Prison outbreaks add to rising toll as China reports 899 new cases

https://www.scmp.com/news/chin...officials-report-411


200 prisoners test positive for Covid-19, accounting for nearly a quarter of daily confirmed infections

Recent downward trend on mainland reversed as 118 further deaths reported

The coronavirus outbreak in China reversed its downward trend on Friday, with 899 new cases and 118 further deaths reported, one day after the number of new infections fell to its lowest point in weeks.

Hubei province – epicentre of the disease – had 411 of the newly confirmed cases and 115 deaths, compared to 349 and 108, respectively, recorded a day earlier.

The new national figure showed an increase from the 394 new infections and 114 new deaths recorded as of Wednesday – which may suggest the crisis has yet to reach its peak, according to experts who cautioned against optimism while the outbreak was still fluctuating.
Prison outbreaks lead to sackings

Officials have been sacked after hundreds of prisoners in two Chinese jails were infected with the coronavirus, making up nearly a quarter of the 899 new cases of Covid-19 reported on Friday.

According to the government of Shandong province, eastern China, a prison guard at Rencheng jail in Jining city started coughing and showing other symptoms in early February. All 2,077 people held or working at the prison were given the nucleic acid test and, as of Thursday, 200 prisoners and seven prison officers had tested positive for the virus.

The provincial government said Xie Weijun, party secretary for Shandong's department of justice, and seven prison officials had been sacked for mismanagement of the outbreak.

In southern Zhejiang province, 34 prisoners have been infected at Shilifeng jail. The provincial government said these were imported cases and two prison officials had been removed from their roles.
Newly discharged patients exceed 2,000 for first time

For the first time the number of newly discharged patients exceeded the 2,000 mark. According to China’s National Health Commission, 2,019 patients had recovered as of Friday, bringing the total number of discharged patients to 18,264.

Recovered patients may still be infectious

In a grim assessment, a key Chinese respiratory disease expert described the situation of the epidemic as a “see-saw battle”, despite the drop in daily recorded cases in recent days.

“We should not be relaxed. The figure may go up again,” said Zhao Jianping, head of an expert team working to contain the outbreak in Hubei.

Zhao told the magazine Southern People Weekly there were cases in China in which recovered patients continued to show traces of the virus through nucleic acid tests. There were similar results in Canada, where nose and throat swabs taken from a couple who had recovered from Covid-19 revealed they still had traces of the virus.

“We also have such cases. This is dangerous. Where do you put these patients? You can't send them home because they might infect others, but you can't put them in hospital as resources are stretched,” he said.

Zhao said there were 27 patients when his team first went to a Wuhan hospital designated to treat infected people on December 30, and the number increased on January 10 with infections among medical workers.

“The number of patients has jumped from 27 to 70,000. It is highly contagious,” he said.

New Canadian coronavirus patient never went to China, but had visited Iran

https://www.scmp.com/news/worl...-coronavirus-patient

Canadian health authorities have announced what they called a “sentinel event” with the detection of the new coronavirus
in a woman who had never travelled to China.
The woman instead had recently returned to British Columbia from Iran, which has reported just five cases of the disease. Two of those patients
have died.

The infection of the woman is the sixth case detected in BC, and the ninth in Canada.

The woman in her 30s lives in the Fraser Health region outside Vancouver, provincial health officer Dr Bonnie Henry said.

Henry told a press conference in Victoria late on Thursday that the case was a “sentinel event”, as a possible “indicator that there’s more widespread transmission”.

Henry said an international investigation would ensue to “try to understand where the exposure occurred”. The case was “clearly a bit unusual … travel to Iran is something new [among Canadian infections]”.

Interesting map.
https://bnonews.com/index.php/...t-coronavirus-cases/

Cases are really picking up around the world. I bet we start seeing some rapid advancement here.

The US isnt even testing cases.... probably to stick their head in the sand and not report bad news. But there are thousands of suspected cases in the US currently. Its hot and its spreading.

