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Something does not add up
So the virus is on its way. Even though Australia has no known community transmission we are choosing to slow down the spread by actively importing it even though we are surrounded by a moat, and are pretty much self-sustaining. We have thousands of high risk people and the disease that’s coming is largely unknown — today there are reports a Japanese case of a woman medical experts had thought had recovered who tests positive again. Is this a biphasic disease like anthrax? That’ll be fun.
Winter is twelve weeks away for Australians, and we know the coronavirus potentially threatens to overwhelm our medical systems and could be a GDP-type hit on national economies. It’s highly infectious, and between 5 – 17% of current cases outside China require hospitalization, and probably 1 -3% will need intensive care. Inviting the virus to start spreading now will mean it will peak during winter — the worst possible time in Australia.
Australia is one of the easiest countries to protect from this scourge, yet we are obediently following policies of northern hemisphere nations in a different situation. Hmm?
As I keep saying, it’s easier to import a deadly virus than to bring in cut flowers to Australia.
Most people won’t get very sick, but China is still reacting somewhat like the it has the Black Plague.
Scott Morrison says “the pandemic is upon us” but also says don’t cancel large public events, you can still go to the footy. How to reconcile the two; is it coming, or isn’t it?
Based on all these things, the only logical approach is to close the borders temporarily until we know more. The medical experts I’ve talked to privately agree. Thousands of Australians agree (see the last essential survey). Yet despite that, almost no medical official, commentator or expert even discusses that as an option. Are they all afraid of being called a scaremonger? Is namecalling worse than being the person who decided to let the virus run rife, or do they know something they are not telling us? Perhaps, behind the scenes, the experts know that too many cases are already circulating without diagnosis? Officials are acting as if that’s the case. Somehow we shifted from “low risk” to “100% chance sometime soon”. Germany has just announced six new cases and says “it’s facing an epidemic”. Trump has said “the risk is low” but warned schools need to be prepared to close. One US case with no known source has just been announced. Ominously, they acquired it before Feb 19th, but only just got tested. Evidently undiagnosed coronavirus was spreading a week and a half ago around Sacramento.
LATE NOTE: The US untraceable case suggests the virus has been circulating possibly since Feb 12th or so. Perhaps this isn’t as dire as it sounds. Whoever he caught it off may not have triggered a wave of deadly pnumonia instead perhaps just triggering colds and flus. That may mean the virus is already loose, and most infections are not severe. Then again, since no one is testing these kinds of cases, who knows? I hope someone is tracking pneumonia cases in Sacramento and starting to test them.
Latest claims are the Ro (rate of reproduction of the infection) was a 7.05 in the early days in China. The draconian quarantines have reduced this to to 3.2. (by Jan 23rd, so it’s even lower now, hopefully). We have to bring the Ro below 1 to stop this. Every person has to infect less than one other.
How many will need a hospital?
Based on Worldometer stats, and bearing in mind there is an eight day delay between detection and progression to “severe” — the latest stats from semi-reliable countries on Feb 19th, the rate of progression to hospitalization is: (severe cases/ total cases 8 days ago). Bear in mind that with the lack of current broad testing, these numbers may bear no resemblance to the actual number of cases.
- Japan (13/76) 17%
- Singapore (7/53) 13%
- Germany (2/16) 13%
- Hong Kong (6/62) 10%
- Diamond Princess (36/542) 7%
- Thailand (2/35) 6%
- Taiwan (1/22) 5%
- UAE (2/13) 25%
- France (1/12) 8%
There are zero cases progressing to “serious critical” from Australia (15), USA (29), UK (9), Macao (10), Canada (8), Malaysia (22), Vietnam (16), India (5). That’s 114 cases with good outcomes. Many countries have had only one or two cases and complete recovery: Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Egypt, Belgium, Russia, Philippines. Things are moving too fast in South Korea, Iran and Italy to make their statistics meaningful. Obviously all three had far wider spread a week ago than they knew of.
Is there any data on how this affects different racial groups, or is that information being kept quiet because everyone is too afraid of offending an ethnic group?
Singapore and Hong Kong appear to be doing good jobs of controlling the spread. Iran is a basket case, so is Indonesia (with no reported cases, but little testing and their medical policy is “it’s in the hands of Allah”. )
While graphs show exponential growth outside China, it appears (probably falsely) localized to South Korea, Iran and Italy. Presumably coronavirus has been headed via 747 out of all three for at least a week, which may be why officials have given up. They know outbreaks will occur next week, they just don’t know where. What I can’t explain is why they won’t even try tracking and isolating these cases now and stopping further imports. The success of Singapore and Hong Kong suggests it might still be possible.
The comforting Atlantic headline:
Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.
James Hamblin M.D., The Atlantic
The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. … it’s striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”
… even with the ideal containment, the virus’s spread may have been inevitable. Testing people who are already extremely sick is an imperfect strategy if people can spread the virus without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work. Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses.
At this point, it is not even known how many people are infected. As of Sunday, there have been 35 confirmed cases in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. But Lipsitch’s “very, very rough” estimate when we spoke a week ago (banking on “multiple assumptions piled on top of each other,” he said) was that 100 or 200 people in the U.S. were infected. That’s all it would take to seed the disease widely. The rate of spread would depend on how contagious the disease is in milder cases. On Friday, Chinese scientists reported in the medical journal JAMA an apparent case of asymptomatic spread of the virus, from a patient with a normal chest CT scan. The researchers concluded with stolid understatement that if this finding is not a bizarre abnormality, “the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging.”
Originally, doctors in the U.S. were advised not to test people unless they had been to China or had contact with someone who had been diagnosed with the disease. Within the past two weeks, the CDC said it would start screening people in five U.S. cities, in an effort to give some idea of how many cases are actually out there. But tests are still not widely available. As of Friday, the Association of Public Health Laboratories said that only California, Nebraska, and Illinois had the capacity to test people for the virus.
What to make of Twitter trends that show that more people are searching for the misspelled caronavirus than the correct spelling? That isn’t the case here in Australia where #coronavirus is #1.
The Australian asks “should you travel” and says “Yes, No, Maybe”. Jo Nova says “Why risk it?” — who wants to chance catching it on a plane or overseas — even if you only get the common cold, you may end up facing quarantine for two weeks. Of course, if you are away from home, it might be time to get back.
This may all look so much better (or worse) in a few weeks. We just don’t have the numbers yet.
The Optimist says: Perhaps this is a bad flu season and as long as we can stop the cytokine cascade in the vulnerable, or get some anti-viral working, we may not be looking at large deaths or mass quarantines. The Pessimist says: do the math, stop the flights, and wait for the data.
9.3 out of 10 based on 48 ratings
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9.8 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
UPDATE: The Hon. Craig Kelly MP was so appalled by this story he has taken this to the Australian Parliament already where The Labor Party was so afraid they interrupted his allocated 15 minute speech just to stop him finishing. They even called a formal Division which means the bell is rung and all the missing MPs have to return to the Chamber to vote. See that on Kelly’s Facebook page. Who cares about our climate and who covers up for incompetent bureaucrats?!
For generations it was a Guinness Book of Records type thing. Now it’s gone.
In 1924 Marble Bar set a world record of the most consecutive days of 100 °F (37.8 °C) or above, during an incredible period of 160 days starting in 1923. It was legend — but thanks to the genius homogenized adjustments, we now find out all along it was wrong. It’s another ACORN triumph, rewriting history, extinguishing the hot days of days long gone. The experts at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) have reanalyzed the temperatures from 4000 km away and nine decades in the future and apparently it wasn’t that hot.
Chris Gillham wonders how the bureau figured out the Marble Bar max was one whole degree too warm on 18 Nov 1923, but it was 0.6°C too warm on 19 Nov 1923, 0.3°C too warm on 20 Nov 1923, 0.2°C too warm on 21 Nov 1923, and 0.8°C too warm on 22 Nov 1923? He points out the sky was totally clear every day, the screen didn’t get shuffled around every day, etc, so where’s the logic? The world record was extinguished because on 8 March 1924 the ACORN adjustments magically cooled the temperature from 38.2°C to 36.5°C. What caused the thermometer to be 1.7°C too warm on that particular day? That adjustment is twice the size of the entire century long trend. Check out those “daily changes” of raw versus “ACORN.”
Ponder the bad luck of scientists Saving-The-World who constantly have to battle against all the thermometers which cruelly and overestimated temperatures from Stevenson Screens in sites probably unaffected by concrete and bitumen so long ago. Those falsely high readings lulled the world into thinking that the world has always been hot and that CO2 was an irrelevant, minor and beneficial gas. What are the odds that so much equipment was non-randomly, dastardly conspiring to hide the True Catastrophic Effect of CO2!
But never fear, the brilliant minds of the BoM are correcting past mistakes with secret methods they cannot explain to mere mortals outside the sacred guild of weather druids. Luckily for us, the new super sensitive small box electronic gizmos that record one second spikes of warmth from passing trucks and radiated heat from tarmac and walls is The Truth Hallalujah Brother. In another ten years, the climate of Marble Bar circa 1924 will be so much cooler. I bet the dead will be delighted. I can’t imagine why the BoM didn’t issue a press release to let the world know that Australia now doesn’t hold the longest hottest record which now goes to Death Valley.
