H5N1

Lula: Bolsonaro leading Brazil 'to slaughterhouse' over COVID-19

Via The Guardian: Lula: Bolsonaro leading Brazil 'to slaughterhouse' over Covid-19. Excerpt:

Jair Bolsonaro is leading Brazilians “to the slaughterhouse” with his irresponsible handling of coronavirus, the country’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said. 

In an impassioned interview with the Guardian – which came as Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll hit 1,924 – Lula said that by undermining social distancing and defenestrating his own health minister, Brazil’s “troglodyte” leader risked repeating the devastating scenes playing out in Ecuador where families have had to dump their loved ones’ corpses in the streets.  

“Unfortunately I fear Brazil is going to suffer a great deal because of Bolsonaro’s recklessness … I fear that if this grows Brazil could see some cases like those horrific, monstrous images we saw in Guayaquil,” said the 74-year-old leftist. 

“We can’t just want to topple a president because we don’t like him,” Lula admitted. “[But] if Bolsonaro continues to commit crimes of responsibility … [and] trying to lead society to the slaughterhouse – which is what he is doing – I think the institutions will need to find a way of sorting Bolsonaro out. And that will mean you’ll need to have an impeachment.”  

Bolsonaro – a proudly homophobic former army captain already despised by progressive Brazilians for his hostility to the environment, indigenous rights and the arts, as well as his alleged links to Rio’s mafia – has alienated millions more with his dismissive stance towards the coronavirus, which he belittles as media “hysteria” and a “bit of a cold”. 

Since the World Health Organization declared the pandemic on 11 March, Brazil’s president has repeatedly thumbed his nose at social distancing, first by egging on and attending pro-Bolsonaro protests and then with a series of provocative visits to bakeries, supermarkets and pharmacies. During one unnecessary outing Bolsonaro declared: “No one will hinder my right to come and go.” 

In March the rightwing populist even suggested Brazilians need not worry about Covid-19 since they could bathe in excrement “and nothing happens”. 

Such moves put Bolsonaro at loggerheads with his own health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, a doctor-turned-politician who was fired on Thursday after challenging the president’s behaviour. 

Meanwhile Bolsonaro’s politician son, Eduardo, has taken the wrecking ball to ties with Brazil’s most important trade partner, China, by accusing its Communist party leaders of being to blame for the coronavirus crisis.  

Bolsonaro’s actions have sparked nightly pot-banging protests in cities up and down the country and drawn scorn from across the political spectrum.  

“Coronavirus must be laughing its head off,” Eliane Cantanhêde, a columnist for the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper, wrote of Bolsonaro’s antics this week. 

The rightwing governor of Brazil’s most populous state, São Paulo, has declared the country at war with both the coronavirus and the “Bolsonaro-virus”.

COVID-19 in the US: Thomas Massie is a monster Republicans created

A column in The Washington Post: Thomas Massie is a monster Republicans created. This guy would make a great cellmate for Rush Limbaugh in Leavenworth, or better yet, a USMC brig. Excerpt:

Republicans were aghast that one of their own had committed such a monstrously selfish act.  

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), in purely symbolic opposition to the $2.2 trillion emergency coronavirus legislation, forced hundreds of his colleagues to risk their lives — literally — by flying back to Washington. So what if many of the lawmakers are elderly and at high risk? 

In order to thwart Massie’s pointless protest, an attempt to force a roll-call vote instead of a simple voice vote, leaders had to summon 216 members to fill the chamber, eerily separated on the floor and in the gallery above to limit infection. This fruitless, immoral gesture by the 49-year-old legislator was in service of another: to thwart a nearly unanimous Congress from dispensing aid to the sick and suffering in the middle of a pandemic.

President Trump called Massie a “third rate Grandstander” and proposed to “throw Massie out of Republican Party!” 

Joining in bipartisan revulsion, former secretary of state John Kerry shared Trump’s tweet and added: “Congressman Massie has tested positive for being an asshole. He must be quarantined to prevent the spread of his massive stupidity.”  

