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  • BEST INFO on CORONA-VIRUS

    BEST INFO on CORONA-VIRUS

    by Andrew Strom


    There seems to be quite a lot of misinformation - and even a whiff

    of panic - floating around about the Wuhan virus. I have spent

    much of the last week locating the best sources of info that I

    could find - to ascertain how dangerous this virus truly is.


    Here is my brief summary from the best sources I can find on

    this:

    (1) This virus is VERY infectious (at least twice as infectious

    as a normal flu) - so it spreads easily. BUT-

    (2) The actual fatality level is low. (Much lower than most people

    think). Outside of China, if you get hospitalized for this, your

    chances of survival are VERY HIGH. Older people are more

    vulnerable - but even then, if you are outside China your chances

    are VERY GOOD. (Proof of this below).

    (3) In China this thing is out-of-control - and the fear and panic

    are greatly stifling their ability to locate the worst cases and

    give them the very best care. They are inundated - and I expect

    China to remain a virtual "basket case" for months. The fear

    and panic alone are going to cripple the country for some time.

    Will this affect the global economy? YES. -Especially firms

    that rely on China for anything.


    In summary - will this thing spread? Yes - it will spread. But

    outside China, is it likely to cause high fatalities? No - not

    according to the best info we have. Right now this seems to

    be a highly-contagious, low-fatality virus. Even if you got it,

    you would most likely get through it OK.


    BEST INFO is BELOW


    I am now going to give you links to 3 of the best sources of

    information that I have come across. The first is a Reddit

    thread that follows the cases outside China. And then there

    are two excellent videos with great in-depth information from

    experts-


    Reddit thread-




    Expert interview (very recent)- VERY GOOD INFO

    Given the continued spread of the Wuhan coronavirus, we urgently reached out to John Barry, author of the award-winning New York Times best-seller The Great ...



    Another good video-

    To get Chris Martenson's report on pandemic preparation, go to https://www.peakprosperity.com/coronavirus/WATCH UPDATE #4 HERE: https://youtu.be/pTWZPGzvJIo...
    Last edited by Lou Newton; January 29, 2020, 09:20 AM.

  • #2



    Last edited by Lou Newton; February 10, 2020, 07:50 PM.

    Comment


    • #3
      Someone sent me this link. It is a global map of Corona Virus cases:
      https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/a...23467b48e9ecf6
      Last edited by Lou Newton; January 30, 2020, 08:30 PM.
      You know not what you do because you know not who He is.
      - Paul Washer
      Satan is the angel of knowledge and he does not waste his time on anything for no reason.
      - Lou Newton

      Comment


      • #4


        China admits that it's hospital system is overwhelmed by this epidemic. Think about this; you can not overwhelm a hospital system in a city of 12 million with the number of victims that China admits to. There are sources that claim that the city where it started has over 10,000 victims alone. If you think about it, even that number seems to be far less that the actual number. The situation in China seems very very serious.

        Comment


        • #5
          I think we are still being kept in the dark about this issue. Yesterday I seen report on TV that said there were 75,000 cases in Wuhan alone and that was yesterday and not today. Plus I think that 75,000 number was still low even for yesterday.

          The other thing that is not being reported by the mainstream media is that although they admit the virus came from the wild animal market in Wuhan, they are not telling us it was from bats. Also China uses ground up bats in many of their foods and supplements. They think that bats have some magical quality to make a person more sexually active. Bats eat mosquitoes and mosquitoes eat human blood so eating bats is eating human blood. This is a perfect way to pass on disease. The Bible tells us not to eat bats for this reason.

          The Coronavirus: How Bad Will the Crisis Get?

          The New York Times
          Knvul Sheikh, Derek Watkins, Jin Wu and Mika Gröndahl
          ,The New York Times•February 2, 2020
          Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announces new travel restrictions in Washington on Friday, Jan. 31, 2020. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/The New York Times)
          Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announces new travel restrictions in Washington on Friday, Jan. 31, 2020. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/The New York Times)
          As the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread across China, a flurry of early research is drawing a clearer picture of how the pathogen behaves and the key factors that will determine whether it can be contained. While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat. To avoid any viral illness, experts advise washing your hands frequently and avoiding your office or school when you’re sick. Most healthy people don’t need masks, and hoarding them may contribute to shortages for health workers who do need them, experts said.