Since we like good news "cured" coronavirus victims can still infect others by shedding virus. And as we already have been told, cured individuals can become re-infected again. Next question- how long should those that have been cured be quarantined to make sure they are no longer to infect healthy people? I'm thinking the short answer is "what's the point? this thing is here to stay no matter what we do".

https://www.newsweek.com/coron...traces-virus-1488410

4 COVID-19 cases have been sent here in Spokane because the hospital (Sacred Heart Medical Center) has an infectious disease isolation ward created during the Ebola scare. The ward can treat up to 15 patients so we can expect to see more showing up. All are stable so far and are expected to survive.

Jim

One thing nobody is talking about yet. Manufacturing in certain parts of China is at a standstill. I have customers that rely on China for parts and they were notified this week that orders they were supposed to receive in March, may get here in late April. Some companies haven't seen employees return after Chinese New Year. It's going to be interesting to see the economic impact this is going to have worldwide.

Not good if true...a reinfection.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jen.../1230889573540122629

CDC Warns Coronavirus Coming To US, Will Be "Tremendous Public Health Threat"

Summary:

34 cases in USA.

The CDC had some pretty chilling words for the American public during a press conference on Friday. During the 12:15pm ET update, the organization warned that it had centralized 'surge' virus response due to a lack of testing kits and the fact that every state but three is unprepared for the epidemic.

During the press conference, the CDC described the virus as a "tremendous public healht threat" and warned that human to human transmission in the US is "very possible, even likely."

The announcement comes after the Washington Post reported last night that the CDC opposed the State Department's decision to bring the 14 Americans confirmed to have been infected with the virus aboard the 'Diamond Princess' back to the US with the other ~300 evacuees - thereby breaking the quarantine and risking a broader outbreak, and exposing many of the passengers on the flight who hadn't been infected to the virus.

The CDC was so mad, it reportedly asked for its name to be removed from a press release about the evacuation.

We also noted at the time that the decision to break the quarantine and bring the 14 infected persons back seemed idiotic.

So far, it's looking like that's exactly what's happening: As we noted earlier, 11 of 13 people quarantined in Nebraska have now tested positive.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...break-reported-china

There was no vaccine for Sars or Mers. Will there be one for the new coronavirus?

https://www.scmp.com/news/chin...ill-there-be-one-new

Seventeen years after the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak and seven years since the first Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) case, there is still no coronavirus vaccine despite dozens of attempts to develop them.

As research institutes and companies around the world race to find potential vaccines for a new coronavirus strain that has infected nearly 80,000 people and claimed over 2,000 lives, the question is, will this time be different?

Communicable disease outbreaks are handled by stopping transmission and with medicines and vaccines, but developing those vaccines takes time as they have to go through trials to ensure they are safe and effective.

They are also costly. According to Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, it can cost as much as US$1 billion to develop, licence and manufacture a vaccine from scratch – including building a facility to produce it in.
The new coronavirus strain
originated in central China in December and causes a disease known as Covid-19. Two previous coronavirus outbreaks – Sars and Mers – also had scientists trying to find vaccines. For Sars in 2003, it took four months before the genome sequence of the coronavirus was available to develop antigens that could be used for animal and cell culture trials. The first human trial of a possible Sars vaccine was conducted in Beijing in December 2004, but by that time the epidemic was over, and research into other diseases was given priority so it was shelved.

But the initial stage of the process has moved much faster for the new coronavirus than it did for Sars and Mers. Chinese researchers quickly isolated the strain and the genome sequence was released to the scientific community on January 10. That was well before the Chinese government announced the virus could be transmitted between humans, on January 21.

Initial vaccine research for the new coronavirus has moved much faster than it did for Sars and Mers. Photo: APInitial vaccine research for the new coronavirus has moved much faster than it did for Sars and Mers. Photo: AP
Initial vaccine research for the new coronavirus has moved much faster than it did for Sars and Mers. Photo: AP

Seventeen years after the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak and seven years since the first Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) case, there is still no coronavirus vaccine despite dozens of attempts to develop them.