But if Republicans are disturbed by Massie, they might pause for self-reflection. Massie is the epitome of the anti-government culture they have nurtured and encouraged. He embodies the drain-the-swamp political philosophy they have embraced.  

“I came here to make sure our Republic doesn’t die by unanimous consent in an empty chamber, and I request a recorded vote!” the bespectacled rebel said in his quickly-stifled stunt. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) replied from the gallery, an ABC News journalist heard.  

Massie has it backward. Unanimous consent doesn’t kill the Republic. Unanimity, or at least consensus, is what we need in Washington, and what we have lost. Massie and scores like him in the congressional GOP exist to break up consensus, to throw sand in the gears, to hobble government. Maybe Massie’s antics in this moment of national crisis will help Republicans remember that the government they’ve been demonizing is the only thing they have to save a collapsing national economy and stop a deadly disease. 

Massie, a believer in the “deep state” conspiracy, is a product of the tea party, a protege of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and a collaborator with outgoing Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who is becoming Trump’s chief of staff, when they tried to oust then-Speaker John Boehner. “I’m ready to be unpopular,” Massie said after his 2012 election, and he has opposed even anti-lynching and human rights legislation — and celebrated when he uses “the process” so that “things die.”

Former DR Congo health minister convicted of embezzling Ebola funds

Well, he was a hero for a while. Via the National Post, a Reuters report: Former DR Congo health minister convicted of embezzling Ebola funds.

KINSHASA — A former health minister in the Democratic Republic of Congo and his financial advisor were sentenced on Monday to five years of forced labor for embezzling more than $400,000 from the country’s Ebola response funds, a court order showed.  

Oly Ilunga was health minister for seven months at the height of the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, which has killed more than 2,200 people since mid-2018. It is winding down now, with no new cases recorded in over a month.  

President Felix Tshisekedi stripped him of his role managing the Ebola response last July and he resigned from the government days later, criticizing actions taken by Tshisekedi. He was arrested in September. 

Ilunga’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, but they have previously denied all the allegations. 

The court convicted Ilunga and his financial advisor of forging receipts worth $391,332 from a fake company, referred to as New Sarah pharmaceutical depot, to justify purchases of products already paid for by international donors. 

The pair diverted a further $13,000 intended to pay for transport of life-saving goods to Ebola hotspots, the court found.  

The judgment marks the first time a minister from former President Joseph Kabila’s government has been convicted for corruption since Tshisekedi took power last year. 

Ilunga was nominated by Kabila but remained in his post for months while negotiations about Tshiskedi’s first cabinet dragged out. 

Having run on an anti-corruption ticket, Tshisekedi’s declared ambitions to clean up public finances have been hampered by an awkward power-sharing deal with Kabila, whose allies control a majority of ministries and seats in parliament.  

The hundreds of millions of dollars pumped by foreign donors into the response to Congo’s Ebola outbreak, the second deadliest ever, raised fears of corruption after the response to West Africa’s even larger 2013-16 outbreak was dogged by allegations of graft.

COVID-19 and the Kursk submarine disaster

Via The New Yorker: The Coronavirus and the Kursk Submarine Disaster.

When we face catastrophe, our minds look for points of comparison. Recently, people have talked and written about world wars, the Spanish flu, the plague, and the Great Depression. I have written about terror. Each of these parallels sheds some light on our current predicament. Here is one more: often, these days, I think of a submarine.  

In August, 2000, the Kursk, a giant nuclear submarine, went out to sea off the coast of Murmansk with an undertrained crew and a load of torpedoes that were past their expiration date. One or two of those torpedoes appear to have exploded onboard, killing most of the men on the submarine. The tremors set off by the explosion were picked up by a Norwegian seismic station, but the Russian Navy didn’t acknowledge the accident for nine hours, and President Vladimir Putin wasn’t notified for another nine hours after that. He was on vacation in Sochi, on the Black Sea, and he remained on vacation. All this time, twenty-three men inside what remained of the Kursk awaited rescue at the bottom of the sea.  

