How Did They Do It?

China was better prepared to deal with the virus because it came out of their lab?

 China is an East Asian state and also the most populous country on earth with 1,439,323,776 people.
  China has jurisdiction over four direct-controlled municipalities (Chongqing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Beijing), 4 autonomous regions, and 22 provinces. It is one of the earliest civilizations on earth which emerged fertile basin of Huang He (the sixth longest river on earth) in the North plain of China. The regions political structure was based on dynasties or monarchies for centuries.

Is China Bigger than the United States?
No, the United States has a bigger total area than China due it’s the coastal waters off the American island territories and states. The United States occupies a total area of about 3.8 million square miles while China
has an area of approximately 3.7 million square miles. However, China has a bigger land area than the
United States. The Chinese land area is about 2.2% bigger than the United States (3.5 million square miles).
China has a land area of approximately 3.6 million square miles, and this land area doesn’t include numerous undisputed territories. Taiwan became a Chinese territory after ROC (Republic of China)
was defeated in the 1950 Chinese Civil War. 
The government of the ROC escaped leaving the people’s republic of China controlling Taiwan and numerous islands. China has two disputed territories which India including Arunachal Pradesh (34,749 sq. miles) in South Tibet and Aksai Chin (14,380 sq. miles) near Kashmir. If these territories were to be reunited with China, the Chinese land area would be 4% bigger than the U.S. The Chinese have undertaken numerous contentious projects of building in uninhabited islands which they claim in the South China Sea. Claiming the uninhabited islands can help China increase the size of their maritime area, but at the risk of political and
ecological destabilization.

Geography
The Chinese territory is quite diverse and vast ranging from the subtropical forests to the Taklamakan desert and Gobi desert in the northern parts of the country. China is separated from Central and Southern China by the Tian Shan, Pamir, Himalaya, and Karakoram mountain ranges. China has a 9,000miles long coastline along the Pacific Ocean, and it’s bounded by South China, East China, Bohai, and Yellow Seas. China is home to two of the longest rivers in the world; the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. The country is connected to the Eurasian Steppe via the Kazakh border. Mount Everest, the world’s highest point, is on the Nepalese-Sino border. The lowest point in China and the third lowest on earth is the dried bed of Lake Ayding in the Turfan Depression.

Climate
The Chinese climate is dominated by the wet monsoons and dry seasons that cause the pronounced temperature difference between summer and winter. The southern winds blowing from the coastal regions are moist and warm during summer. The northern winds from the high-altitude regions are dry and cold in winter. One of the main environmental issues affecting China is the expansion of its deserts like the Gobi Desert.
The Chinese climate differs for place to place due to the state’s complex topography. The climate ranges from the subarctic in the alpine and far north to the tropical in the south. Precipitation in the region is concentrated in warm months.

Countries like AustraliaNew Zealand and South Korea are among the few which managed to buck the trend and put a lid on the coronavirus outbreak, at least for now. Their success has boosted investor confidence and it’s showing in the strength of their currencies. With their economies re-opening again, their currencies have significantly jumped from earlier this year when the outbreak ravaged the Asia Pacific region. In contrast, many of their neighbors in the region are still struggling to control the pandemic.

“New Zealand and Australia have been very effective in controlling COVID-19 and are ready to restart their economies,” Kathy Lien, managing director of foreign exchange strategy at BK Asset Management, wrote in a note last Friday. “In Australia, AUD (the Australian dollar) soared despite weaker PMIs after Prime Minister Morrison said they are headed for a COVID safe economy,” she said. Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) is an economic indicator of how well the manufacturing sector is performing.
“The fact that these countries are ready to restart activity after effectively controlling COVID-19 (and not before) means that they are leaps and bounds ahead of the US in terms of economic recovery, which should be wildly positive for their currencies,” Lien said. 
“There is also a notion that Asia has controlled the virus more effectively than the US and Europe,” said Tapas Strickland, director of economics and markets at the National Australia Bank, in a Tuesday note on the recent strengthening of the Australian dollar. 
The U.S. has the most number of reported cases worldwide with at least 1,030,315 infections and 58,670 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data as of Tuesday morning. Spain, Italy, France and Germany are the other countries most badly-hit by the pandemic. Worldwide, there are more than three million confirmed cases, and at least 217,082 deaths, according to the data.  HERE!

In addition, Australia and New Zealand have many of their major export destinations emerging from lockdown sooner than the U.S. and much of Europe, ANZ Research’s Foreign Exchange Strategist, John Bromhead,
wrote in a Friday note.
China, the largest trading partner of both countries, has restarted production as reported cases slow to single-digit levels, with no new deaths for more than a week.      The first coronavirus cases were reported in the country in December.  Australia and New Zealand are in a relatively solid position. Both have strong virus containment, relatively  high shares of primary industries sheltered from the consumer-centric slowdowns,
and strong fiscal responses,” Bromhead wrote. 

Australian Dollar
The population of Australia is estimated to be 25,500,700 as of 14 September 2019. Australia is the 52nd most populous country in the world and the most populous Oceanian country. The Australian dollar was one of the region’s worst-performing currencies last year, on the back of concerns over its slowing economy and that of China’s – its largest trading partner. At the start of 2020, it was as high as $0.70 against the U.S. dollar — but plunged to a low of $0.5798 in mid-March as virus concerns took hold. Since then, it has surged 11.4% and last changed hands at $0.6460. Australia acted swiftly when the outbreak surfaced in the country, closing off its borders and imposing movement restrictions. This week, its daily new cases came down to single digits, and Australia said it will start easing some restrictions. The country has a total of 6,721 cases and 83 deaths as of April 27, according to Hopkins’s data.

New Zealand Dollar
Whereas the Population in New Zealand is 4.48 million At around mid-March, New Zealand’s currency was
at a low of $0.5666. It has since gained about 6.4% to above the $0.60 level. The country lowered its alert level on Monday, allowing gatherings of up to 10 people and permitting businesses to reopen, though they cannot physically interact with customers.
The country had previously raised its alert level to the highest alert level, which meant no gatherings were allowed and all non-essential businesses to close. New Zealand has managed to keep numbers low compared
to the rest of the region, after decisively locking down the country soon after the first cases surfaced.
It recorded 1,472 confirmed cases, and 19 deaths as of April 27, according to Johns Hopkins. 

South Korean won
And in 2019 the population of South Korea is 53 732 586 people. From initially being Asia’s worst-hit country outside China, South Korea is now hailed as a role model for successfully containing the outbreak, after it instituted widespread testing and intensive contact tracing. It has since eased restrictions, with the situation
in the country a stark contrast to the rest of the world: People have started going out to malls and restaurants again, and are returning to work. South Korea’s Kospi index has bounced back — and so has its currency. 
The Korean won weakened to levels above 1,270 in early March, but strengthened almost 5% by around mid-April as cases lessened. U.S. consumer confidence plunged in April as millions lost their jobs, with an index
that monitors attitudes about current business and work conditions dropping by the largest amount on record.
The Conference Board said Tuesday that its confidence index tumbled to a reading of 86.9, down from 118.8 in March. The index is composed of consumers’ assessment of present conditions and expectations about the future. 
The present conditions index slumped from 166.7, to 76.4, a 90-point drop that was the largest on record.
The expectations index, based on the future outlook, improved slightly from 86.8 in March to 93.8 in April.
The numbers in the present conditions index “reflects the sharp contraction in economic activity and surge in unemployment claims,” said Lynn Franco, senior director of economic indicators at the Conference Board.
 
Oxford University Professor Finds The New Covid-19 Vaccine
By September

and Explains The Background!

In the global race to find a vaccine, Oxford University just jumped way ahead of the pack.
Human testing is underway, and scientists say they’re hopeful a coronavirus vaccine will be widely available by September. Technology the lab had already developed in previous work on inoculations for other viruses, including a close relative of COVID-19, gave it a head start.  
“Well personally, I have a high degree of confidence about this vaccine, because it’ s technology
that I’ve used before,” said Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at the university.
The vaccine takes the coronavirus’ genetic material and injects it into a common cold virus that has been neutralized so it cannot spread in people. The modified virus will mimic COVID-19, triggering the immune system to fight off the imposter and providing protection against the real thing. The experimental vaccine has reportedly worked in protecting rhesus macaque monkeys that were exposed to heavy quantities of COVID-19.
In the human trials, 550 participants are given the vaccine, and another 550 receive a placebo.
“It feels like finally, I am able to do something…” said Oxford scientist and trial volunteer Elisa Granato. 
“This was a way for me to contribute to the cause.”
Wasting no time, the largest drug maker in the world, based in India, will start producing millions of the Oxford vaccines by next month, even before they’ve been proven to work.
Oxford scientists say a vaccine may be widely available by September.

Parents Who Both Had Coronavirus Hold Twin Sons for First Time Nearly 3 Weeks After Birth!!

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The Pandemic: 102 Years Later

How the Coronavirus of 2020 compare to the 1918 Spanish Flu ?

The The Spanish Flu pandemic started in a bang…and ended in a whimper. There are several theories on what caused it to come to an end, but the truth is, they don’t really know. It just did.  Basically, like a flu bug today, after a few months it ran it’s course. There were precautions being made, but the pandemic was so bad it was very hard to quarantine people who had it. There was no medicine, my Grandma had it and said they were given aspirin, a new drug for pain and whiskey for the cough (the forerunner of Nyquil). It was not eradicated with drugs or medicine, it just came to a natural end, as the virus began to run out of new hosts. The fact is,
if a virus kills too many people or what ever host it is in, it will die off because it has nowhere to go.
The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic. Lasting almost 36 months from January 1918 to December 1920,  it infected 500 million people – about a
third of the world’s population at the time. The death toll was estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
  The Influenza Pandemic of 1918. It infected 28% of all Americans, with an estimated 675,000 Americans dying of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy   
To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Newspapers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the name Spanish flu. Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify with certainty the pandemic’s geographic origin, with varying views as to its location.
https://www.historyhit.com/
facts-about-the-deadly-1918-flu-epidemic/
  
Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill the very young and the very old, with a higher survival rate
for those in between, but the Spanish flu pandemic resulted in a higher than expected mortality rate for young adults. Scientists offer several possible explanations for the high mortality rate of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Some analyses have shown the virus to be particularly deadly because it triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults. In contrast, a 2007 analysis of medical journals from the period of the pandemic found that the viral infection was no more aggressive than previous influenza strains. Instead, malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene promoted bacterial superinfection.
This superinfection killed most of the victims, typically after a somewhat prolonged death bed. Despite its name, historical and epidemiological data cannot identify the geographic origin of the Spanish flu. The origin of the  “Spanish flu”  name stems from the pandemic’s spread to Spain from France in November 1918.  Spain was not involved in the war, having remained neutral, and had not imposed wartime censorship. Newspapers were therefore free to report the epidemic’s effects, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these widely-spread stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit.

READ MORE: See all pandemic  coverage here. What Is the Flu? Influenza, or flu, is a virus that attacks
the respiratory system. The flu virus is highly contagious: When an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks, respiratory droplets are generated and transmitted into the air, and can then can be inhaled by anyone nearby. Additionally, a person who touches something with the virus on it and then touches his or her mouth, eyes or nose can become infected. Did you know? During the flu pandemic of 1918, the New York City health commissioner tried to slow the transmission of the flu by ordering businesses to open and close on staggered shifts to avoid overcrowding on the subways. Flu outbreaks happen every year and vary in severity, depending in part on what type of virus is spreading. (Flu viruses can rapidly mutate.)

HISTORY This Week podcast:  The Deadliest Pandemic in Modern History

In the United States, “flu season” generally runs from late fall into spring. In a typical year, more than
200,000 Americans are hospitalized for flu-related complications, and over the past three decades, there have been some 3,000 to 49,000 flu-related U.S. deaths annually,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Young children, people over age 65, pregnant women and people with certain medical conditions, such as asthma, diabetes or heart disease, face a higher risk of flu-related complications, including pneumonia, ear and sinus infections and bronchitis. A flu pandemic, such as the one in 1918, occurs when an especially virulent new influenza strain for which there’s little or no immunity appears and spreads quickly from person to person around the globe. Spanish Flu Symptoms The first wave of the 1918 pandemic occurred in the spring and was generally mild. The sick, who experienced such typical flu symptoms as chills, fever and fatigue, usually recovered after several days, and the number of reported deaths was low. However, a second, highly contagious wave of influenza appeared with a vengeance in the fall of that same year. Victims died within hours or days of developing symptoms, their skin turning blue and their lungs filling with fluid that caused them to suffocate.
In just one year, 1918, the average life expectancy in America plummeted by a dozen years.
> What Caused the Spanish Flu?
It’s unknown exactly where the particular strain of influenza that caused the pandemic came from; however, the 1918 flu was first observed in Europe, America and areas of Asia before spreading to almost every other part of the planet within a matter of months. Despite the fact that the 1918 flu wasn’t isolated to one place, it became known around the world as the Spanish flu, as Spain was hit hard by the disease and was not subject to the wartime news blackouts that affected other European countries. (Even Spain’s king, Alfonso XIII, reportedly contracted the flu.) The Spanish Flu Was Deadlier Than WWI | History

One unusual aspect of the 1918 flu was that it struck down many previously healthy, young people—a group normally resistant to this type of infectious illness—including a number of  World War I servicemen.  In fact, more U.S. soldiers died from the 1918 flu than were killed in battle during the war. Forty percent of the U.S. Navy was hit with the flu, while 36 percent of the Army became ill, and troops moving around the world in crowded ships and trains helped to spread the killer virus. Although the death toll attributed to the Spanish flu is often estimated at 20 million to 50 million victims worldwide, other estimates run as high as
 100 million victims—around 3 percent of the world’s population.
 The exact numbers are impossible to know due to a lack of medical record-keeping in many places.
What is known, however, is that few locations were immune to the 1918 flu—in America, victims ranged from residents of major cities to those of remote Alaskan communities. Even President Woodrow Wilson reportedly contracted the flu in early 1919 while negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I.
  
Why Was The Spanish Flu Called The Spanish Flu?
The Spanish Flu did not originate in Spain, though news coverage of it did. During World War I,
Spain was a neutral country with a free media that covered the outbreak from the start, first reporting on it in Madrid in late May of 1918. Meanwhile, Allied countries and the Central Powers had wartime censors who covered up news of the flu to keep morale high. Because Spanish news sources were the only ones reporting on the flu, many believed it originated there (the Spanish, meanwhile, believed the virus came from France and
called it the “French Flu.”)

READ MORE: Why Was It Called the ‘Spanish Flu?’  

Where Did The Spanish Flu Come From? Scientists still do not know for sure where the Spanish Flu originated, though theories point to France, China, Britain, or the United States, where the first known case was reported at Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas, on March 11, 1918. Some believe infected soldiers spread the disease to other military camps across the country, then brought it overseas. In March 1918, 84,000 American soldiers headed across the Atlantic and were followed by 118,000 more the following month.

Why the 1918 Spanish Flu Probably Didn’t Originate in Spain

Photos: Innovative Ways People Tried to Protect Themselves From the Flu  
Fighting the Spanish Flu When the 1918 flu hit, doctors and scientists were unsure what
caused it or how to treat it. Unlike today, there were no effective vaccines or antivirals, drugs that treat the flu. (The first licensed flu vaccine appeared in America in the 1940s.) By the following decade, vaccine manufacturers could routinely produce vaccines that would help control and prevent future pandemics. Complicating matters was the fact that World War I had left parts of America with a shortage of physicians and other health workers. And of the available medical personnel in the U.S., many came down with the flu.
Additionally, hospitals in some areas were so overloaded with flu patients that schools, private homes and
other buildings had to be converted into makeshift hospitals, some of which were staffed by medical students. Officials in some communities imposed quarantines, ordered citizens to wear masks and shut down public places, including schools, churches and theaters. People were advised to avoid shaking hands and to stay indoors, libraries put a halt on lending books and regulations were passed banning spitting. According to The New York Times, during the pandemic, Boy Scouts in New York City approached people they’d seen spitting on the street and gave them cards that read: “You are in violation of the Sanitary Code.”

