# CNN: CDC director says some coronavirus-related deaths have been found posthumously



## LKJ86

*CDC director says some coronavirus-related deaths have been found posthumously *

During the House Oversight Committee discussion on the novel coronavirus response, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said some deaths from coronavirus have been discovered posthumously. 

Rep. Harley Rouda asked CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield if it’s possible that some flu patients may have been misdiagnosed and actually had coronavirus.

"The standard practice is the first thing you do is test for influenza, so if they had influenza they would be positive," Redfield said.

Rouda then asked Redfield if they are doing posthumous testing.

Redfield said there has been "a surveillance system of deaths from pneumonia, that the CDC has; it’s not in every city, every state, every hospital.”

Rouda followed up and asked, “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”

The doctor replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.” 

Source:https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-...0-intl-hnk/h_1319f66f92245a2fe4ec63fe91ab66c9

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## 大汉奸柳传志

Which means coronavirus may have existed in the US long before it appeared in Wuhan

CDC failed to identify the virus strain due to negligence or sheer incompetence.

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## LKJ86



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## LKJ86

MARCH 12, 2020 / 12:29 AM
*Reuters Exclusive: White House told federal health agency to classify coronavirus deliberations – sources*
Aram Roston, Marisa Taylor
Source:https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...ronavirus-deliberations-sources-idUSKBN20Y2LM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials.

The officials said that dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room at the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), a key player in the fight against the coronavirus.

Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings, which included video conference calls, the sources said.

“We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,” one official said. “These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary.”

The sources said the National Security Council (NSC), which advises the president on security issues, ordered the classification.”This came directly from the White House,” one official said.

The White House insistence on secrecy at the nation’s premier public health organization, which has not been previously disclosed, has put a lid on certain information - and potentially delayed the response to the crisis. COVID19, the disease caused by the virus, has killed about 30 people in the United States and infected more than 1,000 people.

HHS oversees a broad range of health agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which among other things is responsible for tracking cases and providing guidance nationally on the outbreaks.

The administration officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said they could not describe the interactions in the meeting room because they were classified.

An NSC spokesman did not respond to questions about the meetings at HHS. But he defended the administration’s transparency across federal agencies and noted that meetings of the administration’s task force on the coronavirus all are unclassified. It was not immediately clear which meetings he was referring to.

“From day one of the response to the coronavirus, NSC has insisted on the principle of radical transparency,” said the spokesman, John Ullyot. He added that the administration “has cut red tape and set the global standard in protecting the American people under President Trump’s leadership.”

A spokeswoman for HHS, Katherine McKeogh, issued a statement that did not address questions about classified meetings. Using language that echoed the NSC’s, the department said it that it agreed task-force meetings should be unclassified.

Critics have hammered the Trump administration for what they see as a delayed response to coronavirus outbreaks and a lack of transparency, including sidelining experts and providing misleading or incomplete information to the public. State and local officials also have complained of being kept in the dark about essential federal response information.

U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence, the administration’s point person on coronavirus, vowed on March 3 to offer “real-time information in a steady pace and be fully transparent.” The vice president, appointed by President Donald Trump in late February, is holding regular news briefings and also has pledged to rely on expert guidance. Katie Miller, Pence’s press secretary, said Wednesday that since being appointed the vice president has never requested that HHS hold meetings in the SCIF or treat information as classified.

The meetings at HHS were held in a secure area called a “Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility,” or SCIF, according to the administration officials.

SCIFs are usually reserved for intelligence and military operations. Ordinary cell phones and computers can’t be brought into the chambers. HHS has SCIFs because theoretically it would play a major role in biowarfare or chemical attacks.

A high-level former official who helped address public health outbreaks in the George W. Bush administration said “it’s not normal to classify discussions about a response to a public health crisis.”

Attendees at the meetings included HHS Secretary Alex Azar and his chief of staff Brian Harrison, the officials said. Azar and Harrison resisted the classification of the meetings, the sources said.

HHS did not make Azar or Harrison available for comment.

One of the administration officials told Reuters that when complex issues about a quarantine came up, a high-ranking HHS lawyer with expertise on the issue was not admitted because he did not have the proper security clearance. His input was delayed and offered at an unclassified meeting, the official said.

A fifth source familiar with the meetings said HHS staffers often weren’t informed about coronavirus developments because they didn’t have adequate clearance. He said he was told that the matters were classified “because it had to do with China.”

The coronavirus epidemic originated in China and the administration’s main focus to prevent spread early on was to restrict travel by non-U.S. citizens coming from China and to authorize the quarantine of people entering the United States who may have been exposed to the virus.

One of the administration officials suggested the security clearances for meetings at HHS were imposed not to protect national security but to keep the information within a tight circle, to prevent leaks.

“It seemed to be a tool for the White House - for the NSC - to keep participation in these meetings low,” the official said.

Two Democratic senators, both senior members of the Intelligence Committee expressed dismay Wednesday in statements to Reuters.

“Pandemics demand transparency and competence,” said Mark Warner of Virginia. “Classification authority should never be abused in order to hide what the government is doing, or not doing, just to satisfy domestic political concerns.”

Ron Wyden of Oregon said: “The executive branch needs to immediately come forward and explain whether the White House hid information from the American people as a result of bogus classification.”

_Roston and Taylor reported from Washington, D.C.; Richard Cowan contributed reporting; Editing by Julie Marquis_

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## beijingwalker

LKJ86 said:


> Rouda followed up and asked, “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”
> 
> The doctor replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”



I believe this number is huge.

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## LKJ86

A latest research paper about coronavirus from Japan:








Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.08802

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## beijingwalker

LKJ86 said:


> A latest research paper about coronavirus from Japan:
> View attachment 613026


It proved what I always believe, at last the coronavirus in US has been always there ,not imported from China.

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## LKJ86

beijingwalker said:


> It proved what I always believe, at last the coronavirus in US has been always there ,not imported from China.


You can read the paper, and it is interesting.

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## LKJ86

*NBC News: Congressional doctor expects 70M to 150M people in U.S. will contract coronavirus*
Julie Tsirkin
2:42 AM CST
Source:https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heal...00-spread-n1155241/ncrd1155736#liveBlogHeader

The attending physician of Congress and the Supreme Court, Brian Monahan, briefed Senate staff on Tuesday afternoon in a closed-door meeting and said that he expects 70 million to 150 million people in the U.S. will contract the coronavirus, two sources tell NBC News.

The meeting didn't include any senators but was for administrative staff and personnel from both parties. Monahan briefed staff on how they can keep healthy and ways to prevent the virus from spreading, including not shaking hands, advice that is not being followed by some senators, as we’ve seen this week.

In addition to getting briefed on prevention and treatment, staffers asked questions, including if any travel restrictions should be put in place for members. On international travel, Monahan said members should not go if they don’t have to, whereas for domestic travel, no restrictions have been put in place.

Monahan also told staffers that, right now, coronavirus testing would be administered only to members of Congress, and that staff should go to their doctors if they are experiencing any symptoms.

Monahan also told staffers that ultimately, 80 percent of those who contract the coronavirus will be fine.

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## Hamartia Antidote

大汉奸柳传志 said:


> Which means coronavirus may have existed in the US long before it appeared in Wuhan
> 
> CDC failed to identify the virus strain due to negligence or sheer incompetence.



It could have also existed in China long before Wuhan too. It was only some Doctor in Wuhan that tipped you guys off of a problem (and almost silenced too) otherwise you'd be treating them all as the flu.

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## LKJ86

*NYT: ‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response*
_A series of missed chances by the federal government to ensure more widespread testing came during the early days of the outbreak, when containment would have been easier._

By Sheri Fink and Mike Baker
March 10, 2020
Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html

Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time.

In late January, the first confirmed American case of the coronavirus had landed in her area. Critical questions needed answers: Had the man infected anyone else? Was the deadly virus already lurking in other communities and spreading?

As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.

To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.

By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.

What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.

“It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.”

In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days.

Federal and state officials said the flu study could not be repurposed because it did not have explicit permission from research subjects; the labs were also not certified for clinical work. While acknowledging the ethical questions, Dr. Chu and others argued there should be more flexibility in an emergency during which so many lives could be lost. On Monday night, state regulators told them to stop testing altogether.

The failure to tap into the flu study, detailed here for the first time, was just one in a series of missed chances by the federal government to ensure more widespread testing during the early days of the outbreak, when containment would have been easier. Instead, local officials across the country were left to work in the dark as the crisis grew undetected and exponentially.

Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus. The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C.

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview on Friday that acting quickly was critical for combating an outbreak. “Time matters,” he said.

He insisted that despite the rocky start, there was still time to beat back the coronavirus in the United States. “It’s going to take rigorous, aggressive public health — what I like to say, block and tackle, block and tackle, block and tackle, block and tackle,” he said. “That means if you find a new case, you isolate it.”

But the Seattle Flu Study illustrates how existing regulations and red tape — sometimes designed to protect privacy and health — have impeded the rapid rollout of testing nationally, while other countries ramped up much earlier and faster. Faced with a public health emergency on a scale potentially not seen in a century, the United States has not responded nimbly.

The C.D.C.’s own effort to create a system for monitoring the virus around the country, using established government surveillance networks for the flu, has not yet built steam. And as late as last week, after expanding authorizations for commercial and academic institutions to make tests, administration officials provided conflicting accounts of when a significant increase in tests would be available.

In states like Maine, Missouri and Michigan, where there are few or no known infections, state public health officials say they have more than enough tests to meet demand.

But it remains unclear how many Americans have been tested for the coronavirus. The C.D.C. says approximately 8,500 specimens or nose swabs have been taken since the beginning of the outbreak — a figure that is almost certainly larger than the number of people tested since one person can have multiple swabs. By comparison, South Korea, which discovered its first case around the same time as the United States, has reported having the capacity to test roughly 10,000 people a day since late February.


*A prime mission*
As soon as the genetic sequence of the coronavirus was published in January, the C.D.C.’s first job was to develop a diagnostic test. “That’s our prime mission,” Dr. Redfield said, “to get eyes on this thing.”

The agency also released criteria for deciding which individuals should be tested for the virus — at first only those who had a fever and respiratory issues and had traveled from the outbreak’s origin in Wuhan, China.

The criteria were so strict that the sick man in the Seattle area who had visited Wuhan did not meet it. Still, worried state health officials pushed to get him checked, and the C.D.C. agreed. Local officials sent a sample to Atlanta and the results came backpositive.

Officials monitored 70 people who were in contact with the man, including 50 who consented to getting nose swabs, and none tested positive for the coronavirus. But there was still the possibility that someone had been missed, said Dr. Scott Lindquist, the state epidemiologist for communicable diseases.

Around this time, the Washington State Department of Health began discussions with the Seattle Flu Study already going on in the state.

But there was a hitch: The flu project primarily used research laboratories, not clinical ones, and its coronavirus test was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And so the group was not certified to provide test results to anyone outside of their own investigators. They began discussions with state, C.D.C. and F.D.A. officials to figure out a solution, according to emails and interviews.

Dr. Scott F. Dowell, a former high-ranking C.D.C. official and a current deputy director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds the Seattle Flu Study, asked for help from the leaders of the C.D.C.’s coronavirus response. “Hoping there is a solution,” he wrote on Feb. 10.

Later, Dr. Lindquist, the state epidemiologist in Washington, wrote an email to Dr. Alicia Fry, the chief of the C.D.C.’s epidemiology and prevention branch, requesting the study be used to test for the coronavirus.

C.D.C. officials repeatedly said it would not be possible. “If you want to use your test as a screening tool, you would have to check with F.D.A.,” Gayle Langley, an officer at the C.D.C.’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, wrote back in an email on Feb. 16. But the F.D.A. could not offer the approval because the lab was not certified as a clinical laboratory under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.

Dr. Chu and Dr. Lindquist tried repeatedly to wrangle approval to use the Seattle Flu Study. The answers were always no.

“We felt like we were sitting, waiting for the pandemic to emerge,” Dr. Chu said. “We could help. We couldn’t do anything.”


*Sense of exasperation*
As Washington State debated with the federal officials over what to do, the C.D.C. confronted the daunting task of testing more widely for the coronavirus.

The C.D.C. had designed its own test as it typically does during an outbreak. Several other countries also developed their own tests.

But when the C.D.C. shipped test kits to public labs across the country, some local health officials began reporting that the test was producing invalid results.

The C.D.C. promised that replacement kits would be distributed within days, but the problem stretched on for over two weeks. Only five state laboratories were able to test in that period. Washington and New York were not among them.

By Feb. 24, as new cases of the virus began popping up in the United States, the state labs were growing frantic.

The Association of Public Health Laboratories made what it called an “extraordinary and rare request” of Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the F.D.A., asking him to use his discretion to allow state and local public health laboratories to create their own tests for the virus.

“We are now many weeks into the response with still no diagnostic or surveillance test available outside of C.D.C. for the vast majority of our member laboratories,” Scott Becker, the chief executive of the association, wrote in a letter to Dr. Hahn.

Dr. Hahn responded two days later, saying in a letter that “false diagnostic test results can lead to significant adverse public health consequences” and that the laboratories were welcome to submit their own tests for emergency authorization.

But the approval process for laboratory-developed tests was proving onerous. Private and university clinical laboratories, which typically have the latitude to develop their own tests, were frustrated about the speed of the F.D.A. as they prepared applications for emergency approvals from the agency for their coronavirus tests.

Dr. Alex Greninger, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, said he became exasperated in mid-February as he communicated with the F.D.A. over getting his application ready to begin testing. “This virus is faster than the F.D.A.,” he said, adding that at one point the agency required him to submit materials through the mail in addition to over email.

