All this quarantine stuff is very interesting to me.
A few years ago I was involved in exercises to test local governments’ responses to fictional diseases that were much more contagious and deadly than this one (thus far). One of the questions raised was whether any sort of mass quarantines would be imposed, and how that would be accomplished. It’s one thing to detain and segregate small numbers of people who are returning to the US, but it would be far different to shut whole cities down as is evidently being done in China.

Nothing like that was ever discussed in the exercises I participated in, and in fact the elected officials who would have had responsibility for imposing any quarantines seemed to be unwilling to even think about what might be required. It would be interesting to see how the issue is addressed in any future exercises in light of what’s being done overseas now.

China Sends 25,000 Medical Personnel To Hubei As 'War Time Conditions' Take Effect

https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...cal-supplies-persist

Update (2200ET): China has sent 217 medical rescue groups totaling 25,633 medical rescue personnel to Hubei province, 20,374 of whom are from local areas, according to the Global Times. This exceeds the number sent to support the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake which killed over 80,000 people.

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
China Sends 25,000 Medical Personnel To Hubei As 'War Time Conditions' Take Effect

https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...cal-supplies-persist

Update (2200ET): China has sent 217 medical rescue groups totaling 25,633 medical rescue personnel to Hubei province, 20,374 of whom are from local areas, according to the Global Times. This exceeds the number sent to support the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake which killed over 80,000 people.

Update (1650ET): On Friday morning, Japanese health officials confirmed four new cases of the coronavirus, including one individual who had recently visited the US state of Hawaii.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
it would be far different to shut whole cities down as is evidently being done in China.

News articles speculated 5 million of the 11 million people in Wuhan left before the quarantine went into effect.

quote:

Where Did They Go? Millions Left Wuhan Before Quarantine

https://www.voanews.com/scienc...eft-wuhan-quarantine

quote:

Originally posted by gearhounds:
I believe it is a reference to someone stroking out, obviously in jest here from the usual jokers

Thanks!

China Has ‘Global Chokehold’ on Medicine, Can Shut Down Our Pharmacies, Hospitals in Months

https://www.breitbart.com/radi...hospitals-in-months/

China could effectively shut down America’s healthcare system within months given the one-party state’s “global chokehold” on the manufacturing of medicines and medical supplies, explained Rosemary Gibson, author of China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine.

Gibson, senior adviser at the Hastings Center, offered her remarks on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Ed Martin.

Mansour noted how the coronavirus outbreak in China has exposed America’s dangerous dependence on Chinese production of pharmaceutical and medical supplies, including an estimated 97 percent of all antibiotics and 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients needed for domestic drug production.

Gibson said, “If China shuts the door on exports of medicines and the ingredients to make them, within a couple of months our pharmacies would be empty. Our healthcare system would cease to function. That’s how dependent we are.”

Gibson added, “Say there’s a coronavirus outbreak in the United States, God forbid, and a lot of people end up in hospitals with severe cases. The medicines needed to care for them if they can’t breathe and are on a ventilator — fentanyl and propofol — [are made in China]. We depend on China for the raw materials. If they go into shock, the epinephrine and dopamine we need to care for them, we depend on China. If they have bacterial infections, we depend on China for the antibiotics.”

Many over-the-counter supplements sold in the U.S. are at least partly manufactured in China, Gisbon noted. “We can’t make [vitamin C] here anymore. That comes from China.”

America has lost much of its manufacturing apparatus for medicines to China via globalization, explained Gibson. “With our medicines, it’s not just the active ingredient [that is made in China]. It’s the raw chemicals, the molecules, the white powdery stuff, that we also depend on China for. That’s where China has the real global chokehold.”

Gibson explained how generic drugs manufacturers around the world are dependent on China for raw materials.

“Another shocking thing I discovered is that India and its huge generic [drug] industry — they’re the top generic producer in the world, although I think China’s going to overtake them in about five to ten years — even India depends on China,” Gibson stated.” [India’s] generic industry would shut down within weeks and months without those core components, and you see it in the Indian press, right now, that they’re already concerned about this because this coronavirus in China is really disrupting supply chains.”

China uses predatory mercantilist policies — including dumping — to undercut American and Western drug manufacturers, just as the communist state did with steel and other commodities, noted Mansour.

Gibson recalled, “I documented China’s penicillin cartel. There’s an incredible story of how we lost our penicillin manufacturing plants. These are huge industrial facilities, big fermentation plants, and China came in and knocked them out in the U.S. and even India by dumping it on the global market at really cheap prices — keeping it low for several years — and then the price goes back up again.”

