People have been asking me what’s going on in Russia with respect to the Corona situation. I am a Russia blogger, and I am quite obsessed with Corona, so I certainly need to write about this intersection.
As of March 8, there were 17 confirmed cases in Russia (two Chinese – both several weeks ago, since recovered; an Italian; and the rest Russians – both Chinese and one Russian have recovered). There has also been one case in Saint-Petersburg (an Italian exchange student, whose hostel is now under quarantine along with 700 students), and there has been a case in Nizhny Novgorod today.
The authorities appear to be treating Corona seriously, at least by unexacting international standards.
- Russia sealed its Chinese border as early as January 30, and flights from China have been largely curtailed, with the exception of business visitors and transit flights.
- People returning from high-risk countries (which now include China, South Korea, Iran, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the US) need to submit to a home quarantine lasting for 14 days, with the local police having leave to check up on them anytime during that period.
- Breaking the quarantine carries criminal penalties of up to an 80,000 ruble fine, or expropriation of six months of wages, or 360 hours of community service, or up to one year of prison. If breaking the quarantine leads to a death, there are harsher penalties.
- Several major events have already been called off, such as the annual Saint-Petersburg Economic Forum. (Not like investors are going to be doing much investing this year anyway).
- Although I haven’t seen exact figures, I think that there have been perhaps a couple of thousand people put through quarantine by now.
- Rospotrebnadzor, as of three days ago, has claimed that Russia has performed 51,000 Coronavirus tests. I do not know how credible that is – certainly, if true, it would suggest incredible efficiency for a middle-income country where the epidemic is still likely in its incipient stages (for comparison, as of approximately the same time, South Korea has performed 150,000 tests; the US performed 6,000 tests).
About a week ago, Moscow’s epidemic planning was leaked to the media.
It consists of three stages: Plan A (preventative measures); Plan B (when the first transmissions occur); and Plan C, or State of Emergency (self explanatory).
Plan A includes the aforementioned measures, as well as daily temperature measuring in schools and kindergartens, remote temperature measurements at some metro stations, and cancellation of all major mass events (this hasn’t been fully implemented yet).
Plan B involves the identification and geolocation of all recent contacts and family members of people confirmed to have COVID-19, who are subjected to a 14 day quarantine observed by the police. There are mass disinfections of places known to have been visited by infectees, such as apartments, workplaces, and schools. Public transport is also subjected to regular disinfections. By March 12, it is planned to roll out an information system informing residents of danger zones and SMS messaging of people who have been in contact with COVID-19 infectees. Schools, museums, cinemas, libraries, shopping centers, etc. may be selectively closed. This appears to be similar to what Singapore has practiced, and I personally expect Plan B to be rolled out in another week or two.
If these measures fail to contain an exponentially increasing outbreak, Moscow is to move to an Emergency Situation, which presupposes Wuhan-tier restrictions on public life. These are to include the closure of all non-essential enterprises and organizations, the shutdown of public transport, and restrictions on entering and leaving the city even in private vehicles, and the imposition of a curfew enforced by the police and the National Guard.
Last I heard, the recommendations in this document have yet to be formally approved, though I suspect many of them are already getting implemented.
For those of you who read Russian, the journalist Mikhail Golovanov posted scans from this document on his Facebook page.
Overall, I am now relatively optimistic about Russia’s chances of controlling the epidemic – at least, much more so than for the United States, which gives off the impression of a chicken running about without its head (this represents a major revision of my views since late January). One good thing about having many siloviks in positions of power is that they are a paranoid, authoritarian bunch. To a limited extent, I have even already observed some of this at work. For instance, the director at the institute where I work part-time received an advisory from the Mayoralty against inviting Chinese citizens to conferences several weeks back. So it’s clearly it’s something that high-ranking officials really are concerned about. The relatively large-scale quarantines at such an early stage, the detailed contingency planning, the surprisingly wide-ranging testing, the Soviet legacy of a surfeit of hospital beds (incidentally – a factor that historian Adam Tooze has just remarked upon)… if China was able to control its outbreak, at least temporarily, then I think Russia should be able to do that as well.
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Holy fuck, oil crashed 25% overnight! Stupid Saudi Barbaria.
Russian economic resilience is to be tested.
Forget oil, watch American stock markets tomorrow. It will be something special.
Or better yet, watch US Treasury yields. I always knew they were going negative (free dollars for everybody!!), but UST10 under 0.5% already is exceeding even my wildest fantasies. I expected that some time end of the year.
Free money is coming, and capital becomes worthless overnight. Perfect for Universal Basic Income.
EDIT: Or a World War. That’s how those problems were solved in the past.
I believe “circuit breakers” will not allow indexes to drop below 5%. So nowhere to go but up.
Hey, I resent that! Actually, the US is more like that chicken that successfully traveled the sideshow circuit, with its head missing, and to which people wrote letters addressed “the headless chicken.”
