International COVID-19 Megathread

[Tender Branson]

All 35 suspected cases in Austria have been tested negative.

No more suspected cases left.

But the Austrian military has returned 7 people from Wuhan yesterday, who are now in quarantine and awaiting tests.

https://www.kleinezeitung.at/international/5762504/Coronavirus_Die-aktuellen-Entwicklungen-zur-Ausbreitung-des-Virus

[PSOL]

death toll passes Sars virus as dozens more die in Wuhan

Dozens more people have died in the city at the centre of China’s coronavirus outbreak, where hospitals are severely undersupplied and understaffed and residents have described increasingly desperate conditions.

Chinese state media reported 57 new deaths on Monday, all but one in Wuhan, the capital of the central province of Hubei which has been under lockdown for almost two weeks as authorities try to contain the outbreak.

The foreign ministry issued an urgent appeal for protective medical equipment as the total number of casualties reached 361, surpassing deaths in mainland China caused by the 2002-03 Sars virus. The number of infections also jumped, passing 17,200.

With such a slow rate of infection out of China, I think the theory that there was attempts at suppression of the true extent of infected individuals.

[StateBoiler]

You kind of cut your post off there mid-thought.

Everyone is focusing on China vs. the Rest of the World. Let's look at Hubei Province vs. the Rest of China. The death rate compared to number of cases reported is significantly worse in Hubei than it is Rest of China. It makes me wonder if this has some kind of intensity factor, because taking a simplistic face value look at the numbers, "Rest of China" with more than half the cases should have all things being equal 150 to 200 deaths.

Hubei Province - 11177 cases, 350 deaths
Rest of China - 6028 cases, 11 deaths
Rest of World - 181 cases, 1 death

[100% pro-life no matter what]

You kind of cut your post off there mid-thought.

Everyone is focusing on China vs. the Rest of the World. Let's look at Hubei Province vs. the Rest of China. The death rate compared to number of cases reported is significantly worse in Hubei than it is Rest of China. It makes me wonder if this has some kind of intensity factor, because taking a simplistic face value look at the numbers, "Rest of China" with more than half the cases should have all things being equal 150 to 200 deaths.

Hubei Province - 11177 cases, 350 deaths
Rest of China - 6028 cases, 11 deaths
Rest of World - 181 cases, 1 death

That tells me that the case count in Hubei may be exponentially higher with the non-severe cases going unreported.  The non-Hubei China death rate suggests almost 200K cases in Hubei.

[Silent Hunter]

Wuhan is a highly populated city, so this could have easily been passed around there before anyone noticed it.

[Cassius]

Good.

Hopefully it also leads to civil unrest and the destruction of the dictatorial regime.

Yeah, what a fantastic idea: civil war in a large, nuclear state currently experiencing an epidemic. What could be better?

[StateBoiler]

Passing on from another message board. I've advised him to contact the New Zealand Embassy (he appears to be a Kiwi) and if he wants to get out he better do it soon considering all the countries shuttering flights to and from China.

Today is the first day I've sort of panicked and realised I might need to leave China very soon. Possibly this week or next. It's getting real hairy over here real fast. I've sat quarantined in my apartment in Beijing for four days since getting back from the CNY break slowly losing my mind. I've been living in denial but today was the day I cracked a bit and realised I'm not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. No one knows what the  is going on really which is the scary thing, but I'm looking around with my own eyes and it doesn't look good. I saw a guy being carried out to an ambulance by paramedics in full protective gear across the road from where I live this evening. The armchair experts on here trying to convince people its no worse than the regular flu genuinely crack me up.

The censorship is also going through the roof, even for China. I'm kind of worried to discuss it objectively over Wechat in group chats, stories of people going missing, a lot of messages getting conspicuously deleted, Western media stories of the outbreak are now completely banned on Wechat.

The other thing is the social unrest/economic side of things. The flu is worrying, but the social unrest that might be brewing is even more frightening. No one is working. I think after tomorrow, unless you have the capacity to work from home, to the best of my knowledge you're not getting paid. All the shops are shut except for the supermarkets basically and sh**t is flying off the shelves. Economic consumption must have slid to a crawl because there's nothing to buy. Anyone who's spent any real time in China knows the whole place is a house of cards but it's ok because the music keeps on playing and house prices go up and the Gucci bags keep on rolling. There isn't unrest yet but if this carried on for a few more weeks which it could well do, I could see there starting to be some real problems over here in a society with few if any safety valves when things go wrong.

