China has posted its Feb. 24 #Covid19 numbers.
+508 confirmed cases, +71 deaths.
It says it has confirmed, in total, 77,658 cases & 2,663 deaths. pic.twitter.com/smyB8pDwMO— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) February 25, 2020
Of immediate interest to some Balloon Juice readers:
This is important for university students abroad as @CDCgov level 2 alerts tend to be the threshold for universities to start contingency planning for potentially bringing students back. https://t.co/HfVzztbYpD
— Dr. Saskia Popescu (@SaskiaPopescu) February 25, 2020
Smart advice for us ‘worried well’ (by all means read the whole article!)
IMO a really good post!
"Buy a few of the things each weekly shop. Don’t buy things you won’t eat later, don’t hoard and don’t buy more than you’ll need for a 2 week period. We’re not talking zombie apocalypse and we very probably won’t see power or water interruptions either." https://t.co/iGtIHylmwj
— Paul (@davispg) February 25, 2020
GENEVA, Feb 24 (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday that the novel coronavirus outbreak was not out of control globally nor causing large-scale deaths and it was "too early" to speak of a pandemic.@WHO
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) February 24, 2020
Prepare like it's going to be a pandemic, @WHO tells countries, though it said the #coronavirus epidemic does not yet qualify as one. https://t.co/oCN7C9L02Y
— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) February 24, 2020
I spoke with @katarinazimmer @TheScientistLLC the other day about #SARS_CoV_2 and #COVID19 disease. The short answer – it's complicated + your immune system has a lot to do with how things turn out. Also featuring @angie_rasmussen and Dr. Stanley Perlman.https://t.co/QYCSlo3b6U
— Lisa Gralinski (@LisaGralinski) February 24, 2020
Put the Qom imams' rejection of quarantine and social distancing together with the South Korea religious cult and BINGO — #COVID19 out of control.
Not good to mix religion with epidemic controlhttps://t.co/J6IY6gKcM0 https://t.co/vkhKtDRcvT
— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) February 25, 2020
To be honest, it’s not the religious cultists overseas that worry me most, at this point — it’s the political cultists right here:
“The view in the White House is that this is one of those classic black swan events, and all we can do is control the health issues in the U.S.,” said Stephen Moore, an informal economic adviser to the Trump team. https://t.co/kOfPbabdzr @politico by @ddiamond & @nancook
— Darren Samuelsohn (@dsamuelsohn) February 25, 2020
… With the possibility of a U.S. outbreak growing by the day, Trump allies and advisers have grown increasingly worried that a botched coronavirus response will hit the U.S. economy. Even Donald Trump Jr. has mused to associates he hopes the White House does not screw up the response and put the president’s best reelection message at risk, said two individuals with knowledge of his comments.
“Trump’s reelection effort is so closely tied to the strength of the stock market and the economy,” said Moore, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and 2016 Trump campaign adviser. “Anything that shakes us off of that pro-growth track is a concern, but I think the view of officials in the White House is that this will be contained.”
“Once the virus is contained, the market will bounce right back,” Moore added…
But inside the White House, officials have been quietly studying models of the pandemic’s potential effect on both the U.S. and the global economy, said one Republican close to the White House. Among policy aides, there‘s widespread concern that the spread of the coronavirus will hit a slew of industries including manufacturers, airlines, automakers and tech companies, slowing down both the U.S. and Chinese economies. Aides fear the White House has few economic tricks it can deploy to lessen the impact.
Meanwhile, officials like acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and domestic policy chief Joe Grogan have turned their fire on HHS Secretary Alex Azar, who’s leading the coronavirus response, arguing that Azar has poorly coordinated the strategy, failed to escalate the potential risks to Trump and pushed for a multibillion-dollar emergency-funding request that they initially viewed as extreme, said four individuals familiar with the matter.The Trump administration on Monday night announced a request for $2.5 billion in emergency coronavirus cash, which would also shift at least $535 million in previously committed funds.
Funding the response had been a major sticking point between the White House and Azar, who lobbied to request additional funds from Congress before he makes four separate hearings on the Hill this week. Officials had spent days jockeying over the final figure for the emergency package, veering anywhere between $1 billion to $5 billion. The package also is expected to face resistance from Democrats, who have warned the Trump administration against shifting money away from existing commitments…
Fortunately, there are still some grown-ups in the government. Per NBC:
The White House is asking Congress for $2.5 billion to respond to the coronavirus illness known as COVID-19 that has killed more than 2,600 people in mainland China, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the request inadequate.
Pelosi, D-California, said in a statement that the administration’s request is “is long overdue and completely inadequate to the scale of this emergency.”
She also accused the Trump administration of leaving vacant critical positions at the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security.
