The SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 coronavirus

[The Romulan Republic]

My level of trust in the Chinese government is somewhere less than Donald Trump but more than a fart after 6 bean burritos

Ditto, especially since IIRC the earlier projections had it peaking in April, and the WHO is recommending pandemic preparations.

[The Romulan Republic]

ctvnews.ca/health/what-would-it-mean-if-covid-19-becomes-a-pandemic-1.4828528

TORONTO -- As the list of countries dealing with COVID-19 grows, a Toronto infectious disease expert says the virus outbreak is already likely at pandemic level – but that’s not clear because some countries are hiding the extent of their outbreak.

“People are kind of dancing around the word pandemic,” said Dr. David Fisman, head of epidemiology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “This is probably a pandemic a week ago.”

He said efforts to contain the outbreak in China have been quite successful but what is happening now is that the virus is probably most problematic in places that aren’t identifying the scope of the outbreak. Fisman cited Iran as particular cause for concern.

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He said his school’s statistical modelling shows that while Iran is reporting 60 cases, it likely has 20,000 or even many more.

Canada has two confirmed COVID-19 cases that are linked to travel in Iran, but is No. 31 in terms of where Iranians travel.

“Where do they travel to from Iran? They travel to Syria, they travel to Iraq, they travel to Azerbaijan, they travel to Turkey. And those are all countries are quiet, but it’s exceedingly unlikely that Canada would be importing multiple cases from Iran, when those countries have no cases.”

Afghanistan, Kuwait, Oman and Iraq have now reported COVID-19 cases, but Fisman says that’s because authorities are now looking for them based on the situation in Iran.

Canada has confirmed 12 cases of COVID-19, including a new case in Toronto in a woman who returned from Iran. All the cases are in Ontario and B.C. Cases of the virus are now confirmed in 41 countries.

According to the World Health Organization, a pandemic is a worldwide spread of a new disease, and generally means an epidemic has spread to two or more continents with sustained person-to-person transmission.

The WHO has final say on whether worldwide epidemics have reached pandemic proportions. But that is not a cut-and-dry issue. There is no checklist of number of infections or deaths or number of countries affected. SARS in 2003 was never declared a pandemic, though it spread to 26 countries because it was relatively quickly contained.

If the WHO concludes a pandemic is underway with COVID-19, as many health experts expect will happen, it won’t require an official declaration, a WHO spokesperson said Wednesday.

The highest declaration level in an infectious disease outbreak is a public health emergency of international concern. The WHO declared that on Jan. 30. A pandemic simply means a new stage of an epidemic, said Christian Lindmeier on CTV's Your Morning.

“Declaring it a pandemic would not change anything in the treatment of cases.”

At this point, the WHO doesn’t believe pandemic levels have been reached, Lindmeier said, but the organization is concerned about preparation in many countries and has been warning about that for weeks.

“The world is not ready for this, this is absolutely clear. But the world is alarmed right now more than it was last week, I would think,” Lindmeier said. “Hence, countries are now really putting their efforts in to get ready to meet these demands.”

He said calling the situation a pandemic doesn’t fully reflect that individual nations are in much different situations when it comes to COVID-19.

“That’s why to put a blanket over it all is not the most suitable. But, at the same time, when these pandemic levels are reached, there is no reason why not to call it a pandemic.”

Declaring a pandemic doesn’t grant the WHO additional powers, but it indicates the health authority no longer believes the disease is containable within a specific region or regions. It also signals that countries should shift to focusing on coping with COVID-19, rather than containment measures, such as overly traveller screening and quarantines.

One of the big challenges with this virus is that symptoms can be very mild or even non-existent but a person can still transmit the virus to others who then can be affected more severely. Symptoms can resemble a cold or flu, ranging from fever, cough, runny nose, headache, and general fatigue to more severe, such as acute respiratory distress, pneumonia, sepsis and death.

The virus can incubate a short or long time, with symptoms taking two day or up to 2 weeks to appear after exposure. Most people with mild symptoms recover within six days.

Canada's chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam says existing pandemic plans focus on influenza but can be adapted for COVID-19. Tam says detection programs are focused on travellers returning from regions of high infection, along with their close contacts, but that will need to shift to broader surveillance should community transmission within Canada occur.

Pandemic response also requires greater diagnostic and laboratory capacity, stronger infection control procedures in hospitals and other frontline health facilities, and preparing for surge capacity among older age groups and those with underlying health issues.

It also means keeping sick people away from others, for instance through home isolation, quarantine, or perhaps through closure of mass gatherings, Tam told CTV News. Workplaces must be prepared for people to stay home, either because they are showing symptoms or because they must care for someone who is sick.

“It is better for us to prepare for a more serious scenario even if this virus doesn’t turn out to be as severe.”

There is a balance to be made between keeping alarm in check and ensuring the public is prepared for what could come, says Tam.

“No matter what happens, our key message to everyone living in Canada is that everyone can do their part to change the potential trajectory and the impact of this virus in Canada by individually keeping yourself healthy, practising the respiratory hygienic measures.”

Science is showing COVID-19 is spread in close contact through droplets unleashed by sneezing and coughing. Tam urges those who are sick to stay home and cover their cough, wash hands frequently and keep home surfaces clean with a solution of one part bleach to nine parts water.

But Fisman says the health authorities, particularly in Ontario, need to be more forthcoming with Canadians about the likelihood that domestic epidemics are underway or coming.

“This could be in any country now, so travel histories have somewhat ceased to be meaningful. So we need clear, frank, honest, practical guidance from public health authorities about what people can do to take control and get through the next number of months or possibly year or two as this thing is circulating.”

Outbreaks in Italy and South Korea are showing profound effects on the healthcare system and the economy and Canadians need to understand the road ahead, he said.

The SARS outbreak in 2003 has left its mark on pandemic preparedness in Canada, says Colin Furness, who researches epidemiology at the University of Toronto.

“Every health-care system really needs to walk through the horror of an epidemic in order to develop a good response to it. We did that with SARS and I think we’re actually very far ahead of a lot of other health systems.”

But COVID-19 is a much different virus than SARS. About two weeks ago, scientists started to see transmission from people who were showing no systems and felt just fine, Furness told CTV News Channel.

“Once the virus is able to do that, we can say the virus is very successful, we’re not going to be able to contain it.”

With SARS, only those who were sick could transmit the disease to someone else. That made containment much easier, says Furness.

So while COVID-19 is more easily spread than SARS, the good news is that it is much less deadly.

Dr. Neil Rau, a medical microbiologist at Halton Healthcare Services and CTV’s infectious diseases expert, believes the WHO has not yet talked of pandemic because there isn’t enough certainty about COVID-19’s fatality rate or just how widespread the disease is.

What isn’t in doubt is that COVID-19 case counts will continue to rise and that more deaths will be linked to it but that doesn’t mean the global picture is getting worse or out of control, says Rau.

Right now, the “genie is in the bottle,” but once the language of this disease does switch to pandemic, the approach will shift, says Rau. Testing becomes less important, hospitals and nursing homes close to visitors, and a priority is placed on protection measures for health-care workers.

“The question is how much disruption do you cause, because that has huge economic ramifications and huge inconveniences. Do you tell people not to go to hockey games or Raptors games to prevent community amplification? Sometimes the mass disruption of reacting to a disease is worse than the disease itself.”

[The Romulan Republic]

Posted without comment:

https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2 ... nese-state

Over the past 70 years, the Chinese Communist party has subjected its country to a succession of manmade catastrophes, from the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre, to the forceful suppression of rights in Hong Kong and Tibet, and the mass internment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Official coverups and corruption have multiplied the death toll of natural calamities, from the Sars virus to the Sichuan earthquake.

Xi Jinping’s mishandling of the coronavirus epidemic must now be added to the party’s shameful list of crimes. With serious outbreaks occurring in Japan, South Korea, Iran and Italy, it is clear that the virus of Xi’s totalitarian rule threatens the health and freedoms not only of the Chinese people, but of all of us everywhere.

