Sunday 26 July 2020

Early Coronavirus chronology after COVID-19 found in Spain from March 2019

Coronavirus fact check chronology


Very interesting development that a strain of the Covid-19 virus — SARS-CoV-2 — has been discovered in a frozen sample of sewage in Barcelona dating from 12th March 2019, indicating (as some scientists have posited) that the virus was already circulating the world before exploding so virulently in Wuhan in December 2019.

America needs to provide an explanation as to why they were able to brief NATO and Israel about the coming pandemic in November but failed to warn China in the middle of a vicious trade war. (EDIT: The Pentagon now denies this.) In a bonfire of the virus protection measures: Trump disbanded in May 2018 the pandemic team set up by Obama, slashed their Beijing CDC office until no staff remained by July 2019, threatened to pull out of WHO and defunded research.



This, of course, means that NATO member Britain was fully in the frame having being tipped off about the virus even before China. However, despite still messing up its handling of the outbreak at home, it is nevertheless prepared to scapegoat China at the behest of the Trump administration. Very noble, chaps. So glad to see we took back control!

To bolster Trump's accusations of tardiness, there are still claims  –  which I thought had long been put to bed – that China suppressed its whistleblower doctors. Of course, early fumbles with the novel coronavirus, and taking less than five weeks from initial discovery to full-on national lockdown and eventual eradication of the virus, can hardly compete in the criminal negligence stakes with America's six months of paralysis.

In a full frontal attack on Age of Enlightenment fact-based science, Trump went medieval on our collective ass. For tales of suppression of doctors, you need only look at the attacks on Dr Anthony Fauci, the World Health Organisation, hospital workers who warn about lack of PPE and scientists working with China in vital research, such as Dr Peter Daszak whose crucial work was defunded. The treatment of the Seattle doctor who realised, "It's just everywhere" in January is a case in point.


So to clarify the chronology of the virus's discovery in China, the following is gleaned from the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, WHO, Xinhua, Asia Review, Read Passage, The Lancet and others.


An "odd" lung infection is noted in the Wuhan hospital 18th December.

Dr Zhang Jixian sees a sick family 26th December and on 27th December, she reports the unusual pneumonia to her hospital boss and local health authority in Wuhan. The provincial CDC then initiates full scale research at the hospital.

By 30th December, the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee (WMHC) notifies its medical institutions. “The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued an urgent notification to medical institutions under its jurisdiction, ordering efforts to appropriately treat patients with pneumonia of unknown cause.” (Xinhua)

On the same day, 30 December, Dr Ai Fen sends private message mentioning SARS to other doctors which is seen by opthalmologist Dr Li Wenliang.

Li sends a private WeChat message warning a group of eight medical colleagues incorrectly that it could be SARS and includes patients' private medical information - from there it goes viral. He is reprimanded by police on 3rd January and told to sign a pledge he won't do it again. (He tragically catches Covid-19 from a patient and dies 7th February.)

The WMHC issues a public notification on its Weibo account on 31st December when CCTV, CGTN and Reuters carry the story.

Same day, 31st Dec, China receives genome results from a commercial lab - the WHO is told (and then formally briefed 3rd Jan). US CDC learn from the 31st Dec reports and begin development reports for HHS on Jan 1st.

2nd Jan the WHO activates their incident management system.

On 3rd January (4th Jan in China), the US CDC chief Robert Redfield talks to China's CDC chief, George Guo. Redfield tells HHS secretary Alex Azar who then tells the White House and instructs his chief of staff to share the Chinese report with the national security council. [EDIT: The Washington Post reports that Azar did not "substantially" inform Trump until 18th January at Mar-a-lago. Azar “assured the president that those responsible were working on and monitoring the issue. Azar told several associates that the president believed he was ‘alarmist’ and Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue, even asking one confidant for advice.”]

The virus genome is identified, sequenced and shared internationally in record time by 12th January.

