harvard |LIPSITCH:One
of the most important unanswered questions is what role do children
play in transmission? The go-to intervention in flu pandemic planning is
closing schools, and that may be very effective or it may be totally
ineffective. It’s a costly and disruptive thing to do, especially in the
United States, because many people rely on school breakfast and lunch
for nutrition. So we really need evidence that closing schools would
help. We need detailed studies in households of children who are exposed
to an infected person. We need to find out if the children get
infected, if they shed virus, and if that virus is infectious. The
second issue that we should be trying to get ahead of is the extent of
infection in communities and in places that aren’t doing extensive
testing.
GAZETTE:What do we know about for sure about how children are affected by this virus?
LIPSITCH:We
know that the cases of children sick enough to get tested is much lower
per capita than those of adults. And we also know that, in China
outside of Hubei province, the difference between children and adults is
smaller. Children are still underrepresented, but they’re a larger part
of the total than inside Hubei province. That would suggest that part
of the equation is that they are getting infected but they’re not that
sick — it’s easier to identify less-severe cases in a system that’s not
overwhelmed as it is in Hubei. But we don’t know whether they’re
infected and not as sick or whether there are a lot of kids that aren’t
getting infected even when they’re exposed.
guardian |Like 27.5 million other Americans,
I don’t have health insurance. It’s not for a lack of trying – I make
too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to buy a private health
insurance plan on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Since I can’t
afford to see a doctor, my healthcare strategy as a 32-year-old
uninsured American has been simply to sleep eight hours, eat vegetables,
and get daily exercise. But now that there are confirmed coronavirus
cases in the United States, the deadly virus could spread rapidly,
thanks to others like me who have no feasible way to get the care we
need if we start exhibiting symptoms.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are confirmed coronavirus cases in at least 50 countries on six continents, and more than 2,800 patients have died from the virus. This certainly qualifies as a pandemic
under the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of the term,
which, under a typical presidency, should necessitate a swift response
from US health officials. However, the Trump administration appears to
still be prioritizing the profit margin of the healthcare industry over
preventing the spread of a deadly pandemic.
Earlier this week, the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar, (a former senior executive at pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly) refused to commit
to implementing price controls on a coronavirus vaccine “because we
need the private sector to invest … price controls won’t get us there”.
Even the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, notably didn’t use the word “free”
when referring to a coronavirus vaccine, and instead used the word “affordable”. What may be considered affordable for the third-most powerful person in the US government with an estimated net worth of $16m
may not be affordable for someone who can’t afford a basic private
health insurance plan that still requires a patient to pay thousands of
dollars out of pocket.
Given the high cost of healthcare in the US, I haven’t seen a doctor
since 2013, when I visited an emergency room after being run off the
road while riding my bike. After waiting for four hours, the doctor put
my arm in a sling, prescribed pain medication and sent me home. That
visit cost more than $4,000, and the unpaid balance eventually went to
collections and still haunts my credit to this day, making it needlessly
difficult to rent an apartment or buy a car. But even a low-premium
bronze plan on the exchange comes with a sky-high deductible in the
thousands of dollars, meaning even if I was insured, I’d have still paid
for that ER visit entirely out of pocket.
The acronym for the day is NDMS. Once (if?) the President declares a public health emergency, Uncle Sam is on the hook for out-of-pocket medical costs via the National Disaster Medical System. https://t.co/rVfYOf26FYpic.twitter.com/2PPwerteuQ
China took and is taking massive economic hits in its drastic martial/medieval response to the SARS-CoV2 outbreak.
China reacted to this like it was a bio-weapons attack. (not saying that it was, but we've established to an acceptable level of confidence that it was at the very least a "gain of function" accident.)
Neither wing of the one party American system is psychologically capable of
conceiving the kinds of measures the situation may demand. The U.S. is grossly under prepared on any level to deal with either an objective biological threat, or, the mass hysterical infodemic threat that SARS-CoV2 has already clearly demonstrated itself to be.
Ensuring profit
is the one and only goal of any response American governance is capable of mustering. So what it comes down to is this. American political leadership MUST pretend that this outbreak is nothing worse than a bad strain of the cold or flu, period.
Now, we've already established in Washington state and in Illinois - that community spread with no known travel is underway. So it's here and it's propagating.
Knowing America as you do, do you expect American infection rates to mirror cruise ship levels ~20% or Korean Tard levels ~80% infection rates?
If you get 50% of the population infected all at once, we're done.
