I do think moving the olympics to 2021 makes a lot more sense than saying it will be in July or any time in 2020, for that matter.
LOL, if you really think it’s voluntary in the US! It’s a NECESSITY. For most of those who don’t have a mommy and a daddy able to cover their $300,000 med school bill.
But soon this may be a moot point… trump apparently will cancel these socialist programs.
@katliamom, Mexico has a mandatory year of social service for newly minted doctors as well. As to importing medical staff from abroad, I’m for anything that prevents a total burnout of our doctors and nurses. They’re already stressed and we’re still far from seeing a peak in hospitalizations.
I feel bad for the elite athletes who are training for the 2020 Olympics. Most of them can’t train because the training facilities are closed. The Olympic training centers in the US (Lake Placid and Colorado Springs) are closed. Also, there are still athletes in some Olympic sports who are trying to qualify for the Olympics .The problem is that many of the qualifying competitions are now canceled. It makes a whole lots of sense to postpone the 2020 Olympics.
"Just as generals take the lead in giving daily briefings in wartime — as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf did during the Persian Gulf war — medical experts should be at the microphone now to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs.
The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps, as happened again on Friday.
Instead, leaders must describe the looming crisis and the possible solutions in ways that will win the trust of Americans.
Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times — not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president’s health. There is no time left to point fingers and assign blame.
“At this point in the emergency, there’s little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who’s at fault,” said Adm. Tim Ziemer, who was the coordinator of the President’s Malaria Initiative from 2006 until early 2017 and led the pandemic response unit on the National Security Council before its disbanding.
“We need to focus on the enemy, and that’s the virus.”
STOP TRANSMISSION BETWEEN CITIES
The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing.
If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.
The virus would die out on every contaminated surface and, because almost everyone shows symptoms within two weeks, it would be evident who was infected. If we had enough tests for every American, even the completely asymptomatic cases could be found and isolated.
The crisis would be over.
Obviously, there is no magic wand, and no 300 million tests. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze.
To attempt that, experts said, travel and human interaction must be reduced to a minimum.
Italy moved incrementally: Officials slowly and reluctantly closed restaurants, churches and museums, and banned weddings and funerals. Nonetheless, the country’s death count continues to rise.
The United States is slowly following suit. International flights are all but banned, but not domestic ones. California has ordered all residents to stay at home; New York was to shutter all nonessential businesses on Sunday evening.
But other states have fewer restrictions, and in Florida, for days spring break revelers ignored government requests to clear the beaches.
On Friday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said he advocated restrictive measures all across the country.
Coronavirus Live Updates: As State Pleas Mount, Trump Outlines Some Federal Action; Senate Democrats Block Stimulus Package
March 22, 2020
In contrast to the halting steps taken here, China shut down Wuhan — the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak — and restricted movement in much of the country on Jan. 23, when the country had a mere 500 cases and 17 deaths.
Its rapid action had an important effect: With the virus mostly isolated in one province, the rest of China was able to save Wuhan.
Even as many cities fought their own smaller outbreaks, they sent 40,000 medical workers into Wuhan, roughly doubling its medical force.
STOP TRANSMISSIONS WITHIN CITIES
Within cities, there are dangerous hot spots: One restaurant, one gym, one hospital, even one taxi may be more contaminated than many identical others nearby because someone had a coughing fit inside.
Each day’s delay in stopping human contact, experts said, creates more hot spots, none of which can be identified until about a week later, when the people infected there start falling ill.
To stop the explosion, municipal activity must be curtailed. Still, some Americans must stay on the job: doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers; police officers and firefighters; the technicians who maintain the electrical grid and gas and phone lines.
The delivery of food and medicine must continue, so that people pinned in their homes suffer nothing worse than boredom. Those essential workers may eventually need permits, and a process for issuing them, if the police are needed to enforce stay-at-home orders, as they have been in China and Italy.
People in lockdown adapt. In Wuhan, apartment complexes submit group orders for food, medicine, diapers and other essentials. Shipments are assembled at grocery warehouses or government pantries and dropped off. In Italy, trapped neighbors serenade one another.
It’s an intimidating picture. But the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart.
South Korea avoided locking down any city, but only by moving early and with extraordinary speed. In January, the country had four companies making tests, and as of March 9 had tested 210,000 citizens — the equivalent of testing 2.3 million Americans.
As of the same date, fewer than 9,000 Americans had been tested.
