and 12 deaths made it the most infected country outside Asia – Italy is scrambling to counter a coronavirus outbreak after a sharp spike in cases and deaths made it the worst-hit country outside Asia.As of Wednesday morning, 12 people in Italy had died from the virus and at least 322 cases of COVID-19 had been reported in the country.All the deaths involved people who were elderly or had other health complications, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and the Associated Press (AP) reported.The country has put 11 towns on lockdown with the hope of containing the spread. The two most infected regions are Lombardy and Veneto in the north, which contain the major cities of Milan and Venice. But the virus has also spread farther south, with regions including Tuscany and the island of Sicily also reporting cases on Tuesday and Wednesday.Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced an emergency plan to quarantine towns late on Saturday, locking down the settlements by blocking most travel to and from them. He said the quarantine could last for weeks, the BBC reported.Italian officials estimated on Monday that about 100,000 people in the country were affected by travel restrictions. Schools, museums, and theaters across the region have been closed in these areas. Police officers and members of the armed forces have been given the authority to e nforce the lockdown, the BBC reported.On Tuesday, Conte warned against panic and defended the country’s response to the virus. “Obviously I can’t say I’m not worried because I don’t want anyone to think we’re underestimating this emergency,” he said, according to the AP. “But we trust that with the measures we’ve implemented there will be a containing effect in the coming days.”
Coronavirus: Outbreak spreads in Europe from Italy BBC. Several European countries have announced their first coronavirus cases, all apparently linked to the growing outbreak in Italy. Austria, Croatia, Greece and Switzerland said the cases involved people who had been to Italy, as did Algeria in Africa. The first positive virus test has been recorded in Latin America – a Brazilian resident just returned from Italy. Italy has in recent days become Europe’s worst-affected country. Authorities have confirmed more than 300 cases and 12 deaths there, the most recent a 70-year-old resident of Lombardy who died after being taken to intensive care in Parma. The country has also seen four children infected. Its neighbours, however, have decided closing borders would be “disproportionate”. Health ministers from France, Germany, Italy and the EU Commission committed to keeping frontiers open at a meeting on Tuesday as new cases of the virus emerged throughout Europe and in central and southern Italy. “We’re talking about a virus that doesn’t respect borders,” said Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza. His German counterpart, Jens Spahn, said the neighbours were taking the situation “very, very seriously” but acknowledged “it could get worse before it gets better”.
- In the UK, schoolchildren returning from holidays in northern Italy have been sent home, with the government issuing new guidance to travellers.
- In Austria, a young Italian couple who live in Innsbruck in the Tyrol were confirmed to have the virus. The couple’s home was sealed off and a hotel in which one of the pair worked was put in lockdown. Officials on Wednesday said the lockdown had been lifted, while nine people had been put in quarantine “as a precaution” following medical tests
- Switzerland said a man in his seventies living in Ticino, bordering Italy, had been infected in Milan on 15 February and was now in isolation
- A man in Croatia who recently returned from Italy became the first confirmed patient in the Balkans
- On the Spanish island of Tenerife, hundreds of guests were locked down in a hotel after an Italian doctor and his wife tested positive for the virus
- Spain reported its first case on the mainland, involving a woman in Barcelona who had been to northern Italy
- Greece confirmed its first case, in a 38-year-old woman who had returned from a trip to northern Italy, according to reports
- France confirmed the first death of a French national from the virus. The 60-year-old French man was the second fatality in the country, after an 80-year-old Chinese tourist died there earlier this month
- France and Germany reported new cases involving people who had recently been to northern Italy
Coronavirus cases surge to 400 in Italy -The number of coronavirus cases in Italy has jumped to 400, amid international efforts to contain the spread of the deadly outbreak. The rise in Italy, the main focus of infection in Europe, represents a 25% surge in 24 hours. Several European countries announced new cases traced to Italy. Also on Wednesday, the World Health Organization said that for the first time the virus was spreading faster outside China, where it originated. Globally, more than 80,000 people in about 40 countries have been infected with the new coronavirus, which emerged in December. The vast majority remain in China. Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, has killed more than 2,700 people so far. Map Late on Wednesday, authorities reported a total of 400 cases – a rise of 80 from Tuesday night. The worst-affected areas are in the industrial north of the country – Lombardy, the region around Milan, and Veneto near Venice. The outbreak has killed 12 people in the country so far. Government officials have sought to reassure the public, and insisted steps were being taken to prevent the spread of the disease. Schools, universities and cinemas have been closed and several public events cancelled. Eleven towns at the centre of the outbreak – home to a total of 55,000 people – have been quarantined. There are fears that the outbreak may tip Italy into economic recession. The BBC’s Mark Lowen in Milan says fear is the reason for the city’s empty cafes and many hotel cancellations. EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides told reporters after meeting the Italian health minister in Rome: “This is a situation of concern, but we must not give in to panic. “There are still many unknowns about this virus and in particular its origin and how it spreads.” In the past two days, Austria, Croatia, Greece, Norway, Switzerland, Georgia and North Macedonia reported their first coronavirus cases. Many of them involved people who had been to Italy. More cases were also announced in Spain, France and Germany. Ireland postponed Six Nations rugby matches with Italy in Dublin that were to be held on 7 and 8 March. In the UK, where 13 cases have been reported, tests for coronavirus are being increased to include people displaying flu-like symptoms. Outside Europe, Algeria, Brazil and Pakistan also reported their first coronavirus infections. The Brazilian case marked the arrival of the virus in Latin America.
Coronavirus cases in Italy hit 447 -Italy has 447 confirmed cases of coronavirus as of Wednesday, according to The Associated Press. Earlier the same day, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the number of cases had reached 400, marking a 25 percent uptick in just 24 hours. The 47 additional cases were announced later in the evening.Seven other European nations confirmed new cases of the virus overnight, including 80 new cases in Italy alone as of Wednesday morning, with a concentration in the northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto. The outbreak has killed 12 people in the country so far.”The sudden increases in cases in Italy, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Korea are deeply concerning,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday.A number of elected officials have self-quarantined to send a message to the public to limit travel in an effort to contain the disease.Soccer games have also been canceled in Italy, and at least six universities announced Wednesday that they would cancel their study abroad programs there. “In response, the Italian government has been taking swift action to try to prevent its spread,” a New York University spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday. “While we do not believe there is a pressing health threat to the NYU Florence community, the past month has taught us that countries may swiftly and unexpectedly make decisions that can significantly affect one’s ability to travel.”