Thanks to the volunteer number-crunching dedication of Chris Gillham for doing what the million-dollar-a-day BoM hasn’t found time to do — tell Australian we no longer have our long-standing heatwave world record at Marble Bar and that distinction now goes to America. Perhaps if we paid them less, they’d be more informative? — Jo
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by Chris Gillham, WAClimate
If the Bureau of Meteorology’s Australian Climate Observation Reference Network (ACORN) accurately corrects historic temperature observations, it means that Marble Bar in the north of WA can no longer boast it had a world record heatwave in 1923/24.
Marble Bar has been world famous for decades because of the 160 consecutive days in which it recorded maxima at or above 37.8C (100F or a “century” in the Fahrenheit days).
The Marble Bar thermometer in a Stevenson screen topped 100F every day from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924, and nowhere else on earth is known to have recorded 160 century days in a row without a break.
Marble Bar is now a runner-up
The BoM website used to have a Climate Education page explaining Marble Bar’s heatwave record. The National Library of Australia considered it to be of national significance and has archived it for posterity.
In 2020, the BoM website still has a page that explains: Marble Bar, in the Pilbara, holds the Australian record for the longest sequence of days over the old century mark (100°F or 37.8°C). This occurred during the period from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924 when the maximum temperature equalled or exceeded 100°F for 160 days in a row.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics acknowledges the world record and Australians have heard about the Marble Bar heatwave record for many decades :
Temperature dataset downloads from the BoM website show that ACORN has cooled 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924 so much that the Pilbara town can no longer boast that it had a world record 160 consecutive days above 37.8C.
ACORN 2, which is described as a world-class homogenisation network, has reduced the 160 days to just 128 – from 1 November 1923 to 7 March 1924.
From 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924, the dates during which the 160 days of 100 or more were recorded, there’s now 153 days at or above 100F.
And the winner is … America
Wikipedia’s Death Valley page states that “The greatest number of consecutive days with a maximum temperature of 100 °F (38 °C) or above was 154 days in the summer of 2001.” This data is confirmed by the American Meteorological Society, which also references 134 consecutive days at Furnace Creek in Death Valley that were above above 37.8C during the summer of 1974.
154 days is less than 160 days but a lot more than 128 days, so it seems that America now holds the world record heatwave of consecutive 37.8C+ days at Death Valley – thanks to ACORN.
On its archived Climate Education page, the BoM states that “The highest temperature recorded during the record spell was 47.5°C on 18 January 1924.”
This is correct in the original RAW temperature dataset (see below), but ACORN 2 cools 18 January 1924 to 47.3C.
An Excel spreadsheet (499kb) with columns of daily maximum temperatures at Marble Bar from October 1923 to April 1924 in ACORN 1, ACORN 2 and RAW can be downloaded here.
Daily cooling adjustments
BoM temperature adjustments to ACORN weather stations have cooled Australia’s history of very hot days (see No more extreme hot days in Australia than 100 years ago and The Australian Bureau of Met hides 50 years of very hot days).
Politicians and climate change skeptics are often scorned for suggesting that the BoM adjusts temperature data to fit a global warming agenda or to cool the past (e.g. Media Watch), and in late 2019 SBS News reported that the bureau denied it has rewritten Australia’s climate record.
The animation below uses the daily temperature datasets for RAW, ACORN 1 (introduced 2011/2012) and ACORN 2 (introduced quietly with no BoM announcement in early 2019) to compare the number of days each year from 1910 to 2019 that Marble Bar recorded a very hot day (defined by the bureau as at or above 40C) :
 Marble Bar very hot day trends
This animation demonstrates that temperature data has been adjusted, with Marble Bar just one of many examples where Australia’s climate record has been rewritten to cool the past.
The slides show that very hot days were far more frequent according to the original RAW thermometer observations in the first half of the 1900s, but ACORN 1 cooled many of these and ACORN 2 has trimmed them even further to create an upward trend in the occurrence of 40C+ days at Marble Bar since 1910.
Rain = clouds = fewer very hot days
The bureau’s archived 2009 Climate Education page helps explain why Marble Bar had the world’s longest heatwave in 1923/24: “The town is far enough inland that, during the summer months, the only mechanisms likely to prevent the air from reaching such a temperature involve a southward excursion of humid air associated with the monsoon trough, or heavy cloud, and/or rain, in the immediate area.”
Marble Bar averaged just 9.9mm of rain per month from November 1923 to April 1924, compared to the 1910-1964 Nov-Apr average of 43.4mm per month. Just 71.1mm of rain fell in 1924, compared to an average 325mm in 1910-1964. The town had 132 very hot 40C+ days in 1924, compared to the 1910-1964 average of 112.3.
It’s no surprise that the frequency of rainfall strongly influences how hot it gets in Marble Bar and how often the town exceeds 40C. In the absence of cloud data, rainfall is a proxy for cloudy days that keep temperatures below 37.8C or 40C.
Confining the data to months when very hot days occur, the animation below shows the correlation between annual November to April rainfall at Marble Bar and the number of very hot days in the RAW, ACORN 1 and ACORN 2 daily temperature datasets :
RAW very hot day (40C+) annual averages:
1910-1964 112.3
1965-2019 98.7
ACORN 1 very hot day (40C+) annual averages:
1910-1964 93.2
1965-2019 94.5
ACORN 2 very hot day (40C+) annual averages:
1910-1964 90.7
1965-2019 95.1
Rainfall November to April monthly averages:
1910-1964 43.3mm
1965-2019 56.5mm
The animation demonstrates that the frequency of very hot days increased when rainfall and cloudy days were relatively sparse at Marble Bar in the early 1900s, and how very hot days decreased when rainfall and cloudy days increased from the 1970s.
However, the correlation between very hot days and rainy days is ignored by ACORN 1, and even more so by ACORN 2. For example, ACORN cools 8 March 1924 from 38.2C to to 36.5C at Marble Bar, ending the world record, but there was no rainfall on 8 March 1924 so what caused the thermometer to be 1.7C warmer than it really was on that particular day (according to ACORN)?
1,187 fewer very hot days
Marble Bar had 6,178 very hot days of 40C or more from 1910 to 1964 in the original RAW observations, and ACORN 2 cuts this to 4,991 – a 19.2% reduction.
If this homogenisation is an accurate adjustment, it must be assumed the BoM identified a significant recording error in the standardised equipment and/or Stevenson screen, or an influential site move, in the first half of Marble Bar’s temperature record – sufficient to diminish the ability of rain clouds and clear skies to keep the daily temperature below or above 40C.
Alternatively, the daily ACORN adjustments are due to area averaging based on daily temperatures at “neighbouring” weather stations. In 1923/24, the closest known weather stations with digitised daily temperatures were Port Hedland Post Office, a coastal site almost 140 kilometres away, and Broome Post Office about 440 kilometres to the north (long-term Nov-Apr average maxima : Port Hedland 34.6C; Broome 33.9C; Marble Bar 39.7C). Nullagine, about 120 kilometres south and without digitised daily temperatures, is an influential station (long-term Nov-Apr average maxima 37.6C).
Although ACORN 2 substantially reduces the frequency of very hot days in the early 1900s at Marble Bar, both RAW and adjusted ACORN 2 maxima show the average temperature of the very hot 40C+ days was 42.4C in 1910-1964 and 42.3C in 1965-2019.
As at most weather stations, Marble Bar’s temperature history has been influenced by shifting rainfall patterns rather than CO2.
ACORN homogenisation of Australia’s temperature history doesn’t alter readings at the rainfall gauges since 1910, and seemingly ignores the correlation between cloudy days and very high temperatures.
Averages
The cooling adjustment of Marble Bar’s early observations affects both the frequency of very hot days and the yearly average maxima. Below compares average annual maxima in the RAW, ACORN 1 and ACORN 2 datasets :
Average maxima
1910-1964 – ACORN 1 34.90C / ACORN 2 34.77C / RAW 35.45C
1965-2019 – ACORN 1 35.16C / ACORN 2 35.18C / RAW 35.25C
ACORN 1 warmed 0.26C / ACORN 2 warmed 0.41C / RAW cooled 0.20C
Average change per decade : ACORN 1 0.10C / ACORN 2 0.12C / RAW 0.03C
The maximum averages show that ACORN’s reduction of very hot days in the history books is typical of broader adjustments to maximum temperatures on all days at Marble Bar before the 1970s.
Not just very hot days
ACORN adjustments to historic daily observations affect not only the frequency of very hot days (40C+) but also what the BoM defines as hot days (35C+).
Since 1910, Marble Bar has recorded daily maxima at or above 35C every month of the year. The animation below shows annual hot 35C+ days at Marble Bar in the RAW, ACORN 1 and ACORN 2 datasets from 1910 to 2019, as well as annual rainfall :
RAW hot day (35C+) annual averages:
1910-1964 206.5
1965-2019 196.7
9.8 fewer hot days per year in 1965-2019 than 1910-1964
ACORN 1 hot day (35C+) annual averages:
1910-1964 196.3
1965-2019 194.2
2.1 fewer hot days per year in 1965-2019 than 1910-1964
ACORN 2 hot day (35C+) annual averages:
1910-1964 191.2
1965-2019 194.8
3.6 more hot days per year in 1965-2019 than 1910-1964
RAW hot day (35C+) annual average temperature:
1910-1964 40.1
1965-2019 39.9
Average hot days temperature 0.2C cooler in 1965-2019 than 1910-1964
ACORN 1 hot day (35C+) annual average temperature:
1910-1964 39.9
1965-2019 39.9
Average hot days temperature the same in 1965-2019 as 1910-1964
ACORN 2 hot day (35C+) annual average temperature:
1910-1964 39.9
1965-2019 39.9
Average hot days temperature the same in 1965-2019 as 1910-1964
Annual rainfall averages:
1910-1964 325.0mm
1965-2019 407.3mm
Because annual rainfall can include downpours concentrated over just a few days and there isn’t necessarily any rainfall on cloudy days, another way to identify the correlation between hot or very hot days and cloudy rainfall days is to compare the average number of actual rainfall days each year, rather than total annual rainfall, since 1910.
