The Walls Come Down: No Travel Betwen US and Europe for 30 Days

[The Romulan Republic]

In other news, BoJo is out of intensive care. Pity the same can't be said for everyone who "benefited" from his herd immunity policy.

[madd0ct0r]

A good article looking at the quiet success of Germany, but not really in enough detail. https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/09/coro ... -to-shame/

Article in ft yesterday suggesting the UK is considering a staged relaxation of lockdown, aiming to release 20-30 year olds who don't live with vulnerable people.
That's 4.2 million people, most of whom have been hit hardest financially by the lockdown and have the smallest flats/room shares to wait in.
They estimate this will result in 630 premature deaths. I hope it is offered on a voluntary basis and not a 'we relaxed your limits so now we cut off your support' one

[Broomstick]

Wouldn't the best case scenario be if Trump himself was struck down by the virus?

That would result in President Mike Pence. Even if he's limited to a caretaker presidency that lasts less than nine months, that's not a terribly edifying prospect.

I survived 4 years with Pence as governor, we can endure less than a year of him as President. Not that I think he'd be a good president - I expect he'd continue to be a homophobic fundy piece of shit like he's always been - but at this point I don't think we'd be any worse off and given he doesn't demand constant ass-kissing maybe better.

What I'd worry about is that he'd get elected in November and we'd get four years of him as PotUS.

[Broomstick]

A scene from Hart Island, the Bronx, New York City's Potter's Field from yesterday:

[The Romulan Republic]

Wouldn't the best case scenario be if Trump himself was struck down by the virus?

That would result in President Mike Pence. Even if he's limited to a caretaker presidency that lasts less than nine months, that's not a terribly edifying prospect.

I survived 4 years with Pence as governor, we can endure less than a year of him as President. Not that I think he'd be a good president - I expect he'd continue to be a homophobic fundy piece of shit like he's always been - but at this point I don't think we'd be any worse off and given he doesn't demand constant ass-kissing maybe better.

What I'd worry about is that he'd get elected in November and we'd get four years of him as PotUS.

Counterpoint- Pence is an utterly boring and unlikable man who would be easy to tie to Trump's baggage, but is unlikely to have the same level of devotion from Trump's cult.

I don't fear running against Pence any more than I fear running against Donald.

[loomer]

Prison inmates are in full revolt in Oregon because the correctional department won't give them basic hygiene supplies during a pandemic. It's time to open the gates.

[Broomstick]

In the Cook County Jail in Chicago they aren't protesting, they're dying.

On the other hand, the public fears releasing violent criminals back into the community. Cook County HAS released literally hundreds of non-violent offenders already.

In any case - absolutely prisoners should have soap and other basic hygiene products.

[MKSheppard]

Morning update.

Data on NYC and New Orleans is 22 hours old and lags behind the others. Some nations get reported faster on Wikipedia, the usual.

Some changes to graph scales. I've had to adjust things.

Placed in a spoiler so it won't break the thread.
Spoiler

Takeaways:

NYC death rate on 4/6 went to 1,013 dead (117.48 per 1 million population) before going back down to around 524 to 562 dead (60.7 to 65.1 per 1 million population).

New Orleans is steadily chugging forward, with a deaths per million of 42.49 at the latest.

Spain *may* be over the peak now; the first western nation to do so.

Italy -- looks like the peak is going to go on for a few more days. At the current death rate of 500 to 600/day, that's about 2,000 or so people who are gonna die before situation there starts to improve.

USA -- Some slight bit of good news. The US is starting to break away from the Spain data, I guess we may be seeing initial quarantine measures and the lesser population density of the US take effect.

[loomer]

COVID-19 has exposed the inequalities of New York once again. People in the Bronx are dying twice as much as the rest of the city, and so are Black and Latino New Yorkers generally.

We are not, in fact, 'all in this together'. That's never been realistic. The marginalized and impoverished are facing a disproportionate toll of both infections per capita and death rates. That's why we get the headlines about this disease 'not respecting class' when we get a prominent white politician catching it - it's a reassertion of the underlying premise that actually, no, we're not in this together by presenting those infections as bridging a social gap.

