COVID-19 (Continuación)

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La semana pasada se publicó un artículo científico que estableció un nuevo récord. Poco después de aparecer en Internet, su “puntuación altmétrica” —que mide la atención que reciben los ensayos de investigación en la prensa y las redes sociales— había sobrepasado ya a cualquier otro estudio anterior. El artículo, publicado en una página web dedicada a resultados preliminares, aseguraba que el nuevo coronavirus que estaba extendiéndose en China tenía fragmentos de código genético similares al VIH, lo que desató las teorías de la conspiración de que el virus se había creado mediante ingeniería genética. Solo había un inconveniente: el artículo tenía defectos importantes y fue desacreditado por los principales investigadores genéticos.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Chinese authorities have placed an estimated 760 million people into lockdown as part of an epic campaign to contain the spread of covid-19, the novel coronavirus. As of Sunday, there were over 77,000 confirmed cases and more than 2,500 deaths in China, mostly in Hubei province. Wuhan, the provincial capital and the epicenter of the outbreak, has been hard hit.

Why did China’s CDC system, once touted as among the world’s best disease control programs, fail to help contain the virus early on? And what has the crisis exposed about China’s system of governance? Here’s what you need to know.

China built a system to prevent another SARS crisis

In the aftermath of the 2003 SARS crisis, China invested heavily to improve its system for infectious disease control and prevention.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Meanwhile, on the other side of the Earth, there have been more than 75,000 cases of coronavirus and more than 2,000 deaths. This leaves U.S. health experts hoping that the number of infections has been dramatically underreported.

That is not a typo. If the current numbers are close to accurate, it indicates a coronavirus mortality rate upward of 2 percent. The mortality rate for the seasonal flu is generally 0.1 percent. The mortality rate for pandemic flu is 0.3 to 0.5 percent. The particularly deadly flu pandemic of 1918 — which took the lives of 50 million people around the world — had a mortality rate of about 2 percent.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Japan’s bureaucrats are great at some things. Crisis management doesn’t seem to be one of them.

As it attempts to manage the fallout of the covid-19 coronavirus — which has taken the lives of more than 2,000 people worldwide, including a Japanese man and woman on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship — Japan is reliving the bureaucratic red-tape nightmares that hampered emergency efforts in Kobe in 1995 and Fukushima in 2011.

After a major quake devastated Kobe in 1995, volunteers who came to offer help to the displaced were turned away by officials, as were Swiss search-and-rescue dogs because authorities refused to relax quarantine regulations.…  Seguir leyendo »

A rescued pangolin in search of food on a private property near Johannesburg on Saturday. (Themba Hadebe/AP)

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About two years ago in northern Uganda, I watched anxiously as an endangered pangolin was released into a protected forest. Wildlife authorities and conservationists had rescued the scaly mammal from poachers. The small, gentle creature fell off the tree he was trying to climb and weakly crawled into the underbrush. Pangolins tend to die in captivity so release into the wild was his best option for survival. But the odds were stacked against him, in many ways.

The pangolin is likely the world’s most poached and trafficked mammal, largely because of voracious demand for its scales and meat from China and other Asian countries.…  Seguir leyendo »

Chinese police with items seized from a store suspected of trafficking exotic meats in Guangde, central China, last month. Credit Anti-Poaching Special Squad, via Associated Press

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The new coronavirus disease has a name now: COVID-19. That took a while. The virus’s genome was sequenced within two weeks or so of its appearance, but for many weeks more, we didn’t know what to call it or the disease it causes.

For a time, in some quarters, the disease went by “Wuhan pneumonia,” after the city in central China where the first human infections were detected. But guidelines from the World Health Organization, which christened COVID-19 recently, discourage naming diseases after locations or people, among other things, to avoid “unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities.”

Indeed. On Jan.…  Seguir leyendo »

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The number of cases of covid-19 — the newly named coronavirus — has topped 70,000 globally, with over 1,800 deaths. The World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on Jan. 30, citing the lack of scientific knowledge about the new virus, as well as the need to increase preparation in “vulnerable countries and regions”.