This clarifies the influence of downpours over a few days but can’t account for cloudy days without rainfall.
The table below shows the averaged number of 35C+ and 40C+ days at Marble Bar in years when 10 to 19 days, 20 to 29 days, 30 to 39 days … 60 to 69 days of rainfall were recorded from 1910 to 2019:
Marble Bar is also noteworthy for recording 200 consecutive days of 35C+ from 5 October 1923 to 21 April 1924, averaging 41.7C, which ACORN 2 has reduced to 179 days from 19 October 1923 to 14 April 1924, averaging 41.5C.
Which dataset do we believe?
Marble Bar, widely considered to be the hottest place in Australia, nowadays has cooler weather and its residents endure fewer scorching hot days than was the case a hundred years ago.
ACORN’s rewriting of Marble Bar’s climate history has warmed the town and encouraged the belief that CO2 is responsible for more hot and very hot days.
If the BoM still believes its 2009 Climate Education web page and argues that Marble Bar retains its heatwave world record because the original 160 consecutive days of 37.8C+ in 1923/24 were valid and accurate, the credibility of ACORN is destroyed as a homogenisation process that persistently cools historic temperature observations around Australia.
But If ACORN is touted as a world-class network that produces accurate historic temperatures, Marble Bar can no longer boast that it holds the heatwave world record.
Either the original observations were accurate or the ACORN cooling adjustments are accurate, and the bureau can’t claim it’s both.
• Further details here, a page with links to further analysis of hot and very hot day frequency in different Australian regions.
9.9 out of 10 based on 107 ratings
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8.9 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
On twitter, there are a few photos suggesting that in Iran people are collapsing in the streets. The semiofficial news agencies are reporting the death toll in Qom alone is 50, but the official toll stands at 12, out of 61 reported cases. Iranian officials deny that Qom’s death toll is 50, but admitted 900 suspected cases were being tested. Some of the deaths are reported to be doctors and some of the infected are officials suggesting the virus has been spreading for weeks and is underreported. For example: the Chancellor of Qom’s Medical Sciences University, Dr. Mohammad-Reza Ghadir, had tested positive.
If official stats are correct the death rate is 20%. It almost certainly isn’t, but either this virus is deadlier than ever, or Iranian officials are hiding a broader spread. Either way, every nation with high risk people (say, people over 60 years old) might consider suspending the flights til we know more. We would all probably be dealing with what Iran is right now if we had not closed flights to China weeks ago.
The infection from Iran has spread to six countries so far –– Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Lebanon, Canada and Oman. But flights from China to Iran are apparently still open. Given the risk, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Oman, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Jordan, Ankara, Georgia and Tajikistan have stopped flights from Iran. Lebanon has reduced flights. However medical safety standards are lower in the USA, Australia, etc where it is fine for infected people to fly in without quarantine. Cheapest flights from Tehran to Melbourne are $761.
The US CDC says it’s OK to fly to and from Iran, though older people should “consider” postponing their trip. Travellers should stay away from sick people and use hand sanitizer etc. That’s Alert Level 2. They have raised the alert to level 3 for travel to South Korea. “Avoid non-essential travel” — but hey, go if you really want to. There is seemingly no warning on CDC Travel Notices that people traveling to these countries risk getting caught inside them if flights are stopped or internal borders shut. Will we do rescue flights in plastic wrapped planes?
Australian authorities say “reconsider your need to travel” and sternly warn “If you travel to Iran despite our advice, you will be screened for coronavirus (COVID-19) at airports. ” Which means someone will check your temperature, but not whether you have taken a panadol 2 hours ago and not whether you are an asymptomatic carrier.
Flights from Iran are already cartoonized on twitter:
Apparently, Iranian health officials think quarantine is too old fashioned. For that reason alone we should stop all flights from Iran from entry.
Amirabadi-Farahani [Qom lawmaker, who spoke in Parliament] said Qom should be quarantined, while also suggesting that nurses and other health-care workers lacked the necessary protective gear to treat coronavirus patients.
[Deputy Health Minister Iraj] Harirchi told journalists that a quarantine in the holy city — where many senior ayatollahs and thousands of religious students are based — is unlikely to be efficient in controlling the spread of the disease that emerged in China in December.
“We do not agree with quarantining Qom; the practice of using a quarantine is pre-World War I for the plague and cholera and Chinese [officials] are also unhappy with the quarantines imposed [in their country],” Harirchi said.
The son of an 83-year-old woman who died in Qom over the weekend after being infected with the coronavirus told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that she died while in quarantine in a hospital.
He said doctors did not test him even though he had taken care of his mother before she was transferred to the hospital. “They asked me if I coughed and asked a few other questions,” the man, who identified himself as Reza, said. “Then they said, ‘You can go.'”
David D. Kirkpatrick, Farnaz Fasshiki and Mujib Mashal, NY Times
Experts worry that few Middle Eastern countries are ready to respond effectively to the threat posed by the virus.
“How ready are these countries?” asked Dr. Montaser Bilbisi, an American-trained infectious disease specialist practicing in Amman, Jordan. “In all honesty, I have not seen the level of readiness that I have seen in China or elsewhere, and even some of the personal protective equipment is lacking.”
In Jordan, for example, he said that he had not yet seen a fully protective hazardous materials suit. “So health care workers would be at very high risk for infection.”
In Afghanistan, officials said the first confirmed case of the virus was a 35-year-old man from the western province of Herat who had recently traveled to Qom. Health officials declared a state of emergency in Herat. The government on Sunday had already suspended all air and ground travel to and from Iran.
But the border is difficult to seal. Thousands cross every week for religious pilgrimages, trade, jobs and study — about 30,000 in January alone, the International Organization of Migration, an intergovernmental agency, reported.
“In the past two weeks, more than a 1,000 people have visited or traveled to Qom from Herat, which means they come into closer contact with the virus,” the Afghan heath minister, Ferozuddin Feroz, said on Monday at a news conference in Kabul.
9.3 out of 10 based on 44 ratings
Australians are installing renewable energy, per capita, faster than any place on Earth, or at least we were until 2020 when the subsidies and schemes ran out.
 Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables
The Quarterly update for the Greenhouse Gas inventory is out and we can see just how much difference all those renewables make, which is almost nothing. Emissions have flatlined.
Australians are paying record prices, risking blackouts, buying batteries and synchronous condensors, building new billion dollar interconnectors, losing companies overseas, and suffering voltage spikes. We’re playing chicken with our smelters, and party games with PeakSmart timers and extra domestic circuits so that electricity companies can manage our pool pumps and our air conditioners.
And this is all we get?
 Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables After adding so many wind farms and solar panels the electricity sector decreased emissions by only 1.2% on the year before.
Electricity sector emissions decreased 1.8 per cent in the June quarter of 2019 on a ‘seasonally adjusted and weather normalised’P 8 P basis (Figure 6). This reflected strong increases in hydro and wind generation (42.0 and 14.8 per cent) and decreases in coal and natural gas generation (5.7 and 21.3 per cent) in the National Electricity Market (NEM). Over the year to June 2019, emissions from electricity decreased by 1.2 per cent compared with the year to June 2018.
The electricity sector is Australia’s largest single source of emissions, and some of the gains in the last decade have come from efficiency, not from renewables, and from making electricity so unaffordable that it scares people into not using their air conditioners.
 Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables Given all this, you might think the team at Reneweconomy might worry that renewables won’t save the planet and were a dismal and useless way to spend environmental money, but not so. They were pretty happy with a 2 percent fall in electricity emissions from Sept 2018 to Sept 2019.
They were not impressed that as our electricity emissions had fallen, our diesel emissions have gone up the other way. Mostly for truckers, they say.
How much of this is due to electrical generators?
 …. Per capita Australians are using 40% less CO2 than they were 30 years ago, and this is what the Opposition calls, “a policy vacuum”. Perhaps it is a vacuum — of achievement.
Australia has almost the fastest growing population in the West. Fifty percent population growth in 30 years, and we are aiming to cut emissions 27% on top of that?
Over the period from 1989-90 to June 2019, Australia’s population grew strongly from 17.0 million to around 25.4 million.P 16,17 P This reflects growth of 48.8 per cent.
 Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables The best way to keep Australian emissions down (apart from nukes) is to cut immigration, but left leaning politicians don’t want to discuss that, and nor apparently do left wing activist websites. Importing new left-leaning voters seems to be more important.
By picking the most expensive and ineffective methods it’s almost like none of the people driving renewables even care about the CO2 emissions.
9.8 out of 10 based on 79 ratings
Think this is pandemonium?
Changing by the hour:
This is the danger of too many open borders and not enough testing. If things are this far advanced in Italy and Iran and South Korea what’s happening under the veil in Africa and Indonesia, and so many other places?
Choices for the West include closing risky borders now, or later perhaps closing schools, events, football matches, movies, parties, and maybe elective surgery.
Italy –a lesson in how fast things move
Current tally: 2 dead, 134 infections and 26 are severe (that’s 19%, and who knows what the lag is, or if this will get worse?)
