H5N1

COVID-19 in the DRC: Bulletin n° 4, Saturday, 28 March 2020

A very brief update from the MRC: Covid-19: Bulletin n° 4 Samedi, le 28 mars 2020.

COVID-19 EPIDEMIOLOGICAL SITUATION IN KINSHASA AND IN ITURI ON MARCH 28, 2020 

Date: Saturday, March 28, 2020  

• Since the start of the epidemic declared on March 10, 2020, the cumulative figure is 65 confirmed cases. In total, there were 6 deaths. 

o 7 new confirmed cases in Kinshasa

COVID-19 in Italy: 5,974 new cases and 889 new deaths

A screen from Worldometer: Italy Coronavirus: 92,472 Cases and 10,023 Deaths - Worldometer.

These numbers reflect 5,974 new cases and 889 new deaths in the last 24 hours. Italy reported its first COVID-19 case on January 29.

ER doctor who criticized Bellingham hospital’s COVID-19 protections has been fired

Unbelievable. Via The Seattle Times: ER doctor who criticized Bellingham hospital’s coronavirus protections has been fired. Excerpt and then a comment:

BELLINGHAM – An emergency room physician who publicly decried what he called a lack of protective measures against the novel coronavirus at his workplace, PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center, has been fired. 

Ming Lin, who has worked at the hospital for 17 years and became a local cause célèbre for his pleas for more safety equipment and more urgent measures to protect staff, was informed of his termination as he was preparing for a shift at the hospital Friday afternoon, he said. 

“I got a message that said, ‘Your shift has been covered,’” Lin told The Seattle Times. He phoned his supervisor and was told, “You’ve been terminated.” Lin said he was told he would be contacted by human resources staff from his employer, TeamHealth, a national firm that contracts with PeaceHealth’s emergency department. 

TeamHealth could not immediately be reached for comment. A spokesperson for PeaceHealth St. Joseph confirmed that Lin had been fired but said the hospital had no comment because Lin wasn’t a PeaceHealth employee. 

Lin said supervisors threatened his employment more than a week ago after he spoke to reporters and made social media posts accusing PeaceHealth of a lack of urgency to protect health care workers from the virus. 

Lin said he was told to take down his social media posts about the hospital but refused. 

He continued to post daily updates on Facebook after shifts at the emergency room, although many of his posts had shifted away from hospital practices to efforts to help secure more protective equipment for hospital workers.  

Specifically, Lin had written that PeaceHealth St. Joseph refused to screen all patients outside the hospital, rather than in an often-crowded emergency room waiting area where the virus could easily spread. Two emergency department workers, who both asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, told The Times they shared Lin’s concerns about the possible spread of infection because of that practice.  

Lin and other doctors have also persistently complained about the availability of testing approved by PeaceHealth, even as testing capacity ramps up in Washington state.

Bellingham is just across the border from Vancouver, and people here used to pop across the border all the time for shopping and cheaper gas. No more.

Long ago, the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest distinguished between two groups of white traders: American "Boston men" and British "King George men." 

 

When the border between the US and British North America was set, it became known as the Medicine Line: different rules applied north of it, and people in trouble with the Boston men often crossed the line to sanctuary—as Sitting Bull did after winning the Battle of the Little Big Horn against Custer.

 

Now it appears the border is literally a Medicine Line again, between a healthcare system in BC that's (barely) holding its own against the pandemic and a system that isn't. I hope Dr. Lin soon finds work again, in a system that welcomes criticism and tries to improve.

The missing six weeks: How Trump failed the biggest test of his life

Via The Guardian: The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life. Excerpt:

When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus. 

On the very same day, 5,000 miles away in Asia, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in South Korea. The confluence was striking, but there the similarities ended.  

In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites. 

One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions. 

Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease. 

Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.  

The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”  

‘A fiasco of incredible proportions’ 

A week after that, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by two former top health policy officials within the Trump administration under the headline Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic. Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb laid out a menu of what had to be done instantly to avert a massive health disaster.  

Top of their to-do list: work with private industry to develop an “easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic test” – in other words, just what South Korea was doing.  

It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.

Those missing four to six weeks are likely to go down in the definitive history as a cautionary tale of the potentially devastating consequences of failed political leadership. Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.

More than a quarter of those cases are in New York City, now a global center of the coronavirus pandemic, with New Orleans also raising alarm. Nationally, 1,301 people have died.

Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.

“The US response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014, told a Georgetown university panel recently. “What’s happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions.”

‘We have lost it all’: The shock felt by millions of unemployed Americans

Via The New York Times: ‘We Have Lost It All’: The Shock Felt by Millions of Unemployed Americans. Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — So much has changed so quickly for Joseph Palma that he barely recognizes his life. 

On Tuesday last week, he was going to work, helping passengers in the customs area of the Miami airport. The next day, he was laid off without severance or benefits. Five days later, he moved back in with his 59-year-old mother, loading his bed and his clothes into the back of his friend’s pickup truck.  

Now he is staring at his bank account — totaling about $3,100 — and waiting on hold for hours at a time with the unemployment office, while cursing at its crashing website.  

“I’m feeling scared,” said Mr. Palma, who is 41 and nervous about the $15,000 in medical debt he has from two recent hospital stays. “I don’t know what’s the ending. But I know I’m not in good shape.” 

For the millions of Americans who found themselves without a job in recent weeks, the sharp and painful change brought a profound sense of disorientation. They were going about their lives, bartending, cleaning, managing events, waiting tables, loading luggage and teaching yoga. And then suddenly they were in free fall, grabbing at any financial help they could find, which in many states this week remained locked away behind crashing websites and overloaded phone lines.

“Everything has changed in a matter of minutes — seconds,” said Tamara Holtey, 29, an accountant for an industrial services company in the Houston area, who was on a cruise to Cozumel, Mexico, as the coronavirus outbreak intensified in the United States and was laid off on her second day back at work.  

Now she spends her days applying for jobs online from her home in Alvin, Texas, while she and her wife weigh whether to delay paying their mortgage for a month or two — only to have to pay more in interest.  

“It’s just a constant thought in my head: Am I going to lose my house? Am I going to lose everything?” she said. They had been talking about starting to have children, but “that’s on pause now.”  

In 17 interviews with people in eight states across the country, Americans who lost their jobs said they were in shock and struggling to grasp the magnitude of the economy’s shutdown, an attempt to slow the spread of the virus. Unlike the last economic earthquake, the financial crisis of 2008, this time there was no getting back out there to look for work, not when people were being told to stay inside. What is more, the layoffs affected not just them, but their spouses, their parents, their siblings and their roommates — even their bosses.

COVID-19 latest: Europe’s death toll surges as world plunges into recession

Via the South China Morning Post: Coronavirus latest: Europe’s death toll surges as world plunges into recession. Excerpt:

Europe was reeling from a staggering surge in coronavirus deaths on Saturday, still days or weeks from what experts desperately hope will be the epidemic’s peak. 

Grim new tolls from Italy and Spain came as the IMF confirmed the world economy has plunged into a historic slump, and the US invoked wartime procurement powers. 

More than 600,000 cases of the new coronavirus have been officially recorded around the world since the outbreak of the epidemic. 

Variations in testing regimes mean the true number is likely far higher still, and confirmed deaths are mounting.  

Spain recorded 832 fatalities in 24 hours, bringing its toll to 5,690, second in the world only to Italy, which confirmed a one-day record of 969 on Friday. 

Elsewhere, Iran announced 139 more deaths and India sealed off a dozen Punjab villages that had been visited by a guru now known to be infected and a possible “super-spreader”. 

And, in South Africa, Johannesburg police resorted to rubber bullets to enforce social distancing on a crowd queuing for supplies outside a downtown supermarket during a national lockdown.

The United States now has the world’s highest single number of Covid-19 cases but per capita European nations are still the worst hit, with emergency services struggling to cope.  

In Japan, where officials urged citizens to stay indoors to prevent a potential emergency on Saturday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a televised press briefing that the country would extend economic stimulus on an “unprecedented scale” with cash handouts for citizens and the government acting to protect regional employment. The actions will be on a larger scale than that of the financial crisis more than a decade ago, he said.

NYPD has 500 COVID-19 cases and 2nd civilian death

Via The New York Times: N.Y.P.D. Has 500 Coronavirus Cases and 2nd Civilian Death. Excerpt:

500 N.Y.P.D. employees have the virus, and 11 percent of officers were out sick. 

At least 500 New York Police Department employees have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, and more than 4,000 officers — about 11 percent of the uniformed work force — were out sick on Friday, officials said. 

