Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Motown is Joe-Town!

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Please don’t feed the bears.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

The willow is too close to the house.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

A consequence of cucumbers

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / ‘Novel’ Coronavirus Update – Sunday / Monday

‘Novel’ Coronavirus Update – Sunday / Monday

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For the first time, coronavirus got the top slot on the evening tv news — either it’s broken through the America-centric media barrier, or all the ‘name’ reporters were busy with Super Bowl prep. Seriously, though, I suspect the people who are in a position to make the rest of us care about a news event have decided this is gonna affect their bottom line. It’s no longer the proverbial nine days’ wonder — attention must be paid.

CNN, this morning:

The US has begun implementing new rules around travel from China as the coronavirus death toll creeps higher — rules that include re-routing Americans flying into the country to specific airports for screening…

In the US, government officials urged residents not to travel to China, issuing a level 4 travel advisory, days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.

For Americans who traveled there in the past 14 days, the US Department of Homeland Security said there are a total of 11 designated airports — including John F. Kennedy International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport — where travelers can enter the US. Those airports, the government said, have more resources to conduct enhanced screening procedures.

If passengers are screened and show no symptoms they will be re-booked to their final destination and asked to “self-quarantine” inside their home, DHS says…

To help expedite that process, Wolf said, Customs and Border Patrol and air carriers will identify passengers who fall under the restrictions before their scheduled flights.

“Once back in the U.S., it’s imperative that individuals honor self-quarantine directives to help protect the American public,” he said in a statement.

The new rules also mean foreign nationals who were recently in China will be temporarily denied entry into the US, Azar said…


Reader Interactions

19Comments

  1. 1.

    Sab

    I have Chinese members of extended family. Amazed that hardly anyone happened to be in China for this new year.

  2. 2.

    Rusty

    From a NYT breaking news email last night, “Breaking News: Hospitals are running out of test kits and sending people home with fevers, our reporter writes from the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.” So it’s not just a backlog of test kits. The fatality toll and reported number of serious infections are probably a better indication of the spread of the virus.

  5. 5.

    YY_Sima Qian

    I won’t be writing a long opus today. :-)

    The WP article is quite good. OT: Often times I find reporting on China in English language MSM to be quite skewed, myopic to the point of being divorced from the larger reality as experienced by the vast majority of Chinese. (At least in the areas dominated by Han Chinese. I can’t comment on the quality of reporting on events in Tibet or Xinjiang; what is happening there is far too opaque to me.) In the past two years I feel the media coverage is also being tinged with an ideological flavor, as if the MSM elites are conditioning themselves (and being conditioned by segments of the policy elites) for a new Cold War with China.

    The last time I saw such quality reporting on major news event in China was following the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake. The similarity with 2008 is that the CCP regime is currently allowing fairly free wheeling discussion in media and especially social media, as long as the accusations do not point toward the central leadership. The motivation is probably to relieve popular pressure, salve popular discontent, and expose problems and wrongdoing that are causing these discontent. This gives western reporters a lot more materials to work with and better access to sources.

    In Chinese media, Southern Metropolitan, the Paper, Caijing, Caixin, Xinjing all have done superb on the ground reporting. Caixin just published an in depth series on the outbreak in Wuhan, one taking a close look at the play by play in Dec. to Jan. (like the WP article), but from the perspective of front line medical workers. It does not pose the question who is responsible for the lack of transparency and the slow response (that would be courting trouble), but leaves it to the reader to ponder (as readers inevitably). I hope they translate the articles and post them on their English site, soon.

    I expect the relatively openness (which is still less open than post-2008 earthquake, IMO) to last until the current crisis subsides.

    Wuhan has just announced new policy to isolate all suspect cases, cases that cannot be rule out as 2019-nCoV, and people who had close contact with confirmed or suspect cases. Hotels and guesthouses have been commandeered for this purpose. Wuhan probably should have done this sooner, other cities and provinces have already implemented such policy earlier. One of the consequences of the combination of the outbreak exploding around Chinese New Year, plus the lock downs, and the public awareness campaigns to urge people to stay home, is that often three generations of people who have united before the lock downs for the Spring Festival are now stuck in crowded flats. If one person was infected, then the rest of the family members are also infected in short order. So the spread (in Wuhan, at least) are now more within family, rather than from neighbor to neighbor, co-worker to co-worker, stranger to stranger. It appears to be rare for infants to catch the virus, young children do not appear to present even moderate symptoms. The parents will probably fight through, but the grandparents are in serious trouble.

