State Department made one change: downgrading South Korea from 2 to a 3 on their 1 to 4 scale.
The first cases in the U.S. that are not related to travel to China were announced on Wednesday night. There’s a dorm at UC Davis that is now quarantined. This is what I meant the other day when I posted about community infection. We also found out that this patient has been in intensive care since the 19th: a week before the news was released.
The CDC issued this cute graphic about what men should shave in order to get a facemask to fit properly.
This is cool. It plots Chinese provinces in columns, and days in rows, with color coding for the number of cases.
Obviously Hubei is still pretty bad. Also, in a lot of those other provinces, the quarantines were not ordered by Beijing, but strongly encouraged by them, and enforced by local authorities. It tends to confirm the view of the WHO that the outbreak is mostly being brought under control in China.
The graphic also points out that quarantine is not a magic tool. If it was, Hubei, where quarantines are tighter would be in better shape. Quarantines are mostly about slowing the spread of the disease. In the chart, you could of no quarantine as making it more likely that red in one cell leads to red in the following cells. Thus the handful of red cells in the second, third, and fourth columns weren't allowed to perpetuate much.
Very interesting. The Chinese word for SARS is "Feidian". Check this out:
Searches for SARS were constant until around December 30th. Searches for feidian started going up around December 15th. Someone knew something was happening. Here's the source working paper.
China is postponing some national exams that were to be held on April 11-12. It’s hard to reconcile a cancellation that far out with an outbreak that is coming under control.
Xinqi Su reports that this new information was quickly censored in China (not really sure why), but it’s still available here. Caijing, a Beijing based magazine, reported that expert teams from Beijing that went to Wuhan in January were lied to by local officials about hospital staff becoming infected. This delayed the conclusion announced last week that the virus was capable of aerosol transmission (basically, particles that float for a long time, rather than just getting sprayed when someone coughs or sneezes).
P.S. On a related note, police in Hong Kong rounded up a bunch of anti-government demonstrators today, based on past offenses. Might this be because the unofficial/local quarantines there make it easier to find people?
Still working on this until class time.
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