          — How contagious is the virus?

          The scale of an outbreak depends on how quickly and easily a virus is transmitted from person to person. While research has just begun, scientists have estimated that each person with the new coronavirus could infect somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

          That would make the virus roughly as contagious as SARS, another coronavirus that circulated in China in 2003 and was contained after it sickened 8,098 people and killed 774. Respiratory viruses like these can travel through the air, enveloped in tiny droplets that are produced when a sick person breathes, talks, coughs or sneezes.

          These droplets fall to the ground within a few feet. That makes the virus harder to get than pathogens like measles, chickenpox and tuberculosis, which can travel a hundred feet through the air. But it is easier to catch than HIV or hepatitis, which spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person.

          If each person infected with the new coronavirus infects two to three others, that may be enough to sustain and accelerate an outbreak if nothing is done to reduce it.

          Compare that with a less contagious virus, like the seasonal flu. People with the flu tend to infect 1.3 other individuals, on average.

          But the transmission numbers of any disease aren’t set in stone. They can be reduced by effective public health measures, such as isolating sick people and tracking individuals they’ve had contact with. When global health authorities methodically tracked and isolated people infected with SARS in 2003, they were able to bring the average number each sick person infected down to 0.4, enough to stop the outbreak.

          Health authorities around the world are expending enormous effort trying to repeat that.

          So far, the number of cases outside China has been small. But in recent days, cases have turned up in several countries, including the United States, with people who have not visited China. And the number of cases within China has accelerated, far surpassing the rate of new SARS cases in 2003.

          — How long does it take to show symptoms?

          The time it takes for symptoms to appear after a person is infected can be vital for prevention and control. Known as the incubation period, this time can allow health officials to quarantine or observe people who may have been exposed to the virus. But if the incubation period is too long or too short, these measures may be difficult to implement.

          Some illnesses, like influenza, have a short incubation period of two or three days. SARS, however, had an incubation period of about five days. In addition, it took four or five days after symptoms started before sick people could transmit the virus. That gave officials time to stop the virus and effectively contain the outbreak, said Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, who was at the front lines of the Canadian response to SARS.

          Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that the new coronavirus has an incubation period of 2 to 14 days. But it is still not clear whether a person can spread the virus before symptoms develop or whether the severity of the illness affects how easily a patient can spread the virus.

          “That concerns me because it means the infection could elude detection,” said Dr. Mark Denison, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

          — How deadly is the virus?

          This is one of the most important factors in how damaging the outbreak will be, and one of the least understood.

          It’s tough to assess the lethality of a new virus. The worst cases are usually detected first, which can skew our understanding of how likely patients are to die. About one-third of the first 41 patients reported in Wuhan had to be treated in an ICU, many with symptoms of fever, severe cough, shortness of breath and pneumonia. But people with mild cases may never visit a doctor. So there may be more cases than we know, and the death rate may be lower than we initially thought.

          At the same time, deaths from the virus may be underreported. The Chinese cities at the center of the outbreak face a shortage of testing kits and hospital beds, and many sick people have not been able to see a doctor.

          “There’s still a lot of uncertainty about what this virus is like and what it is doing,” said McGeer, of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

          Early indications suggest the fatality rate for this virus is considerably less than another coronavirus, MERS, which kills about 1 in 3 people who become infected, and SARS, which kills about 1 in 10. All of the diseases appear to latch onto proteins on the surface of lung cells, but MERS and SARS seem to be more destructive to lung tissue. As of Jan. 31, fewer than 1 in 40 of the people with confirmed infections had died. Many of those who died were older men with underlying health problems.

          Pathogens can still be very dangerous even if their fatality rate is low, McGeer said. For instance, even though influenza has a case fatality rate below 1 per 1,000, roughly 200,000 people end up hospitalized with the virus each year in the United States, and about 35,000 people die.

