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Timeline of @WHO’s response to COVID-19 Last updated 30 June 2020 Misc. |
WHO provides this timeline of the Organization’s COVID-19 response activities for general information.
WHO will update the timeline on a regular basis and in light of evolving events and new information. Unless noted otherwise, country-specific information and data are as reported to WHO by its Member States.
This timeline supersedes the WHO Rolling Updates and WHO Timeline statement published in April 2020. It is not intended to be exhaustive and does not contain details of every event or WHO activity
1 January 2020
WHO requested information on the reported cluster of atypical pneumonia cases in Wuhan from the Chinese authorities.
3 January 2020 Chinese officials provided information to WHO on the cluster of cases of ‘viral pneumonia of unknown cause’ identified in Wuhan.
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Weak, divided, incompetent... the west is unfit to challenge Xi’s bid for global hegemony @guardian Simon Tisdall Law & Politics |
In the world according to Xi, the US, principal barrier to China’s ambitions, is led by the most incompetent, easily manipulated president in living memory.
US influence and military reach across Asia are in decline. Anxious friends, notably the Taiwanese, can no longer count on Washington’s support.
Seen from Beijing, the EU-UK, riven by rightwing nationalist, populist and separatist controversies such as Brexit, is not a serious rival.
Like the US, Europe has been further weakened by the pandemic. Russia, obsessed with re-fighting the cold war, poses no threat. India’s leaders mostly spout hot air.
At the watershed 19th party congress in 2017, Xi hailed an approaching “new era” of unmatched Chinese (and personal) power.
“This is a historic juncture in China’s development. The Chinese nation... has stood up, grown rich, and become strong,” he declared. “It will be an era that sees China move closer to centre stage.”
Beijing’s interest in cooperative security is visibly fading. Fond hopes that China, in time, would democratise are dashed.
Trump’s hostility has crystallised the rift. Xi is going for bust.
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There's a mean lag of 23 days between infection and death, see page 4 #COVID19 Nature H/T @zorinaq Misc. |
The number of deaths today is the sum of the past infections weighted by their probability of death, where the probability of death depends on the number of days since infection and the country-specific infection-fatality ratio.
The infection-to-onset distribution is Gamma distributed with mean 5.1 days and coefficient of variation 0.86.
The onset-to-death distribution is also Gamma distributed with a mean of 17.8 days and a coefficient of variation 0.45.
The infection-to-death distribution is therefore given by:
π ∼ Gamma(5.1,0.86) + Gamma(17.8,0.45)
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‘Earlier signs of coronavirus’ in sewage samples in Brazil @SCMPNews Misc. |
Researchers in Brazil say they have detected the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 in sewage sampled in November.
“[The virus] was being shed within the community for several months prior to the first cases being reported by regional, national or Pan-American authorities,” Gislaine Fongaro, from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, said in a non-peer-review paper posted on the preprint server medRxiv.org on Monday.
Fongaro’s study was based on samples collected from the waste water network in Florianopolis, a beach town in southern Brazil.
Previous studies indicated that the coronavirus could bind with cells in the intestines, and the researchers thought sewage could be a useful tool to monitor the rise and fall of the epidemic in the city, with up to 100 million copies of the virus per gram of faecal matter.
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The most logical explanation is that it comes from a laboratory Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen and his colleagues have examined the corona virus. @Minervanett Misc. |
“There are very few who still believe that the epidemic started there, so as of today we have no good answers on how the epidemic started. Then we must also dare to look at more controversial, alternative explanations for the origin,” Sørensen says.
Birger Sørensen and one of his co-authors, Angus Dalgleish, are already known as HIV researchers par excellence.
In 2008, Sørensen’s work came to international attention when he launched a new immunotherapy for HIV.
Angus Dalgleish is the professor at St. George’s Medical School in London who became world famous in 1984 after having discovered a novel receptor that the HIV virus uses to enter human cells.
The purpose of the work Sørensen and his colleagues have done on the novel coronavirus, has been to produce a vaccine.
And they have taken their experience in trialling HIV vaccines with them to analyse the coronavirus more thoroughly, in order to make a vaccine that can protect against Covid-19 without major side effects.
“The difference between our approach and other vaccine manufacturers is that we have a chemistry background, and we analyse the virus in detail as if we were making a drug,” Sørensen starts to explain.
“Biology is also chemistry, so by considering the virus from a chemistry perspective, we carry out more detailed analysis, zooming in on certain components.”
“We have examined which components of the virus are especially well suited to attach themselves to cells in humans. And we have done this by comparing the properties of the virus with human genetics. What we found was that this virus was exceptionally well adjusted to infect humans.”