New tests typically require validation — running the test on known positive samples from a patient or a copy of the virus genome. The F.D.A.’s process called for five. Obtaining such samples has been hard because most hospital labs have not seen coronavirus cases yet, said Dr. Karen Kaul, chair of the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Illinois.

She said she had to scramble to obtain virus RNA from a laboratory in Europe. “Everyone is trying to figure out what we can get to help us gather the data that we need,” she said.

The F.D.A. has disputed that it moved too slowly, saying that it provided emergency authorization for two laboratory-developed tests within 24 hours of a completed submission — one was the C.D.C.’s test and the other a test developed by New York’s Wadsworth laboratory after it had trouble verifying the C.D.C.’s test.


*‘What do we do?’*
On the other side of the country in Seattle, Dr. Chu and her flu study colleagues, unwilling to wait any longer, decided to begin running samples.

A technician in the laboratory of Dr. Lea Starita who was testing samples soon got a hit.

“I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’” Dr. Starita said. “I just took off running” to the office of the study’s program managers. “We got one,” she told them. “What do we do?”

Members of the research group discussed the ethics of what to do next.

“What we were allowed to do was to keep it to ourselves,” Dr. Chu said. “But what we felt like we needed to do was to tell public health.”

They decided the right thing to do was to inform local health officials.

The case was a teenager, in the same county where the first coronavirus case had surfaced, who had a flu swab just a few days before but had no travel history and no link to any known case.

The state laboratory, finally able to begin testing, confirmed the result the next morning. The teenager, who had recovered from his illness, was located and informed just after he entered his school building. He was sent home and the school was later closed as a precaution.

Later that day, the investigators and Seattle health officials gathered with representatives of the C.D.C. and the F.D.A. to discuss what happened. The message from the federal government was blunt. “What they said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu,” Dr. Lindquist remembered. “Stop testing.”


*A silent spread*
Still, the troubling finding reshaped how officials understood the outbreak. Seattle Flu Study scientists quickly sequenced the genome of the virus, finding a genetic variation also present in the country’s first coronavirus case.

The implications were unnerving. There was a good chance that the virus had been circulating silently in the community for around six weeks, infecting potentially hundreds of people.

On a phone call the day after the C.D.C. and F.D.A. had told Dr. Chu to stop, officials relented, but only partially, the researchers recalled. They would allow the study’s laboratories to test cases and report the results only in future samples. They would need to use a new consent form that explicitly mentioned that results of the coronavirus tests might be shared with the local health department.

They were not to test the thousands of samples that had already been collected.

The same day, the F.D.A. said it would relax its rules and allowclinical labs to begin using their own coronavirus tests as long as they submitted evidence that they worked to the agency. Under that new policy, according to an agency representative on Tuesday, it had heard from 14 labs, with 10 already beginning patient testing.

On March 2, the Seattle Flu Study’s institutional review board at the University of Washington determined that it would be unethical for the researchers not to test and report the results in a public health emergency, Dr. Starita said. Since then, her laboratory has found and reported numerous additional cases, all of which have been confirmed.

As new samples came in, Dr. Starita’s laboratory also worked their way backward through some older samples that had been sitting in the freezers for weeks, finding cases that date back to at least Feb. 20 — seven days before public health officials had any idea the virus was in the community.

The scientists said they believe that they will find evidence that the virus was infecting people even earlier, and that they could have alerted authorities sooner if they had been allowed to test.

But on Monday night, state regulators, enforcing Medicare rules, stepped in and again told them to stop until they could finish getting certified as a clinical laboratory, a process that could take many weeks.

In the days since the teenager’s test, the Seattle region has spun into crisis, with dozens of people testing positive and at least 22 dying — many of them infected in a nursing home that had unknowingly been suffering casualties since Feb. 19.

The availability of testing for coronavirus remains uneven, with some people able to easily obtain tests in certain parts of the country while others have been turned away. Some state officials fear that the virus is spreading far faster than the capacity for testing is increasing.

Looking back, Dr. Chu said she understood why the regulations that stymied the flu study’s efforts for weeks existed. “Those protections are in place for a reason,” she said. “You want to protect human subjects. You want to do things in an ethical way.”

The frustration, she said, was how long it took to cut through red tape to try to save lives in an outbreak that had the potential to explode in Washington State and spread in many other regions. “I don’t think people knew that back then,” she said. “We know it now.”

_Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Joseph Goldstein, Sheila Kaplan, Michael D. Shear, Knvul Sheikh, Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland._

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## 大汉奸柳传志

Hamartia Antidote said:


> It was only some Doctor in Wuhan that tipped you guys off of a problem (and almost silenced too) otherwise you'd be treating them all as the flu.


I really don't think the Wuhan officials did anything wrong.

The fact that so many people including Trump still think it's just a flu till last week, could give you a hint on what a dilemma the Wuhan officials were facing two months back: a new SARS-like virus, causing flu-like symptoms(mild in most cases). What would you have done, if you were put in charge？Treat it like SARS, with all the quarantines and lockdowns, causing panic and risking the economy? or treat it like the flu, telling everyone everything is OK and risking a potential deadly outbreak? I think no one could easily make that call at that early stage.

of course they were fired because people were angry and need to blame someone, same goes for that doctor... point is it's always easy to see things in hindsight

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## LKJ86

大汉奸柳传志 said:


> I really don't think the Wuhan officials did anything wrong.
> 
> The fact that so many people including Trump still think it's just a flu till last week, could give you a hint on what a dilemma the Wuhan officials were facing two months back: a new SARS-like virus, causing flu-like symptoms(mild in most cases). What would you have done, if you were put in charge？Treat it like SARS, with all the quarantines and lockdowns, causing panic and risking the economy? or treat it like the flu, telling everyone everything is OK and risking a potential deadly outbreak? I think no one could easily make that call at that early stage.
> 
> of course they were fired because people were angry and need to blame someone, same goes for that doctor... point is it's always easy to see things in hindsight




__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1237027356314869761

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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> *CDC director says some coronavirus-related deaths have been found posthumously *
> 
> During the House Oversight Committee discussion on the novel coronavirus response, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said some deaths from coronavirus have been discovered posthumously.
> 
> Rep. Harley Rouda asked CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield if it’s possible that some flu patients may have been misdiagnosed and actually had coronavirus.
> 
> "The standard practice is the first thing you do is test for influenza, so if they had influenza they would be positive," Redfield said.
> 
> Rouda then asked Redfield if they are doing posthumous testing.
> 
> Redfield said there has been "a surveillance system of deaths from pneumonia, that the CDC has; it’s not in every city, every state, every hospital.”
> 
> Rouda followed up and asked, “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”
> 
> The doctor replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”
> 
> Source:https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-...0-intl-hnk/h_1319f66f92245a2fe4ec63fe91ab66c9




__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1238114622684585984

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1238111898828066823

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## beijingwalker

*CDC director says some COVID-19 deaths diagnosed as flu-related in U.S.*

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## Beast

Hamartia Antidote said:


> It could have also existed in China long before Wuhan too. It was only some Doctor in Wuhan that tipped you guys off of a problem (and almost silenced too) otherwise you'd be treating them all as the flu.


Not possible. Becos the genome sequence is different from China region or from the usual influenza exists in China. The only possible reason to exist in Wuhan is imported. The study are published for all public scientist to cross examine. Nothing to hide.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-coronavirus-shocking-update/5705196

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## LKJ86

*COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US*
_By Larry Romanoff
Global Research, March 11, 2020_
Source:https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-further-evidence-virus-originated-us/5706078

It would be useful to read this prior article for background:

China’s Coronavirus: A Shocking Update. Did The Virus Originate in the US?

_By Larry Romanoff, March 04, 2020_

***

_As readers will recall from the earlier article (above), Japanese and Taiwanese epidemiologists and pharmacologists have determined that the new coronavirus almost certainly originated in the US since that country is the only one known to have all five types – from which all others must have descended. Wuhan in China has only one of those types, rendering it in analogy as a kind of “branch” which cannot exist by itself but must have grown from a “tree”._

The Taiwanese physician noted that in August of 2019 the US had a flurry of lung pneumonias or similar, which the Americans blamed on ‘vaping’ from e-cigarettes, but which, according to the scientist, the symptoms and conditions could not be explained by e-cigarettes. He said he wrote to the US officials telling them he suspected those deaths were likely due to the coronavirus. He claims his warnings were ignored.

Immediately prior to that, the CDC totally shut down the US Military’s main bio-lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, due to an absence of safeguards against pathogen leakages, issuing a complete “cease and desist” order to the military. It was immediately after this event that the ‘e-cigarette’ epidemic arose.






Screenshot from The New York Times August 08, 2019


We also had the Japanese citizens infected in September of 2019, in Hawaii, people who had never been to China, these infections occurring on US soil long before the outbreak in Wuhan but only shortly after the locking down of Fort Detrick.

Then, on Chinese social media, another article appeared, aware of the above but presenting further details. It stated in part that five “foreign” athletes or other personnel visiting Wuhan for the World Military Games (October 18-27, 2019) were hospitalised in Wuhan for an undetermined infection.

The article explains more clearly that the Wuhan version of the virus could have come only from the US because it is what they call a “branch” which could not have been created first because it would have no ‘seed’. It would have to have been a new variety spun off the original ‘trunk’, and that trunk exists only in the US. (1)

There has been much public speculation that the coronavirus had been deliberately transmitted to China but, according to the Chinese article, a less sinister alternative is possible.

If some members of the US team at the World Military Games (18-27 October) had become infected by the virus from an accidental outbreak at Fort Detrick it is possible that, with a long initial incubation period, their symptoms might have been minor, and those individuals could easily have ‘toured’ the city of Wuhan during their stay, infecting potentially thousands of local residents in various locations, many of whom would later travel to the seafood market from which the virus would spread like wildfire (as it did).

That would account also for the practical impossibility of locating the legendary “patient zero” – which in this case has never been found since there would have been many of them.

Next, Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease expert at Georgetown University in Washington, said in an article in _Science magazine_ that the first human infection has been confirmed as occurring in November 2019, (not in Wuhan), suggesting the virus originated elsewhere and then spread to the seafood markets. “One group put the origin of the outbreak as early as 18 September 2019.” (2) (3)

Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally.

Description of earliest cases suggests outbreak began elsewhere.

The article states:

_“As confirmed cases of a novel virus surge around the world with worrisome speed, all eyes have so far focused on a seafood market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the outbreak. But a description of the first clinical cases published in The Lancet on Friday challenges that hypothesis.” (4) (5)_

The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).

In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. “No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases”, they state. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace. “That’s a big number, 13, with no link”, says Daniel Lucey . . . (6)

Earlier reports from Chinese health authorities and the World Health Organization had said the first patient had onset of symptoms on 8 December 2019 – and those reports simply said “most” cases had links to the seafood market, which was closed on 1 January. (7)

“Lucey says if the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019 – if not earlier – because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan – and perhaps elsewhere – before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December. “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace”, Lucey asserts.

“China must have realized the epidemic did not originate in that Wuhan Huanan seafood market”, Lucey told Science Insider. (8)

Kristian Andersen is an evolutionary biologist at the Scripps Research Institute who has analyzed sequences of 2019-nCoV to try to clarify its origin. He said the scenario was “entirely plausible” of infected persons bringing the virus into the seafood market from somewhere outside. According to the Science article,

_“Andersen posted his analysis of 27 available genomes of 2019-nCoV on 25 January on a virology research website. It suggests they had a “most recent common ancestor” – meaning a common source – as early as 1 October 2019.” (9)_

It was interesting that Lucey also noted that MERS was originally believed to have come from a patient in Saudi Arabia in June of 2012, but later and more thorough studies traced it back to an earlier hospital outbreak of unexplained pneumonia in Jordan in April of that year. Lucey said that from stored samples from people who died in Jordan, medical authorities confirmed they had been infected with the MERS virus. (10)

This would provide impetus for caution among the public in accepting the “official standard narrative” that the Western media are always so eager to provide – as they did with SARS, MERS, and ZIKA, all of which ‘official narratives’ were later proven to have been entirely wrong.

In this case, the Western media flooded their pages for months about the COVID-19 virus originating in the Wuhan seafood market, caused by people eating bats and wild animals. All of this has been proven wrong.

Not only did the virus not originate at the seafood market, it did not originate in Wuhan at all, and it has now been proven that it did not originate in China but was brought to China from another country. Part of the proof of this assertion is that the genome varieties of the virus in Iran and Italy have been sequenced and declared to have no part of the variety that infected China and must, by definition, have originated elsewhere.

It would seem the only possibility for origination is the US because only that country has the “tree trunk” of all the varieties. And it may therefore be true that the original source of the COVID-19 virus was the US military bio-warfare lab at Fort Detrick. This would not be a surprise, given that the CDC completely shut down Fort Detrick, but also because, as I related in an earlier article, between 2005 and 2012 the US had experienced 1,059 events where pathogens had been either stolen or escaped from American bio-labs during the prior ten years – an average of one every three days.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

_Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research._

Notes

(1) https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/CjGWaaDSKTyjWRMyQyGXUA

(2) https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6477/492.full

(3) Science; Jon Cohen; Jan. 26, 2020
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally

(4) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext

(5) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext

(6) http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020011109036

(7) http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020011509040

(8) https://sciencespeaksblog.org/2020/...-2019-ncov-qa-6-an-evidence-based-hypothesis/

(9) http://virological.org/t/clock-and-tmrca-based-on-27-genomes/347

(10) http://applications.emro.who.int/emhj/v19/Supp1/EMHJ_2013_19_Supp1_S12_S18.pdf

_Featured image is from Health.mil_

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020

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## LKJ86

*NYT: Sick People Across the U.S. Say They Are Being Denied the Coronavirus Test*
By Farah Stockman
March 12, 2020
Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/us/coronavirus-testing-challenges.html

BOSTON — First came the tickle in the throat. Then, a hacking cough. Then, a shortness of breath she had never experienced before. Hillary King, a 32-year-old consultant in Boston who lives down the street from a hotel where dozens of Biogen executives contracted the new coronavirus, decided that she had better get tested.