          — How effective will the response be?

          In addition to closing off transportation, officials shut down a market in Wuhan selling live poultry, seafood and wild animals, which was thought to be the origin of the coronavirus, and later suspended the trade of wild animals nationwide. Schools have been closed, Beijing’s Great Wall is off-limits, and tourist packages from China have been halted. World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus.

          But the measures have also had unintended effects. Residents in Wuhan who are unwell must walk or cycle for miles to get to hospitals. There, many complain that they are being turned away because of shortages of hospital beds, staff and supplies that have been made worse by the lockdown.

          And during the critical first days of the outbreak, Chinese authorities favored secrecy and order over openly confronting the crisis, silencing medical professionals who raised red flags. The reluctance to go public delayed a concerted public health response.

          On Thursday, the WHO declared the outbreak a global health emergency, acknowledging that the disease represents a risk beyond China.

          The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China, and several major airlines said they expect to halt direct service to mainland China for months. Other countries — including Kazakhstan, Russia and Vietnam — have temporarily restricted travel and visas. But critics fear that these measures will not be enough.

          — How much have infected people traveled?

          Wuhan is a difficult place to contain an outbreak. It has 11 million people, more than New York City. On an average day, 3,500 passengers take direct flights from Wuhan to cities in other countries. These cities were among the first to report cases of the virus outside China.

          Wuhan is also a major transportation hub within China, linked to Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities by high-speed railways and domestic airlines. In October and November of last year, close to 2 million people flew from Wuhan to other places within China.

          China was not nearly as well connected in 2003 during the SARS outbreak. Large numbers of migrant workers now travel domestically and internationally — to Africa, other parts of Asia and Latin America, where China is making an enormous infrastructure push with its Belt and Road Initiative.

          Overall, China has about four times as many train and air passengers as it did during the SARS outbreak.

          China has taken the unprecedented step of imposing travel restrictions on tens of millions of people living in Wuhan and nearby cities. But experts warned that the lockdown may have come too late. Wuhan’s mayor acknowledged that 5 million people had left the city before the restrictions began.

          “You can’t board up a germ. A novel infection will spread,” said Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “It will get out; it always does.”

          — How long will it take to develop a vaccine?

          A coronavirus vaccine could prevent infections and stop the spread of the disease. But vaccines take time.

          After the SARS outbreak in 2003, it took researchers about 20 months to get a vaccine ready for human trials. (The vaccine was never needed because the disease was eventually contained.) By the Zika outbreak in 2015, researchers had brought the vaccine development timeline down to six months.

          Now they hope that work from past outbreaks will help cut the timeline even further. Researchers have already studied the genome of the new coronavirus and found the proteins that are crucial for infection. Scientists from the National Institutes of Health, in Australia and at least three companies are working on vaccine candidates.

          “If we don’t run into any unforeseen obstacles, we’ll be able to get a Phase 1 trial going within the next three months,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

          Fauci cautioned that it could still take months, even years, after initial trials to conduct extensive testing that can prove a vaccine is safe and effective. In the best case, a vaccine may become available to the public a year from now.

          This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

          © 2020 The New York Times Company
          Last edited by Lou Newton; February 2, 2020, 02:19 PM.

          Comment


          • #6

            World

            China Arrested Doctors Who Warned About Coronavirus Outbreak. Now Death Toll’s Rising, Stocks Are Plunging.

            Brendon Hong
            February 3, 2020, 6:12 AM EST
            Betsy Joles
            HONG KONG—The new coronavirus that has spread consternation around the world over the last few weeks has now killed more people in China than the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003. China’s health commission reported Sunday that there were 361 deaths nationwide. During the SARS outbreak, 349 people died in mainland China and 774 altogether around the world. The Chinese stock markets took major hits Monday, and the whole nation feels its growing isolation.

            Three New Cases of Coronavirus Confirmed in California

            Yet last December—before people all over China were falling sick with pneumonia-like symptoms, before people around the world grew alarmed about a disease leaping from captured wild animals to human shoppers in dense Chinese food markets, and before coronavirus reached new shores after being carried onto planes by human hosts, forcing the World Health Organization to declare a global emergency—eight people discussed how several patients in Wuhan were experiencing severe, rapid breakdowns in their respiratory systems.

