They were saying that one of the next industries to be impacted will be the construction sector.gnrc_louis wrote: ↑Sat Mar 28, 2020 10:11 amhttp://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-28/c ... r/12097124
As I said in another post, I think this all definitely has the potential to decrease future office projects.
They've been a major cause but community transmission is happening now. Once that begins it becomes exponentially more difficult to control. Also, as Rev said, a reasonable number of people with the virus can be asymptotic and inadvertently spreading the virus without realizing. Things will be clearer in a few weeks, unfortunately though if it does become clear the virus is much more widespread than thought, it'll likely be too late to effectively stop its spread then.
Special Investigation: Chinese officials covered-up the coronavirus outbreak for more than a month, destroying any hope the deadly virus could be contained within the city of Wuhan and unleashing a killer pandemic on the world.
Wuhan health officials knew in early December there was a likelihood the virus could be transmitted from human to human, when the wife of a man who worked at the market at the centre of the outbreak fell ill.
But China didn’t alert the World Health Organisation about a concerning strain of pneumonia until December 31 – and didn’t admit publicly it was contagious between humans until January 20.
Wuhan health officials were formally notified of a worrying new strain of pneumonia on December 27, but doctors had been warning for several weeks a potentially contagious strain had been identified.
The gravity of China’s actions were highlighted in a study by the University of Southampton which showed that earlier “non-pharmaceutical interventions’’ such as lockdowns and travel bans could have reduced the spread of virus by up to 95 per cent.
This is exactly what I was saying the other week, but I was supposedly a racist for saying the obvious.How the coronavirus was covered-up by China in Wuhan
Ellen Whinnett, News Corp Australia Network
March 28, 2020 8:16pm
Subscriber only
Special Investigation: Chinese officials covered-up the coronavirus outbreak for more than a month, destroying any hope the deadly virus could be contained within the city of Wuhan and unleashing a killer pandemic on the world.
Wuhan health officials knew in early December there was a likelihood the virus could be transmitted from human to human, when the wife of a man who worked at the market at the centre of the outbreak fell ill.
But China didn’t alert the World Health Organisation about a concerning strain of pneumonia until December 31 – and didn’t admit publicly it was contagious between humans until January 20.
Officials instead prioritised hosting a pre-organised meeting of the local leadership of the Chinese Communist Party from January 11-17 in Wuhan. As well, local officials were determined to push on with Lunar New Year celebrations, including a communal dinner for 40,000 families, held in Wuhan on January 18.
The result was a catastrophic spread of the illness across the globe, where by 9am on Saturday 590,594 people were infected across 176 countries, and 26,943 people had died. The Chinese people suffered terrible losses, with 3174 people killed in Hubei province alone.
The gravity of China’s actions were highlighted in a study by the University of Southampton which showed that earlier “non-pharmaceutical interventions’’ such as lockdowns and travel bans could have reduced the spread of virus by up to 95 per cent.
China expert, American scholar Dali L. Yang, told News Corp the local Hubei officials had been “trying to mothball a fire’’ by suppressing news of the virus during the Community Party conference.
He said health officials banned testing for people who had not been to the market, which kept infection numbers down.
“All through this (conference), the effort by the Wuhan authorities was to say ‘oh no, no human-to-human transmission’,’’ Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, said.
“And that’s really tragic for the people of Wuhan, really for people globally.
“The doctors who were attending to patients from the very beginning, at the end of December were very worried it was highly contagious, and said so from the very beginning.
“By the middle of January there were more and more doctors, medical staff who were getting infected.
“There was growing numbers of people who had all the symptoms of COVID-19 but they had not been to the seafood market and were not allowed to be diagnosed because of the case definition.
“The Wuhan authorities introduced more stringent criteria than the national (authorities) and my sense is it was partly to make it more difficult to find the cases.’’
Prof. Yang said this allowed officials to report no new cases during the period the Communist Party meeting was being held.
“The Wuhan people particularly manipulated the data in such a way to create this atmosphere (when) the provincial leadership, the provincial people’s congress met at that time,’’ he said.