Football matches and the Venice carnival are being closed. There’s a ban on public events in 10 municipalities.
In Italy, strict quarantine restrictions are in force in two northern “hotspot” regions close to Milan and Venice.
Around 50,000 people cannot enter or leave several towns in Veneto and Lombardy for the next two weeks without special permission. Even outside the zone, many businesses and schools have suspended activities, and sporting events have been cancelled including several top-flight football matches.
Italy still can’t find patient zero. So they don’t know if this quarantine of two regions will be enough.
International quarantines are no fun, but domestic quarantines are worse
Look at what’s happening in Italy (let alone China):
Italian authorities have implemented draconian measures to try to halt the coronavirus outbreak in the north of the country, including imposing fines on anyone caught entering or leaving outbreak areas, as cases of the virus in the country rose to more than 130. Police are patrolling 11 towns – mostly in the Lombardy region, where the first locally transmitted case emerged – that have been in lockdown since Friday night.
The Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said: “We have adopted a decree to protect the health of Italians, which is our priority and which ranks first in the list of constitutional values.” He urged people to “have faith in the political and scientific institutions, which are doing everything possible”.
Locals wearing facemasks were already lined up outside a supermarket in the town of Casalpusterlengo, a 10-minute drive from Codogno, on Sunday morning. Shoppers were made to wait, then allowed to enter in groups of 40 inside the store to stock up on provisions.
Three days ago the people living in these areas probably didn’t think they would suddenly be quarantined.
As I said a week ago we have a choice. A two week mandatory quarantine is not the end of the world, and rocks and hard places are all around us.
We could start building emergency hospital ICU rooms like China has, or we could start building quarantine cabins which are infinitely cheaper and ask all entrants from countries with uncontrolled cases of Covid 19* (or SARS CoV 2, whatever it is called) to go through a two week quarantine. This will limit traffic drastically, affecting weddings, conferences, holidays and all kinds of business. It will be costly and inconvenient, but it will possibly save people and quite a lot of money. (ICU care is $5000 a day). Separated families can still be reunited after the two week delay. Am I mad, stopping all flights to nations at risk seems like the cheap conservative option?
Hope: Singapore infections are only growing slowly — but 5% need critical care
Singapore did exhaustive thorough tracking and testing with isolation and have slowed the exponential curve significantly. Perhaps it’s possible to avoid closing borders, but it is a risky game, and Singapore hasn’t defeated it yet, though this curve is about as good as we might have hoped for last week.
The problem with this reactive approach is that if it doesn’t work, we risk running out of hospital beds, as well as domestic quarantines.
Consider the ICU “critical” rate — there have been no deaths in Singapore so far, but fully 30% have been hospitalized, and 5% are critical.
Singapore has about 12,000 hospital beds (of all sorts). With a ten day doubling rate all the hospital beds will be taken in about nine weeks and that’s just with coronavirus patients. It’s not clear how many of those beds are ICU. But it is clear that we need to put our thinking caps on.
The range progressing to severe after an 8 day lag now ranges from 0 – 25%.
Worldometer statistics with calculations of the proportion who need severe hospitalized care, with and without an 8 day lag.
The China figures are underestimates because it’s China.
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 Coronavirus, Covid-19, cases outside China. Source JoDiGraphics The short not-good news: It’s looking like early exponential growth outside China
The cases outside China have reached 1,500. South Korean cases leap to 156, 204, 340, mostly centred on one church and one hospital. In China, prisoners were discovered to be infected and a 29 year old doctor has died. The first death in Italy is confirmed, cases jump from 4 to 17, and the health minister there has cancelled or closed schools, events and shops in ten towns. The Iranian death toll has risen to 4, and Iraq has closed flights to Iran. Improbably Canada’s ninth case turns out to be a woman who flew from Iran, raising the worrying possibility that the virus is spreading undetected. Lastly, panic is spreading too. There were attacks in Ukraine to stop a bus of evacuees from China for their 14 day quarantine. It was triggered supposed by an email hoax.
Wise people might like to stock up the pantry just in case. As the people in some Italian towns just found out, there may not be a lot of warning.
The extraordinary rise in South Korea:
Four days ago South Korea had 30 cases. Now, 346. Where the percentage progressing to “severe” was nought, now it’s hard to calculate. How many infections did the country really have eight days ago? Officially, South Korea had 28, and of those, supposedly now 17 have recovered, 9 have progressed to severe and of those, 2 have died. It’s shifted from being the good news outlier to the place to watch.
In South Korea many cases revolve around the Shincheonji Church which is considered to be cultlike. According to the NY Times people sit on the floor packed together, with no glasses or facemasks, they come when they are sick and are taught “not to be afraid of illness”. So the sudden freaky rise may not reflect bad luck but a kind of amplified “superspreader on steroids” visits a “virus farm in waiting”. Unfortunately the authorities can’t find about 700 of the 1,000 worshippers who were there to check them. If only patient #31 in South Korea had not turned up there with mild symptoms.
Raw twitter tales of a country in seige
On the twitter feed of #Coronavirus (if you dare) it’s tough. There are one or two images of people jumping out of windows in China, some mass killing of farm animals, plus even footage of pet cats and dogs being killed (it’s not clear they can catch this virus, as most viruses are species specific). It’s a warzone, and checkpoints are run with disturbing military efficiency. There are many shots of people are being forcibly dragged away by the Hazmat police. It’s a poignant kind of thing. Some of these people may not see loved ones again and if they don’t have coronavirus there would be much to fear from being incarcerated with those who do. One (see below) shows people being led in a roped long line. Another shows masses of people allegedly waiting to get their money from a bank in China. Is this the first bank run? (UPDATE Probably not — comments under it suggest it is not a bank). In others, people appear to be collapsing on trains, or sometimes in the street. It’s all unverified, and hard to know whether it’s one freak event or even a fake, but it’s a strange land. If people are going door to door to kill pets in China, it may be just a sign of a desperate (and possibly pointless) panicked reaction by some local authority? (It didn’t appear to be for food, but then, there are tweets talking about starvation.)
How many progress to “Severe”? Still 0 – 11%
Trying to track nations (or cruise ships) with an 8 day lag from diagnosis to the “severe” state has become even harder with the numbers changing so fast that estimates change by the hour.
The most meaningful early guesstimates of how many cases will need medical attention are still ranging from 0 to 11%. Hong Kong 11%; Thailand 6% Singapore 9%; Taiwan 6%. But no cases have progressed to severe in Australia, USA, Malaysia, Germany, Canada and the UK (which together had 92 cases on Feb 14th). It’s not all bad news.
The numbers matter because it not only tells us how many people might get quite sick, it also gives us some idea of how many hospital beds we might need, especially of the Intensive Care kind. Severe cases need some assistance, or supplemental oxygen and estimates are around 1 in 6 severe cases will need the ICU.
Transmission: Aerosol or not?
Chinese officials say it is spread via aerosol but the US CDC still says “droplet”. Aerosol borne viruses carry on air currents, and are much harder to contain. It would explain why the Diamond Princess disease control of standing 6 ft apart on deck was futile, as was confining people to cabins possibly with shared air conditioning. Though one US medico warns that it looks just like influenza spread – airborne. For a month twitter has shown Chinese medical experts behaving as though it was an aerosol.
…one US infectious disease expert cautions that, overall, the epidemiologic data continue to point to airborne transmission being the driver of the COVID-19 outbreak. “It’s almost a rewrite of the influenza playbook,” said Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
The US CDC now lists five countries as having likely “community based spread”.
- Singapore
- South Korea
- Taiwan
- Thailand
- Vietnam
Given how little is known, stopping flights to these nations would seem wise, even just for a week or two.
On the plus side, if we believe communist statistics of no fixed definition, then the worst province in China is plateauing, “peaking” and the quarantine is having some effect. Ponder how draconian and difficult it is and how long they may need to maintain it for. If they have managed to stop millions from being infected in Wuhan and surrounds, they still have a vulnerable population, and even if they could theoretically extinguish the virus in those regions — there will be the continuous threat of reinfection from other provinces and other nations. What then, a new local lock down each time one breaks out? Having given the virus to Africa, it will be difficult not to get it back in return…
Many books are going to be written about what is happening in China at the moment
We feel for the people of Wuhan. Fofllow The @EpochTimes (some images here don’t load in Firefox.)
Barricaded homes.
Internet cut off to most affected areas
Inexplicable scenes.
[UPDATE: Reading the comments underneath this Prof Hanke’s tweet, no one really knows what was happening. Were these people caught selling illegal masks? Did they break the “wear a mask” rule? Was it a mass arrest of a pyramid marketing scam? Was it the arrest of people playing poker, which apparently is now illegal during the outbreak. ] [Deleted the unlikely “bank run” tweet. Wait to see if there is any corroboration. ]
The Optimistic Mantra (repeated): Covid 19 will almost certainly be less severe outside China due to cleaner air, healthier lungs, better diets, lower population density, possibly genes (ACE2 receptor), cultural habits, more sun, better nutrition, lower rates of smoking, and better medical systems. We also got a head-start. Estimates in China suggest 82% of people have only a mild infection, and we can still hope that the rate of mild infections turns out to be a lot higher in the West, or that some anti-virals in the multiple trials turn out to be useful and can be mass produced.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 44 ratings
More lies by omission from the Bureau of Misinformation
When a PM gets it totally wrong, where is the BOM…
“What this royal commission is looking at are the practical things that must be done to keep Australians safer and safe in longer, hotter, drier summers.” — Scott Morrison. — ABC
The BoM, like Prof Andy Pitman of UNSW, and all other climate scientists know that “climate change” will make the world a hotter wetter place. Who are the evaporation deniers among us? Yet, apart from one momentary candid admission from Professor Andy Pitman, which of our paid public servants will correct the PM when he says things that are flagrantly, 100% wrong? Will a Royal Commission really be forced to accept a complete myth?
