Covid-19 in China

[Randy W]

from the SCMP on Facebook

 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3063610297085998&id=355665009819

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Cathay Pacific 國泰航空 is expecting to make a loss of US$1.28 billion in the first half of 2020, the largest loss in its history.

 

Full story here: https://sc.mp/ii2lt

 

 

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from the Global Times on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/115591005188475/posts/3262027090544835/

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Chinese movie theaters in low-risk areas will reopen on Monday in another sign the #COVID19 epidemic in China has significantly waned. #Shanghai’s Macalline Cinema World started prepping on Sunday for Mondays’ reopening including a full disinfection of every theater.

 

 

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from the SCMP on Facebook - July 20

Urumqi once again under lockdown

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3151760244917964&id=355665009819

 

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from Shenzhen Pages on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/305447029839943/posts/1122103711507600/

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#Zhuhai has suspended the recognition policy which waived mandatory #quarantine on inbound travelers if they have finished a 14-day quarantine in #HongKong.

Now inbound travelers from Hong Kong need to do another 14-day quarantine. Shenzhen released the same policy earlier.

 

 

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from the Sixth Tone on Facebook

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Sixth Tone’s photographer Shi Yangkun has won a Getty Images Reportage Grant for documenting Wuhan’s recovery from #COVID19. http://ow.ly/gaJD50AONAd

 

Check out his photo series:

 

 

The Many Faces of Wuhan

Portraits of life after COVID-19.

https://www.facebook.com/1570821646570023/posts/2710933405892169/

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from China Pictorial on Facebook- some good pictures

 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3012001998925169&id=553929144732479

 

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Photos from “Life Matters, Love Prevails”, Part Two of online photography #exhibition “Zooming in on COVID-19: Unforgettable Moments in the Global Fight against the #Pandemic.”

http://www.china.com.cn/yijing/en/node_8019064.html

 

 

 

 

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Some good reading material - lengthy, but detailed and well written, if you're interested.

 

How China Controlled the Coronavirus

• Teaching and learning in Sichuan during the pandemic.

from the New Yorker

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The school scheduled regular hand-washing breaks, and every afternoon an announcement sounded over the intercom: “Temperature-taking time has arrived!” Each day, my daughters had their temperature taken at least five times. This routine began at 6:30 a.m., when the class’s WeChat parent group engaged in something called Jielong, or “Connect the Dragon.” One parent would start the hashtag #Jielong, and list her child’s name, student number, temperature in Celsius, and the words “Body is healthy.” One by one, other parents jumped in—“36.5, Body is healthy”—lengthening the list with every dragon link. My account usually had about sixty of these messages every day. After eight o’clock, impatient notes were sent to stragglers: “To so-and-so’s father, please quickly connect the dragon!”

 

Soon that kind of error was no longer made. In the time that Serena spent with the committee members, she observed them becoming more professional. They came to understand their role, along with the stakes of the pandemic. The Chinese state press reported that fifty-three members of neighborhood committees died while working to control the virus. Others were fired or chastised for even the smallest mistakes. That’s what happened to the official in Serena’s home town who missed the apartment—he was forced to write a self-criticism, another long-standing Party tradition. It turned out that the apartment contained the only coronavirus case in the residential district, he told Serena. The occupant—I’ll call him Liu—had been taking a shower when the committee members knocked.

 

At a party a week earlier, Liu had had a long conversation with a d.j., who, it was later learned, had been infected by someone from Hubei. Liu was thirty-five, single, and highly energetic. The details of his post-contact movements are listed on a public WeChat account maintained by the city government. In China, such case histories are often available, as resources for local residents. Liu’s case history notes that, during the first three days after he is unknowingly infected, he visits a bar, a store, two pharmacies, three gas stations, and six restaurants. Liu’s tastes are eclectic, ranging from a pancake restaurant to a frog-and-fish-head restaurant. He picks up a friend named Huang, and he visits his elderly parents. He goes to work. He gets a fever. Post-fever, Liu hops over to a few more pharmacies, and then he keeps going: he picks up a friend named Li; he visits his parents again; he goes to another party. On the WeChat account, Liu is the Liupold Bloom of northeastern Sichuan, with every step of his urban odyssey recorded in terrifying detail. When is this guy going to stop?

 

Such meticulous case histories were prepared by contact tracers who worked under the direction of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. There are about three thousand C.D.C. branches in China, each branch containing roughly a hundred to a hundred and fifty staff members. Despite these numbers, the Chinese C.D.C. has traditionally been underfunded, like Chinese public health in general.

 

Approximately ten thousand contact tracers worked in Wuhan, where more than eighty per cent of China’s deaths occurred. Epidemiologists told me that the tracers were divided into teams of between five and seven, with each group directed by an individual who had formal training in public health. Other team members might have no health background, but they came out of the same detail-oriented national educational system that had produced my students, and they often had local knowledge. Many tracers worked for neighborhood committees or other government organizations, including the police. As the virus spread, tracing teams were established across the country, and the C.D.C. recruited others who had technical expertise.