Not entirely related to coronavirus
I’ve always liked Russia as a good hedge for global existential risk, except for nuclear war. The country is only one generation removed from systemic collapse, so a lot of people have a living memory of how to survive it. It’s hard to rattle the Russians, they just shrug.
I assume you’re joking.
It was Russia that crashed oil, looking to hit US shale, with budget tightening and build up of reserves the Kremlin has obviously seen this as a scenario for awhile and has actually enacted it itself.
The American response to the Wuhan Flu is staggeringly incompetent, a reflection of the third World demographics of the country, rather than the demographics of the eighties that popular imagination still supposes the US has. The US looks very vulnerable and blowing the US oil shale business will cascade through the bond market and US financial system when they are most vulnerable.
Russia still has the community cohesion and relatively efficient administrators uninfected by PC ideology to manage a Wuhan Flu outbreak. The contrast between the West and the response of the East Asian countries really is a wake up call, I suspect Russia will sit between the two.
Interesting!
Great article Anatoly Karlin. Thanks!
This Trump-chicken-man needs a lot of luck now.
Still seeing a lot of Americans saying you can’t trust the Chinese numbers, actually I trust them much more than the US numbers.
That’s good. Hungary so far has not shown much competence, unfortunately.
The Italian numbers have shown wild swings. One day it’s 50, next day just 30, then over 100…
The Chinese numbers were clearly doctored to an extent, since they were way smoother. Over the weeks, they might have shown reality faithfully, but at the very least they smoothed out the daily swings. I also suspect they were lower than reality, though it’s really hard to know.
It would be useful to revisit official known beginings in RF:
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/02/02/i-want-to-apologize-to-everyone
Given what we know now about contagious spread that means this Chinese guy presumably might infected Russian doctors, doctors have infected their patients, patients infected family members and so on as this case is lagging USA first case in WA about 10 days.
I could not find any information if the contact tracing, comprehensive testing and isolation was done to all the potentially exposed people in this case, but if it was not done, it means this RF region is just about 10-12 days behind the spread schedule in Seattle area.
And, here is the newest addition to your conspiracy files.
If the virus was really created by Donald Trump to destroy the Deep State, would it be good or bad? Would you be happy to die if you knew that the world satanic illuminati cannibal conspiracy goes down with you? 😉
https://twitter.com/travis_view/status/1236304668248010758
Russia declined to participated in new output cuts. Saudis then started an actual price war. They crashed the market.
Damn, low-IQ camel-fuckers should not have this much market power.
Russia declined to cut output knowing the price would crater. The Kremlin has planned for $25 oil, so they are presumably comfortable with that for a few months. Why cut just to prop up US shale, this is retaliation against the Americans.
Someone I know just visited St Petersburg and mentioned that Russian health officials were checking everyone for fever and other symptoms on the train. If we had done such basic testing for people returning from Italy this might not have exploded here but no.
I think those Western propagandists who were predicting trouble for the CCP are going to be eating crow as this will turn out to be a worse disaster in “liberal democracies”. Russia has a good chance of scoring a propaganda victory out of this, though it will be a cold comfort with the collapsing oil price and all.
It’s a Saudi tantrum. Don’t give me this “cunning plan” bullshit.
Prices were going down anyway, Saudi tantrum or not, they have real issues with oil at this level, market share can soften the blow of lower prices.
Doesn’t change the fact the Kremlin was well aware of what oil prices were going to do when they said no output cuts.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-07/putin-dumps-mbs-to-start-a-war-on-america-s-shale-oil-industry
Hopefully this tantrum will lead to an Islamic revolution and replace this dismal jewish puppet state.
There was an interesting case in a not very big city in Liao Ning, the southernmost province of Manchuria.
In the entirety of Feburary, the official figure of that big city area, the city proper and the large rural surroundings, bigger than a county, there was zero confirmed patient. Then, near the end of Feb, it turned out that there was a seriously ill case. It was misdiagnosed.
The patient seemed to be having got it out of province in Jan, the onset was early Feb, but local hospitals made mistake, so the patient was free roaming, basically, the entire Feb until the symptoms became serious near the end of Feb.
Then, about 10 days has since passed, the figures there only increased very slightly. I took it as a sign that when large gatherings are cancelled, and when the public are kind of scared so they mostly stay at home, the ability of one patient to infect others can become quite low.
Plus the summer may help and the drugs will come eventually. At this point, I am still hopeful that the world can go back to normal summer this year. Otherwise, the economic pressure will kick in and a lot more will be fluid.
The world going to back to “normal” is the worst possible thing that could happen, what redeeming qualities does this nightmare ZOG world hold for you exactly?
While you people are panicking, California and France laugh at some puny virus.
