rutherford | Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate
its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after
another in order to expands its powers.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration,
asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes,
eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate
responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of
compliance and control in the police state’s hands.
It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil
unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order,
purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health
emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it
allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in
the so-called name of national security.
Now we find ourselves on the brink of a possible coronavirus contagion.
I’ll leave the media and the medical community to speculate about the
impact the coronavirus will have on the nation’s health, but how will
the government’s War on the Coronavirus impact our freedoms?
For a hint of what’s in store, you can look to China—our role model for all things dystopian—where the contagion started.....
....We’re not quite there yet. But that moment of reckoning is getting closer by the minute.
In the meantime, we’ve got an epidemic to survive, so go ahead and
wash your hands. Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. And stock up
on whatever you might need to survive this virus if it spreads to your
community.
We are indeed at our most vulnerable right now, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s the American Surveillance State—not the coronavirus—that poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.
thescientist |Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease
researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week
(November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a
virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in
horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like
severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could
infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the
team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.
The
results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind
and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other
coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to
people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work,
known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody
could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the
Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.
In October 2013, the US government put a stop to
all federal funding for gain-of-function studies, with particular
concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East respiratory
syndrome (MERS). “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has funded such
studies because they help define the fundamental nature of
human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic
potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and
preparedness efforts,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement at the time. “These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better.”
Baric’s
study on the SHC014-chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium
was announced, and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review
process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not
fall under the new restrictions, Baric told Nature. But some researchers, like Wain-Hobson, disagree with that decision.
The
debate comes down to how informative the results are. “The only impact
of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers
University, told Nature.
But Baric and others argued the
study’s importance. “[The results] move this virus from a candidate
emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,” Peter Daszak,
president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which samples viruses from animals
and people in emerging-diseases hotspots across the globe, told Nature.
xinhua |Not only that, the U.S. government also announced that restricting the entry of Chinese and foreigners who have visited China into the U.S. is actually an indirect declaration of a travel ban on China, which isolates other countries in the world from China, and has a great economic impact on China. of.
These practices in the United States are very unkind. They can be described as falling into the ground and killing people while they are ill. Now China's new crown pneumonia epidemic has been controlled. Except for Wuhan, new confirmed cases have been added in single digits. But it's getting worse.
If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it will also announce strategic control over medical products and ban exports to the United States. Then the United States will be caught in the ocean of new crown viruses.
According to the US CDC officials, most masks in the United States are made in China and imported from China. If China bans the export of masks to the United States, the United States will fall into the mask shortage, and the most basic measures to prevent the new crown virus are Can't do it.
Also according to the US CDC officials, most of the drugs in the United States are imported, and some drugs are imported from Europe. However, Europe also places the production base of these drugs in China, so more than 90% of the US imported drugs are Related to China. The implication is that at this time, as long as China announces that its drugs are as domestic as possible and banned exports, the United States will fall into the hell of the new crown pneumonia epidemic.
However, there is a great love in the world. The Chinese people and the Chinese government have never done so. They have not insulted the United States, nor have they banned the export of masks and medicines to the United States. As China ’s new crown pneumonia epidemic is gradually controlled, China ’s ability to export masks and medicines Will be greatly enhanced, and the United States is one of the demand side. US government officials, such as Secretary of Commerce Rose, US Secretary of State Pompeo, and US White House Economic Adviser Navarro, have publicly gloated over China's new crown pneumonia epidemic, saying that the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in China is good for the United States and will help companies return to the United States. It also called on companies around the world to consider the risks of China's supply chain. Even the infamous "Wall Street Journal" published an infamous article "China is a real patient in Asia", and the "New York Times" in the United States also published a document condemning the closure of Wuhan in China as a violation of human rights. The American culture of falling rocks is really shameless. Today, Feng Shui is taking turns, and the United States has become a victim of the new crown pneumonia epidemic. At this time, China has not fallen into rocks and has not condemned the United States. At this time, the United States should be more mistakes for the past. Apologize to China for your actions.