How One Singapore Sales Conference Spread Coronavirus Around the World – One meeting, attended by 109 people, sent virus hunters scurrying to a French Alpine ski town, a British pub and locations in Malaysia and South Korea – Wall Street Journal -Last month, 109 people gathered in a Singapore hotel for an international sales conference held by a U.K.-based company that makes products to analyze gas.When the attendees flew home, some unwittingly took the coronavirus with them.The virus had a 10-day head start on health authorities who, after belatedly learning a 41-year-old Malaysian participant was infected, began a desperate effort to track the infection through countries including South Korea, England and France.Health investigators have found at least 20 people in six Asian and European countries who were sickened, some who attended the conference and others who came in contact with participants.After this one conference alone, 94 participants left Singapore, authorities determined. Some joined Lunar New Year dinners. Others went on vacation, one to an Alpine ski town. They had eaten, taken car rides and shared a roof with others who then boarded more planes to places the virus hadn’t yet reached.Health officials used international communications channels to share names of the potentially infected and relied on self-reporting by sickened conference-goers, creating “activity maps” that detailed their movement. They checked flight manifests and called passengers. French authorities closed down schools in sparsely populated towns. U.K. public-health officials isolated health-care workers who got the illness and searched for patients with whom they came in contact. Tracking even a relatively small number of cases such as those linked to the conference requires meticulous detective work. To stop the contagion’s global spread, it is critical to identify people who might have caught the virus before they pass it on.
Aerial footage shows huge queues for masks in South Korea amid coronavirus panic (video)A queue of hundreds of people wanting to buy face masks from a supermarket stretched round several streets in Daegu on Monday. Customers queued outside one of Daegu’s E-mart stores, which began to sell face masks at half price in the city, according to local media reports. South Korea has raised its infectious disease alert level to its highest for the first time since 2009
Hospitals in Japan refusing to test many who suspect they have COVID-19 – Some medical institutions in Japan have been rejecting possible COVID-19 patients under the strict but ambiguous testing guidelines currently in place, leaving many patients shunted from hospital to hospital. Experts point out that the vague criteria have caused confusion among medical staff. According to the health ministry, eligibility for the test is limited to two groups of people; those who have come into close contact with patients confirmed as infected with the new virus, and those who have traveled recently to infected areas in China, have a fever of at least 37.5 degrees Celsius and have pneumonia-like symptoms that require hospitalization. But the final decision on whether to test a patient is also “up to the doctor’s overall judgment.” A government worker in his 30s who lives in Tokyo visited a hospital after his temperature rose to 39 degrees on Feb. 17. When he mentioned that he had recently visited Taiwan, he was advised to go to a dedicated COVID-19 consultation center. The center told him that visitors to Taiwan were not eligible for the test. After being refused by two more hospitals due to reasons such as inadequate facilities, he was finally seen by a doctor at a general hospital where he took a lung X-ray. He was given the all-clear. A 29-year-old male company employee in Tokyo called the COVID-19 consultation center after developing a fever of 39 degrees on Feb. 12 as well as feeling lethargic and having diarrhea. He had recently been in contact with a person who had traveled to the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. The center told him to visit a local hospital because he had not had close contact with the individual with Wuhan travel history. He was then refused by a hospital in Tokyo, but was later able to see a doctor at a hospital that specializes in treating infections. Symptoms of infection with the novel coronavirus may be difficult to distinguish from those of other illnesses, and it is said that most cases of infection do not become severe. A Chiba woman in her 70s who on Feb. 20 was found to have been infected had previously been told to note her symptoms, but had not been tested. She had gone on a three-day bus tour ending Feb. 18, but the symptoms continued and so she visited the hospital and then tested positive. Suggesting one reason so many hospitals have been refusing patients, a Tokyo Metropolitan Government official said, “Medical institutions are probably overreacting,” fearing the risks of in-hospital infection.
14% of Recovered Covid-19 Patients in Guangdong Tested Positive Again — About 14% of patients who recovered from the novel coronavirus and were discharged from hospitals in southern China’s Guangdong province were tested positive again in later check-ups, according to the local health authority. A positive test suggests the recovered patients may still carry the virus, adding complexity to efforts to control the outbreak.There is no clear conclusion on why it happens and whether such patients could still be infectious, said Song Tie, deputy director of the Guangdong Center of Disease Control And Prevention (Guangdong CDC), at a Tuesday briefing.According to the preliminary assessment, experts believed the patients are still recovering from lung infections and have yet to be fully healthy, according to Song. According to the latest treatment guidelines for the Covid-19 issued by the National Health Commission, patients can be considered recovered and released from hospital when their throat or nose swabs show up negative in two consecutive tests, with a CT scan indicating no lung lesions, and when they have no obvious symptoms such as fever.The guidelines suggest recovered patients should monitor their health and limit outdoor activities for two weeks after leaving the hospital, and check in for retesting in following weeks.Some patients’ test results returned to positive in the follow-up checks, said Li Yueping, director of the intensive care unit at Guangzhou No.8 People’s Hospital at the briefing.
Saudi Arabia suspends entry for pilgrims over coronavirus — Saudi Arabia on Thursday suspended visas for visits to Islam’s holiest sites for the “umrah” pilgrimage, an unprecedented move triggered by coronavirus fears that raises questions over the hajj, which starts in July. The kingdom, which hosts millions of pilgrims every year in the cities of Mecca and Medina, also suspended visas for tourists from countries with reported infections as fears of a pandemic deepen. Saudi Arabia, which so far has reported no cases of the virus but has expressed alarm over its spread in neighbouring countries, said the suspensions were temporary. It provided no timeframe for when they will be lifted. “The kingdom’s government has decided to take the following precautions: suspending entry to the kingdom for the purpose of umrah and visit to the Prophet’s mosque temporarily,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. “Suspending entry into the kingdom with tourist visas for those coming from countries, in which the spread of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) is a danger.” Gulf countries have already announced a raft of measures, including flight suspensions and school closures, to curb the spread of the disease from people returning from pilgrimages to Iran. – Logistical headache – The umrah, which refers to the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca that can be undertaken at any time of year, attracts tens of thousands of devout Muslims from all over the globe each month. There was no clarity over how the move would affect the annual hajj pilgrimage due to start in late July. Some 2.5 million faithful travelled to Saudi Arabia from across the world to take part in last year’s hajj — one of the five pillars of Islam. The hajj and the umrah centre on the western city of Mecca and its surrounding hills and valleys. The hajj represents a key rite of passage for Muslims and a massive logistical challenge for Saudi authorities, with colossal crowds cramming into relatively small holy sites. Saudi Arabia’s custodianship of Mecca and Medina — Islam’s two holiest sites — is seen as the kingdom’s most powerful source of political legitimacy.
CDC announces first US case of coronavirus with ‘unknown’ origin – Officials on Wednesday announced a new case of coronavirus in California, which could be the first known instance in the United States of the virus spreading among the general public. Officials announced a case in California in which the person did not have a history of going to places with the virus or known exposure to another person with the virus. “At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said. “It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of COVID-19, which would be the first time this has happened in the United States. Community spread means spread of an illness for which the source of infection is unknown.” “It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveler who was infected,” the CDC added. If confirmed, it would be a major milestone if the virus were spreading in the U.S. among the general public, something officials have warned is coming but so far has not happened. The case is the 15th in the United States, not counting those who returned from a cruise ship abroad.
