Corona / Wuhan virus

Oh, sh*t... First native person in my country has infected with coronavirus right now. I wonder where that person has walked and has she infected anyone else.. ><
 
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flower said:
Oh, sh*t... First native person in my country has infected with coronavirus right now. I wonder where that person has walked and has she infected anyone else.. ><
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It's possible, the virus doesn't show itself for days/weeks and the pros are still only making assumptions on how it acts based on a few cases they've seen transmitted.

The best thing you can do is just keep yourself as healthy as possible right now so that if you do come into contact with it you'll be as set as can be.
 
MoonFlier said:
It's possible, the virus doesn't show itself for days/weeks and the pros are still only making assumptions on how it acts based on a few cases they've seen transmitted.

The best thing you can do is just keep yourself as healthy as possible right now so that if you do come into contact with it you'll be as set as can be.
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Yup, makes me a bit paranoid because it doesn't show itself for few days or weeks as you said. D:
 
It's interesting that on the CDC website they mention that they have no clue how the virus propagates yet.
flower said:
Yup, makes me a bit paranoid because it doesn't show itself for few days or weeks as you said. D:
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Even though COVID-19 has had tragic consequences, I see this as an opportunity for everyone, globally, to learn and enforce proper hygiene. Shifts in social behavior have to come about due to this alone. My hope is that we will come out stronger and better prepared globally should other major viruses occur.

Quick observation: When walking through Disney last year I was impressed by the number of people who now carry hand sanitizer clipped onto their backbacks. Compared to the prior year the number of people doing so increased exponentially. Now, were they using it? Hmm. The signs were looking good. We also did not get all the funny looks from others as we washed down our seats and trays in the airplane that we usually get.
 
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MoonFlier said:
It's interesting that on the CDC website they mention

Even though COVID-19 has had tragic consequences, I see this as an opportunity for everyone, globally, to learn and enforce proper hygiene. Shifts in social behavior have to come about due to this alone. My hope is that we will come out stronger and better prepared globally should other major viruses occur.

Quick observation: When walking through Disney last year I was impressed by the number of people who now carry hand sanitizer clipped onto their backbacks. Compared to the prior year the number of people doing so increased exponentially. Now, were they using it? Hmm. The signs were looking good. We also did not get all the funny looks from others as we washed down our seats and trays in the airplane that we usually get.
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I agree. I hope we can overcome this nasty virus as a humanity with as few casualties as possible. People really have to learn a proper hygiene now.

Reassuring to hear that people are using hand sanitizers more, at least there where you were. I've always a small bottle of a hand sanitizer in my handbag, lol.

Just need to wash hands even more now than ever (always been very hygienic).

SarahBS said:
Well, Think about us and you'll be relaxed

*Sarah from Iran* :D

The government is still saying it's the US work and nothing is happening and the schools shouldn't be closed.
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Aww, Sarah! :laughing: :hug:

I'm so sorry of your country's government. ><
 
SarahBS said:
As an INFJ, with my dark side at work these days "You're going to be ok" doesn't really work. :D but thanks <3

I mean they closed the schools for a week and people are going on holiday This is why we are the worst : STUPIDITY!
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The Emperor had it all wrong. There is no Dark side. There is only the light side and the realistic side infused with anger.
darthvader.gif
My comment was simply a vote of confidence that you're smart and understand what is a risk, what is not.

It's unfortunate that political games seem to blanket everything, in every country. I wish politicians would wake up and realize we're all in this world together and our politics and religious differences need to take a back seat. Besides, wait 10 years and who knows which countries are buddies. It all keeps changing.
 
flower said:
Awee! If it makes you feel any easier, it seems spreading kinda fast in Europe too. I guess is just a matter of time when it's everywhere... ><
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MoonFlier said:
The Emperor had it all wrong. There is no Dark side. There is only the light side and the realistic side infused with anger.
darthvader.gif
My comment was simply a vote of confidence that you're smart and understand what is a risk, what is not.

It's unfortunate that political games seem to blanket everything, in every country. I wish politicians would wake up and realize we're all in this world together and our politics and religious differences need to take a back seat. Besides, wait 10 years and who knows which countries are buddies. It all keeps changing.
Click to expand...

well, that is true. I guess I'm that side infused with anger now. That was beautiful my friend <3
 
MoonFlier said:
It's interesting that on the CDC website they mention that they have no clue how the virus propagates yet.