“But at the end of that conference they could no longer contain the fire.’’
On January 20, legendary Chinese doctor Zhong Nanshan, who was involved in the coronavirus response, announced for the first time that the virus could be passed between humans.
By then, people infected with the virus had travelled to countries including the US, Thailand, Japan and Australia, and global spread of the illness was underway.
On March 11, world population mapping experts at the University of Southampton published a devastating study showing what could have been prevented if China had launched “non-pharmaceutical interventions’’ such as travel lockdowns, earlier testing and quarantine, earlier.
“If NPIs could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier in China, cases could have been reduced by 66%, 86%, and 95%, respectively, together with significantly reducing the number of affected areas,’’ the report found.
Study author Dr Shengjie Lai said the study showed: “how important it is for countries which are facing an imminent outbreak to proactively plan a co-ordinated response which swiftly tackles the spread of the disease on a number of fronts.’’
“We also show that China’s comprehensive response, in a relatively short period, greatly reduced the potential health impact of the outbreak.”
China took strong action from the end of January, locking-down Wuhan and restricting the movements of millions of people across the country.
Wuhan health officials were formally notified of a worrying new strain of pneumonia on December 27, but doctors had been warning for several weeks a potentially contagious strain had been identified.
Medical journal Lancet published a study which showed that by January 2, there were 41 people admitted to hospitals in Wuhan with “laboratory-confirmed 2019-nCov infection.’’
The study, published on January 24, also revealed doctors had identified a case early in December which appeared to be a human contagion case. The study identified the first fatal case of the disease involving a man who had “continuous exposure’’ to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. His symptoms had emerged on December 1.
“ … 5 days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalised in the isolation ward,’’ the study noted.
Health officials responded to the growing crisis by taking action against the doctors who tried to alert colleagues, ordering labs to destroy samples, and closing the university-aligned laboratory in Shanghai which first made public the genomic code for the virus.
The WHO, which has been criticised internationally for its meek acceptance of China’s assertions about the virus, tweeted as late as January 14 that there was no firm evidence it was contagious among humans.
But ophthalmologist Dr Li Wenliang had tried to warn colleagues at Wuhan Central Hospital, sending a post to a private group of seven of his medical colleagues on WeChat at 5.43pm on December 30 that he believed people were catching SARS and advising them to wear protective equipment when dealing with patients.
Dr Li was summonsed and detained by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau, accused of “making false comments’’ and “severely disturbing the social order’’ and made to sign a statement promising not to do it again.
The police then issued a public warning to “all netizens to not fabricate rumours, not spread rumours, not believe rumours.”
Dr Li went back to treating patients when he was released. He contracted coronavirus and was hospitalised within days. Authorities apologised to him. He died on February 6, his worst predictions realised as 200 of his colleagues at the hospital fell ill.
Another prominent whistleblower was Ai Fen, a director at the same hospital, who first posted the information Dr Li had shared with his colleagues.
She had posted a photograph on WeChat of a diagnostic chart and warned about an infectious illness. She was reprimanded by her bosses and ordered to delete it.
Dr Ai detailed her story in a state-owned newspaper, People, in March, where she also revealed tests had showed a patient at her hospital had contracted a previously unknown coronavirus on December 16. “How could I refrain from discussions with my medical colleagues knowing that a new and significant virus had emerged? I followed my intuition as a doctor,’’ she said.
The People interview was removed from the internet three days later by censors.
Australian scholar and noted critic of the Chinese Communist Party, Clive Hamilton, told News Corp that the virus had “got away’’ because Chinese officials had “actively suppressed information about the virus and downplayed its highly-contagious nature.’’
“Given the attempts by the CCP to rewrite history it’s important to keep reminding Australians of what happened and why the pandemic itself can be attributed in large part to the Chinese Communist Party and the way it covered up early information and refused to act – and in fact put out disinformation for several weeks,’’ Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, said.