Xi’s vacuous, self-aggrandising ideological vision lies at the heart of this global crisis. When he was appointed party leader in 2012, he announced his “China dream” of national rejuvenation, promising that the country would be moderately prosperous by the party’s 2021 centenary, and fully advanced into global economic hegemony by the republic’s centenary in 2049. Xi vowed that, by then, the world would concede that his one-party dictatorship is superior to the mess of liberal democracy.

Appointing himself “president for life”, Xi now has more power than any party leader since Mao Zedong, and has crushed all dissent by attempting to build a hi-tech totalitarian state. The Communist party is an insidious pathogen that has infected the Chinese people since 1949. But under Xi’s rule, it has mutated into its most sinister form, allowing capitalism to grow rapaciously while reaffirming Leninist control. The promise of wealth and national glory has blinded many Chinese people to the chains around their feet, and to the barbed wire around the faraway internment camps.

In a speech on 31 December 2019, Xi heralded triumphantly a new year of “milestone significance in realising the first centenary goal!” Naturally, he didn’t mention the mysterious pneumonia reported that day by health authorities in Wuhan, Hubei province. Although the World Health Organization had been notified, the Chinese people were largely kept in the dark. How could an invisible bug be allowed to dampen the glory of Xi’s China dream?

In times of crisis, the party always places its own survival above the welfare of the people. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan central hospital, has become the tragic symbol of this disaster. On 30 December, he notified his former medical classmates on WeChat that seven people with an unspecified coronavirus, which reminded him of Sars (the virus that killed almost 800 people in 2003), were in quarantine at his hospital, and advised them to protect themselves. In any normal society, this wouldn’t be considered subversive – but in China, even a small act of kindness, a cautious and private alert to colleagues, can land a person in political danger. On 3 January, Li was reprimanded by police – he then went back to work, and within days contracted the virus.

Over the next two weeks – the critical window of containment – authorities claimed the problem was under control. But coronavirus is indifferent to the vain desires of despots. Left unchecked, it spread. By the time Xi deigned to publicly acknowledge the outbreak, on 20 January, ordering it to be “resolutely contained”, it was too late.

On 23 January, Wuhan was placed in lockdown. Yet on that same day, at a reception in Beijing, Xi merely stressed the need to “race against time and keep abreast with history to realise the first centenary goal of the China dream of national rejuvenation”. Videos on WeChat and Weibo revealed the hollowness of Xi’s ambitions. There was footage of deserted boulevards in affected cities. Corpses lying unattended on pavements. A woman on the balcony of a luxury tower block striking a gong and wailing into the sky: “My mother is dying, rescue me!”

As Li lay on his deathbed on 30 January, he revealed the truth about his experience of the epidemic. Despite being a party member, he spoke to the New York Times about official failures to disclose essential information about the virus to the public, and told the Beijing-based journal Caixin: “A healthy society cannot have just one voice.” In that one sentence, he identified the root cause of China’s sickness. Xi suppresses truth and information to create his utopian “harmonious” society. But harmony can only emerge from a plurality of differing voices, not from the one-note monologue of a tyrant.

After the eruption of public grief and anger that followed Li’s death on 6 February, the government backtracked, and hailed the doctor they had muzzled “a hero”. But behind the scenes, the silencing continued: several people who documented and spoke out about state handling of the outbreak were detained.

In the thick of calamity, people finally understand that if your leaders have no regard for human life or liberty, no amount of money can save you. Entire families have been wiped out by the virus as more than 70 million people have been confined to their homes. Chinese officials have today reported 78,064 infections and 2,715 deaths, mostly in Hubei. But no one trusts the party’s figures. The only certainty about the numbers it releases is that they are the numbers it wants you to believe. In an effort to change the narrative after Li’s death, the party has called for a people’s war against the virus, and has urged journalists to replace “negative content” on social media with “touching stories from the frontline of combating the disease”. Having buried the truth about the calamity of the Cultural Revolution and other earlier crimes, the party is now dragging the nation back to its Maoist past.

Official language is being contaminated once more with military jargon; society is being divided once more into antagonist groups – not the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, but the infected against the yet-to-be-infected. Rural police post videos of their attacks on citizens who dare venture outside without a face mask.

The state media have posted photographs of pregnant nurses in hazmat suits serving on the frontline; there are masked patients in another field hospital being awarded party membership on their deathbeds, joyfully raising their fists in the air as they pledge undying loyalty to Xi. To anyone with a conscience, these sad individuals look like victims of an inhumane cult. That it is believed these snapshots could promote “positive energy” reveals the moral abyss into which totalitarianism has sunk the nation.

Meanwhile, with the epidemic still raging, Xi has ordered the country back to work, all to ensure that the economic targets of his 21st-century goals are met. Of course, he is keeping the political elite safe, though, by postponing the National People’s Congress in March. Further proof, if it was at all needed, that Xi’s China dream is a sham.

• Ma Jian is an author from Qingdao, China. He left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987 as a dissident, and after the handover moved to London. All his books are banned in China

[The Romulan Republic]

https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2 ... oronavirus

I got a phone call from Dr Song* one night. He had just finished a shift at a hospital in Wuhan and was about to go back to work again. He told me it had been weeks since he had had a full night of sleep or a day off. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spent time with his family or eaten a warm meal. At work, he wraps himself in raincoats due to a lack of protective gear across the hospital. Some of his colleagues wear diapers to work to avoid having to remove their protective suits.

“Maybe you can write something to let the patients know we have all tried our best,” he said. Just a few hours before, when a patient had died at a Wuhan hospital, family members had beaten up and severely injured two doctors. Even though he and his coworkers were working non-stop – overwhelmed, under-equipped and exhausted – they still faced a backlash from patients, many of whom he had to reject due to the lack of hospital beds. Some left disappointedly. Others abused him.

Even now, when the virus has taken more than 1,700 lives, the government is still trying to hide information
I got to know Song when I was helping a medical supplies donation group. He was not the only one pleading for help via social media – I was contacted by dozens of medical workers, who all described a desperate situation. I also received a lot of pleas for help from patients. They had been waiting in packed hospital lobbies for days, in fear of being left untested, untreated and ultimately dying from what is now officially called Covid-19. Some people had felt ill for almost a week, and in that time, their family members had started to feel ill as well. But they had a long wait to be diagnosed and treated.

Lin*, a college student, started to feel light-headed and thought she had caught a cold – at the time, there was still no official information about the coronavirus outbreak – but her condition deteriorated drastically. The ban on local transport meant that she and her mother had to walk for hours to get to the hospital. She waited in the lobby for an entire night, then was given some medicine and advised to come back the next day in case there were coronavirus testing kits available.

She was diagnosed at the end of January. So was her mother, who was infected while taking care of her. They were told again and again to remain confined at home and wait to be taken to hospital. As time went by, her messages seemed more and more depressed. One night, she told me that she felt like she was waiting to die. The last time we spoke, she was back at the hospital, waiting again: “If there is only one bed, I will let my mother take it. Her health is declining rapidly. I will quarantine myself at home.” She couldn’t stop crying.

The coronavirus outbreak has only heightened Hong Kong’s hostility towards Beijing
Ilaria Maria Sala
Read more
Lin is not alone. On Weibo, one of the biggest social media platforms in China, there is a group of more than 150,000 people – mostly patients and their families – asking for help. Reading through the posts, it’s clear there is a shortage of everything. Many people have to decide whether to prioritise their mother or daughter, grandson or grandfather, wife or husband.

Knowing how both medical workers and patients are struggling, I couldn’t stop thinking about what caused all these tragedies in a country that should have learned a lot from its Sars outbreak 17 years ago.