Looks like extra CO2 “causes” Summer rainfall in Australia to increase
Apparently, we should burn fossil fuels to stop fires. You know it makes sense…
 Australian rainfall trends, Bureau of Meteorology, But wait, what about Southern Australia?
To cover every last caveat, it’s possible that “climate change” could change where rain falls, or when rain falls — so lets look at the BoM’s own rainfall records.
CO2 apparently makes summers wetter across Southern Australia too
 Australian rainfall, Bureau of Meteorology, Southern Australian rainfall totals, long term trend. Source It’s also possible that the rainfall could increase but fall in a more variable pattern which increases floods and droughts, but in 178 years of data, that isn’t happening either.
How about the South East corner of Australia
Nooo…
 Summer rainfall, Australia, South Eastern region, trend, graph. Source: BOM What about individual towns? Don’t believe your lying eyes: See a century of rain in Dalgety, Cobargo, Ensay, and 160 years of nothing in Melbourne and Sydney.
As Prime Minister, there is no excuse, it is Scott Morrison’s fault that he’s wrong and he needs to fix it
It’s Morrison’s job to make sure he asks hard questions, trusts the right people, and gets good advice. A leader cannot say “I just accepted what the experts said”, or “I assumed they would correct me”.
This is high school type science. It is “just basic chemistry” that the world will become a hotter-wetter place. Sadly, the BOM, CSIRO, ABC, and most of lower and higher Education have been eroding public scientific knowledge for 3 decades — undoing anything useful that people learnt in high school science lessons.
Time for skeptics to write to the PM and all the rest: Let the “hotter wetter summer” campaign begin.
On another note: When will the Press Council investigate the ABC for publishing repeated misinformation that serves to promote Labor Party policy, increasing the odds of Australians voting for the type of governments that increase ABC salaries. Is it incompetence, or self serving culpable negligence?
Some things matter.
Top posts on fires, rain and droughts
The Hotter-Drier “Climate change” myth — the rain in Australia has always been erratic, no CO2 trend
Blockbuster: 178 years of Australian rain has nothing to do with CO2, worst extremes 1849, 1925, 1950
Climate change and bushfires — More rain, the same droughts, no trend, no science
Prof Andy Pitman admits droughts are not worse and not linked to climate change
Figure this: Andy Pitman says “we don’t understand what causes droughts” but “the indirect link is clear”!
10 out of 10 based on 73 ratings
It’s a flip on a flop. After all the media headlines, a new paper suggests that some climate scientists are not just wrong, they got cause and effect mixed up, and that the wandering “blocking” jet streams are not caused by warmer arctic, but may be causing the temperature changes instead.
“”The well-publicised idea that Arctic warming is leading to a wavier jet stream just does not hold up to scrutiny,” says Screen.
“With the benefit of ten more years of data and model experiments, we find no evidence of long-term changes in waviness despite on-going Arctic warming.””
The truth is that most big models loosely predicted that global warming would make the jet streams less wiggly, but from the mid 1980s the jet-stream-trend was the other way. As the Arctic warmed the “waviness of jet streams increased”. So in 2012 a few modelers came up with a post hoc rationalization of why, really, truly, actually a warmer Arctic meant that the jets streams would wander more. The media enthusiastically repeated it, though it was contentious and disagreed with most models. But oh dear, by golly, by 2015 the trend started to reverse again. Now in 2020, Blackport and Screen are resolving the latest inconsistency by discovering the data going back 40 years and the longer trends. They explain (quite sensibly) that temperature changes in the Arctic have no significant effect on the jet streams, though the opposite might be true.
Welcome to the world of climate modeling where long monotonic trends can be explained in a jiffy, but no one can predict a turning point in advance.
When will the newspapers retract all the false headlines?
 A wandering polar jet stream can drag cold air south, and warm air north. | NASA/TRENT L SCHINDLER “Global Warming is responsible for Freezing”
This paper heavily criticizes a central media theme in the man made global warming theory. At the core of this was the principle that the poles would warm the fastest, this would reduce the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator, and that would mean the winds would slow too, and the jet streams would be “wavier” (meaning wandering north and south). They would bring hot air away from the equator, and dump cold arctic blasts in the most odd distant places. This Francis and Vavrus hypothesis was only devised in 2012 (discussed more here). This theory though, has been used by the science-media industrial complex to tell us that cold snaps, snow storms and warm weekends were caused by polar vortexes, which were thus driven by our evil coal plants and our horrible light globes. If only we drove more Teslas we’d get less blizzards, right?
Media headlines in The Independent, The Guardian, Forbes, Financial Times.
National Geographic may want to interview someone other than Michael Mann next time (see the image below). There is so much wrong with this, starting with the Earth only having two poles and one of them isn’t warming. (Antarctica has generally been cooling since Roman Times. The small part that has warmed sits on 91 volcanoes and the Southern Oceans haven’t warmed either.).
 Michael Mann said so… National Geographic Who knew — the theory was always contentious?
It appears that ever since this theory was published there were plenty of scientists who weren’t sold on it (and these are the same climate modelers that the newspapers usually love to quote — read the introduction of this 2014 paper by Hassanzadh et al.). Indeed it appears many climate scientists really didn’t think that Arctic Warming would create more “blocking” events. Where were they when the journalists were blaming coal stations for storms and blizzards?
The post hoc stop-gap theory:
It has been proposed that the faster warming of the Arctic compared to the rest of world—so-called Arctic amplification—is altering the atmospheric circulation and contributing to an increase in extreme weather in the midlatitudes (6). One hypothesis proposed by Francis and Vavrus suggests that the reduced equator-to-pole temperature gradient weakens the predominant westerly wind, which, in turn, causes larger-amplitude waves in the midlatitude circulation (7, 8), hereafter referred to as a “wavier” circulation. A wavier circulation has been linked to increased occurrence of extreme midlatitude weather, with the types of extremes favored by amplified waves varying by location (9)
The new paper looks at the way that the Arctic kept warming in autumn and winter but the jet stream waviness didn’t. The increase in waviness suddenly, and for no reason the models could say, reversed in the last few years. Blackport and Screen do the most surprising thing and draw the obvious conclusion: the models are wrong.
DISCUSSION
As usual, the paper solves model failures and discrepancies that the public didn’t know existed. Where was that press release?
Our results help to resolve the apparent discrepancy between the observed increased in waviness and the small decrease projected by modeling studies.
So the models predicted waviness would go down, but it went up. Then someone came up with a way to explain that, but now the waviness stopped going up. So we’re resolving nothing much by dropping that dud theory except that climate modelers do not understand what drives jet stream trends.
The increase was only detected in 2012. (Ref 7):
In the years since the observed increase was first detected (7), Arctic amplification has continued; however, the increase in waviness has not. Over the past 40 years, seasonal trends in waviness across all regions and using multiple metrics are close to zero, in agreement with multidecadal trends simulated by models. This strongly suggests that the previously reported increases in waviness were a manifestation of internal variability.
Note “internal variability” is code for “some factor we don’t know” which in this case could be The Sun. None of the models include little old factors like solar magnetic changes, solar particle flows, or massive solar spectral changes. The Sun swings through high UV years to low ones but the models won’t find out if that matters because they are not even looking.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 57 ratings
The coldest ever day recorded in Greenland stands at -63.3 C (minus 81 F). But on January 2nd in 2020, after Greenland suffered a century of global warming, the thermometer at Summit Camp sunk to at least -64.9C. I say, at least, because it may have been even colder. Sharp eyes of Cap Allon at Electroverse saw it hit minus 66C. Ryan Maue also saw it and predicted there would be cold as the Arctic Oscillation broke down.
4:13 AM · Jan 4, 2020
I sought confirmation at the time (among the Bushfire days in Australia). I looked for any official tweet even, but couldn’t find any. How’s that work — a new all time record for a whole continent for any month of the year, and no one who was paid to care about these things even writes a paragraph?
John Cappelen: I have now had the opportunity to go through the American observations from NOAA GeoSummit from January 2, 2020 . I have at NOAA’s wab-site found January 2020 ftp data up to January 15, 2020.
January 2, 2020 was a cold day at SUMMIT and 23:13 utc the temperature had a minimum -64,9C…the same temperature was registered 23:15 and also 23:16 utc….data looks all right…
 … That’s nearly three degrees cooler than the record for January at Summit Camp:
 … Paul Homewood writes that it’s a record one way or the other:
Although the DMI equipment has now been closed, it was at the same location as the Geo Summit, so readings should be comparable.
Quite clearly then, a new record low has been set for both Summit and Greenland. Whether it is –64.9C, as stated by John Cappelen, or the graphic reading from Electroverse remains a mystery.
Nevertheless, we await the new record to be officially declared by NOAA, and reported in the world’s press!
Compare this to the rush to declare the highest ever June temperature in Greenland last year which was announced in the newspapers but turned out to be wrong and was quietly corrected a week later. From Anthony Watts at WUWT August 2019 “Shoot out the headlines first, ask questions later.”