As research institutes and companies around the world race to find potential vaccines for a new coronavirus strain that has infected nearly 80,000 people and claimed over 2,000 lives, the question is, will this time be different?

Communicable disease outbreaks are handled by stopping transmission and with medicines and vaccines, but developing those vaccines takes time as they have to go through trials to ensure they are safe and effective.

They are also costly. According to Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, it can cost as much as US$1 billion to develop, licence and manufacture a vaccine from scratch – including building a facility to produce it in.
The new coronavirus strain
originated in central China in December and causes a disease known as Covid-19. Two previous coronavirus outbreaks – Sars and Mers – also had scientists trying to find vaccines. For Sars in 2003, it took four months before the genome sequence of the coronavirus was available to develop antigens that could be used for animal and cell culture trials. The first human trial of a possible Sars vaccine was conducted in Beijing in December 2004, but by that time the epidemic was over, and research into other diseases was given priority so it was shelved.
Coronavirus: Scientists dismiss claim that humans engineered the deadly contagion

But the initial stage of the process has moved much faster for the new coronavirus than it did for Sars and Mers. Chinese researchers quickly isolated the strain and the genome sequence was released to the scientific community on January 10. That was well before the Chinese government announced the virus could be transmitted between humans, on January 21.
Coronavirus still stumps experts on when human carrier turns infectious
13 Feb 2020

Funding also appears to be available, at least at this stage. With Beijing under huge pressure to control the epidemic that has stalled the economy for weeks, it has been willing to mobilise any resources it has for scientific research, and a special task force has been set up to coordinate efforts.

“Since the task force was set up, vaccine development has been a priority and we have pulled together all the best units in the country to work towards a breakthrough and to expedite the development of a vaccine,” Zhang Xinmin, director of the China National Centre for Biotechnology Development under the Ministry of Science and Technology, told media on February 15.



Outside China, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) – a group backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and investments from various countries to speed up vaccine development – is funding institutes and companies including US firm Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a joint project by US firm Moderna and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the University of Queensland.

Initial vaccine research for the new coronavirus has moved much faster than it did for Sars and Mers. Photo: APInitial vaccine research for the new coronavirus has moved much faster than it did for Sars and Mers. Photo: AP
Initial vaccine research for the new coronavirus has moved much faster than it did for Sars and Mers. Photo: AP

Seventeen years after the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak and seven years since the first Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) case, there is still no coronavirus vaccine despite dozens of attempts to develop them.

As research institutes and companies around the world race to find potential vaccines for a new coronavirus strain that has infected nearly 80,000 people and claimed over 2,000 lives, the question is, will this time be different?

Communicable disease outbreaks are handled by stopping transmission and with medicines and vaccines, but developing those vaccines takes time as they have to go through trials to ensure they are safe and effective.

They are also costly. According to Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, it can cost as much as US$1 billion to develop, licence and manufacture a vaccine from scratch – including building a facility to produce it in.
The new coronavirus strain
originated in central China in December and causes a disease known as Covid-19. Two previous coronavirus outbreaks – Sars and Mers – also had scientists trying to find vaccines. For Sars in 2003, it took four months before the genome sequence of the coronavirus was available to develop antigens that could be used for animal and cell culture trials. The first human trial of a possible Sars vaccine was conducted in Beijing in December 2004, but by that time the epidemic was over, and research into other diseases was given priority so it was shelved.
Coronavirus: Scientists dismiss claim that humans engineered the deadly contagion

But the initial stage of the process has moved much faster for the new coronavirus than it did for Sars and Mers. Chinese researchers quickly isolated the strain and the genome sequence was released to the scientific community on January 10. That was well before the Chinese government announced the virus could be transmitted between humans, on January 21.
Coronavirus still stumps experts on when human carrier turns infectious
13 Feb 2020

Funding also appears to be available, at least at this stage. With Beijing under huge pressure to control the epidemic that has stalled the economy for weeks, it has been willing to mobilise any resources it has for scientific research, and a special task force has been set up to coordinate efforts.

