WHO Finally Declares Emergency
Today the W.H.O. Declares Global Emergency, something any rational person knew at least a week ago.
Declaring a global emergency would allow the WHO to coordinate government responses to the crisis.
Ponder my question from yesterday.
US Case of Person-to-Person Transmission Confirmed
As the WHO finally declares an emergency, First U.S. Case of Person-to-Person Transmission Confirmed, 195 U.S. citizens in isolation.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that it has confirmed the first U.S. case of person-to-person spread of coronavirus, among a married couple in Illinois.
There are now six confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S., two of which are in Chicago. The sixth case is the husband of the first confirmed case in Illinois, a woman in her 60s. He did not travel to Wuhan, China, the city that first identified the novel coronavirus, and only recently began to show symptoms of the virus.
The first U.S. residents to be diagnosed with the coronavirus had all recently traveled to Wuhan City, China. There are now 21 people under investigation in Illinois and a total of 165 under investigation in the U.S., according to the CDC.
Disturbing Trends
Jim Bianco has another set of excellent charts. These are from an email exchange today.
Conaravirus Infections Accelerating Faster Than SARS, Swine Flu
Conaravirus Deaths Accelerating Faster Than SARS, Swine Flu
Bianco Comments
- This is day 14 of published reports, not day 14 after the first known case. This is why the charts do not start at zero or one.
- Both the published infection and mortality rates for the coronavirus are much larger than SARS and Swine Flu, at the same point.
- After just 14 days, the published infection rate has already surpassed the total 60-day total infection rate for SARS.
- The published mortality rate is about to exceed the 60-day total for the Swine Flu mortality rate (probably today or tomorrow).
Nauseating Video of Wuhan Meat Market
In case you were wondering what the Wuhan meat market looked like before it was closed, here you go, but this may be disturbing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tJndwiKuoQ
Click on Above Image to Play Video
American Airlines Pilots File Suit to Stop Flights
I expected that.
As noted yesterday, Growing Number Airlines Suspend Flights to China.
Q&A With Michael Pettis on the Coronavirus Impact
In case you missed it, please consider Q&A With Michael Pettis on the Coronavirus Impact
Coronavirus Facts
Also note The Fact is, We Don’t Know What the Facts Are
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
That video is of Langowan market in Indonesia, NOT China. Pasar means market.
Any confirmed deaths? I think panic has set in…
A respectful attitude about a novel and unknown infectious disease does not equate to panic. Here is a link to a map previously mentioned on this site that displays official infected, deaths, and recoveries. The map is sometimes behind by 12 to 24 hours:
Because the infected victim does not present any symptoms for about ten days whilst being contagious, all reports are actually only telling us about the state of contamination last week. Those poor souls who got infected today will not be visible until next week, statistically, and deaths lag even further behind.
The CCP is suppressing the flow of information, so all statistics generated from Chinese sources must be viewed as severely underreported.
We will see how much distortion there may be next week as the few outbreaks outside of China begin to grow as the folks they have infected begin presenting symptoms.
In any event, I will not be attending the Superbowl or the Daytona 500.
The many joys of living in a country with “universal”, single payer (government) health care:
Mish wrote: Chinese Officials Lock Virus Infected Persons Inside Their Apartments!
An unknown Chinese nurse (doctor?) talks about patients being trapped in Wahun, unable to get out, unable to get admitted to a hospital, and unable to get diagnosed otherwise… being left to die
WAIT WAIT!!! Don’t tell me… The great organization that gave us the USPS, Amtrak and the TSA is going to do things so much differently than the other big bureaucracies of the world. If you believe that, you probably think Congress didn’t exempt itself from Obamacare. Great coverage for them (paid for by you), you get to wait in line behind the neglected vets at the VA
When I went to bed last night the death toll from coronavirus in China was 175, this afternoon they admit it is now 215. 40 people in about 15 hours. And now there are people giving it to other people in the US, and damn, I have to fly to Tampa Saturday, then back to the west coast Tuesday.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/people-collapsing-coronavirus/
This all reminds me of when Mish said Hillary had a degenerative brain disease because she fainted.
Bats? Why are they eating BATS,FFS? Even Ozzy stopped eating bats decades ago.