A single coronavirus case exposes a bigger problem: The scope of undetected U.S. spread is unknown – The discovery that a California woman was likely infected with the novelcoronavirus by a previously unrecognized case in her community is proof of an enormous problem the country is facing at the moment, according to public health experts. It’s clear that the virus is spreading undetected in the United States – but how broadly it’s spreading is an utter mystery. Before Thursday, a perfect storm of problems in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s development of test kits – and the agency’s reluctance to expand its recommendation of who should be tested given the limited availability of kits – meant very little testing has been done in the country. As of Wednesday, the CDC said that 445 people had been tested – a fraction of the number of tests that other countries have run.The new case in California makes it clear the virus is spreading undetected in at least one area of one state. The woman is not believed to have traveled outside the country and had no contact with a known case. As her condition worsened – she is on a ventilator – health officials in California asked the CDC to test her for the virus. Because she had not been to China and had not been a contact of a known case, the agency said no. Eventually, more than 10 days after she went into hospital, the CDC agreed she could be tested. Dozens of health workers who may have come into contact with her at NorthBay VacaValley Hospital, in Vacaville, Calif., are now being monitored. California Gov. Gavin Newsom was critical of the testing debacle in a press conference on Thursday. His state has only 200 kits to test for the new coronavirus, he said. “Testing protocols have been a point of frustration for many of us,” Newsom said. Requests for comment from the CDC on Thursday went unanswered. The New York Times reported that the Trump administration has ordered that all statements on the coronavirus be funneled through the office of Vice President Mike Pence, who was named to head the administration’s coronavirus response on Wednesday by President Trump.
Public health experts raise alarm as coronavirus spreads – A global pandemic outbreak of a new coronavirus will almost inevitably spread to the United States, public health experts are warning, putting new pressure on the Trump administration to act as cases begin to mount outside of the Chinese epicenter. Those experts, many of whom were on the front lines of the battle against an Ebola outbreak six years ago, said the coronavirus represents an even greater threat to the United States. Though much is still unknown about the virus, which first appeared late last year in Wuhan, China, it’s clear it spreads easily between humans. “We’ve seen what this disease can do. We’ve seen what it did in China. We’ve seen what it did on the cruise ship,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development who directed USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Ebola outbreak. “This is a highly transmissible disease, and there’s nothing magic about China that means it’s going to spread there and not here.” Experts have watched with growing alarm as clusters of cases have popped up, and multiplied exponentially, both in poor countries with weak health infrastructure like Iran and in wealthy countries with strong infrastructure like Italy and South Korea. The latest case counts showed nearly a thousand cases of the coronavirus in South Korea, just days after cases numbered in only the single digits. “This is going to continue to spread around the world like a pandemic, not like SARS or MERS, and you can’t stop it with traditional public health measures,” said Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “The only thing that would stop it is if you have a vaccine for the world. And we don’t and we won’t.” Nancy Messonnier, who directs the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters Tuesday that the virus’s spread inside the United States is now inevitable. She said she had spoken to her children about the virus Tuesday morning. “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” Messonnier said. “Disruption to everyday life might be severe.”
Whistleblower: Feds helping evacuees lacked virus protection (AP) – A government whistleblower has filed a complaint alleging that some federal workers did not have the necessary protective gear or training when they were deployed to help Americans evacuated from China during the coronavirus outbreak.The complaint deals with Department of Health and Human Services employees sent to Travis and March Air Force bases in California to assist the quarantined evacuees. The Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency that investigates personnel issues, confirmed on Thursday that it had received the unnamed whistleblower’s complaint and had opened a case.Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., said the whistleblower recently contacted his office, also alleging retaliation by higher-ups for having flagged safety issues.”My concern from the moment I heard it is that individuals at HHS are not taking the complaints of HHS employees seriously,” Gomez said in an interview. “Their superiors are not supposed to brush them off. By retaliating against people if they do call out a problem, that only discourages other people from ever reporting violations.” The whistleblower was among a team of about a dozen employees from the agency who had been deployed to help connect the evacuees with government assistance that they might qualify for to ease their return. The team was there from mid-January until earlier this month.Although team members had gloves at times and masks at other times, they lacked full protective gear and received no training on how to protect themselves in a viral hot zone, according to a description provided by the congressional office. They had no respirators. While helping the evacuees, team members noticed that workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were in full gear to protect them from getting sick.
California is monitoring at least 8,400 people for the coronavirus – California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that 33 people have tested positive for COVID-19 and the state is currently monitoring at least 8,400 others – a day after U.S. health officials confirmed the first possible community transmission of the coronavirus in a Solano County resident. “This is a fluid situation right now and I want to emphaize the risk to the American public remains low,” said Dr. Sonia Y. Angell, California Department of Public Health Director and State Health Officer during a press conference. “There have been a limited number of confirmed cases to date.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t know exactly how the new California patient, who’s receiving medical care in Sacramento County, contracted the virus. The patient didn’t have a relevant travel history or exposure to another patient with the virus, the CDC said Wednesday. California health officials said the patient wasn’t under quarantine before her diagnosis and was out and about in her community. “We are currently in deep partnership with CDC on one overriding protocol that drives our principle focus right now and that’s testing, and the importance to increase our testing protocols and to have point of contact diagnostic testing as our top priority not just in the state of California but I imagine all across the United States,” Newsom said at a press conference. Newsom said five of the 33 patients who tested positive for the virus have since left the state. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the 33 positive cases were part of the group of Diamond Princess passengers who were evacuated from the cruise ship that was quarantined off the coast of Japan. The U.S. had 60 cases as of Wednesday night, 42 of which are people who were on the ship, according to the CDC. California health officials have 200 testing kits on hand and will be receiving more over the next few days, Newsom said.
Coronavirus: Trump says US risk ‘very low’ as Australian PM warns pandemic is ‘upon us’ — Donald Trump has sought to play down the threat from coronavirus despite mounting concerns about unchecked worldwide contagion, as Australia’s prime minister launched an emergency plan and said that the risk of a pandemic was “very much upon us”.In a press conference in Washington, the US president said the danger to Americans “remains very low” and predicted that the number of cases diagnosed in the country, currently on 15, could fall to zero in a “few days”.”We have had tremendous success, tremendous success, beyond what people would have thought. At the same time, you do have some outbreaks in some countries – Italy and various countries – are having some difficulties,” he said, in remarks that appeared to be contradicted by officials from his own administration at the same media briefing. The president also said that stock markets, which have seen substantial falls in recent days because of worries about the global economic impact of the virus, would recover, even attempting to blame the Democratic leadership debate for the losses on Wall Street.However, the growing threat of a pandemic forced the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, a staunch Trump ally, to enact the country’s emergency response plan, which could include mass vaccinations and the quarantining of large numbers of people in sports stadiums if necessary. “There is every indication the world will soon enter the pandemic phase of the virus,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra. “We believe the risk of a pandemic is very much upon us and we as a government need to take steps necessary to prepare for such a pandemic.” Morrison was speaking after evidence continued to mount from the rest of the world that the number of cases of the virus, which has killed nearly 3,000 people and infected more than 82,000, was rising unchecked, and as countries stepped up their policy responses:
- South Korea reported a further 334 new cases of Covid-19, bringing the total to 1,595 – the highest number outside mainland China. Most of the cases were again centred on Daegu where a church at the centre of the country’s outbreak is located.