“Since the task force was set up, vaccine development has been a priority and we have pulled together all the best units in the country to work towards a breakthrough and to expedite the development of a vaccine,” Zhang Xinmin, director of the China National Centre for Biotechnology Development under the Ministry of Science and Technology, told media on February 15.
Vaccine for new coronavirus unlikely to be ready before outbreak is over, says Sars expert

Outside China, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) – a group backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and investments from various countries to speed up vaccine development – is funding institutes and companies including US firm Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a joint project by US firm Moderna and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the University of Queensland.
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CEPI wants to see if new platform technologies – which allow vaccines for different viruses to be developed in the same platform after some adjustments – can be applied to vaccine development for the new coronavirus, reducing the production time. The concept is similar to the one used in developing new seasonal influenza vaccines.
Animal trials begin

Less than two months after the new strain was identified on January 7, several institutes in China, the United States and Europe have already begun animal trials.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), five vaccine candidates have reached the preclinical stage, which involves cell culturing and animal trials to find out if they can induce immunity.

Moderna said it planned to start human trials in April, while a research team at Imperial College London indicated they hoped to begin human trials in summer.

China meanwhile announced on Friday that it aimed to conduct clinical tests on humans by mid- or late April. Xu Nanping, vice-minister of science and technology, said Chinese vaccine researchers had made progress at a similar pace to their international peers.

The speed is unprecedented – in the past, it would have taken a couple of years to get to the human trial stage. And previous attempts to find a coronavirus vaccine had only reached that stage, a meeting of the WHO in Geneva was told earlier this month.

Of the 33 vaccine candidates for Sars, only two reached clinical trials on humans, the rest stopped at the preclinical stage. For Mers, just three of the 48 vaccine candidates went to clinical trials on humans while the others only made it to the preclinical stage.
18 months away?

Speaking after the Geneva meeting last week, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said a vaccine could be available in 18 months.

Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the WHO, said: “It usually takes several years to develop a vaccine. We were able to shorten that in the development of the vaccine for Ebola by harnessing global efforts. We are already working to do the same for Covid-19.”

He said the WHO was expecting clinical trials on humans to start in three to four months.

But some scientists said that timeline could be too ambitious as it was a complicated process to prove the safety and efficacy of a vaccine.

“Making a vaccine isn’t a simple process – first there needs to be a ‘candidate’ vaccine, with an appropriate manufacturing quality. This is then tested in animals to see if it seems to work,” said Allen Cheng, professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at Monash University in Australia.

“Then there need to be tests in humans to see that it elicits an immune system response, and to define the dose, then it needs to be tested in proper trials to see if it actually protects against infection and doesn’t cause side effects,” he said.

“Then it needs to be approved by regulators, and manufactured at scale, purchased by governments and deployed. This would usually take 10 years at a minimum. Even if everything goes perfectly … I would expect this would at least take a few years.”

The first Ebola vaccine was approved in December, five years after research first started, as the development process was delayed due to reported side effects in human trials. The WHO fast-tracked the approval process in the later stage.

Other experts who were more optimistic about the timeline said even in the best scenario, it would be impossible for the vaccine to be ready to deal with the current epidemic.

“I would expect to see a vaccine being commercially available in no sooner than a year if everything progresses without setback,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security. “Though vaccine development is accelerating at a rapid pace, we cannot expect to have vaccine in sufficient quantities to be able to impact this initial stage of the outbreak.”

Peter Smith, a professor of tropical epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who sits in a specialist panel advising the WHO, said the later stages of human trials would not be possible this year.

“I would expect human studies on some candidates to start in the coming months, but the later stage studies which are required to test the safety and efficacy of a vaccine before licensure or widespread use seem unlikely to be completed this year,” he said.
Is it worth it?

Given that Sars disappeared after 2003, some have questioned whether it is worthwhile to pour money into vaccine development for another coronavirus. According to scientists, that depends on whether it comes back.

