Wuhan Virus Watch: Trump angry that infected Americans were flown back to U.S. with healthy passengers
Italy quarantines ten towns. Chinese general with bioweapons background takes leading role in coronavirus fight.
The number of Wuhan Coronavirus cases reported now stands at 78,773, located in 33 separate countries and territories. The death toll is now reported at 2,462.
Today’s report contains some disturbing updates to news we previously reported.
Trump furious Americans infected with coronavirus flown back to U.S. with healthy passengers
A new report indicates that President Trump was angry that 14 Americans infected with the coronavirus returned to the United States rather than remain in quarantine overseas.
Trump had been briefed that the healthy U.S. passengers who spent weeks quarantined aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan would be allowed to fly home on two chartered planes — while those who were sick or infected would stay in Japan to prevent the spread of the deadly virus.
The president became “furious” with senior advisers after learning the 14 Americans who tested positive had been put on a plane with healthy passengers, according to The Washington Post. One official told the paper that the failure to inform Trump of the decision in advance of the plane’s departure was a “big operational mistake.”
As we previously noted, the State Department ignored the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control on this matter.
Italy puts ten towns on lockdown after two Italians die of coronavirus
Yesterday, I noted that a town in northern Italy had a significant outbreak of COVID-19. Now it is being reported that ten Italian towns are under quarantine after the death of two of Italian citizens.
Italy has become the first country in Europe to have its own nationals die from COVID-19 coronavirus.
Authorities have put ten towns on lockdown in the north of the country after a cluster of cases emerged on Friday.
The latest victim was announced as a 75-year-old woman from Lombardy, which follows the death of man, 78, from Veneto.
The total number of cases nationwide is 59, with 46 patients in Lombardy, 11 in Veneto, one each in Piemonte and Umbria.
Many of the new cases represented the first infections in Italy acquired through secondary contagion.
New Chinese study indicates novel coronavirus did not originate in Huanan seafood market
The Global Times is an English version of a pro-Communist Party of China outlet. Therefore, it is interesting that it reported on a new Chinese study indicating the Wuhan coronavirus did not originate in Huanan seafood market.
The study published on ChinaXiv, a Chinese open repository for scientific researchers, reveals the new coronavirus was introduced to the seafood market from another location, and then spread rapidly from market to market. The findings were the result of analyses of genome-wide data, sources of infection and the route of spread of 93 samples of the novel coronavirus collected from 12 countries across four continents.
The study believes that patient zero transmitted the virus to workers or sellers at the Huanan seafood market. The crowded market facilitated the further transmission of the virus to buyers, which caused a wider spread in early December 2019.
According to the researchers, the new coronavirus experienced two sudden population expansions, including one on January 6, 2020, which was related to the Chinese New Year’s Day holiday.
An earlier expansion occurred on December 8, implying human-to-human transmission may have started in early December or late November, and then accelerated when it reached the Huanan seafood market.
This article corresponds to a report that we covered last week on the possible laboratory origins of the coronavirus.
Chinese general with bioweapons background takes leading role in coronavirus fight
Also supporting the notion that COVID-19 may not be a naturally occurring virus is the news that the individual leading the fight in China has a background in bioweapons.
People’s Liberation Army Maj. Gen. Chen Wei joined the effort to contain the outbreak in Wuhan, the state-run Pengbai news outlet reported Jan. 31, describing the general as “our nation’s ultimate expert” in biological and chemical weapon defenses.
Gen. Chen was credited with working on the fight against the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, and the Ebola virus outbreak a decade later. According to the Pengbai report, Gen. Chen also is the leader of a team of experts at China’s Biological Hazards Prevention and Control Program.
The expanded role for China’s military in the epidemic fight comes as Chinese authorities drag their feet on repeated appeals from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to allow a full team on international experts to travel to Wuhan to study the virus and the efforts to contain it.
The Chinese are still not permitting World Health Organization (WHO) or CDC scientists in the country to assist in battling the epidemic.
South Korea, Singapore, and Iran report ‘untraceable’ new infection clusters
We noted that South Korea is on the brink of an epidemic, and the fact that the source of many infections cannot be tracked down is worrying public health officials.
…[A]larm bells were sounding as three countries reported clusters of infected patients with no traceable source vector from China, the first sign that the virus is spreading uncontrollably and could reach pandemic levels.