Even though COVID-19 has had tragic consequences, I see this as an opportunity for everyone, globally, to learn and enforce proper hygiene. Shifts in social behavior have to come about due to this alone. My hope is that we will come out stronger and better prepared globally should other major viruses occur.

Quick observation: When walking through Disney last year I was impressed by the number of people who now carry hand sanitizer clipped onto their backbacks. Compared to the prior year the number of people doing so increased exponentially. Now, were they using it? Hmm. The signs were looking good. We also did not get all the funny looks from others as we washed down our seats and trays in the airplane that we usually get.
Click to expand...

When the wife and I went to Disney we each had sanitiser and used it after every ride. Didn't see a lot of others using it though.

MoonFlier said:
The Emperor had it all wrong. There is no Dark side. There is only the light side and the realistic side infused with anger.
darthvader.gif
My comment was simply a vote of confidence that you're smart and understand what is a risk, what is not.

It's unfortunate that political games seem to blanket everything, in every country. I wish politicians would wake up and realize we're all in this world together and our politics and religious differences need to take a back seat. Besides, wait 10 years and who knows which countries are buddies. It all keeps changing.
Click to expand...

But also to quote the Emperor, "The only thing he was afraid of was... losing his power."

This is why polticians, dictators and religious leaders are the way they are. They fear any sign of weakness will be used by enemies to destroy them. Hence they can trust no one and everyone is in perpertual fear of each other, thus no cooperation except when everyone is on the brink of death or interest align (and even then its an uneasy truce rather than trust).
 
Business Wire
Put Lives over Politics – WHO Must Declare Coronavirus a Pandemic Now!
Business WireFebruary 25, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

e63f196adf3db79599aa5d8f339e60ee

Put Lives over Politics – WHO Must Declare Coronavirus a Pandemic Now!
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) urgently calls on United Nations Secretary General António Guterres to convene an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council (UNSC) in response to the escalating spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) across 37 countries and territories.

Concurrently, the World Health Organization (WHO) must declare the ongoing outbreak a pandemic as COVID-19 poses an imminent danger to global public health and is likely to continue spreading across the world.

"The UN Security Council must bring to bear its resources and political weight to mount a response commensurate with the unprecedented scale of danger facing global public health security and the global economy," said Michael Weinstein, AHF President. "Many countries are entirely unprepared in terms of healthcare capacity, infrastructure, and supplies to fight a highly contagious and potentially protracted outbreak – and as a UN body charged with protecting global peace and security, it is time for the UNSC to step in."

According to the latest epidemiological data, the total number of COVID-19 cases has reached 80,396 globally, and 2,706 people have died from the virus, which puts the mortality rate at nearly 3.4%. With recent localized flare ups in Italy (283 cases), Iran (95 cases), and South Korea (977 cases), the total number of affected countries or territories has reached 37.

Despite COVID-19 spreading to five continents, WHO still hasn’t declared the outbreak a pandemic. In a press briefing on Monday, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told media the virus has the potential to become a pandemic but hasn’t reached that level yet. "For the moment, we are not witnessing the uncontained global spread of this virus, and we are not witnessing large-scale severe disease or death," the Director-General said in the briefing.

In contrast to Dr. Tedros’ view of the situation, WHO’s guidance document titled "Current WHO phase of pandemic alert for Pandemic (H1N1) 2009," states Phase 6 is defined as a pandemic if it includes human-to-human spread and community-level outbreaks in at least two different WHO regions. While the guidance was specifically tailored to the H1N1 2009 outbreak, the spread of COVID-19 has already far exceeded those comparatively low threshold requirements.

"If we look at what is happening in South Korea, Italy, and Iran, the requirements are met for WHO to declare Phase 6 of a pandemic—it is no longer contained and controlled within the borders of China," said Dr. Jorge Saavedra, Executive Director of the AHF Global Public Health Institute at the University of Miami. "The hesitation to declare a pandemic is motivated by political reasons and concerns for impact on the Chinese economy, which is a very dangerous course of action. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from pandemics, it’s that when global public health takes a backseat to politics, things end tragically and with many preventable deaths."

