Wuhan, nCV, germs....

drypowder said:
And now it's 204. Countries might ban flights from SK if this keeps up for another couple of days.
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This is choice.

Coronavirus: South Korea in crisis mode as Daegu cases surge

More than six in 10 patients in South Korea are linked to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu, a group that mainstream churches describe as a doomsday cult with 200,000 followers in the country.

Jun Eun-kyeong, head of the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), said a survey of 4,500 church followers – about half of Shincheonji’s congregation in Daegu – revealed more than 500 were experiencing symptoms of Covid-19, which causes a pneumonia-like illness.

The KCDC on Wednesday identified a 61-year-old Shincheonji follower as starting a “super-spreading event”, after she attended at least four church services while having a fever. She had refused testing twice, saying she had not travelled to mainland China.

Pastor Shin Hyun-wook, a former Shincheonji follower who quit the group in 2006 and is now an anti-cult campaigner, said: “Shincheonji followers are insensitive to catching virus … They believe people get ill because they lack faith.”​
 
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gc70 said:
This is choice.

Coronavirus: South Korea in crisis mode as Daegu cases surge

More than six in 10 patients in South Korea are linked to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu, a group that mainstream churches describe as a doomsday cult with 200,000 followers in the country.

Jun Eun-kyeong, head of the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), said a survey of 4,500 church followers – about half of Shincheonji’s congregation in Daegu – revealed more than 500 were experiencing symptoms of Covid-19, which causes a pneumonia-like illness.

The KCDC on Wednesday identified a 61-year-old Shincheonji follower as starting a “super-spreading event”, after she attended at least four church services while having a fever. She had refused testing twice, saying she had not travelled to mainland China.

Pastor Shin Hyun-wook, a former Shincheonji follower who quit the group in 2006 and is now an anti-cult campaigner, said: “Shincheonji followers are insensitive to catching virus … They believe people get ill because they lack faith.”​
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They better have faith in ventilators and artificial lungs that some of them will need to survive to doomsday. The potential saving grace here is that authorities can probably track almost all these cases and contacts, esp if these cultists mostly keep to themselves. The bad news is that containing this will require China-like quarantine measures.

Iran also has a problem, and seems like it might be a different strain.

The inaccuracy of the PCR tests is a big problem. They need a much more accurate test so health authorities stop releasing carriers back into the public.
 
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drypowder said:
The inaccuracy of the PCR tests is a big problem. They need a much more accurate test so health authorities stop releasing carriers back into the public.
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I was disturbed this morning when I read that Chinese reporting is now excluding people who test positive but show no symptoms.
 
gc70 said:
I was disturbed this morning when I read that Chinese reporting is now excluding people who test positive but show no symptoms.
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Got a link to that? I first heard about that over a week ago, but it was just a tweet from some unofficial source, and then that was picked up by many bloggers/youtubers. Never saw any official confirmation of that.

What has happened is that CCP has now reverted back to the original reporting criteria - a positive PCR test counts as a confirmed case. For several days, they were also including positive CT scans as confirmed cases (only in Hubei), which is why we saw the huge spike of 15k cases in one day when that reporting criteria went into effect. Now they've reverted back - only positive PCR counts as confirmed case; positive CT scan is back to the 'suspected case' category.

WHO is spinning this as positive (after previously praising CCP for including positive CT scans as confirmed cases when that change was announced) by saying it probably reflects increased testing capacity. CCP probably thought mkts would find this soothing, as the case count dropped dramatically. But mkts puked on it because it throws into question the data mkts have been using to assure themselves that the outbreak is slowing and will soon be contained. Commies and socialists consistently underestimate the reaction function.

Another aspect of the reaction function are Chinese workers - CCP probably thought the reporting change and decreased cases would hasten workers back to work, but instead it raises suspicions that CCP is manipulating data to get people back to work regardless of the health risks.