 

Once, when Jiang and I met for dinner in Shanghai, he showed me how our phones automatically sensed each other via Bluetooth. Such data could be used to figure out who had been in close proximity to an infected person. In another C.D.C. work meeting, a colleague of Jiang’s suggested using this tool. But her idea was quickly dismissed. “They said, ‘This is a violation of data protection. We can’t do that,’ ” Jiang explained. “It was surprising to me.”

 

It surprised me, too—given the heavy-handed tactics of many lockdown policies, I had assumed that the government used any tools available. But there seemed to have been some resistance from prominent tech companies. Tencent and Alibaba helped the government develop “health code” apps that assist in monitoring and controlling the virus’s spread among citizens, but these tools are much less sophisticated than programs used in South Korea and Singapore. In Europe, virus-alert apps based on software developed by Google and Apple have been downloaded by millions of users, and the apps rely on Bluetooth signals to detect close contact with infected individuals.

 

In some parts of China, the health-code apps register a change in a user’s location largely through a manual data transfer: if the user checks in with his I.D. at an airport, for example, or if his license plate is recorded at a toll booth. An epidemiologist in Shanghai told me that one Chinese city with a flourishing tech industry had commissioned the development of a much better tool that combines G.P.S. data and artificial intelligence to alert anyone who comes into the proximity of an infected person. “But that system was never implemented, even in that city,” the epidemiologist, who asked not to be identified, said. “It could not get approval from somewhere in the government system because of data privacy.” He noted that while some of the apps track location through cell-phone towers, they don’t use the more accurate G.P.S. data.

 

In June, after Beijing had reported no locally transmitted cases for fifty-six days, there was a sudden outbreak at a wholesale produce market called Xinfadi. The epidemiologist in Shanghai told me that the place was well managed: masks were required, and anybody who entered had to show his health code and have his temperature taken. Even so, more than three hundred people were infected, and all the warning systems had failed to catch it in the early stages. The first alert came when a man in his fifties felt sick and went to a hospital to request a test. It was another example of old science: effective public communication. The man not only recognized his symptoms but travelled to the hospital by bicycle, as officially recommended, in order to avoid infecting others on public transport. Afterward, the government locked down parts of Beijing, and, within a month, nearly twelve million residents were given swab tests. The city had the capacity to test four hundred thousand people per day.

 

In the end, it became another type of theatre: a dress rehearsal. The university introduced the fever tents, the delivery robots, and the facial-recognition scanners, but I sensed that administrators were mostly testing systems in preparation for the fall. Chinese epidemiologists told me that they were concerned about the possibility of a second wave of infections. Despite the country’s current success, they never seemed satisfied. “There’s no long-term plan,” a professor of epidemiology in Shanghai said bluntly. “No country has a long-term plan.” Another epidemiologist expressed concern about the lack of social distancing, believing that China needed to be prepared to use measures that were less aggressive than a lockdown but more effective than mask-wearing. “This is something we need to fix,” he told me. “There are smart people in the Chinese C.D.C. who realize this.”

 

 

Edited June 8, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Beijing - Xinfadi Wholesale Markets re-opens

 

from China Daily on Facebook

 

https://www.facebook.com/191347651290/posts/10158749228941291/

 

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#Beijing's #Xinfadi wholesale market, which reported #COVID_19 infections in June, officially reopened when the first truck loaded with watermelons entered the entrance gate on Saturday.

 

 

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

in the WSJ

 

China’s CDC, Built to Stop Pandemics Like Covid, Stumbled When It Mattered Most

• Local leaders in Wuhan, consumed with domestic politics, did an end run around the Western-educated virologist whose agency was supposed to contain new contagious diseases

 

 

BEIJING—Before going to bed, George Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, typically completes his 10,000 steps for the day and then checks the news online.

 

When he scanned his feed on Dec. 30, he was stunned. Two leaked local-government notices warned about cases of unexplained pneumonia in the Chinese megacity of Wuhan. It was the first he’d heard of the outbreak, according to people close to him.

 

The 58-year-old virologist called the head of Wuhan’s disease-control office, who confirmed the outbreak and revealed to Dr. Gao’s growing alarm that it had been going on since at least Dec. 1, with 25 suspected cases so far, the people close to him said.

 

This wasn’t how things were supposed to work.

 

Dr. Gao’s agency, known as the China CDC, was set up in 2002 precisely to detect and stop epidemics that often emerge from southern China. It was a mission that grew more urgent after a deadly outbreak that year of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

 

The China CDC trained hundreds of its staff in outbreak-response techniques with U.S. help, sent teams to fight Ebola in Africa and introduced a China-wide, real-time reporting system for infectious diseases. In Dr. Gao, they recruited an expert with credentials from Oxford and Harvard universities.