[TimothyC]

Did Ohio get it right? Early intervention, preparation for pandemic may pay off.

April 9, 2020 at 4:23 p.m. EDT

On Feb. 26, two days before President Trump called the coronavirus outbreak the Democratic Party’s “new hoax,” the Cleveland Clinic alerted the public that it was prepared to quickly open 1,000 additional hospital beds should the need arise.

On March 4, the day Trump boasted that “we have a very small number” of infected people in the United States, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, shut down a weekend fitness expo expected to draw 60,000 people a day to a Columbus convention center. There were no identified coronavirus cases in the state at the time.

Now, Ohio may be realizing the benefits of early intervention in the pandemic by its government and medical community. With about 5,100 covid-19 cases, it has fewer than a third the number of people with the novel coronavirus than in three comparably sized states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois. And Ohio has just a small fraction of the deaths reported in those states.

The Cleveland Clinic, which eventually beefed up plans to expand from 3,200 beds to 8,000 should the worst occur, held just 150 covid-19 patients (along with 2,000 others) this week and is preparing to scale back some facilities. It is moving to lend medical personnel to cities such as Detroit and New York hit hard by the virus.

In the Cincinnati region, models now show that peak occupancy of hospital beds by covid-19 patients may be just 10 percent of the predicted worst-case scenario.

“You’ve got to make these decisions early. Early means early,” DeWine said in an interview this week. “Every day you wait, you create a bigger problem.”

With the pandemic still spreading and case counts rising, it’s too early for certainty on whether Ohio’s actions have spared it the worst of the virus’s impact. Experts caution that infectious disease outbreaks never move smoothly through a population. They arise opportunistically: A party here or church service there can produce an explosion of infections that quickly puts public health officials behind the disease curve. There is no way to account for luck, good or bad.

But an early look at Ohio’s preparations and decision-making shows they reflect textbook recommendations for the way to handle an outbreak. Identify it early. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. Move swiftly because disease expansion will be exponential, not linear. In the absence of testing, assume the virus is spreading through the community. Communicate with the public clearly, and keep the message consistent.

“It seems we have gotten ahead of it,” said Tomislav Mihaljevic, chief executive of the Cleveland Clinic, one of the top medical systems in the country. “Here in Ohio, we may well be in a position of not a high, high curve of patients but more of a swell.”

Through Thursday’s report, Ohio had 5,148 positive cases and 193 deaths from covid-19, according to the COVID Tracking Project, a small group of journalists and others amassing data from public sources. The state had performed more than 53,000 tests.

In Pennsylvania, there were 16,239 cases and 309 deaths after nearly twice as many tests. Illinois has seen 15,478 cases and 462 deaths, after testing 75,000 people. Michigan, which has a smaller population than those three states, had 20,346 cases and 959 deaths after conducting the same number of tests as Ohio.

Even neighboring Indiana, which has a little more than half of Ohio’s population, has 5,943 confirmed cases and 203 deaths, despite performing only 31,000 tests.

Having been through infectious disease outbreaks such as SARS and the H1N1 flu, Ohio has a well-established emergency medical response system. The state is divided into three regions, each clustered around major population centers in Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati. Planners call these zones the “three C’s.”

Their CEOs met and agreed to drop their historical competition for shares of the market and collaborate on just about everything, said Richard P. Lofgren, president and CEO of the University of Cincinnati’s health system.

As news of the outbreak in China began to spread in early January, epidemiologists and infectious disease experts at the three major medical centers in those regions began to track the spread. Soon, they were modeling the potential impact in Ohio and meeting more regularly to prepare.

“The ‘uh-oh moment’ was looking at news reports coming out of Wuhan and China,” said Robert Wyllie, chief of medical operations at Cleveland Clinic, referring to the Chinese city where the outbreak began. By Jan. 20, the first U.S. patient, a man in Snohomish County, Wash., had emerged.