I was in Laos with old mates from uni over the break. Basically a two week long bender and didn't check my phone or read the news the whole time I was away. I had been loosely following the Wuhan thing for a bit but it didn't seem like that big a deal until a couple of weeks ago, then just seemed to blow up over CNY. Ran in to a couple of other expats in Vang Vieng who also lived in Beijing on CNY night and they told me they weren't going back to Beijing and staying put/going home. I wasn't really sober enough to comprehend the seriousness of the situation and sort of went in to denial and just ignored the whole thing until I got back to China. One of my mates who I was traveling with is a doctor and tried to explain that going back was pretty stupid under the circumstances but naturally I knew better.

I was still in denial really up until today that it's a serious situation and I probably shouldn't be here any longer. I live in Sanlitun which is like the main entertainment/nightlife area of Beijing. Went for a walkabout on both Friday and Saturday evenings and it was completely dead but at the same time it felt surreal and didn't really all sink in until today.

[urutzizu]

Countries that have banned travel from China:



Almost all EU/Schengen Countries have suspended the Issuance of Visas to Chinese nationals. Visas already granted remain valid. France seems to continue to Issue Visas. The German Minister for Health Jens Spahn has called for a more broad travel ban. The Chinese Government condemns the travel restrictions. It says its screening measures on departure are adequate. Europe now has 26 confirmed cases, 12 of them in Germany. The latter all but two connected to the aforementioned Webasto case. The other two are German evacuees from Wuhan who were flown out and quarantined three days ago.

Also some pretty ugly xenophobic sentiments seem have spread in Europe and elsewhere, some of which I experienced myself. Misinformation Online, especially that notorious video of the Chinese woman eating bat soup (which was actually from Palau three years ago) seems to have become an ample excuse to slag off Chinese and Asian people and their cultures as disgusting, backward and this as some sort of deserved ("devine") punishment. Pretty sad to see even (quite respectable) newspapers swoop this low.

 
"Yellow Alert"                                 Source: Der Spiegel

Particularly charming and very effective..

https://twitter.com/OnkelNasch/status/1222756056633368577?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7C...

[It’s so Joever]

Is 800,000~ deaths Worldwide too optimistic?

[StateBoiler]

Countries that have banned travel from China:



Almost all EU/Schengen Countries have suspended the Issuance of Visas to Chinese nationals. Visas already granted remain valid. France seems to continue to Issue Visas. The German Minister for Health Jens Spahn has called for a more broad travel ban. The Chinese Government condemns the travel restrictions. It says its screening measures on departure are adequate. Europe now has 26 confirmed cases, 12 of them in Germany. The latter all but two connected to the aforementioned Webasto case. The other two are German evacuees from Wuhan who were flown out and quarantined three days ago.

Also some pretty ugly xenophobic sentiments seem have spread in Europe and elsewhere, some of which I experienced myself. Misinformation Online, especially that notorious video of the Chinese woman eating bat soup (which was actually from Palau three years ago) seems to have become an ample excuse to slag off Chinese and Asian people and their cultures as disgusting, backward and this as some sort of deserved ("devine") punishment. Pretty sad to see even (quite respectable) newspapers swoop this low.

 
"Yellow Alert"                                 Source: Der Spiegel

Particularly charming and very effective..

https://twitter.com/OnkelNasch/status/1222756056633368577?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7C...

Why is the German newspaper headline in English?

[urutzizu]

Why is the German newspaper headline in English?

Germans dont have the same sense of insecurity about the English language as the French tend to. Also its a newspaper with a readership that is leaning towards upper-middle class Intelligentsia. And the "Pun" would not work very well on German.

Its not the first Time Der Spiegel have done this sort of thing either:


Source: Der Spiegel

A cheap attempt to boost sales, which is sad, because Der Spiegel is actually considered one of the Hallmarks of German Journalism, and the cover story itself, a piece about how globalisation made the Coronavirus inevitable, was reflective of that.

[StateBoiler]

https://mobile.twitter.com/IsChinar

A Twitter feed with some videos and black humor.

Some of the social aspects of this going on: this could seriously bring down Xi.

[Tender Branson]

We now had over 100 suspected cases, but all have been tested negative.

4 cases in Tyrol and 2 in Carinthia are remaining ...

[PSOL]

Link

[StateBoiler]

If you want to throw fire on the official numbers not being real.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3871594

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — As many experts question the veracity of China's statistics for the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Tencent over the weekend seems to have inadvertently released what is potentially the actual number of infections and deaths, which were astronomically higher than official figures.

