Posted on 01/23/2020 2:11:39 PM PST by Red Badger
BEIJING - Major Chinese cities, including the capital and virus-hit Wuhan, banned all large gatherings over the coming Lunar New Year festival, the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar, in an expanding effort contain the rapidly spreading outbreak.The announcement Thursday came as authorities expanded travel restrictions imposed on Wuhan to surrounding municipalities, shutting down travel networks and attempting to quarantine about 25 million people - more than the population of Florida.
The extreme measures were accompanied by other indications that Communist Party authorities were struggling to control the outbreak, notably the aggressive censorship of any criticism or skepticism on social media.But some outspoken doctors warned that the controls would not be enough to stop the spread of the pneumonia-like virus, which has now killed 17 people in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province.
"A bigger outbreak is certain," said Guan Yi, a virologist who helped identify severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003. He estimated - "conservatively," he said - that this outbreak could be 10 times bigger than the SARS epidemic because that virus was transmitted by only a few "super spreaders" in a more defined part of the country."We have passed through the 'golden period' for prevention and control," he told Caixin magazine from self-imposed quarantine after visiting Wuhan. "What's more, we've got the holiday traffic rush and a dereliction of duty from certain officials."
The World Health Organization on Thursday cited Chinese efforts to prevent transmission and the limited number of cases recorded abroad as its reasons for not declaring the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.
But WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference that it "should not be taken as a sign that WHO does not think the outbreak is serious or that we're not taking it seriously....
(Excerpt) Read more at greenwichtime.com ...
That’s a big move for them.
Does this mean the year of the pig is forever?
china has been testing God for years with human genetic experimentation...
it appears payback time may have arrived...
They’ve got a population of 1.4 billion.
If this thing has a death rate of 2% that’s 28 million Chinese lives that could be saved by quarantining 20 million people.
And fewer officials that will be “nailed to the shame pillar forever.”
Will China use this as an excuse to bow out of the trade deal? What punishment is there for China if they do?
Only if Hilliary wins....................
Chinese exotic food virus gets spread by air travel and
causes chaos.
Strikingly similar .
I saw it.
IIRC, it was shown in reverse sequence, tracing the outbreak back to patient zero?..............
[That’s a big move for them.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E1%BA%BFt
So far there is not a very high death rate in people who have been infected. This virus as currently constituted will not result in a pandemic with a high mortality rate. The problem is that as more mammals become hosts for prolonged periods, the virus has a chance to mutate and become more virulent, communicable and lethal. If that happens, the world has real troubles.
The thing to be concerned about are the cases that are not ending up in the hospital. Their numbers are probably low estimates.
Time will tell.
Based on my novel-based training, a bit factor will be the contagion factor. How many people does one person infect. If it moves too fast it burns out, like Ebola.
I am thinking this is a bigger deal than China is letting on. Imagine cutting off NYC or Boston, or Chicago during the period between Christmas and New Years. That is about 1/3 the size of the areas cut off in China.
China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan - and US biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could ‘escape’
... Authorities in Texas are investigating a second suspected case on US soil of the coronavirus virus, officials said. Brazos County, northwest of Houston, “is investigating a suspected case of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV),” officials wrote in a statement on Facebook....
15:07 EST An 18th person in China has died from the virus. The 80-year-old man died in Hebei province, near the capital Beijing, on Wednesday. It is the first confirmed death outside Hubei province, in central China.
Richard Hatchett, Chief Executive Officer of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI), announced that three new partnerships with vaccine producers have just been agreed.
“Our hope is to have these vaccines developed very rapidly and moved into human trials soon, maybe as soon as this summer,” Hatchett said.
Jeremy Farrar, of the Wellcome Trust, gave reporters a swift explanation -- about how the virus probably jumped from bats to humans at a market in Wutan, before then starting to spread between humans.
Farrar’s hunch is that the coronavirus will have a lower mortality rate than the SARS epidemic 28 years ago, which killed 788 people. But if it spreads faster and further than SARS, and isn’t controlled in time, then the deathtoll could be higher than SARS. But there’s a lot of uncertainty. He reminded reporters that the influenza epidemic a century ago had a low mortality rate, but killed 50m people because it spread so far.
That is an INSULT to pigs. They are DEEEElicious creatures and we use every part of the pig but the squeak.
This should be the Chinese year of the FILTHY SLOB...which is every year. Is there anything so good as a BLT? MMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!
This does NOT, I repeat, NOT apply to ABC's (American Born Chinese).
This might not apply to CIA's (Chinese in America...1 year or fifty years).
But it DOES apply to FOB's (Fresh of the Boeing) and to the Chinese still living in China.
It's not racial as Singapore, 100% Chinese, is one of the cleanest places on earth.
I saw that, thanks. This outbreak seems to be “linked to stallholders who worked at the Huanan Seafood Market, which also sold live animals.”
So it doesn’t sound as though it escaped from a lab.
Singapore is not 100% Chinese—that’s a ridiculous thing to say.
Singapore is a multiracial and multicultural country with ethnic Chinese (76.2% of the citizen population), Malays (15.0%), and ethnic Indians (7.4%). Chinese Singaporeans make up the majority of the population. There are also Eurasians in Singapore. The Malays are recognised as the indigenous community.
Okay: 76.2% Chinese, not 100%. The Chinese SEEM to pretty much run the place.
Assuming 100% infection.
AP News 6 minutes ago · BEIJING (AP) — China's National Health Commission says the number of cases of a new respiratory virus has risen to 830 with 25 deaths.
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