Doctors are unable to identify the source of coronavirus clusters in South Korea, Singapore and Iran, the World Health Organization said Saturday.
WHO officials said China’s crackdown on parts of the country bought time for the rest of the world to prepare for the new virus. But as hot spots emerge around the globe, trouble finding each source – the first patient who sparks every new cluster – might signal the disease has begun spreading too widely for tried-and-true public health steps to stamp it out.
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Comments
FWIW, it looks like Gen. Chen Wei is female. https://www.timesnownews.com/international/article/china-appoints-terminator-of-ebola-in-wuhan-major-general-chen-wei-chinas-foremost-bio-warfare-expert/554930
I think the Washington Times has it wrong, although several other sources do, too.
Thanks for the catch!
Are you sure? What if she identifies as male?
The General’s pronouns are above my pay grade.
I am sorry… I read that as “above my gay parade”
An example of the deep state thinking they know more than everyone else.
“As we previously noted, the State Department ignored the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control on this matter.”
I bet this is the fault of some Obummer types still hanging on.
Maybe, but my bet is that it was typical Foggy Bottom incompetence.
“As we previously noted, the State Department ignored the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control on this matter.”
and yet, Washington would have us believe that these State Dept. bureaucrats want only the best for the citizens of the United States (thinking here of the impeachment garbage).
“Never let a crisis go to waste.”
There have been reports about some news people hoping for a financial crisis to get voters away from Trump. So, having a medical crisis would be a logical event for those people.
Once upon a time, I would have dismissed such a thought as paranoia. Not so much now.
Fire their collective ass’es
Now (not later) is the time for the President to declare a state of emergency. The U.S. military is trained and capable of dealing with biological warfare control. (Spare me the argument that there is no proof this is a bioweapon.)
The State Department in its best times is strictly incompetent in dealing with this situation. While it may seem a world away from us tracking the infecteds travel and who they may have come in contact with is a Herculean task. So we must begin working several different avenues of control and prevention.
At best it may be six to eight weeks before a preventive inoculation is ready for production, and distribution could take up to a year.
So the President and the head of the CDC need to get the message out on all forms of media to the public on what precautions to take what to look out for and common sense ways to prevent the spread.
Given the right information the general public is far more capable of preparing than the government bureaucrats who have become irrelevant with the changing times.
How smart is it for Trump to go to India (or anywhere else) in this pandemic environment?
The key problem is C-19 is asymptomatic and infections, and for several days.
So the only way to safely transport people is in individual bubbles into individual negative pressure room quarantine. And is it 2 weeks or 3 weeks (there is a statistical curve…), and is anyone like “Typhoid Mary”, someone who becomes a resivoir of the disease without suffering from it?
What happens if this is shown to be sexually transmitted (Karl Denninger of market-ticker.org theorizes it might live in feces and the difference in Western v.s. Eastern sanitary practices is a key difference, but he found a report it was found in urine).
It seems that there is a South Korean super spreader who infected 37 people last week.
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-superspreader-south-korea-church.html
Typical stupid ass move by a typical dipshit in government.
0bama holdover maybe?
If Trump attempts to discipline anyone, he’ll be threatened with investigations and impeachment again, and the wrongdoers will be transferred into desirable new posts, à la Vindman. (BTW, I didn’t mean to downvote; my fingers need to go on a diet. )
On the contrary, if the President took a stand on this and used it as a pretext for some serious swamp-clearing, the Dems wouldn’t dare oppose him. Nobody wants to be seen as pro-virus.
That’s way too optimistic a view on Democrat and MSM reaction to anything Trump does.
“… the State Department ignored the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control on this matter.”
No, SOMEBODY at the State Department ignored it. That person must be named and fired.
Gee, It’s almost like somebody was hoping to let some infected people in and cause a panic in time for the election.
When it was first reported that Trump was upset that the State Department allowed infected passengers to fly home with healthy passengers, it was followed up with another report from a State Department official that “it was complicated…”. Something about leaving the infected to freeze to death or something.
How “complicated” can it be to understand that you just don’t take people out of quarantine and immediately mix them back into the general population (no less a virus death trap like a passenger airplane) before they have been certified to be healthy? I suspect that State official was pressured by partisan bureaucrats to do this and didn’t have the backbone to just say no. If he is a medical doctor, there is no excuse. Aren’t there established protocols and if so, is it that easy to bypass them?
