Category: Wuhan Flu

It’s Probably Nothing

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 14 Comments

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

Health officials worry as untraceable virus clusters emerge

It’s Probably Nothing

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 20 Comments

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

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 24 Comments

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.

It’s Probably Nothing

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 28 Comments

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

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 58 Comments

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

It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 23 Comments

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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It's Probably Nothing Wuhan Flu 34 Comments

New York Times;

As countries race to deal with an outbreak that has begun spreading around the world, inciting panic and disrupting the global economy, the residents of Wuhan are waging a daily battle to survive an illness that has sickened more than 4,100 people and killed 224 in their city alone.
 
Last month, the government put Wuhan in a virtual lockdown, sealing off the city and banning most public transportation and private cars from its streets in a desperate effort to contain the outbreak. Now, many residents say it is nearly impossible to get the health care they need to treat — or even diagnose — the coronavirus.
 
Expressing exasperation, doctors say there is a shortage of testing kits and other medical supplies, and it is not clear why more are not available. The ban on transportation means some residents have to walk for hours to get to hospitals — if they are well enough to make the journey. Layers of bureaucracy stand between residents and help. And the long lines outside hospitals for testing and treatment suggest that the outbreak is spreading far beyond the official count of cases.
 
Ambulances, too, are hard to come by, residents say. In recent days, some say they have called 120, China’s equivalent of the emergency number 911, only to be told that there were already hundreds of people in the queue.
 
Those who do make it to the hospital say they are squeezed together for hours in waiting rooms, where infections are easily spread. But the shortages have meant that many are ultimately turned away and sent home to self-quarantine, potentially compounding the outbreak by exposing their families.
 
Many doctors and residents are putting their hopes on the two new coronavirus hospitals that China has been racing to build in Wuhan in just a matter of days. One of them spans about eight acres, has 1,000 beds and is scheduled to open on Monday. The government says 1,400 military medical workers will be deployed to work there, potentially helping with the shortage of health professionals on hand to combat the outbreak.
 
On Sunday, city officials announced plans to set up quarantine stations around Wuhan for people with symptoms of pneumonia and close contacts among coronavirus patients. But just over a week into the lockdown, many residents believe the virus has already spread much further than the official numbers suggest.

More… Chinese market drops 9.1% on Monday opening. Details at Zerohedge.

A comparative chart.

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