“For example, before it shut down Wuhan some five million (people) had left over previous weeks, many of them to go abroad and undoubtedly a significant proportion of them who left Wuhan were carrying the virus with them.
“If Australia ends up in Italy’s situation, which is quite possible, then we will undoubtedly have Beijing magnanimously offering large quantities of medical supplies to Australia to help us solve our terrible medical crisis.
“And of course it’s done entirely cynically, as a way of winning over public sympathy for the Chinese regime.
“It is really a kind of ideological Trojan horse to send across thousands of respirators and masks, ostensibly to provide help in a crisis but really to gain a political and ideological foothold in Australia.’’
Prof. Hamilton likened the actions of Chinese officials who suppressed information about the virus to an arsonist who “set the fire, attends as part of the Rural Fire Service, puts it out, then basks in the glory.’’
“That’s why they’re trying to do. So it’s important to remind people that the CCP set the fire in the first place. If they didn’t strike the match they’re certainly fanned the flames in a sustained and deliberate way because always for the Chinese Communist Party the first and dominant consideration is survival of the regime.’’
https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/eig ... 52acc5257fEight strains of the coronavirus are circling the globe and scientists are learning from the clues
Nathan Vass in New York, News Corp Australia Network
March 29, 2020 10:13pm
Subscriber only
Australia is being smashed by multiple strains of the deadly coronavirus as scientists desperately try to track the spread of the disease across the globe.
A map created by scientists in the US shows that at least eight strains of the coronavirus are making their way around the globe, creating a trail of death and disease that scientists are tracking by their genetic footprints.
A variety of strains of COVID-19 have made their way into Australia, according to maps on Nextstrain.org, an online resource for scientists that uses data from academic, independent and government laboratories all over the world to visually track the genomics of the virus.
But the good news is that while the virus continues to mutate, the new strains do not seem to be becoming more lethal.
USA Today reports that labs around the world are using sequencing machines to rapidly sequence the genomes of virus samples taken from people sick with COVID-19.
The information is uploaded to a website called NextStrain.org that shows how the virus is migrating and splitting into similar but new subtypes.
“The virus mutates so slowly that the virus strains are fundamentally very similar to each other,” said Professor Charles Chiu from the University of California’s San Francisco School of Medicine.
Researchers believe the small differences between the virus strains suggest stay-at-home and isolate orders are being effective in some areas and that no one strain of the virus is more deadly than another.
COVID-19, also referred to by scientists as the SARS-CoV-2 virus, first began causing illness in China in November and December last year.
“The outbreaks are trackable. We have the ability to do genomic sequencing almost in real-time to see what strains or lineages are circulating,” Prof Chiu said.
The different strains of the virus found in Australia and around the world have almost certainly been passed on by international travellers.
While scientists are excited by the results of their research, they warn there is still a lot more to learn.
“Remember, we’re seeing a very small glimpse into the much larger pandemic. We have half a million described cases right now but maybe 1,000 genomes sequenced. So there are a lot of lineages we’re missing,” said Kristian Andersen, a professor at Scripps Research.
The virus is so good at transmitting itself between human hosts, said Andersen, it is under no evolutionary pressure to evolve.
While there remain many questions about the trajectory of the COVID-19 disease outbreak, one thing is broadly accepted in the scientific community: The virus was not created in a lab but naturally evolved in an animal host, USA Today reported.
The genomic molecular structure of the virus is closest to a coronavirus found in bats. Parts of its structure also resemble a virus found in scaly anteaters, according to a paper published earlier this month in the journal Nature Medicine.
Someone manufacturing a virus targeting people would have started with one that attacked humans, wrote National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins in an editorial that accompanied the paper.
Dr Andersen was lead author on the paper. He said it could have been a one-time occurrence.
“It’s possible it was a single event, from a single animal to a single human,” and spread from there.
The construction industry has been deemed an essential service.gnrc_louis wrote: ↑Wed Apr 01, 2020 12:37 pmSo do people want to take guesses how many developments will be cancelled? My feeling is all this will likely have long term ramifications, although those aren't yet clear.
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