It’s a perfect time to like going on long bike rides alone. Easy to stay six feet from everyone else.
N95 mask ad showing on the side just now. 
Lots of fake 95 masks etc online. Wouldn’t trust it at this point.
N-95 masks I’m familiar with are supposed to have a valve. Lots of those I’ve seen advertised in the past month or so don’t and I don’t trust them to perform as advertised. They’re also supposed to be fitted to the wearer, every year.
It seems like the so called “herd immunity” plan in the UK should instead be called the “natural selection” plan. Smh.
Hospitals in Nagoya city in Japan’s industrial heartland have more coronavirus patients than they can treat, forcing transfers to nearby areas and offering a glimpse of the challenges the outbreak poses for a country with a huge elderly population, Reuters reports.
Japan has closed schools and cancelled public events, which experts say has helped prevent an explosive spread of the virus. But because testing hasn’t been widespread, some medical experts say the extent of infection is understated, and a surge could yet happen.
“If the numbers rise further, we won’t be able to cope, so we will either have to ask nearby prefectures to help, or tell those with lighter symptoms to stay at home,” a prefecture official in Nagoya told Reuters.
Confirmed coronavirus cases in Nagoya, the capital of Aichi prefecture, totalled 98 as of Sunday, the official said, far exceeding the city’s 27 beds at hospitals that meet conditions for patients with the highly contagious disease.
Aichi, home to Toyota Motor Corp, is Japan’s second-hardest hit prefecture, with 121 confirmed coronavirus cases so far. It has a total of 161 beds capable of handling patients with such a disease. Of those, 105 were in use as of Sunday, the official said.
An Australian television network entertainment editor has tested positive for the new coronavirus after meeting Tom Hanks wife, Rita Wilson, in Sydney.
Hanks and Wilson have been isolated in an Australian hospital since they were both diagnosed with Covid-19 on March 12.
Nine Network entertainment editor Richard Wilkins said Monday that he was tested because he met Wilson at the Sydney Opera House on March 7 and again at Nines Sydney studio on March 9. The result came back positive on Sunday, AP reports.
“You could’ve knocked me over with a feather last night when I got that call. It took me a couple of minutes to reel from the news that they gave me. But I feel fine. I feel 100%,” Wilkins told Nine by Facetime from his Sydney home.
The 65-year-old journalist said he could only assume that he had been infected by Wilson, a singer and actor.
“We’re assuming this is from Rita. It may not be. They’ve all said it could be anyone, anywhere, any time, such is the prevalence of this thing,” Wilkins said.
Wilkins was one of 37 new case confirmed over 24 hours in New South Wales state, bringing the state total to 171 by Monday. The increase was the largest for Australia’s most populous state in a day.
Guardian
The Reuters story about Nagoya was interesting - it suggests that Japan’s infectious disease law requires that they hospitalize anyone testing positive, even if they have only mild symptoms. That may explain why they are not testing much in Japan.
So, am I understanding this correctly? This person was tested but as yet has no symptoms?
Well, it’s not the US. I did see mention that one of Australian’s state alone had tested over 20K.
Speaking of symptoms, read below.
Infected people without symptoms might be driving the spread of coronavirus more than we realized
By CNN
New studies in several countries and a large coronavirus outbreak in Massachusetts are bringing into question reassurances by US officials about the way the coronavirus is spreading.
Previously, officials have emphasized that the virus is spread mainly by people who are already showing symptoms, such as fever, cough or difficulty breathing.
If that’s true, it’s good news – people who are obviously ill can be identified and isolated, making it easier to control an outbreak.
But it appears that a Massachusetts coronavirus cluster with at least 82 cases was started by people who were not yet showing symptoms, and more than half a dozen studies have shown that people without symptoms are causing substantial amounts of infection.
During a press briefing at the White House on Saturday, the administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, seemed to strike a somewhat different note on asymptomatic transmission.
“Until you really understand how many people are asymptomatic and asymptomatically passing the virus on, we think it’s better for the entire American public to know that the risk of serious illness may be low, but they could be potentially spreading the virus to others.”
