https://regiehammblog.wordpress.com/2020/02/27/birth-of-a-virus/

As I watched my neighbor put her dog’s poop in a single-use plastic baggy, I thought about split pants in China.

When my wife and I got off the plane, 18 years ago, to adopt our first daughter, we were taken aback by the split pants. Split pants are (or at least were, back then) pants the children wear that are open in the crotch area. That allows them to urinate or defecate unobstructed, onto the street or wherever they may be. The theory is that eventually they will learn to “aim it at the toilet” or something to that effect.

Either way, I distinctly remember my brand new Nike slip-ons (probably made not far from where I was standing) sloshing into a mix of urine and who knows what else, and continuing to do so for the next three weeks.

As I started feeling the cough coming on, I remember one of the women in our group saying, at one of the airports (as she too, stepped into urine) “The people in this country probably have built up antibodies inside them our bodies have never even thought about.”

I replayed that line in my head for the next three weeks, as I descended into night sweats, fevers and a cough like I’ve never experienced.

Over the next several days and weeks, we would experience the amazing culture of China, in several different cities. But some things stood out to this germophobic American. I watched a man hock up something from his chest and spit it on the floor, right next to us, in a restaurant. No oysters for me, thanks. I’ve suddenly lost my appetite.

We visited a Hutong (inner city – where the locals live) and saw raw chickens, skinned and bleeding, just laying on the floor, waiting to be thrown on a restaurant grill…for public consumption. No FDA or USDA or food inspectors or “codes” to comply with, here. But why? This is the last purely communist country on earth. You’d think there would be red tape everywhere. What was happening here?

Then, my wife and I had to rush our newly adopted, 8-month-old daughter to the public hospital…and suddenly it all started making sense.

As we stepped in more urine, took our number from the print-out machine, walked past the line of children whining and crying from the scalp IVs in their heads, then rushed to clean up blood and mucus (left by the last patient) on the plastic table they were now laying our baby on, then waited on the ONE overworked doctor (attending to no less than three hundred people) try to round up a basic anti-biotic to administer to my daughter (right there on site – no refills) it dawned on me what I was seeing and what I had been seeing this whole time. I wasn’t watching a “backward” culture or a third-world society. These people weren’t genetically inferior to first-worlders. They weren’t “less-evolved” than I was.

I was witnessing the kind of maximum, almost brutal efficiency a society must develop when the state is the master and the individual is merely a subject. Why would a Communist country not have an effective FDA? Because who are you going to complain to if you get tainted food? The government? They don’t answer to you. The press? They are owned by the government. And again, they don’t answer to you.

So what if you don’t like the conditions in the hospital? Where else are you going to go? This hospital is the last (and only) stop. You can’t opt for another place and then just pay out of your own pocket. The government has capped financial upward mobility. There is now “income equality.” And that means nobody has the means to buy their way into a different (or better) situation. And even if you could, one doesn’t exist. The state provides it all. You’re stuck.

In every one of those places I described (especially the hospital) there were uniformed guards posted everywhere. The government was literally on every corner. And yet it didn’t feel like help. It felt like surveillance.

The main thrust of the article, though is actually about the dangers of single-payer health-care, which is also single-buyer (for drugs, machines, supplies) and single-provider (doctors, nurses, hospitals) health-care.

I wonder if that has anything to do with their susceptibility to the Corona virus, which apparently attacks the upper respiratory system?

There were also all sorts of public health problems that the Communist government had campaigns to try to stop, things like spitting on the street.

I wonder if they still have such public health problems, and, if they do, how such public health problems might contribute to the spread of the Corona virus?

There certainly was newspaper coverage then, and news filtered down to children – including me. But somehow the country didn’t self-destruct.

True. But we didn’t have so much globalization and air travel back then. It’s a different world now.

The Coronavirus issue hits on three main points of policy outlined by President Trump since his announcement of candidacy in 2015: (1) The need for secure borders and strong immigration controls. (2) The need to stop reliance on Chinese manufacturing; and (3) The need for the U.S. to have independent control over key sectors of manufacturing; including healthcare products and pharmaceuticals, as a matter of national security.

So strange to have a President who actually tries, and sometimes succeeds, in doing what he advertised during the campaign.

The woman was among the 91 Americans evacuated from Wuhan and placed in federal, 14-day quarantine at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. The woman tested negative twice for the new coronavirus and was released Saturday under guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Nirenberg said Monday.
…
“Unfortunately after the person’s release, the CDC received the results of another test that showed a weakly positive confirmation of the virus that causes COVID-19,” Nirenberg said at a news briefing earlier Monday. “As mayor of this city, I find it totally unacceptable that CDC would release a patient prior to receiving all test results and potentially expose the public to this harm.”

The negligence means a hotel and mall have to do deep cleaning and sterilizing.
I wonder if any business has insurance for that kind of thing?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ER7Sx9_WsAAxZiA?format=jpg&name=large

The high school student’s family released a statement yesterday and if I understand correctly he got sick over the weekend of Feb 22/23 then stayed home from school Mon/Tue/Wed/Thur then felt close to 100% so he returned to school Fri morning and then the school sent him home and the testing process started. I think that sums it up. The family didn’t have any reason to believe he had this virus and the fact that he was recovered in days seemed to further prove that. He is now symptom free but quarantined.

A few salient excerpts:

Were any patient specimens either false positives or false negatives?

A: No. Importantly and fortunately, the problem was quickly identified in laboratories in some states in the standard quality control testing phase BEFORE any patient specimens were tested.

How did CDC explain the problem whereby some states found “inconclusive results?”

A: CDC stated: “When a state gets the test kits, they have to verify that it works the same in their lab that it worked at CDC. And when some states were doing this, we received feedback that they weren’t — that it wasn’t working as expected, specifically some public health labs at states were getting inconclusive results and what that means is that test results were not coming back as false positive or false negatives, but they were being read as inconclusive. Now, these were not tests being run on actual clinical specimens from potential patients.

Did there appear to be a problem with one reagent used in the PCR assay?

A: Yes. As CDC explained: “These were part of the verification process, and because of that we are — when we evaluated what the issue is, we think that there might be an issue with one of the three assays and we think that maybe one of the reagents wasn’t performing consistently, so it’s a long story to say that we think that the issue at the states can be explained by one reagent that isn’t performing as it should consistently and that’s why we are re-manufacturing that reagent, obviously a state wouldn’t want to be doing this test and using it to make clinical decisions if it isn’t working as well as perfectly at the state as it is at CDC, so this is part of a normal process and procedure and redoing the manufacturing is the next step”.

Re the high school student – Worldometer site reported that the student was sick, got tested, felt better and went back to school before getting the results. Now the school is being treated and everyone who was there is going to be worried for the next few weeks. What happened to common sense about staying HOME until the results come back??

About that care center – I checked the center online and it is both a short term rehab center as well as a long term care facility. But, the infection source really cannot be from the patients, but from the staff or visitors.

The stupidity in this country is amazing.