Xi Jinping’s Zero Covid Test: A Case Study of Social Media Outrage in Wuhan, China, Just Before the Communist Party Convention
There was a lot of chaos in Wuhan. The city shut itself off from the outside world, while hospitals were overrun with the sick and dying – but it was too late to stop the virus’ advance. China was locked down, too, making the country a standstill. Online, public outrage over apparent delays in the official release of information – and the silencing of whistleblowers – lit up social media faster than the censors could repress it.
She shouts abuse at the workers below in a video that appears to show the Chinese public’s growing impatience with their government’s uncompromising zero- Covid policy.
The woman has been under quarantine for half a year since returning from university in the summer, she shouts at the workers. They look back, seemingly unmoved.
Even though China has a widespread natural immunity, that doesn’t mean that the swine flue is gone or that the health care systems in China are prepared for potential future surges, experts say.
That claim comes even as infections flare and a new strain circulates just days before the country’s most important political event, the Communist Party Congress beginning in Beijing on Sunday at which Xi Jinping is expected to cement his place as the country’s most powerful leader in decades.
Observers from around the world will be watching the meeting for signs of the party’s priorities, since it has been blamed for worsening the economy by introducing a zero-covid stance.
“Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. No to great leader, yes to vote. One of the banners called for the removal of adictator and national traitor, while the other called for being a citizen.
After a protest was held at theSitong Bridge, search results for it were taken down by Weibo. Before long, key words including “Beijing,” “Haidian,” “warrior,” “brave man,” and even “courage” were restricted from search.
Numerous accounts on Weibo and WeChat, the super-app essential for daily life in China, have been banned after commenting on – or alluding to – the protest.
Many people responded with their support and awe. Some shared the Chinese pop hit “Lonely Warrior” in reference to the protester, while others said “I saw it.”
The shock of the economic and social problems of Xi’s zero-Covid policy: coping with the economic lockdown and water shortage
But, now, as Xi steps into an expected new era of his rule, that system – known today as the “dynamic zero-Covid” policy – is facing both social and economic pushback.
The economy was hurt by the lock-up. China’s GDP shrunk by 2.6% in the three months ending in June, while youth unemployment hit a record high of nearly 20%.
He acknowledged that many countries have seen lags in reporting hospital data, but pointed to China’s “narrow” definition of a Covid death as part of the issue. Some Covid patients that died of respiratory failure are listed in the country. China reported less than 20 deaths from Covid cases in the two weeks leading up to January 4.
Spooked by the possibility of unpredictable and unannounced snap lockdowns – and mindful that authorities have previously backtracked after suggesting that no such measures were coming – some people in the city have reportedly been hoarding drinking water.
The panic buying was made worse by the announcement that water authorities have taken action to make sure the quality of water at the mouth of the Yangtze river is maintained.
China isn’t going to let its borders down: Implications of the latest Covid outbreak in Inner Mongolia on a Communist Party campus
Many researchers aren’t surprised the WHO’s plans have been thwarted. The US intelligence officials later said they had begun investigations after members of Trump’s team made false claims that the virus came from a Chinese lab. The city of Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security lab that works on coronaviruses. Chinese officials questioned whether the virus originated inside the country’s borders.
The country has seen an increase in tourist cases in domestic destinations despite the fact that people are not going to China for the Golden Week holiday.
More than 240,000 university students in Inner Mongolia have been locked down on campuses due to the latest outbreak, according to Zhang Xiaoying, a deputy director of the regional Department of Education. And the outbreak on campus has led to punitive action, with one university Communist Party boss being sacked after 39 students from his institution tested positive.
There are 22 million people who have been banned from leaving the western part of the region because they want to go somewhere else. The official tally shows that there were over 400 new cases on Thursday.
Beijing seems unwilling to move from its hardline stance. commentaries from the Communist Party’s People’s Daily for three days this week reiterate that China is not going to let its guard down.
The fight against Covid was winnable, it said. The countries that had opened their borders had no choice but to act because they had failed to effectively control the epidemic.
Living in danger: Why big data has no choice but to change it – the case of Li. Li, a Chinese Communist leader with two terms in office
When he is anointed by his peers as the next leader of the ruling Communist Party on Sunday, it will mark the first time in decades that a third term will not be followed by a second one.
Many are watching for signs that restrictions on movement could be loosened as the Chinese Communist Party National Congress takes place this week. Any change would have to come from the top, and from a leader, who throughout his rule has sought to extend, not curtail, the party’s control on daily life.
China has offered unparalleled convenience in various areas for consumers to shop, dine and travel. It’s found that technologies are playing a role in limiting daily life.
The system, which is separate from the health code scanning system still required in a reduced number of places in China, had used people’s cell phone data to track their travel history in the past 14 days in an attempt to identify those who have been to a city with zone designated “high-risk” by authorities.
Basic activities, such as going to the grocery store, riding public transport or entering an office building depend on holding a positive Covid test and not being flagged as a close contact of a patient, which is reflected by a color code.
If you’re going to go out in public, be aware that if someone tests positive, you’re in danger, as being barricaded inside of a mall or office building during a snap lock down could be a risk in itself.
The flaws of big data are all visible when it has control over a person’s daily life, as evidenced by the case of the Shanghai resident, surnamed Li.
Li, who’d been with his wife at the time but received no such message, said they were eventually able to reach a hotline and explain their situation, ultimately returning her health code to green.
Implications for Security in China of the Party Congress and the Violent Communist Influence on People’s Lives – Dr. Yanzhong Huang
In a bid to lower public expectations about policy changes ahead of the Party, three different lines were written by the People’s Daily in recent weeks – one of them being “putting people first and prioritizing life.”
One of the responses to the viral comment was to ask what makes people think they will not be on that late-night bus one day.
There was a rare political protest in Beijing last week that saw banners hung on a bridge along the Third Ring Road that had been earmarked for social controls.
The Communist Party has protected the people’s health and safety to the greatest extent, according to the president, who spoke before 2,300 mostly surgical-mask clad party members on Sunday.
People are struggling for access to food and medicine because of the constant lock downs, which have become more frequent as the impact of those controls becomes sharper.
The major political event, the Party Congress, occurs in the last weeks before, as local authorities around the country attempt to contain outbreak associated with the event.
“Maintaining the zero-Covid strategy is now substantially more costly than it was a year ago, because the latest (viral) strains are so much more transmissible and outbreaks are occurring more frequently,” said epidemiologist Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health.
The zero- Covid policy may be dropped but some of the key components could be retained and used to maximize security in China, said Huang, pointing to Xi’s focus on maximizing security in China.
“We need all parties to work together scientifically against the epidemic to ensure the safe movement of people between countries, maintain the stability of the global industrial chain supply chain and promote the resumption of healthy growth in the world economy,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in a briefing.