“If the epidemic is only for this year, then the answer is no. But if Covid-19 recurs, then the answer is yes,” said Stanley Plotkin, who had a key role in developing the rubella vaccine in the 1960s and is now a consultant for vaccine companies, as well as on the specialist panel advising the WHO.

Smith said if there was no recurrence next year it would be difficult to obtain data to test the efficacy of vaccine candidates in human trials.

“If conventional control procedures stop transmission of the new virus in the next few months then it may be that vaccine studies to establish efficacy in human populations will not be possible [until there is another outbreak],” he said.

“However, given the number of people already infected and the spread of the current outbreak, it seems to me unlikely that it will be brought to a rapid end, particularly if it spreads to countries with less well developed public health systems.”

Other experts agreed.

Adalja said: “The novel virus is spreading efficiently in communities – something Sars could never do. This will not disappear and there will be a continued push for a vaccine for some time.”

Florian Krammer, a professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who specialises in virology and vaccine development, said the coronavirus would probably last for several winters.

“Everybody is hoping that this can still be controlled, but the realistic chance that it can be controlled is low. So then what is going to happen is that this is going to spread worldwide, ” he said. “If it does you might have an initial pandemic wave, but not everybody is getting infected and nobody has immunity, so it might be that this virus stays in the community and comes back in the northern hemisphere for the next few winters.”

Osterholm said the virus was transmitting like influenza, and it was increasingly obvious that containing its spread was impossible.

“The situation in China supports that this is more like influenza. No one has even proposed to stop seasonal influenza by doing the kind of interventions that have been done with this – social distancing, border closing, airport screening – and I think we’ve already seen initial containment hasn’t worked,” he said. “This one may sustain itself in a very different way with a dynamic potential to be quickly transmitted. So it can’t be compared to Sars and Mers with that regard.”

But even if trials prove a candidate is safe and effective, having a vaccine ready to be used for a large population poses another challenge.

“Producing enough to vaccinate several hundreds of thousands of people may be much less challenging than producing sufficient quantities to vaccinate very large populations, using multiple batches of vaccine and requiring consistency testing between different vaccine batches,” Smith said.

Osterholm said: “Manufacturing these vaccines is not cheap and you have to have an approved facility, which is a very tough job to accomplish – you are talking well over US$500-700 million just for a building, and if you don’t have excess capacity that you can use now, it will take four to five years to build these facilities.”
Strong political incentive

Drew Thompson, visiting senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and a former US defence department official responsible for managing relations with China, Taiwan and Mongolia, said there was strong political incentive for Beijing to carry through its vaccine development.

“If you think about the way the Communist Party thinks about legitimacy, successfully developing a vaccine independently would be a huge boost for China’s prestige, which matters to them a great deal. I can definitely see that being a top priority.”

Safety should also be a concern because vaccines are supposed to be given to a large number of healthy people.

“Vaccines are given to healthy individuals while small molecules [medicines] are given to someone who is already sick, so the risk calculus is different,” Adalja said.

Cheng noted that vaccination had a long-term impact on the human body.

“Vaccines work by ‘training’ the immune system with a part of, or weakened form of, the virus. In general the vaccine itself doesn’t persist in the body, but the immune cells do and provide protection against later infection,” Cheng said.

Chinese officials said they were trying to balance safety with the urgency of the situation.

“We have high quality R&D teams and we have vaccine manufacturers,” said Zhang, from the biotechnology development centre. “But we must be aware that vaccines are a special product given to healthy people and safety must come first … Vaccine development must follow scientific procedures and strict management and we have to give scientific researchers time to come up with a safe and effective vaccine.”

Yan Jinghua, a vaccine expert with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, agreed.