“And now, the president is compounding our vulnerabilities by seeking to ransack funds still needed to keep Ebola in check,” Pelosi said.
“The president should not be raiding money that Congress has appropriated for other life-or-death public health priorities,” she said, suggesting that the House would move forward with its own plan…
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, signaled his disapproval as well, saying the effort was “too little too late.”
“That President Trump is trying to steal funds dedicated to fight Ebola — which is still considered an epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — is indicative of his towering incompetence and further proof that he and his administration aren’t taking the coronavirus crisis as seriously as they need to be,” Schumer said in a statement.
There have been no deaths from the coronavirus illness in the United States, but there are confirmed cases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that there have been two cases of person-to-person transmission in the U.S., and that the virus can be spread via respiratory droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes. The CDC says on its website that the virus is not currently spreading in the U.S…
The acting deputy secretary of homeland security is asking the internet where to get information about the spread of #Covid19.
We are so borked. pic.twitter.com/hWony9uGG4
— Greg Greene (@ggreeneva) February 24, 2020
The @JohnsHopkins map is a great tool. But when I coordinated the Ebola response in 2014-15, I got two briefings a day from the CIA … and never crowd-sourced the response on @Twitter. https://t.co/eT1FVmtaSQ
— Ronald Klain (@RonaldKlain) February 25, 2020
Another excellent thread, from someone who knows what he’s talking about:
As both an emergency manager and as someone who helped manage the 2014 USG Ebola response, let me tell you why this is such a damaging tweet.
This is the loudest voice in the US government sharing actively problematic risk communication. https://t.co/L3PPHX4gW8
— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) February 24, 2020
Wow, this has blown up. While you're here: don't despair, do prepare.
This outbreak can be managed, and damaging overreaction is as risky as damaging under-reaction.
Here's an overview of what governments should be doing to get ready: https://t.co/mboRx431i2
— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) February 25, 2020
The coronavirus story will also become a health-insurance story in America. This guy went to China, caught the flu, came back, did the responsible thing and reported himself for possible coronavirus — but tested negative and now might have to pay $1,400+. https://t.co/GdDqyODPVw
— Matt Pearce ? (@mattdpearce) February 24, 2020
This is EXACTLY the argument against formally declaring a pandemic. Pandemic does not necessarily mean "category 5 hurricane". It simply means that the outbreak has taken root in multiple geographic regions. But the word elicits panic and hysteria, which are NOT helpful.
— Sanghyuk Shin (@sanghyuk_shin) February 25, 2020
The Chinese CDC today published the largest case series to date of #COVID19 in mainland China (72 314 cases through 2/11/20). Here are some of the data:
Case-fatality rate
• 2.3% Overall
• 14.8% age >= 80
• 8.0% age 70-79
• 49.0% in critical caseshttps://t.co/ZFR6pScCpa— JAMA (@JAMA_current) February 24, 2020
I wholeheartedly agree with this. Chinese have sacrificed so much. The party members have covered up, and the cadres produced theater, but the everyday Chinese put their lives on hold to save the world. We owe them the best use of our remaining bought time https://t.co/zqoRA9BmeD
— Daniel Sinclair (@_DanielSinclair) February 24, 2020
Betty Cracker
One of the two designated Trump sycophants at The Post, Hugh Hewitt, has a column up today on how Trump should address the problem. It makes no mention of the fact that Trump fired everyone responsible for coordinating a pandemic response for the sin of being hired by Obama. But it does suggest setting up a blue ribbon commission headed by Mike Pence! Yeah, that’ll work.
opiejeanne
Thank you Anne Laurie for continuing to post this information. It’s not only interesting but very helpful.
Was it last night that someone on BJ mentioned that the vast majority of seeds for gardening are produced in China, and that the supply either has been or will be disrupted? It’s amazing the number of things that will not be widely available because of this, many things we take for granted.
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: I can’t imagine what Pence would do on such a panel. He’s not terribly bright, according to people who have observed him. Is he going to lead prayer sessions?
Cermet
Good news on the Corona virus front – a vaccine has been developed for testing:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/drugmaker-ships-first-experimental-coronavirus-vaccine-for-human-tests/ar-BB10l6xQ?ocid=ientp
Mary G
Thank you so much for these nightly threads, AL.
Rusty
Case-fatality rate
• 2.3% Overall
• 14.8% age >= 80
• 8.0% age 70-79
• 49.0% in critical cases
This highlights the risks to nursing homes and the older community. We need to really start coordinating how to best protect these older groups.
Cermet
@Rusty: while we do need to be far better prepared, those statistics are based on Chinese rates. I seriously doubt those rates will occur in the healthier US population if/or when, the corona virus spreads here. I tend to believe the current outside of China rate of 0.4% is more likely. That is four times worse than the common flu (and considering no children have died, means yes, older people will die at a higher rate, still) but not anywhere near the 2.4% China is seeing; remember, that number is based on known cases – likely far greater number of people have become ill but never seriously enough to be tested. So, even for China, that number of deaths to people infected is likely too high.