According to the Financial Times, there was at least a three-week period when Wuhan authorities were aware the virus was spreading but “issued orders to suppress the news”. In early January, eight medical professionals were reprimanded by the police for rumour-mongering, including Dr Li Wenliang – the whistleblower who died from the disease – who has become a symbol of public frustration over the Chinese government’s censorship and poor management. These “rumours” were actually based on infection cases in hospitals in Wuhan, and if the government had instead put its energy into investigating these cases, then lives could have been saved.

In mid-January, a nurse told me that medical workers in Wuhan had been advised to not wear protective gear to avoid causing panic. Later, Song told me that medical workers had been advised not to appeal for help on public media outlets. Now 1,700 medical workers nationwide have been infected.

Even now, when the virus has made 70,000 people sick and taken more than 1,700 lives, the government is still trying to hide information. Thousands of posts were deleted from the online group asking for help, including Lin’s. I was told by editors of Chinese media outlets that I couldn’t write about anything that reflected negatively on the government.

It is not new for figures in government to put their political interests ahead of public health. But given the rapid spread of the virus and the gravity of the situation in China, I thought the government could put aside the censorship and propaganda for a while. I was wrong.

* Dr Song and Lin are pseudonyms

• The author is a Chinese writer living in north America

[The Romulan Republic]

Some possible good news:

https://theverge.com/2020/2/26/21154220 ... hina-ebola

Researchers in the US are conducting a clinical trial of a treatment for COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, the National Institutes of Health announced yesterday. There are currently over 80,000 confirmed cases of the disease around the world, and it has killed 2,770 people.

Two trials of the drug, an experimental antiviral called remdesivir, have already been up and running in China for a few weeks — and preliminary results appear promising. “There is only one drug right now that we think may have real efficacy and that’s remdesivir,” said Bruce Aylward, an assistant director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), at a press conference this week.

In lab experiments, remdesivir blocks the activity of the new coronavirus in cells. It’s also effective against MERS and SARS, which are also coronaviruses, in cells. It hasn’t yet been tested against those particular diseases in humans. It was first developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead to treat Ebola. A handful of COVID-19 patients, including the first US patient, have been given the drug under compassionate use, which allows doctors to give experimental drugs to patients when no other options are available. The treatment appeared to help in some of those cases, but it takes a clinical trial, like the ones that are underway, for experts to conclusively know if it works.

The first site for the US trial is at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. The first patient enrolled was passenger repatriated to the US after being on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined off the coast of Japan and had an outbreak of the virus on board. The trial aims to run at a number of sites around the world, in order to allow people in the largest geographic area possible to participate, says lead investigator Andre Kalil, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. The goal is to enroll around 400 people with COVID-19.

Only patients experiencing severe symptoms are eligible for the trial. “About 80 percent of people have mild disease. They will clear the infection on their own,” Kalil says. “The goal here is to help the ones that are in the most need, who acquired the virus and need to be in a hospital.”

Participants will be randomly assigned to either receive the drug or a placebo. The study was designed to be flexible, though, and if it starts to show that the drug works, the patients in the placebo group will also receive it. The most important thing the study will measure, Kalil says, is if patients start to get better. It’s much more geared toward finding clinical improvement than toward finding a specific dose or understanding the way the drug works.

“IT’S AMAZING HOW FAST THIS HAPPENED. THIS IS LANDMARK, THAT IT COULD BE DONE THIS FAST.”
The trial was put together in a matter of weeks. “It’s amazing how fast this happened,” Kalil says. “This is landmark, that it could be done this fast.”

Results from the remdesivir trials in China may be available as soon as April. The US-run trial is scheduled to run through 2023, but there may be preliminary data within the year. Research teams and pharmaceutical companies are also working to develop vaccines for the new coronavirus, but that process will take much longer — a year to 18 months at the fastest, experts say.

The remdesivir trials are just a few of the dozens of ongoing clinical trials testing treatments for COVID-19, targeting tens of thousands of patients. The scale and speed are remarkable — even more so given that, only a few years ago, the public health community was reluctant to use experimental treatments during active outbreaks.

Like with the new coronavirus, there were no proven treatments available for Ebola in 2014 when an epidemic broke out in West Africa. At the start, the WHO was concerned that experimental products would increase the already-high levels of mistrust in health workers, and experts worried that focusing on research studies would take resources away from providing active care to sick patients.

But the WHO quickly outlined recommendations for conducting research during the crisis, and trials on various treatment options started up. Scientists learned useful ways to structure trials and thought through some of the ethical issues involved.

Those approaches were refined in the still-ongoing epidemic of Ebola in Congo, which started in 2018. A study of four different drugs found that two were effective — and did so in the middle of the ongoing outbreak. “This is the first time that a randomized, controlled trial has shown quickly and successfully what the best drugs are in the middle of an ongoing outbreak,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, told The Verge at the time.

Researchers will hope to repeat that success now. The setup of the study for the US remdesivir trial is based on the design of the four-drug Ebola trial, Kalil says. The ongoing outbreak of the new coronavirus is different from the Ebola epidemics because it’s less deadly, but it’s affecting far more people in many more countries around the world. But the ongoing response benefits from those experiences, as will the response to any future public health crises. “We are learning,” he says. “What we learned from Ebola is definitely something that is helping us to be even better during this outbreak.”

Update February 26, 4:51PM ET: Updated with comments from Andre Kalil.

[Col. Crackpot]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... oronavirus

Japan is shutting down all schools nationwide for the next month...

That’s a big step.

[Ralin]

Too tired to go point by point, but this one stood out to me

Meanwhile, with the epidemic still raging, Xi has ordered the country back to work, all to ensure that the economic targets of his 21st-century goals are met. Of course, he is keeping the political elite safe, though, by postponing the National People’s Congress in March. Further proof, if it was at all needed, that Xi’s China dream is a sham.

President Xi hasn't 'ordered' the country back to work. Various parts of the government have relaxed the restrictions on people in some jobs in some parts of the country to allow them to go back to work. What the article calls 'economic targets' has more to do with people wanting to keep receiving their fucking paychecks with as little of a gap as possible. But you know, scary loaded language for scary Chinese leader.

Also love how they seamlessly jump from 'local authorities were irresponsibly slow to sound the alarm and take measures to stop the spread of the virus' to blaming the national government in general and President Xi Jinping in particular. As if the national government weren't the ones who stepped in and kicked said local authorities out of the decision-making process.

[AniThyng]

May as well ask here - what was the true story behind those welding the doors shut stories?

[madd0ct0r]

Wales is crushing it..

As of Thursday 20 February, 209 people in Wales have been tested for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), and all received negative results.

“Nearly 95 per cent of the individuals who have been tested in Wales have been offered testing in their own home, making it as convenient as possible for them, as well as protecting our ambulance and hospital resources for those who need it most. We are not able to comment on individual cases for reasons of patient confidentiality.

[mr friendly guy]

Posted without comment:

You just know I am going to post a comment.

Over the past 70 years, the Chinese Communist party has subjected its country to a succession of manmade catastrophes, from the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre, to the forceful suppression of rights in Hong Kong and Tibet, and the mass internment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Official coverups and corruption have multiplied the death toll of natural calamities, from the Sars virus to the Sichuan earthquake.

When they are talking about China's handling of covid 19 and they start with the cultural revolution, you know its going to be good.

Take a step back for a moment. Imagine if for example, Tommy Robinson was to say something along the lines of, for years BBC has protected sexual predators in their ranks like Jimmy Saville, John Nathan Turner and Gary Downie, and now they are trying to shut me up about talking about Muslim rape gangs in the UK. I think most people here would intuitively realise there is a fallacious argument somewhere.

How about if criticism of the US handling of H1N1 starts off with talking about killing North Vietnamese civilians. Hmm. What's that fallacy called again. Oh that's right, poisoning the well. This is exactly the same thing, which shows the standard of this particular Op Ed.