In reference to Iran’s exceedingly high COVID-19 mortality rate of nearly 20% (95 cases, 16 deaths), Dr. Saavedra said the UNSC should consider softening the sanctions so that the country can obtain enough resources to freely and urgently import public health goods to contain the outbreak. "In times of public health emergencies and when the world is on the verge of a pandemic – ideology, geopolitics, and battles for patents and profits need to be set aside for the benefit of humanity," he said.

For more information, please contact Ged Kenslea at gedk@aidshealth.org or (323) 791-5526

About AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)

AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 1.3 million people in 43 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Eastern Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website: www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/aidshealth and follow us on Twitter: @aidshealthcare and Instagram: @aidshealthcare.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200225005929/en/

Contacts

U.S. MEDIA CONTACTS:
Ged Kenslea, Senior Director, Communications, AHF
+1 323 308 1833 work +1.323.791.5526 mobile
gedk@aidshealth.org

Denys Nazarov, Director of Global Policy &
Communications, AHF
+1.202.503.4743
dn@aidshealth.org
 
This, unlike AIDS, is airborne. A man was wearing a mask as a patient at the doctors' office Wednesday.

The Independent
Iran’s coronavirus outbreak is bizarrely reminiscent of the Black Death
Robert Fisk
The IndependentFebruary 27, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

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AP
When the very first coronavirus reports emerged, I had a suspicion that Iran would be a target of the world’s anger. The spread of Covid-19 to the Middle East was as inevitable as history because the Muslim pilgrim routes have always acted as a channel for pestilence. But however honest or dishonest Iran’s response to the virus has been, contemporary hatred for Shia Islam in Sunni Muslim lands and the anti-Iranian bias of the western world was going to turn poor old Persia into a plague pariah.

A virus that clearly had its origins in China is now supposedly turning Iran into a menace to us all. The New York Times announced that it was emerging “as a worldwide threat”, spreading the coronavirus “to a host of neighbouring countries”. The Jerusalem Post declared that Iran had “now set the Middle East ablaze with fears of coronavirus”. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo said Washington was “deeply concerned by information indicating the Iranian regime may have suppressed vital details about the outbreak in that country.”

It was inevitable, of course. After originally denying that it had shot down the Ukrainian passenger jet over Tehran on 8 January, Iran’s word was not going to be trusted when it announced its first coronavirus deaths. The holy city of Qom had itself suffered 50 fatalities, one of the country’s own MPs claimed to the horror (and denial) of the government. Of the 139 people testing positive in the country, even its health minister admitted he was a patient after dripping perspiration at a televised press conference. With 19 officially admitted deaths in a week, it did not help when an Iranian cleric announced that the very fabric of the golden-domed mosques of Qom would protect its pilgrims. This was truly medieval in its fantasy.

Iran’s neighbours piled on the grief. The Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia all pointed at Iran as the source of their own virus outbreaks – accurate enough in that the victims (even in Lebanon) appeared to have arrived from Tehran – but for a world which has for years collectively isolated and sanctioned Iran and deprived it of the very basic commodities, including medical equipment, this is surely a grotesque act of hypocrisy. The virus coincides with the great pilgrimages to Qom. Had it broken out a few months later, then the most dangerous source might have been – and could still be – this midsummer’s Haj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Coronavirus does not respect Islam.

Nor Christianity for that matter. Early records show that Muslims in the Middle East thought that Christians might be spared the Black Death when it arrived in the region. They were not.

Within only seven years of the death of the Prophet Mohamed, pestilence struck the entire region. The Plague of Amwas, named after a Palestinian village not far from Jerusalem (its modern Arab inhabitants were evicted by Israeli forces in 1948), killed 20,000, including the prophet’s own companion Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah, and struck from Syria to what is today Saudi Arabia. In an earlier epidemic, the second caliph, Umar al-Khattab, was advancing from Medina to Syria – but turned back when he heard from Abu Ubaidah that a plague had broken out in Syria. He returned to Arabia, an act provoking a debate which has echoes even amid today’s coronavirus outbreak.

Should we stay where we are amid a pestilence? Or run for home? Early Muslims apparently contented themselves with a supposed quotation from the prophet himself – its historical accuracy is equally open for debate – in which Mohamed said that if plague “is in a land, do not approach it; but if it occurs in a land while you are there, do not leave to escape it.”

Scholar Yaron Ayalon has pointed out that both Muslims and Christians faced the philosophical as well as physical question of contagion. “If a disease could be transmitted from one person to another, there should be a way to prevent it, and if so, the argument that epidemics were a divine punishment for man’s sins would be harder to sustain.” Some Muslim writers suggested that even though contagion existed, it was up to God to decide whether a person should become ill.