We don't have the means to do bulk testing.
We have limited capacity to treat people who go past flu-like symptoms.
If you try and force everybody to stay at home you may as well just switch off the lights. The real problem - however - will be the number of poor people still well enough to crawl to work.
For tens of millions it is show up for work or sleep in the car.
Not to mention the ones who show up for work everyday but are still forced to sleep in the car.
If the most severe aspects of the outbreak run like wildfire through the
elderly, poor, and homeless demographics - American elites will
consider this an unanticipated windfall and begin proclaiming their
exceptionalism.
It would be too sweet if the rich, elderly attendees of an elite cocktail/dinner party came in contact with servant peasants infected with SARS-CoV2 and they spread it around to all the sleek party attendees. A fair number of the rich and affluent getting sick and/or dying might shake things up a bit.
So the trick now is to try and draw out the process.
Though it will be a hard slog, if you can keep the infection rate below 5% - you may have the resources to manage care rationing and prevent more massive outbreak and economic disruption.
We shall all soon see. The chickens have surely come home to roost!
wired | Nearly 750 years ago, Marco Polo famously undertook several voyages from
Venice across the Mediterranean Sea, overland through Persia and
Central Asia to the court of the great Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis
Khan and founder of the Yuan dynasty, which presided over perhaps the
largest empire in world history. The Mongols nurtured the Silk Roads of
commerce that spanned the medieval world from China to Italy—until the
Black Death spread along them in the same direction, wiping out nearly
half the world’s population.
It is, of course, far too soon to make such dire predictions about Covid-19.
But a striking overlap exists between the path of today's viral spread
and the path that emerged in the 1300s. These parallels tell us
something crucial about the present state of geopolitics. Trade routes
and infrastructure expand imperial influence; interruptions along them
heighten awareness of our vulnerabilities. If we’re smart, we respond by
creating sensible frictions to avoid being dominated by a single
hegemon.
The
14th-century plague is said to have originated in northwestern China,
with bacteria contracted from marmots. Hebei Province bore the brunt of
China’s plague fatalities, with 5 million of its residents perishing in
the 1330s. Making its way westward via Silk Road merchants and caravans,
the plague took several years to reach Persia, where it killed the Khan
overlord Abu Said as well as half the population. In 1347, it entered
Europe via Italy’s port of Genoa.
Now compare that to what we’re seeing today with Covid-19. This time around, the source of illness may have been pangolins or bats instead of marmots. It started in Wuhan,
which just happens to be Hebei's capital. The coronavirus reached Iran
in a couple of weeks, and so far has infected hundreds of people, even
the country’s deputy health minister. Next to Iran, the next worst
outbreak is in Italy, with more than 300 cases and rising quickly—and
likely spreading through Europe exactly as the plague did centuries ago.
It
is, perhaps no coincidence that, in the past two decades, China has
been the origin of SARS, the swine flu, and now the Covid-19
coronavirus. Nor should we be surprised that Iran and Italy have
emerged, once more, as waypoints for pandemic spread. What do Iran and
Italy have in common today? They are two major anchors of China’s Belt
and Road Initiative—also known as the 21st century’s new Silk Roads.
I'm not a virologist and don't pretend to be. But I can read a fugging manual with the best of them, and understand what I've read. That said, slowly reread the nature paper from 2015 yourself.
Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to
infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus
encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV
sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats1—in
the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus
allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause
disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its
natural backbone. Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection
mediated by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells and in vivo,
and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against
SHC014-CoV. Together, the strategy translates metagenomics data to help
predict and prepare for future emergent viruses.
Shi Zhengli - you know you done f'd up....,
Mebbe what I'm watching from other "gain of function" virologists is a poster-child instance of the Weinstein's Distributed Information Suppression Complex?
The Proximal Origin of SARS-C0V2
virological |Since the first reports of a novel pneumonia (COVID-19) in
Wuhan city, Hubei province, China there has been considerable discussion
and uncertainty over the origin of the causative virus, SARS-CoV-2.
Infections with SARS-CoV-2 are now widespread in China, with cases in
every province. As of 14 February 2020, 64,473 such cases have been
confirmed, with 1,384 deaths attributed to the virus. These official
case numbers are likely an underestimate because of limited reporting of
mild and asymptomatic cases, and the virus is clearly capable of
efficient human-to-human transmission. Based on the possibility of
spread to countries with weaker healthcare systems, the World Health
Organization has declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health
Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). There are currently neither
vaccines nor specific treatments for this disease.
SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh member of the Coronaviridae
known to infect humans. Three of these viruses, SARS CoV-1, MERS, and
SARS-CoV-2, can cause severe disease; four, HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E,
are associated with mild respiratory symptoms. Herein, we review what
can be deduced about the origin and early evolution of SARS-CoV-2 from
the comparative analysis of available genome sequence data. In
particular, we offer a perspective on the notable features in the
SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which these features could
have arisen. Importantly, this analysis provides evidence that
SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated
virus.
Say What?
The genomic comparison of both alpha- and betacoronaviruses (family Coronaviridae
) described below identifies two notable features of the SARS-CoV-2
genome: (i) based on structural modelling and early biochemical
experiments, SARS-CoV-2 appears to be optimized for binding to the human
ACE2 receptor; (ii) the highly variable spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2
has a polybasic (furin) cleavage site at the S1 and S2 boundary via the
insertion of twelve nucleotides. Additionally, this event led to the
acquisition of three predicted O-linked glycans around the polybasic
cleavage site.
FoxNews | "Yes, we are thinking about [the] southern border, we have received a
lot of power on the southern border over the last couple of years from
the courts but we are looking at that very strongly," Trump said at
the press conference.
The rare appearance in the White House press
briefing room came shortly after news of the first death in the United
States from the new virus and a terrible week on the stock market over
fears of the outbreak.
"There's no reason to panic at all. This is
something that is being handled professionally," Trump assured, while
also acknowledging more cases in the U.S. are "likely."
The president said there are 22 patients in the United States who have coronavirus.
"Unfortunately, one person passed away overnight," Trump said, speaking to a case in Washington state.
“She was a wonderful woman, a medically high-risk patient in her late
50s. Four others are very ill. Thankfully 15 are either recovered fully
or they're well on their way to recovery. And in all cases, they've
been let go in their home.”
Shortly
before Trump spoke, Washington state health officials confirmed one
person had died from the new virus; the first person to die from the
disease in the United States. She was not infected by travel abroad,
officials said.
Trump also said Saturday that most healthy people
would be able to pull through should they contract coronavirus:
"Additional cases in the United States are likely. But healthy
individuals should be able to fully recover.”
newyork.cbslocal | With the coronavirus outbreak affecting at least 40 countries, many travelers are concerned about what’s being done to contain the virus.
At JFK Airport, jetlagged passengers typically in a rush to
clear immigration are now appalled by a lack of screening, especially
compared to procedures in the countries they just left.
Emily Ferrara and Blair Haworth just returned from Florence, Italy,
where their study abroad program was canceled because of the virus.
There are more than 300 cases there, one of the largest outbreaks
outside China.
Yet, the students told CBS2’s Christina Fan they weren’t asked a
single question about potential symptoms once they landed in New York
City.
“We didn’t even get checked. Like we’re used to being in Florence
where you get your temperature checked. Here they didn’t do anything,
which is kind of crazy,” Ferrara said. “Considering, like, how much the
cases have spread so fast, like, they should definitely be taking more
precautions here.”
Currently, the United States is only conducting health screenings for passengers who are flying in from China.
But Dr. Teresa Amato, the chair of emergency medicine at Long Island Jewish Forest Hills, says the idea may not be effective.
“I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult given that people are
infected with no symptoms and travel areas are becoming more and more
widespread with the virus,” she said.
In addition to airport screenings, some passengers believe there
should be more travel restrictions from countries other than China.
President Donald Trump weighed in on the idea at a press conference
Wednesday.
“At a right time, we might do that. Right now, it’s not the right time,” he said.
SMH | Was Australia about to put the cash flow of its universities ahead of
the peoples' health in the middle of a pandemic? Was the Morrison
government about to bungle the coronavirus response as badly as it did
the bushfires?
As MPs and senators returned to Canberra this week
for a parliamentary sitting, it was a topic of lively
concern. Government members knew that the universities had been
agitating behind the scenes for the China travel ban to be relaxed as
soon as possible. Some 100,000 of their Chinese students are caught by
the ban and the unis want them back in Australia. Paying fees.
The
Chinese government had been complaining about the ban for weeks, too.
Australia had been "discriminatory", according to the Chinese embassy in
Canberra. In multiple meetings across the government, every week with
the politicians who have let them in, China's officials have been
pressing their case hard.