Gibson went on, “So we can’t make penicillin, and this was the playbook for how we lost aspirin manufacturing, vitamin C, and so many other antibiotics that we rely on. We’re talking about last-resort antibiotics, medicines to treat sepsis, MRSA, [and] C. diff. These are the antibiotics you give to your kids for ear infections, or you take if you have a tooth infection of staph infection.”

Gibson warned, “We are so vulnerable. These are infectious diseases, and we depend on China to treat them.”

American politicians have been absent on the issue of domestic hemorrhaging of drug manufacturing capabilities to China, Gibson said.

“Nobody did anything about it,” lamented Gibson. “This has been going on for almost 20 years. In fact, no one wanted to even expose it. That’s why it took so long to figure this out and to put it out there, to reveal our dependence. It’s really quite remarkable. The American public’s been thrown under the bus.”

Mansour asked why American politicians allowed domestic manufacturing of medicines and medical supplies to be outsourced to China.

Gibson replied, “There was country-of-origin legislation introduced in Congress around 2008 that would require companies to state on their packages where their product is made, and it was killed immediately. So I asked someone in the industry, someone who worked there for more than 30 years, ‘So, what’s going on here?’ and this person said, ‘Well, the industry thought it probably wouldn’t be good for business if their customers knew where their medicines were coming from.'”

Gibson continued, “Our military is dependent on China. So the young men and women in the South China Sea on those aircraft carriers, they’re dependent on their adversary for their medicine.

Gibson reflected on the testimony of Larry Wortzel, a 32-year veteran and retired Army colonel, regarding contaminated blood pressure medicines made in China. Wortzel’s comments were made during a 2019 hearing of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

“It was spellbinding,” recalled Gibson, “for 90 seconds, he described how he got three different blood pressure medicines. They were made in India but the ingredients came from China, and it had rocket fuel compounds in it. … He said, ‘If I’m getting it, that means our active duty military are all getting it.’ This is how far down we have come in our standards with our medicine.”

“There are no short-term solutions,” Gibson stated of measures to restore America’s medical manufacturing capacity. “We have lost so much of our industrial base to make our own medicines, and you don’t create that overnight. … the FDA has proposed some measures, going forward, that drug manufacturers produce risk management plans and require them to identify alternate sources in case there are future disruptions.”

Gibson continued, “You know what the problem with that is? So many of these manufacturers [are now] Chinese domestic companies that are now ramping up from ingredients to making generic finished drugs. So now, 90 percent of the generic drugs sold in the United States [are linked to China]. They’re birth control pills, antidepressants, HIV/AIDS medicines, medicines for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, diabetes.”

“China’s on track to gain control of our generic drugs, and so the FDA has proposed that it’s going to ask manufacturers to tell us what their plan B is,” added Gibson. “So we’re going to be effectively relying on Chinese companies to help us out in a future emergency.”

Gibson noted, “China’s stated aim is to become the pharmacy to the world with its own companies. And what we’re seeing with Western generic drug companies, they’re collapsing because they can’t compete.”

Gibson said, “There’s a chapter in China Rx called “Made in China, Sue in America? Good Luck.” One of these reasons for the cheap price is that Chinese companies assume no liability for the quality of their product. When there was this huge recall of blood pressure medicines in the U.S. and around the world, it was because of a single company in China that made the active ingredient that had carcinogens in it — these rocket fuel compounds — and they knowingly sent product to the United States, knowingly knew that it didn’t meet U.S. standards, and it went on for four years before we picked it up.”

Gibson continued, “What we’re seeing is not just our supply coming from China, but the quality that is diminishing, and the FDA’s leverage to protect the public is just falling apart. Look, the FDA had to recall inspectors from China because of the coronavirus. It’s going to be months before [FDA] employees go back there, and they volunteer for those positions. The agency can’t [compel them]. Who’s going to want to go?”

Gibson added, “Just imagine you’re an FDA inspector over there and you’re in this big Chinese plant and you write a report, and you see some very serious violations, do you think the Chinese government will ever want you back in the country? Would you ever want to go back? Would you be afraid of retaliation?”

“I think we have to prepare for a future where the FDA will have virtually no leverage in China to really protect the American people,” assessed Gibson. “[The FDA] is already making trade-offs between substandard medicines and preventing shortages in medicines. It’s allowing stuff in that doesn’t meet standards, because we have no choice.”

Free market solutions can’t correct China’s mercantilist undercutting of Western drug and medical supply manufacturing.