As of mid-February, 29 countries have reported cases, including Egypt — with the first confirmed case on the African continent. Trade and migration between Africa and China, as well as the presence of roughly 1 million Chinese nationals on the continent, mean it is possible that other covid-19 cases will appear.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Desde que se reportó un nuevo tipo de coronavirus en Wuhan, China, el pasado mes de diciembre, la cantidad de personas infectadas en todo el mundo ha ascendido a más de 44.000 y el número de víctimas hoy supera las 1.100. El virus se está propagando en toda Asia –incluido Japón, Corea del Sur, Singapur, Tailandia, Vietnam y Malasia- y también a países en Europa y Norteamérica, aunque sólo una muerte se ha reportado fuera de China hasta el momento.

Todavía está por verse lo letal que terminará siendo este nuevo virus. Actualmente, es sin duda menos severo que la epidemia de SARS (síndrome respiratorio agudo grave) de 2002-03, causado por un coronavirus diferente.…  Seguir leyendo »

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In their botched handling of the tragic death of Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who sounded the alarm on the Wuhan coronavirus, authorities in Beijing seem to want it both ways.

On the one hand, officials have expressed their sorrow over his death and encouraged people to tell the truth about the outbreak. On the other hand, government censors are hard at work scrubbing online posts that call for freedom of speech in the wake of Li's death.

When millions of people are denied the opportunity to grieve collectively over someone widely regarded as a hero, their trust in government can only further erode.…  Seguir leyendo »

A woman in Hong Kong after the first cases of coronavirus infection in the city were confirmed last month. Credit Miguel Candela Poblacion/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images

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The Chinese police have exercised unusual restraint in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.

It seems that just eight people have been detained so far, all doctors who early on turned to work-related chat groups to warn of the dangers of a new mysterious infection. The local police — an honorary, if usually uninvited, participant in every chat group in China — detected malfeasance and pounced, briefly detaining the doctors on grounds of rumor-mongering.

The new coronavirus, for its part, was treated with dignity and respect. When it first emerged, suspect 2019-nCoV appeared to be committing illegal assembly, unwanted touching and incitement to subvert the state.…  Seguir leyendo »

Chinese police officers wearing masks stand in front of the Tiananmen Gate on 26 January. Photo: Getty Images.

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The coronavirus outbreak in China poses a tremendous test for Beijing. Beyond the immediate public health crisis, the Chinese Communist Party faces a stuttering economy, growing public anger and distrust, and a potentially heavy blow to its global reputation.

The hesitant early response to the outbreak sheds light on the way the Chinese bureaucracy approaches crises at a time when the party leadership is tightening control at almost all levels of society. At first, officials in Wuhan attempted to censor online discussions of the virus. This changed only after President Xi Jinping’s call for a much more robust approach was followed by a sudden increase in the state media coverage of the outbreak.…  Seguir leyendo »

Getty Images. A street-cleaner working in a virtually deserted shopping precinct during the coronavirus lockdown of Wuhan, Hubei province, China, February 3, 2020

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Before Shiyan, a city in Hubei province, went into quarantine, the sum of thirty yuan (about $4) could buy two cabbages, enough spring onions for two soups, a large white radish, two lettuces, a potato, and ten eggs. Not any more. Wanting to record the hiked prices, I took two photos of price cards in my local district’s largest supermarket. Immediately, a shop assistant approached. “You can’t do that,” she said. “Please delete them.” Even after I agreed, she stood peering over my shoulder to see my phone, to make sure that the images were gone. “You could report her,” a local resident told me later: national orders have forbidden merchants to raise their prices.…  Seguir leyendo »

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La única verdadera amenaza natural que pesa sobre la humanidad es el riesgo de una epidemia viral. Para dejar constancia, recordemos que hace un siglo la llamada gripe española mató a alrededor de cincuenta millones de personas en todos los continentes; la media de edad de las víctimas era de veinte años, y muchos murieron en un día. Una gripe comparable, llegada de México en 2009, mató al contagio a un millón de personas en Norteamérica, con una media de edad de cuarenta años. Estas gripes o neumonías, diferentes a las gripes estacionales corrientes, afectan a los jóvenes en lugar de a los ancianos, porque los más jóvenes, que nunca han estado expuestos a este tipo de virus, no tienen ninguna inmunidad natural.…  Seguir leyendo »

Cobra china, una de las primeras especies sospechosas en ser portadora del nuevo coronavirus. Thomas Brown, CC BY

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La aparición en China de un brote de neumonía provocado por un coronavirus (2019-nCoV) es un desafío para los virólogos, que han emprendido una carrera contrarreloj para obtener más datos sobre la secuencia genética, la epidemiología y la propagación del patógeno.