EDIT: To be more specific:
2nd January: The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) receive the first batch of samples of four patients from Hubei Province and begin pathogen identification.
4th January (3rd Jan in the US): Head of the China CDC George Guo talks over phone with director of the U.S. CDC Robert Redfield about the pneumonia outbreak. The two sides agree to keep in close contact for information sharing and technological cooperation.
5th January: Laboratory test results rule out respiratory pathogens, such as influenza, avian influenza, adenovirus, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, as the cause. The WHO is informed and releases its first briefing on cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan.
EDIT: In a Time magazine interview, Professor Zhang Yongzhen says he recieved samples at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center on 3rd January and uploaded the sequence to the US on 5th January. "Zhang insists he first uploaded the genome to the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) on Jan. 5—an assertion corroborated by the submission date listed on the U.S government institution’s Genbank."
7th January: The China CDC succeeds in isolating the first novel coronavirus strain.
8th January: The National Health Commission (NHC) initially identify a new coronavirus as the cause of the epidemic.
9th January: The NHC make public their discovery of the pathogen, saying a new type of coronavirus has been initially identified as the cause of the viral pneumonia in Wuhan. China informs the WHO who release a statement on progress saying that this unusually fast preliminary identification of a new virus is a notable achievement.
10th January: The China CDC shares with the WHO the specific primers and probes for detecting the novel coronavirus.
11th January: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission updated briefing on the situation of viral pneumonia of unknown cause.
12th January: The China CDC, the CAMS and the WIV under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), as designated agencies of the NHC, submit to the WHO the genome sequence of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which is published by the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) and shared globally. 

 

China's genuine biggest blunder allows a public banquet in Wuhan to go ahead on 18th January. Local officials are later disciplined and sacked.

Evidence for human to human transmission is confirmed 20th January. 

Previous accusations of "crying wolf" over H1N1 Swine Flu in 2009 by the BBC among others: "They [WHO] frightened the whole world with the possibility that a major plague was on the way," means China and the WHO are ultra-cautious until they have scientific proof this time. However, they do NOT rule it out and on 14th January, the WHO tweets that as yet "Preliminary investigations ... have found no clear evidence" of h2h infection. 


Wuhan lockdown begins 23rd Jan when its air traffic is stopped. Two 1,000 bed emergency hospitals for confirmed cases are built in 10 days.


China reopens 76 days later having eradicated the virus but cautiously leaving the system in place to deal with flare-ups. It had a total of 86,000 cases with 4,653 deaths, most in Hubei.



COVID-19 origin: University of Calgary research shows SARS-CoV-2 may have been evolving slowly since 2013.

The Atlantic: Trump’s Break With China Has Deadly Consequences. After scuttling its partnership with Beijing on public health, the U.S. was unprepared for the pandemic.


Joshua Cho, Fair: No, China Didn’t ‘Stall’ Critical Covid Information at Outbreak’s Start

Tuesday 23 June 2020

“Let's Blame China": an infantile disorder when Covid-19 comes knocking

How the White House turned "China bought us time" into "China lied, people died" and put the world at risk    




"Let's blame China" has become the lazy go-to for so many politicians and media lacking the will to think outside the Trump admininistration box, it's tragic. Literally. Stupefied by the past three years of a vicious trade war on China, the commentariat allows information which could save our lives to be buried in the mush of memes and accusations put out by the various right-wing think tanks: from Bannon to the fugly Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). Meanwhile, the bodies pile up.

Even LBC radio host James O'Brien, usually one who incisively questions the status quo, went on autopilot the other day to blame China's "appalling conduct" for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Blaming China is several degrees north of perverse when the US knew about the coming pandemic at least from November, even briefing NATO and Israel while keeping this vital information from the nation that would be the first to deal with it. [Edit: the Pentagon now denies this.]

Anyone scapegoating the country that lost thousands of lives and devastated its own economy in the drive to eradicate the virus and buy time for the rest of the world, needs to be reminded of what China learnt once they got on top of it. Because that's our collective knowledge, too. 