The Russian Navy sent rescue crews, but they failed to dock to the submarine. It seemed that they lacked the necessary skills, because, ten days later, when a Norwegian crew were finally allowed to attempt a rescue, they docked on their first try. By that time, the men inside had been dead a week. 

Trapped in their underwater capsule, those twenty-three seamen had survived for more than two days. As long as they lived, they kept beating out an S.O.S. signal. In August, 2000, Russia had thriving independent television and print media that were reporting on the tragedy, but the vacationing President, at first, said nothing. Then he mumbled something incoherent about the value of the equipment aboard the Kursk. On the seventh day after the explosion, Putin’s aides finally persuaded him to return to Moscow. He told television reporters, “I did the right thing, because the arrival of nonspecialists from any field, the presence of high-placed officials in the disaster area, would not help and more often would hamper work. Everyone should keep to his place.” Then he travelled to the Arctic and, under the cover of night, met with the families of the dead sailors, told them that the sailors might still be alive, and also railed against the forces that had destroyed the Russian military. “I never thought that things were in this kind of condition,” he said. 

There is no direct parallel between the coronavirus pandemic and the Kursk submarine, but, as sometimes happens with President Donald Trump and Putin, there is a similarity of spirit. Both Presidents stayed silent when they should have been speaking. (Putin vacationed; Trump golfed.) Both offered false hope and accepted no responsibility. Both blamed other countries (Russia briefly embraced the theory that an American submarine had collided with the Kursk), and both blamed their predecessors for destroying a system that should have saved people. 

But there is more. The most striking aspect of Putin’s failure to accept responsibility for the Kursk disaster was his retreat into bureaucratese. It was a preview of the twenty years since (and possibly the next twenty). Putin’s use of bureaucratic language is a means of misleading the public and deflecting responsibility, but it also offers an insight into his understanding of government. He saw himself as a figurehead who might get in the way of people doing their work, and seemed unaware that his job was to lead the effort. Perhaps as a result, the Russian Navy and government were overcautious, rejected foreign help, and didn’t even respond to the S.O.S. signals from the submarine. 

I don’t usually think of Trump as a bureaucrat. In many ways, he seems the opposite of one—he favors snap decisions, and sweeping ones, and he abhors regulation. But he and Putin share a toxic combination of imperiousness and laziness, a kind of high-handed lassitude. They like to be in charge, but they can’t be bothered to take charge. They disdain competence but somehow assume that other people’s competence will fix whatever it is that needs fixing. As his relentless campaign against government has shown, Trump sees the American system of government as a giant bureaucracy. The government, under Trump, has been partly dismantled, partly corrupted, and partly allowed to churn along, in part because he didn’t feel like paying attention. 

But, in a crisis, when churning along will not do, the government cannot function without a leader; or at least its proper functioning is severely delayed, as it struggles to adapt to the idea that the leader—who in other respects is something of a control freak and in all respects is terrifying—isn’t going to lead.  

My colleague Robert P. Baird has traced why testing for the coronavirus has not been widely available in the United States, laying out a succession of contradictory and confusing events. The test was delayed not only by human error but by rules that had unintended consequences; by a reluctance to make decisions; and, most of all, it seems, by a system’s inability to recognize its own failings. In this age of anti-bureaucratic government, it was a story of bureaucratic failings. 

This is not actually surprising: Hannah Arendt called bureaucracy “the rule of Nobody.” Trump, who rejects all responsibility, is this Nobody now. And we are all in a submarine at the bottom of the sea, banging out an S.O.S. signal.

Japan says 23 passengers mistakenly left COVID-19 ship before testing

Via Inquirer News in the Philippines, an AFP report: Japan says 23 passengers mistakenly left virus ship before testing. The Japanese certainly seemed to have failed every challenge the virus has offered them. Well, in fairness they didn't quarantine the passengers in the long-abandoned houses around the Fukushima nuclear reactor. Excerpt:

TOKYO, Japan — Around 100 more passengers were allowed to disembark from the coronavirus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship on Saturday as Japan’s health minister apologised after 23 others were allowed to leave without being properly tested.  

