Category: Health & Medicine

New Study Details How Long It Takes Coronavirus Symptoms To Show, How Long To Self-Isolate

A new study published this week conducted by researchers for the American College of Physicians details how long it generally takes for symptoms of coronavirus to show up and provides recommendations on how long to self-isolate if exposed to the virus.

The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday, found that it takes by average about 5 days for symptoms of coronavirus to show up after infection — about 95% of the cases researchers studied showed up within 4 to 6 days — and that almost all (97.5%) who have been infected have displayed symptoms within 12 days.

Based on those findings, researchers concluded, the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) recommendation of a 14-day self-isolation period for those who have been potentially exposed to the virus is appropriate, though a longer period might be justified in some “extreme cases” — which the researchers describe as “high-risk scenarios,” like health care workers who care for COVID-19 patients without proper protective equipment. Excerpts from the report below:

There were 181 confirmed cases with identifiable exposure and symptom onset windows to estimate the incubation period of COVID-19. The median incubation period was estimated to be 5.1 days (95% CI, 4.5 to 5.8 days), and 97.5% of those who develop symptoms will do so within 11.5 days (CI, 8.2 to 15.6 days) of infection. These estimates imply that, under conservative assumptions, 101 out of every 10 000 cases (99th percentile, 482) will develop symptoms after 14 days of active monitoring or quarantine. … This work provides additional evidence for a median incubation period for COVID-19 of approximately 5 days, similar to SARS. Our results support current proposals for the length of quarantine or active monitoring of persons potentially exposed to SARS-CoV-2, although longer monitoring periods might be justified in extreme cases.

Although our results support current proposals for the length of quarantine or active monitoring of persons potentially exposed to SARS-CoV-2, longer monitoring periods might be justified in extreme cases. Among those who are infected and will develop symptoms, we expect 101 in 10 000 (99th percentile, 482) will do so after the end of a 14-day monitoring period (Table 2 and Figure 3), and our analyses do not preclude this estimate from being higher. Although it is essential to weigh the costs of extending active monitoring or quarantine against the potential or perceived costs of failing to identify a symptomatic case, there may be high-risk scenarios (for example, a health care worker who cared for a COVID-19 patient while not wearing personal protective equipment) where it could be prudent to extend the period of active monitoring.

In its current risk assessment for the virus, the Centers for Disease Control maintains that the risk of being exposed remains low for the majority of people in most parts of the country and in most professions. Below are the summaries of the CDC’s current risk assessment:

  • For the majority of people, the immediate risk of being exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19 is thought to be low. There is not widespread circulation in most communities in the United States.
  • People in places where ongoing community spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 has been reported are at elevated risk of exposure, with increase in risk dependent on the location.
  • Healthcare workers caring for patients with COVID-19 are at elevated risk of exposure.
  • Close contacts of persons with COVID-19 also are at elevated risk of exposure.
  • Travelers returning from affected international locations where community spread is occurring also are at elevated risk of exposure, with increase in risk dependent on location.

While the risk of contracting the virus for most Americans remains low, the CDC explains that the number of cases will likely continue to expand in the coming days and presents the following potential scenarios for how that might impact the communities:

More cases of COVID-19 are likely to be identified in the United States in the coming days, including more instances of community spread. It’s likely that at some point, widespread transmission of COVID-19 in the United States will occur. Widespread transmission of COVID-19 would translate into large numbers of people needing medical care at the same time. Schools, childcare centers, and workplaces, may experience more absenteeism. Mass gatherings may be sparsely attended or postponed. Public health and healthcare systems may become overloaded, with elevated rates of hospitalizations and deaths. Other critical infrastructure, such as law enforcement, emergency medical services, and sectors of the transportation industry may also be affected. Healthcare providers and hospitals may be overwhelmed. At this time, there is no vaccine to protect against COVID-19 and no medications approved to treat it. Nonpharmaceutical interventions would be the most important response strategy.

Italian doctor describes dealing with coronavirus: ‘This isn’t flu, I’m shaking’
Italy’s Dr. Daniele Macchini, describes his experience with coronavirus. Here it is, translated from the original Italian.

Dr. Daniele Macchini, a doctor at Humanitas Gavazzeni hospital in Bergamo, northern Italy, described on Facebook how his hospital has been affected by coronavirus.

“After much thought about if and what to write about what is happening to us, I felt that silence is not responsible,” he wrote. “Therefore I will try to tell people who are far from our reality about what we are living in Bergamo in these days. I understand the need not to create panic, but when the message of how dangerous events are is not reaching people, I shake with fear.”