Everyone who is infected in South Korea goes into isolation in government shelters, and phones and credit card data are used to trace their prior movements and find their contacts. Where they walked before they fell ill is broadcast to the cellphones of everyone who was nearby.
Anyone even potentially exposed is quarantined at home; a GPS app tells the police if that person goes outside. The fine for doing so is $8,000.
British researchers are trying to develop a similar tracking app, albeit one more palatable to citizens in Western democracies.
FIX THE TESTING MESS
Testing must be done in a coordinated and safe way, experts said. The seriously ill must go first, and the testers must be protected.
In China, those seeking a test must describe their symptoms on a telemedicine website. If a nurse decides a test is warranted, they are directed to one of dozens of “fever clinics” set up far from all other patients.
Personnel in head-to-toe gear check their fevers and question them. Then, ideally, patients are given a rapid flu test and a white blood cell count is taken to rule out influenza and bacterial pneumonia.
Then their lungs are visualized in a CT scanner to look for “ground-glass opacities” that indicate pneumonia and rule out cancer and tuberculosis. Only then are they given a diagnostic test for the coronavirus — and they are told to wait at the testing center.
The results take a minimum of four hours; in the past, if results took overnight, patients were moved to a hotel to wait — sometimes for two to three days, if doctors believed retesting was warranted. It can take several days after an exposure for a test to turn positive.
In the United States, people seeking tests are calling their doctors, who may not have them, or sometimes waiting in traffic jams leading to store parking lots. On Friday, New York City limited testing only to those patients requiring hospitalization, saying the system was being overwhelmed.
Isolate the infected.
ISOLATE THE INFECTED
As soon as possible, experts said, the United States must develop an alternative to the practice of isolating infected people at home, as it endangers families. In China, 75 to 80 percent of all transmission occurred in family clusters.
That pattern has already repeated itself here. Seven members of a large family in New Jersey were infected; four have already died. After a lawyer in New Rochelle, N.Y., fell ill, his wife, son and daughter all tested positive.
Instead of a policy that advises the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease and Prevention now does, experts said cities should establish facilities where the mildly and moderately ill can recuperate under the care and observation of nurses.
Wuhan created many such centers, called “temporary hospitals,” each a cross between a dormitory and a first-aid clinic. They had cots and oxygen tanks, but not the advanced machines used in intensive care units.
American cities now have many spaces that could serve as isolation wards. Already New York is considering turning the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center into a temporary hospital, along with the Westchester Convention Center and two university campuses.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said on Saturday that state officials were also considering opening isolation wards.
In China, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the World Health Organization’s observer team there, people originally resisted leaving home or seeing their children go into isolation centers with no visiting rights — just as Americans no doubt would.
In China, they came to accept it.
“They realized they were keeping their families safe,” he said. “Also, isolation is really lonely. It’s psychologically difficult. Here, they were all together with other people in the same boat. They supported each other.”
FIND THE FEVERS
Because China, Taiwan and Vietnam were hit by SARS in 2003, and South Korea has grappled with MERS, fever checks during disease outbreaks became routine.
In most cities in affected Asian countries, it is commonplace before entering any bus, train or subway station, office building, theater or even a restaurant to get a temperature check. Washing your hands in chlorinated water is often also required.
“They give you a sticker afterward,” said Dr. Heymann, who recently spent a week teaching in Singapore. “I built up quite a collection.”
In China, having a fever means a mandatory trip to a fever clinic to check for coronavirus. In the Wuhan area, different cities took different approaches.
Cellphone videos from China show police officers knocking on doors and taking temperatures. In some, people who resist are dragged away by force. The city of Ningbo offered bounties of $1,400 to anyone who turned in a coronavirus sufferer.
The city of Qianjiang, by contrast, offered the same amount of money to any resident who came in voluntarily and tested positive.
Some measures made Western experts queasy. It is difficult to imagine Americans permitting a family member with a fever to be dragged to an isolation ward where visitors are not permitted.
“A lot of people’s rights were violated,” Dr. Borio said.
Voluntary approaches, like explaining to patients that they will be keeping family and friends safe, are more likely to work in the West, she added.
A US Secret Service employee has tested positive for coronavirus
From CNN’s Geneva Sands
A United States Secret Service employee has tested positive for coronavirus, the agency said in a statement. It said the employee, who is not being further identified, is currently in quarantine.
