The Associated Press reports that in the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.
President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.
Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan. 13, to get leaders in Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases — distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients, all without telling the public.
The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference. Some of the memo’s contents also appeared in a public notice about the teleconference, stripped of key details and published in February.
Under a section titled “sober understanding of the situation,” the memo said that “clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible.” It singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had “changed significantly” because of the possible spread of the virus abroad.
“With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high,” the memo continued. “All localities must prepare for and respond to a pandemic.”
In the memo, Ma demanded officials unite around Xi and made clear that political considerations and social stability were key priorities during the long lead-up to China’s two biggest political meetings of the year in March. While the documents do not spell out why Chinese leaders waited six days to make their concerns public, the meetings may be one reason.
“The imperatives for social stability, for not rocking the boat before these important Party congresses is pretty strong,” says Daniel Mattingly, a scholar of Chinese politics at Yale. “My guess is, they wanted to let it play out a little more and see what happened.”
In response to the teleconference, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing initiated the highest-level emergency response internally, level one, on Jan. 15. It assigned top CDC leaders to 14 working groups tasked with getting funds, training health workers, collecting data, doing field investigations and supervising laboratories, an internal CDC notice shows. The memo directed Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, to begin temperature checks at airports, bus and train stations, and cut down on large public gatherings.
The National Health Commission also distributed a 63-page set of instructions to provincial health officials, obtained by the AP. The instructions ordered health officials nationwide to identify suspected cases, hospitals to open fever clinics, and doctors and nurses to don protective gear. They were marked “internal” — “not to be spread on the internet,” “not to be publicly disclosed.”
In public, however, officials continued to downplay the threat, pointing to the 41 cases public at the time.
Paul Plante says
This is the same Associated Press which served us up the hysteria-mongering news article entitled “‘We’re all in big trouble’: Climate panel sees a dire future” by the master hysteria mongerer Seth Borenstein on September 25, 2019, which screamed out at us that the IPCC, which is a political lash-up prostituting science to create HYSTERIA in the public at large to make them “tractable” and therefore, easy to manipulate with falsehoods, warned that if steps aren’t taken to reduce emissions and slow global warming, seas will rise 3 feet by the end of the century, with many fewer fish, less snow and ice, stronger and wetter hurricanes and other, nastier weather systems, right?
More sloppy and questionable reporting on their part, I would say, which is not at all surprising, because the first Health Advisory Network advisory notification that was distributed to state and local health officers, state and local epidemiologists, state and local laboratory directors, public information officers, HAN coordinators, and clinician organizations by the CDC was on 8 January 2020, to wit:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This is an official CDC Health Advisory
Distributed via the CDC Health Alert Network
January 8, 2020, 1615 ET (04:15 PM ET)
CDCHAN-00424
Summary
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is closely monitoring a reported cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology (PUE) with possible epidemiologic links to a large wholesale fish and live animal market in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China.
end quotes
“Etiology” means the cause, set of causes, or manner of causation of a disease or condition, and on 8 January 2020, nobody yet knew that COVID-19 was a distinct virus, precisely because its symptoms are very similar to those of the flu and other known viral outbreaks.
According to a ScienceDaily update entitled “COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin” on March 17, 2020, the source of which was the Scripps Research Institute, we had as follows:
On December 31 of last year, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization of an outbreak of a novel strain of coronavirus causing severe illness, which was subsequently named SARS-CoV-2.
Shortly after the epidemic began, Chinese scientists sequenced the genome of SARS-CoV-2 and made the data available to researchers worldwide.
The resulting genomic sequence data has shown that Chinese authorities rapidly detected the epidemic and that the number of COVID-19 cases have been increasing because of human to human transmission after a single introduction into the human population.
end quotes
A lot of words there and much to think about, so it is no wonder the Associated Press missed all of that, plus it doesn’t serve to create hysteria, so of course, they would ignore it as too boring.
Getting back to the CDC alert on 8 January 2020, because regardless of what Chinese President Xi Jinping might have said or done, or didn’t say, or didn’t do, and who really cares, anymore, to be truthful, the fact of the matter is that public health professionals in this country, where the ball was dropped big time, because our public health infrastructure is a big ******* joke, were alerted that something serious was brewing in the world with implications for here, to wit:
An outbreak investigation by local officials is ongoing in China; the World Health Organization (WHO) is the lead international public health agency.
Currently, there are no known U.S. cases nor have cases been reported in countries other than China.