The news came as a Japanese woman who left the ship on Wednesday tested positive for the virus after returning home to Tochigi Prefecture, Kyodo news agency reported, citing the prefectural government.  

She is the first person to have tested positive for the virus among the group of approximately 970 passengers who disembarked earlier this week, it said.  

The 100 passengers who left on Saturday had been in close contact with infected people on board, local media said.  

They included the last group of Japanese passengers to leave the ship, while some foreign passengers were still waiting on board for their governments to send chartered aircraft.  

Television footage showed a driver in a white protective suit at the wheel of a bus with the curtains drawn so that passengers could not be identified. 

They will be quarantined for two weeks near Tokyo, officials said. 

An official apology 

At a news conference on Saturday, Health Minister Katsunobu Kato apologised for 23 passengers having been allowed to leave the ship without undergoing all the required tests.  

“We deeply regret that our operational mistake caused the situation,” Kato said, adding that the passengers would be tested again. 

With the latest disembarkation, a 14-day quarantine is expected to start for more than 1,000 crew still on board.  

Many of them were not placed in isolation as they were needed to keep the ship running — preparing food and delivering meals to cabins. Critics have charged that they were inadvertently spreading the virus throughout the ship, which has seen more than 600 cases of the potentially deadly COVID-19 disease.  

Kato defended Japan’s on-board quarantine, telling a TV programme Saturday there was no medical facility large enough to admit more than 3,000 people at once.  

Speaking at the news conference, Kato said six Australian passengers tested positive after leaving Japan. 

Meanwhile, 18 repatriated Americans and one Israeli who returned home from the ship have tested positive, authorities from the two countries announced Friday.

World Health Organisation division tackling coronavirus underfunded and facing internal corruption allegations, audits reveal

Via Australia's ABC News, a major (and alarming) report: World Health Organisation division tackling coronavirus underfunded and facing internal corruption allegations, audits reveal. Take some time to read and reflect on the whole article. Excerpt:

The World Health Organisation division leading the global response to the coronavirus outbreak is so chronically underfunded it has repeatedly been found to pose a "severe" level of hazard to the organisation, deemed "unacceptable" by its internal risk policy, recent audits reveal.  

                                                                    

Key points: 

• WHO is still struggling to implement reforms in the fallout of its response to a deadly Ebola outbreak six years ago 

• There has been a surge in internal corruption allegations across the whole of the organisation 

• Critics say the initial response to coronavirus was far too slow 

The WHO Health Emergencies Program, established in 2016, scored the highest-level risk rating in 2018 and 2019 because the "failure to adequately finance the program and emergency operations [risks] inadequate delivery of results at country level".  

                                                                   

The ABC can also reveal the WHO is still struggling to implement vital reforms in the fallout of its widely criticised response to a deadly Ebola outbreak six years ago.  

As of May last year, 59 of the 90 recommendations made by its internal auditors were yet to be completed, including 38 "high-significance" reforms, some of which had suffered from "low implementation effort".  

There has also been a surge in internal corruption allegations across the whole of the organisation, with the detection of multiple schemes aimed at defrauding large sums of money from the international body. 

An external committee has warned the WHO it is facing "decreasing internal control compliance".

A separate "principal risks" assessment of March 2019 says deficient funding of the WHO Health Emergencies Program means it risks the "failure to adequately manage multiple, simultaneous or consecutive [high level] emergencies, resulting in poor performance and results at a country level".  

According to the WHO's internal risk management policy, this means the program poses the highest level of danger, and states: "The risk is unacceptable and is escalated to the highest approval authority, i.e. reported to the DG [Director General]."  

A WHO spokeswoman said: "We have made strides in improved raising of finance and the fact that we have managed multiple grade-three emergencies simultaneously suggests that while a risk, we have managed it."  

But the emergency program is "in a constant state of crisis," according to Adam Kamradt-Scott, a global health security expert with Sydney University.