He said that the World Health Organization is concerned about the risk to life in China and that the importance of booster doses to protect against hospitalization and disease has been reiterated.
“The vaccines take time, the ICU expansion takes time – and if you don’t see effort to prepare for the change, that implies that they are not planning to change the policy any time soon,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Health codes, illegal activity and the U.S.-China epidemic: evidence from a modelling study of the recent United Nations Population Update (2013-2019)
Already the health code system has been used to diffuse social protest – with petitioners who lost their savings in rural banks barred from protesting after their health codes inexplicably turned red.
When fishing vessels hide their locations, they sometimes reveal a wealth of information. A modelling study found that there were gaps in tracking data that suggested illegal activity. That is, in science. Adv. 8, eabq2109; 2022).
The team discovered that most time lost to the disabling of AIS was on ships from Spain, the United States, Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. However, most vessels that use AIS come from middle- and upper-income countries.
The origin of the SARS-coV-2 infectious disease has been the subject of many scientific and political debates. One of the two main theories is that the virus went from an animal to a person due to a lab accident or that it traveled from an animal to a person in a market.
In July this year, the UN released a new population update which lowers its long-term projection from 11 billion to 10 billion.
Although approximate, this could be the most reliable estimate that the UN has produced so far. The organization has changed how it analyses data, switching from five-yearly to annual intervals. And there has been a steady improvement in recent decades in the ability and capacity of many countries to collect statistics.
The most significant factor behind the UN’s updated forecast is that data from China have been more reliable since the end of the country’s one-child policy in 2015. According to the UN predictions, China’s population has peaked and will continue to decline until the end of the century.
CNN’s Meanwhile in China: a family of auto dealers in China, lost by a lockdown from an Apple factory in 2008, left without news
The countries that are experiencing conflicts and humanitarian crises, such as Yemen and Syria, have significant blind spots.
CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter provides a three-times-a-weekly update about what you need to know about the country’s rise and impact on the world. You can sign up here.
Zhou, an auto dealer in northeastern China, last saw his father alive in a video chat on the afternoon of November 1, hours after their home on the far outskirts of Beijing was locked down.
Zhou and his family did not know that the Covid restrictions had been imposed and their apartment building had no cases, he said.
The family found out the hard way, when Zhou’s father was denied an emergency medical help after he began struggling to breathe during a video call. Zhou and his son made a dozen calls for an ambulance, he said, claiming security guards blocked relatives from entering the building to take the 58-year-old grandfather to a hospital.
The workers left a locked-down Foxconn factory on their way to escape an outbreak at the largest Apple assembly site in China. A 3-year-old boy died of gas poisoning in lockdown after he was blocked from being taken promptly to a hospital. A 4-month-old baby girl died after a 12-hour delay in medical care.
Zhou contacted several state media outlets in Beijing to report his story, but no reporters showed up. Amid growing desperation and anger, he turned to foreign media – despite knowing the risk of repercussions from the government. CNN is only using his surname to mitigate that risk.
The Zhengzhou protest, Chongqing protest, and Beijing’s zero-Covid lockdown have become public controversies
In the central city of Zhengzhou this week, workers at the world’s biggest iPhone assembly factory clashed with hazmat-suited security officers over a delay in bonus payment and chaotic Covid rules.
And on Thursday, in the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing in the southwest, a resident delivered a searing speech criticizing the Covid lockdown on his residential compound. “Without freedom, I would rather die!” The police officers who tried to take him away were wrestled to the floor by the crowd who hailed him a hero.
The defiance of these acts of defiance was echoed by Chinese football fans who are unable to watch the World Cup from their homes due to the restrictions placed on them.
The fans are not wearing face masks or required to submit proof of Covid test results. Are they not living on the same planet as us?” asked a Wechat article questioning China’s insistence on zero-Covid, which went viral before it was censored.
There are indications that Chinese officials are feeling the effects of the public discontent, which comes on top of heavy social and economic tolls.
Many local officials are reverting to a zero-tolerance approach, attempting to quell infections as soon as possible.
The first city to stop mass testing was Shijiazhuang. It also allowed students to return to schools after a long period of online classes. Authorities told residents to stay home as cases rose over the weekend.
The financial hub of Shanghai banned anyone arriving from other countries from entering for five days. Cultural and entertainment venues were shut down in half of the city.
In Guangzhou, officials this week extended the lockdown on Haizhu district – where the protest took place – for the fifth time, and locked down its most populous Baiyun district.
In Beijing, streets in its largest district of Chaoyang are largely empty as authorities urged residents to stay home and ordered businesses to shut. Schools across several districts also moved to online classes this week.
Huang said he does not expect any fundamental changes to the zero-Covid policy in the short term. “Because the local governments’ incentive structure has not been changed. They are held accountable for the situation in their jurisdiction.
There are 20 measures listed in the government guidelines that Chinese officials have categorically denied being for a pivot to living with the virus.
Last week, the disease control official said that the measures are aboutoptimizing existing Covid prevention and control policy. “They are not an easing (of control), let alone reopening or ‘lying flat’,” he said.
Back on the outskirts of Beijing, Zhou said while the zero-Covid policy “is beneficial to the majority,” its implementation at a local level had been too draconian.
“I don’t want things like this to happen again in China and anywhere in the world,” he said. I lost my dad. My son’s grandpa passed away. I’m furious now.”
The Impact of the New Beijing Zero-Covid Relaxation Reaction on the Angular Momentum and Stress in the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Some signs of China’s zero-coded controls have been dismantled, health code signs have been removed from metro station walls, and checkpoint signs have been closed after the government changed its pandemic policy.
Many residents expressed relief and happiness but some were concerned about how the new rules would be implemented.
“The world changed overnight, and that’s really amazing,” said Echo Ding, 30, a manager at a tech company in Beijing. I think we are getting back to normal. This is important to me because if I don’t get back to a normal life, I might lose my mind.”
How can it change so quickly? Ding asked. It makes me feel like we are fools. It is up to them. I think they said it was good, so that is what I feel right now. I have no choice but to enjoy it. I can’t do anything else.
The changes were welcomed, according to David Wang, but they had sparked a sense of disbelief in the city, which was locked down for a couple of months earlier this year.
Most of my friends are showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder because of the changes I am happy about, they just can’t believe it’s happening.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/china/china-zero-covid-relaxation-reaction-intl-hnk/index.html
What to do if you get Omicron and what to do when you get it: Social media reactions to the recent public outcry against Covid
Scientific evidence, including the spread of the milder Omicron variant and China’s experience in responding to the virus, led to the changes to the rules.