March 4 was the day that defined the crisis for the state, everyone involved agrees. Columbus was scheduled to host Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sports festival — known as “The Arnold” — a weightlifting competition and fitness expo that would have jammed 60,000 people together each day in the city’s convention center.

After consulting with health experts, DeWine ordered everything but the competitive weightlifting events canceled, a decision that cost the city tens of millions of dollars. Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther (D) concurred.

Without a single coronavirus case identified, DeWine’s decision created controversy and backlash. Only California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Washington state authorities had ordered similarly harsh restrictions at the time.

“Everyone on the phone understood the implications of the decision we were making for the local economy,” said Andrew Thomas, chief clinical officer for the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, who was part of the team that advised DeWine and is coordinating the Columbus region’s response. “It was a difficult decision to make. It was at the time putting us way out in front of where most communities were.”

In retrospect, the sports festival forced planners to confront the pandemic days, and in some cases more than a week, before other communities. DeWine would go on to close schools and businesses, and order residents to stay home, earlier than most other states. His March 12 school order was one of the first in the nation. Ohio State University, with 68,000 students on multiple campuses, went to online classes March 9 and extended it to the rest of the semester March 12.

“When it came down to it, we were in some ways lucky that we were asked the question early, and we answered it correctly,” Thomas said. DeWine credited state residents with taking the restrictions seriously and observing them.

While children have largely been spared serious illness in the pandemic for reasons that are unclear, some public health officials believe they are spreading the disease, especially to parents and grandparents — although that remains open to debate.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Health Security, said in an email she is “skeptical that school closures will do much in the end,” although other social distancing measures clearly are having an impact.

Ohio also may have benefited because even its largest cities are not as densely packed as Chicago, where the virus spread quickly, Nuzzo said.

As DeWine was shutting down the state, the three large medical systems were frantically scaling up. The Cleveland Clinic, using a model with more dire predictions than their counterparts in Columbus and Cincinnati, determined it would need to expand to 8,000 beds to handle its peak load of covid-19 patients.

The system made plans to install 1,000 beds in its new medical school. It took over a hotel where 150 beds could be added. It put two beds in rooms meant for one patient. It stopped sending back expired protective garb and began scouring the marketplace for more. It designated some of its hospitals “covid-19 only,” so people with the disease wouldn’t mix with patients admitted for other medical problems.

“We looked at every nook, every cranny, every closed floor,” Wyllie said.

In Cincinnati, where planners were working with a more conservative model, officials nevertheless realized they would need 1,839 ventilators on the worst day of the crisis — twice what they had, said Evaline Alessandrini, senior vice president and chief medical officer for UC Health, affiliated with the University of Cincinnati.

In Columbus, which estimated it would need 7,500 beds — 1,000 more than hospitals had — officials set to work installing them, along with staff and equipment, in the convention center where the Arnold fitness expo had been scheduled.

Then, social distancing appeared to help curb the virus. “We see here in Columbus that people living in our communities have really listened to the recommendations,” said Harold L. Paz, chief executive of the Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State.

Cincinnati’s peak is now forecast to be 291 cases — about 10 percent of the original prediction — on April 28, according to modeling Alessandrini received Tuesday. The number is so low she is hesitant to trust it yet. The peak is also later than originally predicted, and patients should arrive in a manageable order, not the crush that New York City experienced, she said.

That doesn’t mean Ohio is out of the woods. Experts expect flare-ups as the pandemic fades — a saw-toothed curve rather than a smooth downward slope.

“They’re going to come from the hot spots like prisons and nursing homes, where people can’t socially distance,” said Thomas, Ohio State’s chief clinical officer. Any one of those could produce an explosion of disease.

Persuading cooped-up residents to accept a very gradual return to something like their previous lives will require great discipline, officials said. For those reasons, Columbus and Cincinnati are not yet scaling back their facilities. Cleveland is also being cautious, though it is soliciting volunteers on its staff to work elsewhere.