"When WHE was set up in 2016 they already had three or four level-three category crises they were dealing with," Dr Kamradt-Scott said. 

"They had a series of emergency health crises to deal with from day one … [and yet] they have consistently been forced to hold donor meetings to get more money into the fund."  

David Heymann, who worked at WHO for 22 years, told the ABC the emergency arm of the WHO was underfunded. 

"It's not prioritised properly," Professor Heymann said. 

The WHO's own inspectors last year found the Geneva headquarters of the organisation needed to do more to ensure it could fulfil its mandate during health emergencies.  

"There is a need to further strengthen operational support by headquarters and regional offices to country operations, particularly in the context of emergency operations," their report said.

Coronavirus: Chinese military takes control of medical supplies in Wuhan

Via the South China Morning Post: Coronavirus: Chinese military takes control of medical supplies in Wuhan. Excerpt:

China has deployed hundreds of military officers to control the flow of medical and essential supplies in Wuhan, ground zero of the deadly coronavirus outbreak, state media and sources said. 

A People’s Liberation Army logistics team of 260 officers, with 130 military trucks, started delivering basic supplies on Sunday, according to state broadcaster CCTV. 

It said they delivered 200 tonnes of supplies to supermarkets in the Hubei province city of 11 million people on the first day. 

The team is made up of officers from the PLA’s airborne troops and air force stationed at the Wuhan garrison, and ground force troops from local military academies. 

The logistics operation began the same day as 1,400 medical personnel from the PLA were sent to staff the first completed temporary hospital in Wuhan. The Huoshenshan hospital, which was built from scratch in eight days in response to the crisis and will be controlled by the military, was due to open on Monday. A defence ministry statement said the medical staff deployment had been personally approved by President Xi Jinping.

A source close to the PLA, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the logistics team was there to make sure donations to charity organisations like the Red Cross Society reached their intended recipients. 

“The Beijing leadership realised that almost all the donation points in Hubei and Wuhan have had delivery problems, that there are some opportunists using this crisis to make money,” the military source said.

He gave the example of donors in Shandong province who claimed the 350 tonnes of cabbage they sent to Hubei had not been delivered to families in need, but had instead been found on sale in local supermarkets. 

“Mobilising the military is always the most efficient way to maintain public order at critical moments in mainland China,” the source said. “The [Central Military Commission] also sent PLA troops to deliver basic supplies during the Sars outbreak,” he said, referring to the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic in 2002-03.

'Pricejacking' masks in Vancouver for Wuhan's 2019nCoV

Here in North Vancouver, my local pharmacy has a big sign posted saying it's all out of masks and doesn't know when it will get more. But it's not because my neighbours are freaking out at the prospect of a pandemic in BC. 

Via the South China Morning Post: The dentist, the donor, the dude in the van: Canadian coronavirus profiteers run rampant as Vancouver donates thousands of N95 medical masks to Wuhan. Richmond, BC is a suburb of Vancouver with a large Chinese population. Excerpt:

The deal took place at 9.30pm at a strip mall in Richmond, outside Vancouver, where “a Russian dude in a van” gave Anthony Tsui a sample of his merchandise. 

The street price was steep – triple the normal rate – but the goods checked out, so Tsui soon came back for more. 

But there was nothing illegal about the transaction, and Tsui, at least, was operating from the purest of motives. 

He was buying N95 surgical-grade face masks to donate to doctors and other frontline workers in Wuhan, battling the outbreak of deadly coronavirus.  

On Tuesday, he handed over 400 masks, bought at C$4.50 apiece (US$3.45), to a Vancouver network for donors started by dentist Chen Jianghao and organised via WeChat. 

But the difficulty of sourcing masks points to local profiteering that has helped run supplies to almost zero at storefront retailers in this British Columbia city. 

The campaign is sending about 5,000 masks and other supplies to Wuhan that are expected to arrive within a few days, with thousands more masks on the way. 