Up until Trump's U-turn in mid-March, most were impressed with the record time in which China identified, sequenced and shared the "strange pneumonia's" gene code as they struggled to make sense of what was happening since the first case was confirmed on 27th December 2019. Having finally confirmed human-to-human transmission 20th January after initial confusion and missteps, they turbocharged their efforts. Three days later on 23rd January, they shut down the city of Wuhan, and Hubei, a province of 66 million (about the same population as Britain), and halted its air traffic. The purpose was to starve the virus of hosts in order, not just to contain it, but to wipe it out completely. 


I watched the webcam broadcasts of two mega-hospitals being built in 10 days and wondered how – after witnessing these unprecedented feats by a fifth of humanity – anyone could ever return to the incessant dehumanising depictions thrust at us over the three years of Trump's trade war. 


We didn't have to wait very long. As early as January, Senator Tom Cotton; Steve Bannon; the Washington Times; Radio Free Asia; Fox 'News' and other right-wing mouthpieces had begun accusing China of creating the SARS-Covid-2 virus in the Wuhan lab: a patent falsehood now debunked by scientists and the Pentagon. Commie bashers hurled abuse and ridicule at the evhul totalitarian state for clamping down on freeberty, something we would never do in the West. Masks were depicted as a mark of subhuman Them versus superior Us, and we were assured that we would never see these symbols of Asian subjugation on the streets of Old Blighty.

Trump wasted precious time as Covid-19 seeded itself in the population leading to chaos and recriminations. Then on 13th March the president performed his reluctant U-turn and declared a national emergency, saying, "I don't accept responsibility at all." 

Cue blame game.

A week later on 20th March, the same day the UK went into lockdown and news emerged of US senators selling their stocks on the eve of the long-awaited crash finally triggered by the coronavirus Black Swan, the White House sent a cable to State Department officials, issuing "guidelines for how U.S. officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China."

The Daily Beast reported that the cable's key talking points to be pressed home were that the Chinese government "... hid news of the virus from its own people for weeks, while suppressing information and punishing doctors and journalists who raised the alarm. The Party cared more about its reputation than its own people’s suffering."

However, Dr Zhang Jixian, the director of respiratory and critical care at Wuhan Hospital had raised the alarm on 27th December, informing the head of her hospital and the local health authorities that the "strange pneumonia" confounding the doctors was not the suspected return of SARS, but a "novel coronavirus". Far from being punished, she was rewarded and honoured for her diligence, an inconvenient fact ignored by Western press. 

The media preferred to turn the late opthalmologist Dr Li into a martyr as proof of a cover-up despite his WeChat message wrongly identifying SARS going "viral" in an email and threatening panicked flight of a possibly infected public after Dr Zhang had already reported her grim discovery. (EDIT: Dr Li's message was to a small WeChat group, a member of which shared it against his specific request.) The World Health Organisation, US CDC and press including Reuters knew of the novel coronavirus by 31st December. Dr Li wasn't arrested as claimed, but was heavy-handedly reprimanded by police on 3rd January — after work had begun on the virus and news was out — and told to sign a document pledging he wouldn't do it again. Tragically, he would become an early victim of the virus, catching it from a patient and dying on 7th February.

Americans would find suppression of critical medical information nearer home in Seattle where Dr Helen Chu found early Covid-19 cases from as far back as January 2020 — "It's just everywhere already"— but was told to shut up and stop testing. Or watch the CDC's director Robert Redfield finally testifying to Congressman Harley Rouda in March that they had been wrongly diagnosing Covid-19 deaths as flu.


However, he who smelt it must have dealt it. Politico got hold of "a detailed 57-page memo authored by a top Republican strategist advising GOP candidates to address the coronavirus crisis by aggressively attacking China", dated 17th April.

The memo includes advice on everything from how to tie Democratic candidates to the Chinese government to how to deal with accusations of racism. It stresses three main lines of assault: That China caused the virus “by covering it up,” that Democrats are “soft on China,” and that Republicans will “push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic.”