- Iran’s state-run Irna news agency reported that 22 people had died – more than in any country apart from China – and that there were 141 confirmed cases. Experts fear Iran is underreporting the number of cases as infections across the wider Persian Gulf have emerged in recent days linked back to the Islamic republic.
- Saudi Arabia temporarily banned foreign pilgrims from entering the country to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.
- China reported 433 new confirmed cases, and 29 deaths.
- Britain is preparing for a surge in cases by launching a mass public information campaign in case of an Italy-sized outbreak.
- Denmark recorded its first case, a man returning after a skiing holiday inItaly. Estonia, Pakistan, Georgia, Norway, Macedonia, Greece and Romania were among countries to report their first case of coronavirus in the past 24 hours.
- Italian prosecutors launched an investigation into the alleged failure of a hospital in Lombardy to test a man believed to be the first to transmit the infection in the area, as infections surged over 400.
- Concerns continued to mount about major events such as the Tokyo Olympics, with the Australian swimming legend Ian Thorpe saying athletes would have to put their health first when considering whether it was safe to attend.
Explainer: Coronavirus reappears in discharged patients, raising questions in containment fight – (Reuters) – A growing number of discharged coronavirus patients in China and elsewhere are testing positive after recovering, sometimes weeks after being allowed to leave the hospital, which could make the epidemic harder to eradicate. On Wednesday, the Osaka prefectural government in Japan said a woman working as a tour-bus guide had tested positive for the coronavirus for a second time. This followed reports in China that discharged patients throughout the country were testing positive after their release from the hospital. An official at China’s National Health Commission said on Friday that such patients have not been found to be infectious. Experts say there are several ways discharged patients could fall ill with the virus again. Convalescing patients might not build up enough antibodies to develop immunity to SARS-CoV-2, and are being infected again. The virus also could be “biphasic”, meaning it lies dormant before creating new symptoms. But some of the first cases of “reinfection” in China have been attributed to testing discrepancies. On Feb. 21, a discharged patient in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu was readmitted 10 days after being discharged when a follow-up test came back positive. Lei Xuezhong, the deputy director of the infectious diseases center at the West China Hospital, told People’s Daily that hospitals were testing nose and throat samples when deciding whether patients should be discharged, but new tests were finding the virus in the lower respiratory tract. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia who has been closely following the outbreak, told Reuters that although the patient in Osaka could have relapsed, it is also possible that the virus was still being released into her system from the initial infection, and she wasn’t tested properly before she was discharged. The woman first tested positive in late January and was discharged from the hospital on Feb. 1, leading some experts to speculate that it was biphasic, like anthrax.
Five more Chinese regions lower emergency response level as COVID-19 threat recedes – Five Chinese regions have downgraded their emergency response level after assessing that health risks from the coronavirus outbreak have receded, state media and government authorities reported. The northwestern Chinese regions of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, the southwestern province of Sichuan, the northeastern province of Jilin and the southern island of Hainan have all cut their emergency response levels. China has a four-tier response system for public health emergencies that determines what measures a region will implement, with level I the most serious. READ: Four Chinese provinces lower COVID-19 emergency response level Sichuan announced it would adjust its measures from level I to level II, while Inner Mongolia will change from level I to level III, state news agency Xinhua said on Wednesday (Feb 26). Sichuan said every locality will be required to return to work and develop targeted prevention and control programmes for areas still deemed “high-risk”. The region of Xinjiang, home to China’s Muslim Uighur population, also reduced its emergency response level from I to II after reporting no new cases for seven consecutive days, the official local news portal Tianshan.com said on Wednesday. Elsewhere, Jilin province also cut its emergency response level from I to II, according to a notice posted on an official government website. As did Hainan island, from level I to III, according to a notice on the Haikou city government’s official WeChat channel. The provinces of Gansu, Yunnan, Guangdong, Shanxi, Guizhou and Anhui have also cut their emergency response levels in the last few days. Some regions, including Fujian in the southeast, are also starting to dismantle emergency roadblocks designed to screen incoming vehicles and curb the contagion. The flu-like disease, which was first detected in the city of Wuhan last December, has infected more than 80,000 people globally and killed more than 2,700 in mainland China. The World Health Organization has said the epidemic in China peaked between Jan. 23 and Feb. 2 and has been in decline since.
New Virus Cases In South Korea Surpasses China For First Time – The outbreak of COVID-19 in South Korea has just hit another unfortunate milestone: For the first time on Thursday, new cases in the tiny East Asian country of just 25 million surpassed new cases in China. While few trust the Chinese numbers, the message is still clear: the global outbreak’s center of gravity is moving from Wuhan over to Daegu, and that the global spread of the virus is accelerating, putting governments and epidemiologists on edge. On Thursday, South Korea confirmed 505 new cases, compared with 433 in China, according to China’s NHC. Across South Korea, total cases have hit 1,766 in the 38 days since the first case was confirmed on Jan. 20. Of these, 1,132 are from Daegu, 345 from neighboring North Gyeongsang Province, and another 56 are from Seoul. A total of 13 have died. More broadly, this week marked the first time where new cases outside China surpassed those in China. The rapid surge in cases in Daegu and elsewhere made South Korea home to the biggest cluster of cases outside the mainland as it surpassed the “Diamond Princess’s” infection total earlier this week. So far, most of the cases have been connected to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus and its branch in Daegu, a city in the southeastern area of South Korea. South Korean President Moon Jae-in promised to avoid the draconian crackdowns utilized by China, even as the WHO praised Beijing’s heavy handed tactics. But as the virus spreads and hysteria takes hold, with the US and South Korea cancelling military exercises for the time being, who knows what lengths the government will go to prevent the outbreak from spiraling out of control.