CDC has established an Incident Management Structure to optimize domestic and international coordination if additional public health actions are required.
This HAN Advisory informs state and local health departments and health care providers about this outbreak and requests that health care providers ask patients with severe respiratory disease about travel history to Wuhan City.
end quotes
Now, how much plainer could the English have been to our public health professionals?
And no, Donald Trump had absolutely no role to play here, people, regardless of what the Democrats and Andy Cuomo of New York are saying, because he is not a public health official, and as a politician, he would have only gotten himself in the way, which takes us back to the CDC public health alert, as follows:
Wuhan City is a major transportation hub about 700 miles south of Beijing with a population of more than 11 million people.
Background
According to a report from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, as of January 5, 2020, the national authorities in China have reported 59 patients with PUE to WHO.
The patients had symptom onset dates from December 12 through December 29, 2019.
Patients involved in the cluster reportedly have had fever, dyspnea, and bilateral lung infiltrates on chest radiograph.
Of the 59 cases, seven are critically ill, and the remaining patients are in stable condition.
No deaths have been reported and no health care providers have been reported to be ill.
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission has not reported human-to-human transmission.
Reports indicate that some of the patients were vendors at the Wuhan South China Seafood City (South China Seafood Wholesale Market) where, in addition to seafood, chickens, bats, marmots, and other wild animals are sold, suggesting a possible zoonotic origin to the outbreak.
The market has been closed for cleaning and disinfection.
Local authorities have reported negative laboratory test results for seasonal influenza, avian influenza, adenovirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV), and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) among patients associated with this cluster.
Additional laboratory testing is ongoing to determine the source of the outbreak.
end quotes
When confronted with something new, like COVID, which has symptoms similar to all of the above diseases which were first tested for, given that they are known to exist, there is going to be a time lag as other sources are crossed off the list by testing.
Getting back to the CDC report:
Health authorities are monitoring more than 150 contacts of patients for illness.
CDC has issued a level 1 travel notice (“practice usual precautions”) for this destination. (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/wa … onia-china).
On January 5, 2020, WHO posted an update on this situation, including an early risk assessment, which is available at: https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january- … n/external icon.
end quotes
We didn’t know because we were asleep at the switch, and we were asleep at the switch because there is absolutely no accountability for public health officials in this country who are often nothing more than party hacks rewarded for party loyalty by comfy sinecures in the party patronage system.
We reap exactly what we sow, and when what we sow are the seeds of worthless weeds, a crop of crap is our harvest, which takes us back to the meat of the CDC alert as follows:
Recommendations for Health Care Providers
1. Providers should consider pneumonia related to the cluster for patients with severe respiratory symptoms who traveled to Wuhan since December 1, 2019 and had onset of illness within two weeks of returning, and who do not have another known diagnosis that would explain their illness.
Providers should notify infection control personnel and local and state health departments immediately if any patients meet these criteria.
State health departments should notify CDC after identifying a case under investigation by calling CDC’s Emergency Operations Center at (770) 488-7100.
2. Multiple respiratory tract specimens should be collected from persons with infections suspected to be associated with this cluster, including nasopharyngeal, nasal, and throat swabs.
Patients with severe respiratory disease also should have lower respiratory tract specimens collected, if possible.
Consider saving urine, stool, serum, and respiratory pathology specimens if available.
3. Although the etiology and transmissibility have yet to be determined, and to date, no human-to-human transmission has been reported and no health care providers have been reported ill, CDC currently recommends a cautious approach to symptomatic patients with a history of travel to Wuhan City.
Such patients should be asked to wear a surgical mask as soon as they are identified and be evaluated in a private room with the door closed.
Personnel entering the room to evaluate the patient should use contact precautions and wear an N95 disposable facepiece respirator.
For patients admitted for inpatient care, contact and airborne isolation precautions, in addition to standard precautions, are recommended until further information becomes available.
This guidance will be updated as more information becomes available.
Stuart Bell says
Those Coolies are not our friends….never have been, never will.
Paul Plante says
I truly think the Coolies would be the very first people on earth to agree with you on that sentiment, Stuart Bell.
They didn’t cross the Yalu back when for the purpose of bonding and being buddies with those Marines up around the frozen Chosin.
They came down with the express purpose of killing them.
Same over on the west side of the mountains in North Korea where they mauled and overran those Army troops.
No acts of friendship involved.
It goes back to some residual hostility they have for us as a result of the Opium Wars.