Several experts interviewed by CNN said while it’s unclear exactly what percentage of the transmission in the outbreak is fueled by people who are obviously sick versus those who have no symptoms or very mild symptoms, it’s become clear that transmission by people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic is responsible for more transmission than previously thought.
“We now know that asymptomatic transmission likely [plays] an important role in spreading this virus,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Osterholm added that it’s “absolutely clear” that asymptomatic infection “surely can fuel a pandemic like this in a way that’s going to make it very difficult to control.”
In an article two weeks ago in the New England Journal of Medicine, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, expressed concern about the spread of the disease by people who haven’t yet developed symptoms, or who are only a bit sick.
“There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or even presymptomatic. That means COVID-19 will be much harder to contain than the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which were spread much less efficiently and only by symptomatic people,” he wrote…
Others agree that people without serious symptoms play a substantial role in the spread of the new coronavirus.
“Asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic transmission are a major factor in transmission for Covid-19,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and longtime adviser to the CDC. “They’re going to be the drivers of spread in the community.”
Osterholm urged public officials to be clearer about the way the virus is spread.
“At the very beginning of the outbreak, we had many questions about how transmission of this virus occurred. And unfortunately, we saw a number of people taking very firm stances about it was happening this way or it wasn’t happening this way. And as we have continued to learn how transmission occurs with this outbreak, it is clear that many of those early statements were not correct,” he said.
“This is time for straight talk,” he said. “This is time to tell the public what we know and don’t know.”
Outbreak in Massachusetts
In the United States, more than 2,000 people are confirmed or presumed positive for the novel coronavirus, and 50 have died.
In February, employees of Cambridge biotechnology company Biogen attended a company meeting. After the meeting was over, three employees tested positive for the virus.
Those three employees did not have symptoms during the meeting, according to Ann Scales, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, who noted that an investigation into the outbreak is ongoing and new information about cases and their symptom status may become available later.
Part 1
Part 2
International studies
There are also reports in other countries of significant transmission by people who are asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic.
On Tuesday, Dr. Sandra Ciesek, director of the Institute of Medical Virology in Frankfurt, Germany, tested 24 passengers who had just flown in from Israel.
Seven of the 24 passengers tested positive for coronavirus. Four of those had no symptoms, and Ciesek was surprised to find that the viral load of the specimens from the asymptomatic patients was higher than the viral load of the specimens from the three patients who did have symptoms.
Viral load is a measure of the concentration of the virus in someone’s respiratory secretions. A higher load means that someone is more likely to spread the infection to other people.
While Ciesek has not yet published this finding, on February 18, she published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine about two passengers who returned to Germany from Wuhan, China, and tested positive for coronavirus. One of these positive passengers had no symptoms and the other had a faint rash and a mild sore throat. When she took their testing samples back to the lab, she successfully infected a cell culture with the patients’ swabs.
“We can conclude that both patients [were] shedding virus that is able to infect cells, and, most likely, other humans,” Ciesek wrote in an email to CNN.
Early, large-scale studies using mathematical modelling of outbreaks in Tianjin, China, and Singapore in January and February have also found significant amounts of spread by people who had not yet developed symptoms.
Both studies were posted on MedRxiv, a pre-print server founded by Yale University, the medical journal BMJ and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Articles on this server have not been reviewed by the authors’ scientific peers.
A study posted Sunday by Belgian and Dutch researchers shows that between 48% and 66% of the 91 people in the Singapore cluster contracted the infection from someone who was pre-symptomatic. Of the 135 people in the Tianjin cluster, between 62% and 77% caught it from someone was pre-symptomatic.
One of the study’s lead authors, Tapiwa Ganyani at the Data Science Institute at Hasselt University in Belgium, noted in an email to CNN that these are estimates with uncertainties.
Canadian, Dutch and Singaporean researchers looked at the same outbreaks in Tianjin and Singapore and found that infection was transmitted on average 2.55 days and 2.89 days before symptom onset respectively in each location.
“Our analysis would suggest that presymptomatic transmission is pretty commonplace,” said the study’s lead author, Caroline Colijn, who leads the mathematics, genomics and prediction in infection and evolution research group at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
CDC officials have said that while it’s clear asymptomatic spread does happen, it does not appear to be the driver of the outbreak – or as the CDC says on its website, asymptomatic transmission “is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”
“If I were writing that CDC webpage today, I would phrase that a little more towards transmission before symptoms show up,” Colijn said.