 

The China CDC missed early signals because hospitals didn’t enter details in its real-time system, the technological core of its disease-surveillance efforts.

 

What concerns Chinese doctors and their foreign peers is that Beijing may be no better prepared for the next potential pandemic.

 

Instead of the China CDC spotting the outbreak in early December and leading a coordinated response, the virus was rampant in Wuhan by the time Dr. Gao learned of it. By Jan. 23—when authorities ordered the city locked down—it was spreading across the world.

 

The pathogen would go on to infect more than 21 million people by mid-August, kill more than 760,000, cause trillions of dollars of economic damage and plunge China-U.S. relations into a crisis redolent of the Cold War.

 

Edited August 18, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Inactivated COVID-19 #vaccine candidates developed by a Chinese pharmaceutical company are likely to be on the market by the end of December, at a price of less than 1,000 yuan ($144) for two doses. Photo/Xinhua

from China Pictorial on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/ChinaPic/photos/a.558235270968533/3032975646827804/?type=3

 

 

Edited June 8, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from the WaPo

 

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China is claiming the dubious honor of the first nation to roll out an experimental coronavirus vaccine for public use.

 

 

 

https://www.facebook.com/6250307292/posts/10160244688407293/

 

 

 

China says it began public use of covid-19 vaccine a month ago, bypassing clinical trials

 

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For those keeping score, that would put Beijing’s civilian rollout three weeks earlier than Russia’s, with neither vaccine having yet passed standard clinical trials. Beijing health officials said Saturday they began dosing some medical workers and state-owned enterprise employees with an experimental covid-19 vaccine in late July under “urgent use” protocols.

 

 

The Beijing announcement followed a diplomatic controversy last week, in which Papua New Guinea said it had turned back a group of Chinese miners who had received an experimental coronavirus vaccine.

 

 

There were signs of impatience in the White House as Beijing trumpeted its vaccine rollout over the weekend. President Trump tweeted Saturday alleging that either the Food and Drug Administration or the “deep state” was delaying progress for a U.S. coronavirus vaccine, without providing substantiating detail. On Sunday, Trump touted the FDA’s emergency authorization of convalescent plasma as a treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

 

. . .

 

Now Beijing and Moscow have pushed the timeline up further, with large numbers of citizens essentially being asked to serve as test subjects as an act of patriotism.

 

Authorities are considering expanding the inoculations this fall to employees of food markets, transport systems and service industries, he said.

 

. . .

 

One point that remains unexplained is why China chose to delay its announcement of the public rollout of a trial vaccine for a full month. It could reflect caution among authorities, as a quiet rollout would be easier to end if those inoculated reported severe side effects.

 

 

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from the SCMP Dec. 4

China to have 600 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines ‘ready for use this year’

• Scientist in charge of vaccine development says there will be ‘a major announcement’ in the next one to two weeks

• Three inactivated vaccines are in the final stage of clinical trials, but the drug makers have yet to release any phase 3 data

Chinese drug makers with vaccines in the final stage of clinical trials have yet to release efficacy data. Photo: AFP

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CNBG data could be released “soon”, its parent company China National Pharmaceutical Group said on Saturday, while Sinovac is also expected to make an announcement on its phase 3 trial imminently. A Sinovac spokesman said the company could not provide further details when reached for comment on Friday.

 . . .

Inactivated vaccines use a conventional technique that involves killing off the virus in a lab and using it to trigger an immune response. Two such vaccines developed by China National Biotec Group (CNBG) and a third by Sinovac Biotech are in the final stage of clinical trials in South America, the Middle East and Asia but the drug makers have yet to release any of the phase 3 data needed for full regulatory approval.
The companies have already built the required high-level biosafety facilities and scaled up production.

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Wuhan artists pay homage to a city scared by the coronavirus, one year after outbreak

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“We have faith in Wuhan.” - 1 year later, Wuhan artists pay homage to the sacrifices the city made as ground zero of the Covid-19 outbreak.

 

Edited December 21, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from the SCMP on Facebook - Dec. 11

https://www.facebook.com/scmp/videos/1288679771506460/

More than 21,000 people left Hong Kong for the mainland in the first week of December. They will need to spend two weeks in quarantine before being allowed to move freely.

[Randy W]

The SCMP on Instagram

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scmpnews
Verified

Hong Kong is banning all passenger flights from Britain starting on Tuesday after a more infectious strain of Covid-19 was found in the country, while existing social-distancing restrictions in the city are set to be extended for another 2 weeks.⁠

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by South China Morning Post (@scmpnews)

Edited December 22, 2020 by Randy W (see edit history)