The document urges candidates to stay relentlessly on message against the country when responding to any questions about the virus. When asked whether the spread of the coronavirus is Trump’s fault, candidates are advised to respond by pivoting to China. “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China,” the memo states.

Other smears doing the rounds in a tsunami of hate included linking Chinese to filth and pestilence  — very Goebbels — by claiming Chinese eating bats started the outbreak when the heat of cooking would have killed the virus, and bats are eaten in Micronesia, Indonesia, Texas and Louisiana ... but not generally in China. [EDIT: Some minorities in southern China near the border eat bats but the wildlife trade was banned in January following the coronavirus outbreak.] 

In a piece headlined "'Don't defend Trump, attack China': Republican memo reveals coronavirus campaign strategy" the Independent pointed out more talking points and how Republican senatorial candidates were instructed to use them:

... the GOP's messaging effort to attack China for the coronavirus pandemic and blame the country's communist government leadership for "covering it up, lying, and hoarding the world’s supply of medical equipment."
 
...encourages candidates to promote unverified theories that the coronavirus is "likely the result of an accidental release by a Chinese research facility," which China and the World Health Organisation (WHO), among other groups, deny.


Even in Britain, the BBC continues to twist reality by excluding all mention of anything positive done by the most populous nation on Earth, rendering their reports absurd and denying Britons access to the Covid-19 roadmap drawn by China through their trial by fire. In post-Brexit Britain, results of this month's trade negotiations with the declining US superpower have been largely kept quiet but UK media exclusion of positive news from China and hostile reporting as our death toll rises to over 42,600, have generally not improved.

What this means is that, in the absence of vital information learnt by the Chinese as the first to grapple with the pandemic, the nations that set up China as the antagonist have had to reinvent the wheel, squandering months during which the virus has spread, killed people and may be mutating into forms against which the vaccines currently being developed may not work. Six months after the outbreak, we have only just been told that masks do indeed cut the spread of the virus. Yet one Chinese scientist had informed us on Twitter around February that research done at home in Cambridge indicated that as much as 70 per cent of the virus could be stopped with masks. 


If only Trump and Boris Johnson had dropped their egos and learnt, as decidedly non-authoritarian New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern had done, that a lockdown was immediately necessary, we too might only be stamping out flare-ups instead of sinking under the weight of death and sickness. Most Britons and Americans aren't even aware that the lockdown serves a purpose beyond just keeping case numbers down. The virus needs human hosts to survive, and therefore quarantine lockdown starves the virus to extinction. In China, this was achieved within the 76 day lockdown. [Edit: The Covid-19 virus fell to zero in 43 days.]

Scientists are still trying to find out where the virus originated. Current research suggests that the Wuhan outbreak was the B-strain of a coronavirus originating in horseshoe bats that had possibly been circulating the world for years before mutating and erupting in Wuhan, the transport hub of America's upstart rival superpower, three years into a nasty trade war.

President Trump's administration knew about the pandemic threat in November, informing Israel and NATO — which means Britain knew in November and also failed to warn China. It closed down the pandemic team set up by Obama, cut the CDC office in Beijing to a third of its usual 47-team, slashed the funding for its Eco Health Alliance lookout in the Wuhan lab, and continues to trash-talk China. [EDIT: the Trump admin closed down the CDC's Beijing office completely by July 2019.] More to the point, the US couldn't even identify its own early cases, let alone develop a test that actually worked, or collaborate with China on any meaningful strategy for elimination of the virus. Injecting bleach doesn't count. Nor does gargling with anti-malaria tablets.

Some might categorise the US pirating Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) from other countries as "appalling conduct" while China was sending out PPE by the ton to Serbia, Iran, Italy, Cuba and a number of other countries, including a medical team dispatched to the UK which was ignored by most of the media. Confiscating PPE and ventilators from blue states and giving them to private outlets under control of your son-in-law and red states that voted for Trump is hardly pretty, either.