            They were part of a medical school’s alumni group on WeChat, a popular social network in China, and they were concerned that SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, was back.

            It wasn’t long before police detained them. The authorities said these eight doctors and medical technicians were “misinforming” the public, that there was no SARS, that the information was obviously wrong, and that everyone in the city must remain calm. On the first day of 2020, Wuhan police said they had “taken legal measures” against the eight individuals who had “spread rumors.”

            Since then, the phenomenal spread of the virus has created cracks even within the normally united front of the Chinese Communist Party. “It might have been fortunate if the public had believed the ‘rumor’ and started to wear masks, carry out sanitization measures, and avoid the wild animal market,” a judge of China’s Supreme People’s Court wrote online last Tuesday.

            Li Wenliang, a doctor who was among the eight people who tried to sound the alarm before the coronavirus infected many thousands and killed hundreds, has been diagnosed as someone infected with the coronavirus and is being treated at a hospital.

            As of 5 p.m. Monday, the official tally of coronavirus damage runs at more than 17,000 confirmed infections, more than 21,000 under observation, 361 dead. But the actual numbers must be far higher, possibly by a considerable magnitude, according to estimations by doctors in China and infectious-disease experts around the world.

            Authorities are still actively censoring social-media posts and news articles that are questioning the government response to the outbreak. One local man, Fang Bin, uploaded footage of corpses in a van and a hospital in Wuhan, and was then tracked down and taken into custody. His laptop was confiscated, and he had to pedal for three hours on a bicycle to get home after he was questioned, warned, and released. His coronavirus video went viral.

            The Chinese government is eager to project the image that everything is under control. Beijing pushed back the post-Lunar New Year opening of financial markets by a few days, and traders returned to their posts Monday morning. The Shanghai Composite Index and Shenzhen Composite Index quickly dropped 8.7 percent and 8.6 percent, respectively. By lunch time, more than 2,600 stocks had tripped regulator-imposed breakers after losing 10 percent in value. At market closing at 3 p.m., the indices were unable to recover from their nosedives.

            This was the worst plummet in China’s markets since an equity bubble burst in 2015, and it isn’t difficult to see why. Schools have been closed indefinitely. Flights have been grounded, and domestic travel has been limited or even halted. Office buildings, restaurants, and malls are empty. Public functions have been canceled. Overwhelmingly, white-collar workers across the country are telecommuting. The country, it seems, is a network of ghost towns with wide boulevards and glass towers. Combined with the ongoing swine flu and a new outbreak of avian flu south of Wuhan, the coronavirus is hitting China’s economy on many fronts.

            Perhaps the most striking development in China is how borders became tangible. Villages, towns, and cities are physically blocked off from each other, sometimes with local officials posted on roads to stop anyone except emergency relief personnel from passing through. Married couples who hail from different parts of the country have been separated if they chose to travel over the Lunar New Year; as they returned home after the break, local officials in some locations barred one spouse, whoever is an “outlander,” from entering city limits.

            The coronavirus is isolating China from the rest of the world, too. Many countries have imposed travel restrictions on Chinese nationals, or even banned visitors who have recently been in mainland China. Over in Hong Kong, medical workers who joined a newly formed union voted to begin a strike Monday to pressure the city’s officials into sealing the border with mainland China. Clashes have broken out at sites where the government had attempted to set up mass quarantine facilities in Hong Kong.

            Coronavirus Has Europe Treating Chinese People Like the Plague

            Back in Wuhan, one of two speed-build hospitals began absorbing patients on Monday. It took 10 days to build, has 1,000 beds, and is staffed by 1,400 military doctors who are managing the symptoms of those under their care. The additions are welcome, but people living in Hubei, the province where Wuhan is the capital, have doubts about how effective the facilities will be. There’s a severe shortage of testing kits, and sick people are still being turned away from hospitals. It is common for patients to wander between several emergency rooms before giving up to head home and tough it out.