That’s not what happened. The planes were full of people who had just come out of quarantine. Then they put the infected people on the same plane! Which (I assume) means the healthy people have to go back into quarantine for another two weeks. And if any of them got infected, whoever took this decision will be directly responsible (and I don’t think will qualify for qualified immunity).
The people repatriated from Diamond Princess would have had to go through quarantine again regardless. The quarantine on the Diamond Princess was demonstrably insufficient to stop them from cross-infecting, so the clock needs to start from scratch in a quarantine which is sufficient to stop cross-infections.
When you have a mass quarantine (and with insufficient precautions to prevent cross-infection, this was a mass quarantine), every new case resets the counter, so no one gets out until it’s been X days since the most recent case.
Off topic but it looks like we have another possible Arkancide.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/23/obama-dhs-whistleblower-found-dead-gunshot-wound-chest/
WOW
“If I am found dead, it wasn’t suicide,” Haney told multiple people, confirmed by two anonymous sources, the NOQ Report learned.
Does this mean Killary is becoming more ballistic?
I don’t believe most of the Arkancide stories. This one? Not an accident, highly unlikely to be a suicide. This is more like the prosecutor who had goods no Kirchner in Argentina and was about to untangle the Iranian-sponsored attack an the Jewish community center there, who committed ‘suicide’ with the help of an intruder who had the key to his hotel suite.
So it’s perhaps an Arkancide, perhaps an Obamacide. There will be an investigation, investigating how to conceal and perhaps destroy evidence. I really hate to say that, it’s not the USA I recognize. But such things do happen around the world, and now they are occasionally happening here.
They would have had to send two planes but that would mean that pelosi could not fly back to frisco one week end. Trump would have loved that argument.
They did send two planes. The 14 infected people were not supposed to be on either of them. They were supposed to stay in Japan and be treated there.
The more facts I hear, the more it proves that someone at State made a very bad decision. At this stage of the crisis, there should be very clear and established protocols. We need to find out who made this decision and why. “Complicated” doesn’t explain anything.
Since Trump has come out against the Coronavirus infection, will Democrats be in favor of it?
As it was explained to me, the CDC is the gate keeper of testing for the virus. They will not test for unless the person has been to China or knowingly been in contact with someone who has been to China or infected.
It was also explained to me, that doctors are seeing cases which are symptomatic of the virus, but cannot test for the reason above.
I don’t frequent a lot of crowded areas, but am doubling down on that now.
This is a Forrest Gump moment…Stupid is as Stupid does.
Having our President make a public statement calls out the fact the the left is sitting on their hands looking up and away saying nothing which with their silence is everything. If one wonders” what Group Think” looks like..this is it!
If I were a suspicious person I might think that the State Department is deliberately spreading disease to make Trump look bad.
I don’t know what is going on at the UN but WHO’s director just issued a baffling declaration defying all previous reports.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/wuhan-eases-lockdown-then-retracts-order-3-hours-later-italy-cases-soar-past-200-live
Now it’s NOT YET an epidemic. Last week, it was a “lost opportunity” (whatever that means) to contain the virus. I guess they want us to panic early but not get carried away. Sounds more like they are more concerned about exploiting an opportunity for garnering more power for the UN without causing panic. Politics trumps science.
Add to that
https://nypost.com/2020/01/28/harvard-professor-charged-for-lying-about-1-5m-chinese-research-scheme/
One rumor – or perhaps fact – mentioned in the NY Post article is that the Wuhan lab staff sometimes sells lab animals which are by regulation required to be incinerated. If you’re willing to expose the public like that, you might also be a bit casual about rules in general. Even a few staff who take shortcuts would be enough to move this virus into densely populated Wuhan, where it gained a hold in the population.
It did seem to me that the official response was excessive: at first, excessive secrecy, then an excessive, expensive lockdown out of proportion to what was publicly said to flu-like ailment with occasional fatalities among the vulnerable. But the sudden lockdown does make sense if the lab typed it, recognized “oops, that’s something we’ve been researching (or, if you’re paranoid, modifying for lethality) and ummmm, you don’t want that thing spreading to 1.4 billion of us”.
Careless or negligent release of something that was harvested for study from some obscure animal host in the aftermath of SARS/MERS seems entirely plausible to me. Population control/Soros/Joker virus, not so much. Not this time at least 😉