“I myself watched with a certain amount of amazement as the hospital was reorganized entirely over the past week. When our current enemy was still in the shadows: The departments ‘slowly emptied,’ elective activities were stopped, ICU patients were transferred there in order to empty as many beds as possible.

“All of these rapid changes brought an atmosphere of surreal silence and emptiness to the hospitals’ hallways, when we still did not understand, when we were waiting for a war that had not yet begun and that many (including myself) were not sure that would ever come with such cruelty.

“I still remember the nighttime conversation I had a week ago, when I waited for the results of the test. When I think about it, my fear of the possible situation looks almost stupid and unjustified now, when I’m seeing what’s happening. And so, things are pretty dramatic here, to say the least.

“The war broke out, very simply, and the battles were endless, day and night. But now the need for beds has come to be big drama. One after the other, the departments which were emptied are filling up at an impressive pace.

“The boards with the patients’ names, in different colors in accordance with the operation units, now they’re all red and instead of the operation, we see always see the same horrible diagnosis: Bilateral interstitial lung disease.

“Now explain to me how the flu virus causes such drama, so quickly. And there are still people who are proud of the fact that they’re not scared, and ignore the guidelines, and protest that their lifestyle has ‘temporarily’ been put in crisis.

“The epidemiological disaster is happening. And there are no more surgeons, urologists, orthopedists. We’re just doctors who have suddenly become part of one staff that’s facing this tsunami that’s overwhelmed us.

“The cases are becoming more numerous, we’re seeing 15-20 hospitalizations per day, and it’s all for the same reason. The test results come in now one after the other: Positive, positive, positive. Suddenly the emergency room is collapsing.

“The reason for coming in is always identical: Fever and difficulty breathing, fever and cough, respiratory failure. Radiology always reports the same thing: Bilateral lung infection, bilateral lung infection, bilateral lung infection. They’re all going to be hospitalized.

“One patient needs intubation and the intensive care unit. For others it’s too late….all the ventilation machines have become gold. Those in the operating rooms which have ceased their non-urgent work have become intensive care rooms which did not previously exist.

“The staff is exhausted. I saw their exhaustion on the faces which have not seen such work, despite the overload of work that already exhausted them. I saw the solidarity among everyone, who never ceased turning to our internal medicine doctors and colleagues, asking, ‘And what can I do for you now?’

“Doctors are moving beds and transferring patients. Nurses have tears in their eyes because we can’t save them all and thee vital signs of several of them simultaneously reveal their known fate.

“There’s no more shifts, there are no more hours. Our social lives have been put on hold. We don’t see our families already, out of fear we might infect them. Some of us have already become infected, despite the protective protocols.”

 

Italy: Total Lock Down Imposed to Contain Virus

Just Sunday, the Italian gubbermint quarantined the north of the country, now the whole shebang.

MILAN (AP) — Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte says travel restrictions are being imposed nationwide to try to stop the spread of the new coronavirus.

Conte said Monday night that a new government decree will require all people in Italy to demonstrate a need to work, health conditions or other limited reasons to travel outside the areas where they live.

The restrictions will take effect on Tuesday and like those in northern Italy will last until April 3., he said.

“There won’t be just a red zone,″ Conte told reporters referring to the quarantine order he signed for a vast swath of northern Italy with a population of 16 million over the weekend.

“There will be Italy” as a protected area, he said.

The premier also took to task the young people in much of Italy who have been gathering at night to drink and have a good time during the public health emergency that started on Feb. 21.

“This night life…we can’t allow this anymore,” Conte said.

Pubs had been closed in northern Italy, with eateries and cafes also ordered to close at dusk. Now that crackdown is extended to the entire country.

We Need Hard Decoupling: The coronavirus crisis is underscoring the need to re-examine old ideologies about globalization and modernization.

The realization is finally sinking in across the U.S. policy community: The belief in “globalization” as a sure path to modernization has been perhaps the greatest delusion to have seized American elites since the conviction that the United Nations would eliminate the problem of war from the international system. The current coronavirus crisis may have put an exclamation point on this truth by exposing key vulnerabilities caused by farming out critical elements of the U.S. supply chain to China. But the diagnosis and remedy have been clear for a much longer time: We need a hard decoupling from China.