Here’s what else the Secret Service said:
“The Secret Service has conducted a comprehensive contact trace assessment and determined that the employee has not had contact with any Secret Service employee or protectee for nearly three weeks,” the agency said.
“The Secret Service is committed to protecting the health and safety of its employees, its protectees, and the public. Accordingly, the agency continues to follow all guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and continues to communicate those updates to the workforce.”
Top infectious disease expert on Trump: “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down”
From CNN Health’s Arman Azad
America’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has described the challenges of working with the Trump administration during the coronavirus pandemic.
Asked how he responds to falsehoods from the President during news conferences, Fauci said, “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down."
“OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time,” Fauci said, according to an interview published by the journal Science.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci has advised six presidents and has played a central role in the White House’s coronavirus task force.
“I’m sort of exhausted,” Fauci said in the interview. “But other than that, I’m good. I mean, I’m not, to my knowledge, coronavirus infected. To my knowledge, I haven’t been fired.”
Fauci said he and the President “disagree on some things.” But he described Trump as responsive, saying: “He goes his own way. He has his own style. But on substantive issues, he does listen to what I say.”
Virus timeline: Fauci was asked about some of Trump’s comments, including his assertion that China should have told US officials about the coronavirus three months sooner. That would have been around September, and there is no evidence Chinese officials were aware of the virus at that time.
“It just doesn’t comport with facts,” said Jon Cohen, the interviewer.
“I know, but what do you want me to do?” Fauci replied. “I mean, seriously Jon, let’s get real. What do you want me to do?”
Terminology: Fauci also said he had never used the term “China virus.” Asked if he ever would, Fauci responded, “No.”
TRACE THE CONTACTS
Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is essential, experts said. At the peak of its epidemic, Wuhan had 18,000 people tracking down individuals who had come in contact with the infected.
At the moment, the health departments of some American counties lack the manpower to trace even syphilis or tuberculosis, let alone scores of casual contacts of someone infected with the coronavirus.
Dr. Borio suggested that young Americans could use their social networks to “do their own contact tracing.” Social media also is used in Asia, but in different ways.
China’s strategy is quite intrusive: To use the subway in some cities, citizens must download an app that rates how great a health risk they are. South Korean apps tell users exactly where infected people have traveled.
When he lectured at a Singapore university, Dr. Heymann said, dozens of students were in the room. But just before he began class, they were photographed to record where everyone sat.
“That way, if someone turns up infected later, you can find out who sat near them,” Dr. Heymann said. “That’s really clever.”
Contacts generally must remain home for 14 days and report their temperatures twice a day.
MAKE MASKS UBUQUITIOUS
American experts have divided opinions about masks, but those who have worked in Asia see their value.
There is very little data showing that flat surgical masks protect healthy individuals from disease. Nonetheless, Asian countries generally make it mandatory that people wear them. In China, the police even used drones to chase individuals down streets, ordering them to go home and mask up.
The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology, experts explained.
All experts agree that the sick must wear masks to keep in their coughs. But if a mask indicates that the wearer is sick, many people will be reluctant to wear one. If everyone is required to wear masks, the sick automatically have one on and there is no stigma attached.
Also, experts emphasized, Americans should be taught to take seriously admonitions to stop shaking hands and hugging. The “W.H.O. elbow bump” may look funny, but it’s a legitimate technique for preventing infection.
“In Asia, where they went through SARS, people understand the danger,” Dr. Heymann said. “It’s instilled in the population that you’ve got to do the right thing.”
PRESERVE VITAL SERVICES
Federal intervention is necessary for some vital aspects of life during a pandemic.
Only the federal government can enforce interstate commerce laws to ensure that food, water, electricity, gas, phone lines and other basic needs keep flowing across state lines to cities and suburbs.
Mr. Trump has said he could compel companies to prioritize making ventilators, masks and other needed goods. Some have volunteered; the Hanes underwear company, for example, will use its cotton to make masks for hospital workers.
He also has the military; the Navy is committing two hospital ships to the fight. And Mr. Trump can call up the National Guard. As of Saturday evening, more than 6,500 National Guard members already are assisting in the coronavirus response in 38 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.
High-level decisions like these must be made quickly, experts said.
“Many Western political leaders are behaving as though they are on a tightrope,” said Dr. David Nabarro, a W.H.O. special envoy on Covid-19 and a veteran of fights against SARS, Ebola and cholera.
“But there is no choice. We must do all in our power to fight this,” he added. “I sense that most people — and certainly those in business — get it. They would prefer to take the bitter medicine at once and contain outbreaks as they start rather than gamble with uncertainty.”