The changes come after a wave of unprecendented protests across the country against harsh Covid restrictions, which are a reversal of the government’s long-held aim to eradicate all infections. While health authorities made slight policy revisions last month, the central government had shown no signs of preparing for an imminent shift in strategy until last week.
The government and state media had long emphasized the dangers of the virus and its potential long-term effects – and used this to justify the maintenance of restrictive policies.
State media are downplaying the lethality of the Omicron variant. At the same time, a huge drive to vaccinate the elderly is underway.
On China’s heavily moderated social media platform Weibo, topics and hashtags related to what to do if infected by Omicron trended high on Thursday morning, while there were numerous reports of panic buying of fever medications.
There was not a lot of information about what kind of medicine to have or what to do if they got the disease. In fact, we should have started doing this a long, long time ago,” said Sam Wang, 26, a lawyer in Beijing, who added that the policy release felt “sudden and arbitrary.”
Bob Li, a graduate student in Beijing who tested positive for the viruses on Friday said he didn’t fear it but his mom was worried about him and stayed up all night. Li said that she finds theviruses very scary.
Wang said that his mother was buying high-quality N95 masks and readying for a “nuclear winter” until a potential initial wave of cases passed.
Implications of new COVID-19 tests for urban health and the safety of citizens and businesses in the coming era of reopening
Many people in cities are watching to see how the guidelines are implemented as local authorities adjust.
In Beijing, authorities on Wednesday said a health code showing a negative Covid-19 test would still be required for dining in at restaurants or entering some entertainment venues – in conflict with the national guidelines.
Then, in the space of just a few days, this world of restrictions was quite literally dismantled. On November 30, the Covid-19 testing sites that for so long had dictated our movements were all closed. Soon after, it was announced that lockdowns would only be allowed in “high-risk areas,” allowing businesses outside those areas to resume. Furthermore, a Covid-19 test would no longer be required to enter them.
When and where to test people during an outbreak is ambiguous and open to interpretation by local governments, as are other aspects of the new rules.
Furthermore, the guidelines do not lift testing and quarantine requirements for international travellers, which “doesn’t have a rationale if the objective is no longer zero COVID”, says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.
Many people in China live in densely populated high-rise buildings, where it will be difficult to limit transmission. Allowing people to be indoors will make it harder to spread the disease, according to George Liu, a public health researcher. This could overwhelm hospitals.
The timing of the reopening is not ideal, say researchers. Winter is peak influenza season so hospitals will already be experiencing a rise in the number of patients. Many people are traveling to China for the spring festival and the lunar new year, which is increasing the spread of diseases according to an economist at Yale University.
China doesn’t have a strong system for primary medical care system, such as a network of general practitioners, so people go to hospital for mild conditions, says Xi Chen, who hopes more details on how the government plans to triage care will emerge in the coming days.
Without additional support, the easing of restrictions wouldn’t help businesses recover from lengthy lock-ups or remove the social stigma attached to COVID-19. “I’m afraid that the health and socio-economic risk will be passed on to individuals.”
Urgent guidance is needed on how to curb transmission during a surge, such as through mask mandates, work-from-home policies and temporary school closures, says Cowling. He says that it’s not certain how officials will track whether cities have passed or are about to pass the peak of aninfecting wave after the reduction in testing.
Researchers are concerned that hasty changes will not leave enough time to ramp up vaccination among older people. Currently, some 70% of people aged 60 or older, and 40% of those aged 80 or more, have received a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
The guidelines propose setting up mobile clinics, and training medical staff to address people’s safety concerns to boost vaccination. But they stop short of issuing vaccine mandates or introducing strong incentives for local governments to increase their vaccination rates, says Huang. Whether the inevitable rise in infections will lead to a spike in deaths remains to be seen. “The full impact remains to be unfolded,” he says.
Changes continued Monday as authorities announced a deactivation of the “mobile itinerary card” health tracking function planned for the following day.
Many Chinese people had raised concerns about the use of data collection and the idea of local governments banning entry for people who have visited a city with a high risk zone even if they weren’t in that city.
To investigate the Pandemic would encompass topics such as better detection of new pathogens, improvements to the public health system’s data collection apparatus, supply chain vulnerabilities and a lack of public trust.
Covid-19 Impact on China: State Media Report on Long Lines, National Health Commission and a Unnamed Expert: Implications for Public Health and Health Care in China
The China Youth Daily reported on long lines at a clinic in central Beijing on Friday and cited unnamed experts urging residents not to visit hospitals unless necessary.
A hospital official appealed to residents with mild or no symptoms who call the emergency services line not to do so due to a surge in emergency calls from Covid-positive residents.
The Beijing Emergency Center has seen a rise in the volume of emergency calls over the past few days, according to the official media.
In an interview with state media, a top Covid-19 expert claimed that the disease was spread quickly by Omicron versions in China.
“No matter how strong the prevention and control is, it will be difficult to completely cut off the transmission chain,” Zhong, who has been a key public voice since the earliest days of the pandemic in 2020, was quoted saying by Xinhua.
The rapid rollback of testing nationwide and the shift by many people to use antigen tests at home has also made it difficult to gauge the extent of the spread, with official data now appearing meaningless.
The surge in cases may be difficult to handle in China, after the surprise decision to lift its measures, following nationwide protests against the policy.
Zhong, in the state media interview, said the government’s top priority now should be booster shots, particularly for the elderly and others most at risk, especially with China’s Lunar New Year coming up next month – a peak travel time where urban residents visit elderly relatives and return to rural hometowns.
Enhancements to the medical staff for intensive care and setting up more clinics forfevers are two of the measures that China’s National Health Commission says should be undertaken.
Meanwhile, experts have warned a lack of experience with the virus – and years of state media coverage focusing on its dangers and impact overseas, before a recent shift in tone – could push those who are not in critical need to seek medical care, further overwhelming systems.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/china/china-zero-covid-impact-beijing-intl-hnk-mic/index.html
Lars Hamer: A Commentary on China’s Drastic Covid-19 Epidemics and Trends in the Weibo Social Media
China’s market watchdog said on Friday that there was a “temporary shortage” of some “hot-selling” drugs and vowed to crackdown on price gouging, while major online retailer JD.com last week said it was taking steps to ensure stable supplies after sales for certain medications surged 18 times that week over the same period in October.
A hashtag trending on China’s heavily moderated social media platform Weibo over the weekend featured a state media interview with a Beijing doctor saying people who tested positive for Covid-19 but had no or mild symptoms did not need to take medication to recover.
“People with asymptomatic inflections do not need medication at all. It is enough to rest at home, maintain a good mood and physical condition,” Li Tongzeng, chief infectious disease physician at Beijing You An Hospital, said in an interview linked to a hashtag viewed more than 370 million times since Friday.