YY_Sima Qian
@Rusty: For each of the categories, the data needs to be separated into Wuhan, Hubei ex-Wuhan, and China ex-Hubei. China overall is not that meaningful. Wuhan represents a medical system initially caught unprepared and collapsed, only brought back by tremendous investment of people and materials; Hubei ex-Wuhan one under significant stress; and China ex-Hubei one that is pressured but more or less normal. Even Wuhan does not represent what is likely to happen elsewhere if their medical systems collapse under the weight of a mass of severe/critical COVID-19 cases. Wuhan benefited from enormous reinforcement of human and material resources from the rest of China. How many other countries have the resource pool and the organization capacity?
Mortality rate in China ex-Hubei has been creeping back up north of 0.8%, from 0.15% a couple of weeks ago, and may end up at ~ 1%. Probably the critical cases are reaching resolution. I would not necessarily attribute the lower death rate in ROW to more advanced health care than China. It may simply be that the critical cases in ROW are mostly more recent, and have yet to reach resolution. See the number of COVID-19 deaths in South Korea and Italy.
germy
Rush Limbaugh on coronavirus: ‘The common cold’ that’s being ‘weaponized’ against Trump
Baud
@germy:
Baud!/Common cold! 2020!
Shalimar
I know almost nothing about this, and it is apparently more than Moore. It seems like the time when containment was even possible has passed now.
Chyron HR
@germy:
“This pandemic is VERY VERY unfair to me!”
Baud
@Chyron HR:
I can actually see that happening. Kudos.
Princess
I’ve got news for Trump — even a perfect coronvirus response is going to hit the economy
And since the CDC has only been testing people in a very limited way, I am going to say that they have no idea whether it is spreading in the US at this point. Iran and Italy only discovered it after they had deaths. By that point, the virus has been actively and silently spreading.
Rusty
@YY_Sima Qian: Thank you for these thoughtful points. China has been able to marshal resources in ways that other countries will not be able to match. What so far seems consistent (again, based on numbers that are all over the place) is 5% have severe symptoms and half of those are fatal. The quality of care will really vary the fatality rate for that 5%. Lack of facilities or overwhelmed facilities will prove critical.
Citizen_X
If your main concern in a global epidemic is not the public-health risk, but the economic, and thus the political risk to you, then you’re pretty much guaranteed to fuck up the response.
So I have confidence that Trump and his court are going to fuck it up.
Geminid
Iran may be in real trouble. An official announced that there have been 50 Covid-19 deaths in Qom, a big Shiite pilgrimage center. Pilgrims have returned to Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and other neighbors, carrying the virus. Mullahs in Qom are still conducting large prayer sessions. The official who announced the death toll has been denounced by other officials.
chopper
@Cermet:
here’s hoping. scientists have been working for years on a vaccine for sars and couldn’t come up with one that works very well at all.
Starfish
Wow. Look at that Laura Garrett quote. Athiests have fun showing their butts.
In South Korea, the group that was affected was a religious minority, and now they are getting persecuted.
Qom is one of the holy sites of Shia Islam. Going there to tour a religious site is like going to tour the various most famous churches in the world. The government of Iran was in denial and did not communicate to the people the extent of what was going on. Did the imams even know the severity of what was going on?
But who needs facts to get in the way of athiest lulz?
Cermet
@Rusty: Only for Wuhan otherwise, the numbers are not all that different and under 1%. That 5% get extremely ill isn’t something I’ve seen as fact for this illness. Don’t use Chinese numbers for that calculation since there is no proof they are counting all the people with Corona – in fact, extremely likely far more got sick but never enough to be tested.
Cermet
Rather than poorly based information, see the following article that summarizes most known details:
https://www.livescience.com/new-china-coronavirus-faq.html
Obvious Russian Troll
@Rusty: My wife has just started volunteering for the Red Cross up here in Toronto. They have an on-call system where they call volunteers when they need them.
My wife also has a mother in a nursing facility in the US who she visits regularly
Anyway, she gets a call and is asked if she can go a quarantine facility where they have put people suspected to have the virus.
She turned that one down pretty quickly.
Rusty
@Cermet: Here is the information from the site you mention. ”
The study researchers, from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, analyzed information from 44,672 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in China that were reported between Dec. 31, 2019 and Feb. 11, 2020. Among these cases, there were 1,023 deaths, resulting in an overall death rate of 2.3%.
That’s much higher than the death rate of flu, which is around 0.1% in the U.S., according to The New York Times.