“There is no approved vaccine for this coronavirus anywhere in the world yet, and that means there is a lack of experience and there is no risk assessment for the vaccine yet,” said Yan, speaking at the same press briefing as Zhang. “It is a challenge for vaccine researchers. We have to have sufficient proof of the risks and benefits … safety is the number one concern – we want to have a licensed vaccine as soon as possible … but we have to make sure it is safe.”

quote:

Originally posted by Ox190:
One thing nobody is talking about yet. Manufacturing in certain parts of China is at a standstill. I have customers that rely on China for parts and they were notified this week that orders they were supposed to receive in March, may get here in late April. Some companies haven't seen employees return after Chinese New Year. It's going to be interesting to see the economic impact this is going to have worldwide.

OH, its being discussed...we just got word certain hats and gloves will be delayed. Luckily higher up diversified their supply chain and partnered-up with some S.American factories. If company's sourcing dept didn't get things moving before CNY, they're screwed. Heard Philippines are trying to get factories to scale-up and remove some red-tape but, Deuterte and his cronies are too dumb to understand the implications.

Not only is manufacturing come to a standstill (not because of sickness but, workers staying away), but the freight transportation sector isn't moving anything. Inventory for apparel is either sitting in containers at the port/distro yards, or, the raw materials are piling up. Auto part shortages have impacted S.Korean and Japanese manufactures, as they've either cut production or, halted their lines altogether. I've heard Foxconn and other premium electronic manufactures got 'exceptions' to continue operations. Will be interesting to see the effects on pharmaceutics and the paper industry.

I still keep waiting for Para to come along and tell us we are over reacting, I'm actually hoping because when he's done it in the past he's been right.

Many people here evidently believe that if a disease hasn’t killed them yet, everyone else is overreacting. There’s nothing the vast majority of us can do about its effects, either actual or potential, so yes, why should we worry about it? Not being worried about it, though, isn’t the same as not paying attention to what’s happening, and paying attention is what many of us are doing. That doesn’t mean we’re Chicken Littles, and being accused of being that says much more about the accuser’s insecurities than the accused’s.

If we’re not interested enough at this point to even pay attention, fine; if things change and it becomes important to pay attention, we’ll certainly be told in countless ways.

quote:

Originally posted by Killer:
I still keep waiting for Para to come along and tell us we are over reacting, I'm actually hoping because when he's done it in the past he's been right.

I imagine if the veil of secrecy wasn’t so very tight on this, less people would be monitoring it so closely. I don’t recall this little information from the Chinese during the SARS outbreak, despite the higher reported mortality rate. One has to wonder why they’re playing the cards so close to the chest if it’s “not that big a deal”.

I've always wanted to be a hermit. Now seems like a pretty good time to start. Anyone have a nice, isolated cave they can recommend?

If you find a nice one, might want to avoid wattling the walls

Wuhan woman with no symptoms infects five relatives with coronavirus

https://www.jpost.com/Internat...h-coronavirus-618362

The case study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, offered clues about how the coronavirus is spreading, and suggested why it may be difficult to stop.

A 20-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, traveled 400 miles(675 km) north to Anyang where she infected five relatives, without ever showing signs of infection, Chinese scientists reported on Friday, offering new evidence that the virus can be spread asymptomatically.
The case study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, offered clues about how the coronavirus is spreading, and suggested why it may be difficult to stop.
"Scientists have been asking if you can have this infection and not be ill? The answer is apparently, yes," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.
China has reported a total of 75,567 cases of the virus known as COVID-19 to the World Health Organization (WHO) including 2,239 deaths, and the virus has already spread to 26 countries and territories outside of mainland China.
Researchers have reported sporadic accounts of individuals without any symptoms spreading the virus. What's different in this study is that it offers a natural lab experiment of sorts, Schaffner said.
"You had this patient from Wuhan where the virus is, traveling to where the virus wasn't. She remained asymptomatic and infected a bunch of family members and you had a group of physicians who immediately seized on the moment and tested everyone."
According to the report by Dr. Meiyun Wang of the People's Hospital of Zhengzhou University and colleagues, the woman traveled from Wuhan to Anyang on Jan. 10 and visited several relatives. When they started getting sick, doctors isolated the woman and tested her for coronavirus. Initially, the young woman tested negative for the virus, but a follow-up test was positive.
All five of her relatives developed COVID-19 pneumonia, but as of Feb. 11, the young woman still had not developed any symptoms, her chest CT remained normal and she had no fever, stomach or respiratory symptoms, such as cough or sore throat.
Scientists in the study said if the findings are replicated, "the prevention of COVID-19 infection could prove challenging."
Key questions now, Schaffner said, are how often does this kind of transmission occur and when during the asymptomatic period does a person test positive for the virus.