Don’t worry, be happy, smurf it up!
https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1236918862890713089
https://twitter.com/covidperspectiv/status/1236725302883045376
To be honest, ZOG, LGBTQ, CCP, Great FireWall, Wars in Mideast, all of these are really far away topics. Just topics. At some level, they are not seriously different from NBA or NFL to me.
This virus, and the potential economic risks down the road, they are different. They can make daily lives very uncomfortable.
Do not worry, world’s greatest scientist and world’s greatest economist is monitoring the situation. Closely!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1237004509156642816
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1237024549046288385
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1237027356314869761
That most likely means justafluer Trump is not going to worry much until USA hits 70 thousand deaths from SARS 2.0.
The only good thing coming from that – Trump himself quite soon is going to end the same way as Zingaretti, leader of co=ruling Italian Democratic Party, who posted a photo of him drinking beer in a pub, recommending Italians to go out and eat a pizza on Feb 27. Now he’s tested as infected with the coronavirus since March 8, lol
https://i.redd.it/gzzu4b7tqll41.jpg
https://clicklancashire.com/2020/03/08/italys-co-ruling-democratic-party-leader-zingaretti-tests.html
Numbers for Russia look good at the moment. However, ominous things:
Therefore, in Russia there is an additional 1-2 months in “the dangerzone”, compared to Southern Europe where summer weather will arrive earlier.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/HJ3ofsmSL
If there are more like this, it could be a sign of the virus is already in the country. (With Iran and Italy, something similar was first noticed – that tourists were tested for the virus).
It’s possible the virus is already in Russia and not being checked adequately.* On the positive side, we can be sure the situation is definitely 2-3 weeks better (i.e. more delayed) than in Italy.
Probably it could be 1-2 weeks better than in UK, Sweden, Germany, etc.
This virus requires colder weather (and therefore lower absolute humidity) to spread at a high rate. In much of the country, summer is arriving at least 1-2 months later than in Southern Europe, so the amount of time in a “dangerzone” is greater.
Whereas Southern USA (especially Florida), India, Middle East, Southern Europe – all these areas will reach temperatures sufficiently high to start to slow the virus transmission at the end of this month, or at least around the end of April.
Testing might not be comprehensive enough https://ru.reuters.com/article/topNews/idRUKBN20T18K-ORUTP
Of course, summer weather (i.e. higher temperatures) will help to slow this virus’s transmission in multiple different ways.
One of the main ways it will slow the transmission – absolute humidity rates increase with air temperature. Absolute humidity rates (but not relative humidity rates) are known to be inverse to droplet/airborne transmission of respiratory illness causing viruses.
But in Northern Europe, it will not reach high enough temperatures for at least 2- 3 months, so there is sadly still a lot of time in which this virus can spread exponentially.
It is smoother probably because of the large number effect. Like when you throw a dice many, many times, …
If you compare the Italian numbers with numbers of one single province of China, say Zhe Jiang or Hu Nan, …
The numbers of Korea right now is a lot smoother than that of Japan. Korea got many more cases while in Japan, the confirmed cases are still few, in comparison.
Canadian response is hilarious, no restrictions and inviting people from infected countries over.
This is not about Trump, this is about millions of his supporters who are listening to him alone and treat his pronouncements as voice of god.
Stay away from them, if you can.
https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/1236303031429455872
It’s all in how you spin it, if they avoid a major economic disaster while the West is in turmoil they can brag how much more stable their system is even if it is not an economic top performer
Do wealthy Russians still dream of bugging off to Italy, France, California, etc? They are less likely to get sick if they stay home.
There is an assumption that people in hot climates are always outdoors. It’s called the Sun Belt – this region’s rise is completely dependent on air conditioning. There are maybe two months out of the year where it is comfortable to stay outside all day.
From the article, it sounds like he probably picked it up in Spain and then just passed through Moscow:
That’s quite a hectic flight schedule, it shows why the spread is going to be so hard to contain.
This guy gets it.
After the Saudis threatened to flood world markets, the Russian Finance Ministry took the time to tell the entire world: “We can deal with $25 a barrel for a decade“.
That’s a key reason that the US financial and oil services sector (OSX -31%) have been among the most-crushed sectors. At $50 they will go backwards slowly; at $30 they won’t get quarterly bridging finance.
Anyone with the slightest understanding of strategy, knows that this was tantamount to an act of war.
The Yanks can’t say that without showing how weak their hand is.
The US will probably respond by launching a war of aggression somewhere – as they did when the oil price got down to the $20 region just prior to the invasion of Iraq.
They didn’t attack Iraq for the oil – they attacked because doing so would add a massive risk premium to oil prices, which would increase the value of oil-service stocks (like Halliburton and Schlumberger) and any land with oil under it would become a better value-proposition regardless of where the lands was situated.