The national security predicament the United States finds itself in has deeply entrenched ideological roots. Until the Trump Administration confronted China, multiple U.S. administrations had fundamentally misread the pathway the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would follow as it used access to Western markets and technology to modernize its economy. Today we have been forced to address the consequences of three decades of massive wealth and knowledge transfers to a power that—left unchecked—could bring about a fundamental structural shift in the international system.

Over the past three decades globalist ideology has fueled the greatest centralization of market and supply chains to date, creating a system in which a single point of failure can disrupt the manufacturing of consumer goods. Apple’s recent difficulties with Foxconn and iPhone manufacturing are just the tip of the iceberg. China accounts for the vast majority of production of rare earth elements, which are vital to consumer electronics. Eighty percent of key ingredients for U.S. brand-name and generic drugs come from abroad, mostly from India and China. But the problem goes beyond consumer goods. In the event of a military conflict—whether in the Pacific or elsewhere—a paucity of diverse supply sources and regionalized distribution chains with built-in redundancies poses an immediate challenge to planners and operators alike. Over the years, this process—which I call the “radical centralization of market networks”—has been accompanied by the seepage of Western technology to China.

While the West’s hard power margins are indeed shrinking, the focal point of the Chinese onslaught is not first and foremost the theft of our technology and know-how. Rather, the principal challenge facing the United States and its allies is one that is internal to our own polity.  It rests on our competitor’s ability to exploit our own set of legacy assumptions about the purportedly inevitable waning of the nation state and the universalization of participatory democracy as a direct consequence of globalization and market-driven modernization across the world. Even though evidence to the contrary has been piling high for the past thirty years, the globalization paradigm still dominates a large segment of U.S. policy debates.

This ideological dimension constitutes arguably the most important vulnerability of the West in its accelerating great power competition with China. During the Cold War, the ideological contest was for hearts and minds; now the struggle has shifted predominantly to our home terrain, where the idea of globalization as a panacea for the presumed systemic ills of the nation state is crowding out alternative solutions. Three decades of assurances from Washington, echoed out of Berlin and Paris, that institutions trump culture and, most importantly, that the best pathway forward for humanity lies in the formation of one global market and one set of democratic principles (notwithstanding the mundane obligatory mantra that “diversity is our strength”) have effectively disarmed our polities when it comes to confronting the reality of resurgent great power competition and predatory behavior by our adversaries. Market access-cum-export-driven modernization was supposed to bring about the eventual democratization of Russia and China; instead, the two countries have adopted revisionist-nationalist and techno-nationalist postures, respectively.

The greatest risk in the current stage of U.S.-Sino competition is not the larger structural inevitability of conflict between a rising and declining power—the much-discussed “Thucydides’s trap” from Graham Allison’s bestselling book—but rather the more urgent and potentially dangerous driver of China’s growing ability to penetrate and shape the U.S. economy, financial and digital spaces, and, by extension, political processes. Beijing’s power to compete with the United States rests on its “transformational capability” that relies on access to American society while its own remains largely contained within a Communist Party-controlled digital landscape.

The risk China poses to the United States in geostrategic terms—from the Western Pacific through Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa, and the High North—extends beyond traditional indices of hard power calculus into the digital domain, where our adversary benefits from access to our networks, and through them to our society.

In the last decade the challenge posed to our national security by communist China has morphed from now-familiar predatory market policies into a military challenge of the kind that may ultimately outstrip anything the United States has seen since the Japanese imperial project of the early 20th century. The signs that China is seriously gearing up for a confrontation with the United States are plain to see, especially in the maritime domain. Though the U.S. Navy remains dominant, Chinese shipyards nonetheless continue to churn out new vessels at an unprecedented rate, the Chinese navy’s missile arsenal is growing, and Beijing is rapidly expanding its overseas port network. The same goes for conventional, nuclear, cyber, and other realms. In short, the PRC is gearing up to launch a multi-theater, multi-domain challenge to the United States.

Chinese techno-nationalism remains largely misunderstood and, more importantly, unappreciated in the West. The society remains insulated and run by the Communist Party. In effect, a 90-million-strong Communist elite controls 1.4 billion PRC citizens, while the PRC continues to leverage the digital era to enhance its economic, political, and ultimately military reach by working through our digital infrastructure, tapping into our educational and research institutions and media—and thus increasingly also our political processes. This leaves the United States with no alternative but to make an effort to disconnect our supply chain from China’s, while at the same time developing regional networks as alternatives to the current model.