The editor in chief of the China lifestyle magazine is Lars Hamer. He has lived in Guangzhou, China since 2018. His views are his own in this commentary. Follow him on Twitter @LarsHamer1. Read more opinion on CNN.
The knock every resident here dreads: the first time the Covid-19 ghost town turned into a bustling metropolis in Guangzhou
It’s the knock every resident here dreads. There was a loud bang at the door of my apartment in Guangzhou on Tuesday morning. Health care workers in hazmat suits were ordering everyone to go upstairs because a neighbor had tested positive for Covid-19, I was afraid immediately.
I had a reason to worry. Just one month ago, a teacher friend of mine and his colleagues were sent to centralized quarantine after one student at his school tested positive for Covid-19. I was scared the same thing was going to happen to me.
To my surprise, nothing of the sort. I failed the Covid-19 test, that was it. Before my result even came out, I was free to leave my house and go about my day, totally unrestricted.
My friend and I would have been labeled close contacts and powerless to escape the facility if this had happened a few weeks ago.
Almost overnight, Guangzhou, a city of some 15 million people, has been transformed from a Covid-19 ghost town back to the bustling metropolis I first encountered when I moved here five years ago.
Just look at the new measure forbidding the blocking of fire exits in the event of a lockdown, for example. People who are sick can be alone at home. Quarantine facilities are going to disappear soon.
Friends and families who had not seen each other for months gathered in bars and restaurants, and QR codes were being ripped down from walls; our movements no longer tracked.
In my experience, working late at night became the only way to go because non-essential businesses closed and millions of people were restricted to their homes. I too began to feel the strain and started considering leaving the country.
It was a moment of pure disbelief. There were over eight thousand cases in Guangzhou, the numbers were similar to the ones that caused a city-wide shut down in Shanghai in April.
The Covid Commission Planning Group: Comment on the Covid-19 Epidemic Report from the Department of Energy and the House Republican Intelligence Committee
One of the sources said that the new assessment from the Department of Energy is similar to information from a House Republican Intelligence Committee report released last year on the origins of the virus.
Some experts believe a broad-based examination of the Pandemic is too daunting. And even if a commission were established, it might have difficulty overcoming the intense partisanship surrounding Covid-19. The Sept. 11 panel was almost split after the 9/11 attacks because of partisan pressures. Philip D Zelikow is a historian and former government official. He stated that the problem is worse today.
“There’s no substitute for showing the vision that we showed in the early 2000s at creating an architecture that fixes things that we got wrong then, that addresses things that we didn’t think of then that we’ve learned, having gone through it,” said Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the health committee’s top Republican, who is sponsoring the measure with Ms. Murray.
The Covid Commission Planning Group is a privately funded effort involving more than three dozen experts who have spent the past two years researching and preparing for a national inquiry. The group, which has held several hundred interviews, grew tired of waiting for Congress and plans to publish its findings in a book this spring, Mr. Zelikow said. He declined to discuss details.
A quiet street in Beijing to end the pandemics? Vaccination and herbal medicines in the presence of public health measures after record highs
Infectious disease experts predict that pandemics will occur with increasing frequency, fueled by global travel, climate change and humans moving into closer proximity with animals. Biodefense experts say that pandemics are every bit as big a threat to national security as terrorist attacks. But the public may not see it that way.
China’s National Health Commission has scaled down its daily report after the government put anti-viruses measures on hold because they hit record highs.
The commission stopped publishing daily figures on cases where no symptoms are found since it was difficult to accurately grasp the actual number of people that have been bitten, according to a notice on the website. The only numbers they’re reporting are confirmed cases detected in public testing facilities.
The streets of Beijing have become so quiet that lines are forming outside clinics and at the pharmacy where cold and flu drugs are harder to find.
Despite a push to boost vaccinations among the elderly, two centers set up in Beijing to administer shots were empty Tuesday except for medical personnel. Despite fears of a major outbreak, there was little evidence of a surge in patient numbers.
At the China-Japan Friendship Hospital’s fever clinic in Beijing, a dozen people waited for nucleic acid test results. There are nurses in full-body white protective gear.
A few kilometers (miles) south, at Chaoyang Hospital, about a dozen people waited in a line of blue tents, deflecting winds amid subzero temperatures. One person in the queue took out a bottle of disinfectant and sprayed it around her as she waited.
Across the street at Gaoji Baikang Pharmacy, around a dozen people waited in line for cough medication and Chinese herbal remedies. A sign at the front told waiting customers: “Avoid panic and hoarding, we are doing all we can to stock up to fulfill your medicinal needs.” The man who came out bought a couple of packages of the Chinese remedy and told his customers that they couldn’t buy more than that.
Counting COVID-19 deaths in China’s cities, cities and hospitals: a public health expert warning against Xi’s resignation
Facing growing skepticism that it is downplaying Covid deaths, the Chinese government defended the accuracy of its official tally by revealing it had updated its method of counting fatalities caused by the virus.
Since Tuesday, the U.S. consulates in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang and the central city of Wuhan have been offering only emergency services “in response to increased number of COVID-19 cases,” the State Department said.
Hospitals have also reportedly been struggling to remain staffed, while packages were piling up at distribution points because of a shortage of China’s ubiquitous motorized tricycle delivery drivers.
Some Chinese universities say they will allow students to finish the semester from home in hopes of reducing the potential for a bigger COVID-19 outbreak during the January Lunar New Year travel rush.
The move follows the government’s dramatic announcement last week that it was ending many of the strictest measures, following three years during which it enforced some of the world’s tightest virus restrictions.
In Shanghai, protesters even demanded that Xi step down – an unimaginable act of political defiance toward the country’s most powerful and authoritarian leader in decades.
The doctor who made the misleading claims about the SARS outbreak is one of the more well-known public health experts. He went from touting China’s mass quarantine strategy in May to telling a state media outlet that he hasn’t seen cases of COVID-19 causing obvious long-term organ damage.
The majority of patients don’t have to be re-hospitalized for a long time. Most people will get reinsured every one to two years as protection against reinfection goes down over time.
When China Reverses Its Zero Covid Policy, Why Have We Don’t Know? An Online Commentary on “Confusion and Falsehoods Spread as China Has Not Solved Its COVID Infection
The Chinese internet was aware of the about-face. Posts juxtaposing several experts’ TV appearances before and after state policy change – including Zhong and Liang – have garnered more than 100,000 views.
Wu Fan, a member of Shanghai’s disease outbreak containment expert commission famous for insisting that Shanghai could not shut down is now receiving apologies online.
Whiplash aside, much of the online discussion has moved to how to deal with the aftermath of the policy change, including what preventative measures and treatments are available.
In the last few days, untried remedies have once again flourished. The method of rinsing out your mouth can be used daily by an internal medicine doctor from China’s prestigious Academy of Engineering. Commenters online were baffled. “Wasn’t salt water rinse debunked two years ago? Is it possible that iced version makes a difference?