PRODUCE VENTILATORS AND OXYGEN
The roughly 175,000 ventilators in all American hospitals and the national stockpile are expected to be far fewer than are needed to handle a surge of patients desperate for breath.
The machines pump air and oxygen into the lungs, but they normally cost $25,000 or more each, and neither individual hospitals nor the federal emergency stockpile has ever had enough on hand to handle the number of pneumonia patients that this pandemic is expected to produce.
New York, for example, has found about 6,000 ventilators for purchase around the world, Governor Cuomo said. He estimated the state would need about 30,000.
The manufacturers, including a dozen in the United States, say there is no easy way to ramp up production quickly. But it is possible other manufacturers, including aerospace and automobile companies, could be enlisted to do so.
Ventilators are basically air pumps with motors controlled by circuits that make them act like lungs: the pump pushes air into the patient, then stops so the weight of the chest can push the air back out.
Automobiles and airplanes contain many small pumps, like those for oil, water and air-conditioning fluid, that might be modified to act as basic, stripped-down ventilators. On Sunday, Mr. Trump tweeted that Ford and General Motors had been “given the go-ahead” to produce ventilators.
Providers, meanwhile, are scrambling for alternatives.
Canadian nurses are disseminating a 2006 paper describing how one ventilator can be modified to treat four patients simultaneously. Inventors have proposed combining C-PAP machines, which many apnea sufferers own, and oxygen tanks to improvise a ventilator.
The United States must also work to increase its supply of piped and tanked oxygen, Dr. Aylward said.
One of the lessons of China, he noted, was that many Covid-19 patients who would normally have been intubated and on ventilators managed to survive with oxygen alone.
RETROFIT HOSPITALS
Hospitals in the United States have taken some measures to handle surges of patients, such as stopping elective surgery and setting up isolation rooms.
To protect bedridden long-term patients, nursing homes and hospitals also should immediately stop admitting visitors and do constant health checks on their staffs, said Dr. James LeDuc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
The national stockpile does contain some prepackaged military field hospitals, but they are not expected to be nearly enough for a big surge.
In Wuhan, the Chinese government famously built two new hospitals in two weeks. All other hospitals were divided: 48 were designated to handle 10,000 serious or critical coronavirus patients, while others were restricted to handling emergencies like heart attacks and births.
Wherever that was impractical, hospitals were divided into “clean” and “dirty” zones, and the medical teams did not cross over. Walls to isolate whole wards were built, and — as in Ebola wards — doctors went in one end of the room wearing protective gear and left by the other end, where they de-gowned under the eyes of a nurse to prevent infection.
More than 154 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean are out of school due to coronavirus
From CNN’s Hira Humayun in Atlanta
More than 154 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean are temporarily out of school due to the coronavirus outbreak, according to the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
That’s about 95% of all kids who are enrolled.
Over the next few days and weeks, about 90% of early childhood centers, pre-primary, primary and secondary schools in the regions will be closed, according to the report.
And that percentage is quickly growing, UNICEF said.
“This situation, which could last longer than initially planned, increases the risk of permanent drop out, especially for the most vulnerable children,” UNICEF’s statement reads.
According to Bernt Aasen, UNICEF’s Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, this is an “unprecedented educational crisis in the recent history of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
"Never have so many schools been closed at the same time. The expansion of the coronavirus Covid-19 will leave most boys and girls out of school in the coming weeks.
"If school closure is further extended, there is a great risk that children fall behind in their learning and we fear that the most vulnerable students will never return to school. It is vital that they do not stop learning from home.”
Children in many countries around the world have also been told to stay home, potentially putting their education and psychological well-being at risk.
DECIDE WHEN TO CLOSE SCHOOLS
As of Saturday, schools in 45 states were closed entirely, but that is a decision that divided experts.
“Closing all schools may not make sense unless there is documented widespread community transmission, which we’re not seeing in most of the country,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former C.D.C. director under President Barack Obama.
It is unclear how much children spread coronavirus. They very seldom get sick enough to be hospitalized, which is not true of flu. Current testing cannot tell whether most do not even become infected.
In China, Dr. Aylward said, he asked all of the doctors he spoke to whether they had seen any family clusters in which a child was the first to be infected. No one had, he said, which astonished him.
That leaves a quandary. Closing schools is a normal part of social distancing; after all, schools are the workplaces for many adults, too. And when the disease is clearly spreading within an individual school, it must close.