The bad news is that decoupling the U.S. economy from China’s may cause short-term pain. The good news is that the United States has alternatives when it comes to the labor market and natural resources, both domestically and across the Western hemisphere. It also has an enduring structure of alliances across the Atlantic and the Pacific that—when firmed up—will give America an unbeatable advantage in its competition with China. The key, however, is to re-examine the dogmas of the past three decades and bring a fresh set of assumptions to the task of understanding where the world is heading: not toward a “global” utopia, but to a destination chosen by self-constituting polities and in alignment with their national interests.

California prepares to dock cruise ship with 21 virus cases

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — As the U.S. death toll from the new coronavirus reached at least 21, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the mayor of Oakland sought Sunday to reassure the public that none of the passengers from a ship carrying people with the virus will be released into the public before undergoing a 14-day quarantine.

The Grand Princess carrying more than 3,500 people from 54 countries is expected to dock Monday in Oakland, in the east San Francisco Bay, and was idling off the coast Sunday as officials prepared a port site. Those needing acute medical care will come off first.

“This is a time that we must be guided by facts and not fears, and our public deserves to know what’s going on,” Mayor Libby Schaaf said.

On Sunday, the U.S. State Department issued an advisory against travel on cruise ships. “U.S. citizens, particularly travelers with underlying health conditions, should not travel by cruise ship,” the department said in a statement on its website. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “notes increased risk of infection of COVID-19 in a cruise ship environment.”

Meanwhile, the number of infections in the United States climbed above 500 as testing for the virus increased.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health’s allergy and infectious diseases chief, said Sunday that widespread closure of a city or region, as Italy has done, is “possible.”

“You don’t want to alarm people, but given the spread we see, you know anything is possible and that’s the reason why we’ve got to be prepared to take whatever action is appropriate to contain and mitigate the outbreak,” Fauci said on “Fox News Sunday.”

One slide in a leaked presentation for US hospitals reveals that they’re preparing for millions of hospitalizations as the outbreak unfolds

With this bug, I think it’s better for the hospitals to prepare for something that may be 10 times worse than a ‘severe’ flu season. As it is, his estimate of how deadly it is, the CFR or “Case Fatality Rate”, is an average of only .05% or 1 out of 200, and that’s much less than the 3-3.5% number being bandied about. Of course, that’s an average and our elderly seem to have it worse off.

Hospitals are bracing for millions of Americans to be hospitalized as part of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

The American Hospital Association, which represents thousands of hospitals and health systems, hosted a webinar in February with its member hospitals and health systems. Business Insider obtained a copy of the slides presented. 

The presentation, titled “What healthcare leaders need to know: Preparing for the COVID-19” happened February 26, with representatives from the National Ebola Training and Education Center. 

As part of the presentation to hospitals, Dr. James Lawler, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center gave his “best guess” estimates of how much the virus might spread in the US.

Lawler’s estimates include:

  • 4.8 million hospitalizations associated with the novel coronavirus
  • 96 million cases overall in the US
  • 480,000 deaths
  • Overall, the slide points out that hospitals should prepare for an impact to the system that’s 10 times a severe flu season.

Here’s the slide:

Screen Shot 2020 03 06 at 1.41.37 PM

AHA webinar

The slide does not give a particular time frame.

The slide represents “his interpretation of the data available. It’s possible that forecast will change as more information becomes available,” a spokesman for Nebraska Medicine told Business Insider in an email.

The American Hospital Association said the webinar reflects the views of the experts who spoke on it, not its own.

“The AHA regularly hosts webinars and conference calls that include a variety of voices and opinions that seek to provide relevant information to professionals at hospitals and health systems that are on the front lines of preparing for and protecting their patients and communities,” a spokeswoman for the AHA told Business Insider in an emailed statement. “The slides you shared reflect the various perspectives of field experts and should not be attributed to the AHA.”

In particular, the slide points out that hospitals should prepare for an impact to the system that’s 10 times a severe flu season.

Tourism is 10% of GDP in France, 13% in Italy, 15% in Spain. And Now it’s in Free Fall
“If the situation of generalized panic continues, thousands of businesses, especially small ones, will first enter a liquidity crisis, then close their doors.”

This is all happening just weeks before high season is about to get under way. But with millions and millions of tourists voting with their feet by staying at home, one of Europe’s most important and (until four weeks ago) fastest growing industries is taking a hammering.