Even if testing capacity in Hubei has caught up to the hopefully slowing spread of the virus, the inaccuracy of the PCR test is reason enough not to revert back to the old criteria. If there is an explosion of pneumonia (resulting in positive CT scans) in Hubei that tests negative for the virus on a known poor PCR test, NOBODY is going to believe that these cases are not COVID-19, unless they are also testing positive for influenza or bacteria, and I haven't seen anything to suggest this is part of the new reporting criteria. Just commies being manipulative, which scares me because if it was under control, why play all these games.
 
gc70 said:
Asymptomatic cases not counted in China
"China's decision to not count patients who have tested positive in the lab but haven't shown any symptoms has also raised eyebrows."
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So from that link, the part referring to asymptomatic cases is:

China's decision to not count patients who have tested positive in the lab but haven't shown any symptoms has also raised eyebrows.
This differs from the reporting practice of countries around the world, said Feigl-Ding.
For example, 11 Americans who were flown back to the US from Japan last week tested positive for the virus but showed no symptoms. Those asymptomatic patients are counted as confirmed cases in the US, but if they were in China they would not be.
"It's extremely frustrating," said Feigl-Ding, who said attempting to count the number of global cases with such a discrepancy, "becomes an apples and oranges situation."
He urged China to report how many lab-positive asymptomatic patients it has, as failing to do so prevent "for international comparisons."
The US Centers for Disease and Control has said that asymptomatic patients can still be contagious and spread the virus.
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Like the reports of this a week ago (around the time they started counting clinically diagnosed (i.e., CT scan) cases as confirmed cases), this article doesn't source this change in reporting. For all we know, Feigl-Ding is responding to similar reports he has seen. Last week when this was circulating, at the WHO daily press briefings (all on youtube) on 2 consecutive days, WHO was asked about China excluding asymptomatic cases with positive tests from confirmed cases, and both times, they responded that China is enlarging the pool of confirmed cases by including clinically diagnosed cases. And in today's briefing, when asked about China's most recent change to the definition of confirmed cases, they said essentially what I described earlier - that they believe it was appropriate to stop counting clinically diagnosed cases if Hubei has sufficient PCR testing capacity and can rule out some of the clinically diagnosed cases via negative test (I think this is a mistake due to false negatives). Zero mention by WHO of the idea that China only counts a positive PCR test as confirmed case if symptomatic.

I'm not saying it's beyond the CCP to do this (I believe they certainly would if they thought they could get away with it), but I'm just not seeing any confirming evidence, so for now, this is still fake news, IMHO.

Oh, and if things weren't confusing enough, some senior official in Hubei said they would stop subtracting clinically diagnosed cases that were previously classified as confirmed from the confirmed case total. CCP is playing "baffle them with BS". WHO's team is finally supposed to go to Wuhan tomorrow so maybe (only "maybe" because of how WHO has been acting somewhat as a spokesman for the CCP) we will get a better idea of just WTF is happening in Wuhan/Hubei.
 
A Texas company supposedly has created a vaccine.....


DS
 
DirtySCREW said:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/texas-ceo-coronavirus-vaccine

DS
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If legit, I'm sure China and other Asian countries would pay these guys handsomely for their work. It would be worth a lot to have a vaccine sooner rather than later. With the usual animal trials, then human trials, we'd be looking at next flu season at the very earliest. Maybe it's possible to fast track (outside the FDA process, i.e., in China) trials and try to get a vaccine in a few months. That would limit the economic damage.
 
drypowder said:
If legit, I'm sure China and other Asian countries would pay these guys handsomely for their work. It would be worth a lot to have a vaccine sooner rather than later. With the usual animal trials, then human trials, we'd be looking at next flu season at the very earliest. Maybe it's possible to fast track (outside the FDA process, i.e., in China) trials and try to get a vaccine in a few months. That would limit the economic damage.
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I read there were COVID-19 outbreaks in several Chinese prisons. I would not be surprised if some patriotic prisoners volunteered to be human guinea pigs for quick testing of a vaccine.
 
Things are getting a little out of control. SK cases are exploding, but as mentioned earlier, I'm hopeful that since so many of the infected are from that cult and the hospital, that SK can actually piece together the transmission chain and trace all the contacts. And SK is taking appropriate measures, but this is going to further compound the global supply chain issues, as so much high tech manufacturing is done here.

Italy and Iran are very problematic. Unidentified transmission chains. And Iran surely does not have the medical resources to deal with an epidemic. Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Armenia have all closed borders (well, not like Afghanistan can close that enormous border, but I suppose they'll close what they can). When Iraq closes its border with Iran, you'll know Iran has a raging epidemic on its hands. And if Italy and Iran aren't brought under control very soon (doubtful), we will have reached the next stage in WHO's pandemic level.