Cheney and his cronies didn’t have to own Iraqi oil reserves to benefit: they just needed to own any oil-producing land that became commercially viable at $50 oil.
Buried in the PM’s press conference in Downing Street was the quiet admission that drastic action to slow everything right up would simply stop it spreading, then when measures were relaxed again we’d get it next Winter. In other words, we need you to get this, but at the time we choose. This Spring/Summer would be the most manageable.
Bloomberg started to cry about Putler’s evil plan to crush American’s shale and… bla, bla, bla. Evil Putler is doing it again. LOL.
Anatoly, following this thread I must ask if you have ever been tested for autism
In the beginning that was probably because they had limited tests and every day they were hitting their limit.
The collapsing oil price is probably not as detrimental to Russia as it was in 2008 or 2014, but maybe I’m wrong.
I’m still skeptical that it could’ve caused such a smooth increase in the number of deaths.
At least the Chinese data probably accurately captured the trends, while in America they are not testing at all, basically, so arguably China was better than America.
The incompetent response of most Western governments (against expectations) makes China now look comparatively very good. I would put them very close to the stellar performers Singapore and South Korea. (And Singapore might’ve been helped by their climate.)
He’s not very autistic, on a scale of 0-10, where 0 is normal and 10 is the most autistic who cannot function in the normal world without 7/24 supervision, his score is probably just 8, or at worst 9. I’m a solid 8 myself, so basically almost normal.
Assuming virus began to spread in late October/early November in China, they were not doing absolutely anything to stop the spread for nearly 3 full months, even actively doing nonsense that helped to spread it – sanctioning whistleblowers, censoring info, doing mass eating party, etc.
West (USA especially) is just actively ignoring the problem for roughly two months (imho, relatively mild initial first cases without deaths in USA/Germany/France did more damage as it helped to relax too much, if those first cases were dead, response would be way more serious) so we have roughly around 2-3 weeks more from now to reach late January Wuhan levels nastiness everywhere at once and then try to go full “late-Chinese” way as deaths will begin to pile up just like Italy did yesterday.
So Chinese response overall (judging both initial and late stages summarily) imho is not worth to be regarded as really good even in context of current Western nonsense.
btw, Taiwan, which was most distrustful from the start regarding China, is arguably currently looking even better than Singapore or South Korea, so imho they might be the best looking model of response overall so far.
I wish the altright was led and populated by normal people and not socially retarded maladjusted freaks. But then maybe only socially retarded maladjusted freaks tend to be attracted to a site like this, but then for the altright to gain mass currency it needs to go mainstream, like how the NSDAP went from 2 to 40 percent of the vote, and get beyond its niche market of attracting socially retarded maladjusted freaks, but then of you look at the content of this site, Unz might as well post articles promoting the vistues of flat Earth, leech treatment, and pedophilia, so go figure.
China had no advance warning about it. They only realized they had something bad in early December, and it took some time for the information to travel up the chain of command.
So they only were one month late. The others don’t have that excuse.
Mass evacuation of the elderly and school children (less now as we enter the effect period from 90’s demographic collapse) to Krasnodar, Sochi and Crimea?
After all they are expecting them anyway in the summer and there has been a lot of construction there recently… and I think the authorities would be capable of accomplishing it, at least for a few million.
Transferring the main May 9th parade to from Moscow to Crimea or rather Sevastopol would work out fine for Russia and still have gravitas for foreign delegations attending
Well, whatever you wish, I will keep being the all-powerful dictator of the alt-right, with Karlin my right-hand man. And Dmitry my left-hand man. We are all totally well-adjusted.
LOL- now it’s “authoritarian” for Russian officials to advise not to invite Chinese citizens to mass events?! Typical Karlin
Would he use that word on all the western governments that are being a million times far stricter on personal controls? Of course not.
Even more baffling because all these health department policies of dealing with it from different states are, by definition, authoritarian.
The authorities couldn’t even organise people to go along with the extended and costlier medical examination on long term substance abuse (for certification to get car insurance), to the extent that the policy was shelved after complaints and last minute queues.
Very little punishment either for any people who have escaped quarantine and made temporary media stars (as in media haven’t been banned from reporting on them in case of promoting it)
Anyway, early diagnosis and testing has been one of the immense successes when Skvortsova was head of Minzdrav. TB, HIV/Aids, heart diseases and so on have all experienced mass increase in testing and early treatment in the last few years.
This can happen again for coronovirus, though checks on public transport for fever seem pointless- too many false positives
Ok- there would be pandemonium from their western colleagues if Macron or Abe attended a parade in Crimea or Sevastopol. Stupid comment from myself!
Good luck finding enough normies who are able and willing to live the life of real dissidents.
Would not have happened if the German mainstream wasn’t already nationalist and the German elite had not preferred them to the German Left.
Hitler was hardly a “normal person” either. You’re not really going to get passionate and dedicated leaders from “normalcy”, whatever that means.