The travel ban was decided immediately
after the US made the same call. Beijing instantly lashed both the US
and Australia on that occasion – the Chinese Communist Party's official
mouthpiece, People's Daily, calling it "racist".
But,
of course, that decision now looks very wise, more so with each passing
day. The WHO followed suit 10 days later. When Morrison announced the
China travel ban four weeks ago, there were about 7000 infections
disclosed by Beijing.
By Thursday this week that number had
ballooned to 78,000. The number of countries announcing travel bans has
grown proportionately, and mostly they have acted too late.
The
political capture of the WHO means, in effect, that it's every country
for itself. It also underlines the central importance of keeping
politics and other extraneous pressures out of the decision-making
processes on a medical matter. Likewise, China's early political
cover-ups and bungling wasted precious weeks in containing the virus.
The
Australian system for dealing with communicable diseases is less prone
to politics. Morrison hid from the bushfires; he had no such option on
the coronavirus. The Chief Medical Officer, Murphy, does not need the
government's permission to invoke the Biosecurity Act. He informed
Health Minister Greg Hunt on January 20 that he was triggering the act,
automatically setting in train a pre-ordained process of monitoring and
advice.
greatgameindia | For those who may not know, The Integrity Initiative is
an anti-Russian propaganda outfit funded to the tune of $140 million by
the British Foreign office. Throughout 2019, leaks have been released
featuring documents dated to the early period of Trump’s election,
demonstrating that this organization, already active across Europe
promoting anti-Russian PR and smearing nationalist leaders such as
Jeremy Corbyn, was intent on spreading deeply into the State Department
and setting up “clusters” of anti-Trump operatives. The documents reveal
high level meetings that Integrity Initiative
Director Chris Donnelly had with former Trump Advisor Sebastien Gorka,
McCain Foundation director Kurt Volker, Pentagon PR guru John Rendon
among many others.
The exposure of the British hand behind the scenes affords us a
unique glimpse into the real historical forces undermining America’s
true constitutional tradition throughout the 20th century, as Mueller/the Five Eyes/Integrity Initiative
are not new phenomena but actually follow a modus operandi set down for
already more than a century. One of the biggest obstacles to seeing
this modus operandi run by the British Empire is located in the belief
in a mythology which has become embedded in the global psyche for over
half a century and which we should do our best to free ourselves of.
Myth of the “American Empire
While there has been a long-standing narrative promoted for over 70
years that the British Empire disappeared after World War II having been
replaced by the “American Empire”, it is the furthest thing from the
truth. America, as constitutionally represented by its greatest
presidents (who can unfortunately be identified by their early deaths
while serving in office), were never colonialist and were always in
favor of reining in British Institutions at home while fighting British
colonial thinking abroad.
Franklin Roosevelt’s thirteen year-long battle with the Deep State, which he referred to as the “economic royalists who should have left America in 1776″, was
defined in clear terms by his patriotic Vice-President Henry Wallace
who warned of the emergence of a new Anglo-American fascism in 1944 when he said:
“Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for
Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already
American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using
it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward
certain races, creeds and classes.”
The fact is that already in 1944, a policy of Anglo-Saxon imperialism
had been promoted subversively by British-run think tanks known as the
Round Table Movement and Fabian Society, and the seeds had already been
laid for the anti-Russian cold war by those British-run American
fascists. It is not a coincidence that this fascist Cold War policy was
announced in a March 5, 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri by none other than Round Table-follower and the butcher of Bengal, Winston Churchill.
nature | "Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus
encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV
sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats1—in the context
of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to
evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease
independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural
backbone. Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection mediated
by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells and in vivo,
and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against
SHC014-CoV"
So they create a "chimeric" SARS-CoV virus that can cause disease (in humans)?
They continue:
"we synthesized the SHC014 spike in the context of the
replication-competent, mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone (we hereafter
refer to the chimeric CoV as SHC014-MA15) to maximize the opportunity
for pathogenesis and vaccine studies in mice (Supplementary Fig. 2a).
Despite predictions from both structure-based modeling and pseudotyping
experiments, SHC014-MA15 was viable and replicated to high titers in
Vero cells"
So they "maximize the opportunity for pathogenesis". Very interesting...
And then they continue saying:
"To test the ability of the SHC014 spike to mediate infection of the
human airway, we examined the sensitivity of the human epithelial airway
cell line Calu-3 2B4 (ref. 9) to infection and found robust SHC014-MA15
replication, comparable to that of SARS-CoV Urbani (Fig. 1c). To extend
these findings, primary human airway epithelial (HAE) cultures were
infected and showed robust replication of both viruses"
So in the last paragraph they have found that the new chimeric virus
they have created (they called it SHC014-MA15) "show robust replication"
in human cells. A great success I guess...