COVID cruises: Ships sailed on despite the coronavirus,
and thousands of people paid the price!!


Aspirin Poisoning and the Flu With no cure for the flu, many doctors prescribed medication that they felt would alleviate symptoms…including aspirin, which had been trademarked by Bayer in 1899—a patent that expired in 1917, meaning new companies were able to produce the drug during the Spanish Flu epidemic. Before the spike in deaths attributed to the Spanish Flu in 1918, the U.S. Surgeon General, Navy and the Journal of the American Medical Association had all recommended the use of aspirin. Medical professionals advised patients to take up to 30 grams per day, a dose now known to be toxic. (For comparison’s sake, the medical consensus today is that doses above four grams are unsafe.) Symptoms of aspirin poisoning include hyperventilation and pulmonary edema, or the buildup of fluid in the lungs, and it’s now believed that many of the October deaths were actually caused or hastened by aspirin poisoning.
The Flu Takes Heavy Toll on Society The flu took a heavy human toll, wiping out entire families and leaving countless widows and orphans in its wake. Funeral parlors were overwhelmed and bodies piled up. Many people had to dig graves for their own family members. The flu was also detrimental to the economy. In the United States, businesses were forced to shut down because so many employees were sick. Basic services such as mail delivery and garbage collection were hindered due to flu-stricken workers. In some places there weren’t enough farm workers to harvest crops. Even state and local health departments closed for business, hampering efforts to chronicle the spread of the 1918 flu and provide the public with answers about it.
READ MORE: Pandemics that Changed History  

How U.S. Cities Tried to Stop The 1918 Flu Pandemic A devastating second wave of the Spanish Flu hit American shores in the summer of 1918, as returning soldiers infected with the disease spread it to the general population—especially in densely-crowded cities. Without a vaccine or approved treatment plan, it fell to local mayors and healthy officials to improvise plans to safeguard the safety of their citizens. With pressure to appear patriotic at wartime and with a censored media downplaying the disease’s spread, many made tragic decisions. Philadelphia’s response was too little, too late. Dr. Wilmer Krusen, director of Public Health and Charities for the city, insisted mounting fatalities were not the “Spanish flu,” but rather just the normal flu. So on September 28, the city went forward with a Liberty Loan parade attended by tens of thousands of Philadelphians, spreading the disease like wildfire. In just 10 days, over 1,000 Philadelphians were dead, with another 200,000 sick. Only then did the city close saloons and theaters. By March 1919, over 15,000 citizens of Philadelphia had lost their lives. St. Louis, Missouri, was different: Schools and movie theaters closed and public gatherings were banned. Consequently, the peak mortality rate in St. Louis was just one-eighth of Philadelphia’s death rate during the peak of the pandemic. While Citizens in San Francisco were fined $5—a significant sum at the time—if they were caught in public without masks and charged with disturbing the peace.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=
Nurse+dies+from+COVID-19+days+before+retirement&FORM=HDRSC1
 
Spanish Flu Pandemic Ends By the summer of 1919, the flu pandemic came to an end,
as those that were infected either died or developed immunity. Almost 90 years later, in 2008, researchers announced they’d discovered what made the 1918 flu so deadly: A group of three genes enabled the virus to weaken a victim’s bronchial tubes and lungs and clear the way for bacterial pneumonia. Since 1918, there have been several other influenza pandemics, although none as deadly. A flu pandemic from 1957 to 1958 killed around 2 million people worldwide, including some 70,000 people in the United States, and a pandemic from 1968 to 1969 killed approximately 1 million people, including some 34,000 Americans. More than 12,000 Americans perished during the H1N1 (or “swine flu”) pandemic that occurred from 2009 to 2010. The novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is spreading around the world as countries race to find a cure for COVID 19 and citizens shelter in place in an attempt to avoid spreading the disease, which is particularly deadly because many carriers are asymptomatic for days before realizing they are infected. Each of these modern day pandemics brings renewed interest in and attention to the Spanish Flu, or “forgotten pandemic,” so-named because its spread was overshadowed by the deadliness of WWI and covered up by news blackouts and poor record-keeping.
Read More: Pandemics That Changed History  

Sources Salicylates and Pandemic Influenza Mortality, 1918–1919 Pharmacology,
Pathology, and Historic Evidence. Clinical Infectious Diseases.  
In 1918 Pandemic, Another Possible Killer: Aspirin.  The New York Times.  
How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America. Smithsonian Magazine. 
   What the Spanish Flu Debacle Can Teach Us About Coronavirus.  Politico.
Nurse dies from COVID-19 days before retirement 🙁  

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The COVID-19 Aftermath

What Economic Analyses of Past Pandemics Can Tell Us About!!!

A big contraction was followed by a bustling aftermath—but with notable negative
long-term effects as well. Total global confirmed cases have reached 2,954,106 At the current daily rate of growth, the number will pass 3 million early next week. Active cases reached 1,887,833 and Recovered cases reached 860,875. Global deaths reached 205.398. With Total cases in the United States have hit 983,229. Active cases were 819,023. Recovered cases hit 108.875, While Deaths also increased to 55,335
which is 2,000 + more than the previous day.

How Satellite Images Reveal the Global Impact of the Coronavirus…

The widely followed University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation forecast is that COVID-19 deaths in the United States will reach 67,641 on August 4. That is an increase from a forecast by the same organization of 60,308 just two weeks ago. However, with 52,400 Americans dead already, over the course of the next 13 weeks, total deaths would need to be only 15,241 for the institute’s figure to be correct. That means deaths per week would need to plummet by 1,722. It raises the issue of whether this model can possibly be accurate. Other models appear more likely to have plausible forecasts. The Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health model currently indicates that, without appropriate social distancing, by mid-May new cases per day could rise to 30,000. The current daily figure is about 18,000. Additionally, MIT’s model forecasts a rise in cases per day, based on social distancing, that would trigger another rapid rise in deaths as well. Taking into account the current death rate and ongoing increase in infections, the chance that only 15,000 people will die in the next 13 weeks is entirely implausible.

New York City Continues to Worsen: Why Some Die Others Don’t?
Cases in New York City numbered 150,473, which is 16% of all cases in the United States. Deaths stand at 11,544, or 22% of the nationwide figure. The number of deaths is growing so rapidly that the figure will reach 12,000 in two or three days. New York City is the 11th largest city in the world, with a metropolitan area population of 18,819,000, based on United Nations estimates. However, none of the larger cities in the world has case or death levels close to New York’s. Tokyo has the largest population of any city in the world at 37,400,068. It currently has 3,586 cases and only 19 reported deaths. Delhi has a population of 28,514,000, which makes it the second largest in the world. The Indian city has 2,514 cases and 53 deaths. Shanghai is the world’s third-largest city, with a population of 25,582,000. Cases counted in China’s largest city number 641, with a total of seven deaths. There is no single way to account for why New York’s case and death levels are tremendously higher than in the world’s other largest cities. Among the explanations is that some of these cities were “locked down” very early in the spread of COVID-19. The state of emergency put in place by Japan’s government may have slowed the spread of the disease in its large cities. Another cause of the tremendous difference in case count between New York and cities in developing nations, particularly India, is that governments outside the developed world do not have sophisticated methods to track and count cases.
Some States Still Have Extremely Few Cases ?

Seven states have total case counts below 1,000. Each is among the smallest states by population. In most cases, they are among the largest states based on square miles. Alaska has only 339 reported cases and nine deaths. Wyoming has only 473 cases and seven deaths. In Montana, there are 444 cases and 14 deaths. Hawaii has 601 cases and 13 deaths, while North Dakota has 748 cases and 15 deaths. In Vermont, 827 cases and 44 deaths were reported. And Maine has 965 cases and 47 deaths. None of these states has what has been termed “hot spots,” where there is a local explosion in the rate of cases reported by day. Based on that, their figures are unlikely to spike soon. Among these states are several counties that have no reported cases at all. They are geographically at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from a huge, densely populated city like New York. America Is Not Too Far From 1 Million Cases:
But When Will It End.

The United States has 927,150 COVID-19 cases, and that figure is rising by about 18,000 a day. Some experts believe case growth in America has peaked. However, at least one widely regarded model shows that new cases could increase to 30,000 a day. At either end of those forecasts, the date when America has a million cases is only a few days away.  

New York’s Death Tally Up Slightly Even as Pandemic Subsides!!!
(Bloomberg) — Daily coronavirus fatalities in New York rose slightly to 437, but Saturday marked the sixth straight day of deaths under 500 and hospitalizations dropped to the lowest point since the beginning of April, Governor Andrew Cuomo said. “Twenty-one days of hell but we are back to where we were,” Cuomo said of overall hospitalizations. Almost all indicators showed that the Covid-19 outbreak in New York, still the worst the U.S., was on the “decline,” the governor said. Deaths compared to the peak of fatalities of 799 on April 9.
New cases rose on Saturday by 10,553 compared to 8,130 on Friday, for a statewide total of 282,143, about 10% of all reported coronavirus cases worldwide. The governor had been concerned about a relatively flat but still high number of new hospitalizations, but that figure dropped Saturday to 1,184 from 1,962 a week ago.
“Only in this crazy reality would 1,100 new cases be relatively good news,” he told reporters in Albany.

The number of deaths reported Friday was 422, the third straight day of decline.
Cuomo called the latest death toll “flat” but still “terrible, horrible news.” Cuomo’s press conference —
a daily punctuation of drama during the pandemic — was relatively subdued on Saturday, with no pleas for help or criticism of the federal government’s response. He said, in fact, that he planned to go hiking with this family after the briefing — with a mask.
Although testing is still in short supply, Cuomo said he would expand testing of health care workers,
first responders and essential workers. Cuomo added he was signing an executive order that would expand testing locations by allowing the state’s 5,000 independent pharmacies to conduct Covid-19 tests.
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com  ©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
As the world is gripped by the ongoing pandemic, many questions remain about the origin
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus—commonly known as the novel coronavirus.
Join Epoch Times senior investigative reporter Joshua Philipp as he explores the known facts surrounding the CCP virus and the global pandemic it caused. In his investigation, Philipp explores the scientific data, and interviews top scientists and national security experts. And while the mystery surrounding the virus’s origin remains, much is learned about the CCP’s cover-up that led to the pandemic and
the threat it poses to the world.

From the start of the virus outbreak in China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has not
been forthcoming with information about the virus. In the early days of the outbreak, medical professionals who sounded the alarm were reprimanded by police for spreading “rumors.” Initially, the CCP said the virus originated at the Huanan Seafood Market, even though it knew patient zero had no connection with the market. Fearing that it might be held accountable for the worldwide pandemic, the CCP shifted its narrative to suggest that the virus originated in the United States and was brought to China by the U.S. military.
As a leading voice in covering China for the past 20 years, we understand very well the CCP’s deceptive nature and its history of cover-ups. With this outbreak, we saw a case of history repeating itself—in 2003, we exposed the CCP’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic in China, far ahead of other media. In this documentary, we present viewers with the known scientific data and facts surrounding the origin of the virus along with experts’ opinions. We don’t draw conclusions, but we point out that serious questions remain about the origins of the virus as well as the CCP’s handling of the outbreak. Some of our viewers felt the documentary was taking a position on the origin of the virus, which was not our intent. The documentary [above]has been slightly updated as of April 14 to better reflect our position, which is not to provide a definitive answer,
but rather to present the known facts.

From the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, humankind has lived in
fear of a potent infectious disease that would mark its demise. Dr. Rosalind Eggo is a mathematical modeler
who tracks the spread of deadly viruses, in an attempt to stop them.
In this talk, she combines science with humor and answers the question we all want to ask:
“Will a pandemic mark the end of humankind?” Rosalind Eggo is an Assistant Professor at
the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, in the UK. She received her PhD in the dynamics of the 1918 influenza pandemic from Imperial College London, and then worked at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. Rosalind works in mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. This means she uses computational and mathematical methods to understand the transmission of pathogens through populations. The aim of infectious disease modelling is to understand the routes and mechanisms that drive the spread of infections, so that we can ultimately design interventions to prevent them. Rosalind has worked on analysis of pandemic influenza, Ebola, Zika, cholera, and other pathogens. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

Watch more: Exclusive: Wuhan funeral home staffer reveals real death toll of coronavirus: https://bit.ly/3bpMTBs CCP virus follows communist China ties: https://bit.ly/2UsNVWc Giving the right name to the virus causing a global pandemic: https://bit.ly/2wzV3IB Undercover video reveals new evidence on forced organ harvesting in China: https://bit.ly/2wBE7RR Full movie: ‘Claws of the Red Dragon’ exposes connection between Huawei and CCP: https://bit.ly/2wW1R3C —————— Get the latest updates as well as exclusive reporting and first-hand videos about the CCP virus from The Epoch Times website. ▶️ https://www.theepochtimes.com/ccp-virus  

Coronavirus is scaring people away from the hospital. Some are dying because of it!!!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/
news/us/coronavirus-is-
scaring-people-away-from-the-
hospital-some-are-dying-
because-of-it/ar-BB13c25x?ocid=msedgdhp
 

Coronavirus Antibody Tests: Can You Trust the Results?
 https://www.msn.com/en-us/
health/health-news/
coronavirus-antibody-tests-
can-you-trust-the-results/ar-BB13aeH1?ocid=msedgdhp


Dr. Deborah Birx Says Social Distancing Must Continue Through Summer Months
https://www.msn.com/en-us/
news/us/dr-deborah-birx-says-
social-distancing-must-
continue-through-summer-
months/ar-BB13e56V?ocid=msedgntp
 

 Closed Hospitals Leave Rural Patients ‘Stranded’ as Coronavirus Spreads!!!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/
news/us/closed-hospitals-
leave-rural-patients-stranded-
as-coronavirus-spreads/ar-BB13duD1?ocid=msedgntp


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Josiah ~ ‘I’ am Rooting for Ya

Josiah Leming (born March 26, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter 
originally from Morristown, Tennessee.  

He was raised by his mother and stepfather alongside four brothers and four sisters,
six of whom are adopted. Leming first learned the piano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np8wgdATqkkwhen he was eight years old after his mother purchased a Casio keyboard. He also played his grandmother’s piano during visits to her house, and participated in school musicals and choirs.  Described as being “self-taught”, he also credits an “elderly piano instructor” for his early musical education and  at 13 years old, Leming was writing his own music. 

A friend introduced him to musicians DC TalkColdplay and TravisNeil YoungBob DylanRyan Adams, and The Smiths at 15 yrs. old. They had some influence on Leming’s musical style.  When he was 16, Leming began to perform locally. He dropped out of high school and left Morristown at 17, and began traveling across the United States to play shows while living out of his car. Which was an attempt to both make it as a musician and find a way to support his large and struggling family. Leming played in clubs and coffee houses through out the Southeast while working at restaurants and temp agencies to pay for food and gas.  
American Idol; Josiah auditioned in Atlanta and  the producers were interested in his life as a traveling musician living out of his car. In an interview later with MTV News, Leming said he was disappointed with how they portrayed his life as a “sob story”. “I wanted to stand on my voice, and my own two feet,” he explained, “but they wanted to know about the story and they wanted to use it. 
I definitely wasn’t going for the sympathy vote.”
At the Audition: Josiah  sang an original song called “To Run” and “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. All three judges voted “yes”, sending him to the next round. Josiah was shown during the second day of Hollywood Week. He sang “Grace Kelly” by Mika while playing the keyboard. All 3 judges voted “yes”, giving him a free pass to the final day of Hollywood Week. On the fourth day, he sang “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King without musical accompaniment. The judges panned his performance. In spite of this, Randy voted “yes” based on all his other performances, Paula also voted “yes” and Simon also voted “yes”, sending him to the final fifty. During the final deliberation, it was revealed that he did not make the Top 24. 
During his short time on American Idol, Josiah Leming always seemed to walk the line between unchecked confidence and outright depression, either beaming at the judges’ approval or lapsing into tears whenever they criticized his performance. His elimination during the semi-finals might’ve ruffled some feathers amongst the show’s die-hard fans, but it was still a smart decision, since someone as noticeably fragile as Josiah (who was the glorified equivalent of a teenaged runaway, having left home to travel the country in his car)
might’ve completely come apart under the pressure of prime-time TV. 

