Category: Wuhan Flu

It’s Probably Nothing

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 15 Comments

Related: #China’s factories activity plunges, worse than global financial crisis in 2008/9.

Australia has banned travel from Iran.

It’s Probably Nothing

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 35 Comments

Just like they do for the flu: Chinese medical staff request international medical assistance

The conditions and environment here in Wuhan are more difficult and extreme than we could ever have imagined. There is a severe shortage of protective equipment, such as N95 respirators, face shields, goggles, gowns, and gloves. The goggles are made of plastic that must be repeatedly cleaned and sterilised in the ward, making them difficult to see through. Due to the need for frequent hand washing, several of our colleagues’ hands are covered in painful rashes. As a result of wearing an N95 respirator for extended periods of time and layers of protective equipment, some nurses now have pressure ulcers on their ears and forehead. When wearing a mask to speak with patients, our voices are muted, so we have to speak very loudly. Wearing four layers of gloves is abnormally clumsy and does not work—we can’t even open the packaging bags for medical devices, so giving patients injections is a huge challenge. In order to save energy and the time it takes to put on and take off protective clothing, we avoid eating and drinking for 2 hours before entering the isolation ward. Often, nurses’ mouths are covered in blisters. Some nurses have fainted due to hypoglycaemia and hypoxia.

It’s not alarmist to keep a solid supply of non-perishables on hand.

Instapundit has a daily roundup of Coronavirus news.

h/t James

“Study Xi, Strong Nation”

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 24 Comments

How the Coronavirus Revealed Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw

How did Xi Jinping—the general secretary of the Communist Party of China, who has been consolidating his power since taking over the post in 2012—let things get to this point?
 
It might be that he didn’t fully know what was happening in his own country until it was too late.
 
Xi would be far from the first authoritarian to have been blindsided. Ironically, for all the talk of the technological side of Chinese authoritarianism, China’s use of technology to ratchet up surveillance and censorship may have made things worse, by making it less likely that Xi would even know what was going on in his own country.

Let’s hope.

It’s Probably Nothing

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 31 Comments

Michael Yon will be on with Steve Bannon shortly, live.

Zerohedge:

China’s notoriously militant censorship has been turned up to eleven during the coronavirus outbreak. They have made it illegal for healthcare workers, crematoriums, and anyone else involved in the response to discuss the situation – disrupting attempts to provide an accurate picture of what’s going on amid the largest quarantine in human history.

The situation in Iran is far, far worse than they’ve admitted to: Deputy Minister of Health has coronavirus.

Harirchi coughed occasionally and appeared to be sweating during a press conference in Tehran on Monday with government spokesman Ali Rabiei.
 

At the time he denied a lawmaker’s claim that 50 people had died from the virus in the Shiite shrine city of Qom, saying he would resign if the number proved to be true.

It’s Probably Nothing

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 35 Comments

As has been predicted for weeks, world markets are finally taking a hit.

Shares on Wall Street have plummeted at the opening bell and European markets are also a sea of red, with the Italian market the worst hit, amid reports of rising deaths from the coronavirus in the country.

The high price of conspiring with China: Iran becomes the new epicenter of infection.

Now 600 cases in South Korea, who the hell knows what’s going on in the North.

More: Trump’s fury over coronavirus patients being repatriated may be justified

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And then there is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.

You heard me right.

Updates

Untraceable clusters alarm US officials.

Infections surge in South Korea.

Italy – Tens of thousands of Italians prepared for a weeks-long quarantine…

8 dead in Iran, which seems to have a abnormally high death rate or an abnormally low detection rate.

2 more young doctors die from coronavirus in China

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@AFP #BREAKING Italy’s coronavirus infections jump to 79, including two deaths, says official

Health officials worry as untraceable virus clusters emerge

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UPI;

Several patients of the deadly coronavirus in China who were discharged from care are testing positive for COVID-19 again, according to Chinese state media.
 
Beijing-owned newspaper People’s Daily reported Friday a former patient in Szechuan Province in southwest China tested positive for the killer virus behind more than 2,200 deaths in the country.
 