Danish climate body wrongly reported Greenland heat record
The Danish Meteorological Institute, which has a key role in monitoring Greenland’s climate, last week reported a shocking August temperature of between 2.7C and 4.7C at the Summit weather station, which is located 3,202m above sea level at the the centre of the Greenland ice sheet, generating a spate of global headlines.
But on Wednesday it posted a tweet saying that a closer look had shown that monitoring equipment had been giving erroneous results.
“Was there record-level warmth on the inland ice on Friday?” it said. “No! A quality check has confirmed out suspicion that the measurement was too high.”
Thanks to Ryan Maue for the satellite images as the polar vortex “anchored to Greenland”
 Coldest Day in Greenland ever recorded, Jet streams, Arctic Oscillation. It’s those dang meridonal jet streams — as predicted here by Stephen Wilde five years ago and postulated via solar driven UV changes or charged particle shifts.
Can’t blame the coal plants, so it’s like it never happened. Don’t call the media “sensationalist”, call them “activists”.
9.6 out of 10 based on 103 ratings
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The good news — babies and children appear to be not at risk. The not-so-great news, people over 80 in China have up to a 15% fatality rate (usual caveats, based on unreliable communist statistics and will hopefully be lower for many reasons, see below.) Note that even with the “one child” policy effects in China, that most western nations have a higher proportion of older folk — especially France, Germany and Greece.
The news on “rates of severe cases” is mixed. Singapore, Japan and HK are looking at 15% early rates. But many other nations are looking at 0%. Hmm?
 A/ Fatality rate per age group. b/ Demographic age groups in different nations. C/ Relative mortality compared to China (apparently due only to the age demographic). | Click to enlarge. Age and Sex of COVID-19 Deaths REF China CCDC *Fatality rates calculated by the China CCDC won’t include many unrecorded asymptomatic infections, nor the deaths outside hospitals and don’t appear to include the lag either. But they show which groups are at most risk.
Worldometer now gives us rates according to sex and preexisting conditions. (Reproduced below). Basically there are 30% higher death rates in men, and death rates are 6 – 10 times higher in people with heart, lung or diabetic type conditions. That is partly due to the conditions themselves, but may also just be due to the ACE2 gene — which the virus binds too. Since variants of the the ACE 2 gene increase the risk of both heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes, it may be that those with a genetic predisposition to those conditions are also predisposed to either the infection or to the more damaging effects from the virus. Given that young people with those same genes are able to cope and recover though, it’s not all “genes”. Managing those conditions may help reduce the risk. For some reason, younger people don’t seem to progress to the cytokine cascade — the inflammatory response that gets out of hand.
The all important rates of progression to severe cases is spread from zero to 15%
Adjusted for the eight day delay in progression to severe symptoms, the number that keeps coming back is strangely split at close to zero, or an unappealing 14% — Singapore has 4 severe cases out of the 28 it had on Feb 11th. (14%) Hong Kong had 49 cases on Feb 11th, and 7 have progressed to severe or critical. 14%. In Japan there were about 28 cases a week ago, and 4 of those are severe. (14%). The Diamond Princess cases: 15% severe (see below).
But in many places the news is good. South Korea is interesting, with 46 cases and still none classed as “severe”. Fifteen of those cases are only one day old, so don’t count, but 28 of those cases are eight days or more after diagnosis. This is encouraging. As is the lack of any “severe” progression in Australia (only five active cases left) and in the US, Germany, and France (apart from one death of a Chinese man, ten of the other cases are now at least ten days old and haven’t progressed.) Taiwan, likewise, had 18 cases a week ago, and apart from one death, none of the others have progressed to severe.
Why the disparity? Statistical fluke perhaps (South Korea only needs 4 severe cases to put it in the same category as Singapore et al)? Otherwise, genes, culture, diet, weather, hospitals and medical systems? Or possibly some strains of the virus may be evolved to be nicer already.
The Diamond Princess: — it ain’t over yet:
On Feb 11th there were 135 cases. Today there are 542, with 20 being severe. So about 15% of cases progress to serious (20/135). We don’t know the ethnic or genetic breakdown, though we can guess the rates are higher because of the demographic spread. Cruise ships probably have few people from 0 – 40 years old.
Since there were another 88 new cases today that tested positive, clearly Cruise-ship-quarantine is a bad plan. There are fears that the Diamond Princess may yet spark a global spread:
With people aboard hailing from more than 50 countries, the end of the quarantine raises worries the vessel could become the source of a fresh wave of global infections.
Undoubtedly these 88 new cases will not be the last new cases, and though the US, Australia, Canada, South Korea and other nations are wisely insisting on a further two weeks of proper quarantine, but Japan is not, and the Netherlands didn’t either. With 76 cases already inside Japan (presumably not former passengers of the cruise) they have apparently given up containment.
One expert in Hong Kong, who ought to know what’s going on, advised that even people who test negative today could test positive in a few days. Keiji Fukuda, the director of the School of Public Health at Hong Kong University thinks more quarantine is needed. Meanwhile another expert in Japan, who ought to know too, says the opposite:
An expert on infectious diseases said Japan has focused on preventing the virus from causing more fatalities. “My view is that Japan’s effort will be evaluated later not on the level of expansion of the spread, but on the rate of mortality,” said Shigeru Omi, a former WHO official who now sits on the Japanese government’s expert panel on the coronavirus. “That’s why our focus is now on community prevention control so that we can reduce mortality rate and lower the speed of expansion,” he said. “It’s impossible to stop transmission.”
So Japan is going to hope those who test negative and have no symptoms can wander around the nation and not infect too many others. Hope that works out for them. It doesn’t seem like a good strategy when their early rates show that 15% in Japan may suffer the severe form.
The world may become split between the no-virus states and the infected ones — call me an optimist — all clean countries need a two week mandatory quarantine as a barrier. Or we may (cheery thought) be in the early stages of a pandemic.
What to do if you are an 80 year old — especially with a high risk condition?
Time to think about improving preexisting conditions (make those doc appointments, fill those scripts, do that exercise, consider eating better). Think about the options if the virus starts to spread locally. Hopefully it wont. But there may come a point where having a stash of things at home and cutting back on shopping trips, parties and nightclubs will improve the odds. Buying up things that will be used anyway in the next few months seems like a low cost form of insurance, as long as they are stored well.
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Best case: West contains the spread
The Optimistic Mantra (repeated): Covid 19 will likely be less severe outside China due to cleaner air, healthier lungs, better diets, lower population density, possibly genes (ACE2 receptor), cultural habits, more sun, better nutrition, lower rates of smoking, and better medical systems. We also got a head-start and, if we are not totally stupid, we might use that to our advantage. We hope we can stay above all this and help the poor sods stuck in China, and probably Africa, and possibly Indonesia, India, etc. We won’t be much use to them if we lose control ourselves. We really really don’t want to get on the wrong side of that exponential growth curve.
If countries manage to avoid the hospital meltdown the big impact from Covid 19 might be the economic fallout. Think about what you might need that is made in China, or rather, used to be made in China. Shelves may get quite empty of a few things in the next two months.
There are hints that the draconian Chinese lock downs might be slowing the spread. But even if that is the case there are many weeks yet of this to play out.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
Since SA was islanded the costs just to keep the frequency stable are as much as the energy itself
Two weeks ago the Australian grid had a major near miss, and South Australia has been isolated from the rest of the nation ever since. It was supposed to be connected again in two weeks, but repairs to the 6 high voltage towers that fell over, evidently will be longer. Strangely, apparently no news outlet has mentioned this in the last two weeks.
While SA has been the renewables star of the world for two weeks, there’s been mayhem in the market. Instead of cheap electricity with 50% renewables it’s chaos. Allan O’Neill explains that the cost of stabilizing the grid has gone through the roof. It’s so bad, and generators have to contribute to balance their output, that solar and wind power are holding back from supply because they can’t afford to pay the costs to cover their share of frequency stability.
But when South Australia became islanded by the transmission line collapse, FCAS requirements for that region could only be supplied from local providers – and there is only a small subset of participants in South Australia who have chosen to offer in the FCAS markets. With a suddenly reduced group of providers, the price of all FCAS products in South Australia leapt from a pre-event range between few cents and roughly $30/MWh (some higher levels on 30 Jan, driven by the very high energy price averaging over $770/MWh on that day), rising to daily average levels mostly over $100/MWh and in a few cases approaching $3,000/MWh after the separation event – remember, these numbers are daily averages!
Johnathon Dyson estimates it’s added up to $90m. He calculates that some solar panel providers are paying as much as 15% of their revenue (in a normal week) on FCAS, far higher than the 1% they would have estimated when they built their projects.
To put that in perspective, five years ago the entire FCAS cost for the whole nation was about $20m, for the whole year.! (FCAS means Frequency Control Ancilliary Service).
The ever rising costs of frequency stability on the Australian grid for the next quarter are about to go “off the scale” in this graph by the Australian Energy Regulator (AER):
 The $90m FCAS cost in SA is higher than any single quarter on the whole national grid. | AER
Years ago frequency stability was just a happy byproduct of the large coal fired turbines. The giant 200 plus ton turbines would spin at 3,000 rpm — exactly in synchrony with the 50 Hz grid. They would absorb the ups and downs and keep the frequency tight within safe bounds.
It’s another hidden cost. Imagine the fun if the whole nation was trying to run on “50% renewable”?