He became a popular contestant after singing his rendition of “Grace Kelly” by English singer Mika.
However, Leming did not make it to the top 24 for his performance of “Stand by Me” by Ben E. KingRandy Jackson and Paula Abdul refused to side with Simon Cowell to see Leming advance to the semifinals.
With Leming later admitted the performance was poor. 
“I didn’t know that song, so I was trying to make it my own, and
I focused more on the words than the melody.  And that’s why it was kind of all messed up.”
He wanted to sing “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand, but was not allowed to do so—Leming did not know why. Cowell is on record saying that he feels it was a mistake not to put Leming through to the next round, having stated: “We should have put him through. I was all for it. I wanted him in the competition.” Leming’s controversial ouster is widely believed to be one factor behind the return of wild cards to
the selection process in Season 8.
Leming’s popularity grew after returning to Tennessee. He gained more followers on MySpace. In addition, many label representatives called him, and producers of The Ellen DeGeneres Show invited Leming to make a guest appearance, which he accepted. This eventually caught the eye of executives at Warner Brothers Records who signed him to his first major label record deal in 2008. 

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dehNxAOixs
 Even so, Josiah surprised everyone by pulling himself together and securing a contract with Warner Bros, the only contestant in the history of American Idol to not make the ‘Top 24’ and sign a record deal with Warner Bros. A label with considerably more credibility and experience than Idol’s own record company. Which was a deal that ruffled a few feather with A. I.
In 2008 and began work on his debut album Come on Kid. 
To promote the album, Warner Bros. released Angels Undercover EP in 2008 and Punk Ass Rain EP in 2009. Meanwhile, Leming recorded Come on Kid in London and Los Angeles, with the help of producers Jesse Owen AstinMartin TerefeWarren Huart and David Kosten. 2 songs from Angels Undercover EP
are featured on the album–“To Run” and  “Arctic Outcry Wind”.

American Idol Sues Josiah Over His New Album !!!   
Then the unexpected happen it seems that we won’t hear new songs from former American Idol contestant,
as he learned his contract with Warner Bros was in danger and they may never release his EP.
Why is this happening?
Why can’t his new album be released, with new music on a fine label like Warner Bros?
It’s because of American Idol Show. They claim that Josiah signed a contract that forbids him to sign a deal with any other company and get a record deal with Sony only. What now happened was  A.I. took legal action and this will probably drag for a long time. We must say this is not what we expected. It is strange that American Idol didn’t mentioned anything about this earlier.
More surprises are dished out on this five-song EP, which serves as an appetizer to the singer’s full-length debut. Angels Undercover presents Josiah as an artist — not an adolescent boy with a flair for double-fisted piano chords, but a genuine songwriter, with melodic twists and articulate turns-of-phrase to boot. He flips into his falsetto on “Arctic Outcry Wind,” perhaps his brightest pop song, Before crooning his way through the subsequent ballads, which run the gamut from angsty anthems “Theysay” to quiet tearjerkers (the titular “Angels Undercover”). “To Run” is the only track to betray Josiah‘s age, however,  those three minutes of teenage melodrama do little to erase the 15 minutes of promising songcraft that precede.
  Josiah Leming is known for his strength and determination, two things that he got from his mother, Sharon Leming who fought leiomyosarcoma for 10 long years, but on June 16, 2009 the cancer overtook her. Josiah released a statement to MTV.com shortly after: “To all my friends: I just wanted to thank everyone for their outpouring of love and kindness.  Mom fought this for a long time, [and] passed away on Tuesday, June 16th surrounded by her family and loved ones,” Josiah’s statement read. 

Sharon was diagnosed with ovarian leiomyosarcoma in October 2000 before succumbing to the disease
at 41 years of age — while at U.T. Medical Center in Knoxville, TN,  it stated in The Citizen Tribune — the newspaper in the Lemings’ hometown of Morristown, TN. Also In her blog titled “My Life with Cancer” — Sharon estimated she underwent “17 surgeries, 55 radiation treatments, 6 cycles of Gemzar/Taxotere, 
0ne
cycle of AIM, 3 cycles of Adriamycin and 6 cycles of Yondelis” to cure the cancer.  
“She had an extremely aggressive type: I know many of you got to know my mom through her postings, and we all thank you for sharing in her life and story. Now my family needs time to be together, and mourn in private.” A funeral will be held in Morristown on June 19. Please leave kind messages for Josiah and his family as they go through the mourning process. Sharon Leming, who had ovarian leiomyosarcoma wrote with such eloquence in My Life With Cancer. 

Here’s an excerpt: 
Once in a while, I indulge in the fantasy of what my life would be like if one day, one glorious day, the cancer was gone and I could lay claim to my life again. I dream of the things I could do, of the the good I would do for the world, of the things I have lost that might be regained.
I picture myself working, volunteering, driving, swimming, walking.
It’s a lovely, happy journey — not a self-pitying one as it might seem, but one that is full of the unfettered hope of a child, the innocent belief that anything is possible. But then of course I am not a child, and I cannot waste a lot of precious time on pie-in-the-sky thinking. It’s time to gird myself up for battle again, and to concentrate on finding peace WITHIN the battle rather than dreaming of life beyond it. 
Women with ovarian cancers, both carcinomas and sarcomas, have been on my mind this week.  Sharon also sited Yvonne Cooper had cancer in an ovary, but she doesn’t call it ovarian cancer. “I consider my cancer to be leiomyosarcoma of ovarian origin,” she said, referring to a rare cancer that resembles smooth-muscle cells. Leiomyosarcoma (LMS) can arise almost anywhere in the body.

In the reproductive tract, LMS is much more likely to occur in the uterus. 
“There are some women with ovarian sarcomas who feel like they get left out,” said Dr. Kian Behbakht,
gynecologic oncologist and associate professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. They may have friends with ovarian carcinoma, or they may know women with uterine LMS. He said the Internet can connect women with rare cancers. Cooper, who lives in Cincinnati, belongs to an online support list for LMS at www.acor.org. She was diagnosed in 2003 and has had three recurrences. She has had surgeries and chemotherapy and taken anti-angiogenic drugs.

Sarcoma’s are probably one of the worse cancers a patient can garner and when that’s combine with the fact these types are usually amongst the rarest of cancer types —  with little known about them. . . .
 it can become emotionally taxing. 

Leiomyosarcoma and with treatments being given it can be gut wretching difficult and unresponsive with
the roller coaster ride taken from the time, hope and disappointment. Although when you consider the story  
From Incurable To Incredible  and this great read from Tami Boehmer
 mention Yvonne Cooper of Cincinnati overcoming this very incurable through the Bill Peeples Protocol and Dr. Elyse Lower 
at UC Barrett Cancer Center or the right doctor elsewhere that can be found in forums
Utilizing The Bill Peeples Protocol as Adjuvant therapy, also known as adjunct therapy, add-on therapy, and adjuvant care, is therapy that is given in addition to the primary or initial therapy to maximize its effectiveness. The surgeries and complex treatment regimens used in cancer therapy have led the term to be used mainly to describe adjuvant cancer treatments. An example of such adjuvant therapy is the additional treatment usually given after surgery where all detectable disease has been removed. This type treatment is something you may want your doctor to check out if the therapy maybe right for you? 
When treating someone with ovarian LMS, a doctor may look at the literature on uterine LMS or sarcoma in general, said Dr. Matthew Anderson, director of gynecologic oncology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “It’s so rare that you have to generalize.” He’s confident that Gynecologic oncologists would know that LMS might need to be treated differently from an epithelial ovarian cancer. For example, some types of chemo are commonly used with LMS, he said, but not with epithelial ovarian cancer. “Because LMS is so rare,” Cooper said, “it is important to do some research and/or go to a sarcoma specialist to know what one’s options are when trying to access appropriate treatment.” 

Yvonne recommends these Web sites:
http://www.leiomyosarcoma.info/general.htm,
www.lmsdr.org and www.
sarcomaalliance.com
http://ovarian-news.com/supportindex.html 
https://www.solitarius.org/2017/12/21/working-cure/    

Specialist vary in degree of experience and knowledge — Dr. Breelyn A. Wilky, M.D. is a sarcoma medical oncologist and clinical trialist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado. is part of a large multidisciplinary sarcoma team including medical oncologists, surgeons, radiation oncologists, pediatric oncologists, pathologists, radiologists, and interventional radiologists who work together to provide comprehensive care for sarcoma patients.  She spends her time taking care of patients over the age of 18 with all kinds of sarcomas, other bone and soft tissue tumors including desmoid fibromatosis, pigmented villonodular synovitis, gastrointestinal stromal tumors,
and giant cell tumor of bone.  
She is also a translational researcher who conducts and designs clinical trials for sarcoma patients.  She also works with laboratory researchers to translate the latest findings from bench research into early phase clinical trials.  She is an expert not only in traditional chemotherapy treatments for sarcomas, but also at using modern technology such as gene sequencing and molecular profiling to identify out-of-the-box treatments particularly in targeted therapy. She is particularly interested in novel immunotherapy approaches for sarcomas.

Suzanne George, MD, director of Clinical Research, Center for Sarcoma and Bone Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and an associate professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, discusses ongoing trials in soft tissue sarcoma (STS). There are several ongoing trials in STS, including in leiomyosarcoma. Although the phase III ANNOUNCE trial with Olaratumab (Lartruvo) and doxorubicin failed to confirm a clinical benefit in patients with advanced or metastatic STS compared with the use of doxorubicin alone, ongoing trials with olaratumab in combination with other chemotherapies are also being explored, says George.
https://www.bing.com/videos/
search?q=Leiomyosarcoma+
treatments+specialist&FORM=HDRSC
 
With leiomyosarcoma, several trials with targeted therapies are underway; however, the challenge with this approach is that physicians do not yet have a singular molecular driver for which to target, says George.  Nonetheless,  there are some biologic pathways that are thought to be potential vulnerabilities, including the PI3K pathway, and potentially, the mTOR pathway. Immunotherapy is another area of interest.
Contact a sarcoma specialist for updated info.
In my own right I have blogged several post about LMS because it this type took my own father 4/03/2006   https://www.solitarius.org/?s=Leiomyosarcoma
  
Therefore,  It’s back to my Come On Kid Front line Story!!!  
Leming’s debut album, Come On Kid, from Warner Bros. came out September 13, 2010. “It was emotional, and it took a long time,” Leming tells Billboard.com. “In order to make an album that everybody was happy with, and also that I felt good about, it took the good part of two years to kind of wrangle that in. While these delays were rumored to have been caused by contract disputes with 19 Entertainment,  both Leming and
19 now say that the “disputes” was a misunderstanding. Come on Kid  failed commercially, which prompted Warner Bros., to drop Leming from the label in late 2010.

‘AMERICAN IDOL’ CASTOFF JOSIAH LEMING SPEAKS: ‘I DON’T HAVE ANY REGRETS’
Leming recorded his music independently in Burbank, California for three years before returning to Tennessee in early Fall 2011.  He then released a new single “What You’ve Taken” on February 6, 2011 in conjunction with the launch of his official website. The single was available on his website for free download until March 6, 2011.
Leming plays in different venues across the country to promote his music. He also regularly updates his Facebook and Twitter page. During a live Stickam broadcast on July 24, 2011, Leming announced he will self-release his second album September 2011; however, he later pushed the release date to October or November 2011. Leming released three singles from his second album in anticipation of its release. On September 24, 2011, he released a studio recorded version of his well-known song, “One Last Song” &
“Too Young”
 was released on October 24, 2011, followed by “Another Life” on November 29, 2011.
Arin Segal  states: One of my favorite concerts of 2012 was definitely Josiah Leming, Buskin Cuffs and Courtney Cotter. At the show, I sat down with Josiah to talk about his music and the new album. He has a unique voice and although he sounds like he has an accent, he was born and raised in Tennessee! At a young 22 years-old, Josiah has a long career ahead.
On September 16, 2014 he released his new single and video “Long Gone” exclusively through Yahoo! Music.[15] This is the first single of his new upcoming record. 
The second single ‘Can You Hear It’ was released Jan 6th, 2015. 
Life Evolves and Time Changes Things. Today Josiah can be found producing new songs: Emily,
Lie With Me,
 Appalachia, Back to Tennessee
 and touring with Josiah and the Bonnevilles!!!!!
https://www.bing.com/videos/
search?q=Josiah+Lemming+songs&FORM=HDRSC3
 
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What Should We DO Next?

  States rushing to reopen are likely making a deadly error, experts warn!!!
     William Wan, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Joel Achenbach.

I thought my last post was my last. But I had visitants to this blog. Ask me what can be done
if we have a second wave to this pandemic after the door is open to it again?


By the end of the week, residents in Georgia will be able to get their hair permed and nails done. By Monday, they will be cleared for action flicks at the cineplex and burgers at their favorite greasy spoon. And it will almost certainly lead to more novel coronavirus infections and deaths. As several states — including South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida — rush to reopen businesses, the sudden relaxation of restrictions will supply new targets for the coronavirus that has kept the United States largely closed down, according to experts,
math models and the basic rules that govern infectious diseases.
“The math is unfortunately pretty simple. It’s not a matter of whether infections will increase but by how much,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a leading epidemiologist at Columbia University.  Closing America was hard.
But it came with one simple instruction: Everyone stay at home. There are no easy answers for the phase that comes next, especially with a continued lack of testingcontact tracing and detailed guidance from federal health agencies, disease experts said. Instead, every state will conduct its own improvised experiment with thousands of lives in the balance.

Many of the earliest reopenings will probably be confusing, chaotic, risky affairs —
especially for states restarting their economies before most infectious-disease experts and 
some mayors and residents believe it’s safe to do so. South Carolina’s governor issued an executive order this week reopening department stores and retailers previously regarded as not essential. Tennessee’s governor said he plans to allow most businesses to reopen once his “safer-at-home” order expires next week. Governors in Mississippi and Ohio have said the same. And in Denver, Gov. Jared Polis (D) said some business could reopen on Friday. Some of those same states are, however, still struggling to contain outbreaks.
In Ohio, where businesses are expected to reopen by next week, a prison has become one of the most worrisome outbreaks in the country, with more than 2,000 inmates testing positive. In South Dakota, more than 700 infections have shut down a Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant. And because South Dakota remains one of the few states without a stay-at-home order, one business said it plans to go forward on Saturday
with a car race drawing 700 spectators.
Georgia, according to some models, is one of the last states that should be reopening. The state has had more than 830 covid-19 deaths. It has tested less than 1 percent of its residents — low compared with other states and the national rate. And the limited amount of testing so far shows a high rate of positives at 23%. On Monday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) explained his decision to reopen tanning salons, barber shops, massage parlors and bowling alleys, saying: “I see the terrible impact of covid-19 on public health as well as the pocketbook.” 
Kemp said he will urge businesses to take precautions, such as screening for fevers, spacing workstations apart and having workers wear gloves and masks “if appropriate.” President Trump Wednesday said he told Georgia’s governor that he “disagree strongly with his decision.” But Trump added, ‘At the same time, he must do what he thinks is right.” In recent days, other governors have defended their decisions to reopen quickly as an economic necessity, an exercise in states’ rights and a matter of freedom.