[…]
 
The reinfection case in Chengdu is not unique, according to physician Zhao Jianping, a respiratory and critical care specialist at Tongji Hospital in Wuhan. Zhao said one his patients tested positive for the virus after being discharged.
 
Zhao told Chinese state media a discharge judgment should be “made carefully.”

It’s Probably Nothing

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Al Jazeera;

Authorities in Iran have confirmed three new cases of the coronavirus, a day after two people died from the infection in the city of Qom.

Alireza Vahabzadeh, an adviser to Iran’s health minister, said on Wednesday a total of five cases have been confirmed in Iran so far.

“The three new cases from today include two in Qom and one in Araq in central Iran. The case in Araq is a doctor,” he told Al Jazeera. “It remains unclear where the virus in Iran has come.”

[…]

The deaths in Iran on Tuesday were the first fatalities in the Middle East region and only the seventh and eighth death caused by the virus outside mainland China. A health official cited by the semi-official IRNA news agency said the victims had not had any contact with foreigners or with Chinese nationals.

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From the deepest, darkest corner of the conspiracy net;

When Professor Xu published his essay, he warned that he was likely to be punished; he said he had already been suspended from work, lost his position as a professor, and had “freedoms curtailed” over critiques published nearly a year earlier.
 
“I can now all too easily predict that I will be subjected to new punishments; indeed, this may well even be the last piece I write,” he wrote at the end of his latest essay.
 
Friends say that, since publication, Xu’s account has been suspended on WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, and they have been unable to get in touch with him for days. Most believe he has not been detained, and is at home in Beijing, but his name has been scrubbed from Weibo, and only a few articles from several years ago showing up on the country’s biggest search engine, Baidu. Calls to his mobile phone went unanswered on Friday.
 
In a further reminder of the government’s strict controls, two citizen journalists who were reporting from the epicentre of China’s coronavirus outbreak have vanished this week, apparently detained.

Just like the flu.

Updated with a new report at the New York Times;

The cruise ship had been shunned at port after port for fear it might carry the coronavirus, but when the Westerdam arrived in Cambodia on Thursday, the prime minister greeted its passengers with flowers.

Amid assurances that the ship was disease free, hundreds of elated passengers disembarked. Some went sightseeing, visiting beaches and restaurants and getting massages. Others traveled on to destinations around the world.

One, however, did not make it much farther than the thermal scanners at the Kuala Lumpur airport in Malaysia. The passenger, an American, was stopped on Saturday, and later tested positive for the coronavirus.

On Sunday, with passengers already headed for destinations on at least three continents, health officials were scrambling to determine how a big a problem they now have — and how to stop it from getting bigger.

“We anticipated glitches, but I have to tell you I didn’t anticipate one of this magnitude,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

With more than a thousand passengers from the Westerdam headed for home, Dr. Schaffner said, it may be harder than ever to keep the coronavirus outbreak contained to China. […]

More than 140 passengers from the ship flew to Malaysia, and all but the American woman who tested positive and her husband were eventually allowed to continue on to their destinations, including the United States, the Netherlands and Australia, officials said. Over 1,000 other passengers took charter flights to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and were in various stages of transit home, the cruise line said.

It’s Probably Nothing

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Really, it’s just the flu. Better than the flu, even.

Update: Health authorities in China’s Hubei province – the epicentre of the coronavirus epidemic – reported on Thursday 14,840 new confirmed cases, almost 10 times the number reported a day earlier, and new deaths attributable to the contagion rose to 242, more than double on the day. This brings the totals announced by the province’s health commission to 48,206 and 1,310, respectively, as of Wednesday.

It’s Probably Nothing

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Don’t go off half cocked. But given the wide gulf between the number of officially reported cases and the brutality of Chinese officials on the ground enforcing the quarantines, it does make you wonder.

Update. (corrected)


More at Zerohedge: As for the now utterly meaningless death rate, one only wonders what goalseek model China is using ot keep the death rate within +/- 0.1% of 2.1% for the past two weeks.

This is a grim feed.

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