But getting tested is far easier said than done, even as testing slowly ramps up nationwide. Five days after President Trump announced that anyone who wants a test can get a test, Ms. King’s experience shows how difficult it can be in the United States to find out if you have the coronavirus.

Many who fear they have the virus have faced one roadblock after another as they try to get tested, according to interviews with dozens of people across the country.

Some have been rejected because they had no symptoms, even though they had been in proximity to someone who tested positive. Others were told no because they had not traveled to a hot spot abroad, even though they had fevers and hacking coughs and lived in cities with growing outbreaks. Still others were told a bitter truth: There simply were not enough tests to go around.

“The system is not really geared to what we need right now, what you are asking for. That is a failing,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Thursday. “It is a failing. I mean, let’s admit it.”

Dr. Fauci added: “The idea of anybody getting it easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we are not.”

In some parts of the country, demand for the tests is low. Elsewhere efforts are underway to make testing easier. States like Colorado have even instituted drive-through testing to streamline the process.

But even there, demand has far outstripped supply. By 11 a.m. at one drive-through lab in the Denver neighborhood of Lowry on Thursday, a three-hour line of cars had formed. The clinic had to stop allowing more vehicles.

The inability to test widely in the United States — which is far behind other countries in this regard — has severely hampered efforts to contain the outbreak. An early test rolled out to states by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was flawed, and delays have continued ever since. Public health experts have warned that each day people do not know whether they have the virus, they risk spreading it more widely.

In cities that have experienced serious outbreaks — Seattle; Boston; New Rochelle, N.Y. — patients who fear they have coronavirus describe Kafkaesque quests to find out their status.

“They said they do think it is possible that I have the virus,” said Ms. King, who spent five hours in the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital on Wednesday. “They said they really want to test me.”

A doctor told her she did not meet the criteria since she had not traveled abroad or had any contact with a person who had tested positive, but because she was so sick he tried to get an exemption from the state’s Department of Public Health. When it was not granted, doctors sent her home, where she plans to stay in self-quarantine for 14 days.

The number of tests in Massachusetts were said to be so scarce that even people who were in close contact with some of the dozens who tested positive at a recent Biogen conference have not been given the test. At least one Biogen employee has been ordered to quarantine at home, but he has not been given the test because he is not showing symptoms.

Hours after Ms. King was sent home, doctors were informed that a new batch test kits was being sent to Massachusetts. Public health officials said that they expected enough kits to test 5,000 people and that two commercial labs — Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp — have started testing. On Thursday, one returned a presumptive positive case, which was included in the state’s numbers.

But many in the medical community said that far more tests were needed.

“In a large city, you should be doing at least 1,000 a week, and ideally you’d be doing 10,000,” said Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has allocated a “laughably small number of tests” to look for signs of community transmission.

Fewer than 2,000 people in total have been tested since New York State was approved to test in-state in late February, even with an escalation in testing in the last several days, according to officials.

For now it appears that a large majority of New Yorkers who end up having the coronavirus are likely to not know it during the duration of their illness because testing is so limited.

Several state labs in California have been unable to use some of the state’s more than 8,000 test kits because the kits lack chemical ingredients known as reagents, Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a briefing on Thursday.

Mr. Newsom compared the problem to having a printer without ink cartridges.

“We want to test more people,” Mr. Newsom said. “This has been an issue in terms of providing more tests,” he said of the missing components, “and we hope it is resolved very quickly.”

For days Mr. Newsom has lamented the lack of testing capabilities in the state. On Tuesday he pounded the lectern in a live television briefing and said, “The bottom line is that we need more tests.”

Some places, like Missouri, have more testing capacity than demand. The state laboratory can test about 100 specimens per day but is doing less than 20, according to Lisa Cox, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. Sixty-five people total have been tested in the state, and all but one turned out negative.

But even states that have seen few cases are preserving their tests for patients who are viewed as most at risk.

“You want to be judicious,” said Dr. Dora Mills, an epidemiologist and the chief health improvement officer for MaineHealth, the largest health system in Maine, which has seen only one patient test positive, and no sign of community spread. “Any time you have an epidemic, you have two epidemics — you have the epidemic of the disease itself, and you have the epidemic of fear.”

But in places that have seen cases spike in recent weeks, many people expressed frustration that the more likely they were to get the virus, the less likely they were to have access to a test.

In Washington State, where at least 378 people have tested positive and 31 have died, public health officials spoke of having to ration the tests and living hand-to-mouth with testing supplies. “At this time we are limiting testing to preserve availability for our most vulnerable,” said Debra Carnes, a spokeswoman for PeaceHealth Columbia Network, a nonprofit health system that operates clinics in Washington, Oregon and Alaska.

Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, Wash., has been running low on nasal swabs to collect specimens from patients.

“We expected another shipment tomorrow,” said Morgan Brice, a public relations specialist.

One mother in Kitsap County, Wash., said her doctor told her that the state was so low on tests that only one of her children could be tested.

That left many anxious people with mild symptoms running a never-ending gantlet: primary care doctors referred them to state public health officials, who referred them to emergency rooms, who referred them back to primary care doctors. Some patients said they gave up and went into self-quarantine, and had to make peace with the idea that they will never know for sure if they had the virus.

Christy Karras of Seattle tried to get tested after some people at a party she attended came down with flu-like symptoms. But her doctor did not have the test and advised her that it did not matter whether she had the virus: Either way, she had to stay home.

“From a public policy standpoint, that’s true,” Ms. Karras said. “From an individual standpoint, you really want to know what you have. It was very frustrating to me because we were all trying to do the right thing.”

Finally, Ms. Karras contacted the Seattle Flu Study, a research project to study the spread of influenza in the region. She ordered a kit, sent her sample and heard back: She was positive for the coronavirus. (Since then, the flu study has been told by authorities to stop doing that kind of testing since it is not properly certified.)

Even those who have good reason to think they may be infected are being denied testing.

The Grand Princess cruise had 21 people on board test positive for the coronavirus. After docking in Oakland, Calif., this week, passengers have been quarantined at military bases.

Peggy Moy, 71, a retired nurse and passenger, is still waiting to be tested. She had a sore throat and stuffy nose during the cruise, which she reported, but by the time she left the ship, those symptoms had gone away.

She is worried for her husband, who has lung cancer, and assumed, as other passengers had, that she would be tested as soon as she got to the base. So far that has not happened, though medical personnel have been taking their temperature twice a day.

Not knowing is making Ms. Moy nervous, as hundreds of people from the ship, mostly older guests, are in quarantine on the base now, and many of them may have been exposed to the virus. People are wearing masks, she said, but are still mingling in common areas, like the lobby where people get coffee and water. They take off their masks to drink and eat.

“I would like to know who among us is positive,” Ms. Moy said by telephone. “I don’t know. None of us know.”

Yet for those who do manage to get tested, the experience can be byzantine. Andy Carvin, 48, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, went to the Howard County General Hospital in Maryland last Thursday with a persistent fever and cough following a meeting with foreign journalists in February.

It started well. Health workers had cleared a path for him to walk to a back room. One doctor wore a large hooded mask and helmet and “looked like an Imperial Guard in ‘Star Wars.’”

They ran several tests, including of his blood. They swabbed his nose and throat about 10 hours later. But then it took a week to get the results back.

With no clear point of contact, Mr. Carvin made multiple calls — to the hospital, the state health department and two county health departments — to try to get the result. Three days later, he was told that one of the two swabs taken had never been sent to the state. At one point, he was given the wrong result. He called it “covid19purgatory.”

On Thursday, he finally got the good news: negative.

_Reporting was contributed by Sabrina Tavernise from Washington; Sean Keenan from Atlanta; Patricia Mazzei from Miami; Wudan Yan from Seattle; Kate Taylor from Cambridge, Mass.; John Eligon and Thomas Fuller from San Francisco; Christopher Dixon from Charleston, S.C.; Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh; and Vanessa Swales and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York._

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## LKJ86

*CNN: Confusion over the availability and criteria for coronavirus testing is leaving sick people wondering if they're infected*
By Ashley Fantz, Scott Bronstein and Drew Griffin, CNN
Updated 12:03 AM ET, Fri March 13, 2020
Source:https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/us/coronavirus-testing-problems-nationwide-invs/index.html

*(CNN)-- *A group of first responders in Washington state, a scientist in California, a woman at an assisted living facility in Florida -- all worried because they believe they might have novel coronavirus but say they can't get tested.

They and many others tell CNN they're suffering symptoms associated with what's officially known as Covid-19, and are worried they may have come into contact with someone who has the virus. They are angry and frustrated after trying to get tested, only to be turned away. Their stories came into CNN's tip line even as Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday told CNN's morning show, "New Day," that anyone with a doctor's order could get tested.

"There's no barrier ..." Pence said. "Make no mistake about it, we're making steady progress."

Anxiety and confusion over the availability and criteria for testing were dominant themes Thursday as the nation continued to grapple with the pandemic.

A primary care doctor in Massachusetts said Pence's assertion that anyone with doctor's orders for testing can get it is "totally false."

*Doctor describes "insanity" of coronavirus testing*

Aside from critically ill patients who are hospitalized, the physician said the Massachusetts Department of Public Health is only approving testing for people who have been exposed to someone who has already tested positive or who has traveled to one of the five heavily impacted countries outside the US in the past 14 days, which mirrors CDC guidelines.

"It's insanity," said the physician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

There are not even tests on hand to use if a patient was approved for testing, the doctor said.

"Even if the patient were around and exposed to someone coughing, sick, sneezing, I cannot give them a coronavirus test," the doctor said. "We are being crippled by our department of public health and the CDC on our ability to combat this pandemic."

The doctor said state and federal health officials "need to loosen the criteria on testing" and "allow us doctors to use our discretion to decide who should be tested."

As of Wednesday only 11,079 specimens had been tested in the US, paling in comparison to the more than 230,000 people tested in South Korea, which has about one sixth the US population.

As of 10 a.m. Thursday, there were 81 public health labs that are verified and offering testing for coronavirus, including at least one in all 50 states and Washington, DC, said Michelle Forman, a spokesperson for the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

Forman said her association estimates the nation's public labs could run up to 10,000 tests a day.

*A big jump in testing is needed to get through crisis, experts say*

Infectious disease experts say more testing is critical to prevent the spread of the disease.

Dr. Rod Hochman, CEO of Providence St. Joseph Health, an organization of 51 hospitals and about 1,000 clinics, described testing capacity in the US as highly deficient.

"We're still not at levels where we need to be. This has been really slow to get started," said Hochman, who said his organization is currently relying on public lab testing but added that he's been in close contact with commercial diagnostic companies, which he believes will begin testing soon.

Hochman said the turnaround time on testing results has ranged from 24 hours to four days, which he called "unacceptable."

"Testing is so critically important because it helps us as clinicians figure out the extent of the spread. It has implications for how we care for patients and where we put them," Hochman said. "It's unraveling the detective story of how the virus spreads but we are trying to do it now with no data."

If cases of the disease are not identified quickly and community spread continues unchecked, it could soon overwhelm the nation's medical system, just as it did in Wuhan, China, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

"Now, we're at the critical point where we have to have a big jump in testing and then quarantining and isolating individuals," in order to slow the spread of the virus, he said.

But the reality for many Americans is that they are asking for tests and being turned away.

*Anger, frustration, fear: Patients describe testing rejection*

Hilal Bayrak of Santa Clara, California, was among those who said he couldn't get the peace-of-mind a test might bring. He came down with a 104 degree fever and started coughing and wheezing about a week ago. He had been working alongside a co-worker who had just returned from Italy. The two shared a keyboard, he said.

His 4-year-old daughter first developed a fever and then a few days later, he and his wife came down with one. Last Saturday, they all went to the emergency room. Each tested negative for flu. Their chests were X-rayed. Same thing -- nothing alarming. Bayrak asked if they could be tested for coronavirus and he says was told that was impossible.

In order to be prioritized for testing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that one must have a fever, cough or difficulty breathing as well as have been in close contact with a person known to have coronavirus. Or, they had to "have a history of travel from affected geographic areas within 14 days of their symptom onset."

Bayrak appealed to ER workers, telling them about his co-worker's recent visit to Italy, a country that has all but shut down while authorities attempt to contain the fast-spreading virus.

It didn't work.

"I was angry. I was frustrated," he said. "What's more surprising is that after we left the ER on Saturday they told me to follow up with them if my symptoms got worse. They did. My fever was persistent. I took Motrin, Tylenol every 4 hours. I started having continuous headaches. I had no energy. At the moment, I have a rash on my body."

So the 40-year-old called the ER Wednesday and reported that. "They told me the same thing. I cannot get tested."

In Washington state, as many as 18 firefighters and paramedics who believe they were exposed to people who tested positive for the virus cannot themselves get tested because they have shown no signs of illness, several firefighters and public information officers told CNN.

"That's very concerning," said Gabe DeBay, a firefighter and paramedic in King County.