But they continue with the research and say:
"We next analyzed infection in more susceptible, aged (12-month-old)
animals. SARS-MA15–infected animals rapidly lost weight and succumbed to
infection"
So they test the new chimeric virus (they call it SARS-MA15 and also
SCH014-MA15) in mice and they saw a high pathogenicity in the lungs of
the animals, more acute in older ones
Then they continue with the trials of the SHC014-MA15 chimeric virus:
"Similarly, antibodies 230.15 and 227.14, which were derived from
memory B cells of SARS-CoV–infected patients13, also failed to block
SHC014-MA15 replication (Fig. 2b,c). For all three antibodies,
differences between the SARS and SHC014 spike amino acid sequences
corresponded to direct or adjacent residue changes found in SARS-CoV
escape mutants (fm6 N479R; 230.15 L443V; 227.14 K390Q/E), which probably
explains the absence of the antibodies' neutralizing activity against
SHC014. Finally, monoclonal antibody 109.8 was able to achieve 50%
neutralization of SHC014-MA15, but only at high concentrations (10
μg/ml) (Fig. 2d). Together, the results demonstrate that broadly
neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV may only have marginal efficacy
against emergent SARS-like CoV strains such as SHC014."
So it seems that the new chimeric virus they created is quite resilient to the antibodies normally used to treat SARS
Still more about the risks of chimeric virus:
"the creation of chimeric viruses such as SHC014-MA15 was not
expected to increase pathogenicity. Although SHC014-MA15 is attenuated
relative to its parental mouse-adapted SARS-CoV, similar studies
examining the pathogenicity of CoVs with the wild-type Urbani spike
within the MA15 backbone showed no weight loss in mice and reduced viral
replication23. Thus, relative to the Urbani spike–MA15 CoV, SHC014-MA15 shows a gain in pathogenesis
(Fig. 1). On the basis of these findings, scientific review panels may
deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating
strains too risky to pursue, as increased pathogenicity in mammalian
models cannot be excluded"
So they recognize they have created a very dangerous chimeric virus
with a high pathogenesis, easily transmitted in human cells and hard to
fight by antibodies, and they said at the end "building chimeric
viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue, as increased
pathegenicity in mammalian models cannot be excluded"
Say What?
At the end of the article they finally said:
"Coupled with restrictions on mouse-adapted strains and the
development of monoclonal antibodies using escape mutants, research into
CoV emergence and therapeutic efficacy may be severely limited moving
forward. Together, these data and restrictions represent a crossroads of
GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future
outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous
pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to
consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved "
So I have some questions:
a) What are the probabilities that an strange new SARS virus, never
seen before, very easily transmitted and very pathogenic, started
exactly some hundred meters from the same research lab where theses
people were creating chimeric viruses one day and the following?
b) What are the probabilities that a new "wild" virus be so similar
to this chimeric virus created in 2015 for this study? Could it be a
self-fulfilling prophecy?
c) What are the probabilities that the Wuhan Virology Instute have
developed a very accurate test for the brand "new" virus in just some
days after the outbreak? Do they have some knowledge in advance of what
kind of virus it was?
slate | Responsible outlets have covered the conspiracy theories, attempting
to debunk them. But even some experts don’t seem immune here. One
rejected the idea of the virus being a biological weapon and praised the
Wuhan Institute of Virology as a “world-class research institution that does world-class research” to the Washington Post at the end of January. Less than a month later, he was tweeting sympathetically about a New York Post opinion piece claiming the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes COVID-19, had escaped from the same lab.
These kinds of conspiracy theories thrive on our fear of the
uncertain, on our tendency to demand absolute proof that something is not
the case—and it’s difficult to prove something 100 percent false. Even
scientists can get sucked into this: During the Ebola outbreak, a
colleague and I tried to address concerns about ebolavirus “becoming airborne,”
a theory based on the argument that because no one could prove it
absolutely couldn’t happen, we should act as if it was happening.
FP | South Korea initially seemed to have the COVID-19 epidemic under
control, armed with efficient bureaucracy and state-of-the-art
technology. However, since Feb. 18, the number of coronavirus cases in
South Korea has exploded to more than 1,700 as of Thursday. The battle
plan against the epidemic was derailed by the oldest of problems:
religion and politics.