On late Saturday evening (Feb. 1), Tencent, on its webpage titled "Epidemic Situation Tracker", showed confirmed cases of novel coronavirus (2019nCoV) in China as standing at 154,023, 10 times the official figure at the time. It listed the number of suspected cases as 79,808, four times the official figure.

The number of cured cases was only 269, well below the official number that day of 300. Most ominously, the death toll listed was 24,589, vastly higher than the 300 officially listed that day.

Moments later, Tencent updated the numbers to reflect the government's "official" numbers that day. Netizens noticed that Tencent has on at least three occasions posted extremely high numbers, only to quickly lower them to government-approved statistics.

Screenshots at the link. Best in mind that was for four days ago.

[PSOL]

News of Kaletra being tested as a possible treatment for the disease sparks panic buying

A drug used to treat people with HIV, the virus that causes Aids, is being trialled in patients in China as a possible therapy against the coronavirus.

News that HIV drugs are being deployed in hospitals, however, has led to panic buying on the black market by people who fear they are ill or are going to get sick. They have been obtaining the drug, Kaletra, from generics companies in India and even from people with HIV in China willing to sell or donate their own stocks.

Kaletra, a combination of two anti-HIV drugs, lopinavir and ritonavir, has been used on patients in a trial in China since 18 January. The aim is to test it in about 200 patients, whose condition will be carefully monitored. Their outcomes will be compared with those of similar people with the same degree of illness who have not been given the drug.

[It’s so Joever]

Singapore is starting to look like an outbreak zone.....

[It’s so Joever]

And here we go...

https://twitter.com/carlyweeks/status/1226888094097563651

These cases came from someone who travelled to Singapore btw, just further proving my point above. Just banning people from China may not work anymore.

[rosin]

After several recent new cases of the COVID-19-virus, the authorities in Vietnam have quarantined the community of  Son Loi, with app. 10,000 inhabitants.

https://www.nst.com.my/world/world/2020/02/565216/vietnam-quarantines-area-10000-residents-over-coronavirus

[parochial boy]

Thinking about it, once this is over, it could have some pretty interesting consequences. Not just the obvious around free-speech and cover-ups in China and the like - but in the last few days we've seen things like travel bans and borders being closed and no-one even thinking to complain. In the near future, we might have some companies starting to think long and hard about how China, or Asia, or even "abroad" fits into their supply chain planning as a whole. I think this more than any thing else could wind up leading to the biggest inversion of the norms around globalisation that we have seen yet - even more so than the rise of the radical right.

[CumbrianLefty]

Whether or not the changes turn out to be that big, what is the case is that the way proponents of globalisation have pronounced it as "unstoppable" and "inevitable" - as if it was like the weather or some sort of act of God - was never as true as they made it out to be.

There are very few things in this world that are not, to at least a significant degree, a choice.

[super6646]

https://twitter.com/JordanJones33/status/1228112543274733568

2 days later...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/world/asia/china-coronavirus.html

Oh my lol.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

For anyone who wants to actually do something to help with scientific research which could result in treatments for COVID-19, you now can!

I personally have used BOINC for a while now to use my computer's spare/idle processing for a variety of scientific projects, so I can vouch for it - it is pretty easy to set up and sort of fun to accumulate "credits."

https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f5as77/distributed_computing_project_rosettahome_is/

Distributed computing project, Rosetta@Home, is using the BOINC infrastructure to model covid-19 proteins that may be drug targets. You can help by donating your computer's idle processing power.

TL;DR

The BOINC project Rosetta@Home is currently working in collaboration with NIH and SSGCID to model covid-19 proteins that may be drug targets. You can help by donating your computing power to the project. It is fairly simple to set up.

To volunteer your computing power visit:

https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

You can also use BOINC to run calculations for other scientific projects, although Rosetta is one of the best ones - particularly I would say now that they are working on COVID-19.

This is a small little thing that you can do, but if a lot of people set it up and help run calculations, this may result in effective treatments/vaccines being developed more quickly and more rapid progress in understanding the virus.

[Don Vito Corleone]

In the near future, we might have some companies starting to think long and hard about how China, or Asia, or even "abroad" fits into their supply chain planning as a whole.

What do you mean?

[PSOL]

Well the virus is now in Iran, and things are really bad. The regime must have covered up the whole thing until now.