The world right now is full of places that should be teeming with people but are not, including many iconic tourist landmarks and attractions. In Italy, home to Europe’s third biggest tourism industry, large parts of the country are on lock down after being hit by the biggest outbreak of the COVID-19 outside of Asia. Many of the most famous tourist attractions have been closed and big international events, including the Venice Carnival, have been cancelled.

The impact on the country’s tourism industry has been brutal, prompting panicked representatives to warn that a “generalized panic” over coronavirus could “sink” the sector. “There is a risk that Italy will drop off the international tourism map altogether,” said Carlo Sangalli, president of Milan’s Chamber of Commerce. “The wave of contagions over the past week is causing huge financial losses that will be difficult to recoup.”……

In the three most affected regions — Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna (in descending order) — cancellation rates on bookings of hotels, flights and apartments have reached as high as 90%. These three regions also happen to be the main motor of Italy’s economy, accounting for 40% of Italy’s GDP. ……

“In recent history Italian tourism has never experienced a crisis like this,” Vittorio Messina, National President of Assoturismo, stated in a press release. “It is the darkest moment. Not even 9/11 affected it so heavily.”…….

In Spain, tourism is even more important to the national economy, generating approximately €180 billion a year — close to 15% of GDP. In 2019, Spain was the second most visited country in the world, attracting 83.7 million foreign tourists……………

France, with 89 million tourists in 2018 (last year’s figures are yet to be released), the most visited country in the world, is also feeling the fallout from of COVID-19. Tourism contributes about 10% to GDP. France’s Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, said two weeks ago that the outbreak had triggered a 30%-40% plunge in the number of overseas visitors. At that point, the virus was barely present in the country. Now, it’s in all 13 of France’s metropolitan regions, as well as French Guiana.

This is all happening just weeks before high season is about to get under way. But with millions and millions of tourists voting with their feet by staying at home, one of Europe’s most important and (until four weeks ago) fastest growing industries is taking a hammering.

 

17 deaths from COVID-19 in Washington as officials scramble to contain

SEATTLE — Two more deaths from coronavirus were reported Saturday, bringing the total to 17 in Washington state. So far, at least 104 have tested positive for COVID-19, health officials said.

The deaths come just a day after three people died at EvergreenHealth Medical Hospital, officials said. One earlier reported death occurred in a patient never hospitalized and the other was a death at Harborview last week that was later found to have been likely caused by COVID-19. In total, there are 28 confirmed cases of coronavirus at EvergreenHealth.

Of the 16 coronavirus deaths reported in King County, 14 are associated with Life Care Center In Kirkland. Eighteen residents have also tested positive for COVID-19, according to Tim Killian, public liaison for Life Care Center.

Killian went on to say that since February 19, Life Care Center reported 26 deaths. Since that date, 11 additional patients died at the facility. They generally have three to seven deaths a month, Killian said. Life Care Center is still waiting back for reports on post-mortem testing and whether 11 of those patients tested positive for coronavirus. They received 45 testing kits on Thursday.

As for staff coming and going day-by-day, KOMO News is told they’re following infection control protocol. “We’ve learned that the virus is volatile, unpredictable,” Killian said. Patients have gone from showing no symptoms to being rushed to the hospital in an hour

Of the 120 residents at the facility, 54 were also transported to hospitals, Killian added. It’s not clear that all 54 were transported for coronavirus or other medical reasons.

Since February 19, Life Care accounted for 180 employees with 70 of them showing symptoms. They are self-quarantining at home. As for moving seemingly healthy people out of Life Center, KOMO News is told no one wants to take them in.

“We are working overtime to take care of residents,” Killian said. “This is a larger issue than just our facility. Encouraging anyone who visited to keep in touch with their doctors. No ballpark on how many people may have visited during the outbreak.”…….

Over in Kittitas County, a 67-year-old woman also tested positive for coronavirus Saturday, according to the Kittitas County Public Health Department. The woman is in stable condition and is self-quarantined at home with her spouse.

The test results are presumptive positive from the University of Washington, which means there will still be confirmatory testing completed at the Washington State Department of Health.

The virus has spread to Clark, Pierce, Jefferson, Grant, Snohomish and Kittitas counties, the Washington State Department of Health reports. Another 156 people are under public health supervision.

A patient at Issaquah Nursing and Rehabilitation Center tested positive for COVID-19 Saturday. Three Eastside Fire and Rescue firefighters who came in contact with the patient are self-quarantining out of an abundance of caution and are currently asymptomatic…….