“What I’ve seen across the country is so many people give up their liberties for just a little bit of security, and they don’t have to do that,” South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R). “We can’t wait until there’s a cure to this,” said Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R), who plans to reopen some businesses after a stay-at-home order expires Monday. “We can’t wait until every single person can get tested every single day to open up our economy.”
But even states proceeding more slowly, such as Massachusetts and California, will have to walk their residents through the coming experiment with competing pressures and voices threatening to drown out public health instructions. “As a country, we’re unprepared not just logistically but mentally for this next phase,” said Michael T. Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious-disease expert. He worries most Americans do not grasp the long, hard months facing them and the likelihood of repeated surges of the virus.
“For a while, people were told all we need is to get past the peak. Then, they started hearing all we need is testing. Meanwhile, the president keeps telling everyone that things are going to reopen in a matter of weeks,” Osterholm said. “The way you prepare people for a sprint and marathon are very different. As a country, we are utterly unprepared for the marathon ahead.” This is the central problem: The vast majority of Americans are still believed to be uninfected, making them like dry kindling on a forest floor. Barring a vaccine or treatment, the virus will keep burning until it runs out of fuel.
“The trick is to keep that burn at a controlled rate,” Osterholm said. “We have focused so much on how we are dying from the virus that we have not focused enough on how to live with the virus.” Epidemiological models suggest the best strategy for keeping the burn rate under control is to drive the number of infections as low as possible before restoring economic activity. That would then provide time to react if cases flare.

The economic devastation that would cause is significant. But those same models suggest that opening prematurely increases the likelihood that communities will have to shut back down once infections reach a certain level, creating multiple open-shut cycles. Adding to those concerns, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that a second wave of infections next winter would be even more devastating because it would coincide with flu season.
There’s no simple, one-size-fits-all protocol for reopening the economy, said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rubin is developing a model to forecast how reopening 260 large U.S. counties on May 15 would play out if residents maintained only half the social distancing measures now in place. The good news, Rubin said, is that modest-size, relatively spread-out cities will probably have room to make adjustments. But if restrictions ease too much, New York and similarly dense cities will rapidly see infections spike again.
“It comes back really quick, and the peaks are much higher than what you’re seeing right now,” Rubin said. “It was sobering. I was more optimistic before we did our models.” This is why epidemiologists are cautioning state leaders to inch toward reopening with tentative, staggered steps. Newly emerging science illustrates just how complicated and fraught those steps may be. Dine-in restaurants are one sector President Trump and some governors have repeatedly mentioned. To reopen, owners may have to rethink not just how closely diners sit together and how food is served but how ventilation systems and airflow may need to be retooled.
A recent case study — published by the CDC — examined how a single patron infected nine others at an air-conditioned restaurant in China. The infected person, a 63-year-old retired woman, did not begin running a fever and coughing until after her lunch Jan. 24 at the Guangzhou restaurant. But over the next two weeks, it became apparent the virus had spread to four diners at her table and to five people sitting at adjacent tables roughly three feet away. Researchers studying the seating arrangements believe an air-conditioning unit propelled tiny viral droplets over distances that are normally safe between the tables. “To prevent the spread of the virus in restaurants, we recommend increasing the distance between tables and improving ventilation,” the researchers concluded.
Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, said the restaurant appears to have had an air-conditioning unit popular in China — and increasingly used in the United States — that recirculates warmed or cooled air, with no air intake or filtration. Milton said measures to make such a situation safe would include a ceiling fan paired with better air filtration and ultraviolet lights that kill germs. But he noted such measures would need to be designed to suit specific establishments.
Studies emerging in the past week are also changing scientists’ understanding of how the virus spreads, which will make efforts to reopen society even harder.
A growing body of evidence suggests the virus is most contagious in people before they develop a fever or even feel a tickle in their throat. That suggests silent spreaders are seeding new cases. When severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) — the cousin to this new coronavirus — emerged in 2002, Asian countries were able to stop it because people became physically ill roughly at the same time they became contagious.
That made it far easier to isolate and prevent the spread of disease.
A study published in the journal Nature Medicine last week estimated that people infected with the novel coronavirus are contagious almost two and a half days before symptoms appear — and that peak contagiousness occurs about 17 hours before people start feeling sick. In a sample of patients from China,
the study estimated 44 percent of cases spread from person to person before symptoms appeared.

A study of Iceland’s population found that 43 percent of the people who tested positive didn’t have symptoms at the time of the test. And a recent New England Journal of Medicine study of 210 pregnant women in New York found that 14 percent tested positive but had no symptoms. Warning signs are also emerging from abroad. For months, Singapore has served as an exemplar, with its pandemic response praised and emulated around the world. Despite its proximity to China and early cases, Singapore used massive testing and contact tracing to keep its disease curve flat. It even deployed police to trace people’s movement
with security camera footage and credit card records.
Those painstaking efforts kept schools and businesses open and its economy afloat — until this month, when the virus found and exploited a weak point: low-wage migrant workers living in densely packed dormitories. “It only takes a few people to let down their guard, and the virus will slip through,” said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who begged citizens to maintain discipline. The daily number of new cases has soared from 200 last month to 1,426 on Monday. In recent days, the government shut down schools, made masks mandatory and forced hundreds of thousands of migrant workers into quarantine.
“What worries me looking at Singapore is how much capacity they have on testing and contact tracing compared to the U.S. and yet months into the pandemic, even they are having to become more restrictive,”
said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Meanwhile, we in America have nowhere near that testing and tracing, yet all we’re talking about is loosening up our restrictions.” Given the dangers involved in reopening, what states desperately need are a warning system and suppression tool to prevent infections from cresting again into the deadly peaks the United States saw in March and April.
But states are jumping into their experiments without the two tools deployed by almost every other advanced nation: massive testing and contact tracing. Governors — Republicans and Democrats — from Virginia to Washington to Ohio continue to plead for federal authorities to fix shortages of swabs, chemical reagents and testing kits, a national supply problem they cannot solve independently. Similarly, local health departments, decimated by decades of budget cuts, lack the money and the hundreds of thousands of workers needed to trace and quarantine everyone who comes into contact with infected people.

By pushing responsibility for the pandemic response and reopening onto the states, experts said, Trump has freed himself to play the role of criticizer-in-chief. Already, he is criticizing governors for not reopening immediately, but if cases rise uncontrollably, he can criticize state leaders for reopening too early or mishandling it. “It might be a clever and effective political strategy, but it leaves our country without
any way to pull itself out of the current mess,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who was in charge of U.S. foreign disaster assistance during the Obama administration.
In Maryland, Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s wife — who was born in South Korea —
 struck a deal to buy 500,000 tests from South Korea. Hogan said this week that he turned for help from a foreign government rather than the federal government after Trump “made it clear over and over again” that states “have to go out and do it ourselves.” In Massachusetts, state leaders have partnered with a nonprofit that works mainly in the developing world to hire and train contact tracers. But such efforts, born of desperation, will go only so far without federal intervention and funding, public health experts say.
 Even if a handful of states find some way to shore up testing and contact tracing, the virus could rage on in neighboring states, throwing off sparks that can ignite new outbreaks. “The only tool the governors have had so far is the clampdown because it deprives the fire of oxygen. The second you let that up, the fire comes roaring back,” said Konyndyk, who oversaw the U.S. government’s Ebola response in West Africa. “But until you have water or sand, that’s all you can do. And it remains to be seen whether we as a country are going to figure out
a way to get that bucket of water to start putting out the fire.”

NORC poll: Few Americans support easing virus protections 
THOMAS BEAUMONT and HANNAH FINGERHUT, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite pockets of attention-grabbing protests, a new survey finds Americans remain overwhelmingly in favor of stay-at-home orders and other efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
A majority say it won’t be safe to lift such restrictions anytime soon, even as a handful of governors announce plans to ease within days the public health efforts that have upended daily life and roiled the global economy. 
The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that more than a month after schoolyards fell silent, restaurant tables and bar stools emptied, and waves from a safe distance replaced hugs and handshakes, the country largely believes restrictions on social interaction to curb the spread of the virus are appropriate. Only 12% of Americans say the measures where they live go too far. About twice as many people, 26%, believe the limits don’t go far enough. The majority of Americans — 61% — feel the steps taken
by government officials to prevent infections of COVID-19 in their area are about right.

Bing COVID-19 tracker: Latest numbers by country and state
About 8 in 10 Americans say they support measures that include requiring Americans to stay in their homes and limiting gatherings to 10 people or fewer — numbers that have largely held steady over the past few weeks. “We haven’t begun to flatten the curve yet. We’re still ramping up in the number of cases and the number of deaths,” said Laura McCullough, 47, a college physics professor from Menomonie, Wisconsin. “We’re still learning about what it can do, and if we’re still learning about what it can do, this isn’t going to be the time to let people go out and get back to their life.”
While the poll reveals that the feelings behind the protests that materialized in the past week or so in battleground states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are held by only a small fraction of Americans, it does find signs that Republicans are, like President Donald Trump, becoming more bullish on reopening aspects of public life. Just 36% of Republicans now say they strongly favor requiring Americans to stay home during the outbreak, compared with 51% who said so in late March. While majorities of Democrats and Republicans think current restrictions where they live are about right, 
Republicans are roughly four times as likely as Democrats to think restrictions in place
go too far — 22% to 5%.
More Democrats than Republicans, meanwhile, think restrictions don’t go far enough,
33% to 19%.
  “They’ll be lifted, but there are still going to be sick people running around,” said 66-year-old Lynn Sanchez,
a Democrat and retired convenience store manager from Jacksonville, Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has reopened state parks and plans to announce further relaxations next week. “And we’re going to have another pandemic.” More than 45,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, while 22 million have applied for unemployment benefits since March. It’s the economic cost that has led some governors to follow Trump’s lead and start talking about allowing some shuttered businesses to reopen, including in Georgia, where many businesses — including gyms, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors — can do so starting Friday. 
Restaurants there can resume dine-in service next week. Yet the survey finds that few Americans — 16% — think it’s very or extremely likely that their areas will be safe enough in a few weeks for the restrictions to be lifted. While 27% think it’s somewhat likely, a majority of Americans — 56% — say conditions are unlikely to
be safe in a few weeks to start lifting the current restrictions. “If we try too hard to restart the economy prematurely, there will be waves of reinfection,” said 70-year-old retired medical equipment salesman
Goble Floyd, of Bonita Springs, Florida. 
“I don’t think the economy or life will get back to normal until there’s a vaccine. It just seems this is so seriously contagious.” The partisan differences are apparent. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is a Republican and unwavering Trump supporter. GOP lawmakers in Wisconsin filed suit Tuesday against the state’s Democratic governor after he ordered most nonessential businesses to remain closed until May 26.The poll finds 59% of Republicans say it’s at least somewhat likely that their areas will be safe enough for reopening in just a few weeks,
compared with 71% of Democrats who say it is unlikely. 

Still, even among Republicans, just 27% say that’s very likely. “I haven’t met one person at the protests that disagrees with the fact that we need to self-quarantine until April 30,” said Matt Seely, a spokesman for the Michigan Conservative Coalition, which sponsored an automobile-based protest at the state’s capitol in Lansing last week. “Nobody wants to do the wrong thing. But the solution is not to stay in your home until
the last case of COVID is gone.”
The AP-NORC poll of 1,057 adults was conducted April 16-20 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES
How to track your stimulus check
Sites that sell face masks
Testing: What you need to know
News, advice and more about COVID-19

‘It’s going to be around a long time’: What we’ve learned from the first
discovered
COVID-19 cases. SEE Article By Jorge L. Ortiz, USA TODAY

States with the highest number of COVID-19 cases per capita…

States Where the Virus Is Growing the Fastest Right Now!!!

In New York’s largest hospital system, 88 percent of coronavirus patients
on ventilators didn’t make it!!!


15 practical ways to help keep safe when going out in public. 
Jessica Dolcourt  April 22, 2020 8:27 a.m. PT
If you’re not already using these tips for grocery shopping, opening doors and signing
your name when you leave the house, now’s a good time to start. Read More Here.

Coronavirus: What To Do
By Dr. David Brownstein
I am sure you are aware of the coronavirus infection that is causing concern around the world. A January 24, 2020 study in The Lancet reported the latest statistics. (1) The fatality rate (so far) from the corona infection is approaching 15%. That is not good news.
 
There is a big HOWEVER here: This Lancet report is based on only 41 laboratory confirmed cases of the recent coronavirus strain (2019-nCoV). Keep in mind, the 15% fatality rate is the percentage of hospitalized patients suffering with corona virus. There must be many more people who became ill with this coronavirus and recovered uneventfully and therefore, did not seek care. 
The symptoms of corona virus initially mimic the flu—fever, headache, cough, fatigue and muscle aches.
The 41 patients admitted to the hospital all developed pneumonia.
 
Coronavirus is nothing new. It has been with us for a long time. Coronavirus can affect both animals and humans. It is important to keep in mind that most corona viral infections are mild. In the last two decades, there were two serious corona virus infections–severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV)
and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) which both had elevated death rates.
 
So, what can you do? Wearing a mask will not help protect you from becoming ill with any viral infection—corona virus included. I would check that off the list.
 
First, its important to maintain optimal levels of nutrients, particularly vitamins A, C, and D. Most people have suboptimal vitamin A and C levels. Both of these nutrients have antiviral abilities and are able to support the immune system when it is under viral attack. If you are not ill, I suggest taking 3-5,000 mg/day of vitamin C. At the first sign of an illness, I would suggest taking 1,000 mg/hour until diarrhea develops, then back off for a time period. For vitamin A, I suggest using 5,000 Units/day if you are not sick and 100,000 Units/day for four days at the first sign of an illness. Pregnant women cannot take these doses. (Note: Take vitamin A, not beta carotene.)  Also, vitamin D is very important for fighting infections.
  I suggest, at the onset of an illness, taking 50,000 IU of vitamin D3/day for four days.
 
Iodine is essential to not only fighting off an infection it is necessary for proper immune system functioning. There is no bacteria, virus, parasite or fungus that is known to be resistant to iodine. As I have written in my book, Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It, most of the population is low in iodine. If fact, iodine levels have fallen nearly 60% over the last 40 years. The RDA for iodine is inadequate to supply enough iodine for all the bodily tissues. For the majority of my patients,
I suggest taking 25 mg/day as a daily dose and more (sometimes 50-100 mg/day) at the first sign of an illness. Iodine can cause adverse effects and it is best used under the guidance of an iodine-knowledgeable doctor.
 
To prevent becoming ill and to avoid having a poorly responding immune system, it is vitally important to 
eat a healthy diet free of all sources of refined sugar.
 Refined sugar has been shown to negatively alter the functioning of the white blood cells for hours after ingestion. Finally, it is important to maintain optimal hydration—drink water! Take your body weight in pounds, divide by two and the resultant number is the amount of water to drink per day in ounces. Dehydration ensures you will be much more likely to suffer serious problems from any infectious process.
 
Conventional medicine has little to offer to prevent or treat coronavirus infections other than washing your hands–I agree with that one. It is time for you to take the initiative and learn what other therapies are out there. Your conventional doctor simply has no effective tools in his/her toolkit for this.
As for getting the flu shot? Fugetaboutit.
 It won’t help corona infections and there was a study which found an increased risk in non-influenza infections, including coronavirus, in those that received the trivalent flu vaccine. (2)
 
My last recommendation is to work with a holistic doctor who can give you nutrient IVs when you become ill. Vitamin C, hydrogen peroxide, and ozone IVs can help anyone suffering from an infection. At my office,
The Center for Holistic Medicine, we have seen the positive results a holistic approach to combatting viruses can provide. To find a holistic doctor near you go to: www.icimed.com.
 
To learn more about virus’, vaccines and other health issues from a holistic point of view,
 join me on Saturday, March 7th for my annual lecture, ‘Holistic Medicine for the 21st Century’.
See below for details.
 
To Everyone’s Good Health!
~Note: These therapies should only used under the guidance of a physician. Dr. B

Coronavirus Preppers Guide: Remain Calm, Don’t Panic, Be Smart, Stay Informed!!!