A local government in southwest China suggested making tea out of orange peels and monk fruit – both common ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine – to prevent infection. Dr. Zhong has said that he hasn’t found any drugs that are effective in preventing a COVID infections.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1143413739/confusion-and-falsehoods-spread-as-china-reverses-its-zero-covid-policy
The Chinese Diaspora as a Tool for Sharing Information About COVID in the Light of China’s Decay Measurement of the Hospital Emergency Room
The uncertainty and chaos reminds Chen of the atmosphere early in 2020 when COVID was first spreading. It’s kind of flying in the dark.
Another challenge is that Chinese news outlets often translate COVID misinformation from English-language sources and share it with their audience. “The sources don’t matter if they are reliable or not,” says Huang. “They find something that they think would be of use to them and translate it into Chinese to spread it around, and it becomes viral.”
A recent example was how the Communist Party-controlled newspaper, The Global Times, cited a misleading report in the British tabloid, Daily Mail, that suggested without evidence that vaccine maker Moderna manufactured the virus. The coverage was extensively cited by The Global Times, which used it to attack the other theories of the virus’s origin. Other smaller social media accounts made videos of the report, putting “British Media” in the headlines.
Chen says that the Chinese diaspora has been useful to share information about their lives with people back in China who might not be as familiar with it.
She points out that while research and journalism focus on social media, many rural, elderly residents rely on television and family members in larger cities to stay informed. Many are vulnerable to the disease, live in places where healthcare resources are scarce, and aren’t adept at finding information on social media.
Mike Ryan said the current numbers released by China did not present the true impact of the disease, in terms of hospital and intensive care admissions and deaths.
As NPR reported, public health authorities don’t base their messages for the public entirely on science – many considerations are also pragmatic and culturally-based.
Chen says that scientists have some soul searching to do in the next couple of years. “If we know that politics is going to play a role in public health and also in science, how do we conduct ourselves? What [are] our ethics?”
The estimates follow China’s decision at the start of December to abruptly dismantle its strict zero-Covid policy which had been in place for almost three years.
The NHC did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Friday when the NHC meeting notes were leaked on Chinese social media; the authenticity of the document hasn’t been verified, but it has been seen by CNN.
The Financial Times said it was Sun Yang – a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention – who presented the figures to officials during the closed-door briefing, citing two people familiar with the matter.
China abandons its zero-Covid policy after months of protests and calls for massive cuts in the Chinese healthcare system – A news conference summary
The NHC reported only 62,592 cases of Covid in the first twenty days of December.
Wang Guiqang, a top infectious disease doctor, told a news conference that deaths caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure are classified as Covid deaths according to the NHC guidelines.
The minutes of the Wednesday closed-door NHC meeting made no reference to discussions concerning how many people may have died in China, according to both reports and the document CNN viewed.
State media reported Monday that Beijing will distribute Paxlovid to its community health centers in the coming days.
The state-run China News Service reported Monday that after receiving training, community doctors will administer the medicine to Covid-19 patients and give instructions on how to use them.
There is a worker at a local community health center that said it is not clear when the drugs will arrive.
After nearly three years of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing, China abruptly abandoned its zero-Covid policy this month following nationwide protests over its heavy economic and social toll.
The emergency room doctor in Beijing told the People’s Daily that he and four other doctors did not have enough time to eat or drink. “We have been seeing patients nonstop,” he said.
The doctor in the emergency room told the newspaper that even though he had become sick, he still continued to work. “The number of patients is high, and with fewer medical staff, the pressure is multiplied,” said the doctor.
A large number of health professionals from across the country have traveled to Beijing to aid the city’s medical system.
The 2022 Winter Olympics in China: A triumphant year for the Chinese government and the post-Omicron outbreak of the swine flu
2022 was supposed to be a triumphant year for China and its leader Xi Jinping, as he began his second decade in power with a pledge to restore the nation to greatness.
In its tightly sealed, meticulously managed Olympic bubble, the ubiquitous face masks, endless spraying of disinfectant and rigorous daily testing paid-off. Any infected visitors arriving in the country were swiftly identified and their cases contained, allowing the Winter Olympics to run largely free of Covid even as the Omicron variant raged around the world.
The party has long claimed that it has superior political systems than those in Western democracies in dealing with the swine flu, a message that was reinforced by the success of the event.
Having tied himself so closely to zero- Covid he was in danger of being trapped by himself. He couldn’t afford to move away from it, the potential surge of infections and deaths posing too great a risk to his authority before he secured his norm-shattering third term at the congress.
And so instead of vaccinating the elderly and bolstering ICU capacity, authorities wasted the next crucial months building larger quarantine facilities, rolling out more frequent mass testing, and imposing wider lockdowns that at one point affected more than 300 million people.
Then, in late November, a deadly apartment fire in the western city of Urumqi finally ignited public anger that had been simmering for months. Many believed lockdown measures had hampered rescue efforts, despite official denials.
There was a large scale of protests across the country. On university campuses and the streets of major cities, crowds gathered to call for an end to incessant Covid tests and lockdowns, with some decrying censorship and demanding greater political freedoms.
The nationwide demonstrations posed an unprecedented challenge to Xi. Omicron had spun out of control, with the country logging a daily record of more than 40,000 infections and the economic strain becoming too much for local governments to pay.
The abruptness of the easing of restrictions has left the unprepared public to fend for themselves, even though the relief was long-awaited.
The over-the-counter cold and fever medicines which were not allowed to be purchased under zero- Covid quickly sold out. Huge lines have formed outside fever clinics and hospital emergency rooms overflow with patients, many elderly. The Crematoriums are struggling with the amount of bodies.
Now, the true scale of the outbreak and deaths could deal a serious blow to the credibility of a government that had justified years of painful restrictions on the grounds that they were necessary to save lives.
Implications of the Covid-19 outbreak for the global supply chain and public health: China vs. the United States, the European Commission, and the World Health Organization
China’s foreign ministry responded Wednesday to reports that the US is considering imposing restrictions on travelers from China, urging parties to work together to ensure the safe movement of people between countries and the stability of the global supply chain.
The US and other countries around the world are worried about the case surge and possible steps to be taken to monitor it.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has called on European countries to set up random testing for travellers from China so that they can detect emerging versions of the disease. Other nations, including the US, Japan and Australia, have put in place policies for travellers from China.
The officials said the US was following the science and advice of public health experts, and considering taking steps to protect the American people.
China has also been criticized by the World Health Organization for its limited data transparency during the outbreak, including its earlier and more narrow definition of a Covid-19 death, which Chinese health officials updated in January.