Xi Jinping’s mishandling of the coronavirus epidemic must now be added to the party’s shameful list of crimes. With serious outbreaks occurring in Japan, South Korea, Iran and Italy, it is clear that the virus of Xi’s totalitarian rule threatens the health and freedoms not only of the Chinese people, but of all of us everywhere.

I sure hope we apply the same standards to Obama's mishandling of H1N1, which is now gone global using the same logic. Oh wait of course we won't. But before someone shouts "Whataboutism," I will get to that.

Xi’s vacuous, self-aggrandising ideological vision lies at the heart of this global crisis. When he was appointed party leader in 2012, he announced his “China dream” of national rejuvenation, promising that the country would be moderately prosperous by the party’s 2021 centenary, and fully advanced into global economic hegemony by the republic’s centenary in 2049. Xi vowed that, by then, the world would concede that his one-party dictatorship is superior to the mess of liberal democracy.

Firstly, I am going to need a quote that Xi has stated China wants global economic hegemony. I mean, can you imagine, someone who wants hegemony, but is stupid enough to outright say it. Seriously, is the CCP the Draka? But we both know Guardian readers will never ever check China's official announcements, because unlike the United States, China is smart enough to say we are not going to seek hegemony.

Now before someone moves the goalpost and demonstrate mind reading powers and say that's what Xi really thinks, keep in the mind article states he has said it, a different proposition and which should be easier to prove.

Appointing himself “president for life”, Xi now has more power than any party leader since Mao Zedong, and has crushed all dissent by attempting to build a hi-tech totalitarian state.

Mmmkay. "President for life." Most westerners don't realise, he still has to be voted in by the party. Removing terms limits hasn't changed that. And yes, since China uses a communist model similar to Soviets, we do have examples of leaders giving up positions due to pressure. Mao stepped down from the position of State Chairman of the PRC after the failure of the Great leap forward and Krushev was forced out by his party because of his handling of the Cuban missile crisis.

The Communist party is an insidious pathogen that has infected the Chinese people since 1949. But under Xi’s rule, it has mutated into its most sinister form, allowing capitalism to grow rapaciously while reaffirming Leninist control. The promise of wealth and national glory has blinded many Chinese people to the chains around their feet, and to the barbed wire around the faraway internment camps.

Oh look. What's this tactic called? Remember high school English? Its called imagery. The example of an insidious pathogen. And its most sinister. That's right folks, virtually eliminating poverty and making China on the verge of high income nation (by World Bank definitions) is worse than the Great Leap forward and the cult of personality Mao had. Ok then, this guy sure knows what he is talking about.

In a speech on 31 December 2019, Xi heralded triumphantly a new year of “milestone significance in realising the first centenary goal!” Naturally, he didn’t mention the mysterious pneumonia reported that day by health authorities in Wuhan, Hubei province. Although the World Health Organization had been notified, the Chinese people were largely kept in the dark. How could an invisible bug be allowed to dampen the glory of Xi’s China dream?

Well yeah he didn't mention it, because at that point we still didn't know much about it. It was still being investigated. But once China did know, he did plenty of talking. But hey, who is keeping track, certainly not Guardian readers, that's for sure.

In times of crisis, the party always places its own survival above the welfare of the people. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan central hospital, has become the tragic symbol of this disaster. On 30 December, he notified his former medical classmates on WeChat that seven people with an unspecified coronavirus, which reminded him of Sars (the virus that killed almost 800 people in 2003), were in quarantine at his hospital, and advised them to protect themselves. In any normal society, this wouldn’t be considered subversive – but in China, even a small act of kindness, a cautious and private alert to colleagues, can land a person in political danger. On 3 January, Li was reprimanded by police – he then went back to work, and within days contracted the virus.

This I already explained earlier, but China's equivalent of the CDC had already been notified about the disease. Li was reprimanded (not arrested) for spreading rumours at a time the disease was still investigated. Would I have wish they handled things differently? Yeah, they should have asked him to post along the lines of, the government already knows, its still being investigated, please don't panic. His leaked wechat conversations wouldn't necessarily have made that much difference since you know, the authorities were already investigating it.

Over the next two weeks – the critical window of containment – authorities claimed the problem was under control. But coronavirus is indifferent to the vain desires of despots. Left unchecked, it spread. By the time Xi deigned to publicly acknowledge the outbreak, on 20 January, ordering it to be “resolutely contained”, it was too late.

Remember the whataboutism. Here is where I address it. Since he has pretty much blamed China's system of government for a presumed slow response, it opens up his argument to compare the response with a government that isn't like China's. Now if only there was an outbreak in democratic country we could compare to.. oh wait, swine flu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic

So a democratic government would respond faster than two weeks right?

The new virus was first isolated in late April by American and Canadian laboratories from samples taken from people with flu in Mexico, Southern California and Texas. Soon the earliest known human case was traced to a case from 9 March in a 5-year-old boy in La Gloria, Mexico, a rural town in Veracruz.[12][11] In late April the World Health Organization (WHO) declared its first ever "public health emergency of international concern," or PHEIC,[13] and in June, the WHO and the U.S. CDC stopped counting cases and declared the outbreak a pandemic

So it took more than a month before the US declared the outbreak a pandemic? What about when the US declared it an emergency.

On 24 October 2009, U.S. President Obama declared swine flu a national emergency, giving Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius authority to grant waivers to requesting hospitals from usual federal requirements

I am no mathematical genius, but I am pretty sure from April when it was first known to declaring it an emergency in october is about 6 months, and that is kind of more than two weeks.

Does the fact the US response sucked, excuse China? No. But if you're going to argue China's response of 2 weeks delay was slow because of its system of government, then you have to apply the same rule and conclude the US response was SLOWER despite having a government system which should allow it to respond faster. And then you have to then ask, why is that, and is it really due to their government or some other factor. But these questions are most probably going to hurt people's brains.

On 23 January, Wuhan was placed in lockdown. Yet on that same day, at a reception in Beijing, Xi merely stressed the need to “race against time and keep abreast with history to realise the first centenary goal of the China dream of national rejuvenation”.

Yeah I know, its almost like China is not allowed to handle multiple goals at the same time.

Videos on WeChat and Weibo revealed the hollowness of Xi’s ambitions. There was footage of deserted boulevards in affected cities. Corpses lying unattended on pavements. A woman on the balcony of a luxury tower block striking a gong and wailing into the sky: “My mother is dying, rescue me!”

Lets see. As has been pointed out, Chinese new year, streets are normally deserted. This guy is Chinese so he can't fail to notice this. Its clearly being dishonest here. But hey, people watch news which reinforce their views.

As Li lay on his deathbed on 30 January, he revealed the truth about his experience of the epidemic. Despite being a party member, he spoke to the New York Times about official failures to disclose essential information about the virus to the public, and told the Beijing-based journal Caixin: “A healthy society cannot have just one voice.” In that one sentence, he identified the root cause of China’s sickness. Xi suppresses truth and information to create his utopian “harmonious” society. But harmony can only emerge from a plurality of differing voices, not from the one-note monologue of a tyrant.

While this guy is right that we need plurality of voices, its funny how he talks about truth when conveniently leaves out facts like, how other doctors have already reported the disease and how, like deserted streets are what we expect in Chinese new year.

In the thick of calamity, people finally understand that if your leaders have no regard for human life or liberty, no amount of money can save you. Entire families have been wiped out by the virus as more than 70 million people have been confined to their homes. Chinese officials have today reported 78,064 infections and 2,715 deaths, mostly in Hubei. But no one trusts the party’s figures.

Well no one aside the WHO, who are you know actually get to look at how China does things. Remember that part about truth. Yeah. I mean at least have the good grace to acknowledge the WHO largely accepts these numbers.

The state media have posted photographs of pregnant nurses in hazmat suits serving on the frontline; there are masked patients in another field hospital being awarded party membership on their deathbeds, joyfully raising their fists in the air as they pledge undying loyalty to Xi. To anyone with a conscience, these sad individuals look like victims of an inhumane cult. That it is believed these snapshots could promote “positive energy” reveals the moral abyss into which totalitarianism has sunk the nation.