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Final Clue About the Pandemic:

This is My Final Blog About The Coronavirus ( I will start posting about cancer again.)

BERLIN — Felix Germann was not expecting anyone when his doorbell rang last week. Outside was a doctor who looked like she had just stepped out of an operating theater, green scrubs, face mask and all — and a policeman. “I didn’t do it!” Mr. Germann said, throwing up his hands, and everybody laughed. The unusual visitors had come with an usual proposal: Would he allow them to test his blood for Covid-19 antibodies?
Every month? For a year? Starting next week? He would be helping to further the science that would ultimately allow for a controlled lifting of social and economic restrictions and save lives.

“Of course I said yes,” said Mr. Germann, a 41-year-old project manager at a media company.
“I want to help. This is a collective crisis. The government is doing what it can. Everyone needs to do their bit. ”With that, Mr. Germann and his girlfriend joined 3,000 households chosen at random in Munich for an ambitious study whose central aim is to understand how many people — even those with no symptoms — have already had the virus, a key variable to make decisions about public life in a pandemic. The study is part of an aggressive approach to combat the virus in a comprehensive way that has made Germany a leader among Western nations figuring out how to control the contagion
while returning to something resembling normal life.
Other nations, including the United States, are still struggling to test for infections. But Germany is doing that and more. It is aiming to sample the entire population for antibodies in coming months, hoping to gain valuable insight into how deeply the virus has penetrated the society at large, how deadly it really is, and how immunity is evolving. The government hopes to use the findings to unravel a riddle that will allow Germany to move securely into the next phase of the pandemic: Which of the far-reaching social and economic restrictions that have slowed the virus are most effective and which can be safely lifted?
The same questions are being asked around the world. Other countries like Iceland and South Korea have broadly for infections, or combined testing with digital tracking to undercut the spread of the virus. But even the best laid plans can go awry; Singapore attempted to reopen only to have the virus re-emerge. In the United States, President Trump is in a hurry to restart the economy in an election year, but experts warn that much wider testing is needed to open societies safely. Both Britain and the United States, where some of the first tests were flawed, virtually forfeited the notion of widespread testing early in their outbreaks and have since had to ration tests in places as they scramble to catch up. In Italy, one of the worst hit countries
in the world, the central government and regional leaders sparred over how widely to test.

Germany, which produces most of its own high-quality test kits, is already testing on a greater scale than most — 120,000 a day and growing in a nation of 83 million. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a trained scientist, said this week that the aim was nothing less than tracing “every infection chain.” That high level of testing has helped her country slow the spread of the virus and keep the number of deaths relatively low. More people in Germany now recover from the virus every day than are infected by it. Every 10 people infected with the virus now pass it to seven others — a sharp decline in the infection rate for a virus that has spread exponentially.

Even so, Ms. Merkel, too, has had her stumbles in dealing with the virus Germany has been criticized for failing to offer forceful leadership to the European Union at a moment of profound crisis. The generosity and solidarity on such striking display inside of Europe’s largest and richest economy have been missing in Germany’s response to poorer European nations in the south, which were hit hardest by the virus. At home, however,
the chancellor’s mixture of calm reassurance and clear-eyed realism — as well as her ability to understand the science and explain it to citizens — also has been widely praised and encouraged Germans to follow social distancing rules!!
Her approval ratings are now higher than 80 percent. That broad confidence in government has given
Germany a tremendous advantage. It is much of the reason a knock on the door by a police officer and strangers dressed like aliens asking for blood can engender good will rather than alarm, even in a country where past authoritarian governments have left citizens protective of their privacy. The Munich antibody study, run by the Division of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine at Munich University Hospital, and co-financed by the government of the state of Bavaria, is the biggest of several regional studies
being rolled out in various corners of Germany.

Still, scientists caution that there is no proof yet that the detection of antibodies signals effective immunity
and even if it does, it is not known how long that immunity might last. Nationally, the Robert Koch Institute, the government’s central scientific institution in the field of biomedicine, is testing 5,000 samples from blood banks across the country every two weeks and 2,000 people in four hot spots who are farther along in the cycle of the disease. Its most ambitious project, aiming to test a nationwide random sample of 15,000 people across the country, is scheduled to begin next month.
“In the free world, Germany is the first country looking into the future,” said Prof. Michael Hoelscher,
who heads up the Munich study, noting that a number of countries had already asked him for the protocol to be able to replicate it. “We are leading the thinking of what to do next.”Mr. Hoelscher was co-author of what has become a widely influential research paper about how the virus can be transmitted before someone develops symptoms. “There’s no doubt after reading this paper that asymptomatic transmission is occurring,”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States, told CNN on Feb. 1, three days after the paper was published.

 “This study lays the question to rest.
”Asymptomatic transmission is what has made containment so difficult because a large number of infections are not detected. Measuring the number of hidden infections and getting a sense of the true scale of the disease is key to fine-tuning the gradual loosening of restrictions and minimizing income loss and social isolation, scientists say.“ We will have a better idea of the number of undetected infections once we have done these representative studies,” said Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases, which is conducting a number of the antibody tests. “A lot is being done to measure well.
”Some interim results have already come out. In Gangelt, a small town of about 12,000 in northwest Germany, tests of a first group of 500 residents found that 14 percent had antibodies to the virus. Another 2 percent tested positive for the coronavirus, raising hopes that about 15 percent of the local population may already have some degree of immunity.“ The process toward reaching herd immunity has begun,” Prof. Hendrik Streeck, director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Bonn, who is leading the study, said in an interim report. And even if 15 percent of Gangelt has some degree of immunity, levels of immunity are
almost certain to be lower elsewhere in the country.

Gangelt was hit early and exceptionally hard by the virus following a carnival event in mid-February that acted as a super spreader. But it may hold valuable insights for places that lag behind as the pandemic runs its course. The mortality rate in the town, for example, turned out to be 0.37 percent, much lower than the national rate of 2.9 percent which is calculated based only on detected infections.The Munich study is expected to be more nuanced in its findings because it follows participants like Mr. Germann for a whole year. In addition to regular blood tests, there will be questions about everything from mental health to income loss. “We are at a crossroads,” said Mr. Hoelscher, the professor. “Are we going the route of loosening more and increasing immunity in the summer to slow the spread of this in the winter and gain more freedom to live public life?
Or are we going to try to minimize transmissions.

“This is a question for politicians, not for scientists,” he added. “But politicians need the data to make an informed risk assessment.”Mr. Hoelscher got the idea for the antibody study in the shower. It was March 19, the day before the state of Bavaria announced its lockdown. “I thought to myself if we’re going into lockdown, we need to start working on an exit strategy now,” he said. The next day, he said he wrote a short pitch to the Bavarian government. Six hours later, he had the green light. It took another three weeks until the test kits had arrived, a new lab was opened and teams of medics started fanning out across the city. Six days after they first rung his doorbell, a doctor and two medical students came back to Mr. Germann’s apartment,
household number 420 out of 3,000.
They put on disposable protection suits, gloves and goggles and one of them sat down on a plastic stool they had brought along to take a small vial of his blood. Then they removed and bagged their suits, disinfected the stool and any surface they had touched and left.
It took all of 10 minutes. “I was like, wow,
it was a  perfect choreography,” said Mr. Germann. “It’s impressive to think they have teams doing this all across the city. And we’re only like one month into this. ”An interim result of the study could be released as early as June. Mr. Germann will get his first results already next week. He is curious.
“You kind of wonder, was that last cold I had corona?”
Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin.

In Germany, a small town near the Netherlands border called Gangelt in the larger area called Heinsberg has a festival marking the beginning of Lent called Karneval. This town of Gangelt (about 12,000 residents) has been called ‘Germany’s Wuhan’ as it has had the largest number of infections and deaths in the country; Heinsberg (the larger principality with about 42,000 residents) as of this writing (10th April) has 1,521 cases and 45 deaths. On 31 March 2020 it was announced they would test 1000 residents that were representative of the population, with the goal of determining at greater detail how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus spreads.
Dr. Hendrik Streeck a Bonn virologist said at that time.
If there are ways of preventing the illness from spreading in our environment, we want to know what they are, with the goal of finding out how we can freely move about in the environment together.
https://translate.google.com/

Dr. Hendrick Streeck, in The Guardian on 31 March 2020
It is surmised through active research across countries worldwide that the coronavirus is not spread through casual contact, such as grocery shopping or sitting next to some random people in public transit, but close social interaction such as hugging, singing, laughing and social kissing. (In Rhineland Germany they greet each other with a Bützchen, or kiss on the cheek.)
On 15 February 2020, a group of about 350 gathering for the Karneval listened to live music, mingled with food and drink, heard the town leaders and generally socialized for a total of four hours. 7 individuals, all attending that event, later tested positive, among the first of all cases in Germany. Of the 1,000 volunteers who submitted for both rRT-PCR testing (via throat swab for active virus infection) and antibody testing for resistance to SARS-CoV-2 (via blood draw to test for anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, specifically IgA and IgG),
the results of the first 500 samples were released yesterday.
In the report (link to the PDF in German is here, the page this PDF comes from is located here) are some surprising, and very interesting, results: about 2% have tested positive for the virus via PCR testing, and 14% have tested positive for antibodies against the disease. Originally given the population size and infected  rate, the researchers were expecting a smaller number of IgA/IgG-positive samples (perhaps 5%). In other words, one in seven have been infected and have recovered with antibodies against the virus, and can be considered ‘immune’ from being infected again (although that is also being actively studied).
This preliminary data has large (dare I say huge) implications for public health policy, as questions are currently being raised as to how the economies and society  of many nations (and literally trillions of dollars of economic activity) will restart again. From a translation of the German PDF, they claim a >99% specificity; will have to await the publication of the results to find out the details. ( Friendly reminder, specificity is the ‘true negative’ rate, thus 1-specificity is the ‘false positive’ rate or <1%.)
The larger implication of this 14% number is the calculation of the death rate, known as a the ‘Case Fatality Ratio’ or CFR. If the denominator is much larger  (i.e. many individuals having been infected and recovered from the virus) the CFR is much lower. Here the German virologists estimate a CFR of 0.37%, compared to the ‘official’ CFR of about 2% for Germany.
As a point of reference, the CFR for the United States is about 3.6%.
Many studies of this type are going on right now in the US; Stanford University recently announced serology testing (first among healthcare workers and this week more widely to the general population) and is ongoing in New York City although not to the wider population yet. Accurate, and widespread serological testing is something to keep on the lookout for, as it will indicate who can be ‘certified’ to be virus-resistant.  Antibody testing will be a vital tool in getting past this pandemic, along with a vaccine, and getting back to something or a normal life.
Preliminary results are out from a COVID-19 case cluster study in one of the regions worst hit by Germany’s coronavirus epidemic.

They are somewhat reassuring.
One often-heard statistic is the “case fatality rate”—that is, the percentage of people diagnosed with a disease who will die of it. This afternoon that figure stands at 3.5 percent for COVID-19 in the U.S., but this rate is significantly inflated because it does not count asymptomatic cases or undiagnosed people who recover at home. What we really need to know is the infection fatality rate: the percentage of all the people infected who eventually die of the disease. That’s what the German study attempts to do. Over the last two weeks, German virologists tested nearly 80 percent of the population of Gangelt for antibodies that indicate whether they’d been infected by the coronavirus.
Around 15 percent had been infected, allowing them to calculate a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of about 0.37 percent. The researchers also concluded that people who recover from the infection are immune to reinfection, at least for a while. For comparison, the U.S. infection fatality rates for the 1957–58 flu epidemic was around 0.27 percent; for the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, it was about 2.6 percent. For seasonal flu, the rate typically averages around 0.1 percent. Basically, the German researchers found that the coronavirus kills about four times as many infected people than seasonal flu viruses do.
The German researchers caution that it would be wrong to extrapolate these regional results to the whole country. But they also believe these findings show that lockdowns can begin to be lifted, as long as people maintain high levels of hygiene to keep COVID-19 under control.
US reopening: What states are relaxing social distancing restrictions and
moving away from lockdowns? 

RECOMMENDED READING!!!
The CDC’s Revised Face Mask Advice Is Based on Information That Was Available Months Ago
‘Immune system gone wild’: Why cytokine storms are so dangerous during COVID-19
Official COVID-19 Numbers Represent Just 6% of Total Infections, a New Analysis Suggests
Antibody tests could be key to reopening the country. Here’s how they work
When will a second wave of the coronavirus hit, and what will it look like?
Coronavirus updates: Cuomo says ‘we are going through hell’
Hundreds of thousands in L.A. County may have the coronavirus, study finds
What We Should Have Learned From Iceland’s Response to COVID-1
Mass Antibody Testing in This Rural Colorado County Sheds Light on COVID-19’s
Prevalence and Lethality
Antibody Tests in Colorado Highlight the Huge Gap Between Confirmed COVID-19
Cases and Total Infections
What is the Percentage by Age of those that Test Positive for Corvid-19   
What We Should Have Learned From Iceland’s Response to COVID-19
U.S. Fever Trends Suggest COVID-19 Rates Could Soon Decline
  Study of 72,000 COVID-19 patients finds 2.3% death rate
Why Some Corvid-19 Cases Are Worse than Others 
Deadliest infectious diseases in the world, ranked
How the CDC and the FDA Wrecked the Economy
German antibody testing for corvid 19.

Update April 12, 2020:

Thanks to a good friend, I discovered a publication (Okba et al on the pre-print server MedRxiv.org) now up on the CDC website located here, with the details  on the antigen used for their Eliza test with useful clinical-sample data. Inexplicably the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases does not have this article as a tidy PDF. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuTskRhgY   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF7G8t-CPAY 

This may have revealed a clue about the pandemic?
1/3 Sweeping coronavirus testing of the entire 4860 crew of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt with 94% having been tested. The Navy spokesperson told  Newsweek the ship has seen
3,920 negative coronavirus tests. This may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: of the majority of the 660 positive cases – 60% were/are asymptomatic, with 7 hospitalized and 1 having died officials say. In medicine, a disease is considered asymptomatic if a patient is a carrier for a disease or infection but experiences no symptoms. A condition is asymptomatic if it fails to show the noticeable symptoms with which it is usually associated.  Asymptomatic infections are also called subclinical infections. 
2/3 The Diamond Princess saw its passengers and crew contract the coronavirus during February this year, sparking worldwide panic that the pandemic could become a genuine threat to human existence.  It was packed full of 3,711 passengers and crew, and in total 14 people died from the virus aboard, while 712 were confirmed to have had the infection. After those on board were allowed to disembark, the rate of infection and its spread across the boat was monitored and compared to the original source of coronavirus in Wuhan, which reported the first case on December 31, 2019. Experts found that the transmission of the virus throughout the ship was four times faster than at the peak of the outbreak in the Chinese city.  Debate raged as to how long those people should have been  left on the cruise liner, given the overcrowded nature of the vessel and a lack of medical understanding of whether cruise goers were virus-free.     Quarantined for coronavirus on the Diamond Princess           https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess
3/3 The Grand Princess was kept at sea for several days before being allowed back into port. 
A source familiar with the process said government officials knew for several hours that there were multiple positive results from the testing done aboard the cruise liner, which had 3,533 people.  These include 2,422 guests and 1,111 teammates. In total, they represent 54 nationalities. Of the 1,103 passengers from the Grand Princess that elected to be tested, 103 tested positive, 699 tested negative.  While Three passengers who traveled on the Grand Princess cruise ship have died,  Over the course of several days, passengers were spread between four military bases in California, Texas and Georgia to complete a two-week quarantine.     
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_
pandemic_on_cruise_ships#Grand_Princess