“We continue to ask China for more rapid, regular, reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive, real-time viral sequencing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a media briefing in Geneva Wednesday.
There, the outbreak has overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums, triggered shortages of basic medicines, and sparked fears of an even darker month ahead as experts warn of a spread to less resourced rural areas during the upcoming Lunar New Year.
On Wednesday, the European Union “strongly encouraged” its member states to introduce a requirement for a negative Covid test for passengers traveling from China to the EU, according to a statement released by the Swedish presidency of the bloc.
The WHO’s Tedros said Wednesday it was “understandable” that some countries were taking these steps, “with circulation in China so high and comprehensive data not forthcoming.”
But the group and WHO officials continued to stress the need for more forthcoming genomic data. The UN body faced criticism at the start of the swine flu outbreak that it didn’t push China hard enough for data and that Beijing was hiding critical information. Beijing has repeatedly defended its transparency.
She said there was more information that needed to be shared around the country so that deeper analyses could be done. Access to the genomic data of different flu viruses can be obtained through a global initiative called GISAID.
Most nations also sequenced a representative sample of viruses from across the community, says Vitali Sintchenko, a microbiologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. In a study he co-authored, the researchers concluded that countries should aim to sequence 0.5% of COVID-19 cases and share those data within 21 days of collecting the samples. It’s 34% more likely for them to find a new lineage before it has 100 people.
But the testing landscape has changed drastically over the past year, says evolutionary virologist Verity Hill at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut. Broad-scale population-based screening was feasible in countries such as the United Kingdom because researchers could tap into samples collected at community-based PCR testing facilities. But in many countries authorities are no longer offering such services because of the expense and the decrease in demand, says Hill. People are choosing to self-test or not using a test at all.
Experts look for mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which allows the virus to enter host cells and is the main target of the body’s immune responses. A jump in the number of mutations in a new variant is one thing to watch out for, says Hill. “That’s a warning flag,” she says. The Omicron variant had many changes in its spikeProtein, after it first appeared.
If a variant is better at evading existing immune system protections, causes more severe disease or is much more transmissible than currently circulating variant, it is considered a new variant of concern by the World Health Organization.
Omicron not only contained many mutations, but also rapidly became a dominant variant in the population, suggesting it was spreading faster than, and out-competing, other variants in the community. The international community was warned about Omicron within days after the WHO designated it as a variant of concern. It was more than three weeks after the first Omicron sequence was deposited.
The Delta variant was designated a variant of concern in May 2021, seven months after the first known sample was collected in India. The first sign that there could be a concerning new variant around was a rapid rise in case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths in India at the start of 2021. “It’s connecting case counts and genetics as much as you can,” says Hill.
So far, most of the sequences that China has submitted to GISAID since the beginning of December belong to Omicron subvariants already in circulation elsewhere. There are five new lineages — descendants of those subvariants — but these are unlikely to gain a foothold outside China, because of pre-existing immunity.
It may be more likely that a variant that emerges in China could go undetected because of the decreased population-wide surveillance outside of China.
A researcher in China who asked to be anonymous said that the current polices in China were insufficient and that they were building their capacity and uploading more and more sequence to the internet.
The WHO has stopped planning phase- two after the high-profile trip. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but “that plan has changed”. She said politics across the world hampered progress on understanding the origins.
A new classified intelligence report states that the Covid-19 epidemic most likely came from a laboratory leak in China.
The WHO sent a circular to member states detailing how it would advance origins studies. Evaluating wild- animal markets in and around Wuhan and the farms that supplied those markets were among the proposed steps.
But Chinese officials rejected the WHO’s plans, taking particular issue with the proposal to investigate lab breaches. The WHO proposal was not approved by all member states, and the second phase should not focus on pathways that the report already found to be extremely unlikely, said the spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry.
The lab leak theory requires more study due to lack of answers about the origins of Covid-19. If only the Chinese cooperated.
The Scientific Advisory Group for the Origin of Novel Pathogens was formed in November of 2016 by the WHO and consists of permanent experts who have written proposals for how to conduct origins studies. SAGO has also evaluated evidence on the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Another study3 by researchers from China, which has not been peer reviewed, reported finding traces of SARS-CoV-2 in January and February 2020 at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, which was visited by many of the earliest known people with COVID-194. The surfaces of doors and market stalls were among the places where samples were taken. The researchers believed that the virus had been shed by humans, but others want to look at the data to see if they can identify animal species.
A public-health expert at the University of Copenhagen who was part of the mission to Wuhan says she hopes that progress will be made.
The first meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee on the zero-covid crisis is a reminder of the need to bolster health care
In the latest sign that the country wants to downplay the political repercussions from zero-covid, a closed-doors meeting of the ruling Communist Party’s top decision-making body made an assessment during Thursday’s meeting.
The years-long policy had generated widespread discontent – including rare nationwide protests – before it was scrapped in December amid rising economic costs, in a decision that caught the public off-guard.
The surge of cases were caused by the roll back of disease controls, causing hospitals to be overwhelmed and people to scramble for basic medicines. But the outbreak appears to have subsided in intensity in recent weeks, with official figures showing visits to fever clinics returning to levels below those of the period before restrictions were lifted after dropping from a peak in late December.
The Politburo Standing Committee said in its Thursday meeting that it had successfully pulled through a swine flu epidemic, according to a summary published by Xinhua.
But experts say the assessment – the first from China’s top leaders since the surge of cases has appeared to recede – merely serves to underscore the deep questions that remain about the impact of the outbreak on the country.
Around 80% of people in China had already been affected by the disease according to the chief Epidemiologist of the CDC.
Reported death figures have also declined, with China reporting just 912 hospital deaths for the week of February 3-9, according to the latest CDC reporting, which also says fatalities peaked on January 4 with a total of 4,273 deaths that day.
According to an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, it may not be good for the government to show us a more complete picture of the outbreak.
According to several international reports, the death toll has risen to up to a million over the past two months. He said that people are going to ask how much the government could have spent on this outcome if we had not done it.
Chinese leaders were in control of the narrative after the surge had died down, according to Huang.
The abrupt policy U-turn that created credibility crisis is over, so there is no longer uncertainty surrounding the outbreak, and there is need to reconcile the conflicting narrative.
The Politburo Standing Committee referenced the need to continue to bolster health care in its meeting, according to the Xinhua summary, which said the body “urged all localities and departments to optimize related mechanisms and measures, strengthen the medical service system,” and called for planning for the next phase of vaccinations and enhancing medical supplies.
“Covid is still around and will be with us for much, much longer,” he said. “After this tsunami, still they have the new challenge of strengthening the health care system.”