Dawn Clements has been sick since March 6. The 49-year-old lives in a Largo, Florida, assisted living facility because she suffers from health problems, including a compromised immune system.

Clements said her daughter, 16, suffered from a 103-degree fever and a burning sensation in her lungs two weeks ago, but tested negative for flu. Clements said she began experiencing similar symptoms after taking care of her daughter, and also got a negative flu test.

She says while her daughter has recovered, she has not. Neither has been able to be tested for coronavirus.

"I was told I didn't meet the criteria because I did not travel out of the United States to one of the countries (with spreading coronavirus). I don't know what virus I have. I'm running a fever and I have chest congestion, and nobody can test us here."

*You need to 'advocate for yourself'*

Pinellas County, where Clements resides, is "prioritizing testing," according to the state health department.

"It's a situation where the most likely to have Covid-19 are being prioritized for testing, and those are people who have been travelling overseas to an affected area or in close contact with a known Covid-19 patient," said health department spokesman Tom Iovino. "We have lots of 'worried well' people who are just wanting to be tested. We are following the CDC advice, prioritizing testing."

In some cases it's not the infected person who wants testing done, but the loved ones around them.

Shelby Koser, a 28-year-old stay-at-home mom from Minnesota, said she's worried about her dad, who suffers from asthma and has been battling a cough and fever. She said her 60-year-old father was diagnosed with bronchitis, but that she's skeptical.

"My dad does not normally get this type of sick," she said.

Koser said her father is "too stubborn" to ask to be tested for Covid-19, and that she and her mom are worried for his health and that of those around him.

"I've got two young kids," Koser said. "My concern is that the government isn't testing enough people and that a lot of people already have it."

"You need to be an advocate for yourself," she added.

*Where testing issues started*

The struggle some faced in getting tested in the US contrasts sharply with the experiences of patients elsewhere in the world.

In Australia, where testing is free and easily available, actors Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, learned they had come down with the virus.

Some of the people contacting CNN complained of symptoms and circumstances more severe than the ones publicly shared by the actors and said they were still denied tests.

The ability for public health labs to test for the virus was hindered last month when the CDC announced that some test kits shipped to labs were not working properly. The CDC announced it was remaking parts of them.

Lab directors and workers are upset by what they say is a lack of follow-up information from the CDC, said Dr. Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology and immunology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He's spoken to lab directors and workers.

"From a morale and readiness perspective, labs were frustrated by the delays and the silence from the CDC," he said.

The Centers' rollout of lab testing "didn't go as quickly and smoothly as we usually see," acknowledged Dr. Anne Schuchat, the CDC's principal deputy director in an interview that aired Thursday with CNN's Sanjay Gupta.
She described the effort to get tests to public labs as "a bit delayed" but also blamed commercial labs, saying they were "really slow to take this on and scale up."

Now, weeks into the crisis, Schuchat said "the jury's out on what exactly is the best way to roll out testing."

"I've heard from colleagues in other countries about concern that there was so much testing going on that people with no symptoms and people who were not at risk clogged up the healthcare systems," she added.

Asked how easy it would be for someone to get tested who is showing symptoms, Shuchat told Gupta, "Well I think an important thing is to be connected to the healthcare system to figure out if you need testing. You know, it may not be the best thing to go into a clinic and ask about that. It may be better to call."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was more direct in his remarks to Congress Thursday.

"The idea of anybody getting (tested) easily the way people in other countries are doing it -- we are not set up for that," he said. "Do I think we should be? Yes. But we're not."

_CNN's Nelli Black, Majlie dePuy Kamp, Scott Glover, Curt Devine and Sonnet Swire contributed to this report._

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## 大汉奸柳传志

LKJ86 said:


> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1237027356314869761


taking the “flu approach” may work for Japan or UK but it will not for the US. Emulating China's "SARS approach" is their only option I think.

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## LKJ86

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1238468948284379141

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## LKJ86



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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> Rouda followed up and asked, “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”
> 
> The doctor replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”

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## LKJ86

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1238865975266758657

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## Menthol

大汉奸柳传志 said:


> I really don't think the Wuhan officials did anything wrong.
> 
> The fact that so many people including Trump still think it's just a flu till last week, could give you a hint on what a dilemma the Wuhan officials were facing two months back: a new SARS-like virus, causing flu-like symptoms(mild in most cases). What would you have done, if you were put in charge？Treat it like SARS, with all the quarantines and lockdowns, causing panic and risking the economy? or treat it like the flu, telling everyone everything is OK and risking a potential deadly outbreak? I think no one could easily make that call at that early stage.
> 
> of course they were fired because people were angry and need to blame someone, same goes for that doctor... point is it's always easy to see things in hindsight



I very agree with you.

We can't blame Wuhan officials on this case.

But what they did is actually quite fast to compare if it happened in other places.



LKJ86 said:


> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1237027356314869761



That's actually what I think about Coronavirus.

But then I'm thinking about elderly and children at home.

If I live alone, maybe it's fine, but I'm not.


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## Hamartia Antidote

LKJ86 said:


> View attachment 613694



LOL!!! Even more Chinese twitter lies and spin.

The deaths are in Washington State (above California)

That lab is in Maryland on the other side of the country near Washington DC.
United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in *Fort Detrick, Md




*


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## LeGenD

beijingwalker said:


> It proved what I always believe, at last the coronavirus in US has been always there ,not imported from China.


Corona is a FAMILY of viruses. Wuhan is/was ground zero of the COVID-19 type, if I am not mistaken.

FYI: https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/soc...nas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back

Earliest case of COVID-19 infection in China was traced back to a 55 year old patient in November 19, 2019. Although research is ongoing.


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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> Rouda followed up and asked, “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”
> 
> The doctor replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”

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## PeacefulWar

LeGenD said:


> Corona is a FAMILY of viruses. Wuhan is/was ground zero of the COVID-19 type, if I am not mistaken.
> 
> FYI: https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/soc...nas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back
> 
> Earliest case of COVID-19 infection in China was traced back to a 55 year old patient in November 19, 2019. Although research is ongoing.


According Shanghai chief epidemiologist in an interview, all China covid-19 viruses are from Wuhan based on Gene testing results they did.
He said it's unlikely the virus is imported from outside. Not for China at least.

He also admit he had no ideas why foreigner virus are different, need to science research to find out more.

I'm generally disappointed by the failed job China Gov in it's early stage.
But I'm even more disappointed how incompetent of most other developped countries' governments, unlike China Gov, they have more than enough time to take action but they didn't!

Only Singapore Gov take proactive actions!
South Korea also did an amazing job after early stage mistakes.


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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> View attachment 614460
> View attachment 614461
> View attachment 614462

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## LKJ86

*The Coronavirus CONSPIRACY - Did COVID-19 Come from America? *







LKJ86 said:


> Rouda followed up and asked, “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”
> 
> The doctor replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”

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## LKJ86

*Expert calls U.S. progress in developing COVID-19 vaccine 'unusual'*

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## LKJ86

*NYT: Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded*
_Government exercises, including one last year, made clear that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic like the coronavirus. But little was done._

By David E. Sanger, Eric Lipton, Eileen Sullivan and Michael Crowley
March 19, 2020
Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html?action=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage










WASHINGTON — The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.

That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from *last January to August*.

The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.

The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.

Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.

In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.

The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement on Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.

What the scenario makes clear, however, is that his own administration had already modeled a similar pandemic and understood its potential trajectory.

The White House defended its record, saying it responded to the 2019 exercise with an executive order to improve the availability and quality of flu vaccines, and that it moved early this year to increase funding for the Department of Health and Human Services’ program that focuses on global pandemic threats.

“Any suggestion that President Trump did not take the threat of COVID-19 seriously is false,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman.

But officials have declined to say why the administration was so slow to roll out broad testing or to move faster, as the simulations all indicated it should, to urge social distancing and school closings.

Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”

The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.

Crimson Contagion, the exercise conducted last year in Washington and 12 states including New York and Illinois, showed that federal agencies under Mr. Trump continued the Obama-era effort to think ahead about a pandemic.

But the planning and thinking happened many layers down in the bureaucracy. The knowledge and sense of urgency about the peril appear never to have gotten sufficient attention at the highest level of the executive branch or from Congress, leaving the nation with funding shortfalls, equipment shortages and disorganization within and among various branches and levels of government.

The October 2019 report in particular documents that officials at the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and even at the White House’s National Security Council, were aware of the potential for a respiratory virus outbreak originating in China to spread quickly to the United States and overwhelm the nation.

“Nobody ever thought of numbers like this,’’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, at a news conference.

In fact, they had.

*From Ebola, Lessons Learned*

As early as the George W. Bush administration, homeland security and health officials focused on big gaps in the American response to a biological attacks and the growing risk of pandemics. The first test came in April 2009, just a few months after the start of President Barack Obama’s first term. A 10-year-old California girl was diagnosed with a contagious disease that would be called swine flu or H1N1, the first flu pandemic in more than 40 years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that ultimately there were about 60.8 million cases in the United States, along with 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths associated with H1N1.

The virus turned out to be less deadly than first expected. But it was a warning shot that officials in the Obama administration said they took seriously, kicking off a planning effort that escalated in early 2014, with the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa and ensuing fear that it could spread to the United States.

Ebola was less contagious than the flu, but far more deadly. It killed 11,000 people in Africa. But it could have been far worse. The United States sent nearly 3,000 troops to Africa to help keep the disease from spreading. While the containment effort was considered a success, inside the White House, officials sensed that the United States had gotten lucky — and that the response had revealed gaps in preparedness.

Christopher Kirchhoff, a national security aide who moved from the Pentagon to the White House to deal with the Ebola crisis, was given the job of putting together a “lessons learned” report, with input from across the government.

The weaknesses Mr. Kirchhoff identified were early warning signals of what has unfolded in the past three months.

His report concluded that the United States assumed more ability on the part of the World Health Organization than the agency actually had.

The United States had its own issues. There was no airplane in the U.S. fleet capable of evacuating an American doctor who was infected while treating patients in Liberia. The Pentagon was largely unprepared for the intervention that Mr. Obama ordered.

While the United States rapidly developed a way to screen air passengers coming into the country — borrowing from intelligence tools developed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to track possible terrorists — Mr. Kirchhoff found deficiencies in even measuring how fast the virus was spreading.

On the plus side, the Obama White House had created an Ebola Task Force, run by Ron Klain, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s former chief of staff, before a single case emerged in the United States. Congress allocated $5.4 billion in emergency funding to pay for Ebola treatment and prevention efforts in the United States and West Africa.

The money helped fund a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services in charge of preparing for future contagious disease outbreaks, the same office that in 2019 ran the Crimson Contagion exercise and other similar events in the years since.

After a man named Thomas Duncan, a Liberian citizen, became the first person given a diagnosis of Ebola on American territory in September 2014, errors resulted in the infection of two nurses and fear of a wider spread in the United States. (Mr. Duncan died, but the two nurses recovered.)

What is striking in reading Mr. Kirchhoff’s account today, however, is how few of the major faults he found in the American response resulted in action — even though the report was filled with department-by-department recommendations.

There were deficiencies “in personal protective equipment use, disinfection” and “social services for those placed under quarantine.”

There was confusion over travel restrictions, and the need “for a smoother sliding scale of escalation of government response, from local authorities acting on their own to local authorities acting with some federal assistance” to the full activation of the federal government.

The report concluded that “a minimum planning benchmark might be an epidemic an order of magnitude or two more difficult than that presented by the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, with much more significant domestic spread.”

But one big change did come out of the study: The creation of a dedicated office at the National Security Council to coordinate responses and raise the alarm early.

“What I learned most is that we had to stand up a global biosecurity and health directorate, and get it enshrined for the next administration,” said Lisa Monaco, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser.

*Getting the Trump Team’s Attention*

After Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Monaco arranged an extensive exercise for high-level incoming officials — including Rex W. Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state; John F. Kelly, designated to become homeland security secretary; and Rick Perry, who would become energy secretary — gaming out the response to a deadly flu outbreak.

She asked Tom Bossert, who was preparing to come in as Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, to run the event alongside her.

“We modeled a new strain of flu in the exercise precisely because it’s so communicable,” Ms. Monaco said. “There is no vaccine, and you would get issues like nursing homes being particularly vulnerable, shortages of ventilators.”

Ms. Monaco was impressed by how seriously Mr. Bossert, her successor, appeared to take the threat, as did many of the 30 or so Trump team members who participated in the exercise, details of which were reported by Politico.

But by the time the current crisis hit, almost all of the leaders at the table — Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Perry among them — had been fired or moved on.

In 2018, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John R. Bolton, ousted Mr. Bossert and eliminated the National Security Council directorate, folding it into an office dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in what Trump officials called a logical consolidation.

Asked about that shift on March 13, Mr. Trump told a reporter that it was “a nasty question,” before adding: “I don’t know anything about it.” Writing on Twitter the next day, Mr. Bolton lashed out at critics who said the shift had reflected disinterest in pandemic threats.

“Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false,” Mr. Bolton tweeted. “Global health remained a top NSC priority.”

In a statement, the National Security Council said it “has directors and staff whose full-time job it is to monitor, plan for, and respond to pandemics, including an infectious disease epidemiologist and a virologist.”

But in testimony to Congress last week, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested that ending the stand-alone directorate was ill-advised. “It would be nice if the office was still there,” he said.

On Feb. 10, nearly three weeks after the first coronavirus case was diagnosed in the United States, Mr. Trump submitted a 2021 budget proposal that called for a $693.3 million reduction in funding for the C.D.C., or about 9 percent, although there was a modest increase for the division that combats global pandemics.