But closing whole school districts can seriously disrupt a city’s ability to fight an outbreak. With their children stuck at home, nurses, doctors, police officers and other emergency medical workers cannot come to work.
Also, many children in low-income families depend on the meals they eat at schools.
Cities that close all schools are creating special “hub schools” for the children of essential workers. In Ohio, the governor has told school bus drivers to deliver hot meals to children who normally got them at school.
RECRUIT VOLUNTEERS
China’s effort succeeded, experts said, in part because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The government declared a “people’s war” and rolled out a “Fight On, Wuhan! Fight On, China!” campaign.
It made inspirational films that combined airline ads with 1940s-style wartime propaganda. The ads were somewhat corny, but they rallied the public.
Many people idled by the lockdowns stepped up to act as fever checkers, contact tracers, hospital construction workers, food deliverers, even babysitters for the children of first responders, or as crematory workers.
With training, volunteers were able to do some ground-level but crucial medical tasks, such as basic nursing, lab technician work or making sure that hospital rooms were correctly decontaminated.
Americans often step forward to help neighbors affected by hurricanes and floods; many will no doubt do so in this outbreak, but they will need training in how not to fall ill and add to the problem.
“In my experience, success is dependent on how much the public is informed and participates,” Admiral Ziemer said. “This truly is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation.”
PRIORITIZE THE TREATMENTS
Clinicians in China, Italy and France have thrown virtually everything they had in hospital pharmacies into the fight, and at least two possibilities have emerged that might save patients: the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and the antiviral remdesivir, which has no licensed use.
There is not proof yet that any of these are effective against the virus. China registered more than 200 clinical trials, including several involving those treatments, but investigators ran out of patients in critical condition to enroll. Italy and France have trials underway, and hospitals in New York are writing trial protocols now.
One worry for trial leaders is that chloroquine has been given so much publicity that patients may refuse to be “randomized” and accept a 50 percent chance of being given a placebo.
If any drug works on critical cases, it might be possible to use small doses as a prophylactic to prevent infection.
An alternative is to harvest protective antibodies from the blood of people who have survived the illness, said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
The purified blood serum — called immunoglobulin — could possibly be used in small amounts to protect emergency medical workers, too.
“Unfortunately, the first wave won’t benefit from this,” Dr. Hotez said. “We need to wait until we have enough survivors.”
FIND A VACCINE
The ultimate hope is to have a vaccine that will protect everyone, and many companies and governments have already rushed the design of candidate vaccines. But as Dr. Fauci has explained multiple times, testing those candidate vaccines for safety and effectiveness takes time.
The process will take at least a year, even if nothing goes wrong. The roadblock, vaccine experts explained, is not bureaucratic. It is that the human immune system takes weeks to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take weeks to appear.
After extensive animal testing, vaccines are normally given to about 50 healthy human volunteers to see if they cause any unexpected side effects and to measure what dose produces enough antibodies to be considered protective.
If that goes well, the trial enrolls hundreds or thousands of volunteers in an area where the virus is circulating. Half get the vaccine, the rest do not — and the investigators wait. If the vaccinated half do not get the disease, the green light for production is finally given.
In the past, some experimental vaccines have produced serious side effects, like Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can paralyze and kill. A greater danger, experts said, is that some experimental vaccines, paradoxically, cause “immune enhancement,” meaning they make it more likely, not less, that recipients will get a disease. That would be a disaster.
One candidate coronavirus vaccine Dr. Hotez invented 10 years ago in the wake of SARS, he said, had to be abandoned when it appeared to make mice more likely to die from pneumonia when they were experimentally infected with the virus.
In theory, the testing process could be sped up with “challenge trials,” in which healthy volunteers get the vaccine and then are deliberately infected. But that is ethically fraught when there is no cure for Covid-19. Even some healthy young people have died from this virus.
REACH OUT TO OTHER NATIONS
Wealthy nations need to remember that, as much as they are struggling with the virus, poorer countries will have a far harder time and need help.
Also, the Asian nations that have contained the virus could offer expertise — and desperately needed equipment. Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba, recently offered large shipments of masks and testing kits to the United States.
Wealthy nations ignored the daily warnings from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, that far more aggressive efforts at isolation and contact tracing were urgently needed to stop the virus.
“Middle income and poorer nations are following the advice of international organizations while the most advanced nations find it so hard to implement it,” Dr. Nabarro said. “That must change.”