The Department of Energy’s latest intelligence assessment and its implication for the lab leak theory of Covid19: Rep. Michael McCaul
The agency based their conclusion on classified evidence that isn’t available to the public. The government defines low confidence to be: ” 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 is the federal government’s website.
It is not known what changed the demeanor of the Department of Energy officials involved in the assessment, but it has not swayed the majority of intelligence agencies.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a report in the year 2021, which found that the initial Covid19 infections were likely caused by natural exposure to an animal.
The DOE office is one of 18 government agencies that make up the intelligence community, which are under the umbrella of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The latest intelligence assessment was provided to Congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pushing for further investigation into the lab leak theory, while accusing the Biden administration of playing down its possibility.
“I’m pleased the Department of Energy has finally reached the same conclusion that I had already come to,” Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.
“I have requested a full and thorough briefing from the administration on this report and the evidence behind it,” the Texas Republican said in a statement.
The committee thinks that after years of trying to integrate China peacefully into the global system as a competitor, not an enemy, the US is changing its mind and is now trying to dismantle the US global order.
We need to do a lot of hearings. I hope our Democratic colleagues in the Congress can support that. The Senate member said that the Republicans in the House were in favor of it.
The COVID-19 pandemic did not start in a caged wild animal at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in China, as noted by State Department spokesman Ned Price
Such definitive statements, based on one assessment, do not recognize that the US intelligence community is still divided over the matter. Many Republicans have long been seeking to prove that the epidemic was a conspiracy by China to spread the disease around and that Trump was negligent in handling it.
The House Oversight Committee is reviewing the classified information provided by the Office of the Director of National intelligence in response to a letter requesting information, according to a statement released by a committee spokesman.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the intelligence community remains divided on the matter, while noting that President Joe Biden has put resources into getting to the bottom of the origin question.
So why does it matter where Covid-19 came from? As Relman, the Stanford microbiologist, previously noted to CNN, finding the answer can help prevent the next pandemic.
The FBI Director told Fox News that the FBI had assessed the origin of the pandemic and that it may have been caused by a lab incident.
The intelligence community elements were not able to coalesce around either explanation without additional information.
On Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry stated that the lab leak theory holds no credibility.
State Department spokesman Ned Price, in separate comments to reporters, accused China of “blocking from the beginning international investigators and members of the global health community from accessing information that they need to understand the origins of Covid-19.”
Two peer-reviewed papers in the journal Science were the strongest evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic started in animals at the market in China. Specifically, they conclude that the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019.
The Intelligence Warfare: Why the US and China are Wrong, and Why We Are Trying to Win in Wall-to-Beck
But she said it’s important to look at the entire analysis of the intelligence community, which is based on evidence. And the evidence does not conclusively point to any one theory.
The two sides have clashed over China’s use of alleged spy balloons over the U.S.; its policy toward Russia and Ukraine; its belligerence toward Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province; and the apparent dangers of TikTok.
This trio of confrontations – along with rising tensions between US and Chinese forces in Asia and escalating standoffs over Taiwan – are dramatizing a long-building and once theoretical superpower rivalry that is suddenly a daily reality.
It is in this politicized atmosphere that the GOP-controlled House is debuting a new bipartisan select committee on competition with China during a primetime hearing on Tuesday night, just as Washington-Beijing tensions have rarely been worse.
The recent news that the Department of Energy believes that Covid-19 most likely originated from a laboratory leak in China, shows that there is a divide in the US government.
The Wisconsin Republican said that they wanted to understand what they had wrong in the Chinese Communist Party and how to get their policy right.
On CBS News on Sunday, Gallagher warned: “We may call this a strategic competition, but it’s not a tennis match. This is about what type of world we want to live in. Do we want to live in a world that is free or do we want to live in something else? China continues to deny that it has inflicted genocide on the Uyghur minority in China, despite accusations from the US.
The committee may be one of the few areas where a divided Congress – and potentially the White House – can find common ground. The stance of the Biden administration was reinforced by Trump later in his presidency. President Joe Biden, for instance, last year signed a new law that will allow the government to spend $200 billion in a bid to claim the leadership of the semiconductor chips industry – a critical sector that could decide the economic race between the US and China in decades to come.
The End of the Wall Street Journal: How DO we see the evidence for zoonotic origin and what evidence of human origin do they tell us about the lab?
Virologist Angela Rasmussen, who contributed to one of the Science papers, says the DOE’s “low confident” conclusion doesn’t “negate the affirmative evidence for zoonotic [or animal] origin nor do they add any new information in support of lab origin.”
Republicans didn’t take long to claim political victory in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report about new intelligence causing the Department of Energy to think a lab leak was to blame. Marjorie Taylor King, who has been accused of spread conspiracy theories about the world, said on her verified account: “Conspiracy theorists – 100 Media – 0.”
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas tweeted: “Re. It doesn’t matter if the lab leak is proven right or not. The Chinese Communist Party needs to be held accountable so that this doesn’t happen again.
The issue has once again become an excuse for the Republicans to target scientists and government health experts, and to twist a story about Covid-19 that still has massive gaps.
China did not have to pay for its support of Russia. This (would be) the first time – it is a very important crossroads,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council, said on CNN Monday.
This new front in US-China antagonism is also beginning to seep into US politics. While being tough on Beijing is a bipartisan position, the idea of a broadened conflict in Ukraine conflicts with the more limited view of US power projection abroad among “America First” Republicans. Traditional hawks like Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell strongly support even more US aid for Ukraine, but some conservatives like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – a likely 2024 contender – have warned against escalating conflict. He mentioned potential Chinese involvement in a rare foreign policy comment last week.
His comments were a reminder that everything in Washington is ultimately political. tortured US relations with China is one of the most politicized issues.
Why is the Covid-19 pandemic so bad? Reply to Ranney and Fauci in the House of Representatives from the House Intelligence Committee
Most of the intelligence community still leans toward the natural occurrence theory that scientific investigations are most likely to conclude. But without conclusive evidence, no one has been able to reject the lab leak theory entirely.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the U.S. Department of Energy has changed its mind about the origin of COVID. A laboratory leak in China is believed to be the cause of the epidemic.
Although details of what led to the Department of Energy assessment are not yet public, US lawmakers who pushed the lab leak theory seized on reporting about it.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri demanded more information about the Department of Energy’s assessment and promised to push for more such reports to be declassified.
Dr. Anthony Fauci – the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whom Republicans have told they will call before Congress to testify about the origins of the disease – has consistently repeated he believes the virus most likely occurred naturally, since other, similar viruses have evolved that way.
“We have never had a Covid commission like the 9/11 Commission,” he said. I think we need it. Because more Americans have died of Covid than have died in every American war since the American Revolution, which is an astonishing number; that is a major national security issue.”
John King asked Megan Ranney, deputy dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, why it matters if the virus came from there.