When it came to preparation, it helped that South Korea had one hell
of a practice run: the MERS outbreak in 2015 that caused 38 deaths. At
the time, the incompetent response by the conservative administration of
then President Park Geun-hye put South Korea in the ignominious
position of having the greatest number of cases outside of the Middle
East. The fallout, which contributed to the public distrust of
government that culminated in Park’s impeachment and removal, pushed the
South Korean government to significantly revamp its preparation for the
next viral event.
South Korea has been preparing for
a potential new strain of coronavirus since as early as November 2019.
Without knowing what virus would hit the country next, the Korea Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) devised an ingenious method
of testing for any type of coronavirus and eliminating known
strains of coronavirus such as SARS or MERS to isolate the new variant
of coronavirus.
For the first four weeks of the outbreak, South Korea marshaled
high-tech resources to respond aggressively while promoting
transparency. The government tracked the movements of travelers arriving
from China, for example by tracking the use of credit cards, checking CCTV footage, or mandating
they download an app to report their health status every day. For those
infected, the government published an extremely detailed list of their
whereabouts, down to which seat they sat in at a movie theater.
The info was also presented (with names removed) in an interactive website
that allows the public to trace the movement of every single individual
with coronavirus. To be sure, there were real privacy concerns—as when one unfortunate patient
in Daejeon had news of their visit to a risqué lingerie store blasted
to every smartphone in their city. Yet on balance, these disclosures did
much to calm the nerves and prevent unnecessary panic in the
population. By Feb. 17, South Korea’s tally of COVID-19 patients stood at 30, with zero deaths. Ten patients were fully cured and discharged, with some of the discharged patients declaring the disease was “not something as serious as one might think.” The government seemed ready to declare victory.
That all came to a crashing halt last week thanks to the 31st case.
Patient No. 31, discovered on Feb. 18, was a member of a quasi-Christian
cult called Shincheonji, one of the many new religious movements in the country. Founded in 1984, Shincheonji (whose official name
is Shincheonji, Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the
Testimony) means “new heaven and earth,” a reference to the Book of
Revelation. Its founder Lee Man-hee claims to be the second coming of
Jesus who is to establish the “new spiritual Israel” at the end of days. The cult is estimated to have approximately 240,000 followers, and claims to have outposts in 29 countries in addition to South Korea.
Shincheonji’s bad theology makes for worse public health. Shincheonji teaches
illness is a sin, encouraging its followers to suffer through diseases
to attend services in which they sit closely together, breathing in
spittle as they repeatedly amen in unison. If they were off on their
own, that might be one thing—but according to Shin Hyeon-uk, a pastor
who formerly belonged to the cult, Shincheonji believes in
“deceptive proselytizing,” approaching potential converts without
disclosing their denomination. Shincheonji convinces its members to
cover their tracks, providing a prearranged set of answers to give when
anyone asks if they belong to the cult. Often, even family members are
in the dark about whether someone is a Shincheonji follower. The net
effect is that Shincheonji followers infect each other easily, then go
onto infect the community at large.
It is not yet clear exactly how Shincheonji cultists were infected
with COVID-19 in the first instance. (KCDC said Patient No. 31 is likely not
the first Shincheonji follower to be infected, given the timeline of
her symptoms.) Although investigations are still pending, South Korean
authorities have been focusing on the funeral of the brother of Shincheonji’s founder held in early February. Shincheonji has 19 churches in China, including in Wuhan, and it may be possible that followers from around the world attended the funeral.
youtube |Barely more than a week ago, South Korea’s coronavirus outbreak appeared to be contained as the number of confirmed infections stabilized at 30. Sensing a turning tide, many Seoul residents took off their surgical masks and resumed riding the subways and shopping at malls.
Then, on Feb. 17, a 31st case surfaced at a health clinic in Daegu, a city about 150 miles south of the capital where the vast majority of known infections were located. An unidentified 61-year-old woman, who lived there and occasionally commuted to Seoul, tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
It seemed like a standard case until public health authorities started tracing the patient’s tracks.
What they learned shocked them: the woman had, during the previous 10 days, attended two worship services with at least 1,000 other members of her secretive religious sect whose leader says the end of days is coming.
Within 24 hours, the nation’s number of confirmed cases started multiplying exponentially. The tally rose by 20 during that period, doubled the following day and then doubled again on the third day.