“We probably need another week to see exactly where we’re heading,” said Mihaljevic, the Cleveland Clinic chief executive. “We still may get hit by a lot of people. We simply do not know. But these early signs are very encouraging. With every passing day of relative calm and quiet, there is increasing confidence that the peak of the wave is not going to be as high as predicted.”

I think they don't give enough credit to the Director of Public Health Dr. Amy Acton for making the calls that she did, and the recommendations to the Governor.

[MKSheppard]

Paging MR FRIENDLY GUY...

https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/10/apple ... cing-tool/

CHINA SHOWS THE WAY

Apple and Google’s engineering teams have banded together to create a decentralized contact tracing tool that will help individuals determine whether they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19.

Contact tracing is a useful tool that helps public health authorities track the spread of the disease and inform the potentially exposed so that they can get tested. It does this by identifying and “following up with” people who have come into contact with a COVID-19-affected person.

The first phase of the project is an API that public health agencies can integrate into their own apps. The next phase is a system-level contact tracing system that will work across iOS and Android devices on an opt-in basis.

The system uses on-board radios on your device to transmit an anonymous ID over short ranges — using Bluetooth beaconing. Servers relay your last 14 days of rotating IDs to other devices, which search for a match. A match is determined based on a threshold of time spent and distance maintained between two devices.

If a match is found with another user that has told the system that they have tested positive, you are notified and can take steps to be tested and to self-quarantine.

[LaCroix]

There are a lots of reports surfacing the last few days that while people do not test positive for the virus, a lot do have antibodies. A sizeble part of the population, in fact.

This raises the question - are we in the second wave? Like back then, with the spanish flu?

The first wave of that was kind of deadly, already, but that was in a society with pretty much no medicine we would consider modern. Any flu was more deadly, back then. A few months later, it mutated and hell broke loose.

I remember having a really nasty cold back in movember/december. Constant light fever, dry cough. No sneezing, though. Took two weeks to get over it. Lots of people had that.

What if that was the first wave, and this is the mutated form?

[Broomstick]

I have not heard it put quite that way before, but it is an interesting and disturbing idea.

[Beowulf]

Fuck the Pope. He's on Pell's side.

Who's Pell, why is he bad, and what does it have to do with the topic?

[Marko Dash]

did that one start with a sore throat? sounds similar to how my December went. started around the 15th and didn't go away till mid January.

[Captain Seafort]

I have not heard it put quite that way before, but it is an interesting and disturbing idea.

Or a reassuring one, depending on how you look at it. If this is a second wave equivalent to that of the 18-20 flu, it would mean that a non-trivial chunk of the population are already immune to a greater or lesser degree, which may make a lot of the casualty projections overestimates.

[ray245]

There are a lots of reports surfacing the last few days that while people do not test positive for the virus, a lot do have antibodies. A sizeble part of the population, in fact.

This raises the question - are we in the second wave? Like back then, with the spanish flu?

The first wave of that was kind of deadly, already, but that was in a society with pretty much no medicine we would consider modern. Any flu was more deadly, back then. A few months later, it mutated and hell broke loose.

I remember having a really nasty cold back in movember/december. Constant light fever, dry cough. No sneezing, though. Took two weeks to get over it. Lots of people had that.

What if that was the first wave, and this is the mutated form?

Sizeable, but not as many people as you would need to actually have herd immunity. And November/December might be too early?

[Broomstick]

Fuck the Pope. He's on Pell's side.

Who's Pell, why is he bad, and what does it have to do with the topic?

If I recall correctly "Pell" is a pedophile priest in Australia. Or at least accused of pedophilia.

[Broomstick]

I have not heard it put quite that way before, but it is an interesting and disturbing idea.

Or a reassuring one, depending on how you look at it. If this is a second wave equivalent to that of the 18-20 flu, it would mean that a non-trivial chunk of the population are already immune to a greater or lesser degree, which may make a lot of the casualty projections overestimates.