“Some are saying, ‘Let the free market fix it,'” noted Gibson. “There is no free market. We wouldn’t allow this for our nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers to operate, because we’d be making them in China. We need to think of our medicines as a strategic asset. Not as something cheap that we outsource to a country that has a lot of problems.”

Gibson added, “It’s not a free market. They cheated [with] subsidies to these Chinese companies, so it’s very hard for any U.S. or Western company to compete, because you’re competing not with Chinese companies, you’re competing with the Chinese government.”

“We’re losing our manufacturing base,” warned Gisbon. “It’s just collapsing before our eyes. It’s the reason why we have really poor quality medicines now coming in.”

Gibson quoted a physician she spoke with, “We’re becoming like a developing country with our medicines.”

Gibson proposed federal industrial policy to renew domestic manufacturing of medicines and medical products.

“I would have our federal government invest in helping to rebuild our industrial base using advanced manufacturing technology that can produce our medicines much more cheaply, safely, with less environmental footprint, and fully, from soup to nuts from those core raw materials to finished drug in one location all here in the United States,” Gibson advised.

Gibson added, “There will be opponents who say, ‘No, we should let the market do it.’ The market will never do this. They’ll never make this investment. So we have to decide as a country, do we want to have some degree of self-sufficiency in our ability to make medicine? Do we want our military not to be dependent on China for pharmaceuticals to treat chemical and biological agents?”

“We’ll be depending on China to help us out when we run out of medicines,” warned Gibson. “The absurdity of it is extraordinary. We have to decide as a country, do we want to have some capacity to make our own medicines, or not?”

“Would you trust taking a last resort antibiotic for your child that was made in China?” asked Gisbon. “Would you trust it? Would you trust a chemotherapy if your child has leukemia? More than ten percent of the generics that have been tested in the U.S. don’t meet standards, by the way.”

Gibson went on “Most Americans don’t trust. They remember when thousands of dogs and cats died when a Chinese company contaminated pet food, and hundreds of humans died when the Chinese did a very insidious and sophisticated operation to contaminate a blood thinner widely used in hospitals.”

“A number of hospitals are having to test certain medicines because physicians see that there’s just something not working,” stated Gibson. “So we have this 18 percent of our GDP in our healthcare system, and we’re relying on these components from China that are essential for helping people recover, that make a difference between life or death. It’s insanity.”

“Food was used as a weapon of war” in World Wars I and II, said Gibson, warning of the political weaponization of medicines.

“Our medicines can be weaponized,” Gibson observed. “China can withhold them. China has threatened the United States with drug shortages in the past, it had nothing to do with the trade issue.Think of the leverage you give to a country when it controls your antibiotics.”

Eighty-five percent of the America’s strategic national stockpile of medicines and medical supplies depends on China, Gibson noted.

Gibson concluded, “We have to diversify away from China and bring some manufacturing of essential medicines back home to this country.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wcb6092,

Perhaps a positive result from all of this disruption from China will be a further move towards domestic manufacturing. With Trump in office and his America first policies, we might never be in a better position. If we were to start making antibiotics here and then the Chinese tried to dump their product on our market to hurt US production I can absolutely see Trump sticking a 100% tariff on those imports to ensure a level playing field. As WW2 showed us, manufacturing capability is every bit as much a matter of national security as having the best weapons and best trained military. Nationalism should not be looked upon as a dirty word, and hopefully the silent majority are starting to see that looking out for our interests above all others in both the short term and, more importantly, the long term is a good thing. Even if it means that prices of a lot of the retail junk we buy creep up a bit and major corporations have to be happy with smaller margins and slightly lower profits I think we may still see some support. Honestly if people would wake up a bit I think they would see that the increased profits of the last 20 plus years have mostly gone to executive compensation anyway, and stock prices would probably be affected much less than a lot of people have been led to believe.

Another 'Nightmare At Sea': First COVID-19 Case Detected Aboard Cruise Ship Given 'Safe Harbor' In Cambodia

https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...uise-ship-given-safe

Remember the cruise ship that was refused entry by four countries, despite having zero confirmed cases of COVID-19? In hindsight, those countries might have had a point.

Because Reuters reports that the first case of coronavirus has been detected among the ship's passengers, who docked in Cambodia on Friday.

What's more: the patient is an 83-year-old American woman. Health authorities in Malaysia confirmed the infection after the woman tested positive on Saturday.

Wait, but didn't the ship dock in Cambodia? Why is this woman being tested in Malaysia.