TW is no better than Fu Jian or An Hui both provinces are having zero confirmed patient right now. TW looks better than Singapore simply because TW is less of an international hub and also that TW is much bigger than that city state.
The disease might be happening in Nov, but right now it is Dec that got solid evidence. Nov is just deduction. Some even guess that it started in Oct. And all these are in retrospect.
The disease was noticed by first line doctors only near the very end of Dec. And the situation was far from explosive before Jan 10. By Jan 22, China was all serious. So, it can be argued that the Chinese gov’t was too late for 20 days, although personally I think 10 to 15 days is more fair. Some of the better doctors in Wuhan, in terms of this epidemic, were becoming more and more nervous by Jan 10. There, it means that the institution did make mistakes.
The mass eating party really is no different from Marathon or Campaign gatherings in this context.
WHO was notified Jan 4 which means the world should be judged by that date. Wuhan’s explosive situation was known by the world since Jan 23 which means the world should be judged by that date.
And, in retrospect, some western critics are just crazy. They reject most of the major actions adopted by Chinese gov’t and yet they blame the gov’t for acting too late. I want to ask what, in their mind, should Wuhan local gov’t do by Jan 10? Just scream Danger?
“Government” here is two rival organizations that spend at least seventy percent of their time yelling at each other. It mostly works, until something new crops up and then it won’t work at all.
Tantrum or not, Saudi Arabia can’t hold out at such low prices forever. Russia can hold out a lot longer than Saudi Arabia. Eventually, the Saudis will be begging the Russians to make a deal.
What would have been the effect of Russia had decided on modest deficit spending of say, -2 percent of GDP, after 2015, in an effort to keep GDP above 4 percent, instead of tightening fiscal policy?
But the vast majority of his post 1929 followers are normies, otherwise by definition they would not make up 40 percent of the voting population.
Living in Saint-Petersburg I have not noticed anything at all. I have been in the metro many times recently, saw people streaming into the new large stadium yesterday, and have observed no changes from a few months ago.
heads are overrated.
Fair point, if we assume this was really natural and naturally occuring virus, but that is yet to be decided for sure.
But if that was leak from the labs in Wuhan, whether natural virus leak/screwup when collecting specimens or even worse, leak of chimeric aritificialy engineered virus with gains of function, then they don’t have excuse of having no advance warning.
Oh oops I just read the misleading headline, and was too lazy to read the article. So coronavirus symptoms usually develop over 5 days, therefore a story described in this article is probably no sign of infections in Russia, as this traveller was in Russia only 2 days earlier.
Weather conditions will become warmer earlier in Krasnodar (i.e. from May), but I don’t think moving people will be helpful, as they will be then closer to other people. If you want to be extreme, then everyone needs to remain at home, and the virus can be controlled, even in colder conditions (as we see in Wuhan now).
I understand governments don’t want destroy their economic figures, by closing everything down.
Incompetent thing is – why there is not more encouragement for the voluntary public social distancing, self-isolation, stocking up. For example, instead of saying “don’t panic”, they should be saying “good idea – stock up with food and stay in your house as much as possible in the next weeks”.
Afterall, the more people voluntarily stay at home with their tins and toilet paper, the less the virus will impact.
In addition, governments should have contributed to production of ethanol hand wash, N95 face masks, gloves laced with antiviral properties. What is incompetent is seeing the opposite – advice not to buy facemasks, because governments want people not to buy them, so there will be enough from private suppliers for medical personnel.
How difficult would it be for a government to produce, or even just purchase, these supplies (N95 masks, ethanol sanitizer, antiviral gloves) with guarantees to producers for compensation if they ramp up production now, and distribute them to the public?
I think it’s not unlikely that it was an accidental leak of a natural virus from one of the Wuhan labs.
Which is not all that different from a natural outbreak, because the leak could happen in one of two ways: either a bat pissed on a scientist, who didn’t properly quarantine himself (but may not have been aware of being infected, nor of infecting anyone else; nor, for that matter, what kind of virus this was, what were the symptoms, etc.), or some contaminated animal was sold for its meat.
In either case the authorities could only become aware of this after there was a huge cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, as a result of investigating its origins. So even in that case, they couldn’t have known earlier than the second half of December, so roughly one month before they started doing something.
One interesting side effect of the virus might be that capital flight from Russia will be a lot more difficult, at least for Russian citizens. So a result of the collapse of the oil prices might not be so catastrophic, as in 2014 or 2008.
A few more things, for example extensive testing, could’ve and should’ve been done. That way they could’ve pursued aggressive individual quarantine measures (separating those individuals with infections, without having to resort to shutting down entire regions), but that ship has sailed in Italy and probably in most of Europe either. So instead of avoiding shutting down their economies, these countries are now going to be forced to do precisely that.