In declaring the coronavirus a pandemic, Dr. Tedros called for countries to learn from one another’s successes, act with unity and help protect one another against a threat to people of every nationality.
“Let’s all look out for each other,” he said.
China’s Top Envoy to U.S. Breaks With Foreign Ministry (10:15 a.m. HK)
China’s ambassador to the U.S. reaffirmed his opposition to promoting theories that the virus that causes Covid-19 originated in an American military lab, in an unusual break with the country’s foreign ministry.
Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai said in an interview with “Axios on HBO” that he stood by his Feb. 9 statement that it would be “crazy” to spread such theories. Since his original remarks, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing has repeatedly posted statements speculating about a possible U.S. origin for the virus, which was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
Cui’s comments represent a sharp public rebuke to Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who has publicly questioned whether the virus originated in China and even touted the idea that it may have been introduced by U.S. Army athletes.
New Zealand Citizens to Self-Isolate (9:03 a.m. HK)
New Zealand will go into a nationwide lockdown within two days as the government takes radical steps to limit the spread of coronavirus.
Everyone will be required to go into self-isolation, all non-essential businesses will close and schools will be shut, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Monday in Wellington. These measures, which will remain in place for at least four weeks, are aimed at breaking the chain of community transmission, she said.
But were they testing all the children? We already know most children are asymptomatic which is what makes it especially dangerous for everyone that child comes in contact.
I have no issues with calling it Wuhan Virus. It shouldn’t be Chinese virus or China virus.
Hong Kong appeared to have the coronavirus under control, then it let its guard down
Analysis by CNN’s James Griffiths
Only a week ago, Hong Kong seemed like a model for how to contain the novel coronavirus, with a relatively small number of cases despite months of being on the front lines of the outbreak.
That was in large part thanks to action taken early on, while cases were spreading across mainland China, to implement measures that are now familiar throughout the world: virus mapping, social distancing, intensive hand-washing, and wearing masks and other protective clothing.
Hong Kong was proof that these measures worked, with the city of 7.5 million only reporting some 150 cases at the start of March, even as the number of infections spiked in other East Asian territories like South Korea and Japan, and spread rapidly across Europe and North America.
Increase in cases: Now, however, Hong Kong is providing a very different object lesson – what happens when you let your guard down too soon. The number of confirmed cases has almost doubled in the past week, with many imported from overseas, as Hong Kong residents who had left – either to work or study abroad, or to seek safety when the city seemed destined for a major outbreak earlier this year – return, bringing the virus back with them.
This is a pattern playing out across parts of Asia – mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan – that were among the first to tackle the outbreak. All are now introducing new measures as a renewed wave of cases begins to crest.
In it for the long haul: Compared to major cities in the West, like London or New York, residents in Hong Kong can sometimes feel as if they’re living in the future. Many of the measures enacted in the Asian metropolis back in February are now being rolled out in European and American cities.
But this latest lesson may be a bitter pill to swallow, as it indicates that quarantines and social distancing must continue well beyond the initial wave of cases, if another round of infections is to be avoided.
For those just going into lockdown, that could mean they’re in for the long haul.
Australia rolls out tough new measures to combat coronavirus spread
From Hilary Whiteman in Brisbane
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Monday that “2020 will be the toughest year of our lives,” as the country rolled out new, tougher measures to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.
Speaking in Parliament, Morrison called on Australians to stand up to the “unprecedented challenge” of the global health crisis.
At midday Monday, businesses across Australia followed the government’s orders to shut down bars, restaurants, gyms, places of worship and other venues where people traditionally congregate.
“Life is changing in Australia for every Australian and life is going to continue to change,” he said. “For many young and old, 2020 will be the toughest year of our lives.”
Morrison’s remarks came as long queues were seen outside Centrelink offices around the country, where people were lined up to apply for social services payouts.
“As Australia works to flatten the curve and slow this virus, we also face an immense economic challenge…this is the biggest economic shock our nation has faced in generations,” Morrison said.
The Australian government website where residents sign up for benefits and jobseekers’ allowance crashed Monday, Government Services Minister Stuart Roberts said.
Roberts said a distributed denial of service (DDOS) alarm was triggered on the MyGov site when 95,000 users logged on at the same time just after 9 a.m., Monday morning. The system was built for 55,000 concurrent users, he said, adding that the government is examining ways to expand the system’s capacity.