By Wednesday, the count skyrocketed past 1,000 -- a more than 30-fold increase in a week that prompted the government to raise its health alert to the highest level. At least half of the new cases are linked to the sect called the Shincheonji -- which translates to “new heaven and land” and whose members worship side-by-side in cramped spaces.
“What made this case so much worse was that this person spent a considerable amount of time in a very crowded area,” said Kim Chang-yup, a professor for health policy at Seoul National University. “There’s growing fear and resentment among the people right now.”
South Korea’s health ministry said Wednesday it was launching a manhunt for more than 212,000 members whose names were provided by the sect. Korea’s Centers for Disease Control & Prevention already is screening 9,300 sect members, in addition to those who attended the two services. On Wednesday, it expects to conclude tests of 1,300 sect members showing symptoms.
Reuters | An So-young had a gut feeling that the 31st person in South Korea to
test positive for the coronavirus might be a member of the controversial
religious sect she quit four years ago.
The person, dubbed “Patient 31,” was the first of an explosive wave
of cases that made South Korea’s outbreak the largest outside of China.
What caught An’s attention was how health authorities were struggling to
track the woman’s movements before she was tested.
“That’s
their culture, they have to hide their movements, and that’s why I
guessed she was with Shincheonji,” An, 27, said in an interview,
referring to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus.
Patient 31 attended
services at the church’s branch in the southeastern city of Daegu this
month, staying for two hours each time, before testing positive on Feb.
18.
The South Korean disease control chief Jeong Eun-kyeong said
the church’s services, where thousands of people sit on the floor,
shoulder-to-shoulder, for hours, could have contributed to the surges.
“You
would be 5 centimeters away from the person who sits next to you, and
have to say ‘Amen’ after every sentence the pastor speaks - it’s the
best environment for the virus to spread,” said An, who is now a
theology student.
In a media interview, Patient 31 said she did
not refuse to be tested. But health authorities said she sought care at a
traditional medicine hospital in Daegu after a minor car accident,
where a medical worker who treated her later tested positive for the
virus. While running a fever, she went to a buffet at a hotel and the
church services.
Shincheonji is in the biggest crisis in its 36-year history, as
hundreds of members have tested positive for the virus, SARS-CoV-2. All
of its 210,000 known followers are being tested amid unprecedented
scrutiny from authorities and the public.
After initial
resistance, the church released the addresses of 1,100 facilities around
the country - 82 churches and 1,018 “affiliates,” - and asked the
public to avoid making “groundless criticism.” It was the “biggest
victim of the virus,” it said.
Calls by Reuters to the church’s headquarters seeking comment went unanswered.
During
a visit to the Daegu branch on Friday, a man who identified himself as a
member said he was the only one there and told Reuters that “all of our
9,000 members are taking self-quarantine measures in compliance with
the government instruction.” He said the building was disinfected twice
last week.
Interactive graphic about the spread of coronavirus inside South Korea: here
SCMP | The new coronavirus has an HIV-like mutation that means its ability to bind with human
cells could be up to 1,000 times as strong as the Sars virus, according
to new research by scientists in China and Europe.
The discovery could help to explain not only how the infection has spread but also where it came from and how best to fight it.
Scientists
showed that Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) entered the human
body by binding with a receptor protein called ACE2 on a cell membrane.
And some early studies suggested that the new coronavirus, which shares
about 80 per cent of the genetic structure of Sars, might follow a
similar path.
But
the ACE2 protein does not exist in large quantities in healthy people,
and this partly helped to limit the scale of the Sars outbreak of
2002-03, in which infected about 8,000 people around the world.
Other
highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme
called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body. Many
proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be
“cut” at specific points to activate their various functions.
When
looking at the genome sequence of the new coronavirus, Professor Ruan
Jishou and his team at Nankai University in Tianjin found a section of
mutated genes that did not exist in Sars, but were similar to those
found in HIV and Ebola.
“This
finding suggests that 2019-nCoV [the new coronavirus] may be
significantly different from the Sars coronavirus in the infection
pathway,” the scientists said in a paper published this month on
Chinaxiv.org, a platform used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to
release scientific research papers before they have been peer-reviewed.
“This virus may use the packing mechanisms of other viruses such as HIV.”
According to the study, the mutation can generate a structure known as a cleavage site in the new coronavirus’ spike protein.
The
virus uses the outreaching spike protein to hook on to the host cell,
but normally this protein is inactive. The cleavage site structure’s job
is to trick the human furin protein, so it will cut and activate the
spike protein and cause a “direct fusion” of the viral and cellular
membranes.