The second wave of the 1918 pandemic was significantly more deadly than the first wave, even with many already being immune. The casualty projections could still be close to the mark.

We shall see, I suppose.

[Nicholas]

Fuck the Pope. He's on Pell's side.

Who's Pell, why is he bad, and what does it have to do with the topic?

If I recall correctly "Pell" is a pedophile priest in Australia. Or at least accused of pedophilia.

Actually he is a Cardinal so a very senior member of the clergy, who was at one point the highest ranking cleric in Australia and a high profile advisor of Pope Francis. In December of 2018 he was convicted by a jury of raping a 13 year old boy (in December of 1996). Last week the high court of Australia overturned the conviction ruling that no rational person could conclude, from the evidence presented at the trial, that Pell was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

https://cruxnow.com/church-in-oceania/2 ... an-prison/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-aust ... SKBN21P00L

Nicholas

[Captain Seafort]

The second wave of the 1918 pandemic was significantly more deadly than the first wave, even with many already being immune. The casualty projections could still be close to the mark.

The reverse of that is "what would the death toll have been like if the really vicious strain had been the first wave, without that initial progress toward herd immunity?" I'm also assuming that the current projections are all based on the assumption that we don't have such progress towards herd immunity against the current lurgie, and therefore may be overestimating the susceptibility of the population.

[MKSheppard]

From another forum:

So much for the IHME GIGO model. Like I mentioned, the only good thing about that retarded BS, was that they set estimates that would be REALLY easy to check.

They estimated that MI's deaths-per-day would peak at 122 on 4/9.

We're already at 205 today with 6+ more hours to go.

...

Oh, and for posterity, the IHME model predicts today 4/10, to be the peak for US deaths-per-day with 1,983 deaths today. (They keep revising things downward and more optimistic, but also a lot easier to see if they're FOS. IIRC, several days ago, the predicted peak-deaths-per-day for the US was something like ~2200 on 4/16).

Well, it's Friday, and we know from the last 3 weekends, that the reported numbers go seriously screwy, underperforming on the weekends, so let's see what the numbers are like next Tuesday.

[MKSheppard]

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/st ... ty-control

Faulty masks. Flawed tests. China’s quality control problem in leading global COVID-19 fight
By ALICE SUCHINA CORRESPONDENT
APRIL 10, 202010:18 AM

BEIJING — The COVID-19 pandemic has ignited a worldwide scramble for medical gear: masks, gowns, ventilators, testing kits, much of it made in China, which is attempting to recast its image as the source of the virus to the leader in the fight against it.

But that narrative is threatened by a major problem: quality control.

A growing list of foreign complaints about faulty medical gear and testing kits imported from China has upset Beijing’s designs. Within the last few weeks, scientists and health authorities in Spain, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Turkey and Britain have complained of faulty antigen or antibody coronavirus tests purchased from Chinese companies — in some cases, costing these governments millions of dollars.

Georgia has canceled a contract with the Chinese company that sent flawed test kits to Spain, and Malaysia has opted to buy testing kits from South Korea instead of China because of the Chinese tests’ reported low accuracy rate.

Last week, the Netherlands asked to return 600,000 face masks purchased from China that had inadequate filters and fit incorrectly. On Tuesday, Finland tested a shipment of personal protective equipment, or PPE, from China and found the items unsuitable for hospital use. Australian border officials have also reportedly seized 800,000 faulty or counterfeit masks from China.

The problem is worse at home. On March 12, officials at a State Council news briefing announced that authorities had seized more than 80 million counterfeit or faulty masks and 370,000 defective or fake disinfectants and other anti-coronavirus products in the prior month alone.

In some cases, defective masks have been reported after buyers purchase them online as a donation to Wuhan and other cities, only for medical staff to discover they can’t use them. China is trying to rein in its subpar PPE manufacturers. Authorities have detained dozens of counterfeiters and threatened those producing poor quality medical products with life imprisonment.