During this time, a voice deliberately speculated that China owes the world an apology, which is very ridiculous. In order to fight the new crown pneumonia epidemic, China has made huge sacrifices, paid huge economic costs, and cut off the new crown virus. The route of transmission. No country has made such a great sacrifice and effort in this new crown pneumonia epidemic.
Moreover, according to the research of Academician Zhong Nanshan, although the new crown pneumonia epidemic broke out in China, the source may not necessarily be in China. Many studies have also pointed out that the origin of the new crown virus may come from other countries. Many confirmed cases of new crown pneumonia in the United States, Italy, Iran and other countries without a history of Asian contact have demonstrated this, so China has no reason to apologize.
Now we should rightfully say that the United States owes China an apology, and the world owes China a gratitude. Without China ’s huge sacrifice and dedication, it would not be possible to win a precious time window for the world to fight against the new crown pneumonia epidemic. The hard-to-find new crown pneumonia epidemic has been blocked for a long time, it is really shocking, crying ghosts!
AHTribune |The Novel Coronavirus, COVID-19,
is cutting a broad and deep swath though epidemiological history with
uncertain impact on the viability of many families, communities,
institutions, economies, and even countries starting with the most
heavily populated nation on earth. Many fates are hanging in the
balance, not the least of which is that of the communist government that
has ruled China since the Maoist Revolution brought it to power in
1949.
The new strain of Coronavirus has added novel genetic features to the
same family of pathogens that brought the world the SARS crisis in
2002-3 and, a decade later, the less lethal MERS outbreak. This Novel
Coronavirus strain, COVID-19, is showing itself to be much more
contagious and lethal than was SARS and MERS.
Some have anticipated that, if not dramatically countered, the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic could be headed in the direction of the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918.
This prediction flows from the assessment of, for instance, Prof.
Gabriel Leung, Chair of Public Health Medicine at Hong King University.
Looking at the very fast rate of COVID-19’s spread from human to human
through the air, Dr. Leung challenged any residual sense of complacency.
He anticipated a possible 60 per cent infection rate of the world’s
entire population with deaths numbering in the many tens of millions.
The so-called Spanish flu has set the bar for how severe and
widespread a contagious plague can become. The pandemic of 1918 took
more lives in one year than all deaths due to World War II. The Spanish
flu of 1918 engendered more mortality in one year than the four peak
years of the notorious Black Death Bubonic Plague that decimated Europe
in the middle years of the fourteenth century. The worldwide pandemic of
1918 infected over a quarter of all people on earth. About 65 million
people died from the illness.
News reports from the ground zero area of the Wuhan Coronavirus
epidemic demonstrate that the effects of the viral infection cut far and
wide. Every facet of Chinese society is being challenged to the limit
by a fast-spreading plague disseminating germs of destruction disrupting
many biological, political, economic, and knowledge systems
simultaneously.
Questions about how to interpret the epidemic and how to explain to
the public what is known or not known are quickly coming into focus. Who
should be believed? Who is credible and who is not credible as the
epidemic unfolds. What should be the role of social media and of whistle
blowers in the process of deciding how to respond? What happens when
genuine whistle blowers like Dr. Li are too quickly dismissed and
reprimanded by ruling authorities as “conspiracy theorists”?
An essential task that must be faced in this initial phase of this
crisis is to develop an accurate explanation of where contagion came
from and how the first victims of the Novel Coronavirus came to be
infected. The need for some degree of certainty about the origins of the
virus and its subsequent genesis is absolutely essential to the
development of sound and appropriate responses. It would be highly
irresponsible to rush ahead with the development of an overall strategy
for dealing with the plague without making an honest attempt to get at
the truth of how the contagion first came into existence.
The importance of getting to the factual roots of what happened to
put humanity on this epidemiological trajectory should be especially
clear after the debacle of September 11, 2001. Without any sustained
investigation of the 9/11 crimes, Americans were rushed into cycles of
seemingly perpetual warfare abroad, police state and surveillance state
interventions at home. This cycle of fast responses began within a month
of 9/11 with a full-fledge military invasion of Afghanistan, an
invasion that continues yet.