There are now 305,289 cases and 42,600 deaths in the UK; 2.32 million cases and 122,000 deaths in the US. Globally, nearly 9 million cases and 469,000 deaths.

But, yeah. Let's blame China.

EDIT 10th September 2020:

Confirmed: Trump admin knew of the Covid-19 dangers on 28th January 2020 but covered it up


We now know that Trump and his admin knew the dangers of Covid-19 from at least the 28th January 2020 when, according to the Washington Post, he was told at a top secret meeting:
“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump ... “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

A reminder that Trump closed down the White House Pandemic Team and shut the US CDC's Beijing office, which was supposed to help China monitor new diseases, by July 2019. Despite being told about the deadly dangers of SARS-CoV-2 at least by the 28th January 2020, Trump ran a super-spreader policy, playing it down, calling it a hoax, stigmatising masks and holding massive unmasked rallies. PPE was pirated from both international supplies and red states at home. As soon as cases grew too numerous to ignore, the White House issued instructions on how to blame China, as reported by The Daily Beast and others.

EDIT 2 31st August 2021

CHINA BECOMES THE FIRST COUNTRY TO END A DELTA OUTBREAK making five times that China has zeroed Covid.

Sky News 24th August 2021:  "China records zero Delta cases in a world first. First country to prove they can crush the Delta outbreak after reporting zero locally acquired cases for the first time since July."




The Lancet: How China Managed COVID-19. Active case finding with case management: the key to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic

Sharp timeline observations by K J Noh: How to Yellow-Cake a Tragedy: the NY Times Spreads the Virus of Hatred, Again

The Gray Zone: How a Trump media dump mainstreamed Chinese lab coronavirus conspiracy theory

Peter Beinart in The Atlantic: Trump’s Break With China Has Deadly Consequences. After scuttling its partnership with Beijing on public health, the U.S. was unprepared for the pandemic.

Foreign Policy: China Deserves Some Credit for Its Handling of the Wuhan Pneumonia. "Within weeks of detection of the initial outbreak in December in Wuhan, China has already identified the novel coronavirus ... Beyond the credit Beijing should rightly take for acting relatively swiftly on this disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) has also played a key supporting role."

LA Times: Trump administration ended pandemic early-warning program to detect coronaviruses

CDC: While China took days to identify the novel coronavirus (27th December to 8th January 2020) the US's CDC took six months to identify H1N1 Swine Flu in 2009 which had likely been circulating in different forms for years. Why the aggressive response to China on Covid-19 when they did so much better and faster?

FAIR: No, China Didn’t ‘Stall’ Critical Covid Information at Outbreak’s Start

A Twitter thread by Anna Chen on Trump's Covid timeline from his covfefe tweet in 2017 to catching Covid-19 in late 2020. Original Twitter thread.

People's Covid Inquiry report summary 1st December 2021: Mike Mansfield chaired months-long inquiry into misconduct in public office. Why did so many thousands die unnecessarily?

PODCAST Media Roots Radio: Bannon, Tom Cotton, Bill Gertz & Anti-China Neocon Propaganda In the Wake of COVID19 (Part 1 of 2)


Sunday 14 June 2020

Plague, protests and how the hybrid war on China is prolonging Covid-19 pain in the West

Covid-19 and the UK's missing PPE - NHS health-workers you need this!






I'm back after a long break following my bout of strange, dry bronchitis in December (Loved One had a dry hacking smokers' cough in parallel) which lost us Christmas and New Year, through the coronavirus crisis, a ramped up Cold War on China, and world-wide Black Lives Matter protests set off when African-American George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police on camera in front of us over an agonising 8 minutes and 46 seconds of horror, supposedly over a $20 bill.

I've been spending far too much time on Twitter. There's always somebody wrong on the internet, as the cartoon goes, but some of the toxic outbursts prompt a response before their narratives set like concrete. I should remind myself regularly that social media - especially the Twitter hellhole that hosts Trump - is a vast undifferentiated id. So what did I expect?