“Regardless, we know the next step,” Ranney said. “While we’re focusing on where Covid-19 started, we’re not spending time about how to keep America from ever having to go through the last three years again.”
Covid-19: How lab leaks are being investigated in China, and how the DOF should be concerned about its investigation and the implication for laboratory safety
King talked to Sanner, who was the deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration during the Trump administration.
The bureau director said that the Chinese government has been trying to obstruct the work here. The work being done by the US government and foreign partners. And that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
She said that it wasn’t just taking information and taking a feeling that turned it into analysis. We don’t know yet because we are doing a rigorous process. The evidence isn’t there.”
The FBI believes that the Covid-19 pandemic was most likely caused by a lab accident in China.
Wray said in the interview that the FBI has a team of experts who focus specifically on the risk of biological threats that come into the “wrong hands,” including by a “hostile nation state.”
Filippa Lentzos of King’s College London is one of the leaders of the discussion of lab safety. At the Nuclear Threat Initiative, there is a proposal for a joint assessment mechanism that would automatically start an investigation of the origins of a novel outbreak. The disgraced former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried briefly managed to elevate lab safety into a significant preoccupation on Capitol Hill, but even then, it barely captured a sliver of public attention. The most recent reliable polling seems to show that more than half of Americans think that there is a link between the virus and a lab.
Wray said that most details of the FBI’s investigation remain classified, and that it has been difficult to work with the Chinese government on investigating the pandemic’s origin.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs pushed against the Department of Energy’s updated assessment during a briefing on Monday, with spokesperson Mao Ning saying that “the parties concerned should stop stirring up arguments about laboratory leaks, stop smearing China and stop politicizing the issue of the virus origin.”
And yet the government does not even maintain a truly comprehensive database of where such experiments are taking place, let alone practice any rigorous oversight of them. There are different standards for crude risk categorization and funding source. It’s a system that Koblentz, in an interview alongside Lentzos, described to me as “a total crazy patchwork quilt of rules” giving rise to a “big zone of uncertainty” about which labs are doing what kinds of work under whose oversight and with what level of security and precaution. There is a patchwork governance and oversight structure around the world. And to judge by the number of places doing those experiments, the risks may be growing in the wake of the pandemic, not shrinking.
“Many other [news] outlets are presenting this as new conclusive proof that the lab origin hypothesis is equally as plausible as the zoonotic origin hypothesis,” Rasmussen wrote in an email to NPR, “and that is a misrepresentation of the evidence for either.”
What does the science tell us about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic? A panel discussion with Michael Worobey
So now we know that when the national public health authorities shut down the market and then sampled the surfaces there, one of the surfaces positive for SARS-CoV-2 was a metal cage in a back room.
When the studies were first published online, NPR spoke to Worobey, who’s at the University of Arizona, to understand what the data tells us about the origin of SARS-CoV-2; how, he believes, the data may shift the debate about the lab-leak theory; and the significance of photos taken five years before the pandemic. Key points have been edited for clarity and length.
There was a big outbreak of contagious diseases at the market. Hundreds of people, working and shopping at the market, were likely infected. That outbreak is the first documented one of the pandemic, and it then spilled over into the community, as one of the Science papers shows.
Evolutionary theorist Michael Worobey has been at the forefront of the search for the source of the Pandemic. The origins of the 1918 flu and HIV have been tracked by him.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162845/what-does-the-science-say-about-the-origin-of-the-sars-cov-2-pandemic
A photometric evidence of COVID in a seafood market: Where will the first cluster of respiratory infections appear in Wuhan? The case of red foxes
The wild animals, including red foxes, were in the market. We have photographic evidence from December 2019. A concerned customer evidently took these photos and videos of the market on Dec. 3 and posted them on Weibo [because it was illegal to sell certain live animals]. The photos were promptly scrubbed. But a CNN reporter had communicated directly with the person who took the photos. I was contacted by this reporter and they gave me the photos from the source. So we don’t completely verify the photos.
We discovered that one stall had five positive samples, and that all five of them had virus on them. The samples were very similar to animals. In another example, scientists found a virus on a feather and a metal cage in a back room, both items that are used for transporting cages.
We found that he took the photo at the same stall, where five samples were positive for the disease, because we checked the gps coordinates on his camera.
You don’t have a chance of linking the early cases to the site where the outbreak started, as a result of a Viruses that cause no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people. The virus is going to spread fast outside of where it started.
And yet, from the clinical observations in Wuhan, around half of the earliest known COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. There is an even closer geographical association to the market for the other cases. That’s what we show in our paper.
There are thousands of other places that are also likely to be where a new pathogen shows up. Out of 10,000 other places, only four sell live animals, and in Wuhan, it’s one of them. If you’re not surprised by that, then I don’t think you’re understanding the unlikelihood that that presents.
In retrospect, where will the first cluster of a new respiratory infections appear in this city? It could appear at a market. But it could also appear at a school, a university or a meatpacking plant.
The odds would be 1 in 10,000. But it’s interesting. There is an analysis that shows the likelihood of having a clustering of cases around the market being 1 in 10 million. [if the market isn’t a source of the virus]. We view that strong evidence in science as valid.
And the data zeroing in on the Huanan market, to me, is as compelling as the data that indicated to John Snow that the water pump was poisoning people who used it. In the 19th century, John Snow was a doctor in London and helped establish the field of outbreak investigations after he discovered the source of a disease in the city.
Sometimes you have these rare moments where you’re maybe the only person on Earth who has access to this kind of crucial information. As I just started to figure out that there were more cases around the market than you can expect randomly — I felt that way. And no exaggeration, that moment — those kinds of moments — bring a tear to your eye.
The 9/11 Commission: The U.S., the National Counter Terrorism Center and the FBI’s assessment of the ‘Covid-19′ tragedy’
“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government seems to me has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here … and that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
And the FBI’s assessment is far from universal. Five U.S. intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council agree that COvid emerged through natural transmission.
Peter Bergen is a CNN analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The author makes his own comments in this commentary. CNN has more opinion on it.
Consider that almost as many Americans have died of Covid-19 already – some 1.1 million – as have died in every war since the American Revolution. If that is not a significant national security problem, I don’t know what is.
The United States hasn’t had a systematic examination of how this happened. The whole issue of the epidemic is politicized and the debates about whether the George W. Bush administration could have done a better job of stopping the 9/11 attacks were alsopoliticized.
The commission to investigate 9/11 was blocked by the Bush administration. Following intense public pressure, the administration finally agreed to allow a commission to be formed more than a year after the attacks.
The 9/11 commission made a lot of recommendations that made Americans safer, including the creation of a National Counter terrorism Center that would coordinate all counterterrorism intelligence and the creation of a new office of the director of the FBI.