Quarantine update: Stopping the spread

Heh. I was just perusing my youtube videos and ran across Trumpieboy announcing he is closing flights to Europe to keep out their Corona virus infected types (the UK is okay for now).

  link2 includes this "Must criticize Trumpieboy" paragraph:

The White House has struggled to execute a cohesive plan to stop the spread of the virus. The president has careened back and forth between insisting the coronavirus is no worse than a common flu and demanding that Congress pass drastic financial relief, including a proposed payroll tax holiday.

so which is it? a "WAGD" (we're all gonna die) infection, or just another flu like epidemic that will kill a couple thousand (mainly older) folk but not a big deal?

uh, both and neither.

As I have stated several times in past posts, since it is a new virus, it will hit everyone at once, and could collapse the hospital/medical system if it does so.

Slow down the spread, and it is easier to manage: fewer cases spread out over a longer time.

the worst case scenerio is 150 million who could catch it in the US (sort of puts that part about "lack of test kits into perspective).

in the past, schools and nursing homes have been shut down to slow the spread of influenza, and I'm old enough to remember when they actually quarantined cases of scarlet fever and measles.

Trumpie boy seems to be in front of the curve here: He stopped travel from China before many other countries, and now will try to stop it from spreading from Europe (how many cases came on with elites?).

AlJ reports that many unniversities are shutting down their classes (and some students are mad,  by gum).

and even the USSurpreme court is getting into the act, sort of, by saying it's okay to keep migrants out of the country while they wait an asylum hearing.

What is going on? Uh, maybe because the elite have realized they might catch it.

That priest who had it but shook the hands of 500 people was at a Washington DC Episcopal church where a lot of the government elites attend. (Full story at WaPost behind a paywall).

for those of you outside the US, the Episcopal church is traditionally the church of the rich white elites that ran America, although their numbers have gone down this is still true in the US Capital area.

So where did the guy get infected? From visiting the homeless or from a traveler from Europe?

and it's not just the clergy to the elite who seem to be spreading the germ: A Boston scientific conference was behind most of the cases there, and then there are the airport screeners who tested positive.

===============
in the meanwhile, here in the Philippines, not much is going on:

Rappler reports (March 11)

68 - admitted to hospitals
662 - discharged from hospitals
The tracker also reflected only 33 confirmed cases, but by Wednesday afternoon, DOH announced 16 more cases. Of the 49 confirmed cases, 46 are currently admitted to hospitals, two have been discharged, and one has died.

but maybe a lot of cases are being overlooked because they also note here that 6 people who left the Philippines came down with the virus after returning home (to SoKoreaa, Singapore and Japan).

Meaning they caught it somewhere from someone who might not have been very sick.

Most of the local cases are in SanJuan in Marakina, an affluent city in the Metro Manila area. and one case presumably was infected at a prayer meeting which means he might have caught it from a local, not an visitor.
They have shut down schools in the area.

most of the 445 cruise ship personnel/tourists who returned here were in quarantine however were cleared to go home (only 2 cases tested positive).

Duterte is being tested, as are a lot of the government VIPS.
Rappler report has a little list and notes the Senate is in lockdown.

and the schools in the Metro Manila were closed this week, though March 15.

and as I noted earlier, the trade fair that Joy and Kuya planned to attend (and exhibit our rice) was postponed.

Here, things are going along normally: schools here haven't closed down yet. But we are close to Manila, and many locals have family members who work there and come home on weekends, so it's just a matter of time.

and if a lot of folks get sick and die, Duterte, who is friendly with China, will get a lot of the blame (probably incorrectly because flights to and from there were stopped on Feb 2) but hey politics here is worse than the USA).

------------------
other countries are suffering but not getting into the news.

Iran, alas, thanks to sanctions by the west, was friendly with China and so was slow in stopping flights and contacts. And now the explosion of cases is overwhelming their hospitals.

but I worry about sub Saharan Africa, which like Iran has many ties to China and may not have wanted to anger China by stopping travel to and from that country. But ironically, most of the cases diagnosed there so far seem to have been from Europe: maybe because tourism is spreading the disease, or maybe because many are immigrants who live there and were coming home to visit.
There are a million Chinese living in Africa (see BBC article below) but I suspect many live and work isolated from the locals (in gated communities, as do the elites and did the whites in the colonial era..think neo-colonialsm and you get the idea), whereas the tourists would spread the disease to tourism guides and hotel/airline workers, and of course, those visiting relatives will infect their extended families (which in Africa, like here in the Philippines, tend to be huge).

Maybe China has stopped folks who have been in contact with the disease from traveling to Africa.

or maybe they just aren't testing the right folks.


BBC article discusses:

The continent has close links to China, where the infection originated in late December, but the cases in Africa have all so far been linked to Europe. They have mushroomed in the last week, which is of particular concern as it is feared that poorer countries on the continent may struggle to cope if it does spread.

: Wikipedia already has a webpage for the epidemic in South Africa.

The SADailyMaverick reports that most of the cases came from Europe. And the "dog that didn't bark" is found in one of their comments:

The effect of Coronavirus on immunocompromised TB and HIV patients will be devastating.

on the other hand, in warmer climates, people live out doors a lot more, so one suspects the spread will be lowe thanks to the sunlight and wind on airborne droplets. But of course I haven't seen many studies on this.

The bad news is that it will still spread indoors, in schools, shops, malls, hotels, buses, etc.

Sigh.

----------------
strategyPage has a long report on the virus in North Korea, link

-----------------
update 2: Joy was going to represent the Philippines at a agri conference early next month in Japan, and she is waiting to hear if they will cancel it. I told her to stay home: Not only the danger of getting sick (she can do that here) but the expense if she ends up in quarantine for two weeks.

------------------
relapse of patients seen in China? (Non peer review) PDF

also:



------------------
heh: The President has Walmart on the case (also Target, Walgreen, etc.).

the dirty little secret is that Walmart was a center to get help for people in disasters in  the USA.