Also a recent published report that examined data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined after passengers began testing positive for COVID-19 in February. In the analysis, which utilized data from both U.S. and Japanese health organizations, the CDC reported that the virus’ ribonucleic acid (RNA) had survived for 17 days in rooms previously inhabited by symptomatic and asymptomatic in the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship — after those rooms were already vacated by guests. The RNA had also survived on a “variety of surfaces,” the report said, albeit before any “disinfection procedures had been conducted,”
per Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases.
The Diamond Princess was first quarantined in early February after a passenger who previously departed in Hong Kong tested positive for COVID-19. Further testing revealed that 712 of the 3,711 passengers and crew eventually contracted the virus as well. Later in February, the Grand Princess cruise ship was also identified as the source of a separate outbreak after a passenger who previously sailed on a Feb. 11-21 voyage tested positive for coronavirus and ultimately died while the ship was already on another voyage. That sailing experienced an outbreak among passengers as well, and the Grand Princess was quarantined off the coast of San Francisco amid testing.   
Source:  https://www.foxnews.com/health/coronavirus-
survived-17-days-cruise-ship-cabins-cdc-report
 
With the numbers being one in seven that might test positive for Corvid-19 infection.  Though that might not seem like that big of deal. Especially when you consider most that acquire the virus are over 60 years of age and in confine spaces with air pollution around them. What is certain, the CDC says, is that cruise ships are “often settings for outbreaks of infectious diseases because of their closed environment and contact between travelers from many countries.”  Both the CDC and the U.S. State Department have since advised that Americans avoid traveling by cruise ship.    
NYC versus Minnesota  versus Oklahoma 
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page 
https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/situation.html 
https://coronavirus.health.ok.gov/  
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3VMtr-6Usc
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Our Love is Here to Stay

A daughter stays on the phone for hours and hours
as her father dies alone from coronavirus!! :'(


Abby Reinhard was expecting her 76-year-old father to be discharged from the hospital earlier this month after a fall. Instead, the 41-year-old mother of three from Rochester, New York, heard from the hospital her father,  Donald Adair, — had tested positive for — COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Two days later, on April 6, Reinhard learned that her dad passed away from complications due to COVID-19.
“I still fully haven’t taken in what happened with my dad,” Reinhard told “Good Morning America.”
“It still feels surreal somehow.” Reinhard and her three siblings — who live around the world — spent the last nearly two days of their dad’s life on the phone with him, as he lay in the hospital struggling to breathe,
with a phone propped up by his ear and they listened for his every breath and said their goodbyes.
MORE: Coronavirus updates: 21 NYC public school teachers dead
She wrote about the experience as it unfolded so she would have a memory of her dad’s last hours on Earth. Reinhard later shared her thoughts in a moving Facebook post that gives a glimpse into what it is like for the thousands of families separated from their loved ones in critical condition due to COVID-19.
“When I looked down at my phone, still connected to your hospital line, I wanted so badly to talk to you again, even though I knew you weren’t really there,” she wrote. “I pictured your body lying on the bed and your spirit rising. ‘I love you, Dad,’ I said into the phone. I paused for a few moments and pressed the red button to
end the call. At least 23,070 people in the U.S. have died as a result of COVID-19, including more than
 10,000 people have died from COVID-19 in New York state alone.
Reinhard though said she wants her dad and the thousands of other COVID-19 victims to be remembered as more than just statistics. She also wants people to understand how quickly COVID-19 can turn into a deadly serious illness and how hard it is for those left behind who were not allowed to be at their loved ones’
hospital bedside.
“It’s easy to feel at a distance from numbers,” she said. “If we totally take in the extent of what’s happening,
it’s almost too much. But when we humanize a tragedy we understand it better.”
MORE: This mom has helped hundreds of people per day get tested for COVID-19
Reinhard’s father, Adair, was a Rochester native who graduated from Harvard University 
on scholarships before graduating from Cornell Law School.

He was an attorney and a grandfather of five, according to Reinhard.
“He was one of the smartest people I ever met and he was also very humble and kind,” she said. “He loved his kids and was very proud of us. He had a big heart, a big brain, an incredible work ethic and a lot of love.”

Here is Reinhard’s full Facebook post,
her account of her dad’s final hours.

April 5th, 2020, Evening:
The terror I’ve felt today is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and I can only imagine how hard it has been for you, Dad. I’m so sorry you are going through this nightmare. You went to the hospital after falling, and you were supposed to be discharged soon. But COVID spread, unsuspected, down the hall, before you had a chance. On Saturday night I read that the test came back positive. I can’t describe the fear I felt in that moment,
and I thought, “This cannot be happening to my family.” Somehow I was able to regain a sense of calm and went to bed hopeful, because the signs of your health were encouraging.
This morning, I got the call and your dire prognosis. “Aspiration… deterioration… suffering…
not much time.” Your lungs got ravaged so fast. I couldn’t fully take in what the nurse was saying — it didn’t feel real. Then I heard myself say, ”How are you going to make sure this doesn’t happen to other families? Why did you all wait so long to wear masks, and why wasn’t there more testing? “This never should have happened!” Then I caught myself and remembered that she was an innocent messenger working on the
frontline of the pandemic,
I told her I was grateful for her.

What was done was done.
The weight of this reality hit hard, the dam broke, and I sobbed, realizing I couldn’t go to be by your side.
No visitors. COVID wing. Oh my God. I felt a huge rush of fear and then anguish.
But I couldn’t stay stuck there.
I needed to talk to you, Dad, as soon as possible.
The nurse offered to call me from your hospital phone and nestle it by your ear, so I could hear you breathe, and you could hear me talk. “I love you… Thank you… I’m sorry… I forgive you,” I said, as I heard you struggle to breathe and eject the ooze from your lungs. Hearing the retching sound of your cough, I knew you were suffering — and there I was, powerless, on the other end of the phone. But I was so thankful for the nurses. “Yes, Don, get that out,” they said.
“You can do it, Don. That’s good.”
You settled down in between coughs, and I searched my heart for what to say. I hope you could hear me.
I talked about our precious times at the lake. I remembered you playing your guitar around the campfire,
and I clung to that image as if it were my saving grace. I hope you could hear through my tears as I sang our old campfire songs. Some of the lyrics seemed so fitting — “Milk and honey on the other side” and “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” I paced back and forth in my bathroom, trying to contain my crying,
as I attempted to get the words out.
I worked hard to breathe — but not as hard as you.

After a half-hour or so, I realized I could join Tom, Carrie and Emily to the call.
Over the next many hours, our conversation with you is one I will treasure for the rest of my life. Although we were each sitting in Dallas, Raleigh, Copenhagen or Rochester, we were together, unpacking memories we had stored away long ago. The lake, the Cape, and our Europe trip. Games, projects, and important conversations. We also sang more campfire songs.
I pray that you could hear it all.
I had to break away from the call a few times to talk to doctors. I needed opinions. I needed data.
Until today I’d actually forgotten I was your health-care proxy, and I was unprepared for the decision I had to make. An unthinkable decision. The doctors shared information and context, and it was clear that they were clear on the hard call I needed to make.
But I did not have that same clarity. You always have been so strong,
Dad, and I wanted to grasp on to any shred of hope.
I read your living will, over and over, meditating on each life-and-death phrase. I tried to put myself in your shoes. I also checked in with my intuition, which I’ve learned over the years is almost always right. The clear voice inside was leading me to the same answer as the doctors. I hated that answer, but I knew it was right and that I couldn’t wait too long, because you were suffering. So I made the horrifying but loving decision.
“Comfort care.”

The doctor sounded relieved.
Through all of this, I want you to know, Dad, that I haven’t had the feeling that it’s too much too bear.
I’ve known deep down, that as hard as this is, I could handle it. And I’m eternally grateful to your sister Robin,
who helped me sort out the right course of action.
It’s now early evening, and I’ve been sitting at my desk writing while connected to our call.
I’m glad to have documented what has happened up to this point. Now I’m trying to absorb this precious moment of being together virtually, giving thanks for you, Dad.
It feels so good to laugh and cry. To be connected on the phone with you and my brother and sisters.
To bring the images of us from earlier years back to life. It also feels good to hear you breathe.
That rhythmic, white noise is the background music to our call. Although we’ve had a few excruciating periods of silence on your end — maybe a minute long each time. When you don’t breathe, I hold my own breath,
afraid it’s the end.
And we all chime in, “Breathe, Dad — we need to hear you breathe.”
Then we finally hear you inhale. Then I let out a sigh of relief, grateful to know you’re still with us.
I have never loved and appreciated breath the way I love and appreciate breath right now.

April 6th, Morning:
Around midnight last night, I dozed off, with you still in my ear and all five phone lines connected.
I don’t know how much sleep I got. Each nap was punctuated by our mantras,
“We love you so much… We’re here for you… Your kids are all here, Dad.”
Today your breath is more sporadic and thick, like you’re straining to suck paste up a straw.
All I can do is listen on the other end of the phone, and write this down.
My own chest is feeling tight now, as I imagine your lungs filling, while the virus seeps in.
You just moaned softly, and I don’t know if you’re trying to say you love us, or if you’re in pain.
We’re listening to you and loving you. I wish desperately we could be with you in person,
and I hate picturing you in that room alone.
But I keep coming back to my faith, which tells me you’re surrounded by love. I pray you can see angels behind your closed eyes. That you can feel their love — and ours. That you can hear us on the other end of the phone. That you can sense the stirrings of your soul even while your body is becoming numb.

April 6th, Afternoon:
It’s been ten minutes since we last heard you, Dad. I know there’s likely just an issue with the phone,
but I’m really scared. But I keep thinking, if you were gone, surely by now the nurses would have come in,
and we’d hear them through the phone. Right? Please…Dear God.
You’re back! The phone had slipped. Thank you, God. Now we hear short, shallow breaths — each one a miracle. You’re here. We’re here. With obvious relief, we’re each telling you again how much we love you.
Baby Skylar is hiccuping on Carrie’s line.
This is life, and this is death. The newborn baby on the phone with the grandfather she’ll never meet.
Then silence again. This one is a dark, harrowing silence…
Ok, here come faint, short flicks of white noise. I hope that’s you. Yes, it’s louder now. It’s you! Thank God.
I just said the Lord’s Prayer, in short bursts between my attempts at squelching my sobs so my kids can’t hear me. I feel the pressure of the wailing behind my eyes, as I whimper like a dog, and wipe the tears away.
I feel it in my throat now too, the pressure. Grief is a strange thing.
It comes in unpredictable waves. At one point earlier, I felt slightly guilty because I actually felt ok.
And now here I am, pushing back against a huge wave of pain as it crests.
I try to breathe through it.
I’m breathing. You’re breathing. We’re ok.
…I’m back and feeling much better. While it was silent on the phone, I breathed in and out when
you did for about 15 or 20 breaths — and it’s all I focused on. A breathing duet and a meditation.
I felt so connected to you, and my mind calmed more than ever today. Thank you.
…We’re all getting tired. The cadence of our conversation continues to slow.

April 6th, Early Evening:
The pain just hit hard again. I exhaled out a sob for so long and so hard, I felt my stomach muscles seize up. These are quiet wails, with just the hiss of air escaping my wide-open mouth. Now that I’m on the other side of that release, I’m feeling much more peaceful.
This is lasting much longer than the doctor predicted yesterday. I start to question my decision until I speak with the with the new, kind doctor on the floor, who uses the phrase “terminally ill.” Yesterday’s doctor is “off for the week” — in quarantine, I assume. I also just read an article in the New York Times by an MD giving a gruesome account of intubation and the small chance of recovery it affords.
I feel more at peace again with what’s happening.
I’m grateful Tom stopped telling you to keep fighting, Dad. But I grieve the loss of his hope —
the hope I played a part in taking away, with the decision Tom is so reluctant to accept.
The first-born — the only son. The one running for office, who needed his dad to last
at least through November. His very proud father.
Tom just stepped away from the call, and Carrie and Emily say, “I love you, Dad.” Silence again. I realize now that some of the silent patches on your end of the line are due to your faint breaths that aren’t loud enough to cue the phone line to pick you up. So the line sounds almost dead, as we wait and listen hard. I miss the in-and-out sound of your breaths,
but the silence isn’t as scary now. I even manage to eat a slice of pizza.
…You’re back! We hear you, Dad. The phone line picked you back up thanks to background noise in the COVID wing, as the nurses opened your door to reposition you. They are superheroes, putting themselves at risk so you can be as comfortable as possible. We hear one of the nurses with a kind, lilting voice narrate as they move your body. Before leaving, she said, “Goodnight, Don. I’ll see you tomorrow.” I can’t help but wonder if she’s right.
I feel the need to sing to you again, so here goes, with “Our Love is Here to Stay.” A bit more upbeat than yesterday’s “Amazing Grace.” And just now I played “Country Road” from YouTube, so you could hear one of your favorite John Denver songs.

…You’re now making a new sound! A gentle, guttural sigh. Is this a new phase?
Are you having a sweet dream? Are you seeing something?
Now it’s gone silent again. How fleeting peace can be. I’m glad I reveled in it while it lasted.
Now we wait, and listen, and pray again.
The flavor of tonight’s call is so different than last night’s. Only a few stories.
Our tired grief is slowing our brains and wearing on our spirits.
The silence has been going on for several minutes now. But no nurses have come.
Maybe the phone slipped again.
Eight-year-old Caroline just popped in to my room asking if Grandpa Don sounded better.
I told her honestly that you have been sounding much more calm. “Yes!” she said, with a huge smile.
“There have been a lot of recoveries,” and, as her smile faded away, she added,“…and a lot of deaths.”
I wonder how the coronavirus will shape my kids and their generation?
I think now about what shaped you and your fellow Boomers. Vietnam….
a war against communism in a distant land. Today it’s the coronavirus…
a war waged against droplets in the air, all around us.
I hear you breathing again, Dad. So grateful for that sound.

Late Evening April 6th/Early Morning April 7th:
The four of us just agreed we need more sleep tonight, and that you’d want us to take care of ourselves.
It could be hours or days, and there’s no way to know.
We couldn’t stay as connected on the phone as we were last night.
I stayed muted on the line with you, as I tucked in the kids and got ready for bed. I journaled and fell asleep around 11. None of us hung up the line, in case we wanted to reconnect at any point during the night, but we agreed to step away from our phones and get some sleep.
Then came the call, just after midnight. I knew what I was going to hear, and braced myself.
Gone. You’re gone.
Cause of death: “Respiratory failure in the setting of aspiration and COVID-19.”
Time of death: 11:50 p.m.
If I’d stayed on the phone just one more hour, I could have been with you. We’d been on the line together for almost 36 hours. What are the chances you would pass within an hour of our break? Maybe you didn’t want us to hear you go. Or maybe you didn’t have the space to leave while we were hanging on your every breath.
If I’m honest, maybe part of me didn’t want to hear your last gasps of air.
When I looked down at my phone, still connected to your hospital line, I wanted so badly to talk to you again, even though I knew you weren’t really there. I pictured your body lying on the bed and your spirit rising.
“I love you, Dad,” I said into the phone. I paused for a few moments and pressed the red button to end the call.

Here comes the pain again, so heavy.
I cannot believe this is happening.
Dear God, Thank you for welcoming my dad. He is such a good soul.
Dad, I know we can still continue our conversation. Thank you so much. I love you forever.
Love, Abby

Daughter chronicles dad’s death from COVID-19: ‘I cannot believe this is happening’ 
originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘We hear you, dad’: A daughter stays on the phone for hours and hours as her father dies alone from coronavirus 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

TO SEPARATE FEAR FROM FACT

I SAT DOWN WITH TWO INFECTIOUS DISEASE EXPERTS IN HONG KONG.
DR. IVAN HUNG & DR. SARAH BORWEIN ~ Kristie Lu Stout

Kristie Lu Stout, “Hong Kong: “Is The coronavirus is man-made.”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“If you look at the virus itself, if you look at the phylogenetic tree,
we find that basically the virus pops very nicely in between the beta coronaviruses
and the SARS coronaviruses. So we believe that this is actually
a natural evolution of this novel coronavirus.”