We don’t know, because they haven’t yet tried much. In Hungary, they triumphantly announced last week that the prison system was producing 25,000 masks a day – “more than enough.” Hungary has a population of roughly 10 million, so assuming 1 mask per day per person (roughly in the ballpark, unless we assume a full lockdown) means they are producing just a quarter of a percent of the requirement.
At least Orbán now seems to have understood that a huge epidemic is coming, and yesterday used terms reminiscent of Churchill’s 1940 speech. Which is probably smarter than falsely reassuring people. He also said that Hungarians were less disciplined than similar peoples to the north of us (he mentioned Poles, Czechs and Slovaks), so that we need greater effort to follow the instructions. He might be correct on that.
Stories are leaking now about the initial Chinese response:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-wuhan-doctor-ai-fen-speaks-out-against-authorities
What is interesting here that it seems to imply that old SARS tests were sensitive enough to show reaction when exposed to SARS 2.0.
Between this all gloom&doom there seems to be some hint of positive development though, which somewhat flew under radar so far, but might explain reduced Chinese fatal cases too:
.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bst/advpub/0/advpub_2020.01047/_pdf/-char/en
Also it seems that chloroquine doesn’t act on the virus directly – it acts on human organism, so the virus can’t find any work-arounds as it is under no evolutionary pressure to do so, differently from HIV drugs, which act on the virus.
https://www.contractpharma.com/contents/view_breaking-news/2020-03-06/recipharm-sees-increased-demand-for-chloroquine-phosphate/
More likely the fecal route.
Urine is often considered sterile. It is not exactly true – think schistosomes, which are really the stuff of nightmares, but require someone to pee in a pond or river inhabited by snails because they have different life stages. But it’s generally not a great environment for infectious organisms, especially peer to peer ones.
In theory you could re-use those masks (until its elastic strap inevitably breaks), as long as you would leave several days inbetween for viruses that might be on outside of mask to deactivate.
So if you went into a contaminated area 1 time each day. Then you would need about 5 such masks, and then you could cycle between them. So each mask can “rest” for 4 days, during which time most viruses on outside would deactivate.
So for Hungary, you will just need about 50 million, assuming nobody breaks the elastic straps.
Mechanical deterioration of those masks is from the straps breaking, rather than the filter. https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/how-long-air-pollution-masks-last-lifespan-data/
(Personally, I would be more confident with ones from 3m, although the strap always breaks on them quite easily).
These masks also stop you touching your face – although you would have to be careful when taking them off. See how carefully nurses remove them in Wuhan https://youtu.be/1Rrn7fmOn1o?t=686.
If we want to think cynically, there could be unfortunately be some pressure next month in “delay of reporting” cases in Russia until after the vote on constitutional “amendments” that will provide the option to Putin to have more presidential terms.
(It seems to be now that the purpose of those other meaningless “amendments” to the constitution is just a distraction, as they only involved some pointless re-arranging of words.)
Although hat’s only possible if the coronavirus situation is still small, and not wildly growing by late April.
All of these were known by public in Jan 23 in China and through official channels.
And I think on UNZ there’s the yellowcaking article where most if not all of these are discussed.
It is still not yet clear who should be held responsible for the delay around Jan 10. Before that date, the WHO was already notified, there were two expert groups from China CDC in Beijing sent to Wuhan, they were not able to make a clear case. In hindsight, they surely failed. But whose responsibility was that? So far it is not yet clear.
My suspicion is that this is a new disease, when the experts were having doubts, unable to tell its seriousness, some local officials might be too assertive out of pure ignorance & arrogance.
so… who is going to run nuclear plants when all the workers here will be hospitalised on ventilators? maybe immigrants from Magreb after 2 week training?
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1237421020119695361?s=19
Finally, studies are coming about survivability of SARS 2.0 virus:
Great thing that there is more to come:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v1.full.pdf
There’s an interesting video from a Russian painter whose Chinese wife gave birth in Wuhan three days ago.
From 5:18 they ride an ambulance and enter an empty maternity ward, both behaving extremely stoically.
15:01: the baby is handed to the father almost immediately after birth, while the mother must remain in hospital for days according to a quarantine rule. He volunteered to do it instead of the baby’s grandmother because she wasn’t tested.
17:28: he shows his daughter lying in a paint box used as a crib, and handles her telling how he feeds her with stocked formula and uses makeshift diapers (apparently baby goods are scarce there).
There’s been no updates on this family’s situation since, I hope they’re already reunited.
https://youtu.be/WEELfQwej3E
How cold is El Salvador? Or is it just an overreaction?
https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1237880325394575360
Is there really some secret plan to genocide boomers?
Because no one can be really so stupid – or can be?
https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1237802877747433472
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/rush-limbaugh-coronavirus-common-cold-and-all-panic-just-not-warranted
Oh, and these brave people didn’t name their girl Cora or Corinne (she’s Anna). Someone who shares Anatoly’s sense of humour probably would.