S. Korea reports 3 more deaths from coronavirus, death toll rises to 16 — South Korea reported three additional deaths tied to new coronavirus on Friday, bringing the country’s death toll to 16, the national public health agency said. According to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), the three — all women aged from 60-90 either quarantined at local hospitals or at home — died of COVID-19 in Daegu, about 300 kilometers southeast of Seoul. Two were posthumously diagnosed with the disease and the third had received treatment after testing positive for the virus on Sunday. Other details are not yet available. As of 4 p.m. on Friday, South Korea reported 2,337 confirmed cases of coronavirus infections, with 81,167 people having been tested since Jan. 3. Nearly 70 percent of patients have been reported from Daegu, with a cluster of infections tied to the fringe religious group Shincheonji located there. S. Korea reports 3 more deaths from coronavirus, death toll rises to 16 – 1
81% Of South Korean ‘End Of Days’ Worshippers Test Positive For Coronavirus – Last week we noted an in-depth report by Bloomberg on how a 61-year-old Korean ‘typhoid Mary’ spread coronavirus throughout her doomsday religious cult after praying with at least a thousand other adherents. “What made this case so much worse was that this person spent a considerable amount of time in a very crowded area,” said Seoul National University professor of health policy, Kim Chang-yup. “There’s growing fear and resentment among the people right now.” As a result, over 1,900 members of the Shincheonji Church have been screened for coronavirus, of which 1,551 – or 81%, tested positive according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker. Put another way: Out of a population of 1,900 1,300 were symptomatic 600 asymptomatic 420 tested positive but asymptomatic 1,131 tested positive and symptomatic Of note, because the church’s leader (who believes he’s an immortal prophet sent by Jesus Christ) preaches about the end-of-days, followers have been accused of purposefully spreading the disease – however those reports are unconfirmed and there is no evidence to suggest this is occurring. What is known is that the church held religious gatherings in the Chinese city of Wuhan – the epicenter of the current outbreak. In short, expect similar results – assuming reports of purposeful infection are false – at similar places of worship around the world.
Coronavirus: Italy death toll rises to 21 as UK confirms 20th case – live updates – Italy’s coronavirus death toll has reached 21 and some 820 people have been infected, the civil protection chief has said, while number of those who have recovered from the virus is increasing. Authorities say all the victims were elderly people who had also been suffering from other health issues. Lombardy’s governor, Attilio Fontana, says the situation intensified sharply in Lodi, near Milan, on Thursday; with a sudden spike in the number of people hospitalised. “Unfortunately another emergency broke out in Lodi overnight,” Fontana, who has put himself into self isolation after a regional government employee tested positive, told La7 television. “There was a rush of hospitalisations yesterday afternoon with 51 people in a serious condition, including 17 who were put in intensive care.” Public Health England (PHE) has confirmed the latest case is a resident of Surrey and it that it’s working with the county council to manage the situation. Dr Alison Barnett, the centre director for PHE South East, said: Public Health England is contacting people who had close contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19. One of the latest cases is a resident of Surrey and we’re working closely with NHS colleagues in that area as well as Surrey county council to manage the situation and help reduce the risk of further cases. Close contacts will be given health advice about symptoms and emergency contact details to use if they become unwell in the 14 days after contact with the confirmed case. A second coronavirus case in a northern Californian patient with no links to international travel has reportedly been identified. The Washington Post quoted Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins centre for health security, as saying: I think there’s a strong possibility that there’s local transmission going in California. In other words, the virus is spreading within California, and I think there’s a possibility other states are in the same boat. They just haven’t recognised it yet. Summary
- A man who was onboard the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship became the first British person to die from the coronavirus, the Japanese health ministry confirmed. The passengers had been taken off the vessel to Japan for treatment.
- The UK said it had detected its 20th coronavirus case and the first case in Wales was confirmed. The latest patient in England is the first to contract the illness while in the UK.
- Coronavirus could reach most, if not all, countries, according to the World Health Organisation. The body said its analysis showed there was a very high global risk of both the spread and the impact of Covid-19.
- The virus has now spread to about 49 countries. New Zealand, Belarus, Lithuania, and Nigeria (the first case in sub-Saharan Africa) reported their first cases in the last day. Many are linked to travellers from Iran.
- Markets around the world have taken huge hits, and the Chinese economy has seen its worst slump in two decades. The Dow, the S&P 500 and the technology-focused Nasdaq all dropped by about 3%, while other markets also tumbled.
- The UN security council decided to lift some economic sanctions on North Korea to help it fend off the virus.Pyongyang still says it has no reported cases.
Illness forces the Pope to cancel an event in Rome a day after showing solidarity with coronavirus sufferers and shaking hands with congregation at weekly audience – Pope Francis has been forced to cancel a planned Mass in Rome with other clergy after suffering a ‘slight illness’. The Vatican said the 83-year-old pontiff had a ‘slight indisposition’ that meant he did not attend an event at the St John Lateran basilica in Rome on Thursday morning.A spokesman said Francis would continue with the rest of his day’s business, but preferred to stay within the Vatican rather than travel across the city. There was no word from the Vatican about the nature of his illness, but the pope was seen coughing and blowing his nose during the Ash Wednesday Mass. Earlier in the day Francis had met with crowds in St Peter’s Square where he touched hands and kissed faces, despite warnings over coronavirus.Northern Italy is currently in the grips of a coronavirus outbreak, which has spread across the country. Cases have been confirmed in Rome, where the Vatican is located.
BBC says 210 dead from coronavirus in Iran, while government says 34 – At least 210 people have died from the coronavirus in Iran, according to BBC News, a number six times higher than the official death toll from the Iranian government.Officially, Iran says 34 people have died, but BBC spoke with sources in the country’s health system that said otherwise. Iran has the highest mortality rate from the coronavirus and has become the new focal point for the virus in recent days amid growing fears that it is a pandemic. The US State Department has offered to help Iran handle the crisis.Iran’s deputy health minister, Iraj Harirchi, on Monday denied there was an effort to cover up the extent of the virus.During a press conference on Monday, Harirchi appeared physically uncomfortable. By the next day, Harirchi announced he had contracted the coronavirus.One of Iran’s vice presidents, Masoumeh Ebtekar, has also been infected – and she’s been seen in meetings with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the Iranian cabinet as recently as Wednesday. The fact that senior members of the government are coming down with the virus has raised concerns among public-health experts who’ve suggested the scale of the outbreak in the country could be far higher than the leadership is letting on.The official number of confirmed cases of the virus in Iran is 338, but the actual number of infected could be closer to 23,000, according to researchers at the University of Toronto and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, The Wall Street Journal reported. Friday prayers were canceled in Iran because of the coronavirus. Prayer cancellations are exceptionally rare in Iran, and they underscore the severity of the outbreak. Iranian lawmakers have also tested positive for the virus, and Iran’s parliament has been suspended indefinitely.