Of the department employees who tested positive, 442 were uniformed officers and 70 were civilians, officials said. In a force of 36,000 officers, that translates to an infection rate of about one in every 80 officers, or about 1.2 percent.  

Officials also reported the department’s second virus-related death: Giacomina Barr-Brown, a civilian employee and seven-year veteran who worked on patrol and administrative assignments. Ms. Barr-Brown died at her home on Thursday, the department said. 

Earlier this week, Dennis Dickson, a custodian who worked at Police Headquarters, died from complications of the virus.  

The Police Department has been stepping up its role in enforcing restrictions on large crowds in the city, visiting stores, restaurants and bars to make sure they adhere to limits on gatherings. Officers patrolled the parks on Friday as warm, sunny weather brought more people into public spaces throughout the city. Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Friday that the police could begin issuing fines to those who disobey social-distancing rules. An experimental program provides a place for children whose parents must work.

Worldometer: COVID-19 on Saturday morning

Two screenshots from Coronavirus Update (Live): 621,103 Cases and 28,663 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Outbreak:

Russia to ban all cross-border travel over Covid-19 pandemic

Via RT News: Russia to ban ALL cross-border travel over Covid-19 pandemic.

Automobile, railway, pedestrian and river checkpoints on the Russian border will go on a lockdown on Monday in order to prevent Covid-19 from spreading across the country, the government has announced. 

The order said that the measure was "temporary," but provided no indication as to when the border traffic will resume. 

Russia has been recently taking a large-scale effort to tackle the highly contagious disease, which included canceling all regular and charter flights in and out of the country.  

The whole next week had been declared a paid nationwide holiday, with the public advised to stay indoors. Restaurants, parks, cinemas and other establishments where large groups of people can gather, except the most essential ones, will also shut down. 

The overall number of infected now stands at 1,264 in Russia, with 228 new cases reported in the last 24 hours. Up to seven Covid-19 patients have died.

Syria: MSF provides relief items and adapts response for coronavirus COVID-19

Via MSF.org: MSF provides relief items and adapts response for coronavirus COVID-19. Excerpt:

Deir Hassan camp in Idlib province, northwestern Syria, is one of the many camps to which hundreds of thousands of displaced families fled, to escape the military offensive by Syrian government forces with their Russian allies between December 2019 and early March 2020. Deir Hassan camp hosts more than 164,000 people in settlements scattered over the hills and, as is the case across northwest Syria, it lacks basic services. It is now also threatened by the potential spread of COVID-19. 

On 16 March, after assessing the needs in Deir Hassan camp, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) distributed essential items to 180 families in the Latamneh and Al-Habeet settlements, including family tents, mats, plastic sheeting, blankets, cooking sets and hygiene kits. 

“We witnessed people living in the open; we also saw two or three families sharing a tent which did not protect them from the cold or the rain,” says Ahmed, MSF project team leader. “There were too few tents to accommodate the new arrivals.” 

The next day, the MSF team distributed the same relief items to 115 families in Abo Obeidah, another settlement in Deir Hassan. 

“Thanks to MSF, we got tents,” says Manaf Shamma, a displaced mother living in Latamneh. “This camp was set up eight months ago, but it needs latrines, sewage, proper roads.” 

COVID-19 pandemic adds to health risks 

In Deir Hassan camp, the water and sanitation facilities are inadequate for such large numbers of people, raising the risk of water-borne diseases. So far, upper respiratory infections have been the main condition seen by the MSF mobile clinics. But now the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has become a huge challenge worldwide and in Syria. 

The Syrian government reported the first case of COVID-19 in Syria on 23 March. While no cases have been declared in Idlib province, the last rebel stronghold, the disease may spread very quickly through the region, especially in camps, where people live in large settlements, in overcrowded conditions with little sanitation.  

MSF has suspended our mobile clinics in Deir Hassan camp to allow our staff to attend training on infection prevention and control (IPC), and to make sure they won’t spread the virus. In the coming days, MSF community health workers will hold health education sessions on COVID-19 with displaced families in 10 settlements in Deir Hassan camp, and will distribute leaflets and specific hygiene kits.  

As our teams are now focusing their work on infection prevention and control measures, they are providing assistance for the triage and screening of patients in the two MSF-supported health centres, in Deir Hassan and Tal Karama.