Bloomberg reports China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus.
People are queuing for eight hours just to get tested for the coronavirus, said the college graduate, John Chen, who’s 23. His feverish mother is yet to be tested.
“At first I was upset that the hospitals and officials I called for help weren’t willing to do their job, but later I realized that it’s not that they are unwilling to help, but that everywhere is way too short of resources,” he said.
“I don’t blame anyone, because if you grow up in China, you learn that’s how the system works.”
The lead image is from that article. Here are a couple more.
View of WuhanKeting
The above image is from China says death toll hits 563 as confirmed cases top 28,000
China’s National Health Commission said that as of Wednesday night, a total of 28,018 cases have been confirmed and 563 people have died in the country. There were 3,694 new confirmed cases. There were 73 additional deaths, with most of them in Hubei province.
New York City tests 5 people for potential coronavirus
Pretty Beds Here
That images is from the FT article WHO expert says China too slow to report coronavirus cases.
The article notes that John Mackenzie, a senior member of the WHO’s emergency committee broke ranks and called China’s response “reprehensible”.
“There must have been more cases happening that we weren’t being told about,” said Mackenzie.
Previously, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, lavished praise on China for its response.
Questions Abound
- Is the world saved?
- Is China?
- How many have really died?
- What about medical supplies?
- Are those images of functional hospital or deathatoriums?
Only 500 Dead?
Thousand Bed Hospital Built in Record Time
Hooray! But No Containment in Sight
As Coronavirus Deaths Surge, No Containment In Sight.
And the WSJ reports Wuhan Coronavirus Hospitals Turn Away All but Most Severe Cases
In light of “All but severe cases turned away,” do we have an answer for question 5?
This is truly sad.
Economically, a “Made in China” Economic Hit is Coming Right Up.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
That pic is where the central planners put all the dissidents, and some infected people too
The only priority for the Chinese Communist Party(the real government) is cementing their hold on complete power in China and under Xi Jinping centralizing all authority in the General Secretary and the Standing Committee. Their main tools are repression, surveillance, and propaganda (lies and misinformation). When first confronted with the information in December, Xi Jinping, attempted to cover it up, when that failed, notice how he threatened first party members and then required all other officials to follow strict orders from central headquarters, basically Xi Jinping. After that repression is always the first order of business, brutal quarantine. The only long lasting workable plan is first tell the truth, ask for citizen’s cooperation, allow a certain level of mobility, avoid hording, encourage citizens to assist each other, and then ride out the storm as best as possible. Pleae let us not hear anything from apologists for China anymore. Also perfectly appropriate for Western countries and South East Asian countries to now apply pressure on Chinese on changing their economic policies and aggressive moves in S. East Asia and Africa. Xi Jinping only recognizes power not goodwill.
To put it in perspective for the whole state of Illinois there are only 29618 staffed hospital beds. It’s easy to see how a healthcare system can be quickly overrun.
Hospital beds would be the least of your problems. Think of all the riots and looting that would inevitably follow.
Damn right. I’ve got my eye on a 65″ TV in our local electrical outlet.
Even 29,000 is too high of a number for hospital beds. When someone has a serious case of viral pneumonia, they need an ICU bed, not just a “hospital bed”. I didn’t add them up, but it appears that about 1/6 of the beds are ICU beds, so Illinois has perhaps 5000 ICU beds. It appears they average about 60% occupancy, so they have perhaps 2000 open at any given time. If they suddenly needed 4000 for nCov victims, they would be overwhelmed.
I’m not sure that the pictures we are seeing from China are any different from what we would see here if the outbreak became established (which it won’t, in the UK, because we’ve locked down our airports for direct flights from China….oh….wait).
We are told that 25% of hospital admissions for this virus are “severe”. By “severe” I assume they mean “requiring what in the UK we would call intensive care”.
We have 5900 critical care beds in the UK. Winter occupancy varies between 90-95%.
Therefore, once we have 2000 cases admitted to hospital, we can no longer provide critical care.
