You can add New York state and Florida (presumptive positives) to this list. New cases coming in fast. we can expect more U.S. states and countries to announce new cases in the coming days. https://t.co/cPI2Wd2F9q
— Josh Michaud (@joshmich) March 2, 2020
• First coronavirus case in sub-Saharan Africa confirmed in Nigeria
• Highest number of deaths outside China is Iran, at 54
• Over 89,000 cases worldwide pic.twitter.com/YvvRRXNcE8— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 2, 2020
Significant #COVID19 activity in Europe:
-France and Switzerland are banning large gatherings
-The Louvre is closed, conferences cancelled
-Over 1100 reported cases in Italy with 29 deaths
-Spain, UK, Germany, others with more caseshttps://t.co/dTwC5NP3b2
— Isaac Bogoch (@BogochIsaac) March 1, 2020
A Chinese woman sneezed, spraying a Thai taxi driver's face. “I thought, she’s pretty but she doesn’t have any manners,” said the driver. A week later, he tested positive for the coronavirus. https://t.co/QsyLYU8igZ
— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 2, 2020
Why working out the #coronavirus death rate is "PHD-level hard" – by the BBC's head of stats @robertcuffe https://t.co/nE1IAuszDV
— BBC Reality Check (@BBCRealityCheck) March 2, 2020
Second US #COVID19 death: a Seattle-area man in his 70s https://t.co/ouQCpKIOOW
— Dr. Tara C. Smith (@aetiology) March 2, 2020
This is not the leadership we need during an epidemic. https://t.co/G0amVhpjxF
— Dr. Tara C. Smith (@aetiology) March 1, 2020
"We have taken the most aggressive measures of any country"
Holy shit no we haven't.
China shut down entire cities and hit pause on its economy. Japan is closing schools. S. Korea has tested ~40k people. We've done nothing approaching that level of aggressiveness.
— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) February 29, 2020
And ends with an appeal to the media and public not to induce panic, as if the problem with public perception is the media's reporting – rather than the White House's muddled, contradictory, and misleading messaging over the past few weeks.
Counterpoint: https://t.co/8U9LPGqKZa
— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) February 29, 2020
Trump is pushing a dangerous, false spin on coronavirus — and some in the media are helping him spread it. My column https://t.co/K27IRYe5NX
— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) March 1, 2020
This means that 100 infections will grow to 200 infections after one week and to 400 infections after two weeks. After local transmission has started, “there’ll be twice as many infections in a week” is a good grounding to think about how things will behave in your area. 2/4
— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) March 2, 2020
If US cases more than double in the next week it’s not because the virus is moving any faster. It’s just because we’ll finally be catching up to it. 4/4
— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) March 2, 2020
Congressional negotiators and the White House have made major progress over the weekend on a multi-billion dollar spending package to deal with the US response to coronavirus, according to two sources familiar with the talks. https://t.co/Ldh6BtLJlv
— CNN (@CNN) March 2, 2020
The ONE THING China merited praise for in the early stages of the #COVID19 Wuhan epidemic was swift ID of the virus and sharing its genetic sequence rapidly with the world. Now it seems the sharing lab is in deep trouble w/authorities. https://t.co/maLixa5vDf
— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) March 1, 2020
THREAD: 1) The accelerating spread of the coronavirus across the globe is hitting global markets hard. Here are some charts that show how risk assets and havens are trading https://t.co/L0cg7XHbGn via @markets pic.twitter.com/KVI7WAb5qw
— Bloomberg Economics (@economics) March 2, 2020
Port of Los Angeles is projecting a 25% drop in container volumes this month, as the economic impact of the coronavirus spreads across shipping operations and foreign supply chain. Imagine if 1 in 4 goods imported from Asia suddenly stopped coming. Impact just starting.
— Eric Lipton (@EricLiptonNYT) March 1, 2020
Stock futures have plummeted — a sign that the markets may be in for another rough week as fears about the novel coronavirus outbreak continue to mount. https://t.co/F3ncqJe7OA
— CNN (@CNN) March 2, 2020
Euro-area factories see first clear signs of coronavirus hitting their business, with widespread delivery delays and steep declines in foreign orders https://t.co/1OhJlLxBwH
— Bloomberg (@business) March 2, 2020
Just out of interest – a lot fo f what's empty there is made in India. Let's hope that manufacturing doesn't; get interrupted. For now, though, there is more in distribution centres for resticking soon. https://t.co/fFuM82n6hV
— ɪᴀɴ ᴍ ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ ????? (@MackayIM) March 2, 2020
Chyron HR
They didn’t say aggression towards the virus, silly, just Democrats.