            This outbreak has given new meaning to a well-worn adage: When China sneezes, the world catches a cold. People recall a lack of transparency when SARS was hitting China, even though the WHO has praised Beijing repeatedly for improving its performance this time around. But that may not be enough. Right now, every country in the world is trying to prevent the epidemic from flaring up on its own shores.




            Read more at The Daily Beast.

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            Comment


            • #7
              Good article, but it totally misses the fact that people in China EAT bats and that would spread the disease faster than living close to them. The Bible warns us to not eat bats and not to touch their feces.

              Science


              Coronavirus Outbreak Likely Began With Bats, an Omen for Next Epidemic

              Robert Langreth
              BloombergFebruary 3, 2020, 4:09 PM EST

              (Bloomberg) -- Somewhere in China, perhaps in the southern Yunnan province, there’s a cave that may hold the mysterious origins of the deadly coronavirus that’s infected thousands, cut off millions of Chinese from their jobs and families and wreaked havoc in global financial markets.

              Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist at nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, would know. He and his team have suited up and ventured into caves all over China and the rest of world in search of bats and the pathogens they carry. “We go into caves,” said Daszak. “We don’t just walk in. We wear a full-body suit: breathing masks, gloves and all the correct equipment.” What he and other scientists around the globe are concluding is that the rapid spread of human settlements in once-remote regions have put people in ever-closer proximity to virus-carrying animals.

              More people, meeting more animals, carrying more diseases—a perfect viral melting pot.

              As the human population rises, “the number of those spillover events is rising exponentially. It is a direct product of human activity,” Daszak said. And it’s “a simple mathematical certainty” that there will be more outbreaks like the new coronavirus in the future, he said. Total confirmed cases have exploded in recent days to almost 17,400 Monday, with more than 360 deaths. Some disease modelling experts project there are likely 75,000 or more actual cases, as accurate counts from overwhelmed parts of China are impossible to come by.

              The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that three out of every four emerging infectious diseases in humans first come from animals. Bats contain the highest proportion of mammalian viruses that are likely to infect people in so-called zoonotic infections, according to research published in 2017 by Daszak in the scientific journal Nature.

              “I have 90% confidence it is a bat-borne virus,” says Linfa Wang, who heads the emerging infectious disease program at Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School. He has been studying bat origins of human viruses for decades and works with a group of researchers sometimes dubbed “the bat pack.”

              The CDC has said it’s preparing for the disease to spread more widely in the U.S. and doesn't expect to stop all cases at the border.

              One of his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology found that the new coronavirus is more than 96% genetically identical to a bat virus from the Yunnan province in the southern China, according to results published in the journal Nature on Monday. Zheng-Li Shi, a top coronavirus expert at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has been studying the bat viruses with Wang and Daszak for more than a decade. She’s leading an emergency science team to respond to the outbreak in Wuhan, according to a Chinese media report.

              The Nature study found that the new coronavirus is a distant cousin of SARS, sharing almost 80% of its genetic sequence. SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is another coronavirus that swept through China and other countries in 2002 and 2003, eventually killing more than 800 people around the globe. It also hijacks the same receptor on lung cells that SARS uses to penetrate cells deep inside the lungs, providing a clue to how it spreads. That receptor is also in the gut, explaining how it may pass through diarrhea as well.

              Shi didn’t respond to Bloomberg News inquiries sent via email.

              Exactly how the deadly new coronavirus sweeping through China made the leap from animal to human remains a mystery, but scientists say it’s closely linked to urban sprawl and the chaotic and loosely regulated free-for-all of China’s open-air markets. The so-called wet markets, also present in Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere around Southeast Asia, feature wild and domesticated animals. They make a perfect mixing ground for viruses.

              “These animals are live,” says Christian Walzer, executive director for health at the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York-based conservation group that also runs zoo and field programs. “You will see a bird on top of a domestic pig, and you might have snake and bats, all stacked together” in wire-mesh cages. Virus-laden fluids and secretions can mix, helping create new viruses, especially when the animals are slaughtered right in front of customers.