He pauses for a second.
“So well that it was suspicious,” he adds.
Perfected to infect humans
It is already known that the novel coronavirus, like the virus that caused the SARS epidemic in Southeast Asia in 2002-2003, could attach itself to the ACE-2 receptors in the lower respiratory tract.
“But what we have discovered is that there are properties in this new virus which enables it to use an additional receptor, and create a binding to human cells in the upper respiratory tract and the intestines which is strong enough to produce an infection,” Sørensen elaborates.
Sørensen says that it is the use of this additional receptor that most likely results in a different illness in Covid-19 patients than the one resulting from SARS.
“This is what enables the virus to transmit to a greater degree between humans, without the virus having attached itself to the ACE-2 receptors in the lower respiratory tract, where it causes deep pneumonia.
“That is also why so many of the Covid-19 patients have mild symptoms at the start of the illness, and are contagious before they develop severe symptoms,” he adds.
It might also explain why some people are ‘super spreaders’ without being ill themselves, Sørensen says.
A spike protein is a part of the virus attached to the surface of the virus. The spike protein is used by the virus when it enters cells, enabling it to stick in humans. The properties of the spike determines which receptors a virus can utilise and thus which cells the virus can enter to create illness.
“There are several factors that point towards this,” says Sørensen. “Firstly, this part of the virus is very stable; it mutates very little. That points to this virus as a fully developed, almost perfected virus for infecting humans.
“Secondly, this indicates that the structure of the virus cannot have evolved naturally. When we compare the novel coronavirus with the one that caused SARS, we see that there are altogether six inserts in this virus that stand out compared to other known SARS viruses,” he goes on explaining.
Sørensen says that several of these changes in the virus are unique, and that they do not exist in other known SARS coronaviruses.
“Four of these six changes have the property that they are suited to infect humans. This kind of aggregation of a type of property can be done simply in a laboratory, and helps to substantiate such an origin,” Sørensen points out.
An artificially created virus
Asked about whether this implies that the virus is not natural, Sørensen goes on to explain the laboratory process that leads to the creation of new viruses.
“In a sense it is natural. But the natural processes have most likely been accelerated in a laboratory,” he explains.
“It’s also possible for a virus to attain these properties in nature, but it’s not likely. If the mutations had happened in nature, we would have most likely seen that the virus had attracted other properties through mutations, not just properties that help the virus to attach itself to human cells.”
Sørensen vividly explains this argument:
“Imagine that you have cultivated a billion coronaviruses you have gathered from nature, then you take this mass of viruses and inject them into a human cell culture from for example the upper respiratory tract. As a result, a few of these viruses will change in order to better attach themselves to this type of cell in the nose and throat region and therefore to infect humans more easily. You end up with a virus with a spike protein which is perfect for attaching to and penetrating human cells.” Sørensen explains.
Asked about the particular mutations in the virus that lead to this conclusion, Sørensens says:
“What we see is that an area that you could observe in the first SARS coronavirus has been moved, so that the parts of the virus that are particularly well suited to attach to humans, have become part of the spike protein that the virus uses to penetrate human cells. And it is this moving of the area of the virus which makes the virus, together with the injected areas explained above, able to utilise an additional receptor to infect humans.”
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Revealed: Seven year coronavirus trail from mine deaths to a Wuhan lab @thesundaytimes Law & Politics |
In the monsoon season of August 2012 a small team of scientists travelled to southwest China to investigate a new and mysteriously lethal illness.
Weeks earlier, six men who had entered the mine had been struck down by an illness that caused an uncontrollable pneumonia. Three of them died.
Today, as deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic exceed half a million and economies totter, the bats’ repellent lair has taken on global significance.
Evidence seen by The Sunday Times suggests that a virus found in its depths — part of a faecal sample that was frozen and sent to a Chinese laboratory for analysis and storage — is the closest known match to the virus that causes Covid-19.
What happened to the virus in the years between its discovery and the eruption of Covid-19?
Why was its existence tucked away in obscure records, and its link to three deaths not mentioned?
Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in southwest China, is known as “the city of eternal spring” because its unique climate encourages flowers to bloom all year.
The sprawling high-rise buildings of the First Affiliated Hospital tower over the ancient city.
On Tuesday April 24, 2012, a 45-year-old man with the surname of Guo was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit suffering from severe pneumonia.
All the men were linked. They had been given the task of clearing out piles of bat faeces in an abandoned copper mine in the hills south of the town of Tongguan in the Mojiang region. Some had worked for two weeks before falling ill, and others just a few days.
The illness confounded the doctors. The men had raging fevers of above 39C, coughs and aching limbs. All but one had severe difficulty in breathing.