If only SA had kept the coal plants running, says Ian Waters:
The Heywood interconnector can normally carry 650Mw of reliable brown coal fired power from Victoria and regularly stops blackouts in S.A. when the renewables are found wanting. The AEMO has been forced to take extraordinary steps to keep the lights on in S.A. and are ready to force shutdowns of solar, wind and gas units if the demand drops. They have taken control of the 3 batteries in S.A. in desperation. It is an !unprecedented! disasterand the whole state is on the edge. Please look at AEMO market notices 73830, 73832, 73838, 73857 and 73858 and you will recognise how desperate they are and how they are running around in blind panic.
Now here is the first point: If Weatherill, Turnbull and the AEMO had kept the Northern coal fired power-station running, most of these problems would not occur, the price would be much lower, the State would have sufficient system strength and S.A. would not be minutes or hours away from the next blackout!
It’s all just another reminder of how fragile our “renewable” grids are now. Despite having nearly twice as much infrastructure to make the same amount of electricity, SA can’t keep itself going without help and a lot of extra money. It’s more prone to price swings, spikes and squeezes that serve Big Corporate profiteers very well.
Someone is making a lot of money out of this. It’s a bit of a short squeeze with few frequency stabilizers able to help. And spikes can reach the same cap as energy charges — $14,700
Allan O”Neill:
Historically, FCAS capabilities have been provided mostly by generators as by-products of their main game, energy production, although batteries and certain loads with appropriate controls can also provide some or all forms of FCAS. In an analogous way to energy prices, market FCAS prices are set via bidding and clearing processes, which are fully enmeshed – coöptimised – with the NEM’s dispatch process for energy.
The quantities of FCAS services required are much smaller than the volumes of energy traded through the NEM (like energy, these volumes are measured in MW and MWh).
Usually other states keep SA stable:
The striking feature here is that the relationship between energy and FCAS prices was turned on its head by the separation event. That’s largely because under normal conditions, FCAS can often be supplied from anywhere in the NEM, so the cheapest offers from generators, batteries, or loads in any region can be used to meet AEMO’s requirements. Not all generators are able or choose to supply FCAS (until recently none of the NEM’s large scale renewable generators did so – however that is changing, and this post may show why that’s long overdue). But with a NEM-wide pool of potential suppliers, FCAS prices have tended to be lower – often much much lower – than energy prices.
But when South Australia became islanded by the transmission line collapse, FCAS requirements for that region could only be supplied from local providers – and there is only a small subset of participants in South Australia who have chosen to offer in the FCAS markets. With a suddenly reduced group of providers, the price of all FCAS products in South Australia leapt from a pre-event range between few cents and roughly $30/MWh (some higher levels on 30 Jan, driven by the very high energy price averaging over $770/MWh on that day), rising to daily average levels mostly over $100/MWh and in a few cases approaching $3,000/MWh after the separation event – remember, these numbers are daily averages!
This graph shows just how chaotic it has been in SA — but notice the prices — it’s a log scale!
Note also the prices hit a automated-cap on Feb 1st (hence the flat line keeping them at $300/MWh).
 five minute FCAS prices over Friday 31 Jan and Saturday 1 Feb. WattClarity This next graph is the exact same graph, but without the automatic cap added. So we can see what the prices would have been. Shocking!
This shows prices for many FCAS products jumping about wildly after separation, with extended periods at $14,700/MWh for a couple of products (the “Raise 6 second” and “Lower 60 second” services
No doubt the whole drama will be used as a reason to build more giant interconnectors. Never waste a crisis!
9.7 out of 10 based on 97 ratings
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8.2 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
Alan Kohler (ABC economics guru) thinks there is so much overwhelming evidence that a Royal Commission would persuade the skeptics. Skeptics say, yes please, lets do the due diligence that’s never been done. Go on convince us.
Over 50% of Australians are skeptical of the IPCC explanations (think that’s changed? See the last election results). Over 60% don’t want to pay even $10 a month. So lay it out. We want a Royal Commission, some kind of public debate, based on scientific evidence, not “scientific opinion”. It’s not enough to show the climate’s changed, we expect to see evidence about cause and effect. Let’s get all the uncertainties laid bare, not buried behind models and hidden by indignant namecalling. What are they afraid of?
If you worry, like I do — that any institutionalized forum can be another waste of money — captured by the swamp — then view this as a play in the only court that matters, the court of public opinion. Let Alan Kohler know there are lots of skeptics and we want a debate. Ask why the ABC won’t tell the world that there are tens of thousands of scientists and engineers, including NASA stars, meteorologists, Nobel Prize winners, and men who went to the moon, and they are willing to speak out even though the ABC likens them to pedophiles and tobacco profiteers and calls them denier scum.
If the science were settled the ABC wouldn’t be so afraid of phoning up Buzz Aldrin or Harrison Schmitt to ask politely “Why are you a skeptic?”
— Jo Nova
Don A reminds Australians who sign the petition that they MUST confirm they’re not a robot, and tick the relevant boxes AND respond to a subsequent email. Make it count!
The PRESS RELEASE:
_________________________________
Cool Futures Funds Management
Climate and Energy Policies – Due Diligence Initiative
We support Alan Kohler’s call for an Australian Royal Commission and the related House of Representatives e-Petition EN1231 to review the evidence on our Climate and Energy Policies.
If the Government is genuinely interested in dispassionately resolving the polarized climate and energy debate, it should welcome this Royal Commission.
No one among the public, the policy-making ministers, the bureaucrats, the corporate and management class, the public intellectuals, or indeed our journalists, has ever seen or understood the empirical evidence in support of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). Why do the climate scientists believe in CAGW? Is there any empirical evidence? Can we see this evidence? What due diligence has been done so far?
This Royal Commission, as Alan Kohler suggests, will fill a critical need.
“… a review of the evidence on (climate change and energy) in which everyone is required (under oath) to tell the truth.”
The Australian Sept 21, 2019
Alan is alluding to those who are sceptical of CAGW. He wants to convince everyone the evidence on ‘climate change’ demands a ‘carbon’ emissions drop. Policies are supposed to be “science based” and “evidence based,” so we all need to know precisely what the relevant terms mean and what the evidence is. The public only ever hear or see people, including scientists, giving their opinions on climate change. But opinions are not evidence.
Climate & energy policy due diligence – not only has to be done – but has to be seen to be done.
Keep reading →
9.3 out of 10 based on 110 ratings
In short:
- Outside China, 2% of cases have progressed to “severe”. But if the lag is eight days then progression to severe is more like 5%.
- In China about 1/5th of severe cases are “Critical”
- If that rate occurs in the West, hospitals will be overwhelmed if just 1% of the population gets infected.
- In Singapore, the doubling period for confirmed cases is about nine days.
- Currently the spread is not exponential outside China (most days)
News today: First victim in Europe — an 80 year old Chinese tourist.
Stats: Total cases outside China: 787 Deaths: 4 Severe cases: 18 (2%)
Early days of “outside China” data
The 2% rate of severe cases is an underestimate above. There is an eight day lag from diagnosis to “severe,” and then a longer lag to death. Total cases outside China on Feb 8th was 354. So a more realistic estimate is that about 5% of confirmed cases outside China have now progressed to “severe” (i.e. 18/354).
What does severe mean? It appears “severe” means hospitalized but not necessarily in ICU. In China, the rates issued in a Feb 7 press release were 82% mild, 15% severe, and 3% critical. From that, we might assume that only a fifth* of “severe” cases are critical and therefore in need ICU care, so outside China that might be 1% of all recorded infections. (Remember the Chinese statistics are all from hospitalized people, outside that in the whole population it probably is much lower, because many people apparently get a cold and stay home and aren’t included. Though there are some who stay home and die at home and they aren’t included either. Twitter shows vans visiting apartment complexes, and being loaded with bodies. How many? Who knows. This is why statistics outside China are the only ones that count.)
*Technically one sixth (3/15+3 — the accumulated severe plus critical total)
Graph source: CNA
Estimating when trouble may really start in Singapore
So, with Western hospitals, perhaps only 5% of confirmed cases become “severe”, and only 1% of confirmed cases need an ICU. Current ICU bed availability in the West is typically about 1 bed per 12,000 of population (and there are even fewer of the proper “negative pressure ICU” rooms we need for best quarantine of an aerosolized disease**). Once the the infection has reached 1% of the total population in a Western nation, about 120 out of 12,000 people have a confirmed case, and about 1% of them — or 1.2 patients — will need an ICU bed. At that point, all the ICU beds are in use, and we have run out of ICU places — even if none are required for other uses. Not happy days in hospital-land.
Obviously we need to slow the spread of the virus urgently, aggressively, so that hospitals don’t have to send people home with an oxygen tank, a how-to-guide and good wishes. Even being optimistic and if the rate of progression to “severe” is only one fifth as common in the West as it is in China (there are reasons to take an optimistic stab), our current medical system stops being able to cope when about 5% of the population gets infected. All numbers are loose — the 5% rate of severe cases assumed in Singapore above might be too low — in Singapore the exact current rate is 8% in HK it is 13%. Sorry about all these numbers.
**Aerosol or not? There is a lot of disagreement over whether it is or isn’t?
The exponential curve we don’t want
The exponential growth of infections in China meant that hospital system was always going to get overwhelmed. It took just two months. The Lancet reported on January 24th that, of the first 41 patients admitted in Wuhan (by Jan 2nd), 32% ended up in the ICU and 15% died. In the Wang study the news was better: 26% of 138 patients needed ICU and only 4% died. But one month after the first study, by Feb 5th, Wuhan hospitals were overwhelmed and turning away all but the most severe cases.