Iran prepares to test ‘tens of thousands’ for coronavirus as number of confirmed cases spikes — Iran is preparing for the possibility of “tens of thousands” of people getting tested for the new coronavirus as the number of confirmed cases spiked again Saturday, an official said, underscoring the fear both at home and abroad over the outbreak in the Islamic Republic.The virus and the COVID-19 illness it causes have killed 43 people out of 593 confirmed cases in Iran, Health Ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said. He disputed a report by the BBC’s Persian service citing anonymous medical officials in Iran putting the death toll at over four times as much.But the number of known cases versus deaths would put the virus’ death rate in Iran at over 7%, much higher than other countries. That’s worried experts at the World Health Organization and elsewhere that Iran may be underreporting the number of cases now affecting it.Yet even as Iran sends spray trucks and fumigators into the streets, officials still are trying to downplay the virus’ reach.”During these 10 days that we are talking about the coronavirus in the country, more than 480 people of our country has been killed in traffic accidents, but no one noticed them,” Jahanpour said.The virus has infected more than 85,000 people and caused more than 2,900 deaths since emerging in China. Iran, with 43 people dead, has the world’s highest death toll outside of China. Of the 730 confirmed cases scattered across the Mideast, the majority trace back to the Islamic Republic. Saturday’s new toll of 593 confirmed cases represents a jump of 205 cases – a 52% increase from the 388 reported the day before. Jahanpour has warned that large increases in the number of confirmed cases would happen as Iran now has 15 laboratories testing for the virus.
Coronavirus threatens global economy as experts warn no country will be spared – With new infections reported around the world now surpassing those in mainland China, World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said even rich nations should prepare. “No country should assume it won’t get cases, that would be a fatal mistake, quite literally,” Tedros said, pointing to Italy, where 17 people have died in Europe’s worst outbreak. In addition to stockpiling medical supplies, governments ordered schools shut and canceled big gatherings, including sports events, to try to halt spread of the flu-like disease known as COVID-19 that emerged in central China more than two months ago from an illegal wildlife market. The death rate appears to be around 2 percent, although it could be lower if there are many mild, undiagnosed cases, experts say. By comparison, seasonal influenza has a case fatality rate of around 0.1%, said Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, ahead of a meeting with Vice President Mike Pence, who has been put in charge of coordinating the U.S. response. “So therefore you have somewhat of a serious potential for morbidity and mortality,” he said, adding, “We’re dealing with a serious virus.” There is particular concern over a case in Japan in which a woman tested positive for the virus for a second time. Second positive tests have also been reported in China and could imply contracting the disease does not confer immunity. Scientists warned that much remains unknown about this new virus.
World prepares for coronavirus pandemic; global recession forecast – Reuters – Share prices were on track for the worst week since the global financial crisis in 2008 as virus-related disruptions to international travel and supply chains fueled fears of recession in the United States and the Euro zone. The U.S. stock market fell into correction territory with the benchmark S&P 500 index down more than 4% on Thursday, extending a market rout that has now sliced more than 10% off of its closing peak on Feb. 19. “Markets are voting and saying they think the U.S. is on its way to recession,” said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at MUFG in New York. “And frankly at this stage after the coronavirus-related slowdown in travel plans that has busted the global supply chain apart, it will be a miracle if we avoid a recession.” Mainland China – where the virus originated late last year – reported 327 new cases on Friday, the lowest since Jan. 23. But with new infections reported around the world now surpassing those in China, World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said even rich nations should prepare. “No country should assume it won’t get cases, that would be a fatal mistake, quite literally,” Tedros said, pointing to Italy, where 17 people have died in Europe’s worst outbreak. A Reuters tally showed almost 10 countries reported their first virus cases in past 24 hours. In addition to stockpiling medical supplies, governments ordered schools shut and canceled big gatherings, including sports events, to try to halt the spread of the flu-like disease known as COVID-19. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration was considering invoking special powers to rapidly expand U.S. production of protective gear, two officials told Reuters. In Europe, France’s number of reported cases doubled, Germany warned of an impending epidemic and Greece, a gateway for refugees from the Middle East, announced tighter border controls. “We have a crisis before us. An epidemic is on its way,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.
Coronavirus outbreak ‘getting bigger’, says WHO, warning of spread worldwide – (Reuters) – The rapid rise in coronavirus raised fears of a pandemic on Friday, with five countries reporting their first cases, the World Health Organization warning it could spread worldwide and Switzerland cancelling the giant Geneva car show. World share markets crashed again, winding up their worst week since the 2008 global financial crisis and bringing the global wipeout to $5 trillion. Hopes that the epidemic that started in China late last year would be over in months, and that economic activity would quickly return to normal, have been shattered as the number of international cases has spiraled. “The outbreak is getting bigger,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva. “The scenario of the coronavirus reaching multiple countries, if not all countries around the world, is something we have been looking at and warning against since quite a while.” Switzerland joined countries banning big events to try to curb the epidemic, forcing cancellation of next week’s Geneva international car show, one of the industry’s most important gatherings. The United States asked its military in Saudi Arabia to avoid crowded venues including malls and cinemas. Mainland China reported 327 new cases, the lowest since Jan. 23, taking its tally to more than 78,800 cases with almost 2,800 deaths.
Coronavirus Precautions: International Travelers Arriving At NYC Airports Concerned By Lack Of Screenings – With the coronavirus outbreak affecting at least 40 countries, many travelers are concerned about what’s being done to contain the virus. At JFK Airport, jetlagged passengers typically in a rush to clear immigration are now appalled by a lack of screening, especially compared to procedures in the countries they just left. Emily Ferrara and Blair Haworth just returned from Florence, Italy, where their study abroad program was canceled because of the virus. There are more than 300 cases there, one of the largest outbreaks outside China. Yet, the students told CBS2’s Christina Fan they weren’t asked a single question about potential symptoms once they landed in New York City. “We didn’t even get checked. Like we’re used to being in Florence where you get your temperature checked. Here they didn’t do anything, which is kind of crazy,” Ferrara said. “Considering, like, how much the cases have spread so fast, like, they should definitely be taking more precautions here.” Currently, the United States is only conducting health screenings for passengers who are flying in from China. Some, including Mayor Bill de Blasio this week, called for the screenings to be extended to flights from Italy, South Korea and Japan. But Dr. Teresa Amato, the chair of emergency medicine at Long Island Jewish Forest Hills, says the idea may not be effective. “I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult given that people are infected with no symptoms and travel areas are becoming more and more widespread with the virus,” she said. In addition to airport screenings, some passengers believe there should be more travel restrictions from countries other than China. President Donald Trump weighed in on the idea at a press conference Wednesday. “At a right time, we might do that. Right now, it’s not the right time,” he said.