*‘Crimson Contagion’*

The Crimson Contagion planning exercise run last year by the Department of Health and Human Services involved officials from 12 states and at least a dozen federal agencies. They included the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Security Council. Groups like the American Red Cross and American Nurses Association were invited to join, as were health insurance companies and major hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.

The war game-like exercise was overseen by Robert P. Kadlec, a former Air Force physician who has spent decades focused on biodefense issues. After stints on the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Council and the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was appointed assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response.

“He recognized early that we have a big problem and we needed much bigger budgets to prepare,” said Richard Danzig, the secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, who had worked with Mr. Kadlec.

The exercise played out in four separate stages, starting in January 2019.

The events were supposedly unspooling in real time — with the worst-case scenario underway as of Aug. 13, 2019 — when, according to the script, 12,100 cases had already been reported in the United States, with the largest number in Chicago, which had 1,400.

The fictional outbreak involved a pandemic flu, which the Department of Health and Human Services says was “very different than the novel coronavirus.” The staged outbreak had started when a group of 35 tourists visiting China were infected and then flew home to Australia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Thailand, Britain and Spain, as well as to the United States, with some developing respiratory symptoms and fevers en route.

A 52-year-old man from Chicago, who was on the tour, had “low energy and a dry cough” upon his return home. His 17-year-old son on that same day went out to a large public event in Chicago, and the chain of illnesses in the United States started.

Many of the moments during the tabletop exercise are now chillingly familiar.

In the fictional pandemic, as the virus spread quickly across the United States, the C.D.C. issued guidelines for social distancing, and many employees were told to work from home.

But federal and state officials struggled to identify which employees were essential and what equipment was needed to effectively work from home.

There also was confusion over how to handle school children. The C.D.C. recommended that states delay school openings — the exercise took place toward the end of the summer. But some school districts decided to go ahead with the start of school while others followed the federal advice, causing the same types of confusion and discrepancies that have marked the response to the coronavirus.

The exercise from last year then went on to predict how the situation on the ground in the United States would worsen as the weeks passed.

Confusion emerged as state governments began to turn in large numbers to Washington for help to address shortages of antiviral medications, personal protective equipment and ventilators. Then states started to submit requests to different branches of the federal government, leading to bureaucratic chaos.

Friction also emerged between the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is traditionally in charge of disaster response, and the Department of Health and Human Services, another scenario playing out now.

But the problems were larger than bureaucratic snags. The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded.

Congress was briefed in December on some of these findings, including the inability to quickly replenish certain medical supplies, given that much of the product comes from overseas.

These concerns turned more urgent at a hearing last Thursday on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers peppered officials with the Department of Health and Human Services with questions that sounded almost as if they had read the script from the fictional exercise, reflecting the shortage of respirators and protective gear.

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said last week that he blamed Congress and prior administrations for not increasing stockpiles of this type of equipment.

“That is an area we ought to consider making an investment in,” he added, making a point, apparently unknown to him, that the administration’s own simulation had made clear five months earlier.

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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> *NYT: Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded*
> _Government exercises, including one last year, made clear that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic like the coronavirus. But little was done._
> 
> By David E. Sanger, Eric Lipton, Eileen Sullivan and Michael Crowley
> March 19, 2020
> Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html?action=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage
> 
> View attachment 615629
> View attachment 615630
> 
> 
> WASHINGTON — The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.
> 
> That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from *last January to August*.
> 
> The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.
> 
> The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.
> 
> Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.
> 
> In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.
> 
> The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement on Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.
> 
> What the scenario makes clear, however, is that his own administration had already modeled a similar pandemic and understood its potential trajectory.
> 
> The White House defended its record, saying it responded to the 2019 exercise with an executive order to improve the availability and quality of flu vaccines, and that it moved early this year to increase funding for the Department of Health and Human Services’ program that focuses on global pandemic threats.
> 
> “Any suggestion that President Trump did not take the threat of COVID-19 seriously is false,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman.
> 
> But officials have declined to say why the administration was so slow to roll out broad testing or to move faster, as the simulations all indicated it should, to urge social distancing and school closings.
> 
> Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”
> 
> The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.
> 
> Crimson Contagion, the exercise conducted last year in Washington and 12 states including New York and Illinois, showed that federal agencies under Mr. Trump continued the Obama-era effort to think ahead about a pandemic.
> 
> But the planning and thinking happened many layers down in the bureaucracy. The knowledge and sense of urgency about the peril appear never to have gotten sufficient attention at the highest level of the executive branch or from Congress, leaving the nation with funding shortfalls, equipment shortages and disorganization within and among various branches and levels of government.
> 
> The October 2019 report in particular documents that officials at the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and even at the White House’s National Security Council, were aware of the potential for a respiratory virus outbreak originating in China to spread quickly to the United States and overwhelm the nation.
> 
> “Nobody ever thought of numbers like this,’’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, at a news conference.
> 
> In fact, they had.
> 
> *From Ebola, Lessons Learned*
> 
> As early as the George W. Bush administration, homeland security and health officials focused on big gaps in the American response to a biological attacks and the growing risk of pandemics. The first test came in April 2009, just a few months after the start of President Barack Obama’s first term. A 10-year-old California girl was diagnosed with a contagious disease that would be called swine flu or H1N1, the first flu pandemic in more than 40 years.
> 
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that ultimately there were about 60.8 million cases in the United States, along with 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths associated with H1N1.
> 
> The virus turned out to be less deadly than first expected. But it was a warning shot that officials in the Obama administration said they took seriously, kicking off a planning effort that escalated in early 2014, with the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa and ensuing fear that it could spread to the United States.
> 
> Ebola was less contagious than the flu, but far more deadly. It killed 11,000 people in Africa. But it could have been far worse. The United States sent nearly 3,000 troops to Africa to help keep the disease from spreading. While the containment effort was considered a success, inside the White House, officials sensed that the United States had gotten lucky — and that the response had revealed gaps in preparedness.
> 
> Christopher Kirchhoff, a national security aide who moved from the Pentagon to the White House to deal with the Ebola crisis, was given the job of putting together a “lessons learned” report, with input from across the government.
> 
> The weaknesses Mr. Kirchhoff identified were early warning signals of what has unfolded in the past three months.
> 
> His report concluded that the United States assumed more ability on the part of the World Health Organization than the agency actually had.
> 
> The United States had its own issues. There was no airplane in the U.S. fleet capable of evacuating an American doctor who was infected while treating patients in Liberia. The Pentagon was largely unprepared for the intervention that Mr. Obama ordered.
> 
> While the United States rapidly developed a way to screen air passengers coming into the country — borrowing from intelligence tools developed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to track possible terrorists — Mr. Kirchhoff found deficiencies in even measuring how fast the virus was spreading.
> 
> On the plus side, the Obama White House had created an Ebola Task Force, run by Ron Klain, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s former chief of staff, before a single case emerged in the United States. Congress allocated $5.4 billion in emergency funding to pay for Ebola treatment and prevention efforts in the United States and West Africa.
> 
> The money helped fund a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services in charge of preparing for future contagious disease outbreaks, the same office that in 2019 ran the Crimson Contagion exercise and other similar events in the years since.
> 
> After a man named Thomas Duncan, a Liberian citizen, became the first person given a diagnosis of Ebola on American territory in September 2014, errors resulted in the infection of two nurses and fear of a wider spread in the United States. (Mr. Duncan died, but the two nurses recovered.)
> 
> What is striking in reading Mr. Kirchhoff’s account today, however, is how few of the major faults he found in the American response resulted in action — even though the report was filled with department-by-department recommendations.
> 
> There were deficiencies “in personal protective equipment use, disinfection” and “social services for those placed under quarantine.”
> 
> There was confusion over travel restrictions, and the need “for a smoother sliding scale of escalation of government response, from local authorities acting on their own to local authorities acting with some federal assistance” to the full activation of the federal government.
> 
> The report concluded that “a minimum planning benchmark might be an epidemic an order of magnitude or two more difficult than that presented by the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, with much more significant domestic spread.”
> 
> But one big change did come out of the study: The creation of a dedicated office at the National Security Council to coordinate responses and raise the alarm early.
> 
> “What I learned most is that we had to stand up a global biosecurity and health directorate, and get it enshrined for the next administration,” said Lisa Monaco, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser.
> 
> *Getting the Trump Team’s Attention*
> 
> After Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Monaco arranged an extensive exercise for high-level incoming officials — including Rex W. Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state; John F. Kelly, designated to become homeland security secretary; and Rick Perry, who would become energy secretary — gaming out the response to a deadly flu outbreak.
> 
> She asked Tom Bossert, who was preparing to come in as Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, to run the event alongside her.
> 
> “We modeled a new strain of flu in the exercise precisely because it’s so communicable,” Ms. Monaco said. “There is no vaccine, and you would get issues like nursing homes being particularly vulnerable, shortages of ventilators.”
> 
> Ms. Monaco was impressed by how seriously Mr. Bossert, her successor, appeared to take the threat, as did many of the 30 or so Trump team members who participated in the exercise, details of which were reported by Politico.
> 
> But by the time the current crisis hit, almost all of the leaders at the table — Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Perry among them — had been fired or moved on.
> 
> In 2018, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John R. Bolton, ousted Mr. Bossert and eliminated the National Security Council directorate, folding it into an office dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in what Trump officials called a logical consolidation.
> 
> Asked about that shift on March 13, Mr. Trump told a reporter that it was “a nasty question,” before adding: “I don’t know anything about it.” Writing on Twitter the next day, Mr. Bolton lashed out at critics who said the shift had reflected disinterest in pandemic threats.
> 
> “Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false,” Mr. Bolton tweeted. “Global health remained a top NSC priority.”
> 
> In a statement, the National Security Council said it “has directors and staff whose full-time job it is to monitor, plan for, and respond to pandemics, including an infectious disease epidemiologist and a virologist.”
> 
> But in testimony to Congress last week, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested that ending the stand-alone directorate was ill-advised. “It would be nice if the office was still there,” he said.
> 
> On Feb. 10, nearly three weeks after the first coronavirus case was diagnosed in the United States, Mr. Trump submitted a 2021 budget proposal that called for a $693.3 million reduction in funding for the C.D.C., or about 9 percent, although there was a modest increase for the division that combats global pandemics.
> 
> *‘Crimson Contagion’*
> 
> The Crimson Contagion planning exercise run last year by the Department of Health and Human Services involved officials from 12 states and at least a dozen federal agencies. They included the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Security Council. Groups like the American Red Cross and American Nurses Association were invited to join, as were health insurance companies and major hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.
> 
> The war game-like exercise was overseen by Robert P. Kadlec, a former Air Force physician who has spent decades focused on biodefense issues. After stints on the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Council and the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was appointed assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response.
> 
> “He recognized early that we have a big problem and we needed much bigger budgets to prepare,” said Richard Danzig, the secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, who had worked with Mr. Kadlec.
> 
> The exercise played out in four separate stages, starting in January 2019.
> 
> The events were supposedly unspooling in real time — with the worst-case scenario underway as of Aug. 13, 2019 — when, according to the script, 12,100 cases had already been reported in the United States, with the largest number in Chicago, which had 1,400.
> 
> The fictional outbreak involved a pandemic flu, which the Department of Health and Human Services says was “very different than the novel coronavirus.” The staged outbreak had started when a group of 35 tourists visiting China were infected and then flew home to Australia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Thailand, Britain and Spain, as well as to the United States, with some developing respiratory symptoms and fevers en route.
> 
> A 52-year-old man from Chicago, who was on the tour, had “low energy and a dry cough” upon his return home. His 17-year-old son on that same day went out to a large public event in Chicago, and the chain of illnesses in the United States started.
> 
> Many of the moments during the tabletop exercise are now chillingly familiar.
> 
> In the fictional pandemic, as the virus spread quickly across the United States, the C.D.C. issued guidelines for social distancing, and many employees were told to work from home.
> 
> But federal and state officials struggled to identify which employees were essential and what equipment was needed to effectively work from home.
> 
> There also was confusion over how to handle school children. The C.D.C. recommended that states delay school openings — the exercise took place toward the end of the summer. But some school districts decided to go ahead with the start of school while others followed the federal advice, causing the same types of confusion and discrepancies that have marked the response to the coronavirus.
> 
> The exercise from last year then went on to predict how the situation on the ground in the United States would worsen as the weeks passed.
> 
> Confusion emerged as state governments began to turn in large numbers to Washington for help to address shortages of antiviral medications, personal protective equipment and ventilators. Then states started to submit requests to different branches of the federal government, leading to bureaucratic chaos.
> 
> Friction also emerged between the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is traditionally in charge of disaster response, and the Department of Health and Human Services, another scenario playing out now.
> 
> But the problems were larger than bureaucratic snags. The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded.
> 
> Congress was briefed in December on some of these findings, including the inability to quickly replenish certain medical supplies, given that much of the product comes from overseas.
> 
> These concerns turned more urgent at a hearing last Thursday on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers peppered officials with the Department of Health and Human Services with questions that sounded almost as if they had read the script from the fictional exercise, reflecting the shortage of respirators and protective gear.
> 
> Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said last week that he blamed Congress and prior administrations for not increasing stockpiles of this type of equipment.
> 
> “That is an area we ought to consider making an investment in,” he added, making a point, apparently unknown to him, that the administration’s own simulation had made clear five months earlier.