A statement from the Australian Cyber Security Centre said the government is currently investigating the outage but has no evidence to suggest it was caused by malicious cyber activity.
As of Monday, Australia reported 1,479 confirmed cases and seven deaths from the novel coronavirus, according to the country’s Department of Health.
New Delhi and major Indian cities are going into lockdown until March 31
From CNN’s Esha Mitra in New Delhi
The Indian capital New Delhi is among 75 districts in the country that will go into lockdown until March 31 in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The measures extend an initial 14-hour lockdown, which came into effect on Sunday. They also include major cities, such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Kolkata, which means millions of workers in the technology and financial sectors will be forced to work from home for the rest of the month.
Only essential services will be operational in these districts, according to the official Press Information Bureau of India.
All shops, commercial establishments, factories, workshops, offices, markets and places of worship will be closed, and interstate buses and metros will be suspended.
Several districts – including the financial capital of Mumbai – are now enforcing a pre-existing law that makes it a punishable offence for four or more people to gather.
Several states have gone into complete lockdown.
In the northern state of Punjab, the chief minister announced that except for essential services, the entire state will be under a lockdown until March 31. The state has confirmed more than 20 coronavirus cases, including one death.
The entire state of Uttarakhand – which has only reported three confirmed cases – announced a non-essential services lockdown until March 31.
“Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said in a tweet.
India has reported 341 infections and five deaths from the coronavirus, according to the World Health Organization.
Op-ed: Thank the health-care, frontline workers for their service too
In my 30-plus years as a financial journalist, I have lived through the ’90s Asian financial crisis, the tech dot-com crash, the 9/11 terrorist attack, and the 2008 financial crisis. Now, however, America is faced with something entirely different. We are at war with a pandemic, and the people we rely on most — our health-care and frontline workers — are unmatched.
I am a military service and war veteran. People who know I have served go out of their way to thank me for my service and I appreciate their regard every time.
Now, however, I call on all of you to thank every health-care worker and all frontline workers (pharmacy, grocery, take-out, gasoline, etc.) to thank them for their service. They are likely more frightened than you are of the virus and its fallout on their financial lives. These people are risking their personal health — and the health of the people they love — for you.
Can we all, please, as Americans, listen to the young girl crying when she thanks me for thanking her for her take-out service? It took me a long time to appreciate people thanking me for my military service, and I was never on the front lines like these people are.
We are America. Let us come together and get through this. Thank the people caring for you and keeping you safe.
–Terri Cullen
CNBC
Cisco commits $225 million in fight against coronavirus as Silicon Valley initiates investment blitz
A technology giant is committing $225 million to assist in efforts aimed at combating the coronavirus while the rest of Silicon Valley initiates an investment blitz to help in the fight.
Cisco, a company that focuses on crafting telecommunications equipment and networking hardware, among other items, is putting up the massive investment, according to a blog post that was written by its CEO, Chuck Robbins Sunday night.
NYSE readies itself for first ever all-electronic trading day
The Securities and Exchange Commission published rule changes on Saturday that allow the New York Stock Exchange to conduct all-electronic trading.
On Monday, the first day the trading floor will be closed, the NYSE opening at 9:30 a.m. ET should happen immediately for almost all stocks, subject to certain trading bands. Existing circuit breakers that would halt trading briefly should the S&P 500 decline by 7%, 13% and 20% will continue to be in effect.
The SEC noted the rule filings were temporary until May 15 or sooner if the trading floor reopens.
CNBC
Fight against the pandemic is like ‘the fog of war,’ says Fauci
The battle against the coronavirus pandemic is “almost like the fog of war,” said renowned top U.S. health official Anthony Fauci in an interview with Science magazine.
“After the war is over, you then look back and say, wow, this plan, as great as it was, didn’t quite work once they started that throwing hand grenades at us,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Testing for the coronavirus across the U.S. has been criticized as unacceptably inadequate and slow. New York state now has more coronavirus cases than France or South Korea as the number of confirmed infections soared to 15,168, according to new data released by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Sunday.
“Why were we not able to mobilize on a broader scale? But I don’t think we can do that right now. I think it’s premature. We really need to look forward,” Fauci said in the interview, adding that testing is one issue that needs to be reexamined.
CNBC
[Kind of cryptic, Fauci. ]
This virus is ravaging rich countries. What happens when it hits the poor ones?