Compared to the Sars’ way of entry, this binding method is “100 to 1,000 times” as efficient, according to the study.
Just two weeks after its release, the paper is already the most viewed ever on Chinarxiv.
jrnyquist | As everybody knows, according to the views propagated by Western
scholars, humanity as a whole originated from one single mother in
Africa. Therefore, no race can claim racial superiority. However,
according to the research conducted by most Chinese scholars, the
Chinese are different from other races on earth. We did not originate in
Africa. Instead, we originated independently in the land of China. The
Peking Man at Zhoukoudian that we are all familiar with represents a
phase of our ancestors’ evolution. “The Project of Searching for the
Origins of the Chinese Civilization” currently undertaken in our country
is aimed at a more comprehensive and systematic research on the origin,
process and development of the ancient Chinese civilization. We use to
say, “Chinese civilization has had a history of five thousand years.”
But now, many experts engaged in research in varied fields including
archeology, ethnic cultures, and regional cultures have reached
consensus that the new discoveries such as the Hongshan Culture in the
northeast, the Liangahn Cutlure in Zhejiang province, the Jinsha Ruins
in Sichuan province, and the Yongzhou Shun Emperor Cultural Site in
Hunan province are all compelling evidence of the exitence of China’s
early civilizations, and they prove that China’s rice-growing
agricultural history alone can be traced back as far as 8,000 to 10,000
years. This refutes the concept of “five thousand years of Chinese
civilization.”
Therefore, we can assert that we are the product of cultural roots of
more than a million years, and a single Chinese entity of two thousand
years. This is the Chinese entity of two thousand years. This is the
Chinese nation that calls itself, “descendants of Yan and Huang,” the
Chinese nation that we are so proud of. Hitler’s Germany had once
bragged that the German race was the most superior race on earth, but
the fact is, our nation is far superior to the Germans.
During our long history, our people have disseminated throughout the
Americas and the regions along the Pacific Rim, and they became Indians
in the Americas and the East Asian ethnic groups in the South Pacific.
We all know that on account of our national superiority, during the
thriving and prosperous Tang Dynasty our civilization was at the peak of
the world. We were the center of the world civilization, and no other
civilization in the world was comparable to ours. Later on, because of
our complacency, narrow-mindedness, and the self-enclosure of our own
country, we were surpassed by Western civilization, and the center of
the world shifted to the West.
In reviewing history, one may ask: Will the center of the world civilization shift back to China?
Comrade He Xin put it in his report to the Central Committee in 1988:
If the fact is that the center of leadership of the world was located
in Europe as of the 18th Century, and later shifted to the United States
in the mid-20th century the center of leadership of the world will
shift to the East of our planet. And, “the East” of course mainly refers
to China.
Harvard | Two of the world’s biggest threats may someday be reduced by wires
thousands of times thinner than a hair but capable of detecting a single
virus. The specter of worldwide viral epidemics is always with us, so
detecting them quickly offers the possibility of saving thousands of
lives. The pathogens also can be stealthy biological weapons, making
their positive detection a vital national defense requirement.
“We want to find a single virus before it finds you,” says Charles
Lieber, Hyman Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. Tests
recently completed in his laboratory show that these unimaginably thin
nanowires can sense and distinguish between viruses that cause flu,
measles, and eye infections. Lieber believes future versions will be
able to spot HIV, Ebola, SARS, West Nile, hepatitis, bird flu, and other
dangerous viruses.
“Viruses are among the most important causes of human disease and are
of increasing concern as agents for bioterrorism,” Lieber says. “Our
work shows that nanoscale silicon wires can be configured as detectors
that turn on or off in the presence of a single virus particle. Such
detectors could be fashioned into arrays capable of sensing thousands of
different viruses, ushering in a new era for diagnoses, biosafety, and
quick response to viral outbreaks.”
“Nano” refers to a “nanometer,” one billionth of a meter, four hundred billionths of an inch, or about 10 atoms in size. One hundred
thousand wires, each 20 nanometers long, would fit on the head of a pin.
The Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research, and National
Cancer Institute all supported Lieber’s research, and at least two
commercial companies have shown interest in manufacturing nanosensors.
In his office, Lieber shows visitors a two-inch-square silicon and
metal chip containg an array of nanowires and two pinhead-size entry
ports through which blood, saliva, or other bodily fluids can enter. Air
samples put into a fluid solution would also be tested this way.
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