Something which has been troubling to myself and other folks at the northern Kentucky Flea Market where I work weekends, we have a Chinese outdoor vendor who left for a 5 week trip somewhere in China. He and his wife went to see family. Two weeks after they arrived in China, they flew back to the States. Noone here has gotten very close to the man for not knowing.

quote:

Originally posted by David Lee:
Something which has been troubling to myself and other folks at the northern Kentucky Flea Market where I work weekends, we have a Chinese outdoor vendor who left for a 5 week trip somewhere in China. He and his wife went to see family. Two weeks after they arrived in China, they flew back to the States. Noone here has gotten very close to the man for not knowing.

This would be the “perfect storm” scenario for s super-spreader to infect a lot of unsuspecting people. If the family in question did get infected, the damage is done. Just hope he went to a part of the country where the epidemic hadn’t spread yet.

North China city of Harbin puts four districts on lockdown in bid to contain coronavirus

Capital of Heilongjiang province, which borders Russia and North Korea, facing ‘peak of the epidemic’, local Communist Party official says
But residents of key commercial and trading hub say authorities have been too slow to react to the deadly outbreak

https://www.scmp.com/news/chin...lockdown-bid-contain

Authorities in one of China’s most northerly cities, which also serves as a major regional transport and trading hub, have placed four districts under total lockdown in a bid to contain the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus
.
The municipal government in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, which borders both Russia
and North Korea
, said that all residents of Daoli, Daowai, Nangang and Xiangfang had been placed in temporary isolation and that all access points into and out of the districts – all of which are in downtown areas – had been closed.

With a population of more than 10 million people, Harbin is both the province’s largest economy and a major commercial centre for northern China. A base for grain production, it is also home to major players in the textile, pharmaceuticals, food, aircraft, car and metallurgy industries.

Harbin has reported 479 coronavirus infections. of which 124 were in the four districts now under lockdown. Photo: XinhuaHarbin has reported 479 coronavirus infections. of which 124 were in the four districts now under lockdown. Photo: Xinhua
Harbin has reported 479 coronavirus infections. of which 124 were in the four districts now under lockdown. Photo: Xinhua
Authorities in one of China’s most northerly cities, which also serves as a major regional transport and trading hub, have placed four districts under total lockdown in a bid to contain the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus
.
The municipal government in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, which borders both Russia
and North Korea
, said that all residents of Daoli, Daowai, Nangang and Xiangfang had been placed in temporary isolation and that all access points into and out of the districts – all of which are in downtown areas – had been closed.

With a population of more than 10 million people, Harbin is both the province’s largest economy and a major commercial centre for northern China. A base for grain production, it is also home to major players in the textile, pharmaceuticals, food, aircraft, car and metallurgy industries.
Since the start of the epidemic, the city has reported 479 infections – 124 of them in the districts now under lockdown – and 12 deaths. It is one of the worst affected outside Hubei province, where the virus was first detected in its capital, Wuhan
, in December, and one of only a handful outside Hubei to have imposed such tight restrictions on its residents.

The area under lockdown encompasses Taiping International Airport, which handled more than 20 million passengers in 2018, as well as several major train stations.

“Harbin is now in the peak of the epidemic and the situation is very serious,” Wang Changsong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s disciplinary committee for Heilongjiang, said in an official statement issued on Wednesday.

“We should take more strict and detailed measures to prevent the disease spreading from downtown to suburban areas.”