Coronavirus live updates: CDC confirms second U.S. coronavirus case of unknown origin as World Health Organization raises global risk level to “very high” – Another person in Northern California has tested positive for coronavirus who wasn’t known to have been exposed through travel or contact with an infected person, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. The patient, an older adult woman with chronic health conditions, is the second person in the U.S. to contract the disease known as COVID-19 without officials knowing exactly how, Santa Clara County officials said. The county’s health department urged residents to prepare for the possibility of widespread community transmission, where an illness spreads from an unknown source. “This new case indicates that there is evidence of community transmission but the extent is still not clear,” Dr. Sara Cody, the county’s health officer, said in a statement. The new patient is the county’s third case of the disease. The other two patients had traveled from mainland China, and one was released from isolation last week. The virus has disrupting plans for everything from major sports tournaments and concerts to planned U.S. military exercises. The global death toll was over 2,800 and the disease made its first worrying appearance in sub-Saharan Africa.More than 83,000 cases of the COVID-19 disease have now been confirmed in more than 50 countries. While about 36,000 of those people have recovered, fast-growing outbreaks in South Korea, Italy and Iran – along with the first case confirmed in Nigeria – show the battle to contain the virus is still in its early stages. Officials have worried the disease could spread widely in countries with weaker public health systems, specifically in Africa and Latin America.In the U.S., at least 63 people were being treated for COVID-19 as of Thursday, most of them evacuated from Asia. The origin of two cases, both women in California, have been impossible for doctors to trace, leading the CDC to warn the U.S. has likely seen its first case of “community spread.”The head of the World Health Organization said that kind of transmission, of unknown origin and possibly from the general population, represented the third of four outbreak stages that every nation must be prepared for: “Every country must be ready for its first case, its first cluster, the first evidence of community transmission, and for dealing with sustained community transmission,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
California coronavirus: Latest case has no recent history of international travel – A new case of the novel coronavirus in California was announced on Friday after Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that 33 people had tested positive for the virus, noting the risk to the public remains low. An adult woman with chronic health conditions in Santa Clara County who “did not recently travel overseas” or come into contact with anyone known to be ill was confirmed to have contracted the coronavirus on Friday by CDC and California Department of Public Health officials. Dr. Sara Cody, director of the Santa Clara County Public Health Department, called for individuals to keep their hands clean and avoid touching their own faces. She said families should consider “what you might need to do if you need to stay home for a week or two.” State health officials and the CDC are investigating who the woman might have come into contact with while contagious. “The case is not linked to either of our other two cases in the county … we don’t have any evidence to suggest the case is linked to other cases in California,” Cody said. “This is an infection that is spread person to person, so the infection would’ve been from another person that’s infected,” she told reporters on Friday. Why it matters: Federal health officials anticipate COVID-19 infections will spread further, but remain uncertain about the severity. Newsom called Thursday’s development a “turning point.”.
Florida won’t release data on coronavirus testing – Gov. Ron DeSantis and top health officials on Thursday said Florida is preparing for the possible arrival of coronavirus, emphasizing that the state has no confirmed cases so far. DeSantis, speaking to reporters, wouldn’t say whether anyone in Florida has been tested for the virus, citing a state law that protects the identity of people under epidemiological investigation. “I actually wanted to give all the numbers,” DeSantis said. “But they actually pointed me to the regulation in the statute that says you can’t.” DeSantis said he is taking his cues on the reading of the law from Surgeon General Scott Rivkees, Florida’s health secretary, who said the coronavirus hasn’t risen yet to a public health crisis. “At the present time, we don’t have community spread in Florida, we don’t have coronavirus in Florida. So, the law dictates that we protect the confidentiality of individuals,” Rivkees said Thursday. “If those circumstances change, then we absolutely will make the public informed.” The state’s patient-protection law has three exemptions for when the public’s health is at risk – when a disease is highly infectious, when there’s a potential for further outbreaks, or when the state has been unable to locate or identify people involved in the case. State Sen. Jose Javier Rodr’guez (D-Miami) told reporters after the DeSantis briefing that Rivkees was misinterpreting the law. The governor’s administration is handling coronavirus information differently than previous administrations handled other outbreaks, he said, such as the Zika virus in 2016. The state should be releasing aggregate information to the public, Rodr’guez said, including the number of people tested and the number and whereabouts of people who have self-quarantined..
New York Is Making Its Own Coronavirus Test After The CDC’s Test Has Repeatedly Failed Federal health officials met with state and city public health labs on Wednesday to fix a crippling lack of options to diagnose the novel coronavirus, a shortfall driven by botched CDC testing kits. As a result, New York state and New York City are moving forward with developing their own test to detect the virus. The lack of adequate testing capabilities was spotlighted on Wednesday evening, when the CDC announced delayed results of the first potential case of a person contracting COVID-19 from “community spread,” meaning they got sick without traveling to China or being exposed to anyone known to have the virus.Early in February, the CDC released a US genetic test for the virus, sent to about 100 state and major city labs as well as overseas ones. Test kits contained enough ingredients to test a few hundred people for the novel coronavirus. The test proved unreliable in validation tests run by labs, however, leaving fewer than a dozen of the labs nationwide confident of the results. The shortfall figured in the extended diagnosis of the Solano County, California, woman reported Wednesday night as the first person in the US with COVID-19 from community exposure. UC Davis Medical Center said that her test results were delayed because neither the county or state lab could run them, and because her symptoms did not initially meet federal diagnostic criteria. The test took four days to approve, and a week later, the CDC announced that the patient had tested positive. The episode is spurring concern over US testing capabilities among public health officials, as cities and states gear up for possible outbreaks across the country. As the CDC scrambles to fix its original test, officials in New York have decided to push forward on developing their own. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the CDC and other federal scientists would no longer be allowed to make public addresses about the outbreak without the approval of Vice President Mike Pence, following President Donald Trump appointing him to oversee all coronavirus-related responses.
California Governor Rattles Stocks: A State with 40 Million Residents Has Just 200 Coronavirus Test Kits from the CDC – California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, seemed to go out of his way to stress that his administration has been working closely with the Trump administration in addressing the coronavirus outbreak. He refused to criticize Trump when questioned by reporters. What did become quite clear, however, as reporters drilled down to the situation on the ground in California, is that the state has taken in 800 repatriated Americans from countries with coronavirus outbreaks, has received thousands more passengers on domestic flights from suspect countries, while it currently has just 200 tests kits from the CDC to test for the virus. Newsom told reporters that “It’s simply inadequate to do justice to the kind of testing that is required to address this issue head on.”In exchanges with reporters, the Governor indicated that California is not alone in terms of a gross inadequacy of test kits. He said other states have the same problem.Even more alarming, the Governor made it clear that the protocol established by the CDC for when states could test a patient for the virus was so limited that it restricted his state and other states from testing a large number of patients.Newsom said that based on calls held with the CDC today, a significant increase in test kits were to be made available to California shortly and the protocol was to be revised to allow more testing. According to Newsom, the CDC assured him that the state would be allowed to “exponentially increase” its capacity to test.In President Donald Trump’s press conference on the coronavirus last evening, the President emphasized the low number of people in the United States that had tested positive for the virus, attributing it to the outstanding work of his administration. If it now turns out that the number of infected people in the U.S. has been artificially depressed because the CDC was not providing test kits to the states, Congress will be launching a wave of new hearings to see if undue pressure was put on the CDC by the Trump administration. The press conference was held as a result of news that went viral Wednesday that a woman from Solano County, who is currently hospitalized at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, had tested positive for coronavirus despite having no known ties to travel outside of the U.S. This raised the alarming possibility that the virus may be present from sources inside the United States.