When two US Senators, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle, sought to slow
the rush of the US executive into emergency measures and war, they and
the US Congress they served were hit hard by a military grade bioweapon,
anthrax. The violent tactic of the saboteurs proved effective in easing
aside close scrutiny that might have slowed down the fast approval by
the end of October of Congress’s massive Patriot Act.
Since then a seemingly endless cycle of military invasions has been
pushed forward in the Middle East and Eurasia. The emergency measure
powers claimed by the executive branch of the US government extended to
widespread illegal torture, domestic spying, media censorship and a
meteoric rise in extrajudicial murders especially by drones. This list
is far from complete.
All of these crimes against humanity were justified on the basis of
an unproven official explanation of 9/11. Subsequent scholarly
investigations have demonstrated unequivocally for the attentive that
officialdom’s explanations of what transpired on the fateful day in
September were wrong, severely wrong. The initial interpretations are strongly at variance with the evidentiary record available on the public record.
We must not allow ourselves to be hoodwinked in the same manner once
again. The stakes are too large, maybe even larger than was the case in
2001. The misinterpreted and misrepresented events of 9/11 were
exploited in conformity with the “Shock Doctrine,” a strategy for instituting litanies of invasive state actions that the public would not otherwise have accepted.
The conscientious portion of humanity, many of whose members have
done independent homework of their own on the events of 9/11, will well
understand the importance of identifying the actual originating source
of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic.
cntechpost | Beijing Ditan Hospital affiliated to the Capital Medical University said on March 4
that the first patient with novel coronavirus pneumonia complicated
with encephalitis was discharged from the hospital on February 25.
Liu Jingyuan, director of the ICU at the Hospital, presided over the
treatment of the patient. He reminded that patients with conscious
disturbances must consider the possibility that the virus may attack the
central nervous system.
At present, patients with new type of coronavirus pneumonia can be
combined with multiple organ damages such as severe respiratory distress
syndrome (ARDS), myocardial damage, abnormal coagulation function,
kidney damage, liver damage, etc. However, no central nervous system
involvement has been reported. The case report is the first in the
world.
Previous studies on SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS
(Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) have also shown that the
coronaviruses that cause these two diseases also cause cases of central
nervous system damage.
According to the introduction of Beijing Ditan Hospital, two
suspected cases of new-type coronavirus pneumonia have been treated
since January 12 this year (confirmed on January 20). As of 7:00 on
March 4, the hospital has accumulatively received 150 patients with
new-type coronavirus pneumonia, of which 150 The above patient is the
only patient with new type of coronavirus pneumonia and encephalitis.
The 56-year-old patient was admitted to the hospital on January 24
with new coronavirus pneumonia, critical illness, and respiratory
failure. After admission, he was given a combination of interferon
nebulization, antiviral treatment, prevention of bacterial infection,
and TCM syndrome differentiation. No improvement, high fever, fatigue,
and dyspnea gradually increased.
theweek | All over the world, governments are scrambling to defend their
citizenry from COVID-19, the disease caused by the outbreak of novel
coronavirus. So far it seems levels of success have varied; countries
like Italy and Iran have struggled so far, while Vietnam and Taiwan have seemingly put forth an efficient and effective response.
The United States, where a major outbreak is clearly developing,
however, is in a class by itself. America's atrociously inadequate
welfare state makes it by far the most vulnerable rich country to a
viral pandemic, and the vicious, right-wing ideology of the Republican
Party has wrecked the government's ability to manage crises of any kind.
The national health care system is of course the most important tool
for any country trying to fight off an epidemic — all citizens need to
be able to get tested, receive treatment, or be quarantined if
necessary. If and when a vaccine is developed, the system needs to
distribute it to everyone as fast as possible. That means handing it out
for free in locations across the country, and perhaps making it
mandatory if uptake is insufficient.