These countries mark the first major outbreaks outside East Asia, so I guess that nixes the hope that other races have some level of resistance to the virus.
 
drypowder said:
Italy and Iran are very problematic. Unidentified transmission chains.
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I went on a tour of the vatican. The day we were there it was almost entirely the two of us and everybody else was chinese in nut-to-butt packed crowds. It wouldn't have been half as bad if it weren't for so many selfie sticks and elbows holding them up in my face...
I'm not a big guy, but I was still found it necessary to pull a modified "gaijin smash" maneuver...
But yeah, Tourism is probably the source of the italian outbreak. Rome is less than 3 hours from milan. venice and milan are even closer.
 
For some good news, China excluding Hubei seems to have the virus mostly contained, and factories are operating at increasing levels as more people go back to work. WHO-China joint briefing this morning was positive with respect to Hubei and the slowing spread there.

While the SK spread is scary, I'm confident that SK will not have anything like Wuhan's outbreak. Neither will Italy. I think those might be more like China outside of Hubei. Iran and other third world countries - tougher call, but also less impact on the global economy.
 
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Wuhan! Pangolin got you all in check!

imrs.php
 
I think the reactions in S. Korea and Italy are exactly what you want to see. These countries seem to have learned from China's mistakes in Wuhan/Hubei, and its successes in other provinces. If all the countries with significant cluster outbreaks react similarly, this might still not go full pandemic. Even if all they do is delay the spread, that might be enough if this virus behaves like the other coronaviruses and influenza viruses known to infect humans - i.e., they don't fare as well when weather warms up.

Remdesivir (antiviral) is promising in monkey trials and seems to have some efficacy in COVID-19 cases. They are running a trial in China, and apparently giving it to some critically ill patients as compassionate use. In monkeys, it was tested against the MERS coronavirus; monkeys given remdesivir as a prophylactic did not develop symptoms; those given it very shortly after being infected developed only mild symptoms relative to those that didn't receive the drug. Obviously prophylactic use would be very interesting for health care workers (~3000 medical personnel infected in China; also a number of them infected in South Korea and Italy).
 
I worry more about Iran, where I fear concentrations like the religious cult in Korea but with fewer resources to respond.
 
gc70 said:
I worry more about Iran, where I fear concentrations like the religious cult in Korea but with fewer resources to respond.
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For sure, but much less impact on global economy.

Interesting how Singapore seems to have the virus under control and that it never really exploded with runaway community transmission (lots of cases were transmission from people who had been in Wuhan) while S. Korea did see an explosion of community transmission. Singapore is a densely populated little island. I wonder if the temps are playing a role here. Perhaps it's just too damned hot for the virus there.

If the temps are indeed playing a role, that might explain why Vietnam and Thailand haven't seen much community transmission (again, most cases are linked to people coming from Wuhan). Could be that they're not testing, but Vietnam has had a town near Hanoi quarantined for what must be 2 weeks by now, so there should be an explosion of sick people by now if we were seeing a Wuhan style spread. But Hanoi is fairly warm in Feb. And what about the Philippines? Lots of Filipinos migrant workers who work in China, but no local outbreaks. It's hot there in Feb.

If the weather is playing a significant role here (as it does with influenza and some other coronaviruses that infect humans), then Iran just needs to hold on for a couple of weeks for some warm relief. Northern Italy, on the other hand, better go the China lockdown route.

This might also explain why Africa isn't seeing an explosion of cases - lots of Chinese travel back and forth. And Ethiopia is a prime transit country for Chinese. Again, could be they aren't testing, but they can't hide sick people the way North Korea can. Plenty warm there, so perhaps that's the difference.

Per this theory, there should be lots of infection in North Korea - but that's a country that can hide sick and dead people from the rest of the world.

Someone punch holes in this theory if they can, let's see if it stands up to scrutiny.
 
gc70 said:
This might be a wake-up call to start rebuilding America's industrial capacity.
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Yes, long term it could result in more decoupling from China. Some combination or more mfg here and more sources around the world is good for us, and bad for China, which is probably also good for us.
 
JimP42 said:
Yes, long term it could result in more decoupling from China. Some combination or more mfg here and more sources around the world is good for us, and bad for China, which is probably also good for us.
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Doubtful China will recover long term from this, at least in this generation. Most investors will see the dishonesty as a huge risk for future investment.