The draft report source:
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthe...after/05bd797500ea55be0724/optimized/full.pdf

Reactions: Like Like:
3


----------



## LKJ86

*'Every Single Individual Must Stay Home': Italy's Coronavirus Surge Strains Hospitals*
March 19, 20201:59 PM ET

Daniela De Rosa, a 43-year-old veterinarian in Italy's southwest Campania region, made a video message over the weekend as she was hospitalized with COVID-19. Her video plea has gathered much attention in Italy, which has just surpassed China in the number of reported deaths from the new coronavirus.

"I've been in isolation in a hospital room for so many days I've lost count," she says. "I have no contact with anyone other than doctors twice a day."

"Very few people understand what's happening. I want people to see I'm suffering," De Rosa continues.

"Every single individual must stay home and not endanger the lives of others," she insists.

Since the video was shared on Facebook last Sunday, it has racked up more than 11 million views.

As of Thursday afternoon, Italy has registered 41,035 diagnoses of the coronavirus and 3,405 deaths. The death toll is now higher than China's known COVID-19 deaths of over 3,200. Earlier this month, Italy became the first Western country to launch a nationwide lockdown to contain the outbreak, but despite strict measures, the number of cases continues to rise.

Italy has a universal health care system. But now, its hospitals and medical staff are overwhelmed, prompting anguished debate.

The Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care has issued guidelines for what it calls a "catastrophe medicine"-like scenario. The college put it starkly: Given the serious shortage of health resources, patients with the "best chance of success and hope of life" should have access to intensive care, the organization says.

"If you have an 99-year-old male or a female patient, that's a patient with a lot of diseases. And you have [a] young kid that need to be intubated and you only have one ventilator, I mean, you're not going to ... toss the coin," says Carlo Vitelli, a surgeon and oncologist in Rome.

He's speaking just a few hours after operating on a perforated appendix of a young man who had been in contact with a person from northern Italy, where the virus has hit the hardest in the country. It was "an emergency operation done on somebody who was in quarantine," Dr. Vitelli says, "don't know if he's going to develop. I don't think so. But, you never know."

Italy is treating the coronavirus pandemic like a wartime emergency. Health officials are scrambling to set up more beds. In Milan, the old fairgrounds is being turned into an emergency COVID-19 hospital with 500 new beds; across the country, hospitals are setting up inflatable tents outdoors for triage.

Other countries can learn important lessons from Italy, says Dr. Giuseppe Remuzzi, co-author of a recent paper in The Lancet about the country's dire situation. The takeaways include how to swiftly convert a general hospital into a coronavirus care unit with specially trained doctors and nurses.

"We had dermatologists, eye doctors, pathologists, learning how to assist a person with a ventilator," Remuzzi says.

Some question why Italy was caught off guard when the virus outbreak was revealed on Feb. 21.

Remuzzi says he is now hearing information about it from general practitioners. "They remember having seen very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November," he says. "This means that the virus was circulating, at least in [the northern region of] Lombardy and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China."

He says it was impossible to combat something you didn't know existed.

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## LKJ86

*Scott Morrison says now is the right time to close our borders*
20/03/2020
ALAN JONES
SCOTT MORRISON
Source:https://www.2gb.com/scott-morrison-says-now-is-the-right-time-to-close-our-borders/

*Prime Minister Scott Morrison is confident in his decision to order the close of Australia’s borders.*

New border controls will take effect in Australia tonight, with all non-citizens to be banned from entering the country.

The new restriction, in force from 9pm, is the latest measure rolled out to help slow the spread of coronavirus.

Earlier in the week, the government issued a ‘do not travel’ alert for the whole world.

Mr Morrison tells Alan Jones he believes the ban is being implemented at the right time.

“We were able to slow the virus’ start and spread in Australia through these early periods.

*“The country which has actually been responsible for a large amount of these [infections] has actually been the United States.”*

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## LKJ86

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1241368154208518145

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## LKJ86

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1241108064507486209

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## LKJ86

*March 20th, 2020 Meet Wuhan CoronaVirus Patient One - Maatje Benassi*

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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> *March 20th, 2020 Meet Wuhan CoronaVirus Patient One - Maatje Benassi*




__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1241697543681126400

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1240930262978043905

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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> *The Coronavirus CONSPIRACY - Did COVID-19 Come from America? *


*CNN: US is "looking into" why young people are getting coronavirus*
From CNN Health's Jacqueline Howard
Source:https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news...0-intl-hnk/h_2fe6383c4ac9154ea1e48cbeafe15a42

US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said the US is looking into why young people in the country are being diagnosed with the novel coronavirus.

"So far the demography definitely seems to be very different in the United States versus in other countries that saw this hit earlier," US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said on the "Today" show on Monday morning.

"And we're looking into that," Adams told NBC's Savannah Guthrie.

"There are theories that it could be because we know we have a higher proportion of people in the United States and also in Italy who *vape*," Adams said. "We don't know if that's the only cause."

In New York state so far, more than half of coronavirus cases — 53% — have been among young people between the ages of 18 and 49, Gov. Andrew Cuomo noted on Sunday.

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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> *CNN: US is "looking into" why young people are getting coronavirus*
> From CNN Health's Jacqueline Howard
> Source:https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news...0-intl-hnk/h_2fe6383c4ac9154ea1e48cbeafe15a42
> 
> US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said the US is looking into why young people in the country are being diagnosed with the novel coronavirus.
> 
> "So far the demography definitely seems to be very different in the United States versus in other countries that saw this hit earlier," US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said on the "Today" show on Monday morning.
> 
> "And we're looking into that," Adams told NBC's Savannah Guthrie.
> 
> "There are theories that it could be because we know we have a higher proportion of people in the United States and also in Italy who *vape*," Adams said. "We don't know if that's the only cause."
> 
> In New York state so far, more than half of coronavirus cases — 53% — have been among young people between the ages of 18 and 49, Gov. Andrew Cuomo noted on Sunday.


*CNBC: Death toll rises from mysterious lung illnesses linked to vaping, prompting CDC to sound alarm on e-cigarettes*
PUBLISHED FRI, *SEP 6 2019* 1:08 PM EDTUPDATED FRI, *SEP 6 2019* 4:04 PM EDT
Source:https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/06/cdc...-in-vaping-related-lung-disease-outbreak.html






At least three people have died from a mysterious lung illness doctors believe may be caused by vaping — a rising public health worry that has U.S. and state officials perplexed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.

A new patient in Indiana died, in addition to the previously reported deaths in Illinois and Oregon, Ileana Arias, CDC’s acting deputy director of non-infectious diseases told reporters on a media call. Officials are investigating a fourth death, she said.

The CDC is urging people to avoid using e-cigarettes amid the outbreak.

“Until we have a cause and while this investigation is ongoing, we’re recommending individuals consider not using e-cigarettes,” said Dana Meaney-Delman, who is overseeing the CDC’s response. “As more information comes about and we can narrow down the specific e-cigarette products, we intend to revise that.”

Federal health officials are reviewing 450 possible cases linked to vaping across 33 states, including the 215 cases it has previously reported, Meaney-Delman said. It’s unclear what exactly is causing the disease, officials said Friday. Until they have more information, the CDC is urging consumers not to buy e-cigarette products off the street or add any substances that are not intended by the manufacturer, the agency said.

Many of the patients who became sick said they vaped THC, a marijuana compound that produces a high. Some reported using both THC and e-cigarettes while a smaller group reported using only nicotine, Meaney-Delman said.

New York officials on Thursday said they are narrowing their focus to vitamin E acetate. Federal officials on Friday said it’s too early to pinpoint one substance.

The FDA is analyzing more than 120 samples for the presence of a broad range of substances, including nicotine, THC, other cannabinoids, cutting agents, opioids, toxins and poisons, Mitch Zeller, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products, said on the call. Lab tests have shown a “mix of results,” and no one substance or compound, including vitamin E acetate, has shown up in all of the samples tested, he said.

Doctors published detailed reports of the cases they’ve treated in the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday in hopes of defining the illness and helping other doctors recognize it.

Patients in many cases experienced gradual symptoms, including breathing difficulty, shortness of breath and chest pain before being hospitalized. Some people reported vomiting and diarrhea or other symptoms such as fevers or fatigue.

X-ray images from the patients typically show shadows similar to the ones seen in patients with viral pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome, said Dr. Dixie Harris, a pulmonologist with Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, who has worked on 24 cases in Utah.

That led her to perform bronchoscopies on the first few patients. Doctors did not find any infections. Then they considered it might be related to vaping. All of Harris’ patients said they vaped. Some used nicotine. Some used cannabinoids, including THC or CBD. Others used both, making it even more difficult for doctors to pinpoint a culprit.

“My stance is overall, as a lung doctor, I don’t want anybody putting anything into their lungs,” she said. “But I do think there is something going on and there is one common thing making all these lungs react.”

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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> A latest research paper about coronavirus from Japan:
> View attachment 613026
> 
> View attachment 613027
> 
> Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.08802




__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1241669849589268482

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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> Remuzzi says he is now hearing information about it from general practitioners. "They remember having seen very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November," he says. "This means that the virus was circulating, at least in [the northern region of] Lombardy and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China."
> 
> He says it was impossible to combat something you didn't know existed.


*The early phase of the COVID-19 outbreak in Lombardy, Italy*

Cereda D, Tirani M, Rovida F, Demicheli V, Ajelli M, Poletti P, Trentini F, Guzzetta G, Marziano V, Barone A, Magoni M, Deandrea S, Diurno G, Lombardo M, Faccini M, Pan A, Bruno R, Pariani E, Grasselli G, Piatti A, Gramegna M, Baldanti F, Melegaro A, Merler S

(Submitted on 20 Mar 2020)

In the night of February 20, 2020, the first case of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was confirmed in the Lombardy Region, Italy. In the week that followed, Lombardy experienced a very rapid increase in the number of cases. *We analyzed the first 5,830 laboratory-confirmed cases* to provide the first epidemiological characterization of a COVID-19 outbreak in a Western Country. Epidemiological data were collected through standardized interviews of confirmed cases and their close contacts. We collected demographic backgrounds, dates of symptom onset, clinical features, respiratory tract specimen results, hospitalization, contact tracing. We provide estimates of the reproduction number and serial interval. *The epidemic in Italy started much earlier than February 20, 2020. At the time of detection of the first COVID-19 case, the epidemic had already spread in most municipalities of Southern-Lombardy.* The median age for of cases is 69 years (range, 1 month to 101 years). 47% of positive subjects were hospitalized. Among these, 18% required intensive care. The mean serial interval is estimated to be 6.6 days (95% CI, 0.7 to 19). We estimate the basic reproduction number at 3.1 (95% CI, 2.9 to 3.2). We estimated a decreasing trend in the net reproduction number starting around February 20, 2020. We did not observe significantly different viral loads in nasal swabs between symptomatic and asymptomatic. The transmission potential of COVID-19 is very high and the number of critical cases may become largely unsustainable for the healthcare system in a very short-time horizon. We observed a slight decrease of the reproduction number, possibly connected with an increased population awareness and early effect of interventions. Aggressive containment strategies are required to control COVID-19 spread and catastrophic outcomes for the healthcare system.

Subjects: Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
Cite as: arXiv:2003.09320 [q-bio.PE]
(or arXiv:2003.09320v1 [q-bio.PE] for this version)

Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.09320

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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> Rouda followed up and asked, “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”
> 
> The doctor replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”




__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1245832946612711424

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## wali87

大汉奸柳传志 said:


> Which means coronavirus may have existed in the US long before it appeared in Wuhan
> 
> CDC failed to identify the virus strain due to negligence or sheer incompetence.


The United States it seems, used China as a scapegoat and to lay blame on. It is now quite apparent that the Virus seems to have originated in the US, that too not recently but about a couple of years ago. I would advise all members here to please google the name ‘Matja Bennasi’ who is American military officer and you ll find the lead. Once they understood the full intensity of the danger they decided to pin it on the next emerging super economy that will eventually outgrow the US. However the Chinese did an excellent job at containing the pandemic.


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## INDIAISM

beijingwalker said:


> It proved what I always believe, at last the coronavirus in US has been always there ,not imported from China.


If it has been always their then Americans would have been immune to this...So pls stop pointing fingure on others and accept that the entire world is paying for chinese sin....

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## LKJ86

INDIAISM said:


> If it has been always their then Americans would have been immune to this...




__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1245832946612711424

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## UKBengali

INDIAISM said:


> If it has been always their then Americans would have been immune to this...So pls stop pointing fingure on others and accept that the entire world is paying for chinese sin....




CCP bots in action again.

If the virus was in USA long before China, then why are we only now seeing the massive death figures?
Bots will say that Covid-19 deaths were "hidden" as flu but Covid-19 deaths happen mainly after lung failure and people then being put on ventilation, which has not happened in USA till the last month.

Lack of logic in action from the programmed bots again!


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## LKJ86

UKBengali said:


> CCP bots in action again.
> 
> If the virus was in USA long before China, then why are we only now seeing the massive death figures?
> Bots will say that Covid-19 deaths were "hidden" as flu but Covid-19 deaths happen mainly after lung failure and people then being put on ventilation, which has not happened in USA till the last month.
> 
> Lack of logic in action from the programmed bots again!

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## UKBengali

LKJ86 said:


> View attachment 620609




You are one of the most intelligent Chinese posters here.

It is thought that each Covid-19 carrier infects 2.5 people each week.

So as I already calculated in another post if there was a single Covid-19 carrier in July 1st 2019 in American, 80-90% of the US public would be infected by December 1st 2019 in the absence of any social distancing or vaccine/immunity.
10s of thousands of US citizens every day would have been dying from the "flu" since December last year.