This people, is called shitting on the medical staff who risks their lives, coming into Hubei from other parts of China. This attitude reveals the sad moral abyss into the blind hatred for China which its dissidents have sunk, and why they should be treated with contempt.

Meanwhile, with the epidemic still raging, Xi has ordered the country back to work, all to ensure that the economic targets of his 21st-century goals are met. Of course, he is keeping the political elite safe, though, by postponing the National People’s Congress in March. Further proof, if it was at all needed, that Xi’s China dream is a sham.

Lets ignore for a moment the problems if we don't go back to work. We need food, need electricity etc.
Lets even ignore for a moment that while some strategically important factories have worked throughout the clampdown, a lot of the going back to work is in areas other than Hubei, where numbers are reported as down.

Lets just point out, since this guy loves the truth so much, he might like to inform readers that going to back involves people taking precautions such as temperature checks and wearing masks. So its not exactly like, business as usual.

[The Romulan Republic]

"Covid-19 will mark the end of affluence politics"

https://wired.com/story/covid-19-will-m ... popular4-1

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump dismissed concerns about Covid-19. As he put it, the virus is "under control" in the US and the “whole situation will start working out.” But according to Politico, Trump is privately voicing worries that the impact of the virus will undermine his chances of reelection. His panicked actions of late—including preventing an American from being treated in Alabama, at the request of a fearful Senator Richard Shelby—confirm that this virus is a political event of the first magnitude. While few in Washington have internalized it, the coronavirus is the biggest story in the world and is soon going to smash into our electoral politics in unpredictable ways.

As Jon Stokes notes, we will, in all likelihood, be locking down travel in some areas of the US for several weeks, as they did in China. People may be advised against gathering in large groups. It's not clear what any of this will mean for campaigning or primary voting, whether most of us will vote by mail or have our votes delayed.

Moreover, the coronavirus is going to introduce economic conditions with which few people in modern America are familiar: the prospect of shortages. After 25 years of offshoring and consolidation, we now rely on overseas production for just about everything. Now in the wake of the coronavirus, China has shut down much of its production; South Korea and Italy will shut down as well. Once the final imports from these countries have worked their way through the supply chains and hit our shores, it could be a while before we get more. This coronavirus will reveal, in other words, a crisis of production—and one that’s coming just in time for a presidential election.

We've been through something like this once before. My book Goliath describes the 1932 campaign for president, one that was carried out at the depths of the Great Depression and during an era when our productive capacity was shut down. Though the crisis at that time was caused by a banking collapse, not a pandemic, the political backdrop was analogous. Eighty-eight years ago, “old order” politicians, as they were known, proved unwilling—even in the face of crisis—to have the government apply its power toward the broader public benefit. Their recalcitrance prefigured, in certain ways, the reflexively libertarian thinking of today.

A toxic ideology invited disaster in 1932, as policymakers did little in response to the collapse of thousands of banks and businesses. At the depth of that depression, cotton hit its lowest price in 200 years and steel production fell to 15 percent of capacity. The situation became so desperate that in just one city, Toledo, Ohio, 60,000 of the 300,000 residents stood in bread lines every day. Children were competing with rats for food. And thousands were dying of dysentery. The politics too turned desperate, with one labor leader telling Congress that "if the Congress of the United States and this administration do not do something to meet this situation adequately, next winter it will not be a cry to save the hungry, but it will be a cry to save the government.”

And yet, the old order had no answers. Congress held hearings, but businessmen, academics, and bankers proffered only belt-tightening. Within the Republican establishment, President Herbert Hoover worked 18-hour days, exhorting confidence while refusing to take even basic steps such as having the government guarantee bank deposits. Instead, his administration’s army attacked hungry protesters in Washington, DC, a move that prompted an angry Republican congressman, Fiorello La Guardia of New York, to remind the president: “Soup is cheaper than tear gas bombs.”

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, conservatives and progressives in the party were locked in a bitter battle for the nomination. Many Democrats agreed with Hoover. Maryland governor and presidential candidate Albert Ritchie, for instance, argued that we should rely “less on politics, less on laws, less on government.” Another candidate, Speaker of the House John Nance Garner, claimed the greatest threat was the “tendency toward socialism and communism” and pledged a massive cut in government spending, as well as a sales tax increase. Others turned to extreme racism and xenophobia. Only Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who went on to win a contested convention, campaigned on aggressive government involvement in the economy—or as he put it, a “workable program of reconstruction,” which later became the New Deal.

That era’s political desperation is alien to us for a few reasons. First off, we haven’t faced shortages of such magnitude for a very long time. More importantly, we have for decades lived under a political framework known as affluence, a term popularized by economist John Kenneth Galbraith in the 1950s. As an affluent society, America automatically produces a surfeit of jobs and wealth, and the problem is solely one of distributing the bounty.

Under the siren song of affluence, we began offshoring critical production capacity in the 1960s for geopolitical reasons. In 1971, economist Nicholas Kaldor noted that American financial policies were turning a "a nation of creative producers into a community of rentiers increasingly living on others, seeking gratification in ever more useless consumption, with all the debilitating effects of the bread and circuses of imperial Rome." Still, Bill Clinton and George Bush accelerated this trend throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Affluence politics is not the politics of being wealthy, though, but rather the politics of not paying attention to what creates wealth in the first place. That is to say, it’s the politics of ignoring our ability to make and distribute the things people need. With the banking collapse in 2008, the election of Trump in 2016 and his mourning of empty factories, and now with Bernie Sanders dominating the early primaries, that era may at last be passing. A pandemic disease outbreak would only hasten this progression and force us back into the politics of production.

With potential shortages of goods, and restrictions on people’s movement, both parties are heading into unknown territory. It is likely Democrats will use this opportunity to further their case for Medicare for All. Pandemic surveillance and medical bureaucracies focused on billing do not mix well—stories about astronomical out-of-pocket costs for Covid-19 testing are already circulating. Republicans are likely to take a more xenophobic approach, emphasizing restrictions on foreigners and infected Americans. When it comes to managing shortages, however, both parties are split, just as they were in 1932, between their Wall Street factions that assume affluence and the less mature populist factions that seek assertive public power. The Democratic Party primaries certainly echo those of the Great Depression, with candidates from Bernie Sanders to Amy Klobuchar trying to wrap themselves in FDR’s mantle.

Regardless, the end of affluence politics means focusing on whether medicine is on shelves, not bitter disputes over bloated and wasteful hospital and insurance billing departments. It means caring about bureaucratic competence in government, and accuracy in media, not because these are nice things to have but because they are necessary to avoid immense widespread suffering. It means understanding that pharmaceutical mergers that benefit shareholders while laying off scientists are destructive, not just because they are unfair, but because they make us less resilient to disease. (Shareholders, as it turns out, also have lungs.) Finally, it means recognizing that wealth, real wealth, is not defined by accounting games on Wall Street, but the ability to meet the needs of our own people.

We came to these realizations once before in 1932, and created a vibrant democratic state over the following few decades—one that rapidly expanded our life spans, defeated the Nazis, and helped create Silicon Valley. The convergence of the Covid-19 outbreak and the presidential election will force us to do it once again. We've lived in the world of unreality for far too long.

As Richmond Federal Reserve Bank president Tom Barkin recently put it, “Central banks can’t come up with vaccines.” It's time to get ready for what that implies.

[The Romulan Republic]

Interesting break-down from a lawyer on Youtube as to whether the US could legally quarantine cities:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IF8MswEQS7w

[The Romulan Republic]

https://theatlantic.com/health/archive/ ... ne/607000/

In May 1997, a 3-year-old boy developed what at first seemed like the common cold. When his symptoms—sore throat, fever, and cough—persisted for six days, he was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong. There his cough worsened, and he began gasping for air. Despite intensive care, the boy died.