              “If you planned it and thought, ‘I am going to make new viruses,’” says Walzer, “that is exactly how you would do it.”

              The markets may have produced outbreaks in the past that burned out locally. Now, with exploding populations and access to cheap airlines and fast trains, bat viruses from the depths of a jungle can spread to every corner of the globe within days.

              In the new coronavirus outbreak, more than 49 of 99 early patients were linked to a market in Wuhan, which also sold wild animals. It now has been closed. The Wildlife Conservation Society is calling for a ban on the markets across Asia. If they aren’t closed, deadly new viruses will emerge every few years, Walzer says.

              For years, coronavirus research was considered a backwater. The viruses, named for the crown-like spike on their surface, were known mostly for causing the common cold. The SARS outbreak almost two decades ago abruptly changed things, and helped jump-start a worldwide search for other viruses that could spill into humans after contact with animal excrement, saliva or mucus. The research has often led back to infected bats as the source.

              One early clue of bats’ role came from a 1998 outbreak of brain-infecting Nipah virus in Malaysia that killed more than 100 people. It turned out that fruit bats with the virus were feeding on mango trees overhanging a pig enclosure, according to the EcoHealth Alliance. The bats dropped fruit into the pens and infected the pigs; the pigs then passed the pathogen onto people.

              To date, researchers have identified at least 200 coronaviruses in bats around the world, according to a recent review in the journal Viruses. In another study, researchers from Columbia University and elsewhere found 12 new coronaviruses in 606 bat samples in Mexico. Due to quirks in their immune system, bats don’t get sick from the myriad viruses they harbor.

              Daszak and his colleagues have teams in 10 countries that conduct roughly 50 bat-virus-hunting expeditions a year. In China, trained bat-hunters go into caves to capture the animals, collect oral and genital swabs, as well as urine, feces and blood. The samples are then shipped directly in cold storage to a high-tech lab for testing, Daszak said.

              In one crowded bat cave in Yunnan province, Shi and her colleagues from the Wuhan Institute of Virology found coronaviruses containing “all of the building blocks” of SARS. The conditions in the cave were ripe for the viruses to keep mixing, creating the potential for a dangerous new pathogen, they wrote in a 2017 analysis in the scientific journal Plos Pathogens.

              “The risk of spillover into people and emergence of a disease similar to SARS is possible,” they said. Several years later, their dire prediction appears to have come true.

              Want more of Bloomberg's health-care reporting delivered to you? Click here to get Prognosis, our weekly newsletter, delivered your inbox every Thursday afternoon.

              (Adds CDC remark in the seventh paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected the full name of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

              To contact the author of this story: Robert Langreth in New York at [email protected]

              To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rick Schine at [email protected], Drew Armstrong

              For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

              Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.

              ©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

              Comment


              • #8
                This doctor tried to warn the medical workers of this virus. He was warned by police to stop talking about it or he would be jailed. This is proof that China is hiding the truth about this disease. They do not want people to isolate China because that would cause economic distress.

                There are reports coming out of China from medial workers that the number of cases and the number of deaths is far far higher than China is reporting.



                Whistleblower Chinese doctor dies from coronavirus in Wuhan, state media says



                Emma Graham-Harrison and Justin McCurry in Tokyo
                The GuardianFebruary 6, 2020

                0:54

                1:39

                Signs and Symptoms of the Coronavirus That Is Spreading from China

                Scroll back up to restore default view.

                A whistleblowing Chinese doctor, who was among the first to raise concerns about the spread of the new coronavirus in Wuhan, has died from the disease, according to state media.

                Li Wenliang, 34, had been targeted by Chinese police for “spreading rumours” after posting a warning on social media in late December 2019 about a cluster of cases of a flu-like disease that had been treated at his hospital.

                Seven patients were in quarantine and the disease symptoms reminded him of Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome). He urged colleagues to wear protective clothing at work.
                Graphs
                Four days later he was summoned to the local public security bureau, accused of “making false comments” and disturbing the social order. He was told that if he continued to talk about the disease, he would be “brought to justice”.