The American health care system fails at every one of these tasks. Nearly 30 million Americans are uninsured, and a further 44 million are underinsured
— meaning they will likely hesitate to go to the doctor if they start
developing COVID-19 symptoms. This problem is seriously exacerbated by
the rampant predatory profiteering that infects every corner of the
health care system. Indeed, responsible citizens who have gone in for
tests have already started getting slammed with multi-thousand dollar bills.
A father and daughter who were evacuated from China and then forcibly
quarantined for several days (luckily they were not infected) went home
to find $3,918 in bills.
If you are working-class person with a $10,000 deductible (not at all uncommon),
going to the doctor simply because you have flu-like symptoms (which is
how most cases of COVID-19 are experienced) could very easily send you
into bankruptcy. If infected, millions of Americans are likely going to
take their chances — and keep spreading the virus.
Indeed, U.S. health care is not only by far the worst system among
rich countries, it is much worse than that of many middle-income or
poorer countries when it comes to confronting a fast-moving epidemic.
lpeblog | It is now clear that we are entering a new phase of the global
COVID-19 pandemic. The virus appears in new countries around the world
each day. New cases are now regularly reported in the United States, and
as testing is scaled up, that number will increase, probably
substantially. It is clear now that the virus will spread in a sustained
way in the community here. The estimated mortality rate derived from
the data from China resembles that of the 1919 flu, which killed 50-100
million people around the world. As we are better able to track mild
cases, we may find that it is substantially, even an order of magnitude,
less deadly. Under every plausible scenario, however, this outbreak is
likely to be extraordinarily disruptive. It will surprise no reader of
this blog that the US is ill-prepared for this, and that the harms of
this pandemic will not be equally visited on all. Yesterday, I worked
with a group of more than 450 law and public health experts to put out a public letter
addressed to federal, state, and local leaders, to identify essential
aspects of an effective and fair response. It may be worth a read for
those thinking about the political economy of pandemics. It illustrates
some familiar LPE themes, and shows how features of our socio-legal
context that drive injustice and inequality will undermine the COVID-19
response.
Slowing the spread of the disease, for example, will be
extraordinarily hard without major surge of social support and a
commitment to something like basic social solidarity. Measures like
contact tracing and isolation and other forms of “social distancing”
(closing schools and minimizing public events) are the main mitigation
tools we have. But as the letter points out, whether they are effective
depends on whether they are enacted fairly, and we put people in a
position to cooperate. We cannot expect people to stay home, identify
contacts, or seek recommended care and testing, if it throws them or
their loved ones into harm’s way. Staying home may create an existential
threat for millions of low-wage and gig-economy workers. If we send
children home from schools and ask families to care for the mildly ill
at home, how will the millions now juggling paid work and care work
manage? Immigrants will be discouraged from seeking care and disclosing
contacts if they fear immigration enforcement.
The letter calls for direct interventions to try to reduce the
precarity in which so many workers, carers, and migrants today in the US
live, so that everyone is in a position to cooperate with
recommendations that will benefit us all. This includes direct payments
or other compensation to individuals who are affected, sick pay, and
immediate assurances that the COVID-19 response will not be linked to,
or trigger, immigration enforcement. It notes that we need to consider
the impact of policing on health, given how jails can drive epidemics.
It sets out the legal requirements and risks of carceral measures like
quarantine (building in part on earlier work I did with others on the
disastrous Ebola quarantines),
and makes clear that voluntary measures are more likely to earn
cooperation and trust. The letter also demands that our leaders address
the potentially catastrophic ways that our for-profit healthcare system
intersects with what may be rapidly mounting need for testing and care.
WSJ | The Trump administration is considering using a national disaster
program to pay hospitals and doctors for their care of uninsured people
infected with the new coronavirus
as concerns rise over costs of treating some of the 27 million
Americans without health coverage, a person familiar with the
conversations said.
In natural disasters such as hurricanes, hospitals and medical
facilities can be reimbursed under a federal program that pays them
about 110% of Medicare rates for treating patients such as those
evacuated from hard-hit areas.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services has been in discussions about using that program to pay
providers who treat uninsured patients with coronavirus, the person
said.