Florida: 2 dead in the state who tested positive for virus

MIAMI (AP) — Two people who tested positive for the new coronavirus have died in Florida, marking the first deaths on the East Coast attributed to the outbreak in the U.S., health officials said Friday.

The Florida Department of Health said the two people who died were in their 70s and had traveled overseas. The announcement raises the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus strain to 16, including 13 in the state of Washington and one in California.

One of the Florida deaths was that of a man with underlying health issues in Santa Rosa County in Florida’s Panhandle, according to the statement. The health department added that the second death was that of an elderly person in Lee County, in the Fort Myers area.

The statement did not give immediate indications of where the two had traveled or whether officials were seeking to determine who they came in contact with.

Helen Aguirre Ferre, a spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, confirmed the deaths and other new cases in South Florida, on Twitter. She promised in her tweet that updates would be provided regularly as they become available.

As of Friday, Florida authorities said seven people in the state have tested positive for COVID-19. They said six are Florida residents and the seventh is a non-resident.

Former Hostage Taker Of US Diplomats Dies Of Coronavirus In Iran.

Almost always a silver lining.

Former Iranian ambassador to Syria and a hostage-taker of U.S. diplomats, Hossein Sheikholeslam, died Thursday from a Covid19 infection, local news outlets report.

An advisor to the Islamic Republic Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, 68-year-old Sheikholeslam was one of the leaders of the so-called “Muslim Student Followers of Imam’s Line,” who took 52 U.S. diplomats hostage, on November 4, 1979, and released them after 444 days.

Sheikholeslam studied at the University of California at Berkeley before the Iranian revolution and later interrogated U.S. Embassy staff members during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979.

Tested positive for the novel coronavirus two days ago, Sheikholeslam was taken to Masih Daneshvari hospital in Tehran, where all Iranian authorities infected with Covid-19 are treated.

Sheikholeslam’s death was announced a day after the advisor to the speaker of parliament, Hossein Abdollahian, had insisted that he was recovering.

So How Deadly is Coronavirus? You’re Most Likely to Die if You’re a Man, Elderly and Have an Underlying Heart Condition, Stats Suggest

Men are 65 per cent more likely than women to die from coronavirus, according to statistics.

Figures from the World Health Organization and Chinese scientists have revealed that 1.7 per cent of women who catch the virus will die compared to 2.8 per cent of men, even though neither sex is more likely to catch it.

More than 98,000 people around the world have now been diagnosed with the virus, which causes a disease called COVID-19, and at least 3,383 have died.

Some experts have put the higher risk among men down to higher smoking and drinking rates – both habits weaken the immune system, making people more likely to get ill.

The elderly and infirm have also been found to more at risk of coronavirus, with 10.5 per cent of heart disease patients expected to die if they catch the deadly virus.

Death rates among people with diabetes – of which there are four million in the UK and 34m in the US – are expected to be around 7.3 per cent, while six per cent of patients who have high blood pressure might die if infected.

Some 5.6 per cent of cancer sufferers infected with the coronavirus would be expected to die along with 6.3 per cent of people with long-term lung diseases.

In the US, at least 233 people have now been confirmed to have the coronavirus, and 12 have died from it, while in the UK there has been one death among 116 cases.

Figures from the World Health Organization and Chinese scientists has revealed that 1.7 per cent of woman who catch the virus will die compared to 2.8 per cent of men (pictured, a graphic showing those most likely at risk from the virus)

Coronavirus Updates: SXSW Canceled; 21 Aboard Princess Cruise Ship Infected; 7 More States Report Cases

A second medical screener who checks travelers at Los Angeles International Airport has been confirmed to have the coronavirus, one of two new cases reported in Los Angeles County Friday.

The screener is linked to another medical screener who worked in the same quarantine station and was confirmed to have the virus earlier this week, Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, said at a press conference Friday.

A second new case was a traveler in a group of people who visited Italy, several of whom were earlier confirmed to have the virus. The county has confirmed 13 cases of the virus, and one has been “resolved,” Ferrer said.

How China’s coronavirus crisis exposes the Achilles’ heel of Communist Party power.

But the demoncraps here yammer for ‘Moar Gubbermint!’ Moar Socialism!’
Idjits.

It may seem preposterous to suggest that the outbreak of the new coronavirus, has imperiled the rule of the Communist Party of China, especially at a time when the government’s aggressive containment efforts seem to be working. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the political implications of China’s biggest public health crisis in recent history.