OzarkHillbilly
“Democrats hope millions will die.” -donald trump jr.
No asshole, just you, your girlfriend, your father, his wife, your sister, her husband, your brother, his wife…
Betty Cracker
My daughter told me yesterday that one of her friends may have the virus. She went to the doctor with a high fever and cough and was told to “self quarantine” at home. I dismissed the possibility that it was C-19 because I’ve known the kid in question all her life and she’s definitely a drama llama. But now that C-19 has cropped up in the Tampa Bay area, I wonder.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: It may be she has something else and the quarantine is to keep her from getting the coronavirus.
bjacques
10 in NL, mostly from northern Italy.
Ironic that neo-Fascist Matteo Salvini tried to hang it on those foul refugees, then Northern Italy, where he’s most popular, infected Europe and Africa as well. Womp womp!
Nemesis is working overtime. My next sacrifice to her will be a hecatomb.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Entirely possible. I’m getting all of this info second hand, but as far as I know, she hasn’t been diagnosed with something else. Maybe they’re still testing. Now that there are confirmed cases in the area, I suppose they’ll have a definitive answer soon. She’s young and healthy so will hopefully be okay in any case.
Morzer
https://twitter.com/marcowenjones/status/1234383314926161920
@marcowenjones
[Thread on Coronavirus and Disinfo] 1/ This one really astounds me. Another verified account, this one an actual republican politician @JWrightforCA34 , tweeted a conspiracy theory (aka disinformation) That corona virus was likely created by a deep state cabal. All the tropes
Morzer
@Morzer:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-01/gop-candidate-for-l-a-congressional-district-tweets-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory
Morzer
@Morzer:
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Morzer: OMG, I voted for that Schiff guy.
I got a thing in the mail from one of his opponents, no party ID(remember we have jungle primaries), but claimed to be “non-partisan” as the reason to vote for her.
Baud
@Morzer: Why are Democrats so uncivil?
Morzer
@Baud: It’s one of the great, unsolved mysteries of this sad, puzzling world.
Betty Cracker
This sounds inexcusable:
Case notes are probably being scrutinized to ensure there’s no information about travel, treatment delays, etc., that could be damaging to Trump. I wish I was joking.
satby
3 cases confirmed around Chicago. I’m on a mission to get people to quit using diluted vinegar water as a “sanitizer”. No it’s not.
Van Buren
Someone should ask Trump if he still thinks the virus will go away in April “when the weather warms up” in light of the fact that Nigeria has an outbreak. Pretty sure it’s not cold there.
Steeplejack
@Morzer:
Best comment in that thread: “But her virus emails!”
Morzer
@Van Buren: I am sure Herr Doktor Perfesser Trump will explain that the coronavirus is just an uppity common cold and can be cured by burning incense to his divine Genius.
Lapassionara
@Betty Cracker: I wish you were too. I saw a Twitter thread yesterday outlining the events in China, and the self-congratulatory tone of the government sources was chilling. Autocrats gotta autocrat.
satby
@Van Buren: it’s a shithole country, remember? He doesn’t think it know about those at all.
satby
My kid is days away from closing a deal on buying the pizza franchise he currently manages. I told him to rerun all his sales numbers and projections again with drops of 30-50% in revenue to see if it still made sense to close the deal. He went to ComiCon yesterday, so I’m expecting more virus cases confirmed soon in the geek community.
What a shit time to start a business.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: Chances are she has something other than Covid-19, but if they don’t know for sure, telling her to self-isolate is prudent. If she’s young it may well be no worse than a typical flu, but you wouldn’t want her to infect other people who are more vulnerable.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I find it sadly funny to hear people telling DEMs not to politicize Covid19, especially when due to the trump admins penchant for lying, the uttering of a simple unadulterated fact is a political act.
different-church-lady
OMG, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE AND WE WON’T HAVE ANY STUFF TO BUY!!1!
Steeplejack
@different-church-lady:
The horror!