Key Missteps at the CDC Have Set Back Its Ability to Detect the Potential Spread of Coronavirus – As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test. The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples. As a result, until Wednesday the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration only allowed those state labs to use the test – a decision with potentially significant consequences. The lack of a reliable test prevented local officials from taking a crucial first step in coping with a possible outbreak – “surveillance testing” of hundreds of people in possible hotspots. Epidemiologists in other countries have used this sort of testing to track the spread of the disease before large numbers of people turn up at hospitals. This story is based on interviews with state and local public health officials and scientists across the country, which, taken together, describe a frustrating, bewildering bureaucratic process that seemed at odds with the urgency of the growing threat. It’s unclear who in the government originally made the decision to design a more complicated test, or to depart from the WHO guidance. “We’re weeks behind because we had this problem,” The CDC announced on Feb. 14 that surveillance testing would begin in five key cities, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. That effort has not yet begun.On Wednesday, under pressure from health experts and public officials, the CDC and the FDA told labs they no longer had to worry about the portion of the test intended “for the universal detection of SARS-like coronaviruses.” After three weeks of struggle, they could now use the test purely to check for the presence of COVID-19. It remains unclear whether the CDC’s move on Wednesday will resolve all of the problems around the test. Some local labs have raised concerns about whether the CDC’s test is fully reliable for detecting COVID-19.
Four new coronavirus cases in Pacific Northwest suggest community spread of the disease — The new coronavirus may to be spreading in parts of the Pacific Northwest, with California, Oregon, and Washington State reporting Friday that they have diagnosed cases with no travel history or known contact with another case.Health officials in Santa Clara County reported a case of so-called community spread late Friday afternoon – the second in the northern part of the state in the past few days.Later on Friday health officials in Oregon reported diagnosing a case of Covid-19 – the disease the virus causes – in a person from Washington County who had neither a history of travel to a country where the virus was circulating nor close contact with a confirmed case. And a teenager from Snohomish County, north of Seattle, was diagnosed with the disease, Washington State health authorities announced late Friday. This individual had not traveled outside the country nor had contact with a known Covid-19 case, they said. These cases raise the specter that the virus may be spreading stealthily in the Pacific Northwest region of the country. The discovery that the virus may be spreading in the country should not come as a surprise, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. “It just tells us where there is testing, there are cases. And that’s what we have to understand,” Osterholm said. “There is no such thing as a barrier containment to keep these out. It’s going to happen. And what we have to do now is get on with how we’re going to deal with them.” Health officials in Oregon said the infected individual there had spent time in a school in the Lake Oswego school district and may have exposed students and staff there. An investigation is underway and employees and families of children are being contacted, a press release from the state said.
New Coronavirus Cases In California, Oregon, & Washington Suggest Community Spread- Officials — New coronavirus cases confirmed in the Pacific Northwest suggest the new virus may be spreading in the community in the United States, officials said.Washington state, Oregon, and California officials confirmed in total four new cases on Friday. Officials do not know where or how three of the patients became infected, making them “possible” instances of community spread, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Community spread means that people acquire COVID-19, the disease caused by the new virus, through an unknown exposure in the community.The first case of unknown origin was confirmed on Feb. 26 in northern California. Three more were reported on Feb. 28.“There was no known travel exposure for this individual. So, this is a case of community spread of the disease, much like the case from California earlier this week,” Pat Allen, director of the Oregon Health Authority, told reporters on Friday.”This new case indicates that there is evidence of community transmission but the extent is still not clear,” Dr. Sara Cody, health officer for Santa Clara County, California, said in a statement.Health officials in the county reported that an older woman with chronic health conditions was tested after going to the hospital with a respiratory illness. The patient “does not have a travel history nor any known contact with a traveler or infected person,” according to county officials.
Washington Declares State Of Emergency After 1st US Coronavirus Death; New China Cases Jump: Live Updates – Following the first death of a Coid-19-infected person in the US, Washington state has declared a state of emergency.King County official Jeff Duchin says that 27 patients and 25 staff members at the long-term care facility in Kirkland, WA are showing symptoms.Here’s the letter @KIRO7Seattle got from a source.It’s the notice from @EvergreenHosp sent to patients and families about the #coronavirus death in the Seattle area. #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/aNk1snAaGo – Deedee Sun (@DeedeeKIRO7) February 29, 2020 CDC’s Messonnier stated that “there is not a national spread of the virus in the US,” and adds that US has capacity to test 75,000 people.CDC erroneously identified the patient as a female in a briefing earlier today with the President and Vice President. Update (1515ET): President Trump has finally wrapped up a lengthy press conference that most agreed was more convincing than his previous effort on Wednesday. Trump confirmed that there are now 22 cases in the US outside of the evacuees from Wuhan and the ‘Diamond Princess’.Read more about it here. Washington State is expected to hold a press conference of its own at 4 pm ET. And here comes the NHC with China’s numbers from Saturday. Mainland China reported 573 new coronavirus cases. Note the ~150 case increase from 427 on Friday. 51,856 are still under “medical observation” across China. In all, there have been 79,824 confirmed cases in mainland China, though most experts believe the true total could be much higher. Here’s the rest of the NHC press release, translation courtesy of the NHC:
On Feb 29, 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland as well as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps reported 573 new cases of confirmed infections, 132 new cases of suspected infections, and 35 deaths (34 in Hubei province and 1 in Henan province). 2,623 patients were released from hospital after being cured. 8,620 people who had had close contact with infected patients were freed from medical observation. Serious cases decreased by 299.As of 24:00 on Feb 29, the National Health Commission had received 79,824 reports of confirmed cases and 2,870 deaths in 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and in all 41,625 patients had been cured and discharged from hospital. There still remained 35,329 confirmed cases (including 7,365 in serious condition) and 851 suspected cases. So far, 660,716 people have been identified as having had close contact with infected patients. 51,856 are now under medical observation.On Feb 29, Hubei reported 570 new cases of confirmed infections (including 565 in Wuhan), 64 new cases of suspected infections (including 50 in Wuhan), and 34 deaths (including 26 in Wuhan). 2,292 patients were released from hospital after being cured, including 1,675 in Wuhan.As of 24:00 on Feb 29, Hubei had reported 66,907 cases of confirmed infections (including 49,122 in Wuhan) and 2,761 deaths (including 2,195 in Wuhan). In all, 31,187 patients had been cured and discharged from hospital, including 19,227 in Wuhan.There still remained 32,959 confirmed cases (including 27,700 in Wuhan), with 7,107 in serious condition (including 6,393 in Wuhan), and 646 suspected cases (including 393 in Wuhan).
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