The total number of acute/general hospital beds has reduced from 299000 to 142000 in the last 30 years. Again, 90% occupancy. Let’s say that this can be reduced to 50% by stopping all elective admissions. That’s 71000 beds.
I pray the Chinese are being honest, but with yesterday’s BBC article featuring a Chinese family who have already lost an uncle, and with a sick aunt and mother trying to get the obviously dying father into hospital and being turned away because he doesn’t have a positive test result (due to backlog in testing) I am starting to wonder.
It will be interesting to see how the Chinese people react to this virus when all is said and done. Anger or simple acceptance are two possibilities. Governments do not always do well with handling such a crisis.
For decades China has been pushing its people towards a more “homogeneous way of thinking.” Reducing political descent was a core principle of the cultural revolution led by Mao Tse-tung. This has had broad implications on the country and how its people think and interact. The article below explores “group-think” in China today.
Those pictures do not claim to be pictures of the new hospitals. The first one is a converted exhibition center. The second one may be the converted gymnasium. The third one, with the pretty beds, is at the Stadium. I don’t expect the new hospitals to be fancy, but better than these, and then these would only be used if the two newly constructed hospitals exceeded capacity.
If if the numbers aren’t higher than the official numbers, there are 19,665 infected people in Wuhan, of which 549 are dead and 633 are healed. That leaves about 18,500 still infected. If the serious complication rate is 20%, as previously announced, that means a need for 3700 hospital bed, just for the Coronavirus. If the existing hospitals had 2000 beds, and the 2 newly constructed hospitals add 2000 more, they made be able to shut down the gym, stadium, and exhibition hall, or perhaps they will just use them for suspected cases.
Pooling suspected cases would be a recipe for them all to end up infected though.
True, and we may see that on the cruise ship – every time a new person is infected, the 14 day clock resets, and no one can ever leave. I suppose they could round up the mild infections, and make sure they stay in quanantine.
Apparently China is going to “round up the infected” – and presumably their families. So maybe these are quarantine facilities.
I can almost hear the collective “FEMA Camp” from the preppers.
It looks like a place where they expect a lot of sick people. A place to treat mass casualties. Doesn’t look much like a place where the dying or dead would be stored. If it was a refrigerated building I would say they are preparing for many dead souls.
The hospital picture looks like the black and white pictures from the 1918 Spanish flu.
I find the most telling statement to be “way too short of resources”. I would think this is the case in most disasters. People are always willing to help, but without resources it is an uphill battle.
Had a close friend that flew into Haiti within days after their earthquake. Amputations being performed with tools from hardware stores and vodka used as a sterilizer.
Most everyone will be way short of resources, when faced with far out on the tail end of the distribution events. Even the most hardened preppers, aren’t set up to handle multi generational containment in their Idaho bunkers, should it come to that.
There are limits to how much resources one can tie up and let lie idle, to play “just in case” with every possible conceivable scenario.
A fair amount of the economic gain over the past 50 years (the real not the printed, one), has come specifically from moving every step of every process closer to a Just-in-Time model. Minimizing idle resources. Doing so, does explicitly trade off some systemic resiliency, as there are fewer buffers at various steps, which could otherwise be drawn down during an unforeseen emergency. So if resiliency against unforeseen shocks start becoming valued in and of itself, a good part of that growth can easily turn out to have been illusory. I.e, we got cheaper cellphones, vaccines and face masks, but at the same time smaller stockpiles of all, as well as inputs to their production and people trained at producing them, at various intermediate points I the production chain.
Apparently there are 7 crematoriums in Wuhan operating 24/7. Given 11MM people one could expect 350-400 deaths without nCoV. At least one has 30 furnaces and typical creation times run 1 – 3 hours. Assuming 5hrs total for start to finish 24/5×30 furnaces x 7 sites about 1k per day. For 1 week that’s 7k – normal of 2k so about 5k per week potential for nCoV cremations. 10 weeks extends that to 50k deaths. Now consider double or triple cremations at a time and backlogs?