Kristie Lu Stout: “So it didn’t come from a lab in China. This wasn’t bioengineered.”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong: “Unlikely.”

”SINCE THE OUTBREAK BEGAN, THERE HAS BEEN A WAVE OF MISINFORMATION,
PROMPTING THIS OPEN LETTER BY SCIENTISTS IN “THE LANCET”:
“CONSPIRACY THEORIES DO NOTHING BUT CREATE FEAR, RUMOURS, AND PREJUDICE
THAT JEOPARDISE OUR GLOBAL COLLABORATION IN
THE FIGHT AGAINST THIS VIRUS.”

Kristie Lu Stout: “My pet can give me the virus because we know that a pet here in
Hong Kong has tested positive for coronavirus and was placed under quarantine…
”Dr. Sarah Borwein, Partner, Central Health Medical Practice, Hong Kong, GP, and Infectious Disease Expert: “It’s very unlikely and more likely that the dog has been environmentally contaminated.

Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“Even though it’s contaminated, you won’t get a very high viral load and very unlikely
that you can actually be transmitted from the pets to you. It’s very unlikely.”

Kristie Lu Stout: “Now this is a big one. ‘Wearing a mask will not protect me from the virus’ because
you have the US Surgeon General telling people you don’t need to buy a mask, it is not effective. Is it?”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“If you look at the data in Hong Kong, wearing a mask is probably the most
important thing in terms of infection control. And it not only brings down the cases of coronaviruses,
but it also brings down influenza. In fact, this is now the influenza season,
and we hardly see any influenza cases. And that is because the masks actually
protected not only against coronaviruses but also against the influenza
viruses as well. ”

Kristie Lu Stout: “The coronavirus is less deadly than the flu. How do they compare?”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“If you look at the mortality rate, so far, currently it stands at 3.4% because I think recently
has been pulled up by the Iranian mortality but otherwise if you look at the thousand cases
being reported by Professor Zhong Nanshan in New England Journal of Medicine,
basically the mortality rate is around 1.4% or probably even going to go lower as the denominator
is getting bigger. So, it still stands above 1%, for influenza, it’s 0.1% or
even lower depending on what seasons you are. So it’s still 10 times more deadly
compared to influenza.”

Kristie Lu Stout: “The virus will go away in April.” A lot of people think so,
including President Donald Trump. Will it?”
Dr. Sarah Borwein, Partner, Central Health Medical Practice, Hong Kong, GP, and Infectious Disease Expert: “It is very speculative. And some people partly say that because SARS went away in April-May,
but when it’s warm here, it’s going to be cold somewhere else.
We’ve got a southern hemisphere too. ”

Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“With SARS, it only affected a few countries. But this time it’s really a pandemic scale.
So basically it can come back, especially in the southern hemisphere and then alternate
with the northern hemisphere.”

Watch the Interview Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
time_continue=3&v=3G0zhZ7sDik&feature=emb_title
 

A Tale of Two Cities: How Hong Kong Has Controlled its Coronavirus Outbreak,
While N.Y.C. Scrambles
Posted on March 9, 2020 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield

A possible new clue in coronavirus transmission
Sweeping coronavirus testing of the entire 4800 crew of the U.S..S. Theodore Roosevelt
may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: Of the majority of the 600 positive cases –
60% are asymptomatic, with 6 hospitalized and 1 having died officials say.
In medicine, a disease is considered asymptomatic if a patient is a carrier for a disease or infection but experiences no symptoms. A condition might be asymptomatic if it fails to show the noticeable symptoms with which it is usually associated. Asymptomatic infections are also called subclinical infections

Authorities say finding ‘patient zero’ would help answer crucial questions about the origin
of the coronavirus. As the coronavirus death toll rises, health authorities are trying to control or even halt the spreading epidemic by tracking down “patient zero” – the first person to have been infected by the disease. Covid-19, the official name of the illness caused by the virus, has infected more than 82,000 people worldwide and killed at least 2,800.
It has spread to at least 44 countries outside China.
But the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday that the coronavirus was “not yet”
a worldwide epidemic, or “pandemic”. Here are the essential things to know about the hunt
for patient zero. Although the term patient zero can be used interchangeably with “index case” and generally refers to the first person infected by a communicable disease in an
outbreak, in the Covid-19 epidemic, there are several patient zeros.
That is according to Sarah Borwein, who works in the infectious diseases field at Hong Kong’s
Central Health Medical Practice. “For example, we know who patient zero is in the big cluster in South Korea, and that is helping to trace all the contacts and understand what happened,” she said. “But we don’t know who patient zero was in the Iran cluster, or the cluster in Italy.”
South Korea has reported more than 1,500 confirmed Covid-19 cases and at least 13 fatalities. The biggest cluster of infections has been linked to a secretive Christian church in the southeastern city of Daegu.
At the centre of the church cluster is a 61-year-old female member of the sect, who is South Korea’s 31st case. Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has described the outbreak there as a “super-spreading event”. Meanwhile, Chinese officials are still trying to trace the epidemic back to its source in China. The first coronavirus case was reported to the WHO on December 31 and has been linked to Wuhan’s Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market. However, a new study published by a team of Chinese scientists last week said the virus might have been imported from somewhere else.
The first known Covid-19 patient, a male who showed symptoms on December 8, had been
discharged but said he was not at the Huanan market, the Wuhan government
said in a Weibo post on Wednesday. “We don’t know who the very first patient zero was, presumably in Wuhan, and that leaves a lot of unanswered questions about how the outbreak started and how it initially spread,” Borwein said.
Why is it important to find them? Knowing who patient zero was would help prevent future outbreaks and provide information about how to prevent transmission, Borwein said. But as time passes, identifying the index case grows increasingly difficult.
“Figuring out who patient zero was wouldn’t give us all the answers but it would help to map the path the virus has taken and how it’s travelling,” she said. “It’s hard to draw that map without knowing where it starts.”
John Nicholls, a University of Hong Kong clinical professor in pathology, said identifying patient zero during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic in 2002-03 was
vital from an epidemiological perspective, as it highlighted the mode of its spread.
The disease, which infected over 8,000 and killed 813 people globally, was traced to a 64-year-old medical professor from Guangzhou, who had infected at least 13 tourists staying at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong.
But Nicholls, who was an important member of the 2003 research team that isolated and characterised the Sars coronavirus, which is in the same family as the current virus,
said the sheer number of infections in the current epidemic meant finding the patient zeros was a huge challenge. “There are so many outbreaks and hotspots around the world, and this virus appears to spread more rapidly than Sars, so it’s going to be a big challenge to accurately
pinpoint patient zero,” he said. “Epidemiological resources would be better at mitigating
the spread rather than looking back.”
Borwein, who worked as head of infection control for a hospital in Beijing and in outbreak communication during the Sars epidemic, said people must be wary of the language they use when talking about patient zero, because it had the potential to fuel xenophobia and panic.
“We talk about a ‘desperate hunt’ or a ‘panicked hunt’ for patient zero – and because coronavirus started in China, and patient zero was probably Chinese, it can easily fuel discrimination and racism,” she said.
“It’s important to understand that patient zero is a clue, not a criminal.” What are some examples of Covid-19 patient zeros? Most coronavirus patient zeros came from Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak. That includes patient zeros in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and the Philippines. The first Covid-19 case outside China was reported on January 13 in Thailand. The patient was a 61-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan who travelled to Bangkok with family members in a tour group.
Two days later, Japan confirmed the second coronavirus case outside China: a man in his 30s who lived in Kanagawa prefecture, southwest of Tokyo.
The man had travelled to Wuhan and been in close contact with a pneumonia patient in the city. Around a week later, on January 23, the US’ Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported the country’s first American coronavirus case, a 35 year-old Washington state man who had visited family in Wuhan. There have also been incidents of human-to-human transmission among Covid-19 patient zeros. Vietnam confirmed two cases of the virus on January 23. A 65-year-old man from Wuhan met up with his son, 27,
who works in the country and did not travel to China.
The father developed a fever on January 17 and the son showed the same symptoms three days later, doctors said in The New England Journal of Medicine on January 28. This family cluster suggested an instance of person-to-person transmission, the WHO said. Germany also reported what is believed to be the first human-to-human transmission case in Europe on January 28.
A 33-year-old German man contracted the disease after attending a training session given by his Chinese colleague in the state of Bavaria. The female colleague, who is from Shanghai, had recently returned from visiting her parents in Wuhan, said Andreas Zapf, head of the Bavarian State Office for Health and Food Safety.

Recovered coronavirus patients are testing positive again. Can you get reinfected?
I’m a Respiratory Therapist: Here’s What I’m Seeing on the Front Lines..
Japanese medical workers fear the worst as coronavirus cases spike..
The coronavirus’ impact on Social Security is now plainly visible..
More Than 60,000 Americans Have Now Recovered From Coronavirus
This is what life could be like after Americans ‘flatten the curve’..
Lessons doctors learned a month into the pandemic..
The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead..

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Coronavirus: How Did It Spread

  Protecting Our Health as They Watch Us Die and Who is the Real Patient Zero?  

Rumors stop with the wise…. it is what it is ? 
The Chinese are to blame for this Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
The Chinese are to blame for this Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
 Their containment methods were laughable, their officials refused to inform the public, and people died.
They allowed Wuhan to celebrate Chinese New Year, exposing potentially tens of thousands to the disease. Then some five million people left the city before they enacted a quarantine. And now we’re hearing that they knew about human transmissions. 
The Wall Street Journal’s piece on how this whole international fiasco began 
all but places the blame where it should rightfully be directed: China!

It was on Dec. 10 that Wei Guixian, a seafood merchant in this city’s Hua’nan market, first started to feel sick. Thinking she was getting a cold, she walked to a small local clinic to get some treatment and then went back to work. Eight days later, the 57-year-old was barely conscious in a hospital bed, one of the first suspected cases in a coronavirus epidemic that has paralyzed China and gripped the global economy.
The virus has spread around the world and sickened more than 100,000.  
For almost three weeks, doctors struggled to connect the dots between Ms. Wei and other early cases, many
of them Hua’nan vendors. Patient after patient reported similar symptoms, but many, like her, visited small, poorly resourced clinics and hospitals. Some patients balked at paying for chest scans; others, including
Ms. Wei, refused to be transferred to bigger facilities that were better-equipped to identify infectious diseases.
When doctors did finally establish the Hua’nan link in late December, they quarantined
Ms. Wei and others like her and raised the alarm to their superiors. But they were prevented
by Chinese authorities from alerting their peers, let alone the public. Source

Shrimp vendor at Wuhan market may be coronavirus ‘patient zero.’
By Amanda Woods March 27, 2020 | 9:15am | Updated
A shrimp peddler at the Chinese market where the coronavirus pandemic likely began has been identified as one of the first victims of the disease — and possibly “patient zero.” The 57-year-old woman, identified by the Wall Street Journal as Wei Guixian, was the first person from the now-notorious Huanan market in Wuhan to test positive for the deadly bug. She was at work Dec. 10 when she developed what she thought were cold symptoms, Chinese outlet The Paper reported. So she walked to a small local clinic for treatment and then
went back to work — likely spreading the contagion. 
  “I felt a bit tired, but not as tired as previous years,” she told The Paper, according to a translation by news.com.au. “Every winter, I always suffer from the flu. So I thought it was the flu.” She visited a local clinic on Dec. 11 and received an injection, but didn’t feel any better, so she went to the Eleventh Hospital in Wuhan. “The doctor at the Eleventh Hospital could not figure out what was wrong with me and gave me pills,” Wei told the Chinese outlet — but those didn’t work either. “By then I felt a lot worse and very uncomfortable,” Wei said.
“I did not have the strength or energy.”
On Dec. 16, Wei went to Wuhan Union Hospital — one of the city’s biggest — to get checked out. A doctor there described her illness as “ruthless” and told her several other people from the same market had already come in with similar symptoms. By the end of the month, she was quarantined when doctors finally established the link between the emerging bug and the seafood market, the Chinese outlet reported.
A Dec. 31 statement from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission revealed that Wei was among the first
27 patients to test positive for COVID-19, and one of 24 cases with direct links to the seafood market.
Wei, who has since recovered and left the hospital in January, said she thinks she contracted the infection
from a market toilet in the market she shared with meat sellers and others, according to the Journal.
The vendors who worked on either side of Wei, along with one of her daughters, a niece and the niece’s husband, also caught the deadly bug, the paper reported. “A lot fewer people would have died” in the country
if the government had acted sooner, Wei told the Journal in February. Wei may have been “patient zero” at the market, but it’s still unclear if she was the first person to ever contract the novel coronavirus in the country.
Rumors have been circulating on Chinese social media that the first known patient did not get sick after making contact with the virus at the seafood market. The virus has been linked to Wuhan Institute of Virology, but the institute has denied the outbreak began among lab technicians, including a woman identified as 
Huang Yan Ling.


Huang was rumored to be “patient zero.”  
Huang Yan Ling (黄燕玲) worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She is reported to be patient Zero
with regard to the CPP virus (Wuhan Virus, Chinese Virus, COVID-19 etc).
While it is claimed that she died as a result of the virus, the CPP government has disavowed this statement
but has not furnished proof that she is alive. There is a powerful function in our human society known as
the 6th degrees of separation. This suggests that any two people on the planet are linked by acquaintances separated by only 6 people. 
For instance, I could probably pass a message to the Queen of England through 3 people – even though
I have no personal direct links to her. Presumably, I could contact a member of the San tribe (also known as “Bushmen”) through 6 linked acquaintances. Under this premise, it should be possible to locate this lady or someone who is familiar with her (if she has died) in order to clarify this supposition. If you read this,
I ask that you cast about your acquaintances to see if they know people, who know people (etc.) and find out
the truth to this mystery.

Huang Yan Ling 黄燕玲 Name in Chinese, links to her page at WHIOV, shows it’s been scrubbed. so that might mean that she is patient zero. Died on the spot pretty much after contracting a huge viral load, the other staff disinfected the body, sent it to a crematorium, then didn’t tell crem. staff, they mishandled body. Then  the lab denied all knowledge of Huang Yan Ling at first, then they said she left in 2015. But that’s not true.

Then they told another lie she’s alive and well. Well where is she?
I agree this is HIGHLY suspicious. She has certainly disappeared but that does not mean she is dead.
 Even if she had a direct IV injection of infected bat blood or its urine that would not kill her “on the spot”
But two things could have happen:.
 
1. She is dead. Basically as you said she got the virus maybe was quarantined for a while but she died.
It then spread from the crematorium.

2. Or She got the virus and GOT really really very sick, recovered in 14 days BUT was still infectious. Then went around Wuhan living her life. Walking to work, walking to the seafood market to buy fresh meat and veggies. Living in that 500m radius of her job in one of the many apartments. Doing the things a young well employed person does in a major city.  All the while infecting people and not even knowing it.
Option 2 has just as much evidence BUT it also provides for a really easy explanation for how that virus spread so devastatingly in Wuhan and then to the rest of world.
https://virusdanger.com/index.php
If option 2 were true and I were her I’d want to disappear too. IF the government of China did this… wouldn’t they do a more competent job? I mean they can completely blank her out of the Chinese internet with an edict. So far this looks about like what one would see if a person wanted to not be found at least for a while.
Here is what I think, she might be dead. But if other folks got sprayed by the bats, then chances are they went to wet markets and infected people there. The wet markets of china are horrible in hygiene and are overcrowded as well. She might be patient zero in the sense that she also developed symptoms first and possibly died as even the chinese don’t have a cure yet.

From having lived through the Reagan Years: I don’t trust the communist party at all and
 I am sure someday the truth always has away of surfacing and will end up like Chernobyl.