Chinese hospitals have been urgently requesting millions of N95 masks, along with other medical supplies. Mainland mask manufacturers cancelled Lunar New Year leave for workers to boost production. 

Hainan Airlines and China Southern Airlines are providing free transport for the Canadian donations, which Chen’s group is sending directly to the Red Cross Society of Hubei and Wuhan Central Hospital. Future donations will go to hospitals elsewhere in China – if Chen can secure supplies.  

He is refusing gifts of cash, because converting it into N95 masks is no simple matter in Vancouver. 

“The only way people can find them is on Craigslist,” said Chen, whose professional training allows him to authenticate donated masks as suitable for medical use in Wuhan. 

Chen said watching the situation unfold in Wuhan had made him “sad and nervous. I know some people aren’t getting good protection … but I can do something to help.” 

He said he was aware the shortage of masks in Vancouver was worrying some Canadians, so he was giving about 5 per cent of the donations to local users, prioritising the elderly. But the need for N95s was more pressing in Wuhan, he said.

Expert: Coronavirus 'is less lethal than SARS'

Via Shanghai Daily: Expert: Virus 'is less lethal than SARS'.

The new coronavirus which leads to pneumonia is no less infectious but much less lethal than SARS, Lu Hongzhou, a professor at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, said on Tuesday.  

"Early diagnosis and treatment have proved to be very beneficial to the patients if the patients are not put on respirators once diagnosed," he said, adding that the use of ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, is also more developed today than it was when SARS broke out. 

Lu said the key is to take preventive measures against the virus in residential communities and prevent communities from becoming a source of virus.  

Wu Jinglei, director of Shanghai Health Commission, said the number of confirmed coronavirus cases has been rising in Shanghai because the government had started to take proactive measures to discover suspicious cases at residential communities and also at entrances to Shanghai besides the effort of hospitals to be more efficient in screening such cases. 

Also, over 4,000 drugstores in Shanghai have been required to register information on people buying medicines to combat fever.

Pakistan accused of cover-up over fresh polio outbreak

Via The Guardian, an appalling report: Pakistan accused of cover-up over fresh polio outbreak. Excerpt:

Officials in Pakistan have been accused of covering up an outbreak of the most dangerous strain of polio and planning a covert vaccination programme to contain the disease. 

According to a source in Pakistan’s polio eradication programme and documentation seen by the Guardian, a dozen children have been infected with the P2 strain of polio, which causes paralysis and primarily effects those under five. The P2 strain had previously been eliminated from the country. 

However, the new cases were allegedly kept hidden from the government and from international donors, including the UK’s Department for International Development, under direct instruction from Babar Bin Atta, the prime minister’s focal representative on polio eradication, who was last month forced to resign after he was accused of corruption. DfID has donated millions to Pakistan’s polio eradication programme.  

The alleged cases, which have all resulted in paralysis, have been discovered mainly in Diamer district, with one in the capital, Islamabad. 

Under Pakistani law, every new case of polio in the country has to be officially registered with the government, which then alerts international health bodies. “But to hide their negligence and their poor performance, Babar Bin Atta decided not disclose the cases to anyone,” said the source.  

The re-emergence of P2 would not only be a dramatic step back in Pakistan’s fight against the polio, it would also be symptomatic of what those in the programme have described as “terrible mismanagement” under Bin Atta.  

Alongside Afghanistan, Pakistan is one of only two countries in the world that has not entirely eradicated polio. It was a key milestone in 2014, when Pakistan officially declared it had entirely eradicated P2 polio.  

Polio exists in three different strands, P1, P2, and P3, with P2 notorious as the most contagious and most vicious in its impact on those infected. 

According to the source within the programme, the renewed outbreak of the P2 strand came from a mismanagement of vaccines, which carry a live strain of the disease to create immunity.  

After the strand was eliminated from Pakistan five years ago, all P2 vaccines should have been collected from hospitals and clinics and not used. However, it appears a P2 vaccine was administered accidentally and a child became a carrier for the disease. Tests on the new cases allegedly show the children are all carrying a form of the disease that originates in vaccine form.