Aware the men might be suffering from another Sars-related coronavirus, he advised the doctors to test them for antibodies.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a renowned centre of coronavirus expertise, was called in to test the four survivors.
These produced a remarkable finding: while none had tested positive for Sars, all four had antibodies against another, unknown Sars-like coronavirus.
Furthermore, two patients who recovered and went home showed greater levels of antibodies than two still in hospital, one of whom later died.
Researchers in China have been unable to find any news reports of this new Sars-like coronavirus and the three deaths. There appears to have been a media blackout.
Other vital details, including the results of the antibody tests, were found in a PhD paper by a student of the director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.“This makes the research of the bats in the mine where the six miners worked and later suffered from severe pneumonia caused by unknown virus a significant research topic,” Li concluded.
For historians of the Chinese Communist Party, Wuhan is where the 72-year-old Mao Tse-tung took a symbolic swim in the Yangtze River in 1966 before launching the Cultural Revolution.
For generations born since that disastrous era, the modern industrial city is the crossroads of China’s high-speed rail network and was the centre of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But the bats in Yunnan are 1,000 miles from her laboratory, and one of the most extraordinary coincidences of the Covid-19 pandemic is that ground zero happened to be in Wuhan, the world centre for the study and storage of the types of coronavirus the city’s own scientists believe caused the outbreak.In 2012 they were in the midst of a five-year research project centred on caves in remote mountains southwest of Kunming when the call came to investigate the incident in the copper mine about 200 miles away.Over the next year, the scientists took faecal samples from 276 bats. The samples were stored at minus 80C in a special solution and dispatched to the Wuhan institute, where molecular studies and analysis were conducted.The results were reported in a scientific paper entitled “Coexistence of multiple coronaviruses in several bat colonies in an abandoned mineshaft” co-authored by Shi and her fellow scientists in 2016.One is classified as a “new strain” of Sars and labelled RaBtCoV/4991. It was found in a Rhinolophus affinis, commonly known as a horseshoe bat. The towering significance of RaBtCov/4991 would not be fully understood for seven years. |
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Revealed: Seven year coronavirus trail from mine deaths to a Wuhan lab @thesundaytimes Misc. |
A study by Harvard University claimed the virus may have started last August. It relied on satellite images in which the car parks of selected Wuhan hospitals looked busier. However, the study’s detractors have pointed to discrepancies in the evidence.Yu Chuanhua, an epidemiology professor at Wuhan University, has told Chinese media that one man was admitted to hospital on September 29 with Covid-19-like symptoms but it is impossible now to show whether he had the virus because he died. From that point it accelerated to about 60 identifiable cases by December 20, according to government research data reported in the South China Morning Post.
Shi’s team managed to identify five cases of the coronavirus from samples taken from patients at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital using a technique to amplify the virus’s genetic material. The samples were sent to another lab, which completed the whole genomic sequence.
However, the sequence would not be passed to the WHO until January 12 and China would not admit there had been human-to-human transmission until January 20, despite sitting on evidence the virus had been passed to medics.
It set out a full genomic description of the Covid-19 virus and revealed that the WIV had in storage the closest known relative of the virus, which it had taken from a bat.
The sample was named RaTG13. According to the paper, it is a 96.2% match to the Covid-19 virus and they share a common lineage distinct from other Sars-type coronaviruses.
The paper concludes that this close likeness “provides evidence” that Covid-19 “may have originated in bats”.
In other words, RaTG13 was the biggest lead available as to the origin of Covid-19. It was therefore surprising that the paper gave only scant detail about the history of the virus sample, stating merely that it was taken from a Rhinolophus affinis bat in Yunnan province in 2013 — hence the “Ra” and the 13.
Inquiries have established, however, that RaTG13 is almost certainly the coronavirus discovered in the abandoned mine in 2013, which had been named RaBtCoV/4991 in the institute’s earlier scientific paper. For some reason, Shi and her team appear to have renamed it.
The clearest evidence is in a database of bat viruses published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences — the parent body of the WIV — which lists RaTG13 and the mine sample as the same entity.
It says it was discovered on July 24, 2013, as part of a collection of coronaviruses that were described in the 2016 paper on the abandoned mine.
In fact, researchers in India and Austria have compared the partial genome of the mine sample that was published in the 2016 paper and found it is a 100% match with the same sequence for RaTG13.
The same partial sequence for the mine sample is a 98.7% match with the Covid-19 virus.
Peter Daszak, a close collaborator with the Wuhan institute, who has worked with Shi’s team hunting down viruses for 15 years, has confirmed to The Sunday Times that RaTG13 was the sample found in the mine.