Dr. Robert Kadlec, who is the assistant secretary for
preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human
Services, said Tuesday at a congressional hearing that discussions are
being held about using the National Disaster Medical System
reimbursement program.
n 2018, 8.5% of people, or 27.5 million, didn’t have insurance at any point
during the year. It was an increase from 2017, when 7.9% of the
population, or 25.6 million, were uninsured, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau.
We will have an economic crisis in 2020 as a result of coronavirus.
There can now be no doubt of that; the likelihood that this epidemic can
now be contained seems to be very low indeed. The evidence from China
is that the impact on productivity and the economy at large is enormous.
Whether we can survive the impact of this epidemic without major
economic consequences arising is largely dependent upon the
effectiveness of the planning that the government undertakes now. What
is apparent is that at present there are a few signs that this planning
is taking place. We can hope for it in the forthcoming budget, but the
signs are, so far, not good.
The key issue that the government has to decide upon is who will bear
the economic consequences of what is to happen. I have already
indicated in my first post on this issue that I think that the
consequences of this epidemic will fall upon three clearly identifiable
groups, which are individuals, businesses and government. However, when
appraising who will bear the cost the criteria are slightly different.
It is unacceptable that individuals bear the cost of this crisis.
There is simply too little economic resilience within the population as a
whole for that to be the case. Far too many people have too few savings
to survive major periods of economic inactivity without massive
prejudice to their short-term and long-term well-being.
In addition, it is unacceptable that many businesses should fail
through no fault of their own but that is what will happen unless the
government steps in to prevent the major economic downturn that might
happen this year. Cash flow issues will cripple many companies.
In that case it would seem that consequences of what might happen will fall, in the first instance, on the government.
asiatimes | China used locational and other data from hundreds of millions of
smartphones to contain the spread of Covid-19, according to Chinese
sources familiar with the program.
In addition to draconian quarantine procedures, which kept more than
150 million Chinese in place at the February peak of the coronavirus
epidemic, China used sophisticated computational methods on a scale
never attempted in the West.
With more than 80,000 cases registered, China reported only 126 new
cases yesterday, compared to 851 in South Korea and 835 in Iran, out of a
total of 1,969 new cases worldwide. Chinese sources emphasize that the
artificial intelligence initiative supplemented basic public health
measures, which centered on quarantines and aggressive efforts to
convince Chinese citizens to change their behavior.
Chinese government algorithms can estimate the probability that a
given neighborhood or even an individual has exposure to Covid-19 by
matching the location of smartphones to known locations of infected
individuals or groups. The authorities use this information to use
limited medical resources more efficiently by, for example, directing
tests for the virus to high-risk subjects identified by the artificial
intelligence algorithm.
All smartphones with enabled GPS give telecom providers a precise
record of the user’s itinerary. Smartphone users in the United States
and Europe can access their own data, but privacy laws prevent the
government from collecting this data. China has no such privacy
constraints, and telecom providers have used locational data for years
for advertising.
A Chinese bank executive reports that his company purchases
locational data from telecom providers. “If you have walked by an auto
dealership three times in the last few weeks, we send you a text
advertising an auto loan,” the executive said. “We wouldn’t be allowed
to do that in the West.
asiatimes | Chinese research scientists have released a paper that says the novel
coronavirus known as Covid 19 has mutated into two subtypes.
The latest findings of Chinese scientific researchers allegedly show
that new coronavirus has recently generated 149 mutation points and has
evolved into an L subtype and an S subtype (see map below).
The study found that the two subtypes showed significant differences in geographical distribution and population spread.
The S subtype is a relatively older version, while the L subtype is “more aggressive and more contagious”.
An in-depth understanding of different subtypes will help
differentiate treatment and help prevention of a new strain of
pneumonia, the scientists said.
‘Differ in transmission ability, severity’
The research comes from the paper “On the origin and continuing
evolution of SARS-CoV” published on Tuesday March 3 by the National
Science Review. It was sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Authors of the thesis are researcher Lu Jian, at the Bioinformatics
Center at Peking University’s School of Life Sciences, and researcher
Cui Jie at the Shanghai Pasteur Institute at the Chinese Academy of
Sciences.
