I live in Singapore. Singapore has a very tight control of everything and has been quarantining every close contact of every known case. IE a very high rate of discovery of infections is likely. So far number infected, 47, number dead, zero. The last 2 days only 2 new infections identified each day and more patients are now leaving treatment having recovered than being diagnosed. In China, number of new infections collapsing and has now dropped to approximately half from peak.
Singapore sounds like it is doing a fantastic job dealing with infections from China.
How do you imagine Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar are doing? Do you imagine there are cases there? Are they being tracked? Are they even being detected?
How about Malaysia? Rumor has it, a fair number of Malays work in Singapore. Is Singapore paying attention to them? I bet they won't, until cases start appearing.
All it takes is a single infected asymptomatic traveler to kick things off in any of these developing countries. And their healthcare systems are NOT up to Singapore standards.
I'm going to suggest that Singapore is probably the very best case situation in Asia. Furthermore, Singapore appears to have adopted "rational thought" (i.e. dealing with things honestly, even when unpleasant) while the CCP optimizes for "social harmony" (bury the crappy stuff whenever possible, as deeply as possible, "shooting the messenger" reflexively). As a result, I trust the numbers out of Singapore. I do not trust the numbers from the CCP.
wow , its really convoluted and hard to navigate its not intuitive for what you need to know - you have to look hard through various links to and tabs and pages to get very little information which could be consolidated into one paragraph. For the most part the information is fairly correct, with out any supposition and most factual context… but its not helpful for people who really need interpretation and understanding what this means… But alas… there is some information which if you cant tell the truth - you should just not publish it all together. here it is …
It’s currently unclear if a person can get 2019-nCoV by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes.
That we know is clearly BS , and they know it as well. people getting from cabs that sick people where - buildings 10 stories below.. and ski resorts - other sick guests were at.... And additionally, there are multiple studies showing this can live on surfaces far longer than the flu - one study found 5 days another 9 days. so , there is blatant misinformation.. probably something that is very important to the spread and needs to be conveyed to the public/.. yeah so yeah.. convoluted website not helpful and then trying to be ambiguous to the actual implications.. and then catching the outright being untruthful about something important to convey .
I imagine WHO is trying to imprint a name for this illness before the public creates its own. Otherwise, a hundred years from now the name of this flu will be known as Wuhan Virus in our collective memory and it will never be forgotten. The same way we call H1N1, Spanish flu.
This study was just published that calculated an R0 of 4.7-6.6, with an initial outbreak doubling time of 2.4 days. The effect of the intense quarantine measures has just been to effectively lower the R0 to 2.3-3.0. While I can’t vouch for his work, I did go to graduate school with one of the authors FWIW. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2020/02/11/2020.02.07.20021154.full.pdf
Singapore is definitely doing a very thorough job. How effective it is will have to be evaluated at a later stage. Every arriving passenger is screened for a fever at arrivals, including all workers from Malaysia. However, as less than half of Corona Virus patients show a temperature during the early phase of the disease this probably produces more false positives than actual positives.
What is interesting is that there have only been two cases in the Nordic countries in Europe (Sweden and Finland) despite very little monitoring and a huge number of tourists arriving to see the Northern Lights. I was recently in Oslo and there were thousands of Chinese tourists milling around and nobody seemed in the least worried.
I work for a company with offices in both Singapore and Oslo and there has always been a huge difference in perception of risk, with Norwegians much more willing to accept a degree of risk than Singaporeans. The response of the governments to the current situation is very much in line with these very ingrained cultural differences. What will be interesting is to evaluate carefully by the end of the year what was the most effective approach. How many of the people quarantined in Singapore will test positive for the virus? Did it make sense to quarantine so many people? Time will show.
I could add that there are current estimates that almost half of the patients in Wuhan were in fact infected IN a hospital. IE if the response had been to say that everybody should stay at home unless VERY ill then the spread might have been greatly limited. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-hospital-transmissions-study/index.html
the new name didn’t make sense to me either. The official statement said something to the effect that the new name doesn’t imply any particular ethnicity. A sign of our times, I guess, when 2019-nCOV sounds too racist.
Is it possible that the air quality/ pollution is worsening the disease for patients in China? Especially the very industrial cities? I thought about this due to my own child’s severe response with poor air quality (toxic mold- long story) but after correcting the air quality and removing all offending environmental issues, she’s had a drastic improvement in her allergic type, reactive airway, viral induced asthma like Respiratory symptoms that she only gets when she is sick. We also relocated out of the city and notice a huge improvement in outdoor air quality as well, less street pollution.
Found this very interesting article: https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/Linking-pollution-infectious-disease/97/i11
I was reading about the Th2/cytokines and all those pathways and it really dawned on me how the air quality could also be a factor in the increased ACE II/2 production as it is increased in smokers. I believe I read that the Australia fires is the equivalent to smoking 1.5 packs of cigarettes a day, and that made me think about the pollution in China. Surely the burning of ?, the aerosolized disinfectant, coal, and other industrial chemicals may be adding insult to already very hard working immune Systems tasked with a new respiratory cleaning job? They keep saying the patients have lymphopenia, but how does pollution/ air quality effect lymphocytes and the cytokines And immune systems in general? Could air pollution be a contributing factor to cytokine storms and ARDS in some people. nCov + pollution particulates + chemical pollution = swamp soup in the lungs, not to mention the likely scarring already from pollution damage. Maybe that’s why the kids are fairing better? They have less chemical exposure and possible toxicity than the adults? Thinking I’m going to add some detox to our health supplements!