That’s tough. Hopefully the baby at least had access to the mother during the Golden Hour.
My bet – fast forward 1-2 weeks from now – Rush Limbaugh tested positive for coronavirus.
Karlin has said multiple times he’s not alt-right and made fun of them. Like that time when an alt-righter was arrested for beating up his father-in-law after the man called him out for cheating on his daughter (traditionalism!) or another got a divorce for throwing toddler tantrums in front of his wife. And the public’s aversion has nothing to do with their mental state. It’s because their vision of fixing the Western world, if honest, involves genocide of blacks, Jews and gays, banning university education as “degenerate”, banning almost all entertainment as “degenerate”, and forcibly putting everyone on their favorite keto diet. That is, until they run out of meat and starve because a country run on these principles will soon sink below Africa in its economic status.
She is nursing when they roll them out of the ward, so she had time to be put on the breast. A lot of stress, but she seems to face it with her parents’ superhuman calm at least.
Mr Dolsky is a very private person who didn’t even disclose his wife’s pregnancy as the reason for not evacuating last month. He’s unlikely to share much about his family from now on (respect for him in this age of hype and cheap fame-seeking). Here’s his gallery in case some rich reader wants to support creation of good art and buy: https://m.vk.com/photos83187583
On another topic, an epidemic update from my suburbia: all the STD clinics but one closed down. I understand this is to avoid infecting AIDS patients, but anyone who doesn’t have a trusted partner should better stock up on condoms rather than toilet paper now.
I don’t think it’s overreaction – it looks like good policy from the government in El Salvador.
We can predict or guess with higher temperatures (therefore higher absolute humidity) and greater UV radiation: the virus will transmit less distance and time in the air, will be active for shorter times on surfaces, and that peoples’ immune response may be stronger, other things equal. In addition, people will be have less social distance in warm weather than cold weather, other things equal.
But nobody knows what combination of these (plus imposed measures like quarantine, closing schools) can be sufficient to reduce the reproduction of the infection below 1.
It’s just bipartisan politicization of all topics in America, at least for such political commentators.
Trump was saying in recent weeks that people shouldn’t panic about coronavirus (because he was worried about the stock market falling – he had connected his reputation to how high it was).
As a result, the Democrats started to emphasize the danger of coronavirus, and Trump’s lack of response – partly to try to win political points.
In response, the Republicans, began saying “coronavirus is not a serious danger, it’s a scam, etc”.
If Trump had the opposite response, then such Republicans would be saying “coronavirus is the apocalypse”.
I’m glad to hear that the child had the minimum contact needed. Children are resilient, but its a tough time for all involved.
I have a friend, not very close, who did just that. They named their kid born in the SARS year that way.
In 11 days, starting 03.02 – from 0 to 47 patients with pneumonia, 10 of them already with confirmed SARS 2.0 in one(?) hospital in Moscow:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2678548975711075&set=a.1554958401403477&type=3&theater
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2678722155693757&id=100006679967481
Currently, in Russia (like many countries to be fair – except the most effective countries like South Korea, Bahrain, etc), it is impossible to be tested for coronavirus, unless you’ve been recently to Italy, China or Korea.
For example, on Facebook a councilwoman in Novosibirsk wrote how she tried to get tested, even privately.
https://www.facebook.com/natalia.pinus/posts/2912857455427466
So if there are any undetected clusters in the country, they will not be detected for now, unless the person who was recently in Italy, China or Korea will go to be tested.
Surprisingly, Latvia has such possibility too at the moment – you can test yourself there in one private local laboratory without any restrictions for the money. The problem seems to be that they are runing out of reagents because there was/is a huge demand for such testing.
Correcting sudden death‘s misinformation –
Denis Protsenko is the head doctor at a hospital which opened a major new facility for treating patients with viral respiratory illnesses on March 1: https://www.facebook.com/100006679967481/videos/2677781709121135/
That is why the number of patients with community-acquired pneumonia started at zero, and went up to 47 – not because their numbers in Russia literally went up from 0 to 47 in the past month, LOL. That is out of a total of 271 patients yesterday.
A few of them were diagnosed with COVID-19, most of them were not. Nothing strange about that.
So it means that at the moment this one newly opened specialized facility in Moscow has 22% of all known cases (10/45) in RF now? Maybe other hospitals in Moscow have no right to diagnose/treat such suspected patients, they need to be transferred only here since March?
Yes it’s something like that. Sending the people who infected with COVID-19 to that medical centre, after they had returned from abroad.
–
Probably, the low number of total diagnosed, is not completely something to celebrate though – it’s partly a product of the lack of surveillance of the virus.