If it wasn't for the mainstream media (MSM) news blackout on all things positive about China, I might be more focused on getting my second poetry book out of the way so I could concentrate on my own writing, which I used to do for pleasure. However, in this science fiction writer's coma dream where we've all been trapped ever since David Bowie died in January 2016 and took all the cosmic glue with him, the sleep of reason has produced monsters of planet-destroying magnitude.

I was brought up to believe that the Fourth Estate — our print and broadcast journalism — was there to protect us, to defend science-based truth as we've known it for 400 years of the Age of Enlightenment. (Hah, as I write that I realise that's about the same timespan during which African-Americans have been enslaved and Jim Crowed in America, so maybe there's a clue in there, somewhere.) However, the complete partisan absence of media coverage of, for instance, Hong Kong's US NED-backed Trojan Horse protester violence — beating, maiming, incinerating, killing Chinese civilians for a whole year with not one death by cop — is a whole other revelation.



Along with locusts, floods, fires in Oz and first-born (loosely, Huawei's "detained" Meng Wanzhou and Hunter Biden) we added plague to our biblical disaster list in January. After some initial fumbles, by 12th January China managed to identify, sequence and share the gene code of the "strange pneumonia" novel coronavirus that's been circulating around the globe possibly for years when it erupted in a potent new strain in Wuhan. But – oy vey! – the co-ordinated Cold War hate-fest aimed at China, intensifying Trump's three-year trade war, has been as breath-taking as the Covid-19 disease.

This week there's been another city lockdown following Thursday's Covid-19 flare-up in Xinfadi, Beijing's major wholesale food market, imported on salmon or rainbow trout, possibly from Norway. Fish: cold, moist, on ice, an ideal transportation system for a virus. BTW, "Fish cannot be infected by coronavirus." Luckily, everything's in place to contain the outbreak so let's hope the US and UK are paying attention this time. More on America and its Thucydides Trap travails later.

In the UK, arrogance and incompetence from the Boris Johnson/Dominic Cummings government has brought Britain to its knees. Instead of learning from the Covid-19 road map drawn for us by China, as New Zealand's Jacinda Arden did, the political, media and even some of the science establishment got jealous and arsey about China's unprecedented lockdown of 1.4 billion human beings in order to contain the virus and starve it of hosts.

The mainstream media (MSM) mostly joined the news blackout on anything positive about China's management of the virus after Trump's U-turn in March led to co-ordinated attacks on China. While China sent a medical team to the UK at the end of March, along with PPE and 300 ventilators when hospitals were running out, the BBC countered with the bogus "faulty equipment" smear and the ever-hateful Guardian spun it as "China portrays itself as a global benefactor". Because, of course, the Yellow Peril can never act out of altruism, empathy, humanity, ethics or just plain practical understanding that the virus doesn't respect borders. Johnson dithered, caught the thing, nearly died himself, and has led us to having getting on for the worst death rate in the developed world: 41,662 to date (in a population of 66.6 million) with no end in sight. On top of which, to brighten your day, that's no light at the end of the tunnel. That's the Brexit train headed straight for us ...

For our frontline health, care-home and transport workers bravely serving the public in bin bags or nothing against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, I've presented the video at the top of the page to show the layers of Personal Protection Equipment required to keep you properly safe. This is the state-of-the-art PPE that stopped Chinese health workers dying. This is what you need, what you deserve. Make sure you get it.

EDIT: I've been advised that Hybrid Warfare is a more accurate description of what's happening than "asymmetric" so I've changed it to "hybrid" in the headline.

Study in The Lancet documenting how China managed the Covid-19 outbreak, published 4th June 2020: Active case finding with case management: the key to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic

Alibaba produced the Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19 (GMCC) international resource for tackling the pandemic, including multilingual manuals on specific aspects available for download

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