Ciesek, the German virologist, agrees that the CDC should tweak its statement.
“I read it before, and I wondered to myself – why are they so sure of this?” she said.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/14/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread/index.html
[ I’ve said all along, don’t discount what the Chinese have observed and reported. Over a month ago they reported contagiousness among asymptomatic patients and that people who did eventually show symptoms were contagious in the days before symptoms arrived. ]
Wuhan health officials say novel coronavirus still “severe,” urge citizens to exercise caution
From CNN
Wuhan, the Chinese city where the novel coronavirus was first identified, is still facing a “severe” epidemic, amid a continuation of locally transmitted cases, the city’s municipal health commission said in a press conference Sunday.
Wuhan, which is home to an estimated 11 million people, has been on lockdown since January 23. It is considered to be the epicenter of the global pandemic.
“Although the number of new (daily) cases in Wuhan remains in the single digits, there are still cases in the community,” Zheng Yun, deputy director of Wuhan municipal health commission, said.
He added that there is still a risk of community infection, as some recent patients are believed to have contracted the virus in their neighborhoods, citing an epidemiological investigation.
Zheng reminded citizens who are relaxing vigilance to maintain cautious and avoid going out as much as possible.
Absolutely. The school staff will be put at risk. You know (some/many?) parents will send their kids to school sick, for as long as they can get away with it, just as happens now. This is where strong teacher unions need to demand consideration for staff. I believe the NYC teacher union was going to stage a sick-out or something until Cuomo caved and shut down schools across the state?
Good, because I can guess which states would try to grab all of the vaccine.
`
One of the explanations for the higher fatality rate among males is that many more of them were smokers. However, Chinese studies also show, among males, the fatality rate for patients who were smokers is actually lower than for patients who didn’t smoke. Smoking is certainly one of the leading causes of a number diseases, but for COVID-19 related death, the data thus far are inclusive.
It will be interesting to see how this story develops. I am trying to be charitable and assume that there was some kind of misunderstanding or mistranslation or something.
Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts Monday
By ZEKE MILLER
yesterday
WASHINGTON (AP) — The first participant in a clinical trial for a vaccine to protect against the new coronavirus will receive an experimental dose on Monday, according to a government official.
The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. The official who disclosed plans for the first participant spoke on condition of anonymity because the move has not been publicly announced.
Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine.
Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests.
Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as COVID-19 cases continue to grow. Importantly, they’re pursuing different types of vaccines — shots developed from new technologies that not only are faster to produce than traditional inoculations but might prove more potent. Some researchers even aim for temporary vaccines, such as shots that might guard people’s health a month or two at a time while longer-lasting protection is developed.
Also in the works: Inovio Pharmaceuticals aims to begin safety tests of its vaccine candidate next month in a few dozen volunteers at the University of Pennsylvania and a testing center in Kansas City, Missouri, followed by a similar study in China and South Korea.
Even if initial safety tests go well, “you’re talking about a year to a year and a half” before any vaccine could be ready for widespread use, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
That still would be a record-setting pace. But manufacturers know the wait — required because it takes additional studies of thousands of people to tell if a vaccine truly protects and does no harm — is hard for a frightened public.
President Donald Trump has been pushing for swift action on a vaccine, saying in recent days that the work is “moving along very quickly” and he hopes to see a vaccine “relatively soon.”
Today, there are no proven treatments. In China, scientists have been testing a combination of HIV drugs against the new coronavirus, as well as an experimental drug named remdesivir that was in development to fight Ebola. In the U.S., the University of Nebraska Medical Center also began testing remdesivir in some Americans who were found to have COVID-19 after being evacuated from a cruise ship in Japan.
For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The worldwide outbreak has sickened more than 156,000 people and left more than 5,800 dead. The death toll in the United States is more than 50, while infections neared 3,000 across 49 states and the District of Columbia.
The vast majority of people recover. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three weeks to six weeks to recover.