Nesrine Malik
Horror over the west’s failure to contain Covid-19 will pale by comparison if it sweeps the developing world
Though Africa has fewer coronavirus cases and a slower rate of infection than the UK, many countries in the continent have passed dramatically more extreme measures to prevent its spread than Britain has. In my birth country of Sudan, after only one case and one death was registered, all schools and universities were shut down. Several other nations, such as Egypt, have taken the ultimate precaution and closed their airports.
There is no denial here, no mixed messaging, and no unfounded promise of how soon we will send the virus packing.
The tough and timely action is borne less out of political maturity than it is bitter experience, and an awareness that already overburdened public healthcare systems cannot sustain an onslaught. The ebola epidemic of 2014 is still fresh in the mind in sub-Saharan African countries; it was an experience that showed prevention and containment are the only hope of fending off thousands of deaths.
It is the recurring theme of how the pandemic has played out so far. The poor, the uninsured, the disenfranchised, the information-poor and the less mobile are sitting ducks
If we are concerned about the failure to contain the virus in western Europe and the US, multiples of that horror await in the developing world. With few means of medical intervention, and several other risk factors such as malnutrition, high population densities, communal living and lack of access to water and washing facilities, the rates of mortality could dwarf what has been seen so far in the west. And economically, the virus risks ushering in an ice age. There are no war chests, no stimulus packages, no insurance payouts.
There is little data about the impact in Africa of previous pandemics such as the 1918-19 Spanish flu (except from South Africa where, because of troop movements, 6% of the population perished). But we do have the experience of economically similar south Asian countries to go by. It is estimated that up to 30% of the entire fatal toll of the Spanish flu came from a single country, India. And in Africa it appears that the countries that suffered the highest casualties were those most exposed to global flows of people and capital – the ports or thoroughfares for troops on the move, and for sea and land labour.
There is something painfully predictable about how coronavirus was introduced to the continent. Well-off travellers to the rest of the world returned from holidays and business trips carrying the virus, as did infected tourists. In Egypt, the first cases of Covid-19 appear to be linked to one cruise ship, where locals who served the tourists contracted the disease.
The spread of the virus on the continent sits in the crosscurrents of travel and financial flows that expose African countries to the sharp end of globalisation – one where the flow of people is encouraged into the continent for business and tourism, and severely restricted out of the continent even for the wealthy and well connected.
It is the recurring theme of how the pandemic has played out so far. The poor, the uninsured, the disenfranchised, the information-poor and the less mobile are sitting ducks. Many western economies, including the US and the UK, have slowly pushed these people to the margins, while restricting employment benefits such as holiday pay, sick leave, and private insurance to an increasingly exclusive class. One of the reasons the British and US governments have been so slow to provide free testing, medical care and bailouts for those who’ve lost work is that these inequalities are now hardwired into the system. They cannot be undone overnight even when lives depend on it.
The global economy is set up in much the same way, with winners who hoard the spoils, and losers who scratch around for the leftovers. If wealthy single countries cannot scramble to save their own people, there is no hope for any effort to extend help to countries with a fraction of the resources.
But here is the tragic catch for those who think that this structural imbalance is not our problem. In this instance, national and international inequalities cannot persist without everyone losing. The realisation is just beginning to dawn upon lawmakers that the rich cannot be barricaded against the poor, no matter how high the barriers to the fortress are. Limiting the spread of the virus entails ensuring that everyone in the pool, be it local or global, is given the ability to test, self-isolate if need be, and receive treatment.
Yes, to some extent this is a utopian aspiration. But it is also essentially pragmatic. We cannot extol the virtues of small government and global societies without grasping that the risk to the majority cannot be halted from spreading: viruses do not distinguish between classes and nationalities.
Just as work and public life cannot be shuttered for ever, borders cannot be closed indefinitely. African countries are moving fast against coronavirus, well aware that they are on their own. But barring a miracle, or a pandemic Marshall plan by wealthier countries, if the virus explodes in poorer countries, the cataclysm will engulf everyone.
• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
Hong Kong will ban the entry of all non-residents to Hong Kong from 11.59pm Tuesday, for 14 days.
Hong Kong airport will also stop all transit flights.Anyone entering from Macau or Taiwan must undergo 14 days quarantine.
Chief executive Carrie Lam said the epidemic in Hong Kong has become more serious, and extra measures were needed.She warned people not to break the law.”For people who breach the quarantine orders we will tackle these cases severely,” she added.
Police have tracked down five people who absconded home quarantine. Another 36 are under investigation. (Guardian)