Eastern Egypt, Sinai, Jordan, part of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, part of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and part of Turkey are within the Biblical Borders of Israel; They are "Occupied Territory"
“I have done the largest body of research in the world on face masks and respiratory masks in healthcare workers,” Professor MacIntyre said. “We found no evidence of protection for healthcare workers with surgical masks. They’re not effective. They’re not designed as respiratory protection. They don’t fit around the face so there’s a lot of leakage. We found even for droplet infections a respiratory mask protects you and a surgical mask does not.”
i mean, the same widespread misinformation and poor coverage exists already with people using face masks in highly polluted cities. in south korea everyone wears face masks during seasons/weather patterns when the 'yellow smog' arrives from china, even though the masks do basically nothing. you need a much higher quality industrial-grade particulate mask for that which will set you back about $300.
just about the best justification i've seen for the things is that they stop you from touching your face. considering how dirty everyone's hands are and how they're the main point of ingress for poor hygiene, i'd say that's at least something.
i mean, the same widespread misinformation and poor coverage exists already with people using face masks in highly polluted cities. in south korea everyone wears face masks during seasons/weather patterns when the 'yellow smog' arrives from china, even though the masks do basically nothing. you need a much higher quality industrial-grade particulate mask for that which will set you back about $300.
just about the best justification i've seen for the things is that they stop you from touching your face. considering how dirty everyone's hands are and how they're the main point of ingress for poor hygiene, i'd say that's at least something.
they stop you from coughing on people. The same reason you are told to cover your mouth when coughing.
The general population doesn't wear them because of smog concerns.
I usually at least listen to a little bit of the State of the Union. Today I am listening to the Cure. Really it's the first one I am completely ignoring. Nothing Trump says matters one way or the other.
What strikes me is the Chinese government's secrecy and lack of openness in regards to this. A potential pandemic and they are too worried about controlling the information and messaging to allow the world to effectively address it.
SuperJail Warden wrote:
I usually at least listen to a little bit of the State of the Union. Today I am listening to the Cure. Really it's the first one I am completely ignoring. Nothing Trump says matters one way or the other.
Isn't much of a surprise though, with their obsessive insistence on controlling individual behaviour and public debate.
If the official numbers are to be believed the spread of the virus is slowing down actually. The compound daily growth rate is decreasing. However, the spread around the globe indicates that much more than 20k people in Wuhan are infected. It went far beyond that one fish market and I'm curious to know what the real numbers are. My guess is at least fivefold.
Not sure whats happening TBH, I'm not an epidemiologist.
It seems strange that 5m people could escape the zone just before it was locked off, and so few cases then occur outside the zone. Could be that people mostly living in shoddy apartments with recycled air are infecting each other at an unprecedented rate. It almost seems as if the zone was locked down and a bomb went off.
Even if Hubei has only 28,000 cases, where are they putting them all? They built a single 1,000 bed facility in 10 ten days, just 27 more to go.
Meanwhile its business as usual in the Indonesian bat-food markets, and they're much closer to Australia than China so they really need to fuck off.
Still strange that all these recent diseases have come out of China and not other places where people eat the same disease ridden shit. Maybe they are accidental releases from Umbrella Corp labs.
I wouldn't say few. I'm sure a data scientist somewhere has the details, but on first glance the amount of expats and international travellers that were infected seems inordinately large if the virus was local and only affected a few thousand people in a city of 7m. China has relatively few expats, the vast majority of whom live in the coastal areas of the country. There's also not too many Chinese people taking international flights (certainly not from Wuhan). The number/% of infected in Wuhan vis-a-vis the number internationally is off.
Anyway the growth rate is decreasing sharply as we only have 3-4k new cases on yesterday's infected population of 24k. The likelihood of an actual pandemic seems very low. The media frenzy is going to ride this out though.
Not too many Chinese people taking international flights? Lol
We have an office in Wuhan. Wuhan is a tech and science hub. Most international tech businesses have at least an R&D presence in Wuhan. I can name at least 10 blue chip companies off the top of my head with a presence there.