However, the new study found that the death rate from COVID-19 varied by location. In Hubei Province, where the outbreak began, the death rate was 2.9%, compared with just 0.4% in other provinces — a 7-fold difference.
The study also showed that older adults have been hit hardest by COVID-19. Among those ages 80 and older, the death rate was 14.8%, compared with 8.0% for those ages 70 to 79; 3.6% for those ages 60 to 69; 1.3% for those ages 50 to 59; 0.4% for those ages 40 to 49, and 0.2% for those ages 10 to 39. No deaths have been reported among children from birth to age 9.
However, some experts have estimated that the number of COVID-19 cases could be much higher than what has been officially tracked and reported, according to the BBC. If that’s the case, then the death rate could be lower than what’s reported in this study.”
This is all completely in-line with the post and what has been discussed. You seem to be the one that shows up on every post on this subject and says this is no worse than the average flu. I am not remotely an expert on this subject, but the posts have been careful to mostly link to those that are experts. The experts are saying this is much more than the flu, the WHO is behaving that this is much more than the flu, and governments are mostly reacting as if this is much more than the flu.
Princess
What Rusty said. Anyone who is not concerned at this point is hiding their head in the sand.
brettvk
Thanks for the link to the Australian site. That was a really helpful article. I’m doing more active caretaking of my elderly mother; she’s still living independently but I’m her transportation for shopping and doctor appointments. It’s good to have some guidance on how to keep her safe.
Dev Null
AL: I’d just like to say how much I appreciate your aggregation of coronavirus links.
I spend a lot of time following pubs and twitterati and research papers, and your posts always include lots of resources that I’ve missed.
Your series is an invaluable public service.
Many many thanks.
Dev Null
And sacrifice of other patients:
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005230/the-invisible-victims-of-chinas-coronavirus-crisis
The Washington Post has a similar article (google “triage”) which for some reason duckduckgo isn’t finding.
Perhaps more to the point, is the US any more ready than Wuhan was in mid-January? If COVID-19 is spreading now under the radar because flu is masking the spread – AND because there’s little, possibly no CDC spot testing – the US healthcare system could be overwhelmed by a sudden surge of cases.
This next is Dave Anderson’s beat, nor do I have expertise on the topic, but it’s my impression that rural healthcare systems are not particularly healthy. What happens when the wave sloshes out of cities and suburbia into Real America? Real America is already struggling with the opioid epidemic, and while coronavirus will cause a different kind of epidemic, the opioid epidemic and a coronavirus epidemic will contend for resources.
Princess Leia
Interesting that estrogen seems to provide some sort of protection. Might be the reason that more men die overall, but also why elderly folks are affected.
Another Scott
Sen. Murray is asking good questions and demanding answers at the HHS budget request hearings today.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?469633-1/secretary-azar-testifies-fy2021-health-human-services-budget-request&live
Cheers,
Scott.
Fair Economist
I have been stocking up since the first cases started showing up outside of China. I only buy a moderate amount each trip and I use some of each thing I buy before I buy more. Stocking up on, if you’re not wasteful, is a commitment to actually use it over the next year or so.
Unlike some here, I expect the US will have one of the worst outbreaks. We might be the very worst for testing since we are still only testing cases from *Wuhan*, not China, or known exposure. Croatia caught an infected businessman coming back from Lombardy – we’d have missed that, and when you are behind Croatia it’s bad. On top of that add our huge insurance and sick leave problems so control will be very difficult. We are likely to have one of the most advanced outbreaks when noticed, and the least ability to control it. It’s going to be bad.
I don’t see how it’s containable now. I logged on to twitter and saw problematic new reports from Korea, Japan, Thailand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Oman, Austria, Italy, Croatia, and Spain. Plus increasingly ominous ommisions from India, Indonesia, the US, and Africa. This with a disease that can often hide while being actively transmitted for a month. Seriously, how is this containable? So it is with us until we have a vaccine and a better than polio eradication effort.
Another Scott
@Fair Economist:
That is certainly possible. If one takes the a look at the latest WHO Situation Report #35 (7 page .pdf) one sees lots of scary graphs like figure 2 (showing origination of cases outside China). The first outside-China case sourced to China was January 1 and the last was around February 14. About 6 weeks.
The HHS budget hearing was in the Senate this morning. The C-Span coverage included someone saying it’s not a big deal in the USA because there are only “14” cases (when that report already shows 35 cases). There’s absolutely no indication that Donnie and his GOP enablers are going to do anything except try to bury this story in the US until it’s too late.
Grr…
To be clear, my view is that we don’t need to panic about this. It’s a serious virus, but it’s not going to kill 30% of the population or something. We need to be smart about how we address it; we know how to be smart about addressing it; and we need to pressure our leaders to be smart about addressing it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
Grr…
As always, follow the money.
Cheers,
Scott.