For example, it has (or had) been difficult to attain a test for the virus even if you have just returned from Iran.
https://www.facebook.com/evgenii.berg/posts/10215795337021088
The difficulty of getting tested, makes sense due to limited resources for testing. But it also means there is lack of surveillance.
Religious Chads in RF seem to be just as fearless as Iranian ones, lol…but sad one actually.
Recent(?) icon kissing in SPB:
https://scontent-arn2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/s960x960/89808228_2779190472165998_1122394470499745792_o.jpg?_nc_cat=110&_nc_sid=110474&_nc_ohc=0vvczJ5RPU0AX8KKocr&_nc_ht=scontent-arn2-1.xx&_nc_tp=7&oh=7a950ee294272716a82967131cc3f746&oe=5E917416
https://scontent-arn2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p640x640/89154852_2779190492165996_8521605115474345984_o.jpg?_nc_cat=107&_nc_sid=110474&_nc_ohc=0XoAQ-jWlIwAX-UvSsW&_nc_ht=scontent-arn2-1.xx&_nc_tp=6&oh=4e736250bfb401d86df7b1381e522c1a&oe=5E922CEE
https://el-murid.livejournal.com/4393865.html
IQ points can be higher than real religious people. (Well perhaps that’s not the way to explain it.) Most of the soi-disant “religious people” don’t actually believe religion in their soul, so they avoid the problem of whether to compete for darwin awards over it.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/03/12/nomarchrussian-churchs-anti-coronavirus-procession-canceled-a69600
On Friday they had 10 infected in that clinic, on Sunday morning 17 already, guess quite likely by midnight or Monday morning they will have 20 or even slightly more, so doubling every 2-3 days may be achieved, even if from low initial numbers:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2680247808874525&id=100006679967481
Whether detected cases is the whole iceberg, or just a top of an iceberg – it perhaps will depend on if the virus had been “brewing” in the country last month, before they started testing all people from infected countries.
The positive news for current policy, is that probably pre-symptomatic people are being detected by tests, because there is a very high early high viral load in COVID-19 infected people. (So testing sensitivity will not need to be high to detect them).
But as you can see, 3 weeks ago you could fly in from Iran and there would be no testing possible, unless you visited to the doctor with symptoms.
At the same time, people who do have symptoms now, cannot be tested unless they had been in one of the infected countries.
Again, with COVID-19 infection people have higher viral load (and possibly more infectious) before they experience symptoms. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502v1.full.pdf+html
So there had been a recipe for possible undetected clusters developing last month as a result of incompetent policy. It’s now something decided by fate whether such a thing exists or not.
And even after it is seems a leaky system.
https://ngs.ru/more/69031156/
Looks like all the people in the study were symptomatic, it were mild symptoms but still, those were not asymptomatic patients, so more correct would be to say that high viral loads can be detected even with mild symptoms such as sore throat:
Also, Estonia with their tiny population already has 208 infected, while RF way below 100 atm, so it quite probably hardly reflects real existing situation.
Well, symptoms, which will not be detectable by e.g. thermal scanning people.
However, the positive side of this is they have high viral load so the tests should be able detect them in the early stages of infection.
The part in that study above which seems to suggest this:
https://i.imgur.com/glqwMCi.jpg
Due to incompetent surveillance about this epidemic in Russia, it’s theoretically possible that detected cases are just the top of an iceberg.
However, it is more likely, in my opinion, the epidemic is actually a couple of weeks behind in Russia, and there is not some enomorous iceberg underneath. This is due to lower connectivity per capita with the areas where there has been community spread of the virus.
For example, in Estonia there is much higher per capita connectivity to Northern Italy, as a result (in Estonia’s situation) of EU membership and open borders to Italy.
The dangerous thing is that in April, climate in many cities in Russia will be like Wuhan in January, or Tehran and Milan in February.
The danger seems to be in this temperature range.
https://i.imgur.com/Z6d0ELd.jpg
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3550308
wow, over 30 overall already infected with Monday evening data in that clinic:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2681505628748743&id=100006679967481
“Social distancing” policies announced this week, so it clear the authorities now accept they have been incompetent idiots in recent weeks, and the virus is now developing in the country to some extent beyond only “the known infected people”.
The best case scenario is that the epidemic will develops slowly enough, that the warming weather in May will reduce the spread.
Russia’s relative isolation (in terms of connectivity and travel) from Europe, might at least mean there is a benefit that there is about 2-3 weeks delay in the epidemic. If the situation does not become bad in April. If “social distancing” policies could slow the development epidemic by some additional days or weeks. Then this can be vital extra time to allow for the warming weather of summer to stop the epidemic.
Sadly, given that as of today RF got the first official death relatively quite early in the epidemic timeline with still low overall official infected numbers, I’m afraid there may actually not be such comforting delay in reality.
Especially given the fact it was victim of community spread as the first fatal case was not even abroad recently…