Please do not degrade yourself by joining the CCP bots in spreading this fantasy that Covid-19 came from anywhere other than China.


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## LKJ86

UKBengali said:


> You are one of the most intelligent Chinese posters here.
> 
> It is thought that each Covid-19 carrier infects 2.5 people each week.
> 
> So as I already calculated in another post if there was a single Covid-19 carrier in July 1st 2019 in American, 80-90% of the US public would be infected by December 1st 2019 in the absence of any social distancing or vaccine/immunity.
> 10s of thousands of US citizens every day would have been dying from the "flu" since December last year.
> 
> Please do not degrade yourself by joining the CCP bots in spreading this fantasy that Covid-19 came from anywhere other than China.


Can USA tell us what the "mysterious lung illesses" is?
Can USA retest it with COVID19 now?

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## UKBengali

LKJ86 said:


> Can USA tell us what the "mysterious lung illesses" is?
> Can USA retest it with COVID19 now?



Makes no difference as it cannot be Covid-19.

2-3 million Americans would be dead now if USA was the source but that clearly has not happened.

Look I know you are just trying to defend your country but no-one apart from China, some in Pakistan and a few others believe Covid-19 came from anywhere else but China.


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## LKJ86

UKBengali said:


> Makes no difference as it cannot be Covid-19.
> 
> 2-3 million Americans would be dead now if USA was the source but that clearly has not happened.
> 
> Look I know you are just trying to defend your country but no-one apart from China, some in Pakistan and a few others believe Covid-19 came from anywhere else but China.


Why don't answer my questions?

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## UKBengali

LKJ86 said:


> Why don't answer my questions?



Like I say it is irrelevant to Covid-19.

2-3 million Americans would now be dead if Covid-19 started off in USA before China.

That is a separate issue and totally not related to the current pandemic. 

Please start a separate thread on that if you wish.


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## LKJ86

UKBengali said:


> Like I say it is irrelevant to Covid-19.
> 
> 2-3 million Americans would now be dead if Covid-19 started off in USA before China.
> 
> That is a separate issue and totally not related to the current pandemic.
> 
> Please start a separate thread on that if you wish.








Why don't answer my questions?

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1245832946612711424

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## bbccdd1470

I don't know why people keep focusing on the numbers since many infected people didn't do the testing due to no symptom or mid symptoms. Also according to their logic, the earliest case of China now tracked back to November, so China should also have million infected due the three months period and huge population, population density and outbreak location (Wuhan is the traffic center of China). Not to mention, the mutation of the virus may affect the ratio of spread. I think if USA is truly innocent, why not let the WHO investigate and collect the local sample cases in US, so WHO can check the genome sequencing to find out the truth.

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## INDIAISM

LKJ86 said:


> Can USA tell us what the "mysterious lung illesses" is?
> Can USA retest it with COVID19 now?


You yourself have answered that vaping E-cigarettes


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## LKJ86

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1246453344425725952

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## LKJ86

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1246378371912568834


INDIAISM said:


> If it has been always their then Americans would have been immune to this...

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## Hamartia Antidote

Mods please move this thread to thread:
*COVID-19 Coronavirus*


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## zectech

LKJ86 said:


> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1238114622684585984
> 
> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1238111898828066823



USA covered up... people died.

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## opruh

Disgusting and uncivilized murica spread the murican virus.


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## LKJ86

Source:https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/07/2004999117

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## LKJ86

LKJ86 said:


> Rouda followed up and asked, “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”
> 
> The doctor replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”


*New signs suggest coronavirus was in California far earlier than anyone knew*
By PAIGE ST. JOHNSTAFF WRITER
APRIL 11, 20205 AM
Source:https://www.latimes.com/california/...rus-deaths-signs-of-earlier-spread-california

SACRAMENTO — A man found dead in his house in early March. A woman who fell sick in mid-February and later died.

These early COVID-19 deaths in the San Francisco Bay Area suggest that the novel coronavirus had established itself in the community long before health officials started looking for it. The lag time has had dire consequences, allowing the virus to spread unchecked before social distancing rules went into effect.

“The virus was freewheeling in our community and probably has been here for quite some time,” Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician who is the chief executive of Santa Clara County government, told county leaders in a recent briefing.

How long? A study out of Stanford suggests a dramatic viral surge in February.

But Smith on Friday said data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local health departments and others suggest it was “a lot longer than we first believed” — most likely since “*back in December.*”

“This wasn’t recognized because we were having a severe flu season,” Smith said in an interview. “Symptoms are very much like the flu. If you got a mild case of COVID, you didn’t really notice. You didn’t even go to the doctor. The doctor maybe didn’t even do it because they presumed it was the flu.”

Just as New York has strong ties to travelers from Europe, who are believed to have brought the coronavirus there from Italy, the Bay Area is a natural hub for those traveling to and from China. Santa Clara County had its first two cases of COVID-19 almost a week before federal approval of emergency testing for the disease Feb. 4. Both were in travelers returning from Wuhan, China, where the virus was rampant.

In January and most of February, there was little, if any, community testing in California.

The CDC provided testing materials to only some health departments, with restrictions that confined testing and thus the tracking of the novel coronavirus to those who were sick or exposed to someone already known to have COVID-19. The federal agency’s focus was on cruise ships, with Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess carrying the largest known cluster of COVID-19 cases outside of China. The first passenger tested positive for COVID-19 five days after the ship’s Jan. 20 departure from Japan. Eventually, 712 passengers and crew tested positive, and nine of them died.

COVID-19 did not reappear in the Bay Area until Feb. 27, when doctors finally decided to test a hospitalized woman who had been ill for weeks. She became the region’s first case of community-spread coronavirus.

But from there, almost every positive test pointed toward local spread. “When public health [officials] tried to track down the start of the disease … we weren’t able to find, specifically, a contact,” Smith told county supervisors. “That means the virus is in the community already — not, as was suspected by the CDC, as only in China and being spread from contact with China.”

Researchers still unsure how long the virus lurked are now turning to blood banks and other repositories to see if lingering antibodies can show them what was missed. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health is looking for virus antibodies in samples from blood banks in Los Angeles, San Francisco and four other cities across the country.

Santa Clara County’s first community-spread case also became its first announced COVID-19 death.

Azar Ahrabi, 68, died March 9, the second COVID-19 fatality in California, five days after the first. For the first few weeks, the urban county that sits at the heart of Silicon Valley, home to Stanford University and tech giants Apple and Google, led California in coronavirus deaths.

Health investigators said they could find no source of Ahrabi’s infection. Her family members said she stayed mostly at home, taking care of her mother. She seldom drove, and she walked to a local grocery store to shop. But she and her mother lived in a Santa Clara apartment complex in a neighborhood with a high density of international residents.

Relatives said she showed signs of illness in mid-February. For more than a week, they gave only a passing thought that her fever and sudden fatigue might be tied to the horrifying news out of China.

Ahrabi’s son, Amir, said that when his mother checked into a medical clinic Feb. 20 and was diagnosed with a nonspecific pneumonia, she was prescribed antibiotics and sent home. The next day, her doctor admitted her to the intensive care unit.

Amir said he asked that she be tested for COVID-19, and doctors told him the county health department would not approve the test. She met none of the qualifying criteria.

New studies out of Stanford University and the CDC, taken together, suggest that the novel coronavirus spread quickly through the Bay Area.

Stanford’s virology lab, looking retroactively at some 2,800 patient samples collected since January, did not find the first COVID-19 cases until late February — from two patients who were tested Feb. 21 and Feb. 23. Neither of those patients, the researchers note in a letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., would have met existing criteria for COVID-19 testing.

The California Department of Public Health and the CDC did not begin community surveillance for COVID-19 in Santa Clara County until March 5. Samples were collected from 226 coughing, feverish patients who visited four urgent care centers; 1 in 4 turned out to have the flu. The state tested samples from a subset of 79 non-flu patients. Nine of them had COVID-19.

The result suggested that 8% of people walking into the urgent care centers carried the novel coronavirus, an infection rate that mirrored the 5% infection rate at a Los Angeles medical center, the CDC said in a report published Friday.

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## LKJ86

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1251753352133857281

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## onebyone

LKJ86 said:


> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1251753352133857281


MY God


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## LKJ86

*1 in 5 New Yorkers May Have Had Covid-19, Antibody Tests Suggest*
_Accurate antibody testing is a critical tool to determine if the pandemic has slowed enough to begin restarting the economy._

By J. David Goodman and Michael Rothfeld
April 23, 2020
Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-antibodies-test-ny.html

One of every five New York City residents tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus, according to preliminary results described by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday that suggested that the virus had spread far more widely than known.

If the pattern holds, the results from random testing of 3,000 people raised the tantalizing prospect that many New Yorkers — as many as *2.7 million*, the governor said — who never knew they had been infected had already encountered the virus, and survived. Mr. Cuomo also said that such wide infection might mean that the death rate was far lower than believed.

While the reliability of some early antibody tests has been widely questioned, researchers in New York have worked in recent weeks to develop and validate their own antibody tests, with federal approval. State officials believe that accurate antibody testing is seen as a critical tool to help determine when and how to begin restarting the economy, and sending people back to work.

“The testing also can tell you the infection rate in the population — where it’s higher, where it’s lower — to inform you on a reopening strategy,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Then when you start reopening, you can watch that infection rate to see if it’s going up and if it’s going up, slow down.”

The testing in New York is among several efforts by public health officials around the country to determine how many people may have been already exposed to the virus, beyond those who have tested positive. The results appear to conform with research from Northeastern University that indicated that the coronavirus was circulating by early February in the New York area and other major cities.

In California, a pair of studies using antibody testing found rates of exposure as high as 4 percent in Santa Clara County and 5 percent in Los Angeles County — higher than those indicated by infection tests, though not nearly as high as found in New York.

Public health officials recently disclosed that a woman in Santa Clara who died on Feb. 6 was infected with the virus.

In New York City, about 21 percent tested positive for coronavirus antibodies during the state survey. The rate was about 17 percent on Long Island, nearly 12 percent in Westchester and Rockland Counties and less than 4 percent in the rest of the state.

State researchers sampled blood from the approximately 3,000 people they had tested over two days, including about 1,300 in New York City, at grocery and big-box stores. The results were sent to the state’s Wadsworth facility in Albany, a respected public health lab.

Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the state health commissioner, said the lab had set a high bar for determining positive results, that it had been given blanket approval to develop coronavirus tests by the Food and Drug Administration and that state officials discussed this particular antibody test with the agency.

He said that while concerns about some tests on the market were valid, the state’s test was reliable enough to determine immunity — and, possibly, send people back to the office.

“It is a way to say this person had the disease and they can go back into the work force,” Dr. Zucker said. “A strong test like we have can tell you that you have antibodies.”

But he cautioned that the length of any such immunity remained unknown. “The amount of time, we need to see. We don’t know that yet,” he said, adding, “They will last a while.”

Unlike so-called diagnostic tests, which determine whether someone is infected, often using nasal swabs, blood tests for Covid-19 antibodies are intended to reveal whether a person was previously exposed and has developed an immune response. Some tests also measure the amount of antibodies present.

Hours before Mr. Cuomo’s presentation, a top health official in New York City expressed general skepticism about the utility of antibody tests — especially those on the private market — when it comes to questions of immunity and critical decisions over social distancing and reopening the economy.

Dr. Demetre C. Daskalakis, the city’s top official for disease control, wrote in an email alert on Wednesday that such tests “may produce false negative or false positive results,” pointing to “significant voids” in using the science to pinpoint immunity.

The alert, sent to medical providers and other subscribers, went on to warn that the consequences of relying on potentially false results may lead to “providing patients incorrect guidance on preventive interventions like physical distancing or protective equipment.”

Dr. Daskalakis, early in the outbreak, had been a strong voice arguing for social distancing measures and urging Mayor Bill de Blasio to close schools in New York City. When Mr. de Blasio resisted doing so, Dr. Daskalakis threatened to resign, a city official said. City Hall has said the mayor was never told of the threat.

Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for the city health department, said the alert referred to “unvetted tests outside of a lab setting — which is not what the state is doing.”

He added that there “isn’t any daylight here” between the city and state.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, praised the overall intent of New York’s study, but said the results in this case probably skew to a higher estimate than is real because a survey of grocery store shoppers in a pandemic would not be representative.

The sampling may disproportionately include those who have either already had the illness, or those who naturally tend to go out more and so are more likely to be exposed to the virus, he said. It would miss children, teenagers and older adults who may be sheltering in place.

“It’s not a criticism. It’s more of a comment that we have to be careful about interpreting supermarket customers as a representative sample when the state was in lockdown,” he said.

State officials said the test had been calibrated to err on the side of producing false negatives — to miss some who may have antibodies — rather than false positives, which would suggest a person had coronavirus antibodies when they did not.

Health experts have worried that if tests return high rates of false positives, they could encourage people to abandon protective measures and risk worsening the virus’s spread. Others warn that the true value of coronavirus antibodies is still unknown.

The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, recommends that antibody testing be used only in research settings, and not to make medical decisions such as to permit an individual to return to work. States and the federal government are not bound by the organization’s advice.

“I’m very ambivalent about these tests, because we don’t really know yet through the science what it means to have an antibody,” said Dr. Joan Cangiarella, the vice-chair of clinical operations at NYU Langone Health’s pathology department.

“We are hoping these antibodies mean you will be immune for some time,” she said. “But I don’t think the data is fully out there to understand if that means that you’re actually immune. And if these antibodies start to decline, what’s that time frame? Does it decline in a year from now?”

