More Chinese cities quarantined

Stats from China's mainland update:
- 830 confirmed cases
- 25 dead (3%)
- 177 are serious to critical (21.3%)
- 34 have been treated, released (4%)
- 1,072 suspected cases

https://twitter.com/bnodesk

BREAKING: Chinese city of Jingzhou to be put on lockdown at 5 p.m., raising number of people in locked down cities to 35 million.

https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1220578836259229697

AI wrote: Stats from China's mainland update: - 830 confirmed cases - 25 dead (3%) - 177 are serious to critical (21.3%) - 34 have been treated, released (4%) - 1,072 suspected cases https://twitter.com/bnodesk

Wow. That's fast. Great info. Thanks.

Good find oakviolet. The quick building of another hospital is concerning.

Damn. They can build hospitals faster than I can assemble an IKEA bookcase 😳

Medical experts are preparing for an outbreak that could last for months.

Dr. Gauden Galea, the representative of the World Health Organization in Beijing, said in an interview on Friday that while much was uncertain, health officials were preparing for an outbreak that could last for months. He said that eventually thousands of people would most likely be infected, citing models produced by public health experts.

“My own office is gearing up for a number of months,” Dr. Galea said. “We do not expect it to disappear in a number of days.”

He said much would depend on the patterns of infection over the holiday travel season. He said there was little precedent for the travel restrictions imposed by the Chinese authorities but that public health experts were hopeful that they could help contain the virus, along with efforts to expand screening, promote the use of masks and isolate sick patients.

Still, he acknowledged, health officials were being forced to improvise. “Part is science and part is hope,” he said.

Dr. Galea, who visited Wuhan this week before the lockdown, defended how Chinese officials had handled the outbreak, saying they had been transparent in sharing data. He said the Chinese authorities faced a daunting challenge.

“With the number of cases,” he said, “one would expect health systems to be stretched.”

Overrun hospitals turn away residents, some displaying symptoms.

As Wuhan residents waited in long lines at hospitals to be checked for possible coronavirus infections, some residents complained they were not able to get the treatment they needed.

Xiao Shibing, 51, has had a fever for 15 days and finds it difficult to breathe. When he went to a hospital, he was not tested for the coronavirus, said his daughter, Xiao Hongxia. He was told he had a viral chest infection and was sent home.

Mr. Xiao’s family has continued to seek treatment, visiting other hospitals, but has been turned away by at least three because of a shortage of beds, his wife, Feng Xiu, said. “It is like kicking a ball from here to there,” she said.

Cai Pei, 41, said his wife began coughing and developed a fever three days ago. He wrote on Weibo that hospitals would not admit her, and he had difficulty finding masks and cold medicine in pharmacies.

They still do not know if she is infected with the coronavirus or some more common ailment.

“Sometimes I can only hide and cry, but I couldn’t tell her and had to reassure her that it is not the virus,” Mr. Cai said by phone. “It is very scary. If it’s real, we have a child and elderly parents at home. What if we all get sick?”

Wuhan hospitals make urgent appeals for supplies and help.

Hospitals and medical workers at the center of the outbreak in Wuhan made urgent appeals for supplies, as stocks of surgical masks and other equipment quickly flew off shelves.

“Shortage of medical supplies, request help!!!” the Wuhan Children’s Hospital said on Thursday in a post on Weibo, the Chinese social network.

The hospital asked for donations of surgical masks, disposable garments, protective goggles and gloves.

Several others, including Hubei General Hospital, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University and the Central Hospital of Wuhan, posted similar notices.

The central government on Thursday acknowledged the severe strain on resources, and the Ministry of Finance announced an urgent allocation of one billion renminbi, about $144 million, for epidemic prevention and control work.

State news media also carried reports of people volunteering to help ease the strain on health workers. Young doctors at the Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University volunteered to take on additional shifts or to take over from colleagues with children, the state broadcaster CCTV reported.