They ate anything that couldn’t get away during the Chinese Agricultural Revolution. Tens of millions of people starved to death. Rats, cats, dogs, crickets, birds and bats became dinner. It is something that they learned to do. They don’t have to eat those things now (or do they?) but they did it for so long that it has become normal. Eating these types of proteins isn’t what is the problem, health wise. The problem is the totally unsanitary conditions by which raw meat is handled in those areas. Before you cast your holier than thou attitude on those people, remember that there are 1 billion Hindus in the world that think that we are barbarians for eating cow. They are just as repulsed at us as we are at those that eat dogs and cats.
I simply do not see how they can contain it at this point. Not closing flights in/out of Hubei province was idiotic.
I hope China finally decides to regulate these markets. Perhaps a first step would be to ban the sale of bats.
In all likelihood there was an intermediate mammal between the bat host and the first human (there may have been several) and no one has a clue yet what that mammal may have been.
See the fourth paragraph of the Discussion section of this paper which was just published today in the Lancet.
I do not doubt that but it started with bat and mammal interaction. I believe SARS was the same. So stop bringing bats to the market.
The article points out there are no bats in the market this time of year because they are hibernating. The transfer between bat and mammal happens in the wild between bat (who are not affected by coronavirus) and lots of different kinds of mammals. You are correct that banning bats may help future outbreaks of new types of coronaviruses, but it probably would not have prevented this outbreak if the authors are correct. They are saying that in all probability the transfer occurred in the wild before bats went into hibernation, to an as yet unknown mammal (such as a civet which is a common bat/transfer host), and that host was later sold at the market in Wuhan.
There are other places for bats and mammals to interact, than at Wuhan meat markets….
What mainly sets meat markets apart, is the increased opportunity for a host species jump from an animal to a human.
From the linked Lancet Article:
“
However, despite the importance of bats, several facts suggest that another animal is acting as an intermediate host between bats and humans. First, the outbreak was first reported in late December, 2019, when most bat species in Wuhan are hibernating. Second, no bats were sold or found at the Huanan seafood market, whereas various non-aquatic animals (including mammals) were available for purchase. Third, the sequence identity between 2019-nCoV and its close relatives bat-SL-CoVZC45 and bat-SL-CoVZXC21 was less than 90%, which is reflected in the relatively long branch between them. Hence, bat-SL-CoVZC45 and bat-SL-CoVZXC21 are not direct ancestors of 2019-nCoV. Fourth, in both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, bats acted as the natural reservoir, with another animal (masked palm civet for SARS-CoV35
and dromedary camels for MERS-CoV)36
acting as an intermediate host, with humans as terminal hosts. Therefore, on the basis of current data, it seems likely that the 2019-nCoV causing the Wuhan outbreak might also be initially hosted by bats, and might have been transmitted to humans via currently unknown wild animal(s) sold at the Huanan seafood market.
“
I thought that the suspected intermediary was a snake, and those are sold in this market as well. Even if they don’t ban these animals outright, how about instituting some modern sanitation and refrigeration?
The bat story sounds like BS. It is far more likely to have escaped from one of the 2 biowarfare labs near Wuhan. There is no evidence at all so far that it was from bats or those 2 labs, but which one looks more likely and obvious?
All the headlines read, “W.H.O. Declares Emergency.”
The stock market heard “W.H.O. Believes China Will Contain the Outbreak. Recommends Air Travel Continue Unabated” and after hours “Amazon Reports Record Earnings for Last Quarter (before anyone knew about 2019-nCoV)”
I wonder which is correct.
The market rallied on GDP news. I believe it was already closed when the Emergency was declared. Also, the first case of person to person transmission in the US happened in Chicago today.
I watched the W.H.O. press conference where they announced the emergency declaration, and it appeared to me their reason for making it was only so poor countries with insufficient resources could get international aid to handle the bug. The W.H.O. otherwise appeared completely unconcerned, and even criticized recent independent evacuation efforts as unnecessary. The head of the W.H.O. almost said explicitly that the evacuations were incorrect judgment and more a show of wealth than anything else. He also said air travel should continue uninterrupted, but passengers are interfering with that because of cancellation of bookings (implying that recent cancellations are not rational). If this ultimately gets out of hand, those guys need to be dissolved. I would not want to be in their position right now.
I think the WHO news came out about 90 minutes before the market close…right about the time AMZN earnings were leaked….
Who’d want to be long of stocks over the coming weekend with more serious developments likely?