The authors believe that, based on the evolution of the new
coronavirus, there may be a large difference in the transmission ability
and severity of disease of the L and S subtypes.
The paper said the difference between the two subtypes is at the 28144 position of the viral RNA genome.
wiley | Following the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS‐CoV)
and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS‐CoV), another
highly pathogenic coronavirus named SARS‐CoV‐2 (previously known as
2019‐nCoV) emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and rapidly spreads
around the world. This virus shares highly homological sequence with
SARS‐CoV, and causes acute, highly lethal pneumonia (COVID‐19) with
clinical symptoms similar to those reported for SARS‐CoV and MERS‐CoV.
The most characteristic symptom of COVID‐19 patients is respiratory
distress, and most of the patients admitted to the intensive care could
not breathe spontaneously. Additionally, some COVID‐19 patients also
showed neurologic signs such as headache, nausea and vomiting.
Increasing evidence shows that coronavriruses are not always confined to
the respiratory tract and that they may also invade the central nervous
system inducing neurological diseases. The infection of SARS‐CoV has
been reported in the brains from both patients and experimental animals,
where the brainstem was heavily infected. Furthermore, some
coronaviruses have been demonstrated able to spread via a
synapse‐connected route to the medullary cardiorespiratory center from
the mechano‐ and chemoreceptors in the lung and lower respiratory
airways. In light of the high similarity between SARS‐CoV and SARS‐CoV2,
it is quite likely that the potential invasion of SARS‐CoV2 is
partially responsible for the acute respiratory failure of COVID‐19
patients. Awareness of this will have important guiding significance for
the prevention and treatment of the SARS‐CoV‐2‐induced respiratory
failure.
WSJ | The NCAA tournament. Major League Baseball opening day. The Masters
golf tournament. The NFL draft, the NBA and NHL playoffs, the Boston
Marathon and Olympic qualifiers all over the U.S.
The busiest time of the American sports calendar is coming—if the coronavirus doesn’t come first.
As the global economy braces for the
potentially devastating effects of a novel coronavirus that is spreading
around the world, few businesses are at greater risk of being impacted
than sports.
This is a multibillion-dollar industry built on live
entertainment, easy travel and mass gatherings, and that makes it
especially vulnerable if major cities begin to embrace social
distancing, as they have in countries where the virus has already
disrupted everyday life. The problem is that there is no work-from-home
in sports. The NBA season can’t be played on Slack.
Should games be canceled? Can they be delayed? Will they be played in
empty arenas? These are the questions that leagues and governing bodies
are scrambling to answer as they size up potentially the biggest disruption
to the sports calendar since World War II, and they are constrained by
uncertainty as they make contingency plans to keep up with this
mysterious pathogen. Their behavior will be dictated by the virus’s.
“It will give March Madness a new meaning,” said Dr. William
Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.
ourfiniteworld | The world economy may become very different, simply because of
COVID-19. The new virus doesn’t even need to directly affect the rest of
the world very much to create a problem. The United States, Europe, and
the rest of the world are very much dependent on the continued
operation of China. The world economy has effectively put way too many
eggs in one basket, and this basket is not now functioning as expected.
If China is barely producing anything for world markets, the rest of
the world will suddenly discover that long supply chains weren’t such a
good idea. There will be a big scramble to try to fill in the missing
pieces of supply chains, but many goods are likely to be less available.
We may discover quickly how much we depend upon China for everything
from shoes to automobiles to furniture to electronics. World carbon
dioxide emissions are likely to fall dramatically because of China’s
problems, but will the accompanying issues be ones that the world
economy can tolerate?
The thing that is ironic is that it is possible that the West’s fear
of the new coronavirus may be overblown–we really won’t know what the
impact will be with respect to people of European or of African descent
until we have had a better chance to examine how the virus affects
different populations. The next few weeks and months are likely to be
quite instructive. For example, how will the Americans and Australians
who caught COVID-19 on the cruise ships fare? What will the health
outcomes be of non-Asians being brought back from Wuhan to their native
countries on special planes?