And, also apparently, the scary Hobgoblins have really come out in force to get you, this time…..
I guess I don’t understand the tone of hostility toward the Chinese government’s efforts. Indeed there were early blunders, but in terms of handling the situation where it is today I wonder what suggestions there are to improve their handling of the situation.
If one thinks the US could handle a similar situation any better, my 30 years working with the medical industrial complex says, sadly, that is incorrect.
As far as accurate statistics go, can someone tell us the precise number of US citizens who have been diagnosed with the flu this year as of today, and the number of overall deaths as of today, and do that all over again tomorrow?
You make a good point about the US medical system potentially becoming overwhelmed and having equal or worse outcomes as China. I agree we should be humble about what could possibly happen here.
If the US system in some city became overwhelmed, I presume we would do the same thing. The first step would be to open temporary hospitals in shuttered Sears store, or K-marts, or whatever large spaces were available.
What I find worrying is the warnings made against hoarding face masks, which is apparently causing/risks causing shortages in the US healthcare system.
You would think that any pandemic planner would have hoarding high on his list of probable first responses, and would have stockpiles of face masks (which are hardly expensive).
If that basic risk had not been considered, I wonder how well planned these scenarios are.
It takes a lot longer, and is a lot less efficient, for the US process, constituting of distributing 90% of resources spent to ambulance chasers and dilettante “investors;” than it takes CCP bureaucrats to more quickly and predictably grab their 50%. Same reason why most all other industry, fares better in China as well. Hospital building isn’t some sort of outlier.
A totalitarian system can use a sledgehammer to fix problems. Try quarantining NY state. Make everyone stay inside. The criminals would have a field day.
i imagine the hostility stems from the lack of an appropriate governmental response or, more seriously, its active attempt to cover it up.
how many otherwise healthy persons contracting the flu require hospitalization? how many of them die from the flu or its complications?
same questions for this ncov.
if those answers were known accurately, i expect the comparisons between the two might cease.
People criticize Chinese government for not accepting help offered earlier in the outbreak. For not properly reporting the data. For lots of logistical errors. I do not equate this to us saying it is a failure that has to be uniquely Chinese. It has to do with not infecting the entire planet. We could make the same mistakes in the USA, if we do, we deserve the same harsh appraisals.
My point exactly. To err is human.
Is it any wonder we see videos of sick people resisting police as they are rounded up for ‘quarantine’? There are other videos of nurses complaining they must turn and ‘clean up’ bodily waste from patients unable to do so themselves. The idea that gravely ill people can just be given a bed pan and left to fend for themselves is absurd. Where are the IV stands, wheelchairs etc to move sick patients
I don’t think you go to a place like that to live.
I have some bad news for you all. You think the U.S. government would put 100’s or 1000’s of citizens in hospitals? Maybe several, but if it’s an epidemic it’s going to be tents, army barracks etc. Think of it as human storage. As long as the place is kept clean it is fine. I work in the medical field and clean shelter is what you need. I hope they have a means of keeping the climate appropriate. I had a travelling nurse friend who cancelled a job here in California due to poor sanitation standards from fellow nurses. Don’t believe this garbage that bad care is specific to the Chinese. Lastly, I was introduced to this article from another message board and it was a very good eye opener regarding the Spanish flu and that they think had its origins in the U.S. Here is the link and very worthwhile reading for prepping for corona virus. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/
will 2019-nCoV become a fifth endemic human coronavirus?
Reasonable article. No hysteria, no fear porn.
Interesting. Particulary the sentence that says that approximately 1/3rd of patients admitted developed pneumonia, and 3 people died (of 96 admitted).
Not all that different to what is being suggested for the current virus.
It’s just that this time, there is no herd immunity so the number infected is a lot higher.
“Substantial exportation of pre-symptomatic cases”
That’s the part that really pisses me off. I say we ready our catapults and fling bodies over our officials fences.