Well, first - yes, it did.

Second, it appears that the Cambodian authorities allowed 144 passengers to fly to Malaysia after disembarking on Friday, apparently without even screening them thoroughly.

According to Reuters, the passengers were tested regularly on board and Cambodia also tested 20 passengers after the ship docked. But it's not clear what kind of tests they were using - swab tests have proved notoriously unreliable.

And clearly, whatever they did, it wasn't thorough enough, because this woman got through.

At some point, the woman's symptoms were noted, she was tested, and is now being quarantined.

But if there's one thing we've learned about COVID-19, it's that there's never just one case in a group. And Malaysia has already reported dozens of cases.

Also, as we've seen with the 'Diamond Princess' cases, cruises are extremely susceptible to widespread outbreaks, which means there could be dozens of others infected.

The Westerdam was carrying 1,455 passengers and 802 crew, and it spent two weeks at sea.

After reading a story in today's South China Morning Post, we realized that President Xi's immediate economic priority is making sure he can present a believable vision of China having 'contained' the outbreak so that the Chinese people and the global community will accept his government's growth-rate targets laid out in the Party's 'Annual Work Report', which is expected to be released at the next National People's Congress in early March.

Delaying the release could be construed as a sign of weakness, so we suspect Xi will make sure to pad it with some of China's famously goalseeked stats. Still, like any other form of propaganda, goalseeking is a strategy, and it only works if at least some of the target audience finds it believable.

Elsewhere, there was an interesting COVID-19 develop in North Korea overnight: Yonhap has reportedly confirmed that a North Korean coronavirus patient escaped quarantine and traveled to a public area before being apprehend and...immediately executed.

The State Department has said it wants to help North Korea deal with the outbreak, though Kim Jong Un and his government continue to insist that there is no outbreak (though of course Kim would probably rather watch 1 million North Koreans suffocate to death from pneumonia before allowing the US to play white knight).

We've already noted some other interesting developments that were reported early Saturday, including the first coronavirus death in Europe, while cases aboard the 'Diamond Princess' spike 30%.


Cruise Ship Coronavirus Cases Spike 30%; First Death Recorded In Europe

https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...cal-supplies-persist

quote:

Originally posted by BOATTRASH1:

quote:

Originally posted by Ryanp225:
You doing ok there Boattrash? You don't smell bunt toast, do you?

Ryanp225 Someone else explained the burnt toast reference to me. I apologize for firing back at you....

No worries buddy.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
It’s one thing to detain and segregate small numbers of people who are returning to the US, but it would be far different to shut whole cities down as is evidently being done in China.

The only thing I perceive that would be effective would be a nation-wide travel ban like that imposed by President Ryan in Tom Clancy's Executive Orders. IIRC, all non-essential travel was banned, nation-wide.

The punishment for violating the ban would have to be extreme, swift, sure and public, because people will be people. That is to say "uncooperative."

Furthermore: To be effective it would have to be invoked early. Before things got out-of-hand.

Interesting times.

quote:

American politicians have been absent on the issue of domestic hemorrhaging of drug manufacturing capabilities to China, Gibson said.

“Nobody did anything about it,” lamented Gibson. “This has been going on for almost 20 years. In fact, no one wanted to even expose it. That’s why it took so long to figure this out and to put it out there, to reveal our dependence. It’s really quite remarkable. The American public’s been thrown under the bus.”

Mansour asked why American politicians allowed domestic manufacturing of medicines and medical supplies to be outsourced to China.

Gibson replied, “There was country-of-origin legislation introduced in Congress around 2008 that would require companies to state on their packages where their product is made, and it was killed immediately. So I asked someone in the industry, someone who worked there for more than 30 years, ‘So, what’s going on here?’ and this person said, ‘Well, the industry thought it probably wouldn’t be good for business if their customers knew where their medicines were coming from.'”

This has been an issue for close to 50-years and not just in the pharmaceutical industry but all sectors, the first 20-years seemed innocuous as the mantra amongst industrialists was globalism. As the internet and e-commerce ramped-up, so did the sophistication of finance, eventually market consolidation of certain industries pushed-on by efficiencies. Meanwhile American companies gladly off-shored all their sourcing, not having to carry the financial overhead of factories and supply chains, they gleefully encouraged the vertical supply-manufacturing pipeline that China offered. While all this was going on, Congress and local lawmakers were oblivious, either because they were directly benefiting or, they were ideologically focused on their pet causes that were more social focused, resulting in general ignorance of finance, commerce, manufacturing, and transportation. All areas that the American lawmaker is largely lacking in understanding.