    There are three families with confirmed cases in my apartment complex (different buildings), in each case every family member (no children among them) is confirmed or suspected (based on symptoms, not necessarily recorded as such in official statistics). We are aware of two further such families amongst our admittedly large circle of acquaintances.

    The good news is that the trends outside of Hubei appears to be turning, with slightly decreasing number of new confirmed cases in each day. Nationally, the number of new suspect cases are also smaller than new confirmed cases, so perhaps tracking and cycle time to confirmation is improving outside of Hubei. There will now be another wave of human migration as people return to work this week or next, excluding Hubei which will remain under lock down. Fingers crossed that it will not result in new unmanageable outbreaks.

    Something is strange with the data from Henan and Jiangsu provinces. The increase in confirmed cases is just about perfectly linear. Does not makes sense, unless these two provinces are only allotted certain number of test kits per day…

    The city of Shenzhen is starting to build a temporary hospital with 1500 bed capacity for 2019-nCoV cases, to be completed in 10 days, despite only having 200+ confirmed cases so far. As a city of immigrants, it must be preparing for the possibly that the large influx of people returning from Chinese New Year break bringing a wave of cases, and not want to be caught with its pants down like Wuhan. For the people in Wuhan, especially the family of the infected, the 8 – 10 days it is taking to build the two temporary hospitals (first of which went into operations today) must feel like a lifetime. For the severe cases desperate for hospital bed and treatment, the wait is a lifetime…

  9. 9.

    Cermet

    Again. thank you YY_Sima Qian; hope everyone in your family remains well!

    The 17000 sick and 2000 seriously ill does not necessarily follow; I bet there is a vast under count of ill because those cases are mild to very mild and so, never tested. Very good news infants and young children seem to not be getting seriously ill. That is the best news I’ve heard so far and very encouraging!

  11. 11.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Cermet: I can’t take the 2K serious cases number seriously. In Wuhan, only those with severe symptoms gets a CT scan to confirm lung infection to be declared a suspect case. They then get in line for confirmation by test kit. Only positive test results are declared confirmed cases, who then wait in line for bed in isolation ICU at one of the designated hospitals. So I would think most of the confirmed cases in Wuhan are in serious condition. In Chinese statistics there are “severe” cases and there are “critical” cases. Perhaps “Serious” cases in the tweet actually refers to “critical” in Chinese statistics, which are those that require significant intervention to stay alive. Anecdotes I have read in Chinese media seem to suggest that the majority of critical cases do pull through.

  14. 14.

    Elizabelle

    FWIW, the coronovirus pandemic has been the top story on the BBC half hour recap for about 10 days now.

    Watched it on the cruise ship, which offered BBC (Coronovirus — anything but Brexit, which we mention in passing only, coronovirus, coronovirus), Fox News (John Bolton, traitor) and MSNBC (impeachment, impeachment, impeachment.)

    It’s like a terrible epidemic allowed BBC to slide right past Brexit coverage, until the day the separation occurred.  (We did get to see Nigel Farrage being sternly reprimanded — by a woman — for trying to wave his little UK flag at the EU congress.  Made me think of … other presumably small things.)

  15. 15.

    Fair Economist

    Seriously, though, I suspect the people who are in a position to make the rest of us care about a news event have decided this is gonna affect their bottom line.

    China will have to have social distancing measures and reduced production for months to control this thing. Even if they get R0 down to 0.5, it will take 3 months to eradicate it – and expecting that is wildly optimistic. There are a lot of different extremely bad scenarios that are realistic possibilities, #1 being that it goes endemic worldwide, permanently, as a worse version of the flu. This is going to have huge economic impacts.

  17. 17.

    Emma

    Re: ASEAN, the chairmanship this year is with Vietnam, which is one of the more combative states when it comes to Chinese influence, both because of historical animosity and current maritime shenanigans. But there’s definitely a split between the more pro-PRC countries (Myanmar is notoriously so) vs. the more anti-PRC countries, and even Vietnam will avoid criticizing China if there’s no real gain. The secretary-general is Bruneian, though, and I don’t have any clue what Brunei prioritizes vis a vis China.

  18. 18.

    lumpkin

    Something I don’t understand. There are reportedly 17,000 cases of the disease in a population of 1.44 billion people. That’s .001% of the population. It just doesn’t seem like that should be such an overwhelming number.

  19. 19.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @lumpkin: If that is the number of people who have actually been tested and found to have the virus, there may be many people who were not deemed “sick enough” to be tested or hospitalized, so they may go uncounted.

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