Puzzled by his rapid deterioration, doctors sent a sample of the boy’s sputum to China’s Department of Health. But the standard testing protocol couldn’t fully identify the virus that had caused the disease. The chief virologist decided to ship some of the sample to colleagues in other countries.

At the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the boy’s sputum sat for a month, waiting for its turn in a slow process of antibody-matching analysis. The results eventually confirmed that this was a variant of influenza, the virus that has killed more people than any in history. But this type had never before been seen in humans. It was H5N1, or “avian flu,” discovered two decades prior, but known only to infect birds.

By then, it was August. Scientists sent distress signals around the world. The Chinese government swiftly killed 1.5 million chickens (over the protests of chicken farmers). Further cases were closely monitored and isolated. By the end of the year there were 18 known cases in humans. Six people died.

This was seen as a successful global response, and the virus was not seen again for years. In part, containment was possible because the disease was so severe: Those who got it became manifestly, extremely ill. H5N1 has a fatality rate of about 60 percent—if you get it, you’re likely to die. Yet since 2003, the virus has killed only 455 people. The much “milder” flu viruses, by contrast, kill fewer than 0.1 percent of people they infect, on average, but are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year.

Severe illness caused by viruses such as H5N1 also means that infected people can be identified and isolated, or that they died quickly. They do not walk around feeling just a little under the weather, seeding the virus. The new coronavirus (known technically as SARS-CoV-2) that has been spreading around the world can cause a respiratory illness that can be severe. The disease (known as COVID-19) seems to have a fatality rate of less than 2 percent—exponentially lower than most outbreaks that make global news. The virus has raised alarm not despite that low fatality rate, but because of it.

Coronaviruses are similar to influenza viruses in that they both contain single strands of RNA.* Four coronaviruses commonly infect humans, causing colds. These are believed to have evolved in humans to maximize their own spread—which means sickening, but not killing, people. By contrast, the two prior novel coronavirus outbreaks—SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, named for where the first outbreak occurred)—were picked up from animals, as was H5N1. These diseases were highly fatal to humans. If there were mild or asymptomatic cases, they were extremely few. Had there been more of them, the disease would have spread widely. Ultimately, SARS and MERS each killed fewer than 1,000 people.

COVID-19 is already reported to have killed more than twice that number. With its potent mix of characteristics, this virus is unlike most that capture popular attention: It is deadly, but not too deadly. It makes people sick, but not in predictable, uniquely identifiable ways. Last week, 14 Americans tested positive on a cruise ship in Japan despite feeling fine—the new virus may be most dangerous because, it seems, it may sometimes cause no symptoms at all.

Read: The new coronavirus is a truly modern epidemic

The world has responded with unprecedented speed and mobilization of resources. The new virus was identified extremely quickly. Its genome was sequenced by Chinese scientists and shared around the world within weeks. The global scientific community has shared genomic and clinical data at unprecedented rates. Work on a vaccine is well under way. The Chinese government enacted dramatic containment measures, and the World Health Organization declared an emergency of international concern. All of this happened in a fraction of the time it took to even identify H5N1 in 1997. And yet the outbreak continues to spread.

The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. Twice in our conversation he started to say something, then paused and said, “Actually, let me start again.” So it’s striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”

Containment is the first step in responding to any outbreak. In the case of COVID-19, the possibility (however implausible) of preventing a pandemic seemed to play out in a matter of days. Starting in January, China began cordoning off progressively larger areas, radiating outward from the city of Wuhan and eventually encapsulating some 100 million people. People were barred from leaving home, and lectured by drones if they were caught outside. Nonetheless, the virus has now been found in 24 countries.

Despite the apparent ineffectiveness of such measures—relative to their inordinate social and economic cost, at least—the crackdown continues to escalate. Under political pressure to “stop” the virus, last Thursday the Chinese government announced that officials in Hubei province would be going door-to-door, testing people for fevers and looking for signs of illness, then sending all potential cases to quarantine camps. But even with the ideal containment, the virus’s spread may have been inevitable. Testing people who are already extremely sick is an imperfect strategy if people can spread the virus without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work.

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. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, about 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)

Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”

At this point, it is not even known how many people are infected. As of Sunday, there have been 35 confirmed cases in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. But Lipsitch’s “very, very rough” estimate when we spoke a week ago (banking on “multiple assumptions piled on top of each other,” he said) was that 100 or 200 people in the U.S. were infected. That’s all it would take to seed the disease widely. The rate of spread would depend on how contagious the disease is in milder cases. On Friday, Chinese scientists reported in the medical journal JAMA an apparent case of asymptomatic spread of the virus, from a patient with a normal chest CT scan. The researchers concluded with stolid understatement that if this finding is not a bizarre abnormality, “the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging.”

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.”

Originally, doctors in the U.S. were advised not to test people unless they had been to China or had contact with someone who had been diagnosed with the disease. Within the past two weeks, the CDC said it would start screening people in five U.S. cities, in an effort to give some idea of how many cases are actually out there. But tests are still not widely available. As of Friday, the Association of Public Health Laboratories said that only California, Nebraska, and Illinois had the capacity to test people for the virus.

With so little data, prognosis is difficult. But the concern that this virus is beyond containment—that it will be with us indefinitely—is nowhere more apparent than in the global race to find a vaccine, one of the clearest strategies for saving lives in the years to come.

Over the past month, stock prices of a small pharmaceutical company named Inovio have more than doubled. In mid-January, it reportedly discovered a vaccine for the new coronavirus. This claim has been repeated in many news reports, even though it is technically inaccurate. Like other drugs, vaccines require a long testing process to see whether they indeed protect people from disease, and do so safely. What this company—and others—has done is copy a bit of the virus’s RNA that one day could prove to work as a vaccine. It’s a promising first step, but to call it a discovery is like announcing a new surgery after sharpening a scalpel.

Though genetic sequencing is now extremely fast, making vaccines is as much art as science. It involves finding a viral sequence that will reliably cause a protective immune-system memory but not trigger an acute inflammatory response that would itself cause symptoms. (While the influenza vaccine cannot cause the flu, the CDC warns that it can cause “flu-like symptoms.”) Hitting this sweet spot requires testing, first in lab models and animals, and eventually in people. One does not simply ship a billion viral gene fragments around the world to be injected into everyone at the moment of discovery.

Inovio is far from the only small biotech company venturing to create a sequence that strikes that balance. Others include Moderna, CureVac, and Novavax. Academic researchers are also on the case, at Imperial College London and other universities, as are federal scientists in several countries, including at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Anthony Fauci, the head of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in JAMA in January that the agency was working at historic speed to find a vaccine. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, researchers moved from obtaining the genomic sequence of the virus and into a phase 1 clinical trial of a vaccine in 20 months. Fauci wrote that his team has since compressed that timeline to just over three months for other viruses, and for the new coronavirus, “they hope to move even faster.”

New models have sprung up in recent years, too, that promise to speed up vaccine development. One is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), which was launched in Norway in 2017 to finance and coordinate the development of new vaccines. Its founders include the governments of Norway and India, the Wellcome Trust, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The group’s money is now flowing to Inovio and other small biotech start-ups, encouraging them to get into the risky business of vaccine development. The group’s CEO, Richard Hatchett, shares Fauci’s basic timeline vision—a COVID-19 vaccine ready for early phases of safety testing in April. If all goes well, by late summer testing could begin to see if the vaccine actually prevents disease.

Overall, if all pieces fell into place, Hatchett guesses it would be 12 to 18 months before an initial product could be deemed safe and effective. That timeline represents “a vast acceleration compared with the history of vaccine development,” he told me. But it’s also unprecedentedly ambitious. “Even to propose such a timeline at this point must be regarded as hugely aspirational,” he added.