As I said on my first post two long weeks ago, human brains don’t seem well adapted to planning for exponential curves. The doubling period inside China was six days in January. Outside China it is about eight days so far, though that is mostly dominated by the unfortunate cruise ship, which is in lock-down off Japan. Ominously, the doubling period in Singapore — which has dedicated advanced infection tracking — is about nine days (40 infections on Feb 8, and 72 today).
Singapore bad case: assume 10 day doubling, 5% progress to severe, 1% progress to ICU
To give some idea of how rapidly this might go, ponder that those 72 cases in Singapore could become 73,000 with ten doublings — which is only three months away. Of that, there may be around 3,500 severe cases and 700 ICU cases. There are probably around 12,000 total beds in Singapore hospitals. Occupancy rates already peak at 85% in March. That’s not a happy set of numbers.
To extrapolate (just to make a point), in less than six months the entire population of six million Singaporeans could theoretically have been exposed — except that sometime around four months the growth curve would slow, because a large section of the population will already be immune (we hope) and the most vulnerable will already have caught it. I expect things will be slower as we learn more how best to help those with it, and how to quarantine. But we can see why Singapore’s health officials are sweating and working so hard to track and trace and hunt down every last case (which they haven’t been fully successful at). What they are not announcing publicly is that without any effort to slow this, or any anti-viral or vaccine, and without entirely shutting schools, factories and enforcing a mass home quarantine, Singapore is only a few months away from hospitals reaching full capacity. We can all see why they don’t want to dwell on worst case possibilities in public. Beyond a few months, without a slowing, the unthinkable, potential pandemonium and mayhem unfolds. We hope that doesn’t even come close. But keep those worst case numbers in mind. Anyone who says “it’s like the flu” hasn’t run the numbers. This is nothing like the flu.
As hospitals fill, manufacturing systems and supply chains will decay. The system will be far beyond the normal epidemiological curves. It will be hard and then impossible to get enough masks, consumables, or even medicine (especially if it’s made in China). If things hit that point, it’s a “black swan”. China is deep inside that.
Best case: West contains the spread
As always, let’s repeat the optimistic caveats: Covid 19 will likely be less severe outside China due to cleaner air, healthier lungs, better diets, lower population density, possibly genes (ACE2 receptor), cultural habits, more sun, better nutrition, lower rates of smoking, and better medical systems. We also got a head-start and, if we are not totally stupid, we might use that to our advantage. We hope we can stay above all this and help the poor sods stuck in China, and probably Africa, and possibly Indonesia, India, etc. We won’t be much use to them if we lose control ourselves. The point of this post is to raise awareness that Singapore is walking on a ridge between control and a deep abyss, and it’s not out of the question that the West may follow. We really really don’t want to get on the wrong side of that exponential growth curve.
Perhaps we are seeing the awful result of malnutrition in China?
I’m astonished to note in the Wang et al study that two thirds of those in the ICU are listed as having “anorexia,” whereas that one third that didn’t need an ICU were listed the same way. I am baffled that there is not more discussion of this. Does it mean malnutrition? Is it a bad translation? (Anoxia is spelt like anorexia?)
Patients treated in the ICU (n = 36), compared with patients not treated in the ICU (n = 102), were older (median age, 66 years vs 51 years), were more likely to have underlying comorbidities (26 [72.2%] vs 38 [37.3%]), and were more likely to have dyspnea (23 [63.9%] vs 20 [19.6%]), and anorexia (24 [66.7%] vs 31 [30.4%]).
Perhaps some medico’s can help out — it simply makes no sense that most elderly Chinese would be anorexic in the same sense as the term is used in the West.
As for dyspnea — it means means “shortage of breath”.
Not yet anyway.
Obviously it could go exponential, and probably will if the virus takes hold in places like Africa (which has just reported it’s first case). But Africa hasn’t done much testing, and has a large fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) population of Chinese workers. If things take off in Africa, we will need a new category of graph “Cases in The West”.
 ….
Still noisy early data, and we can’t tell at this point whether the West will keep control or lose it.
As long as the growth factor is below one (in the growth of daily cases below), the growth is not exponential. However, be aware that at some point our ability to slow the linear growth and keep it under “1” will be overwhelmed. It is simply not possible to do exhaustive tracking of each new case, tracing back to find the source and isolating all the other contacts. At 50 cases Singapore had one unexplained source. Is that the point nations lose control? We don’t know. Singapore might get lucky. They will be tracking hundreds of people.
Cruise boats aside I hope this is a pattern that stays under 1. But there is that nagging concern about untested cases and the superspreader wildcard. Perhaps Singapore was just unlucky and got one, or perhaps even the strain of virus there may be different. Mutations are high in single stranded RNA viruses so there is possibly a cloud of different ones spreading right now. The most infectious strains will win that race, we just hope they are also less nasty.
 Daily growth curve outside China. The red line is “1”. Above that is exponential growth. | Worldometer.
There are new hints today that the virus may weaken hearts and that those recovered may still not be out of the woods. I need to follow that. There were reports like that a few weeks ago, but those referred to the first week of infection. People were sent home, then had to come back.
I’ve heard that China has very stringent tests before people are declared recovered, which is why it takes a month to get on that list. But of course, if the experience of fighting Covid 19 leaves long term damage in some tissues there is probably no data on that yet.
A historic event. Let’s hope it gets boring soon.
REFERENCES
Huang et al (2020) Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, Lancet.
Wang et al (2020): Clinical Characteristics of 138 Hospitalized Patients With 2019 Novel Coronavirus–Infected Pneumonia in Wuhan, China – JAMA, February 7, 2020
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Partial post hoc reactive quarantine holds seven planes at London airport– seriously?
Madness. Eight planes have been held up for hours in London airports as they land with people with coughs and colds and try to check suspected cases. By the time people are symptomatic, its too late. Temperature checks may catch the most contagious people but now one person with a unrelated common cold can also cause a major and unnecessary disruption while other infective people can freely fly in and walk straight through.
Asymptomatic people can potentially infect 2 to 3 random people (or 10) who may then also infect 2 – 3 random people each before the Epidemiology SWAT Team realizes and starts testing and tracking. We play an impossible game of catch up in a race to isolate all possible contacts.
DailyMail UK
Passengers endured hours of misery at Heathrow Airport this morning when up to eight planes were put on lockdown over coronavirus fears after passengers on board complained of symptoms of the deadly virus.
MailOnline understands a British Airways flight from Kuala Lumpur was held up on the tarmac for two hours when it landed at 6.45am after cabin crew grew concerned a Malaysian family ‘of around eight’ might have the contagious infection, now named SARS-CoV-2.
One passenger on the plane said that health workers in protective gowns and face masks came on board the BA34 flight and set up a screen around the family before evacuating everyone off the plane row by row.
The first confirmed case in London was only Wednesday. The phase transition from low-risk to hours-of-disruption is quick, eh? Last week this was “low risk” now the shops of chinatown are empty. A strict quarantine is the only thing that can save businesses like this.
The West has a choice here: Build hospitals or holiday cabins
We could start building emergency hospital ICU rooms like China has, or we could start building quarantine cabins which are infinitely cheaper and ask all entrants from countries with uncontrolled cases of Covid 19* (or SARS CoV 2, whatever it is called) to go through a two week quarantine. This will limit traffic drastically, affecting weddings, conferences, holidays and all kinds of business. It will be costly and inconvenient, but it will possibly save people and quite a lot of money. (ICU care is $5000 a day). Separated families can still be reunited after the two week delay. Am I mad, stopping all flights to nations at risk seems like the cheap conservative option?
Our hospital system is designed to cope with the annual flu load, even if this only doubles it, it will be onerous, hard choices are coming. If 10% of cases need major hospital help (as we see in the cases in Hong Kong and Singapore) the system will be overwhelmed.
I repeat, now that we know this is very infectious the best case scenario is that the virus causes thousands of undetected low grade infections, and that for some reason it is not as severe in the West (genes, pollution, medical care, lower population density, summer, past infection immunity, etc). Perhaps it blows over and we can look back and say “hyped”. We’ll know a lot more in a few weeks time. Are three weeks worth of weddings and conferences really worth the risk?
The disruption of closing borders is nothing compared to the disruption of post hoc late quarantine. Once the virus gains a foothold schools will have to close, businesses and factories will shut. People will need to stay home.
On the Diamond Princess — when will we get those people off that boat and put them in proper quarantine — one where they are not breathing the same presumably unfiltered air? Perhaps these cross infections are due to food handling, the walks to the deck or some other route. Where is this being discussed?
UPDATE:
By Danyal Hussain and Ryan Fahey For Mailonline
Professor Neil Ferguson, of the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, revealed that ‘this is the one I’m scared of’ when asked about the killer coronavirus, which is causing increasing alarm all over the country.
However, he insisted he was not predicting 400,000 deaths, but was warning that the figure ‘is possible’. He said he would rather and adding that he’d ‘prefer to be accused of overreacting than under reacting’.
Research indicates that 60 per cent of Britons could be affected by the virus, formally known as COVID-19.
Which is more scary, a half a degree temperature rise in 50 years or a flu that kills 1% in coming months?
Latest tally: John Hopkins CSSE and Worldometer
h/t Bill in Oz
*Sadly, we probably need to include countries with no cases but inadequate testing. This will increase pressure for nations to control their cases — a big added incentive to manage their health (perhaps with as much help as we can give).
9.9 out of 10 based on 42 ratings
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