                Li was one of eight people targeted by authorities for “sharing false information”, in a heavy-handed approach that was later criticised by China’s supreme court. He agreed not to discuss his concerns in public again.

                But in early January he treated a woman with glaucoma without realising she was also a coronavirus patient; he appears to have been infected during the operation.

                On the 10 January, when China was still insisting there had been no new cases for a week, he started coughing then developed a fever. Two days later he was in hospital; his parents also fell ill.

                The Global Times, a state-owned tabloid newspaper,tweeted on Thursday that Li had died from the virus nearly a month after he fell ill.

                Before he died, Li, who had a child and was expecting a second this summer, had broken his silence to give interviews from his hospital bed.

                “If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier, I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency,” he told the New York Times.

                Li’s relative youth and the slow development of his infection may add to medical concerns about the fatality of the coronavirus.

                Most of the dead have been older, with underlying health conditions. It is not clear whether Li had any previous health problems.

                The death toll from the coronavirus outbreak in China reached 563 on Thursday, as health experts prepared to meet in Geneva next week in an attempt to develop a vaccine

                Chinese authorities said the death toll had risen by 73 in the previous 24 hours – the third record daily rise in a row – with 70 of the deaths recorded in Hubei province, the centre of the outbreak.

                There are more than 28,000 cases in China, according to health officials. The youngest patient is a baby born on Saturday in Wuhan and confirmed positive just 36 hours after birth. The baby was immediately separated from the mother after the birth and has been under artificial feeding.

                The World Health Organization (WHO) however said on Thursday that while it was too early to say that China’s coronavirus outbreak was peaking, Wednesday was the first day that the overall number of new cases in China had dropped. WHO official Mike Ryan said there had been a constant increase in cases in Hubei province but that had not been seen in other provinces.

                In Wuhan, the largest city in Hubei, hospitals were struggling to find enough beds for patients. A 1,500-bed hospital opened on Thursday, just days after a 1,000-bed hospital with prefabricated wards and isolation rooms began taking patients, but senior officials said the city of 11 million was close to capacity with only 8,254 beds for 8,182 coronavirus patients.

                Outside mainland China, at least 230 cases have been confirmed, including two fatalities, one in Hong Kong and another in the Philippines.

                On Thursday the UK confirmed a third case, while Japan confirmed another 10 infections among 3,700 passengers and crew stuck onboard the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship moored off the port of Yokohama, near Tokyo.

                The 10 new cases involve four people from Japan, two each from the US and Canada, and one each from New Zealand and Taiwan, the health ministry said, adding that five were in their 70s, four in their 60s and one in their 50s.

                Japanese health officials now have the results of 102 tests conducted on 273 passengers and crew who complained of feeling unwell or had been in close contact with a man in his 80s who disembarked late last month and tested positive on his return home to Hong Kong.

                TV footage showed the vessel arriving at Yokohama port to take on food and other supplies and hand over the infected patients, who are being treated at hospitals in the Yokohama area. Port officials could be seen dressed in white full-body protective suits, face masks and helmets.

                The WHO is asking for $675m to stop the outbreak. Its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, acknowledged that the sum was large, but said it was “much less than the bill we will face if we do not invest in preparedness now.”

                Li’s fate has echoes of Carlo Urbani, an Italian doctor who in 2003 played a crucial role in identifying Sars and raising the international alarm but was eventually killed by it.

                Working for the WHO in Hanoi, Vietnam, he was called to a hospital when a patient arrived from Hong Kong with unusual pneumonia symptoms.

                He recognised the disease was highly contagious, brought in strict controls and called in international health authorities. His action led to the WHO raising a worldwide alert about the disease and halted its spread in Vietnam.
                Last edited by Lou Newton; February 6, 2020, 11:31 AM.

                Comment


                • #9
                  According to the latest research the Corona Virus is much worse than anyone first thought


                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Please watch this

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                    • #11
                      Latest info today - the really bad news is that latest info may show that people can have it without any symptoms for 24 days while passing it on to others

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