The Associated Press receives support for health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
EDITORS’ PICK|3,466 views|Mar 15, 2020,10:11pm EST
America’s Biggest Banks Suspend Buybacks In Effort To Support Economy Over Their Own Stock Prices
Antoine GaraForbes Staff
Banking & Insurance
Bank CEOs are taking steps to ensure Wall Street plays a helpful role for the economy.
“America’s largest and most important lenders are temporarily suspending their stock buybacks so they can help pump money into an economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic. The move means that Wall Street is prioritizing supporting the U.S. economy with its cash, instead of using it to engineer stock prices higher after a sharp market drop.
Eight of the biggest banks in America said on Sunday evening they will be suspending their stock buybacks for the remainder of the first quarter, ending on March 30, and the second quarter, so as to use the spare cash to lend to individuals and businesses in need of credit. Banks suspending their buybacks are JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York Mellon and State Street.
The coordinated move, among firms who’ve recently bought back a collective tens of billions of dollars in stock annually, underscores Wall Street’s vital role in helping to pull the American economy though what economists increasingly forecast will be a deep recession.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented challenge for the world and the global economy and the largest U.S. banks have an unquestioned ability and commitment to supporting our customers, clients and the nation,” said the Financial Services Forum, an advocacy group for banks, on behalf of the eight lenders.
“The decision on buybacks is consistent with our collective objective to use our significant capital and liquidity to provide maximum support to individuals, small businesses, and the broader economy through lending and other important services,” it added, pointing out that the move is consistent with the dramatic relief actions being put into motion by the Federal Reserve, the White House, and Congress.
These banks were set to submit capital plans to the Fed in coming weeks as part of their annual stress tests. Instead, they alerted Fed of their intention to suspend repurchases, but kept open the option to reinstate buybacks when economic circumstances warrant.
Over the past 10 years, these firms have added $914 billion in capital, a 40% increase, according to the Forum, which added, “The members of the Forum have repeatedly passed the Federal Reserve’s annual stress tests, showing they are able to continue to lend and support the economy even during a severe economic downturn.”
The move is a sharp contrast to the reckless financial plans banks pursued during the 2008 crisis-era, when many firms prioritized shareholder returns over supporting the health of the economy, or even their own balance sheets. Firms like Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch irresponsibly bought back stock and paid out hefty dividends well after signs of a meltdown and their own capital insufficiency were evident. The behavior backfired.
Not only did these firms abdicate much of their role in providing credit during the crunch, they wound up acting as accelerant to a collapsing economy, and eventually required enormous government support to stay alive. Some firms failed.
Current circumstances are different. The eight firms suspending buybacks are well capitalized and most could make huge repurchases of their recently battered stocks without violating Fed-stipulated capital requirements. But as the coronavirus crisis takes the United States by storm, the banking industry appears to be focused on facilitating an eventual recovery over its own potential short-term self-interest”
A lot of contagious conditions are at peak the day BEFORE, of, and immediately after showing symptoms.
My one son has a toddler was Patient 0 (or 1) at his preschool for spreading chicken pox one year. Every single kid he was near the day before and the day the first spots showed up also got it.
My other child who also got it (from his brother) passed it on to no one we knew. His friends and classmates were spared because he was removed from circulation during that critical time.
@privatebanker
Something to keep in mind is that the virus shows up on a CT scan in a very distinct way. If you recall the incident of the optometrist from China who blew the whistle on the virus, he indicated he found it through CT scans, I believe. Also, I just read an article where they interviewed a young adult male in China who had Covid-19 and he described the treatment he received in China and the process they used to diagnose Covid-19 patients. The first screening was thermometer. Second screening was CT test. If CT test was positive, they would then move on to give the actual Covid-19 test. It would seem that they have many portable CT scan machines in China and that they may also have a limited number of test kits like we do here in the US. If it seems likely that your wife has Covid-19. you might consider CT scan, even paying out of pocket if necessary. I used to be a Worker’s Comp adjuster. I will share that getting a CT scan at a facility that specializes in MRI/ CT scans costs about 1/4 of getting one done at a hospital. I also found the results to be better as the radiologist reading the scans would note occasionally that the results from a hospital scan were blurry. Never saw a problem with results from a MRI/ CT scan from a diagnostic center though. Seems like getting a quick diagnoses would be important for your wife, given potential complications.