The more I wait and watch for stories in the US, and the more I hear how bad flu is this year, the more I wonder if this isn’t already circulating more than we realize. I suspect our flu season is shadowing the nCov already circulating in the US. I think there will be many negative flu swabs right now with patients reporting flu like symptoms or maybe those terrible spells of norovirus are really not norovirus after all right now. Didn’t a cruise ship just turnaround today due to norovirus? Is it possible the ncov could mutate to be a GI only virus?? Lots to speculate about.
I’m going to look for med journals on pollution re pneumonia/ ARDS/ respiratory distress And Th2 dominant and ARDS/ respiratory distress. After having the aha moment tonight about the worsened prognosis due to the pollution I am slightly less freaked out tonight than I was before. However, I’ll be honest, the kids and I haven’t left our property since 01/20 because I don’t want to be the first ones out of the gate getting this if we dont have to. If we even get one case in Houston or surrounding, my husband will stop going to work to protect kids. I probably have 3-4m of food easily at this point with some staples for longer… Bc food allergies. Harder to get the food we need. I’m no longer buying fresh fruit due to all the handling and only vegetables that are easily soak washed (avocado). Stocked up on many vitamin c containing frozen veggies (broccoli, cauliflower, spinach) and dried fruits. But that’s our usual staples. Sea salt is our best friend for adding much needed flavor to simple dishes.
Is it my imagination or did we used to have on this site a feature where it says the total number of comments and then next to it is how many new comments there are since you last looked at it? For example, 168 comments (12 new) and you could click on the 12 new and jump right to the first post you hadn’t already read? I could have sworn it used to work this way and realize it’s not the top priority for the PP team right now (nor should it be)! But if there’s a setting I accidentally changed on my end that I can change back or if it’s something that had to be sacrificed on the change of platforms or something and you are considering adding it back, I would find it very useful if that feature someday returned.
If the China start up manufacturing,how do we know that the meds we need will be safe?
Good question. I can see a few possibilities
1) The lack of trained replacement workers causes an increase in errors, resulting in bad medicine or a decrease in supplies.
2) The lack of supplies or ingredients (down supply chain suppliers having to deal with #1), results in a slowdown of medicines or increases error rate.
3) Needing money, manufacturers ship known bad ingredients, or ship medicines with bad ingredients which they would normally pull from selling.
4) Lack of production during quarantine phase results in overseas (US, EU, rest of World) demand for quick supply resulting in contaminated packaging (lack of time for virus to naturally degrade).
China already has a history of shoddy or incorrect products, this will only get worse due to the economic disruption.
So would naming a virus after the city in which it emerged be racist against the ethnic majority of that city? Or would it be embarrassing to the government of the nation in which that city is located which just happens to be a major funder of WHO? You decide.
In response to Oliveoilguy,
Sure, I was there myself at the beginning of the outbreak and I am in regular contact with her as she is staying there for a while with her parents.
I was impressed with the response of the government before I left. Within a week of the outbreak, you could not even enter an airport without being met by two guards who would not let you enter unless you consented to a “forehead temperature check.” That was not true in either of the airports where I changed flights while returning to the US, i.e. Seoul, South Korea or JFK. In JFK airport customs workers actually herded people together into tight queues in order to get them through passport control. I remember thinking that they were just asking for trouble, contagion, by doing that.
Since I left China, there have been the following changes.
First, you cannot get into a grocery store unless you are wearing a mask. They will simply not let you in.
Second, economic activity is vastly slowed down. If you go out on the streets (and, mind you, this is a city almost the size of New York City) you can walk two blocks or more and see, perhaps, four or five people. Virtually, everyone you do see will have masks except some of the elderly. The fact that the elderly sometimes don’t have masks is just a cultural thing. Don’t read anything more into that fact.
Third, as of this week you can’t get into or out of residential buildings without notifying authorities with your “WeChat” app (which is a common smartphone app in China, much like Whatsapp.)
Fourth, people with the virus are often quarantined in their own residences. Sometimes entire apartment buildings are quarantined.
Fifth, initially, supplies like rubbing alcohol (which is used as a disinfectant) and face masks had run out. The government told private suppliers to make as much of such products as they could. The government guaranteed producers that if the spread of the virus abated, that they producers need not worry about producing too much inventory since any excess would be purchased by the government. This has effected a re-supply of those products. My girlfriend recently was able to buy rubbing alcohol but was limited to one bottle at a time. I am not sure if that restriction was government mandated or not.
Sixth, there is a tremendous societal response to the infection. For instance, people use disinfectants to clean doorknobs or just about anything else that could bring infections from the outside to the inside.
Seventh, the general feeling is that the government response has been fantastic. Even broadcasts from neighboring countries are commending China on the government response.
No panic. Less spread of disease?
Maybe that’s why the kids are fairing better? They have less chemical exposure and possible toxicity than the adults? Thinking I’m going to add some detox to our health supplements!
I’m no longer buying fresh fruit due to all the handling and only vegetables that are easily soak washed (avocado). Stocked up on many vitamin c containing frozen veggies (broccoli, cauliflower, spinach) and dried fruits. But that’s our usual staples. Sea salt is our best friend for adding much needed flavor to simple dishes.