Today, there's so many regulatory hurdles with standing up a manufacturing facility in the US, unless such bureaucratic obstacles are removed, the next best option would be for those countries south of the border to recognize the opportunity to improve their economies by attracting big business away from the Far East.

Will it affect Fentanyl laced drugs ?

The WHO Dr's are scheduled to arrive in China shortly.I wonder if now we will get a TRUE account of the deaths and number infected?

I doubt the Chinese Government is being truthful as to how widespread the disease has become.

Exclusive: Chinese doctors say Wuhan coronavirus reinfection even deadlier

Instead of creating immunity the virus can reportedly reinfect an individual and hasten fatal heart attack

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3876197

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — It’s possible to get infected by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) a second time, according to doctors on the frontline in China’s city of Wuhan, leading to death from heart failure in some cases.

The claim is made by doctors working in the Hubei Province capital that is at the center of the epidemic, which has to date infected 64,201 people and killed 1,487. One of the doctors reached out to a relative living in the United Kingdom, who then informed Taiwan News.

Both the relative and doctors asked to remain anonymous, out of consideration they might face retribution from the Chinese authorities. The doctor, Li Wenliang (李文亮), who first raised warnings about the Wuhan virus, was rebuked by the authorities before succumbing to the devastating disease himself earlier this month.

According to the message forwarded to Taiwan News, “It’s highly possible to get infected a second time. A few people recovered from the first time by their own immune system, but the meds they use are damaging their heart tissue, and when they get it the second time, the antibody doesn’t help but makes it worse, and they die a sudden death from heart failure.”

The source also said the virus has “outsmarted all of us,” as it can hide symptoms for up to 24 days. This assertion has been made independently elsewhere, with Chinese pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan (鍾南山) saying the average incubation period is three days, but it can take as little as one day and up to 24 days to develop symptoms.

Also, the source said that false negative tests for the virus are fairly common. “It can fool the test kit – there were cases that they found, the CT scan shows both lungs are fully infected but the test came back negative four times. The fifth test came back positive.”

According to the BBC and other media outlets, some laboratory tests are incorrectly telling people they are virus-free. There is also anecdotal evidence of people having up to six negative results before being diagnosed correctly.

Dr. Li Wenliang first raised concerns about this. His own test results had come back negative multiple times before he was finally diagnosed.

False negative tests raise question marks over how many people have the Wuhan coronavirus, with many believing the Chinese authorities have massively underreported the number of cases and deaths. Meanwhile, the official methodology for diagnosing the virus in China was changed this week, leading to a sudden leap in the number of recorded cases and deaths.

quote:

Originally posted by FN in MT:
The WHO Dr's are scheduled to arrive in China shortly.I wonder if now we will get a TRUE account of the deaths and number infected?

I agree with you about the Chinese, but the “World” in WHO’s name—plus things I’ve read about the organization’s responses to epidemics in the past—doesn’t give me a lot of warm and fuzzies. Hopefully my prejudices will be wrong this time.

So they changed how they count the infected....are they going to go back and count all the people that died and were quickly cremated due to "unknown respiratory illness"

It would seem this has been going on since Dec. and have read several articles siting rumors about many patients dying before they were tested.

Saw a terrible video the other day of 3 dead children being placed in a body bag....how did they count them?

We really have no idea how bad this bug is due to the lack real reporting or actual covering up the facts.

Red an article (mind you it was on zero hedge) that the R factor could be between 3 and 8 and the mortality rate could be 3% or maybe closer to MERS around 36%.


Thank you China for your open society....assholes

70 more tested positive on the cruise ship stranded in Japan.They have tested 1219 people with 355 testing positive and 73 of these showing no symptoms. That is an infection rate of 29% positive.

Video of dentist on ship talking about everyday life on ship and being handed masks to wear onboard with crew member's bare hands, among other practices that may be spreading the virus.




https://www.scmp.com/news/worl...eaths-and-1843-newly

Hm.. Maybe…

“Chinese scientists believe the deadly coronavirus may have started life in a research facility just 300 yards from the Wuhan fish market.

A new bombshell paper from the Beijing-sponsored South China University of Technology says that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WHCDC) could have spawned the contagion in Hubei province.

'The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus,' penned by scholars Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao claims the WHCDC kept disease-ridden animals in laboratories, including 605 bats.

It also mentions that bats - which are linked to coronavirus - once attacked a researcher and 'blood of bat was on his skin.' …”

https://mol.im/a/8009669