He said there was no significance in the renaming. “The conspiracy folks are saying there’s something suspicious about the change in name, but the world has changed in six years — the coding system has changed,” he said.
He recalled: “It was just one of the 16,000 bats we sampled. It was a faecal sample, we put it in a tube, put it in liquid nitrogen, took it back to the lab. We sequenced a short fragment.”
In 2013 the Wuhan team had run the sample through a polymerase chain reaction process to amplify the amount of genetic material so it could be studied, Daszak said.
But it did no more work on it until the Covid-19 outbreak because it had not been a close match to Sars.
Other scientists find the initial indifference about a new strain of the coronavirus hard to understand.
Nikolai Petrovsky, professor of medicine at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, said it was “simply not credible” that the WIV would have failed to carry out any further analysis on RaBtCoV/4991, especially as it had been linked to the deaths of three miners.
“If you really thought you had a novel virus that had caused an outbreak that killed humans then there is nothing you wouldn’t do — given that was their whole reason for being [there] — to get to the bottom of that, even if that meant exhausting the sample and then going back to get more,” he said.
According to Daszak, the mine sample had been stored in Wuhan for six years. Its scientists “went back to that sample in 2020, in early January or maybe even at the end of last year, I don’t know. They tried to get full genome sequencing, which is important to find out the whole diversity of the viral genome.”
However, after sequencing the full genome for RaTG13 the lab’s sample of the virus disintegrated, he said. “I think they tried to culture it but they were unable to, so that sample, I think, has gone.”
In recent weeks, academics are said to have written to Nature asking for the WIV to write an erratum clarifying the sample’s provenance, but the Chinese lab has maintained a stony silence.
A spokesman for Nature said: “Concerns relating to this paper have been brought to Nature’s attention and are being considered at the moment. We cannot comment further at this time.”
On December 10 last year a Chinese state media outlet published an extraordinary video lionising the bravery of a researcher called Tian Junhua, who is said to have caught 10,000 bats in studies for Wuhan’s disease control centre.
Tian admitted that he knew little about bats when he first started visiting the caves eight years ago, and once had to isolate himself for 14 days after being showered with bat urine while wearing inadequate protection.
On occasions bat blood spilt onto his hands but he says he has never been infected.
The young researcher aroused suspicion because one of the offices of the disease control centre is about 300 yards from the Huanan seafood market.
He has refused to talk to reporters, but his friends have firmly denied that he was “patient zero”.
The final and trickiest question for the WHO inspectors is whether the virus might have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
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How A Pornstar & Sci-Fi Writer Influenced @WHO Policies On Hydroxychloroquine With Fake Data @GreatGameIndia Misc. |
An obscure US healthcare analytics company has come under sharp scrutiny for the integrity of its key studies that were published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.
World Health Organization and several national governments changed their COVID-19 policies and treatment based on the faulty data provided by the company with a pornstar and a sci-fi writer on their payroll.
Two of the medical journals – the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine – published studies based on the data provided by the Surgisphere. Since the controversy, both the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have expressed concern about their respective published studies.
The investigation also found out that several of the Surgisphere employees had a questionable scientific background.
One of the employees listed as a science editor appears to be a sci-fi writer while a marketing executive also moonlights as an adult model and event hostess.
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04-NOV-2019 : I am of the view that BITCOIN and crypto is a Jeffrey Edward Epstein [and his cast of characters] level Con Its breathtaking World Of Finance |
The Ministry of Sound [“My concept for Ministry was purely this: 100% sound system first, lights second, design third (in that order); the reverse of everyone else’s idea.”] 4 am[ers] otherwise known as the BITCOIN Evangelists will of course all be screaming.
‘’Aly-Khan, Aly-Khan Just Buy Bitcoin its going to $50,000, $100,000, $1,000,000.’’
Last week they all got carried away when Xi apparently gave Bitcoin and BlockChain his imprimatur.
It took China about 3 days of being officially interested in blockchain to make their intentions clear: transparent, panoptichain immutable social credit dystopia. @nic__carter
All you people that are ready to forsake all of your values for the sake of riding some authoritarian driven pump, I want nothing to do with you @nic__carter.
I don’t believe in the god damn “underlying technology”,
I believe in the FREEDOM that the technology gives us. From autocrats and dictators. @nic__carter.
It matters because ppl are interpreting it as validation of permissionless block- chains when it represents a perversion and corruption of those ideals @ nic__carter.
Not to mention the ability to shut-off access to anyone on the system with a “flip of a switch”.
A 21st century authoritative government’s dream @Rhythmtrader. The terrifying reality of a cashless society @ mc_madvillian.