– has again dismissed rumours suggesting it is linked to the public
health crisis, saying it has been “badly hurt” by conspiracy theories
circulating online.
“The
rumours … have caused severe damage to our researchers who have been
dedicated to working on the front line, and seriously interrupted the
emergency research we are doing during the epidemic,” the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV), which is affiliated with the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, said in a statement.
Those
rumours included that the new virus strain was “man-made”, “leaked from
the WIV lab”, that “the WIV was taken over by the military”, “a WIV
researcher died from the leaked virus”, “a WIV student is patient zero”,
and “a WIV researcher reported to authorities that the WIV chief was
responsible” for the epidemic, the statement posted on its website on
Wednesday said.
The institute runs the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, the only
facility in China equipped to diagnose and research easily transmitted
pathogens at the highest biosafety level of four.
“Looking back on our hard work over the past month, we have nothing to be ashamed of or to regret,” the statement said.
A prominent virologist with the institute has also been targeted by the rumours. Shi Zhengli’s exploration of caves in Yunnan province discovered that another deadly coronavirus – which caused the severe
acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, epidemic in 2002-03 – had
originated in bats. Her database of viruses found in bats provided
evidence for the theory that the coronavirus at the centre of the
ongoing epidemic was also linked to bats. The new virus strain was found
to be 96 per cent identical to one found in bats.
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.
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.
NYTimes | Despite the new virus’s name, though, and
as the people who christened it well know, nCoV-2019 isn’t as novel as
you might think.
Something very much
like it was found several years ago in a cave in Yunnan, a province
roughly a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan, by a team of perspicacious
researchers, who noted its existence with concern. The fast spread of
nCoV-2019 — more than 4,500 confirmed cases,
including at least 106 deaths, as of Tuesday morning, and the figures
will have risen by the time you read this — is startling but not
unforeseeable. That the virus emerged from a nonhuman animal, probably a
bat, and possibly after passing through another creature, may seem
spooky, yet it is utterly unsurprising to scientists who study these
things.
One such scientist is Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a senior author of the draft paper
(not yet peer reviewed and so far available only in preprint) that gave
nCoV-2019 its identity and name. It was Ms. Shi and her collaborators
who, back in 2005, showed that
the SARS pathogen was a bat virus that had spilled over into people.
Ms. Shi and colleagues have been tracing coronaviruses in bats since
then, warning that some of them are uniquely suited to cause human
pandemics.
In a 2017 paper, they set out how, after nearly five years of collecting fecal samples from bats in the Yunnan cave, they had found coronaviruses in multiple individuals of four different species of bats, including one called the intermediate horseshoe bat,
because of the half-oval flap of skin protruding like a saucer around
its nostrils. The genome of that virus, Ms. Shi and her colleagues have
now announced, is 96 percent identical to the Wuhan virus that has
recently been found in humans. And those two constitute a pair distinct
from all other known coronaviruses, including the one that causes SARS.
In this sense, nCoV-2019 is novel — and possibly even more dangerous to
humans than the other coronaviruses.
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independent | Churchgoers in Alabama turned their backs on Michael Bloomberg
as the billionaire former mayor of New York and presidential hopeful
joined Democrats vying for the party's nomination in Selma, where
memorial events have been commemorating the 55th anniversary of a
landmark moment of political violence in the Civil Rights movement.
Mr Bloomberg has faced mounting criticism for a range of
controversies while in office and as a company chief, from sexual
harassment allegations and settlements to his continued defence for his
police department's practice of racially profiling through "stop and
frisk" measures, which he only publicly apologised for as he entered the
presidential race.
He failed to satisfy his critics and other Democratic opponents
during his first-ever debate appearance last month, when he fumbled his
explanation for allowing the policy in the first place.
During a church service in Alabama on Sunday, a group of
black worshippers inside the historic Brown Chapel AME Church silently
stood and turned their backs on Mr Bloomberg as he delivered his remarks
recognising "Bloody Sunday", when white police
brutally attacked hundreds of voting rights activists marching through
town at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement on 7 March 1965.
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