How many of those millions have enough money on hand to pay for international flights? For the vast majority of Chinese a flight costs a fortune. Regardless of there being a uni, science or tech hub, as a percentage of the population there's rather few who do travel often. China being over a billion people and a manufacturing hub, yeah I'm sure there's a ton of international flights. Not your average chinese taking them though.
Factoring that into the equation, did this fish market serve the expat/rich community?
not your average chinese, due to the overwhelming population of China. More (as a total number, not percentage) than a lot of more modern countries, i'm sure.
10% of 11 million is still 1.1 million people.
Something like 10% of chinese citizens own a passport. That's 140 million people. Around 40% of US citizens own a passport. That's around 132 million people.
wasn't it an exotic-wildlife market, i.e. the food that is marketed and consumed by rich people as a conspicuous delicacy? ergo the people who could travel abroad, go on cruises, be in singapore for business the following week, etc. when's the last time humans got a respiratory illness from fish?
I would guess the animal market infected a fairly small number of people, barely in the hundreds if that, all the others we're seeing are secondary infections - they didn't all get it from this one market.
Maybe the waste offal was processed and used in pies, fed to pigs or something else, the Chinese seem to have no qualms about selling toxic waste to their fellow citizens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil
"On the basis of this information, there is evidence that human-to-human transmission has occurred among close contacts since the middle of December 2019," it reads. The paper notes that seven health care workers contracted the virus between Jan. 1 and Jan. 11 -- significant evidence of human-to-human transmission.
The findings sharply contrast with the accounts of Wuhan health authorities who had maintained until mid-January that there was "no clear evidence" that the virus could be passed among humans. Officials also claimed Jan. 11 that no health care workers had been infected.
Public acknowledgment only came Jan. 20 via an interview with an expert commissioned by the National Health Commission on state broadcaster CCTV.
The paper also found that only 55% of the 47 infected patients before Jan. 1 were linked to the seafood and live-animal market thought to be ground zero. This means that other patients either got infected elsewhere or from other people.
I know countries all over the world have embarrassing public health issues from time to time. It's really not a good look for China to keep having food related pandemics though. Especially if they want to be considered the most powerful country in the world.
In July 2018, the Tsinghua University professor Xu Zhangrun published an unsparing critique of the Chinese Communist Party and its Chairman of Everything, Xi Jinping. Xu warned of the dangers of one-man rule, a sycophantic bureaucracy, putting politics ahead of professionalism and the myriad other problems that the system would encounter if it rejected further reforms. That philippic was one of a cycle of works that Xu wrote during a year in which he alerted his readers to pressing issues related to China’s momentous struggle with modernity, the state of the nation under Xi Jinping and the mixed prospects for its future. Those essays will be published in a collection titled Six Chapters from the 2018 Year of the Dog by Hong Kong City University Press in May this year.
Although he was demoted by Tsinghua University in March 2019 and banned from teaching, writing and publishing, Xu has remained defiant. His latest polemical work—“When Fury Overcomes Fear”—translated below, appeared online on February 4, 2020 as the coronavirus epidemic swept China and infections overseas sparked concern around the world.
in light of the above article, larssen's comments are even more bizarre. wuhan is seen within china as the 'transport and communications hub of china'. he was making out it was some provincial backwater, some plague city isolated in the swamp.
I like the East Asian cultural practice of wearing face mask in public. It's a shame that isn't a thing in our culture since I don't want to share germs with strangers in public.
in light of the above article, larssen's comments are even more bizarre. wuhan is seen within china as the 'transport and communications hub of china'. he was making out it was some provincial backwater, some plague city isolated in the swamp.
I'm willing to bet my legs there's more international departures and arrivals in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu, Guanzhou and probably a few other cities. I was surprised by the amount of international coronavirus cases vs those reported domestically, remember. Not much of a bizarre sentiment.
In absolute terms there's probably still a ton from Wuhan but it was my expectation/presumption that the absolute majority of international flights would arrive and leave mostly from the coastal areas, especially from Shanghai. There's a reason it's usually the cheapest destination in the country.