Beijing has also tightened export standards in recent days, requiring domestic certification as well as foreign licenses for medical products shipped abroad. Previously, exported medical products only had to have the certifications in receiving countries, such as the European Union’s CE certification, which could be easily counterfeited in China.

But the desperation of states, nations, hospitals and individuals competing worldwide, shelling out millions of dollars to get medical gear as people die by the thousands each day, has created a scammer’s paradise.

“It’s a complete mess,” said Dan Harris, a lawyer whose firm Harris Bricken has advised companies on sourcing from China for more than 15 years. He called the current situation “unprecedented,” especially as frenzied Chinese suppliers attempt to recoup losses after months of quarantine.

“A year ago, Chinese companies were fine. Now they’re desperate,” Harris said. “A lot of them know they’re going to be bankrupt in a week. A lot are going to be bankrupt already. So they’re selling bad product, fake product” — and the whole world is buying those products, regardless of how they’re made.

Many of those calling Harris’ firm for help are hospital purchasing managers who are under pressure from overwhelmed doctors asking, “Where the hell are the masks?”

Then there are the middlemen, including experienced distributors and longtime sourcing agents who think it’s easy to shift into PPE. And a smattering of “crooks, who go to the hospital and say, ‘I can get you 5 million face masks’ … And they have no clue what they’re doing,” Harris said.

Meanwhile in China, many factories have pivoted into PPE manufacturing under government encouragement, even though they lack capacity and quality control.

“Everybody is jumping on this market and they have zero understanding of quality,” said Renaud Anjoran, a manufacturing supply chain auditor based in Hong Kong. “But these are high-risk items. If they don’t work, people might die.”

It’s common for Chinese suppliers to export a product under one licensed company’s name, but to source their products from second, third or fourth factories, like a chain of Russian nesting dolls, with little to no traceability down the chain of supply.

“In China, nothing is really black and white,” Anjoran said. “You have manufacturers selling you stuff they don’t really manufacture. They’re making it somewhere else, but you don’t know where.”

There are many ways medical product exporters could get away with counterfeited or substandard goods even with the certification requirements, Anjoran said: Certificates can be faked. Certificates can be real, but altered to display another manufacturer’s name.

Certificates can be valid, with goods made at the factory, but the manufacturer may not be checking the quality of its raw materials — especially the filter material in masks, the most important factor in protecting medical workers from the coronavirus. Testing filter material can take up to two weeks and cost more than $2,000.

“You’ve got speed and greed,” Harris said. “It’s perfect for con artists.”

Many of the newly established mask factories also operate in unhygienic conditions, with no process to keep the air clean, Anjoran said, based on his own auditing visits.

“But this is not even on the radar of most buyers these days,” he said. “They’re like, ‘But did you see the masks were dirty? No? OK, who cares! It’s going to save lives. Don’t be picky.’”

Testing kits also require careful buying. The World Health Organization has listed only two COVID-19 diagnostic tests for emergency use, both nucleic acid tests that use a slower, swab-based method to detect viral RNA.

The faulty rapid test kits foreign governments bought from Chinese companies have all been antibody tests, which use blood samples to look for antibodies developed only a week or so into a person’s infection with the coronavirus, or antigen tests, which detect virus proteins.

But both kinds of testing are relatively new and not replacements for the nucleic acid tests — notably the antibody test, which is fast and can catch mild or asymptomatic cases in people who’ve already recovered from the coronavirus, but cannot determine whether a person currently has the coronavirus.

That’s why antibody tests should not be used for diagnosis, said Dale Fisher, chair of the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.

“At the moment, we’ve just got the PCR as a gold standard,” he said, referring to the nucleic acid tests. “Antibody tests are really for research, to help us understand the transmission dynamics.”

Britain reportedly bought 3.5 million antibody tests from two Chinese companies, Guangzhou Wondfo Biotech Co. and Hangzhou AllTest Biotech Co. Only one of those, Wondfo, was on the Chinese National Medical Product Administration’s list of authorized test kits.

