Covid Timeline Wiki Project: February 28, 2020

Now that the propaganda spigot is gushing, let's see what's happening. Love your comments and additions.

NYT HEADLINES

• STOCKS TAKE DIVE NOT SEEN SINCE 2011 OVER VIRUS CRISIS

• In Escalation, Strike in Syria Kills 33 Turks

• Afghan Police Face a Strange New Reality: Peace

NYT FRONT PAGE PHOTO

NYT OPINION SECTION

First day in February with 3 virus-related op-eds

Admit It: You Do’t Know What Will Happen Next

Farhad Manjoo apologizes for his previous column telling readers not to panic about virus.

“Am I panicking? Not really, not yet. But after watching the stock market plummet on Monday and governments struggling to get hold of the contagion, I’ve begun to smell doom.”

When a Pandemic Meets a Personality Cult - The Trump team confirms all of our worst fears.

Paul Krugman

“And in case you’re wondering, no, the coronavirus isn’t like the common cold. In fact, early indications are that the virus may be as lethal as the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people.”

Mike Pence vs. the Coronavirus

Reader letter

“Many of us remember that Mr. Pence wrote: ‘Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.’ He is also a longtime climate change denier. And, of course, he has denigrated the theory of evolution while championing creationism.”

NOTE: PENCE IS SET UP AS STRAW MAN IN TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO TAKE THE BLAME FOR “FAILURES” OF RESPONSE. TASK FORCE IS ACTUALLY LED BY NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL, WHOSE PUBLIC FACE IS DEBORAH BIRX.

PROPAGANDA INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Donald G. McNeil Jr. in NYT: To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It - Quarantines and restrictive measures served a purpose in the old days. They can now, too.

“The medieval way, inherited from the era of the Black Death, is brutal: Close the borders, quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities.

For the first time in more than a century, the world has chosen to confront a new and terrifying virus with the iron fist instead of the latex glove.

At least for a while, it worked, and it might still serve a purpose.

The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, was able to seal off the city of Wuhan, where the Covid-19 outbreak began, because China is a place where a leader can ask himself, “What would Mao do?” and just do it. The bureaucracy will comply, right down to the neighborhood committees that bar anyone returning from Wuhan from entering their own homes, even if it means sleeping in the streets.

…

With luck, the extra time that China bought us by falling on its viral grenade will help produce a treatment or a vaccine. The threat will subside and reporters like me will be accused of alarmism.”

WHO

From 28 February 2020 Situation Report:

Preliminary analysis of countries reporting cases that have imposed restrictive measures suggest that such measures may have delayed the importation of new cases, but did not prevent the importation of the disease. WHO has emphasized to Member States that additional measures should be proportionate to the public health risk, short in duration, and reconsidered in light of the evolution of the outbreak and the constant advancements of knowledge about the virus and the disease.

WHO has published updated advice for international traffic, and continues to recommend against the application of any travel or trade restrictions in relation to the current COVID-19 outbreak.

From Director-General’s media briefing:

In the past 24 hours, China reported 329 cases – the lowest in more than a month.

The report of the WHO-China Joint Mission has now published its report… It calls for all countries to educate their populations, to expand surveillance, to find, isolate and care for every case, to trace every contact, and to take an all-of-government and all-of-society approach – this is not a job for the health ministry alone.

UK - The Guardian

Coronavirus: UK schools and offices could close for up to two months [online Feb 27]

Prof Chris Whitty said the country should prepare to face disruption to many normal activities “for quite a long period” and to pay a heavy “social cost” for efforts to thwart the virus.

CDC- New Testing Guidance

As reported by CNN:

Earlier in the outbreak, CDC guidance to doctors in the United States was that a patient had to have a travel history to China or be a close contact of someone who had been there before being tested, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said.

“As soon as that case was recognized, we met and we revised our case definition for persons under investigation,” Redfield said. “Today, that has been posted (to the CDC website) along with a new health advisory that the recommendation should be when a clinician or individual suspects coronavirus, then we should be able to get a test for coronavirus.”

REMEMBER: ON FEBRUARY 25, doctors in Seattle who were testing for Covid and who found cases of Covid were ordered by the CDC and FDA to stop testing

BIOWARFARE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX - CONFLICTING EDITORIALS

BILL GATES editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (which has dropped its editorial procedures for any coronavirus-related articles, as noted in its Feb 27 op-ed)

Responding to Covid-19 — A Once-in-a-Century Pandemic?

There are two reasons that Covid-19 is such a threat. First, it can kill healthy adults in addition to elderly people with existing health problems. The data so far suggest that the virus has a case fatality risk around 1%; this rate would make it many times more severe than typical seasonal influenza, putting it somewhere between the 1957 influenza pandemic (0.6%) and the 1918 influenza pandemic (2%).²

Second, Covid-19 is transmitted quite efficiently. The average infected person spreads the disease to two or three others — an exponential rate of increase. There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or even presymptomatic.³

One of the main technical challenges for vaccines is to improve on the old ways of manufacturing proteins, which are too slow for responding to an epidemic. We need to develop platforms that are predictably safe, so regulatory reviews can happen quickly, and that make it easy for manufacturers to produce doses at low cost on a massive scale.

FAUCI, Clifford Lane and Bob Redfield editorial in the NEJM

Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted

Either children are less likely to become infected, which would have important epidemiologic implications, or their symptoms were so mild that their infection escaped detection, which has implications for the size of the denominator of total community infections.

If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)