Thread: Covid 19 C&P

Inside China's outbreak. How do they approach the problem of quarantine? Why , build a 82 acre quarantine centre. Of course.

Inside China’s outbreak

China is experiencing its worst surge of the virus since the summer, forcing 28 million people into lockdown and challenging the government’s success in subduing the disease.

The country’s National Health Commission said that 144 new cases had been recorded yesterday along with one death — the county’s first since May. Across China, more than 1,000 people are being treated for Covid-19.

The flare-up is mostly in Hebei, a northern province surrounding Beijing. The region’s capital, Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million people, is scrambling to build an 82-acre quarantine center.

Our colleague Keith Bradsher, the Times’s Shanghai bureau chief, told us that the Chinese authorities “are very concerned about stamping this out, because they have taken a zero-tolerance approach in which they have tested as many as two million people a day in a city if there are even a handful of cases discovered.”

Keith said that for the past few months many people in China had been living as though the virus was a distant threat. They’ve been pulling off their masks, particularly outdoors, and restaurants, bars and theaters have hummed with activity. “Almost all people in China were able to go about their daily lives in the second half of last year as though practically nothing had happened,” he said.

But things have started to change, even for people who live outside the areas in lockdown. In Shanghai, Keith said, office buildings and apartment compounds are, once again, checking smartphone location tracking codes, to ensure that individuals haven’t traveled to hot spots. If someone has traveled to a risky area, that person must immediately report to the authorities and enter a home- or government-supervised quarantine.

“Mandatory immediate quarantine by the government, in total isolation, of every symptomatic or asymptomatic person, plus all of their close contacts” has been China’s secret to containing the coronavirus, Keith said. “In some cases, they identify 800 close contacts per person, so their definition of a close contact is not very close at all.”

With the U.S. and Europe in the throes of another brutal surge, there has been a great deal of nationalistic sentiment in China, promoting the country’s approach to the virus. “There are definite worries about the latest outbreaks,” Keith said. “But I have found a quiet confidence among many people that China has beaten this problem before and can do so again.”

Scientists say they have identified a new variant of SARS-CoV-2—the virus which causes COVID-19—in the United States that may be the most dominant form in the country.



New COVID Variant in U.S. May Now Be Dominant Form, Scientists Say (msn.com)

Now this story has all the makings of a great Monty Python script. Life imitating art ?

The pandemic is a bit of a worry, but we are taking all precautions,” said organiser Siddharth Chakrapani, who expected between 800,000 and a million people to attend on Thursday alone.

Holy men known as sadhus – boasting extraordinary dreadlocks and often smoking cannabis – are a regular feature at the Kumbh Mela, camping by the river and offering blessings to those who come for the holy immersion.
On Wednesday, the river’s banks teemed with pilgrims and vendors while families laid out plastic sheets to put their belongings on while they took turns to plunge in the river.
Most were oblivious to the threat of coronavirus.



India holds massive ‘Kumbh Mela’ festival amid COVID worries | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera

The Coronavirus in Thailand. How they got caught out.


Thailand was nailing coronavirus until they started to see a sudden spike. Here’s how they got caught out (msn.com)

Six new cases in NSW.

Six new cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in NSW (msn.com)

5 countries, 5 experiences of the pandemic.

As the pandemic rolls on, the sheer persistence of the virus, including in countries once believed to have suppressed it, has upended narratives about the superiority of some responses over others. “It’s too early to moralize about how countries have responded to covid,” Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University who has followed global outcomes closely, told me. “We shouldn’t issue definitive judgments yet.” Meaningful scorecards on what worked and what didn’t may be years, if not decades, away.

Cowen also believes that how countries handle their responses has implications beyond the immediate infection rate. In many places, even modestly effective containment efforts have boosted public support for the state, so long as officials are seen as concerned and trustworthy; other countries have found that failing to mount a competent response has not only risked people’s health but shaken their faith in government.

There are some threats—war, terrorism, pandemics—that leaders simply cannot afford to mismanage.

Countries that fail, over time, to protect their people “could enter a crisis of legitimacy,” Cowen said. “A poor pandemic response exacts a big toll in terms of health and lives. But there’s also a cost in terms of trust and morale. People can’t feel good about their country when it’s doing so badly.”

The new coronavirus vaccines represent another opportunity for governments to prove themselves or fail. Like the pandemic, vaccines will have an effect that falls unevenly on people across the world; in different places, they’ll confer protection and usher a return to normality at different times and to differing degrees. Governments will rush to produce, procure, and distribute the vaccines in needed quantities; many will struggle, and that will lead to its own set of inequities and inefficiencies.


Five Countries, Five Experiences of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker

American COVID deaths reach 400,000. Tipped to be 500,000 by the end of Febuary.


The blame for the enormous loss of American life, many experts say, lies in a failure of leadership by President Trump, whose administration politicized the use of masks and left states to implement a patchwork of inconsistent measures that did not bring the virus under control.
“It wasn’t that he was just inept,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University professor of environmental health sciences who has modeled the virus’s spread. “He made something that could have very easily turned into a point of patriotism, pride and national unity — protecting your neighbors, protecting your loved ones, protecting your community — into a divisive issue, as is his wont, and it cost people’s lives.”





Coronavirus Death Toll in the US Passes 400,000 - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

What Scientists Are Learning About Covid-19 Using the Nation’s Blood Supply

Labs and blood banks collect millions of blood samples each month, offering a distinctive source of data on the disease

A volunteer donates blood during an event at the Field Museum in Chicago in May, 2020. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)Nathaniel Scharping, Undark
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
JANUARY 20, 2021 8:00AM


In March, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down major cities in the U.S., researchers were thinking about blood. In particular, they were worried about the U.S. blood supply — the millions of donations every year that help keep hospital patients alive when they need a transfusion.

The researchers were able to put to rest their initial concerns about the virus spreading via the blood supply. But they quickly realized that all those blood donations might offer a vital source of data on the pandemic.

"When Covid-19 infects someone, the immune system’s response to the virus leaves behind detectable proteins in their blood. In March, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, a group of scientists working with blood banks around the country quickly launched a program to surveil the blood supply in certain regions for those traces of Covid-19 infection. With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that initial program expanded to a nationwide effort known as the Multistate Assessment of SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence (MASS) study, which has analyzed roughly 800,000 donations so far."

"Their data so far suggest that a lot of people have had Covid-19 without ever receiving a diagnosis. Confirmed case counts suggest that almost 7 percent of people in the U.S. have had the virus. Data from the arm of the study looking at blood from clinical laboratory tests from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico found rates of antibody positivity that at times ranged from under 1 percent in some states to 23 percent in New York."





What Scientists Are Learning About Covid-19 Using the Nation's Blood Supply | Science | Smithsonian Magazine