According to a New York Times analysis, at least 760 million Chinese, or more than half the country’s population, are under varying degrees of residential lockdown. This has had serious individual and aggregate consequences, from a young boy remaining home alone for days after witnessing his grandfather’s death to a significant economic slowdown.

But it seems to have contributed to a dramatic fall in new infections
outside Wuhan, where the outbreak began, to low single digits.

Even as China’s leaders tout their progress in containing the virus, they are showing signs of stress. Like elites in other autocracies, they feel the most politically vulnerable during crises.

They know that, when popular fear and frustration is elevated, even minor missteps could cost them dearly and lead to severe challenges to their power.

With China’s censorship apparatus temporarily weakened – probably because censors had not received clear instructions on how to handle such stories – even official newspapers printed the news of Li’s death on their front pages. And business leaders, a typically apolitical group, have denounced the conduct of the Wuhan authorities and demanded accountability……

In the post-Mao era, the Chinese people and the Communist Party have adhered to an implicit social contract: the people tolerate the party’s political monopoly, as long as the party delivers sufficient economic progress and adequate governance.

The party’s poor handling of the Covid-19 outbreak threatens this tacit pact. In this sense, China’s one-party regime may well be in a more precarious position than it realises.

Coronavirus Cases Near 100,000 as Countries Struggle to Contain Spread: In the U.S., there have been 233 confirmed cases and 12 deaths, mostly in the state of Washington.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases globally neared 100,000 on Friday, as infections outside of China continued to mount and many countries and cities struggled to get the epidemic under control.
There were 98,698 confirmed cases of the virus world-wide, more than a fifth of which were in countries other than China, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. South Korea, the second worst-hit country, reported another jump in infections, bringing its tally to 6,593. The novel coronavirus is now in around 90 countries, less than three months after it was first identified in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December.
Chinese health authorities on Friday reported 143 new infections, but said that for the first time there were no new cases in the wider Hubei province outside of its capital of Wuhan in the previous day. The vast majority of China’s 80,555 cases have been in Hubei province, and authorities in late January locked down Wuhan and neighboring cities to help contain the disease’s spread.
Globally, 3,383 individuals have died from the illness known as Covid-19 and 55,444 have recovered. In the U.S., there have been 233 confirmed cases and 12 deaths, mostly in the state of Washington, where some schools in the Seattle area will be closed for two weeks and companies have told employees to work from home.
On Friday, a top Hong Kong university released research that surmised the “fatality risk” for symptomatic Covid-19 patients was 1.4%, based on data its researchers analyzed from the city of Wuhan.
That is lower than the 3.4% mortality rate cited earlier this week by the World Health Organization, which was calculated from the number of deaths relative to the total number of confirmed infections.

 

This isn’t a news broadcast or a government statement. This video was put up today by a truck driver at the Port of Los Angeles.As I made the point earlier, the economic effects of this are not going to be good and that will also affect the health effects.

3 test positive for coronavirus in Maryland, Gov. Hogan declares State of Emergency‘

Boy, he didn’t hesitate, did he?

BALTIMORE — Three Maryland residents have tested positive for coronavirus/COVID-19, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced Thursday evening.

All three people with the virus live in Montgomery County — a married man and woman in their 70s and a woman in her 50s. All three are quarantined in their homes right now, are in good condition, and their symptoms are abating.

All three cases are also travel-related. The patients returned home from a trip overseas on February 20. Health officials would not say Thursday evening where they traveled to.

The patients did travel to a hospital to be tested for the virus, but health officials would not say which facility that was. Their specimens came back positive Thursday.

Hogan has declared a state of emergency to fast-track the response efforts and mobilize resources faster, but he stressed that Marylanders should remain calm and go to work and school as they normally would, while also taking reasonable precautions.

3 Who Attended Biogen Meeting in Boston Test Positive for Coronavirus.
Everyone who attended the meeting has been directed to work from home for the next two weeks

Three people who attended a meeting with Biogen employees in Boston last week have tested positive for the coronavirus, the company said Thursday.

Following a meeting with Biogen employees in Boston last week, a number of attendees reported varying degrees of flu-like symptoms. Some attendees have been confirmed with influenza and three attendees have tested positive for COVID-19 to date,” Biogen said in a statement. “At the present time, these individuals are doing well, improving and under the care of their healthcare providers.”

“Protecting our employees and our communities is our priority,” the company added.

What you need to work from home during the coronavirus outbreak.