Chinese national guidelines also state that antibody tests should only be used as a supplement to nucleic acid tests, not for “screening in general population,” and that they should not be used as the sole basis to diagnose or exclude infections with SARS-CoV-2, as the new coronavirus is called.

The company that Spain bought faulty test kits from, Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology Co., was also not on the list of nationally authorized suppliers. The Spanish government reportedly acquired the test kits through a middleman who produced documentation showing that Shenzhen Bioeasy had CE certification.

Chinese diplomats have tried to distance the government from the companies selling faulty medical products, while also asserting that due diligence is the buyer’s responsibility.

“We want to remind everyone to double-check the instructions for use to make sure what they purchase can serve their intended purposes and avoid making mistakes in a rush,” said Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying at a recent news briefing.

China is worried about low-quality medical products damaging its image. On April 6, customs authorities announced they’d confiscated more than 11 million unregistered medical products within one week, including 9.94 million masks, 144,000 protective gowns, more than a million testing kits and 24,000 infrared thermometers.

Orders have meanwhile continued to roll in, with Germany beginning this week to ship millions of masks from China with the government’s help.

The governors of New York and Massachusetts have worked with the Chinese government and internet company Tencent to facilitate PPE deliveries.

The United States’ “Project Airbridge,” a public-private partnership led by President Trump’s advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner, began chartering airlifted supplies from China this week.

But the coronavirus has exposed the world’s dependence on China and China’s problems with quality control.

Whether this experience will lead to further “decoupling” after the pandemic, with more countries seeking to diversify supply chains away from China, will depend in part on how China’s regulators perform.

------------------------------

Special correspondent Meg Bernhard contributed to this report from Brussels. Times Beijing bureau staff Nicole Liu and Gaochao Zhang also contributed to this report.

[mr friendly guy]

Fuck the Pope. He's on Pell's side.

Who's Pell, why is he bad, and what does it have to do with the topic?

George Pell was a catholic cardinal in Australia quite high up in the RCC's heirarchy. During his ahem, stewardship in Australia there were several sex abuse claims against the Church (what a shocker) and he was alleged to have turned a blind eye to this. He himself was recently convicted of sexual abuse himself, but this was recently overturned on appeal.

The Pope supported him, so I guess Loomer's point is, don't give the pope too much credit because he is doing online sermons to combat COVID 19.

[mr friendly guy]

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/st ... ty-control

Faulty masks. Flawed tests. China’s quality control problem in leading global COVID-19 fight
By ALICE SUCHINA CORRESPONDENT
APRIL 10, 202010:18 AM

<snip>

So this article actually reveals more than the reports previously. Good find Shep. Previously I knew that countries have purchased from a non approved government supplier and then cried foul. It seems they purchase antibody detection kits instead of PCR.

Aerius and I briefly discussed testing for antibodies, but let me say it takes time for antibodies to form. Detection in the early stages require PCR testing. Antibody testing is useful to say if you had it before, and you might get an idea of how long be measuring different types of antibodies (IgM is the one formed acutely, once the acute infection is gone, as a very broad rule, your body produces more IgG antibodies to the foreign Antigen).

So antibody kits would be useful to see how many people already had it and may have recovered (and as Aerius posted an article earlier, whether patients had it without knowing they had it to give us an idea how widely spread this thing is). For detection of early cases, PCR is most probably the way to go.

As with the mask thing, apparently China has different grades of mask for hospital workers and general public. The Netherlands purchased the general public one.

Edit - to explain it simply for the non medical people, PCR tries to detect the virus directly. Antibody test try to detect the the body's response to the virus. This takes time to generate the antibodies.

Thus you can see why PCR is useful for people very early on (ie antibodies haven't formed yet, but virus is still there) while antibody testing can be useful to see if you ever had the virus (ie antibodies have now formed, but the virus is no longer there because its been killed).
'
Edit 2 - that being said, antibody test are still useful to detect whether you had a particular infection for some viral illnesses, eg glandular fever., hepatitis B and C etc. For a more deadly disease which kills faster, it makes sense to me you use PCR.