Steeplejack
I’m scheduled to fly to Las Vegas on Wednesday the 11th for family drama. Guess I’m still going to go, although the situation could change drastically in a week. Dr. Bro’ Man and his family are going too, and so far he hasn’t shown any concern. We’ll see.
Ken
Now there’s a vow you don’t want to break.
Anya
@Morzer: I missed this step but when did the Pope become a Soro level enemy?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So two deaths in Washington, assuming 2% death rate, that means 100 infected, then halving 100 every week means the virus got there seven weeks ago. California, one death means 50 infected and six weeks ago.
The mortality might be off because the population at the highest risk right now are those who work in transportation or work at companies that are outsourced to China and those tend to be younger and in decent health then average, so the infection rate might be much higher.
YY_Sima Qian
Even during a national health emergency, the perverse logic of CCP bureaucracy still holds. I am sure the Shanghai lab that first published the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is being “rectified” for doing so without higher approval. The Wuhan lab published the same information a few hours later. One may suspect that the Wuhan lab would not published the information had the Shanghai lab not done so, but I personally doubt that would have been the case. Each element of the bureaucracy jealously guards its prerogative, and the regime really does not like anyone stepping out of the bound and circumvent official channels. I have read interviews with employees of the Shanghai lab in Chinese media, the interviewees made it clear they sounded alarm up the channels, but were exasperated with the lack of response from the system.
Similar story with Dr. Li Wenliang. He was not actually a whistleblower. He was not making his concerns public, but simply sounding alarm with his medical colleagues in a private WeChat group. Someone else in his chat group took screenshot of his messages and posted it far and wide. I think he was warned by the police and reprimanded by the hospital for going outside of official channels, and making it harder for the local government to control the narrative.
There are also interviews in Chinese media with members of the second team of experts from China National Health Commission and Chinese CDC, who visited Wuhan in mid-January (along with experts from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and the WHO office in Beijing). The team of experts made the infamous announcement that “the spread is under control, only limited human to human transmission.” Those interviewees basically blamed the Wuhan and Hubei governments (with collaboration of hospital administrators in Wuhan) for withholding critical information, such as cases of nosocomial transmission in the hospitals. According to the interviewees, when they learned of rumors of infection in hospitals, they called each hospital, and the administrators straight out lied. Not sure if they are simply now covering their own posteriors.
Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a renowned pulmonery infections expert and member of the third team of experts visiting Wuhan, finally punched through the veil of official obfuscation on Jan. 20, when he announced on national TV that the epidemic is a grave threat, and human to human transmission is occurring for certain. It seems like the the entire country of China, from the leadership, to the bureaucracy, to the average citizen, took stock of the situation and turned on a dime and went maximum effort in the other direction, all in the space of 48 hours. By the way, it was also Dr. Zhong who punched through the veil of official obfuscation during the SARS epidemic 17 years ago, and then took a leading role in getting it under control. Of all the expert voices in China, his is the most trusted by the populace. People are asking on Chinese social media: “Dr. Zhong is 84, who will save China from the next epidemic?”
chopper
@Baud:
yeh, it’s still good old-fashioned flu season.
satby
@Anya: when a liberal Pope got elected after the Nazi Pope retired.
low-tech cyclist
Swell. My father-in-law, who lives in Hillsborough County, is 78 and has serious health issues. Right in the coronavirus’ wheelhouse. All of a sudden, this feels very personal.
This alone should be grounds for impeachment.
Barbara
If you want to know what a rational response looks like, consider Kaiser Foundation Health Plan:
Instead of getting ahead of the virus, the CDC basically decided to ration testing: it created a test that was difficult and expensive to run — so very few labs were capable of running it as designed, and CDC doesn’t want to have to pay its contract lab for “unnecessary” testing. What’s really galling to me, anyway, is that the CDC invoked emergency powers. It had no real plan of its own (except to limit testing, evidently), but invoking emergency powers legally impeded anyone else from developing their own plan for testing.