La pregunta más urgente es determinar cómo se propaga. El seguimiento en tiempo real de la velocidad a la que aparecen los nuevos casos, junto con cuándo comenzaron los síntomas para cada uno de ellos, son las señales que indican a los expertos la facilidad con la que el virus puede circular entre humanos y si el brote tiene el potencial de persistir.…  Seguir leyendo »

An ambulance crew member carrying medical supplies in Wuhan, China, on Sunday. Credit CHINATOPIX, via Associated Press

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Five cases of the mysterious Wuhan coronavirus have been confirmed in the United States, giving rise to concerns about a potential global pandemic. We’ve seen this story before, as health authorities working with threadbare data try to walk the line between epidemic readiness and needless panic. Is this new outbreak poised to become the next AIDS pandemic or a new SARS, which was stopped in its tracks after 774 deaths? To cut through the headlines, we can use a simple concept called the “epidemic triangle”. Employed by epidemiologists since the discipline’s earliest days, it is indispensable in predicting whether localized outbreaks will transform into full-blown epidemics.…  Seguir leyendo »

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The coronavirus epidemic in China is far more than a disease; it is the most serious challenge to the rule of President Xi Jinping and the direction he has taken China since he assumed power in 2012. The stakes are extraordinarily high. It is far too early to predict the beginning of the end of Xi’s political career, but the epidemic clearly is shaking China and Xi’s way of governance to its core.

Since the Chinese revolution of 1949, the central tension inside the country’s Communist Party has been between “reds” and “experts”, between ideology and know-how. This tension has real world significance.…  Seguir leyendo »

How to Avoid the Coronavirus? Wash Your Hands

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Americans are watching with alarm as a new coronavirus spreads in China and cases pop up in the United States. They are barraged with information about what kinds of masks are best to prevent viral spread. Students are handing out masks in Seattle. Masks have run out in Brazos County, Tex.

Hang on.

I’ve worked as an emergency room physician. And as a New York Times correspondent in China, I covered the SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003 during which a novel coronavirus first detected in Guangdong sickened more than 8,000 people and killed more than 800. My two children attended elementary school in Beijing throughout the outbreak.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Décidément la Chine est placée sous le signe des catastrophes sanitaires à répétition. En 2003, ce fut l’épidémie du SRAS [syndrome respiratoire aigu sévère] qui se répandit à travers le monde et fit plus de huit cents morts. Durant l’année du cochon, qui vient de se terminer ce 24 janvier, ce sont plus de trois cents millions de porcs qui ont dû être abattus dans le pays, et maintenant que l’année du rat débute, on se demande si ce n’est pas la mauvaise habitude des gourmets chinois de rechercher des aliments « exotiques » comme le rat des bambous ou la chauve-souris qui ont provoqué l’irruption d’un nouveau virus mortel à Wuhan.…  Seguir leyendo »

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On this date 17 years ago, I was covering the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus for several months as it spread across Asia, eventually reaching 37 countries, sickening 8,098 people and killing 774 of them.

So, as I read the first reports of a cluster of animal-market related illnesses, with the first patient exhibiting symptoms of pneumonia as early as December 12, 2019, I had a chilling sense of déjà vu. By New Year's Eve, it was obvious something akin to SARS -- as it turns out, the Wuhan coronavirus is in the same family of viruses as SARS and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) -- was unfolding in China.…  Seguir leyendo »

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As the Wuhan coronavirus continues to spread around the world, the World Health Organization's decision to hold off on declaring the outbreak "a public health emergency of international concern" is baffling.

The virus, which is similar to the fatal severe respiratory syndrome (SARS), first emerged in Wuhan, China, which has a population greater than New York City. More than 1,900 people have already been infected, and more than 55 people have died. To contain the virus during the Lunar New Year, which marks the largest annual human migration in the world, the Chinese government placed a lockdown on 12 cities, affecting about 35 million people.…  Seguir leyendo »