Even if that idyllic year-long projection were realized, the novel product would still require manufacturing and distribution. “An important consideration is whether the underlying approach can then be scaled to produce millions or even billions of doses in coming years,” Hatchett said. Especially in an ongoing emergency, if borders closed and supply chains broke, distribution and production could prove difficult purely as a matter of logistics.

Fauci’s initial optimism seemed to wane, too. Last week he said that the process of vaccine development was proving “very difficult and very frustrating.” For all the advances in basic science, the process cannot proceed to an actual vaccine without extensive clinical testing, which requires manufacturing many vaccines and meticulously monitoring outcomes in people. The process could ultimately cost hundreds of millions of dollars—money that the NIH, start-ups, and universities don’t have. Nor do they have the production facilities and technology to mass-manufacture and distribute a vaccine.

Production of vaccines has long been contingent on investment from one of the handful of giant global pharmaceutical companies. At the Aspen Institute last week, Fauci lamented that none had yet to “step up” and commit to making the vaccine. “Companies that have the skill to be able to do it are not going to just sit around and have a warm facility, ready to go for when you need it,” he said. Even if they did, taking on a new product like this could mean massive losses, especially if the demand faded or if people, for complex reasons, chose not to use the product.

Making vaccines is so difficult, cost intensive, and high risk that in the 1980s, when drug companies began to incur legal costs over alleged harms caused by vaccines, many opted to simply quit making them. To incentivize the pharmaceutical industry to keep producing these vital products, the U.S. government offered to indemnify anyone claiming to have been harmed by a vaccine. The arrangement continues to this day. Even still, drug companies have generally found it more profitable to invest in the daily-use drugs for chronic conditions. And coronaviruses could present a particular challenge in that at their core they, like influenza viruses, contain single strands of RNA. This viral class is likely to mutate, and vaccines may need to be in constant development, as with the flu.

“If we’re putting all our hopes in a vaccine as being the answer, we’re in trouble,” Jason Schwartz, an assistant professor at Yale School of Public Health who studies vaccine policy, told me. The best-case scenario, as Schwartz sees it, is the one in which this vaccine development happens far too late to make a difference for the current outbreak. The real problem is that preparedness for this outbreak should have been happening for the past decade, ever since SARS. “Had we not set the SARS-vaccine-research program aside, we would have had a lot more of this foundational work that we could apply to this new, closely related virus, ” he said. But, as with Ebola, government funding and pharmaceutical-industry development evaporated once the sense of emergency lifted. “Some very early research ended up sitting on a shelf because that outbreak ended before a vaccine needed to be aggressively developed.”

On Saturday, Politico reported that the White House is preparing to ask Congress for $1 billion in emergency funding for a coronavirus response. This request, if it materialized, would come in the same month in which President Donald Trump released a new budget proposal that would cut key elements of pandemic preparedness—funding for the CDC, the NIH, and foreign aid.

These long-term government investments matter because creating vaccines, antiviral medications, and other vital tools requires decades of serious investment, even when demand is low. Market-based economies often struggle to develop a product for which there is no immediate demand and to distribute products to the places they’re needed. CEPI has been touted as a promising model to incentivize vaccine development before an emergency begins, but the group also has skeptics. Last year, Doctors Without Borders wrote a scathing open letter, saying the model didn’t ensure equitable distribution or affordability. CEPI subsequently updated its policies to forefront equitable access, and Manuel Martin, a medical innovation and access adviser with Doctors Without Borders, told me last week that he’s now cautiously optimistic. “CEPI is absolutely promising, and we really hope that it will be successful in producing a novel vaccine,” he said. But he and his colleagues are “waiting to see how CEPI’s commitments play out in practice.”

These considerations matter not simply as humanitarian benevolence, but also as effective policy. Getting vaccines and other resources to the places where they will be most helpful is essential to stop disease from spreading widely. During the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, for example, Mexico was hit hard. In Australia, which was not, the government prevented exports by its pharmaceutical industry until it filled the Australian government’s order for vaccines. The more the world enters lockdown and self-preservation mode, the more difficult it could be to soberly assess risk and effectively distribute tools, from vaccines and respirator masks to food and hand soap.

Italy, Iran, and South Korea are now among the countries reporting quickly growing numbers of detected COVID-19 infections. Many countries have responded with containment attempts, despite the dubious efficacy and inherent harms of China’s historically unprecedented crackdown. Certain containment measures will be appropriate, but widely banning travel, closing down cities, and hoarding resources are not realistic solutions for an outbreak that lasts years. All of these measures come with risks of their own. Ultimately some pandemic responses will require opening borders, not closing them. At some point the expectation that any area will escape effects of COVID-19 must be abandoned: The disease must be seen as everyone’s problem.

* This story originally stated that coronaviruses and influenza viruses are single strands of RNA; in fact, influenza viruses can contain multiple segments of single-strand RNA.

The thing that stands out to me in this one is the prediction that between 40 and 70% of people on Earth will likely get Coronavirus in the next year. And the death rate appears to be between 2 and 4%. I'm sure you can argue over the reliability of those estimates, but if one presumes, for the sake of argument, that they're accurate...

Let's say 7 billion people on Earth (not exact, I know), and doing some quick math: Between 56 and 196 million dead, approximately. Maybe more, as hospitals become overloaded and the economy starts to founder. So basically the best case scenario here is a death toll comparable to WWII, over the next year. Nearly everyone on Earth will probably know someone who's died from it.

And isn't it just perfect that we would get Donald fucking Trump, of all people, to be the man in charge during the biggest short-term global crisis since the Second World War. That's the kind of coincidence that makes you wonder how anyone could ever have believed in a loving god.

I will note, also, once again, the attention being payed, even from a fairly Centrist outlet like the Atlantic, to how capitalism isn't really built to handle something like this. As to Trump, his cuts to the CDC, NIH, and foreign aid while this is going on are nothing less than a crime against humanity of the first order (as are the self-serving responses of the Iranian and Chinese governments). For that alone, Trump is perhaps the most deserving man since Hitler of going to the hangman's noose.

Edit: Googled, and the population's closer to eight billion now. Adjust the death toll accordingly.

[The Romulan Republic]

Trump Regime requiring all statements from government officials and scientists to be vetted by Mike Pence:

https://nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/polit ... pence.html

Wouldn't want anyone to say something true that might upset the stockmarket/Trump's reelection chances, would we?

[Ralin]

while this is going on are nothing less than a crime against humanity of the first order (as are the self-serving responses of the Iranian and Chinese governments).

Article: Despite a massive concerted effort on the part of the Chinese government to contain the new coronavirus containment will most likely be a failure.

TRR: The Chinese government's self-serving response to the coronavirus is a literal Nazi-level crime against humanity

Bitch, are you for real?

[aerius]

Made a quick & dirty chart using data from the covid tracker site

Code: Select all

Country		Cases	Deaths	Death Rate

China		78500	2744	3.5%
Hubei		65600	2641	4.0%
South Korea	1766	13	0.7%
Others		705	4	0.6%
Italy		528	14	2.7%
Iran		245	26	10.6%
Japan		189	3	1.6%
Singapore	93	0	0%
Hong Kong	92	2	2.2%

Iran's getting walloped while most of the others aren't doing too bad. Italy's got a higher death rate than I'd expect which makes me think that we're not getting the full story from them. Apparently there's a whole bunch of towns on lockdown so it's possible there's a lot more cases out in the wild than they've found & reported. Shitloads of infections in South Korea and the cruise ships but death rates are pretty low in both instances.

Overall, not too worried yet. If it goes exponential in Europe or gets out in India and SE Asia then that's when shit gets real.

[The Romulan Republic]

while this is going on are nothing less than a crime against humanity of the first order (as are the self-serving responses of the Iranian and Chinese governments).

Article: Despite a massive concerted effort on the part of the Chinese government to contain the new coronavirus containment will most likely be a failure.