Iran looks like it's going to take a huge hit as well. Head of their health ministry is confirmed to be infected.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51628484
 
Grim said:
Doubtful China will recover long term from this, at least in this generation. Most investors will see the dishonesty as a huge risk for future investment.

Iran looks like it's going to take a huge hit as well. Head of their health ministry is confirmed to be infected.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51628484
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I wonder who he has been in contact with lately. Like doing briefings for the top people...
 
JimP42 said:
I wonder who he has been in contact with lately. Like doing briefings for the top people...
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LOTS of higher ups. They have him on camera the night before coughing and sweating like hell. I wonder how many he infected.
 
On a side note:

We have a vet hospital and I do the ordering of supplies-

No mask at 4 of 5 suppliers, 1 had a 1 box per limit

Back ordered some meds or had to get small bottles: pred. 20mg- normal 1000 or 5000 ct bottles, only 100 ct available and at higher price

Fox News said SC port is receiving 25% less cargo vs last year: and this year imports # have been up.

Germany companies have reported sending single guys with “briefcases” to China to get critical components for manufacturing...

Getting sporty folks


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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mj1angier said:
On a side note:

We have a vet hospital and I do the ordering of supplies-

No mask at 4 of 5 suppliers, 1 had a 1 box per limit

Back ordered some meds or had to get small bottles: predict 20mg- normal 1000 or 5000 ct bottles, only 100 ct available and at higher price

Fox News said SC port is receiving 25% less cargo vs last year: and this year imports # have been up.

Germany companies have reported sending single guys with “briefcases” to China to get critical components for manufacturing...

Getting sporty folks


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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China is hording all the medical supplies they produce and banning export. They even went so far to nationalize a US factory there to keep those products in country. How anyone will ever invest anything there again is beyond me.

If we can capitalize on industrialization here it would be a HUGE win for the US economy.
 
Daily new cases outside China have surpassed China for the first time, primarily driven by S. Korea and Italy.

Until both countries can get a handle on their outbreaks, we shouldn't allow flights to/from. Europe should do the same, but that will be tough to do politically.

Meanwhile, Chinese still flying to/from Africa. And no outbreak there. The temp theory is still holding up - and if it turns out to be correct, Bernie, who ridiculed our very stable genius POTUS for saying the coronavirus issue would be resolved in a couple of months, may have to eat crow.
 
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I have a good friend in Milan. He said the lockdowns are in smaller towns in Lombardia region, not large cities.

It is a concern and an inevitability in the US. Fortunately, I live in a sparsely populated area of NC but unfortunately work for a China-based company.

I’ll be working from home as much as possible.
 
Yes, the iran guy was caught sweating and coughing... but he was also seen in an interview trying to downplay things while sweating and coughing at the interviewer.
Every day looking at the news clips, I can't help but think about the intro to the remake of Dawn of the Dead.
I don't know exactly what's going on, but I do work in the human plasma industry, and my boss at the regional level has been asking if we've had any people that may have been infected yet. He's not much for casual conversation, so I imagine the people in corporate are starting to get spooked. Or maybe they just want to have a good source of COVID-19 to ship to the therapeutics research division...
I can tell you that the floor staff is already not real happy and we have no reported cases in the region yet.
 
Re the guy in Iran. How many did he infect? Who knows, but consider he was likely contagious long before he showed symptoms too. They’re likely going to experience pain at the highest levels.
drypowder said:
Until both countries can get a handle on their outbreaks, we shouldn't allow flights to/from. Europe should do the same, but that will be tough to do politically.
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Not just politically, but corporations have gotten too used to thinking entirely short term rather than strategically long term. They’ll be loath to shut down until they simply can’t go forward due to lack of staffing or resort to lay offs when they have no product demand. Compound that with the idea of people being deeply in debt who are now out of work for several months.
 
Chuckman said:
Quoted for tag
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I’m leaving the country and will be in the eastern Caribbean for about a week. After that, I’ll be in central Florida for about 4 days.

Should I bring a 50pk of nitrile gloves, N95 masks for the fam (3 of us)....hand sanitizer? Will normal alcohol based sanitizer work on this stuff? Should I take a normal pocket size hand sanitizer bottle, fill it with water and 3-5 drops of chlorine bleach?

Trying to protect my family on a trip and any advice would be awesome.
 
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