Marcopolo
I think we have to assume there are quite likely several hundred (or more) folks with infections in the US (and the vast vast majority are out there walking around spreading it). Due to the government’s botched response we just have not been looking. As of three days ago there had only been about 500 folks total tested in the entire country. There was a guest on Lawrence O’Donnell Wed or Thur last week who pointed out the prudent thing to have been doing for the last month would have been monitoring all pneumonia cases at hospitals nationwide and running tests on everyone diagnosed with it. Sure, there would be a lot of false positives but you would have caught COVID-19 early on as well. Obviously we haven’t been doing that. When you add in that 80% of the folks who get infected will have a mild reaction, meaning some of them might not even thing they are all that sick, and that the virus can apparently be spread before infected people become symptomatic you can see why it will be so hard to deal with this.
And, and I think this is one of the more important things that is going mostly unspoken, you would have caught COVID-19 cases before exposing X% of your healthcare workers to folks with the virus. I read an article yesterday that 25 firefighters, who were first or second responders to the corona virus outbreak in the old folks home in WA are now in quarantine basically shutting down an entire fire station. That is also happening to hospital employees on the West Coast. This is what is going to cause the worst disruptions over the next several months.
Anyways, everyone wash your hands and try not to touch your face. And maybe consider stocking up on non-perishable food items. Over the past week I’ve made several extra trips to the grocery store to by a weeks worth of non-perishable food per visit. I’m now up to about a month’s worth along with extra TP, paper towels and tissue paper. Maybe I won’t need it but it is non perishable so that isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Barbara
@low-tech cyclist: Florida is one of the premier destinations of European travelers (South American as well). Many Europeans have second homes or travel extensively back and forth. This is a serious Hobson’s choice for states like Florida, because if travel is curtailed, the state’s economy will be hard hit. At any rate, many people are going to decide not to travel, so it’s actually unlikely that we will need to ban travel.
The idiot in the White House does not seem to understand that banning travel is not much of a response once the virus has invaded our territory.
And the coup de grace, Pence goes on TV and is still characterizing the virus as a political and not a public health event. At least he is so transparently stupid not many will be fooled.
Marcopolo
@Barbara:It really boggles the mind why the US didn’t just start purchasing the test kits that the WHO has been producing for well over a month instead of trying to design our own in house test–which as we know now had flaws which made it unusable.
When the first case outside of Sacramento was diagnosed, the D congressman from the area was on one of the MSNBC shows stating he didn’t know why we weren’t buying test kits from producers in South Korea since they had ramped up production to over 100,000/day. I mean, they have enough testing capacity that they have been testing dogs in S Korea. His comment was something like “we could have those test kits here on the West Coast in 3 days, what are we waiting for?”
Barbara
@Marcopolo: It is not feasible to continue quarantining health care and emergency workers at this pace. It is simply not possible to treat sick people while you sideline the workers who are necessary to provide care and emergency assistance.
ETA: American doctors and our health care system in general practices what I would call “extreme medicine.” Most of the rest of the world, especially where there are resource constraints, adapts to the lack of supplies and diagnostic capability all the time. Sidelining emergency personnel like this is an extreme response and it is unsustainable in a true pandemic.
hitless
@OzarkHillbilly: And just for fun someone should go and dig up all Trump’s tweets about Ebola when Obama was in office.
low-tech cyclist
@hitless: Remember their cute “Ebola” bumper stickers with the Obama campaign logo as the ‘O’?
Anya
I wish news agencies would retire the meaningless ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ categorization. It’s one of the ugly vestiges of colonization.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Anya:
It seems more geographical than political. What’s the problem?
Anya
@Steeplejack (phone): It’s not geographical. It’s basically to separate the Arab parts (member countries of the Arab League) from the rest of Africa. It doesn’t make any geographical sense. It lumps together countries that often have nothing in common. Africans don’t use it. In fact it’s a despised term. The African Union doesn’t use it.
Matt McIrvin
@Steeplejack (phone): “Sub-” always struck me as having ugly connotations of inferiority though here all it really means is “south of”.
Bill Arnold
@YY_Sima Qian:
Thank you much on the context for problems with information sharing about COVID-19 in China, and specifically the lab “rectification”. (It still looks ugly from an American point of view.)
Bill Arnold
For those who don’t want to watch VPOTUS Pence say that Donald Trump Jrs assertion that Democrats want millions of Americans to die of COVID-19 is “understandable”,
transcript:
Republicans like Pence are literally incapable of criticism anyone closely associated with/on their own team.