TRR: The Chinese government's self-serving response to the coronavirus is a literal Nazi-level crime against humanity

Bitch, are you for real?

I shouldn't have to explain this, but "there's probably no way it could be completely contained" does not mean "How a government responds to it makes zero difference, and therefore any corrupt or incompetent response is fine."

I also notice that you deliberately mischaracterized my response as singling out the Chinese government's guilt, and ignored the fact that my focus was actually on the Trump Regime's guilt, with Iran and China added as an afterthought. No doubt this was done so you can bleat about how I'm "racist" again for daring to criticize a non-Western dictatorship.

And given that this crisis is acknowledged to at least have real potential to cause hundreds of millions of deaths over the next year- yes, I think characterizing deliberately dishonest or ineffective responses by governments, regardless of which side of the east-west divide they are on, as a crime against humanity, is entirely appropriate, and I 100% stand by that characterization.

[aerius]

while this is going on are nothing less than a crime against humanity of the first order (as are the self-serving responses of the Iranian and Chinese governments).

Article: Despite a massive concerted effort on the part of the Chinese government to contain the new coronavirus containment will most likely be a failure.

TRR: The Chinese government's self-serving response to the coronavirus is a literal Nazi-level crime against humanity

Bitch, are you for real?

Clearly, it's time for the Shep Solution(TM) It's the only way to be sure.

[Ralin]

I also notice that you deliberately mischaracterized my response as singling out the Chinese government's guilt, and ignored the fact that my focus was actually on the Trump Regime's guilt, with Iran and China added as an afterthought. No doubt this was done so you can bleat about how I'm "racist" again for daring to criticize a non-Western dictatorship.

I singled out the fact that you mentioned them in the same breath as Trump and Hitler, you fucking dumbass.

And given that this crisis is acknowledged to at least have real potential to cause hundreds of millions of deaths over the next year- yes, I think characterizing deliberately dishonest or ineffective responses by governments, regardless of which side of the east-west divide they are on, as a crime against humanity, is entirely appropriate, and I 100% stand by that characterization.

Major cities quarantined. Mandatory/semi-mandatory masks to go out in public. Temperature checks at the gates of apartment complexes and shopping centers (there's a literal barbed wire fence outside the front door of my apartment). Businesses closed country-wide. Mandatory tracking and registration of any one who uses public transit. Fourteen day mandatory isolation for travelers. Medical personnel and researchers have been working around the clock for over a month trying to slow the spread of the virus and provide as much treatment as possible. Article straight up says that Chinese scientists have been working hand in glove with international organizations to find a cure. And SOMEHOW, this is your idea of an incompetent or ineffective response?

What the fuck has Canada been doing that's so much better?

[Broomstick]

Trump Regime requiring all statements from government officials and scientists to be vetted by Mike Pence:

https://nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/polit ... pence.html

Wouldn't want anyone to say something true that might upset the stockmarket/Trump's reelection chances, would we?

Pence tried to set up his own vetted news service while in Indiana to spout approved propaganda - he's gonna love this opportunity to try again on a national level.

[Broomstick]

I shouldn't have to explain this, but "there's probably no way it could be completely contained" does not mean "How a government responds to it makes zero difference, and therefore any corrupt or incompetent response is fine."

The fact containment fails does not mean that those attempting it are "guilty" or "incompetent".

Please explain what, exactly, you think the Chinese government did or is doing wrong.

Yes, I do think you are wrong here on several points.

[The Romulan Republic]

I singled out the fact that you mentioned them in the same breath as Trump and Hitler, you fucking dumbass.

Ah. So, I'm being unfair to China if I criticize China's government and don't criticize other governments, and I'm being unfair to China if I criticize its government and other tyrannical regimes at the same time.

The only correct answer is "Xi Jinping is always right". Got it.

Anyway, my point was that your initial response misrepresented my criticism as being focussed on China, rather than on the United States.

Major cities quarantined. Mandatory/semi-mandatory masks to go out in public. Temperature checks at the gates of apartment complexes and shopping centers (there's a literal barbed wire fence outside the front door of my apartment). Businesses closed country-wide. Mandatory tracking and registration of any one who uses public transit. Fourteen day mandatory isolation for travelers. Medical personnel and researchers have been working around the clock for over a month trying to slow the spread of the virus and provide as much treatment as possible. Article straight up says that Chinese scientists have been working hand in glove with international organizations to find a cure. And SOMEHOW, this is your idea of an incompetent or ineffective response?

China's government has engaged in some very draconian measures (note: draconian and effective are not synonymous). However, it has also attempted to silence reports about the seriousness of the problem at various points. Do you deny this? Do you have credible sources indicating that these allegations are false?

What the fuck has Canada been doing that's so much better?

It would be ridiculous for Canada to be engaging in mass quarantines and such when there are virtually no cases in Canada thus far.

Thus far, the government has urged people to stockpile food and medicine, wash their hands, stay home if sick, get the flu shot (so that there are fewer people with the flu overtaxing the system while its trying to deal with coronavirus). Could they do more to get those messages out? Probably, but I also put some blame on media outlets for largely not paying much attention to coronavirus until recently, compared to other stories.

Of course, the real problem in Canada, as in the US and pretty much everywhere else to varying degrees, is that capitalism isn't built to handle a pandemic, because it prioritizes personal profit over the public good. A full response would include legislation to protect people who stay home due to illness, or as a precaution, from being fired/loss of wages. Of course, the ideal response would be to have already had a Universal Basic Income in place, so sick people didn't have to go to work to live.

At least we've got public health care, unlike the US.

[The Romulan Republic]

I shouldn't have to explain this, but "there's probably no way it could be completely contained" does not mean "How a government responds to it makes zero difference, and therefore any corrupt or incompetent response is fine."

The fact containment fails does not mean that those attempting it are "guilty" or "incompetent".

Please explain what, exactly, you think the Chinese government did or is doing wrong.

Yes, I do think you are wrong here on several points.

Primarily, supressing information about the severity of the crisis at various points, as noted above in both my reply to Ralin and articles I cited.

Could you enumerate what those points are, so that I can address them rather than guessing at them?

Also, I will remind everyone that I am by no means singling out China in this criticism. Iran is clearly being disingenuous about the seriousness of the problem, as is the Trump Regime, which has probably committed the most appalling response by cutting funding to the agencies tasked with preventing or combating a pandemic while this crisis is in progress.

[ray245]

Primarily, supressing information about the severity of the crisis at various points, as noted above in both my reply to Ralin and articles I cited.

I think the issue is whether you are conflating local bureaucrats messing things up with the actions or inaction of the central government. China is massive, and there are significant difference between the work of the local bureaucrats covering things up from saying the central government is covering things up.

That's like conflating the US state government from the US federal government. Yes, officially they are part of the same government and the federal government should take responsibilities of any mess-up. But that's like blaming Obama for the actions of Mike Pence when he was the governor of Indiana for messing up the AIDS epidemic in his state.

[Ralin]

Ah. So, I'm being unfair to China if I criticize China's government and don't criticize other governments, and I'm being unfair to China if I criticize its government and other tyrannical regimes at the same time.

The only correct answer is "Xi Jinping is always right". Got it.

Anyway, my point was that your initial response misrepresented my criticism as being focussed on China, rather than on the United States.

Hey dipshit, when you toss a country's government with Trump and Hitler 'as an afterthought' everyone can damned well see what you're trying to do whether you focus on them or not.

However, it has also attempted to silence reports about the seriousness of the problem at various points. Do you deny this? Do you have credible sources indicating that these allegations are false?

Everything I've seen says that was a local Wuhan government fuck up, and that even that was likely exaggerated.

Frankly there are situations where there are good reasons to downplay the seriousness of a potential pandemic, at least in the near term. It becomes much harder to implement effective quarantine and isolation if people get it into their head that they need to GET THE FUCK OUT MOVE MOVE MOVE OR YOU'RE GOING TO GET INFECTED AND DIE.