For hundreds of years, of course, the Middle East and the Islamic world had a surer grasp of medicine than Europeans possessed. A Christian Arab from Iraq, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, for example, translated both Hippocrates and the Roman physician and surgeon Galen of Pergamon. But a 16th-century Muslim historian in Mamluk Egypt said that dying from the plague was equivalent to a martyr’s death in battle – we should perhaps predict the reawakening of this idea in the modern Middle East – and even suggested, apparently quoting the prophet, that Medina and Mecca were surrounded by angels and thus no plague could enter the cities. This was surely an early version of the Qom cleric who has just claimed that the very mosques of the city would protect pilgrims.

Muslim records of the great plagues which scourged the Islamic world are even scarcer than the European documents which recorded up to 800,000 deaths from the Black Death in England alone in the 14th century. Arab historians believe that the plagues originated in Mongolia and there is little doubt that they moved along the Silk Road – at the speed of armies and camels rather than airliners, of course – to Persia (Iran) and then to the Levant (Syria, modern-day Lebanon, Palestine and modern-day Israel, and then Egypt. The Syrian writer Ibn al-Wardi, who was himself a victim of the plague in 1348, spoke of the Black Death emerging from “The Land of Darkness”. Up to 30 per cent of all Persians died in the 14th century. The great Arab traveller Ibn Battuta recorded 2,000 deaths a day in Damascus. Four years later, Mecca was struck by a plague apparently brought down the Haj pilgrimage route.

In 1347, the Black Death infested Cairo and wiped out a third of the population at the rate of a thousand a day, according to historian and journalist Max Rodenbeck, who records 55 plague outbreaks in the Egyptian city, including 20 epidemics within just over 150 years. “Fatally,” he wrote, “ruler and ruled alike continued to ascribe the plague to heavenly anger.” The sheikh of Al-Azhar was certain that this was God’s punishment for men’s fornication and for women who would “adorn themselves” and walk in the streets. As late as 1835, an English visitor to Cairo recorded how his landlord, banker, doctor, donkey driver, the relatives of his servant and a magician all died of the plague which took the lives of around another 70,000 souls.

I doubt if the cruel story of Middle Eastern contagion counts for much in the White House – or among the Sunni monarchs of the Gulf. Within the region’s refugee camps, in Syria, in Iraq, in Jordan and Lebanon, however, history hovers a little closer. Compared to the ancient plagues, coronavirus – the description “pandemic” aside – is an infinitesimal threat to humanity. But its spread is of a speed that past generations in the Middle East would understand. The plague reached Italy at almost the same moment it struck Alexandria in Egypt. The Silk Road knew no sectarian or national divisions. Nor did the pilgrim routes of Islam.

Read more
This is what it’s like living on coronavirus lockdown in Shanghai
 
wikipedia...

2019–20 Pakistan locust infestation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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Since June 2019, a desert locust outbreak has been impacting eastern Pakistan.[1]

In November 2019, Karachi saw the first locust attack in the city since 1961.[2]

On 29 January 2020, the provincial Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government declared emergency in nine southern districts of the province to control spread of locust. The emergency was declared in Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, Lakki Marwat, Bannu, Karak, Kohat, Hangu, North and South Waziristan districts.[3]

On 1 February 2020, the Pakistani government declared a national emergency to protect crops and help farmers.[4]....copied Wikipedia

China is sending 100,000 ducks to help with the infestation. "The ducks of Khyber Pass"(trying to keep my sanity).......will they be checked for the virus? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3758261/ I wonder if it matters to the Pakistanis?


https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pdf/avianflu/avian-flu-transmission.pdf Seems rare, but possible, for a person to get the virus from a duck. Chickens are worse(live chickens).

Problems need to be addressed.
 
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I wonder how many westerners who have a positivity/optimism bias are or will soon be getting the surprise of their lives after being warned for well over a month that this was going on and was spreading. Anyway they are likely to have the vaccine for months likely towards the end of the year before all the trial work is done and production will take several months more. Some of the WHO and CDC people are saying this could take up to two years before things get brought back into control let alone normal. Last but not least it looks like the outbreak is catalyzing another financial crises as all those nickles and dimes panic sell their stocks crashing the markets.
 
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