According to Taiwanese press reports, the first patient, identified by the surname Chen,
was a resident of the Wuchang District of Wuhan. Chen had never visited the seafood market, and has been “cured and discharged,” reports said. Independent medical researchers have disputed official Chinese claims. On Jan. 24, the Lancet, an independent medical journal, published a study showing Wuhan’s first patient was not connected to the seafood market.
 A joint research team representing China’s Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Huanan Agricultural College and the Chinese Institute for Brain Research have also said the seafood market is not the source of COVID-19. “The research provides further evidence that Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was not the birthplace of the virus,” China.org.cn reported Sunday.
Despite being largely dismissed by the mainstream media, mounting evidence is giving some serious weight
to the theory that the global coronavirus pandemic first spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 
Fox News
 reported Thursday that multiple sources briefed on the matter have “increasing confidence” that the biolab was ground zero for the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. 
According to the report, scientists at the facility were part of a Chinese effort to compete with the United States in the field of virology. The sources indicated that the virus was a naturally occurring strain, likely being studied as part of the Wuhan lab’s documented history of working with bat coronaviruses. With access to bats from the remote corners of China, researchers surely had no shortage of the most exotic and dangerous pathogens in the world.

Sources also told Fox that Chinese government is possibly behind efforts to shift the blame from the laboratory to a nearby wet market. Considering the communist regime’s rocky relationship with the truth, this accusation seems to fit right in with the country’s past behavior. Despite the report pointing to the biolab as the source of the outbreak, the building itself was constructed with safety in mind.
A 2017 Nature article profiled the WIV’s acquisition of a prestigious BSL-4 biosafety certification, touting the lab’s distance from the floodplain and earthquake-proof construction. While the building was safe from tremors, it was never safe from human error. It’s possible that the virus, which can survive on surfaces for over two weeks, simply hitched a ride on a careless employee’s shoes, clothing or hair.
Earlier this year, Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton was one of the first American politicians to openly float the possibility that the novel coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan-area lab
China claimed—for almost two months—that coronavirus had originated in a Wuhan seafood market. That is not the case. @TheLancet published a study demonstrating that of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including Patient Zero.  @SenTomCotton
Cotton was targeted by the mainstream media for this, as so-called fact checkers quickly dismissed the notion that the coronavirus is an engineered biological weapon, while ignoring the potential for a virulent research sample accidentally leaking. After all, despite the best efforts of government bioweapons programs,
the deadliest outbreaks in history have overwhelmingly been of natural origin — the Black Death,
the Spanish flu and smallpox all emerged organically.

In Wuhan, a perfect storm existed for the next outbreak to spread like wildfire: 
The city is the crossroads of modern China, with roads from Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai all intersecting miles from the biolab. China’s position as the center of the world’s manufacturing industry guaranteed constant international flights from a myriad of airports. Throw in lies from the communist government that only helped the virus spread, and it’s clear why we’re now in a pandemic. There’s little doubt that SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans from an animal, the question is now whether China unwittingly helped the pathogen along.

April 17 (UPI) — China’s economy shrank by 6.8 percent in the first three months of the year,
its first quarterly contraction on record, the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported on Friday.
 The squeeze to its gross domestic product is the first since it started reporting such figures in 1992,
 and occurred as cities were placed under lockdown, businesses were told to shutter and factories were ordered closed as the country attempted to clamp down on the spread of the deadly and infectious coronavirus.
The bureau said in a statement that industrial, service and market sales all dropped while investment growth slowed as did imports and exports. It added, however, that agriculture and the emerging service industries grew while the sales of daily necessities and online retail sales of physical goods “grew fast.” The contraction was announced as health officials in China’s coronavirus epicenter of Wuhan revised up its death toll by nearly
50 percent on Friday.

The Wuhan municipal headquarters for the COVID-19 pandemic increased its number
of deaths by 1,290 to 3,869, citing a responsibility to “history, the people and the deceased,”
read an English-language transition of the notification published by China’s state-run Xinhua.
 The health officials said the reason for the discrepancy was due to some patients dying at home, a lack of communication between hospitals, incomplete information concerning patients who died from the virus
and an overwhelmed medical system that resulted in either mistaken, belated or missed reporting.
The total number of infections was also revised up by 325 to 50,333 patients as of the end of Thursday,
the officials said. “Life and people are what matter most,” the notification read. “Every life lost in the epidemic
is not only a loss to their family but also a grief for the city.
Our sincere condolences go to the families of those who deceased in the the COVID-19 epidemic,
and we express deep sorrow to the compatriots and medical workers who lost their lives in the epidemic.”
The revision came amid allegations, particularly from the United States, that China has under-reported it figures. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump, who has previously raised questions over China’s numbers, told reporters that he doesn’t trust their counting as he attacked the Asian nation’s handling of its outbreak. “Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China?” he said.
“Does anybody really believe that?”

President Trump’s comments came a day after he announced he was pulling funding from
the World Health Organization, accusing it of responding too slow to the public health crisis and taking
China’s claims of being transparent about its fight against the virus at face value. Since the outbreak began in December, China has several times adjusted either its numbers or how it counts cases. 
In the middle of February, China revised down its death toll by 108 due to “repeated statistics.” 
A day earlier the National Health Commission adjusted who it considers to be a confirmed infection.
And earlier this month, China began counting asymptomatic cases for the first time. China’s National Health Commission on Friday reported 26 new cases of the coronavirus and zero deaths over the previous 24 hours, increasing its total infections to 82,367 while its death toll stood pat at 3,342.
However, the numbers did not include Wuhan’s revisions. 
Globally, there were 2.16 million coronavirus infections and 145,563 deaths as of this morning. https://google.com/covid19-map/
Please Watch: A documentary showing a Chinese virologist catching wild bats in mountains have fueled a conspiracy theory, which suggests that the novel coronavirus may have originated in Wuhan’s disease control authority. The seven-minute film features the centre’s researcher Tian Junhua, who has visited dozens of caves in Hubei province to capture the flying mammal.

“I felt I met death”: Nurse describes month long battle to beat coronavirus  🙁
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/
coronavirus-recovery-how-long-survival-immunity/


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Coronavirus: A Race to Respond

Medical workers moved a person who died from COVID-19 at a hospital in Wuhan.
© Provided by The Boston Globe 🙂

  China’s race to contain it… which came amid the Lunar New Year and this countries busiest travel time of year. A 55-year-old individual from Hubei province in China may have been the first person to have contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus spreading across the globe. That case dates back to Nov. 17, 2019, according to the South Morning China Post. That’s more than a month earlier than doctors noted the cases in Wuhan, China, which is in Hubei province, at the end of December 2019. At the time, authorities suspected the virus stemmed from something sold at a wet market in the city. However, it’s now clear that early in what is now a pandemic, some infected people had no connection to the market.
That included one of the earliest cases from Dec. 1, 2019 in an individual who had no link to that seafood market, researchers reported Jan. 20 in the journal The Lancet.  
In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.  President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates
based on retrospective infection data. 

Continued insanity: Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited
on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.But the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm.
Yet during that time, from Jan. 5 to Jan. 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country. It’s uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It’s also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine. 
But what is clear, experts say, is that China’s rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for “rumor-mongering,” broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city’s hospitals. “Doctors in Wuhan were afraid,” said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. “It was truly intimidation of an entire profession.” Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan. 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases — distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients,
all without telling the public.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization. “Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless,” said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a Thursday press conference. The documents show the head of China’s National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei,
 laid out a grim assessment of the situation on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials. A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were. 

“The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event,” the memo cites Ma as saying. The National Health Commission is the top medical agency in the country. In a faxed statement, the Commission said it had organized the teleconference because of the case reported in Thailand and the possibility of the virus spreading during New Year travel. It added that China had published information on the outbreak in an “open, transparent, responsible and timely manner,” in accordance with “important instructions” repeatedly issued by President Xi.
The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference. Some of the memo’s contents also appeared in a public notice about the teleconference, stripped of key details and published in February. Under a section titled “sober understanding of the situation,” the memo said that “clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible.”
It singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had “changed significantly” because of the possible
spread of the virus abroad.
“With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high,” the memo continued. “All localities must prepare for and respond to a pandemic.”  In the memo,  Ma demanded officials unite around Xi and made clear that political considerations and social stability were key priorities during the long lead-up to China’s two biggest political meetings of the year in March. While the documents do not spell out why Chinese leaders waited six days to make their concerns public,
the meetings may be one reason.
“The imperatives for social stability, for not rocking the boat before these important Party congresses is pretty strong,” says Daniel Mattingly, a scholar of Chinese politics at Yale. “My guess is, they wanted to let it play out a little more and see what happened.” In response to the teleconference, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing initiated the highest-level emergency response internally, level one, on Jan. 15.
It assigned top CDC leaders to 14 working groups tasked with getting funds, training health workers, collecting data, doing field investigations and supervising laboratories, an internal CDC notice shows. The memo directed Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, to begin temperature checks at airports, bus and train stations, and cut down on large public gatherings.

  The National Health Commission also distributed a 63-page set of instructions to provincial health officials, obtained by the AP. The instructions ordered health officials nationwide to identify suspected cases, hospitals to open fever clinics, and doctors and nurses to don protective gear. They were marked “internal” — “not to be spread on the internet,” “not to be publicly disclosed.” In public, however, officials continued to downplay the threat, pointing to the 41 cases public at the time. “We have reached the latest understanding that the risk of sustained human-to-human transmission is low,” Li Qun, the head of the China CDC’s emergency center, told Chinese state television on Jan. 15. That was the same day Li was appointed leader of a group preparing emergency plans for the level one response, a CDC notice shows.

On Jan. 20, President Xi issued his first public comments on the virus, saying the outbreak “must be taken seriously” and every possible measure pursued. A leading Chinese epidemiologist, Zhong Nanshan, announced for the first time that the virus was transmissible from person to person on national television. If the public had been warned a week earlier to take actions such as social distancing, mask wearing and travel restrictions, cases could have been cut by up to two-thirds, one paper later found. An earlier warning could have saved lives, said Zhang, the doctor in Los Angeles.
However, other health experts said the government took decisive action in private given the information available to them. “They may not have said the right thing, but they were doing the right thing,” said Ray Yip, the retired founding head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s office in China. “On the 20th, they sounded the alarm for the whole country, which is not an unreasonable delay.”

If health officials raise the alarm prematurely, it can damage their credibility — “like crying wolf” —and cripple their ability to mobilize the public, said Benjamin Cowley, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong. The delay may support accusations by President Donald Trump that the Chinese government’s secrecy held back the world’s response to the virus. However, even the public announcement on Jan. 20 left the U.S. nearly two months to prepare for the pandemic. During those months, Trump ignored the warnings of his own staff and dismissed the disease as nothing to worry about, while the government failed to bolster medical supplies and deployed flawed testing kits. 
Leaders across the world turned a blind eye to the outbreak, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling for a strategy of “herd immunity” — before falling ill himself. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro sneered at what he called “a little cold.”  The early story of the pandemic in China also shows missed opportunities at every step, the documents and AP interviews reveal. Under Xi, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades, increasing political repression has made officials more hesitant to report cases without a clear green light from the top. “It really increased the stakes for officials, which made them reluctant to step out of line,” said Mattingly, the Yale professor. “It made it harder for people at the local level to report bad information.”
Doctors and nurses in Wuhan told Chinese media there were plenty of signs that the coronavirus could be transmitted between people as early as late December. Patients who had never been to the suspected source of the virus, the Huanan Seafood Market, were infected. Medical workers started falling ill. But officials obstructed medical staff who tried to report such cases. They set tight criteria for confirming cases, where patients. not only. had to test positive, but also, samples had to be sent to Beijing and sequenced. They required staff to report to supervisors before sending information higher, Chinese media reports show.
And they punished doctors for warning about the disease.
  As a result, no new cases were reported for almost two weeks from Jan. 5, even as officials gathered in Wuhan for Hubei province’s two biggest political meetings of the year, internal China CDC bulletins confirm. During this period, teams of experts dispatched to Wuhan by Beijing said they failed to find clear signs of danger and human-to-human transmission. “China has many years of disease control, there’s absolutely no chance that this will spread widely because of Spring Festival travel,” the head of the first expert team, Xu Jianguo, told Takungpao, a Hong Kong paper, on Jan. 6. 
He added there was  “no evidence of human-to-human transmission” and that the threat from the virus was low. 

The second expert team, dispatched on Jan. 8, similarly failed to unearth any clear signs of human-to-human transmission. Yet during their stay, more than half a dozen doctors and nurses had already fallen ill with the virus, a retrospective China CDC study published in the New England Journal of Medicine would later show. The teams looked for patients with severe pneumonia, missing those with milder symptoms. They also narrowed the search to those who had visited the seafood market — which was in retrospect a mistake, said Cowling, the Hong Kong epidemiologist, who flew to Beijing to review the cases in late January.
In the weeks after the severity of the epidemic became clear, some experts accused Wuhan officials of intentionally hiding cases. “I always suspected it was human-to-human transmissible,”
said Wang Guangfa, the leader of the second expert team, in a Mar. 15 post
on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. He fell ill with the virus soon after returning
to Beijing on Jan. 16. Wuhan’s then-mayor, Zhou Xianwang, 
blamed national regulations for the secrecy.
“As a local government official, I could disclose information only after being authorized,”
Zhou told state media in late January. “A lot of people didn’t understand this.”   
As a result, top Chinese officials appear to have been left in the dark.
“The CDC acted sluggishly, assuming all was fine,” said a state health expert, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution. “If we started to do something a week   or two earlier, things could have been so much different.” It wasn’t just Wuhan. In Shenzhen in southern China, hundreds of miles away, a team led by microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung used their own test kits to confirm that six members of a family of seven had the virus on Jan. 12. In an interview with Caixin, a respected Chinese  finance magazine, Yuen said he informed CDC branches “of all levels,” including Beijing. But internal CDC numbers did not reflect Yuen’s report, the bulletins show.

When the Thai case was reported, health authorities finally drew up an internal plan to systematically identify, isolate, test, and treat all cases of the new coronavirus nationwide. Wuhan’s case count began to climb immediately — four on Jan. 17, then 17 the next day and 136 the day after. Across the country, dozens of cases began to surface, in some cases among patients who were infected earlier but had not yet been tested. In Zhejiang, for example, a man hospitalized on Jan. 4 was only isolated on Jan. 17 and confirmed positive on
Jan. 21. In Shenzhen, the patients Yuen discovered on Jan. 12 were finally recorded as confirmed
cases on Jan. 19.
The elite Peking Union Medical College Hospital held an emergency meeting on Jan. 18, instructing staff to adopt stringent isolation — still before Xi’s public warning. A health expert told AP that on Jan. 19, she toured
a hospital built after the SARS outbreak, where medical workers had furiously prepared an entire building with hundreds of beds for pneumonia patients. “Everybody in the country in the infectious disease field knew something was going on,” she said, declining to be named to avoid disrupting sensitive government consultations. “They were anticipating it.”

There is a wide misconception of what a ‘mild’ case of COVID-19 looks like.
It can be ugly and brutal.!!
Surviving coronavirus: How long does it take to recover? Are you immune?
And more questions answered!

Did Ava Green stumble onto the missing link for a Coronavirus treatment?
TURN UP YOUR VOLUME THIS WAS RECORDED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.

After she watched a doctor talk about covid-19 patients being able to talk and breathe and call loved ones before being knocked out and put on a ventilator, she remembered a treatment for her disability, Diamox.
Let her tell her story on the world news. 

Acetazolamide (DiamoxDiamox Sequels) used to remove excess fluid in the body in people with congestive heart failure; to treat seizures and glaucoma; and the prevention and treatment of altitude sickness.
Possible serious side effects include liver problems, seizures,
and metabolic acidosis. Drug interactions, dosing, and pregnancy and breastfeeding safety
are provided. Read the Cureus Article Here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzu1AJRZJEI&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR0d8YPjNLJ3jJawTpbYfNW3shm6ZXwCqhskuB5NHaZag6vJuGPzSKyPcLY
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