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Coronavirus — borders closing all around the world — no thanks to the WHO

 US and Australia close borders and everyone outside China starts tracking contacts…

The official deaths tally has risen to 259, but for the first time the “total recovered” at 287 now exceeds the total deaths. Evidently it’s quicker to die than to recover.

Australia remains the “leader” of the Western nations with 12 confirmed cases. Thankfully, it and the US have finally got serious and both announced today that they would stop people from China from flying straight in. Citizens can return with a two week isolation or quarantine period, but foreigners cannot. This is very good news (as far as virus control goes). Now all the same nations will be furiously, laboriously tracking and tracing the hundreds of potential contacts. In a few weeks we’ll know how contagious it is, and how deadly. And maybe, with much money and dedication we’ll even stop it.

Though in a few weeks a host of secondary countries may develop their own epidemics and virus-free countries will need to block them too.

What’s really remarkable here is how useless, to the point of negligence, the World Health Organisation is.

US and Australia close borders to Chinese arrivals

BBC News:  The US and Australia said they would deny entry to all foreign visitors who had recently been in China, where the virus first emerged in December.

Earlier, countries including Russia, Japan, Pakistan and Italy announced similar travel restrictions.

All of these countries are going against the World Health Organisation which appears to be using the medical handbook of 1917 — when people had to walk across borders, and no one had a phone. Follow this reasoning:

But global health officials have advised against such measures.

“Travel restrictions can cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies,” the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.

It’s like sickness and death, loss of production lines, and mass holiday cancellations don’t hurt the economy at all….?

The WHO seems to think we should allow 1,000 infectious people to cross borders just so one doctor can go the other way.  Haven’t they heard of email? And how much tax did we pay for that advice?

Understandably the medicos in Hong Kong are at the end of their tether:

Hospital workers in Hong Kong have voted to go on strike from Monday unless the territory’s border with mainland China is completely closed. The Hong Kong government has refused to do so citing WHO recommendations.

How many people will the WHO kill with this advice?

It was reckless to allow borders to stay open once we knew it was transmissible without symptoms. With an Ro of 2 and a death rate of 2 – 10%, the spike in cases needing intensive care would have utterly overwhelmed the medical system in weeks as thousands of people turned up to Emergency Departments. Even if the late block doesn’t stop the virus coming eventually, it buys time to find anti-virals or vaccines and spreads the load on the medical system.

In true Big-Government-style the WHO are trying to save economies instead of people, and failing to do either.

This video next is long but candid and well informed — these two men live there, can read Chinese and know doctors on the inside (one is married to a doctor). The doctors don’t even have the right facemasks in China. They can’t speak up.

One of the standouts from this is the message of hygiene at the wet markets. Medieval is the word. This virus may or may not have arisen from the fishy fish market in Wuhan, but all its friends and cousins of the microbial world are incubating there — ready for the next one.

h/t to Steve H

LATE NOTE: I put these videos on 2 x speed, used auto subtitles, and watched “50 minutes”. (Yay, speed control!). Use the little cog symbol at the bottom right.

In China, firstly, this would have been prevented if they had free speech, and it would be minimized if they had the same culture of hygiene and handwashing and not spitting that the West has developed. I was astonished at the shots of crowded wet markets in the most upmarket city of China.

The eating of weird foods is a double edged sword. There is research showing that some Chinese traditional remedies and foods contain rare glyconutrients or other useful molecules. We eat a very sterile diet and miss out. On the other hand, if we were going to create novel diseases there a few “better” ways. It’s not too good for those endangered species either…

 

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