Mr. Cuomo on Thursday did not talk about any potential for immunity among those previously infected.

But he did suggest, based on the survey, that if as many as 2.7 million New Yorkers had the virus, the death rate in New York from Covid-19 would most likely be far lower than previously believed, possibly 0.5 percent of those infected.

More than 15,000 people have died of the virus in the state, a figure that does not include an additional 5,000 people in New York City who were never tested but were presumed to have died from the disease.

The number of deaths has been increasing less quickly, and new hospital admissions for the coronavirus have remained relatively flat over the past three days: about 1,350 patients per day, down from over 2,000 per day last week. More than 263,000 have tested positive for infection.

Mr. Cuomo said antibody testing results, along with hospitalization numbers, would influence the state’s reopening strategy, noting that the number of people being hospitalized was still too high to consider easing restrictions.

The state’s plan would involve tracking infections as restrictions are loosened on gatherings and businesses. Antibody testing would be used, Mr. Cuomo said, for identifying coronavirus survivors who can donate convalescent plasma — the part of the blood that contains antibodies. Doctors at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York and elsewhere have been testing this use of plasma for treating patients with the virus.

After the city’s alert appeared on Wednesday night, the Greater New York Hospital Association, a powerful group with close ties to the governor, sent its own message to its member hospitals, suggesting that the city’s warning was overblown and highlighting how it differed from the state Health Department’s approach.

Susan C. Waltman, the association’s general counsel, said the tests are valuable for the information they can provide about the virus, and contrasted the city’s “absolute, rather dismissive terms” with what she described as an approach from the state that “tries to put the test results in perspective.”

Last week, Ms. Waltman, state health officials, and a group of senior doctors from 10 major academic and medical institutions across the state submitted a report to state health officials about how to roll out antibody testing.

The discussions were led by Dr. James Crawford, Northwell Health’s senior vice president for laboratory services. Dr. Crawford said in an interview that as of this week, the state’s major medical institutions estimated that they could perform between 5,000 and 10,000 antibody tests per day. They expect to increase that number significantly in the coming weeks and months, he said.

Dr. Crawford said there was a “pressing need to have both parts of the equation — who has the virus and who has mounted an immune response,” but he cautioned against using antibody testing as a criterion to allow people into the world.

“To use it as a fulcrum for when someone can travel or work,” he said, “I think we have to be extremely careful as a society in doing that.”

_Reporting was contributed by Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jesse McKinley and Donald G. McNeil Jr._

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## LKJ86

*Belleville mayor has coronavirus antibodies, believes he had COVID-19 months ago*
Kaitlyn Kanzler, NorthJersey.comPublished 5:05 p.m. ET April 30, 2020 | Updated 10:35 a.m. ET May 1, 2020
Source:https://www.northjersey.com/story/n...s-positive-coronavirus-antibodies/3057925001/

Belleville Mayor Michael Melham said he has tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, adding that he believes he was sick with the virus in *November* — more than a month before doctors in China first reported cases of the new disease. 

Melham said he was sick toward the end of November and suffered from chills, hallucinations and a "skyrocketing temperature" after he left the League of Municipalities Conference in Atlantic City.

"It felt as if I was an addict going through withdrawal," Melham said in a press release. "I didn’t know what was happening to me. I never felt that I could be so sick."

The first known case of the coronavirus in the United States was in January and involved a West Coast man who had been in China's Wuhan Province. Health experts now say the coronavirus may have been quietly circulating in the United States in January and February, when testing was rare. None have pushed the timeline back as far as November, however. 

In a text message to NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey, Melham said it was the sickest he had ever been in his adult life.

The doctor told Melham he had the flu and that he would get better after rest and fluids, the release said. He did not take a flu test and said he did not travel overseas.

Melham said he later suspected he had contracted the coronavirus in November but dismissed the notion because the earliest cases in the United States weren't reported until January. His November illness is what prompted Melham to ask his doctor for the blood test. He got the results Wednesday.

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## Menthol

LKJ86 said:


> *Belleville mayor has coronavirus antibodies, believes he had COVID-19 months ago*
> Kaitlyn Kanzler, NorthJersey.comPublished 5:05 p.m. ET April 30, 2020 | Updated 10:35 a.m. ET May 1, 2020
> Source:https://www.northjersey.com/story/n...s-positive-coronavirus-antibodies/3057925001/
> 
> Belleville Mayor Michael Melham said he has tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, adding that he believes he was sick with the virus in *November* — more than a month before doctors in China first reported cases of the new disease.
> 
> Melham said he was sick toward the end of November and suffered from chills, hallucinations and a "skyrocketing temperature" after he left the League of Municipalities Conference in Atlantic City.
> 
> "It felt as if I was an addict going through withdrawal," Melham said in a press release. "I didn’t know what was happening to me. I never felt that I could be so sick."
> 
> The first known case of the coronavirus in the United States was in January and involved a West Coast man who had been in China's Wuhan Province. Health experts now say the coronavirus may have been quietly circulating in the United States in January and February, when testing was rare. None have pushed the timeline back as far as November, however.
> 
> In a text message to NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey, Melham said it was the sickest he had ever been in his adult life.
> 
> The doctor told Melham he had the flu and that he would get better after rest and fluids, the release said. He did not take a flu test and said he did not travel overseas.
> 
> Melham said he later suspected he had contracted the coronavirus in November but dismissed the notion because the earliest cases in the United States weren't reported until January. His November illness is what prompted Melham to ask his doctor for the blood test. He got the results Wednesday.



Many people are also saying the same thing on Twitter.

It said around October-December, there were so many people, like thousands, have the same sickness in their town.

I think one-third of the population in some places in USA already has the anti-body is true.


Well, you see, COVID-19 is not a big deal if you just ignore it.

Tomorrow China will be blamed for overreacting that created unnecessary panic worldwide.



LKJ86 said:


> View attachment 622581
> 
> Source:https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/07/2004999117



I think China did the right thing for containing Group B from Wuhan.

Despite many scientists say Group C is the son of the Group B.

But in my opinion, not the Group B from Wuhan, and then mutated to C.

But from Group B that already circulated outside Wuhan.

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## Nan Yang

LKJ86 said:


> *Belleville mayor has coronavirus antibodies, believes he had COVID-19 months ago*
> Kaitlyn Kanzler, NorthJersey.comPublished 5:05 p.m. ET April 30, 2020 | Updated 10:35 a.m. ET May 1, 2020
> Source:https://www.northjersey.com/story/n...s-positive-coronavirus-antibodies/3057925001/
> 
> Belleville Mayor Michael Melham said he has tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, adding that he believes he was sick with the virus in *November* — more than a month before doctors in China first reported cases of the new disease.
> 
> Melham said he was sick toward the end of November and suffered from chills, hallucinations and a "skyrocketing temperature" after he left the League of Municipalities Conference in Atlantic City.
> 
> "It felt as if I was an addict going through withdrawal," Melham said in a press release. "I didn’t know what was happening to me. I never felt that I could be so sick."
> 
> The first known case of the coronavirus in the United States was in January and involved a West Coast man who had been in China's Wuhan Province. Health experts now say the coronavirus may have been quietly circulating in the United States in January and February, when testing was rare. None have pushed the timeline back as far as November, however.
> 
> In a text message to NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey, Melham said it was the sickest he had ever been in his adult life.
> 
> The doctor told Melham he had the flu and that he would get better after rest and fluids, the release said. He did not take a flu test and said he did not travel overseas.
> 
> Melham said he later suspected he had contracted the coronavirus in November but dismissed the notion because the earliest cases in the United States weren't reported until January. His November illness is what prompted Melham to ask his doctor for the blood test. He got the results Wednesday.


The narrative that US military brought the virus to Wuhan is gaining traction.
It will be a matter of time before Trump and Pompeo have a mental breakdown.

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## LKJ86

*Coronavirus Florida: Patients in Florida had symptoms as early as January*
_Florida on Monday night removed data from the Department of Health website that showed 171 patients had coronavirus symptoms or positive test results in January and February, before any cases were announced to the public._
By Chris Persaud
Posted May 5, 2020 at 7:31 AM
Source:https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/...s-in-florida-had-symptoms-as-early-as-january

The novel coronavirus could have infected as many as 171 people in Florida as long as two months before officials announced it had come to the state, a Palm Beach Post analysis of state records shows.

Patients reported symptoms of the deadly virus as early as Jan. 1, when the disease was thought to be limited to China, Department of Health records reveal. The records don’t say if patients reported those symptoms to the state until months later or if local offices of the health department actively investigated the illnesses at the time or a combination of both.

The state pulled the records off its website late Monday without explanation. Department of Health officials and the governor’s office did not answer detailed questions on Tuesday.

Florida announced its first two presumed coronavirus cases on March 1. At the time, cases were not considered confirmed until reviewed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC confirmed those first two cases, in Manatee and Hillsborough counties, on March 2. The state now has recorded more than 37,000 cases of the deadly virus.

But at the time of the first two cases, 171 people across 40 counties who would later test positive for COVID-19 said they had suffered symptoms of the disease, state records show. Three of those patients were in Palm Beach County, which officially didn’t record its first two coronavirus cases until March 13. The county now has more than 3,300 cases.

Until Monday evening, when the state confirmed a coronavirus case, it publicly posted data on each case, without identifying the patient. The publicly shared data included a date that represented one of two things: when the patient first reported feeling symptoms or when the patient received a positive test result.

In the early days of January, it is unlikely patients were tested for the novel coronavirus. Such tests were tightly controlled by the CDC and limited to travelers who had been to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus originated. None of the 171 patients reported travel to China.

It is not clear from the data how the state treated the patients or even when they found out about their symptoms.

The entire dataset disappeared from the state website Monday only to return after 7:30 p.m. without the information relating to the timing of the symptoms.

An analysis of the state data, which has been downloaded and retained by The Post since the state started posting it in March, found these diverse early cases:

_— A 4-year-old Duval County girl started feeling symptoms or had her first positive test on Jan. 1. The state did not officially record her case until April 8.

— An 84-year-old Palm Beach County man who had not traveled, but was hospitalized, had symptoms or a positive result on Feb. 5. But his case was not added to Florida’s coronavirus tally until April 3.

— A 48-year-old Palm Beach County woman whose symptoms or positive test results were reported Feb. 6. Her case was counted on Saturday.

— A 74-year-old Palm Beach County woman with symptoms or a positive result on Feb. 23, whose case was recorded by the state on April 4. She reported no out-of-state travel and she came into contact with someone carrying the virus.

— A 65-year-old man in Broward County who had traveled to the Cayman Islands listed symptoms or a positive test on Jan. 4 but his case was not recorded until March 7.

— A 30-year-old Broward County man, whose symptoms or first positive result came on Feb. 25, died. His case was added March 15.

— A 65-year-old man in Sarasota County who had traveled to California and came into contact with an infected person reported symptoms or had a positive result on Feb. 23. State health officials added his case April 6._

Counties where early cases were reported included Broward (31 cases), Miami-Dade (26), Hillsborough (9), Pinellas (10), Orange (9) and Duval (7) and Martin (one case).

Among the 171 patients were 105 women and 66 men. They ranged in age from 4 to 91.

Even though the disease was thought confined to China before January, most of the early patients hadn’t traveled: 103 reported no travel while just 52 said they had.

Three Florida residents whose testing or symptom dates were in January and February had traveled from Japan, where the Diamond Princess cruise ship sailed from Yokohama on Jan. 20, visiting China and southeast Asia.

More than 700 people on the ship would test positive for coronavirus. The ship was quarantined in early February and its passengers released on Feb. 19.

Only six people in Florida whose tests or symptoms started before March were not Florida residents. Their symptoms or positive results started appearing in mid- to late February. Their cases originated in Orange, Flagler, Sarasota, Hillsborough, St. Johns and Jackson counties.

The first report of a coronavirus-related death in the United States came Feb. 29 in the Seattle area. But medical officials there later learned that the virus had killed two more people on Feb. 26.

And then autopsies conducted in Santa Clara County, Calif., confirmed COVID-19 had killed two residents on Feb. 6 and Feb. 17.

In January, when the United States confirmed its first coronavirus infection — a Washington man who returned home from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus originated — the disease already had spread to thousands of Americans, researchers now estimate.

As of Feb. 4, the CDC had 293 people from 36 states under investigation. It had confirmed 11 cases, nine of whom had been in Wuhan and two patients who had made close contact with travelers.

Doctors in Paris announced on Tuesday they had discovered that a patient admitted to the hospital in December had the virus. The 42-year-old man, who had a dry cough, fever and trouble breathing, said he never went to China, and his last trip overseas was in August to Algeria.

The first official reports of COVID-19 in France came on Jan. 24, attributed to a 48-year-old French citizen who had returned from China days before.

If the disease were present in Florida in the first two months of 2020, it would have been hard for state health officials to trace it, said Dr. Claude Dharamraj, who ran the Pinellas County Health Department until 2015.

A national shortage of coronavirus tests would have made tracing impossible, she said.

“We can contact those who have been exposed, but it does no good when you can’t test,” she said.

The state’s 53 local health departments feed data into a centralized system, she said. Where one county might report the onset of a patient’s symptoms, another might report on when health officials swabbed a patient’s nose. Both events would have been captured in the same column of data.

Noting recent reports of an earlier spread in America, she acknowledged that Floridians could have been suffering earlier than previously thought.

“It’s very possible that in Florida the virus was spreading and people, being at the peak of flu season, probably thought they had the flu,” she said.

_Staff writer Lulu Ramadan contributed to this story._

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