A team of 30 volunteers in Wuhan mobilized to drive doctors to and from hospitals, while others have offered to help the local Red Cross answer phone calls and publicize requests for help from hospitals, according to a report by the China Business Journal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/world/asia/china-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage#link-1cd78f22

Well, this should lighten the mood a little.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/scientist-simulated-coronavirus-pandemic-deaths-2020-1

Health experts issued an ominous warning about a coronavirus pandemic 3 months ago. Their simulation showed it could kill 65 million people.
ARIA BENDIX
JAN 24, 2020, 4:04 AM

A coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, has killed 18 people and infected more than 630.
The virus has been reported in at least eight other countries, including the US, where a man in Washington who recently visited China was confirmed to have the illness.
A scientist at Johns Hopkins last year modelled what would happen if a deadly coronavirus reached a pandemic scale. His simulated scenario predicted that 65 million people could die within 18 months.
Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Eric Toner, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security, wasn’t shocked when news of a mysterious coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, surfaced in early January.

Less than three months earlier, Toner had staged a simulation of a global pandemic involving a coronavirus.

Coronaviruses typically affect the respiratory tract and can lead to illnesses like pneumonia or the common cold. A coronavirus was also responsible for the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in China, which affected about 8,000 people and killed 774 in the early 2000s.

“I have thought for a long time that the most likely virus that might cause a new pandemic would be a coronavirus,” Toner said.

The outbreak in Wuhan isn’t considered a pandemic, but the virus has been reported in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia. The US reported its first case on Tuesday: a man in his 30s living in Washington’s Snohomish County, north of Seattle, who recently visited China.

So far, the virus has killed 18 people and infected more than 630.

“We don’t yet know how contagious it is. We know that it is being spread person to person, but we don’t know to what extent,” Toner said. “An initial first impression is that this is significantly milder than SARS. So that’s reassuring. On the other hand, it may be more transmissible than SARS, at least in the community setting.”

Toner’s simulation of a hypothetical deadly coronavirus pandemic suggested that after six months, nearly every country in the world would have cases of the virus. Within 18 months, 65 million people could die.

A viral pandemic could kill 65 million people
Toner’s simulation imagined a fictional virus called CAPS. The analysis, part of a collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, looked at what would happen if a pandemic originated in Brazil’s pig farms. (The Wuhan virus originated in a seafood market that sold live animals.)

The virus in Toner’s simulation would be resistant to any modern vaccine. It would be deadlier than SARS, but about as easy to catch as the flu.


The pretend outbreak started small: Farmers began coming down with symptoms that resembled the flu or pneumonia. From there, the virus spread to crowded and impoverished urban neighbourhoods in South America.

Flights were cancelled, and travel bookings dipped by 45%. People disseminated false information on social media.

After six months, the virus had spread around the globe. A year later, it had killed 65 million people.

The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, by contrast, claimed as many as 50 million lives.

Toner’s simulated pandemic also triggered a global financial crisis: Stock markets fell by 20% to 40%, and global gross domestic product plunged by 11%.

“The point that we tried to make in our exercise back in October is that it isn’t just about the health consequences,” Toner said. “It’s about the consequences on economies and societies.”

He added that the Wuhan coronavirus could also have significant economic effects if the total number of cases hits the thousands.

On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s stock market fell by as much as 2.8%. The drop was led by the tourism and transportation sectors, including airlines, tour agencies, hotels, restaurants, and theme parks.


In the CAPS simulation, scientists were unable to develop a vaccine in time to stop a pandemic. That’s a realistic assumption: Even real coronaviruses like SARS or MERS (a virus that has killed more than 840 people since 2012) still don’t have vaccines.

“If we could make it so that we could have a vaccine within months rather than years or decades, that would be a game changer,” Toner said. “But it’s not just the identification of potential vaccines. We need to think even more about how they are manufactured on a global scale and distributed and administered to people.”

If scientists don’t find a way to develop vaccines quicker, he said, dangerous outbreaks will continue to spread. That’s because cities are becoming more crowded and humans are encroaching on spaces usually reserved for wildlife, creating a breeding ground for infectious diseases.

“It’s part of the world we live in now,” Toner said. “We’re in an age of epidemics.”

https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-xinjiang-uighur-squalid-detention-camps-2020-1

Coronavirus hitting area with large Uighur detention camps housing over 1million

See...........   IKEA building.