As the coronavirus continues its march across the U.S., more and more companies are ordering or offering their employees the opportunity to work from home to help mitigate the virus’ impact on day-to-day operations…….

But before you pack up your desk and set up shop at your kitchen table, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind so you can actually get your work done at home.

Make sure you can connect
If you’re going to work from home, you’ll need to ensure that you have a stable internet connection there…….

Get access to your corporate network
If you need to remotely connect to your employer’s corporate network to pay expenses, or update sensitive databases, you’ll have to ensure you’ve got access to your company’s VPN, or virtual private network. Think of the VPN as your private gateway to your firm’s private servers.
Bring your peripherals………..

 

Coronavirus: there are 2 types, Chinese researchers find, while authorities say faeces and urine can transmit the infection

Well, that mode of transmission means that San Francisco was probably on Gubbernor Newsom’s mind when he declared a state of emergency for California.

San Fransisco Crap Map.

  • Mainland China reports 38 new deaths by Wednesday morning, a rise from the previous day’s count, but new infections fall again to 119
  • Champions League and Europa League matches in Spain to be held behind closed doors

South Korea on Wednesday confirmed 142 new cases of the coronavirus, down from 851 a day earlier, taking the country’s total infections to 5,328 – the world’s largest after China. It reported four new deaths as the country’s toll reached 32.

Mainland China’s new daily cases continued to drop as it reported 119 infections, but the day’s new reported deaths jumped to 38, from 31 a day earlier, bringing its total fatalities to 2,981.

China’s National Health Commission (NHC) said 115 of the new cases on the mainland were reported in Hubei province, the outbreak’s epicentre. The total number of infections in mainland China stood at 80,270, with 49,856 patients having recovered.

‘Two types of coronavirus’

The coronavirus has evolved into two major types, with differing transmission rates and geographical distribution, according to a study published in the National Science Review on Tuesday.

A group of Chinese scientists analysed 103 coronavirus genomes and identified mutations in 149 sites across the strains.

They found that one type, which they called the L type, was more prevalent than the other, the S type, meaning it was more infectious. They also found that the L type had evolved from the S type, and that the L type was far more widespread before January 7 and in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak.

Human actions soon after the outbreak was discovered in December may have changed the abundance of each type, the report said, citing the Chinese central and local governments’ drastic containment measures including lockdowns of cities, which it said may have curbed the spread of the L type.

The researchers said follow-up studies were needed to form a better understanding of the virus’ evolution and spread.

The spread of infection through faeces and urine has been recognised as an additional mode of transmission in China’s latest coronavirus diagnosis and treatment plan.

Italy shutters all schools, universities as COVID-19 death toll reaches 107.

March 4 (UPI) — Italian education officials closed all schools and universities Wednesday in reaction to a coronavirus outbreak that has killed 107 people in the country.

Education Minister Lucia Azzolina made the announcement with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte during a news conference at Palazzo Chigi, Conte’s residence in Rome…………

Italy’s Civil Protection Agency said that in addition to the deaths, there were 2,706 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 disease in the country as of Wednesday. Most were centered in the Lombardy region, with smaller clusters in Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont, the Marche, Campania, Liguria, Tuscany, Lazio, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Sicily, Puglia, Abruzzo, Trento, Molise, Umbria, Bolzano, Calabria, Sardinia and Basilicata.

Some 276 people have recovered from the disease.

Iran’s coronavirus response: Pride, paranoia, secrecy, chaos

Nearly three dozen Iranian government officials and members of parliament are infected, and a senior adviser to the supreme leader has died.

The Health Ministry has proposed sending 300,000 militia members door to door on a desperate mission to sanitize homes. The top prosecutor has warned that anyone hoarding face masks and other public health equipment risks the death penalty.

Iran’s leaders confidently predicted just two weeks ago that the coronavirus contagion ravaging China would not be a problem in their country. They even bragged of exporting face masks to their Chinese trading partners.

Now Iran is battered by coronavirus infections that have killed 77 people, among the most outside of China, officials said Tuesday. But instead of receiving government help, overwhelmed doctors and nurses say they have been warned by security forces to keep quiet. And some officials say Tehran’s hierarchy is understating the true extent of the outbreak — probably, experts contend, because it will be viewed as a failure that enemies will exploit.

As the world wrestles with the spread of the coronavirus, the epidemic in Iran is a lesson in what happens when a secretive state with limited resources tries to play down an outbreak and then finds it very difficult to contain.