I am of the view that BITCOIN and crypto is a Jeffrey Edward Epstein [and his cast of characters] level Con and I am having nothing to do with it other than occasionally looking in and admiring the sophistication and level of the Con. Its breathtaking.
The most referenced Poem today is WB Yeats The Second Coming . Tur- ning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Its easy to see why.
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02-MAR-2020 :: The #COVID19 and SSA and the R Word Africa |
We Know that the #Coronavirus is exponential, non linear and multiplicative.
what exponential disease propagation looks like in the real world. Real world exponential growth looks like nothing, nothing, nothing ... then cluster, cluster, cluster ... then BOOM!
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Portugal to Seize More Isabel Dos Santos Assets @business Law & Politics |
The Portuguese government took control of a stake held by Angolan investor Isabel dos Santos in Efacec Power Solutions SGPS SA as it tries to help the manufacturer find a new shareholder.
The 72% stake in Efacec was held through Malta-based firm Winterfell 2, which is indirectly controlled by dos Santos, Economy Minister Pedro Siza Vieira said in Lisbon on Thursday following a cabinet meeting.
The government will immediately start a plan to sell the stake and there are already proposals from various companies, he said.
An “impasse” in Efacec’s shareholder structure has led the producer of electrical equipment including transformers to face some difficulties with clients, suppliers and creditors, and some orders have been canceled in the last few weeks, according to Siza Vieira.
Efacec has annual sales of about 400 million euros ($449 million), the minister said.
Efacec said in January that dos Santos, a daughter of a former Angolan president, planned to sell her majority stake in the company.
In December, an Angolan court froze some assets of dos Santos, as well as those of her husband and one of her executives, after prosecutors alleged they engaged in deals with state-owned companies that led to the Angolan government incurring losses.
In February, Portuguese prosecutors froze her bank accounts in the country. Dos Santos has previously denied any wrongdoing.
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Top hospitals running out of ICU beds as Covid-19 cases surge @dailynation #COVID19 Africa |
Hospitals are running out of space in Intensive Care Units due to the Covid-19 pandemic that is spreading fast across the country.
The facilities are fast getting overwhelmed with critically ill patients that need admission, forcing hospitals to set aside other rooms for the patients.
This is despite the Ministry of Health introducing home-based care last month to reduce the number of patients admitted to hospitals due to coronavirus.
The development comes as the number of Covid-19 cases continue to increase drastically, with the peak estimated to come in August.
Yesterday, the country recorded 247 cases (164 males and 83 females) after testing 4,147 samples, bringing the caseload to 7,188 from cumulative samples of 180,206.
A source at the Aga Khan Hospital who is not authorised to speak to the media revealed that all the five Covid-19 ICU beds are full while the Nairobi Hospital, with eight beds, now only has three left.
The Kenyatta University Teaching, Referral, and Research Hospital, with a 24-bed capacity, can only admit eight patients at once because of the patient-nurse ratio.
“We have 24 Covid-19 ICU beds but we can only admit eight because of the few staff that we have. The patients in the critical unit depend on nurses for survival, so we cannot admit more,” Irene Wahome, the ICU manager told the Nation.
Dr Peter Michoma, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, is a distressed doctor.
Not because he does not know how to discharge his duty to save the lives of mothers and their newborn babies. No.
The doctor, working at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), cannot efficiently treat some of his patients, especially those diagnosed with Covid-19 because the facility has run out of bed space to admit any more patients.
Dr Michoma wrote: “I am looking for a ward to admit a severely ill Covid-19 suspect case urgently but I can't find a free ward. The Covid maternity ward full, Covid ward for the severely ill (IDU) is full, Covid medical ward for the less symptomatic patients is full, single ward rooms with oxygen points filled with suspected/ confirmed Covid cases.”
Further, the distraught doctor added that in less than 48 hours, he had filled three death notifications for three Covid victims, all young mothers in their 30s.
While releasing the Covid-19 data on Friday, Health director-general Patrick Amoth said that 29 patients are admitted in ICU in various hospitals in the country, adding that 15 were on oxygen support while the remaining 14 were on ventilators.
As it stands, both infectious disease units at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) and Mbagathi Hospital are already full to capacity.
“Yes, we are overwhelmed,” said a source working at the Mbagathi IDU.
The KNH administration declined to comment on the matter and referred the Saturday Nation to the Ministry of Health.
According to the ministry, matatus and digital taxis drivers could easily spread the virus to hundreds of people if containment measures are not followed.
“For those Kenyans who are waiting to see Covid-19 victims for them to believe that we have a crisis, I wish them well…” said Dr Michoma.
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