This is vile. Pence would have been fired on the spot were I his boss.
chris
Somebody mentioned the pope? Huh, Dr. Robert R Redfield, CDC head, is a Catholic whacko who was appointed to the position in 2018 in one of the less-noticed shitstorms of this administration*. Reviews were… mixed, to say the least. The whole salary thing was fun too.
LINK
YY_Sima Qian
@Bill Arnold: It is ugly from any perspective, and it is just getting some coverage in a few Chinese media outlets. Unlike the case of Dr. Li, the Shanghai lab may not resonate with the average Zhou in the street, but it would resonate with intellectuals, academics and well educated people. Depending on the backlash, don’t be surprised if the the “rectification” of the Shanghai lab get quietly dropped, and the scientists in the lab get a slap on the wrist, kind of like how High People’s Court essentially exonerated the eight whistleblowers in late Jan.
Anya
@hitless: Jonathan Lemine and Kurt Bardella mentioned it today on Morning Joe. It was in response to Mick Mulvaney’s despicable comment. Bardella mentioned that Mulvaney was basically projecting because it’s what he and his GOP colleagues did during the Ebola outbreak.
mrmoshpotato
@Bill Arnold: Bill, I think we’d all prefer if you were President too.
ziggy
I’m actually kind of a “disease nerd”, (currently reading The Pandemic Century by Honigsbaum), and find it absolutely fascinating how quickly they were able to sequence the viruses, and how that is changing the tracking abilities.
As Trevor points out on his twitter feed, because of what they discovered, it is estimated that at this time there are actually around 500 active cases in western WA, and possibly as high as 1,500. The doubling time is about 7 days. So at least in our area, the cat is already out of the bag, and I think they are only trying to slow transmission at this point. Seven local schools and several other buildings closed today.
Aleta
Via Ali Noorani (reporter/specialist at NHK)
Also, here are some English-language sources for individual countries’ COVID-19 news.
For Japan: Japan Times, Mainichi News (English version), NHK (Eng. version)
For Italy, Sweden, France, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Germany: You can google a news site called The Local + the name of each country for basic coverage. Example of site addresses: https://www.thelocal.it/ https://www.thelocal.fr/
The Pale Scot
@satby:
He’s got to redo the numbers. Point out that if he doesn’t have the capital to keep it up and running if it’s losing money, he’s blown his stake. Go back to the table and and try to renegotiate a lower price (not going to happen) or modify payment schedule to assume lower revenues.
Potentially deliveries could rise if people are staying home. But he’d have to promote the idea that his staff isn’t infected. That means giving sick days, getting anyone who presents getting tested, taking card numbers over the phone only (no cash), masks on delivery and production workers.
Danger and opportunity etc, but I’d pass on this until a vaccine is available unless I was offered really good terms
Aleta
@Aleta: oops the next-to- last link (Italy) is not working live. The site will come up if you copy and paste https://www.thelocal.it/
The Italy version of The Local has been quite good I think. (I was hoping to go in June, but ? )
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Anya: Thank you for pointing this out. Would be nice if Americans also learned the individual names of African countries, instead of referring to the whole huge continent like it was one country, instead of 54 separate nations. Of course we are still learning that South and Central America are two separate places and that their countries are not interchangeable (also that Mexico is part of North America)
Interrobang
I have two friends who work for the same high-tech company (whose name will go unmentioned, but they’re basically synonymous with Linux) which has just closed its Toronto office because one of its employees tested positive for COVID-19. This is within easy walking distance of where I live. The first case of the virus in Toronto was taken to the hospital nearest me. It’s making me a little twitchy, to be honest, because my history with respiratory infections is…not good.
opiejeanne
@Aleta: Thank you for that local news link. From this I see that British Airways is cancelling a lot of flights to and from France. We have tickets to France in late April and I’m hoping that Iceland Air will cancel our flights soon. Considering where we live, I don’t think we should be welcomed into France right now.
The employees of the Louvre voted to close it down, and it is now closed.
opiejeanne
@Interrobang: I sympathize. I have had some issues with respiratory infections, and I live next door to Kirkland, WA. The deaths occurred in the hospital I visited on Thursday for an office visit. It’s less than 10 miles from my house.
Haydnseek
@different-church-lady
@different-church-lady: Nicely done! That line could be turned into pretty good punk song lyrics.
@different-church-lady: