It was a first person video of a somebody walking around an empty street, presumably in a quarantine zone, and there was a dead body lying on the sidewalk.Originally Posted by lost in melb.
It was a first person video of a somebody walking around an empty street, presumably in a quarantine zone, and there was a dead body lying on the sidewalk.
Warning: The posts of this forum member may contain trigger language which may be considered offensive to some.
Music was better when ugly people were allowed to make it.
There was a bit more that. It started with someone in protective gear racking the slide of a handgun with others standing by a van. Then there where 3 of them walking down the street with AKs (all in quarantine suits).
The video cut to a mostly empty street with some bodies lying around and possible being helped by the few still standing. You could hear sporatic small arms fire in the background then some bursts from full autos.
DemonGeminiX (02-14-2020), Teh One Who Knocks (02-14-2020)
I wasn't listening to it.
Warning: The posts of this forum member may contain trigger language which may be considered offensive to some.
Music was better when ugly people were allowed to make it.
Apparently someone didn't want it on the web though, as Lance said it has been taken down.
DemonGeminiX (02-17-2020), Teh One Who Knocks (02-17-2020)
By David Aaro | Fox News
Both State Department-chartered flights carrying Americans from the coronavirus-infected Diamond Princess cruise ship arrived in the U.S overnight. The first plane touched down at Travis Air Force Base in California just before 11:30 p.m. local time. The second flight landed at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas roughly 2 1/2 hours later.
Hundreds of American passengers who had been quarantined on the cruise ship left Japan Monday on two planes en route to the United States -- with 14 of the passengers infected and isolated in a "specialized containment area." It's not clear which flight the infected were on.
"During the evacuation process, after passengers had disembarked the ship and initiated transport to the airport, U.S. officials received notice that 14 passengers, who had been tested 2-3 days earlier, had tested positive for COVID-19. These individuals were moved in the most expeditious and safe manner to a specialized containment area on the evacuation aircraft to isolate them in accordance with standard protocols," the U.S. Department of State said in a release.
"After consultation with [Health and Human Services] HHS officials, including experts from the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, the State Department made the decision to allow the 14 individuals, who were in isolation, separated from other passengers, and continued to be asymptomatic, to remain on the aircraft to complete the evacuation process," it added.
The 46 Americans who tested positive on the cruise ship were told to remain in Japan to be treated for the virus that has killed an estimated 1,765 people and infected more than 70,000 globally, according to Princess Cruise media relations. Buses had transported U.S passengers -- with the assistance of Japanese troops -- from the ship to Haneda Airport in Tokyo.
Health officials said they screened all passengers prior to boarding the flights and no symptomatic or infected travelers were allowed onboard.
So far, 355 people have tested positive for the virus on the Diamond Princess after doctors found 67 new cases Saturday.
About 380 Americans and family members were on the ship when it was quarantined on Feb. 5. It's unclear exactly how many U.S. citizens have tested positive for the virus other than the 46 reportedly infected.
"All travelers on these flights were screened for symptoms prior to departure and will be subject to [the] Centers for Disease Control (CDC) screening, health observation, and monitoring requirements. Only those who were asymptomatic were allowed to board the flights," a State Department spokesperson said.
Passengers were quarantined for 14 days on the ship, which is considered the virus's incubation period. They are expected to be quarantined for 14 additional days upon arrival at either base.
The bases in California and Texas were selected to ensure facilities were available immediately to treat their medical needs, according to the U.S. Embassy in Toyko.
The chartered flights were the only opportunities for passengers to fly to the U.S until March 4, embassy officials said. The remaining passengers are expected to depart the ship this coming Wednesday.
A fatality rate of 1 in 40 by those numbers
By David Aaro | Fox News
The head of a major hospital in China died from the coronavirus on Tuesday morning, as 1,886 new cases were reported in the country, according to multiple reports.
Liu Zhiming was the director of Wuhan Wuchang Hospital located in the epicenter of the virus outbreak, according to Reuters. Zhiming, who had been on life support, was initially reported to have died earlier in the week before that claim was retracted.
China has suffered the most from the virus, which is now known as COVID-19, with the country having 99 percent of the cases. The U.S. has 15 patients including eight in California, one in Texas, one in Wisconsin, one in Arizona, one in Washington state, one in Massachusetts and two in Illinois. No deaths have been reported in the U.S.
In addition, 14 Americans tested positive for the virus and were transported on Monday from the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan to military bases in California and Texas.
They were originally not allowed to board, but that changed when they tested positive.
The last case found in the U.S. was discovered in Texas from an evacuee who arrived in a State Department chartered flight from Wuhan, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last Thursday.
CDC officials added there will “likely be additional cases in the coming days and weeks, including among other people recently returned from Wuhan.”
The U.S. had announced that Americans who traveled to China within the last 14 days would be sent to designated airports for enhanced screenings. Foreign nationals who recently went to China would be denied entry in the U.S., except for the immediate family of American citizens and permanent residents.
China's Foreign Ministry had said the U.S. hasn't given the country any substantive help in its fight against the coronavirus outbreak. They added the U.S. was contributing to the international panic surrounding the illness, according to a report by the news organization.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a global emergency as it spreads to countries outside of China and the number of infected patients continues to grow.
Countries around the globe have increased travel restrictions to the infected mainland China and Hubei province — with the U.S. State Department increasing its advisory to level 4: "Do Not Travel."
The CDC has advised travelers to avoid all nonessential travel to the country.
Coronavirus has now killed nearly three times the amount of people in China than were sickened during the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. The SARS outbreak had killed 349 people in mainland China back in 2002 and 2003 -- with 744 deaths and 8,096 infections globally, according to the CDC.
Here are the latest figures.
How many have been infected or have died?
The virus has claimed the lives of 1,868 people and infected 73,250 around the globe. Only five people have died outside of China, including Hong Kong.
France announced its first death on Saturday in a Chinese tourist who died in the country. It was the first fatality outside of Asia.
Japan announced its first coronavirus death last Thursday. The 80-year-old woman had been in the hospital near Toyko since Feb. 1 after being diagnosed with pneumonia.
The other deaths were in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
The WHO said the number of cases will keep growing as tests are pending on thousands of suspected cases.
Where is the virus?
Roughly 99 percent of new cases have appeared in China with the vast majority of the cases in Hubei province and its provincial capital, Wuhan -- the epicenter of the virus.
Over 814 cases have been reported in at least 25 countries globally. Europe's total is at 46.
The United Kingdom has nine cases in the country.
Singapore -- 77
Thailand -- 35
Japan -- 519 (454 passengers on Diamond Princess cruise ship outside Yokohama) (1 death)
South Korea -- 31
Taiwan -- 22 (1 death)
Malaysia -- 22
Germany -- 16
Vietnam -- 16
United States -- 15 (14 on military bases in California and Texas)
Australia -- 14
France -- 12 (1 death)
United Arab Emirates -- 9
Canada -- 8
India -- 3
Italy -- 3
Philippines -- 3 (1 death)
Russia -- 2
Spain -- 2
Sweden -- 1
Belgium -- 1
Nepal -- 1
Finland --1
Sri Lanka -- 1
Cambodia -- 1
Hong Kong -- 58 (1 death)
Macao -- 10
lost in melb. (02-19-2020)
Report: China Deploys Hundreds of Internet Censors to Shut Down Coronavirus Talk
By John Hayward - Breitbart
The Epoch Times on Tuesday reported that China has “engaged over 1,600 censors to scrub the internet of ‘sensitive’ information relating to the coronavirus outbreak.”
The information control effort apparently accelerated after Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping emerged from relative seclusion and asserted himself as being in control of the coronavirus response.
The Epoch Times claimed to obtain an internal report drafted on February 15 by officials in Hubei province, epicenter of the virus outbreak. These officials were alarmed by criticism of the government and persistent speculation that the number of people sickened and killed by the virus was much higher than the government was willing to admit.
China’s infamous “50 Cent Army” of online trolls was accordingly deployed to wipe out troublesome social media posts and divert the Chinese public’s attention to inspiring stories about government officials and those fighting on the front lines against the coronavirus:
The trolls, through technological and manual screening, had identified as many as 606,800 posts online with “sensitive or harmful information,” it said.The censors were particularly effective at erasing public expressions of anger over the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower who was himself persecuted for “spreading rumors” when he warned about the danger posed by the coronavirus in the early days of the outbreak, long before the government was willing to admit those dangers. Grief and anger over Li’s death from the virus was erased almost as quickly as it could be posted online, replaced by government-approved celebrations of Li as a hero and martyr of the Chinese Communist Party.
Their approach, it said, was to “timely dispel the online rumors” and “strike powerful blows offline.”
As of Feb. 14, the online censors had deleted as many as 54,000 such “rumors,” and had social media influencers write nearly 400 commentary articles to shape the narrative.
The regime’s propaganda efforts, the report said, should be directed toward promoting the effects of officials’ outbreak control measures and the “moving deeds” of volunteers, community workers, and the police.
Some professional “internet commentators” had also made 400,000 comments to “counter the negative public opinions,” according to the document.
Securing a monopoly on coronavirus information required chasing foreign media out of Hubei, a project viewed as highly successful in the report. As of this week, only five media organizations from beyond China still had reporters on the ground in Hubei.
Chinese citizens, meanwhile, have been terrorized into silence with threats of prosecution for “spreading rumors” or “spreading fake information,” nebulously-defined crimes that can carry sentences of up to seven years in prison. Hundreds of arrests have been made for “spreading rumors” according to human rights groups, many of them involving online posts that were demonstrably accurate.
The document viewed by the Epoch Times allegedly specified that Hubei propaganda groups are working closely with the central government in Beijing to “coordinate public opinion,” both “inside the country and overseas.”
Information control is particularly important now that the regime in Beijing is attempting to portray the coronavirus epidemic as completely under control and likely to end within a few weeks, and the official new Party narrative is that Xi and other top officials responded quickly to the threat but were frustrated by poor compliance with their orders from inept Hubei officials.
The death toll is now over 2,000, but Chinese officials claimed the rate of new infections began slowing this week, eager to persuade the rest of the world to begin lifting travel bans that have inflicted tremendous costs on the Chinese economy.
The World Health Organization (WHO), which has been very careful to avoid antagonizing China, sounded a rare note of disagreement and said the optimistic Chinese reports “must be interpreted very cautiously.”
On Wednesday, the Chinese government expelled three journalists from the Wall Street Journal over an op-ed piece published by the paper – but not written by any of the three journalists – that Beijing considered “racist.”
The article in question, written by foreign affairs and humanities professor Walter Russell Mead of Bard College, referred to China as the “real sick man of Asia” – a phrase coined by Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I to describe the fading Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe” in the 19th Century. The phrase has been used by numerous authors and historians to describe other troubled powers around the world since then.
The thesis of the article that so enraged Beijing was that local officials responded to the virus in a “secretive and self-serving” manner, shaking confidence in the Chinese Communist Party “at home and abroad” badly enough to threaten the Chinese economy.
Ok, well, I guess they want everyone in their country to die then.
Warning: The posts of this forum member may contain trigger language which may be considered offensive to some.
Music was better when ugly people were allowed to make it.
UT Austin announces coronavirus 'breakthrough' could help yield vaccine
By Nick Givas | Fox News
Researchers at the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the University of Texas at Austin claimed to have made a breakthrough in their coronavirus research on Wednesday and said their data could help develop a vaccine.
Scientists were able to create a 3D atomic-scale map of the part of the virus that attaches itself to human cells and causes infection, according to UT News. Mapping what researchers call the "spike protein" is a vital step toward developing vaccines and antiviral drugs.
Jason McLellan, an associate professor at UT Austin, spoke with Fox News on Thursday about the virus and said researchers hope to study the 3D map, in an effort to develop antibodies that can help fight the disease.
"What we've been able to do is produce the molecule that's on the surface of the coronavirus in our lab. So the surface of the virus contains these spike molecules that sort of resemble mushrooms and they use these molecules to bind to our cells and then cause the virus to enter the cells," he said.
"So we really want to target these spikes to prevent their function and prevent the virus from getting into our cell," McLellan continued. "We were able to produce large quantities of these spikes in our lab and then using cryo-electron microscopy, determined a three-dimensional map of these spike molecules. With that information, we and others around the world will begin to apply rational engineering approaches to create small molecules, antibodies in vaccines that target the spike and hopefully prevent the function of this molecule"
He echoed the NIH's hope to have a vaccine developed within 18 months but said it could end up taking over two years to crack the code.
"Optimistically a vaccine could be created in 18 to 24 months," McLellan said. "But this would still be extremely rapid compared to the one to two decades it normally takes, to make most vaccines. It's possible that the small molecules might be able to move quicker. There are some small molecules that have efficacy against other coronaviruses that may also work against this new coronavirus.
"So it's really a multi-pronged approach," he explained. "Vaccines could be ideal because you can treat [people]. You can vaccinate everybody before they're infected and then hopefully provide immunity to the virus. One of the advantages we have is that we've been working on coronaviruses in general for the last five to six years."
McLellan also called for increased government funding to prep for possible outbreaks in the future, so that researchers are not caught flat-footed when the next threat appears.
"That's where we need government funding to fund basic science ... on these viruses before they emerge," he added. "It's much better to have things ready than to try and rapidly respond to them.
"Something my lab is very interested in is developing a universal coronavirus, vaccines and countermeasures that would work against all coronaviruses, including those that have yet to emerge. And that way we can already have vaccines in stock ready to go before the next coronavirus outbreak occurs."
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference last week that vaccines are not the only tool that can be brought to bear against the outbreak and described it as just one piece of the puzzle.
"The development of vaccines and therapeutics is one important part of the research agenda. But it's not only one part," he explained. "They will take time to develop -- but in the meantime, we are not defenseless. The first vaccine could be ready in 18 months, so we have to do everything today using the available weapons to fight this virus."
According to Thursday estimates, more than 75,000 people worldwide have been infected with the novel coronavirus, now known as COVIS-19, while some 2,130 people have died.
DemonGeminiX (02-21-2020)
Haven Orecchio-Egresitz - Insider
Chinese healthcare providers are on the frontlines of the coronavirus outbreak, and several have lost their lives trying to save others.
The government is sympathetic to the families of those medics who sacrificed their lives at work to the tune of $716 (or 5,000 yuan), according to the English news outlet Shanghaiist.
On Monday the Wuhan Municipal Committee's Organization Department announced the new "sympathy" measures that it was taking to aid families of medical workers who have been infected or killed by the virus.
Workers who have been infected — but haven't succumbed to the virus — will also be compensated under the new efforts. They'll receive $429 (or 3,000 yuan), according to the Chinese-language People's Daily Client.
The death toll of a coronavirus outbreak sweeping China has reached 2,130, with more than 75,000 people infected worldwide. Eight people have died outside of mainland China.
Among the healthcare providers who have died is Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old doctor at the Central Wuhan Hospital. He was one of the first people to sound the alarm about the new outbreak in December, but he was silenced by the police in Wuhan and forced to sign a letter saying he was "making false comments."
Li caught the coronavirus after treating patients and died on February 7.
On Weibo, a Chinese social media site, users were shocked by the amount being paid to the families of affected healthcare workers, Shanghaiist reported.
"Is this missing a few zeros?" one asked.
"So the life of a doctor is only worth 5,000 yuan now?" another wrote, according to Shanghaiist.
According to Business Insider's Aria Bendix, China has less than two physicians for every 10,000 residents.
When the outbreak first began, it was unknown that the virus could spread from human to human and some medical workers went without protective gear.
In Wuhan, which has been in quarantine since Jan. 24, doctors are overwhelmed with patients. Some hospital workers have been wearing adult diapers because there is no time to use the bathroom.
"The hospitals have been flooding with patients, there are thousands, I haven't seen so many before," one doctor told BBC News early in the quarantine. "I am scared because this is a new virus and the figures are alarming."
VERY generous.
Coronavirus kills 50 in Iranian city; infections soar in Italy
By David Aaro | Fox News
Fears of a global pandemic continue to grow as coronavirus cases spike in several countries, including Italy, South Korea, and Iran.
A staggering 50 people have died in the Iranian city of Qom from the new coronavirus this month, Iran's semiofficial ILNA news agency reported on Monday. The new death toll is significantly higher than the latest number of confirmed cases of infections that Iranian officials had reported just a few hours earlier by and which stood at just 12 deaths out of 47 cases, according to state TV.
The 50 deaths date back as far as Feb. 13, according to an Iranian official. Iran officially reported its cases and deaths from the virus on Feb. 19.
Authorities are struggling to contain and understand the outbreak in those countries, where infected cases have skyrocketed -- increasing over 2,000 percent in the past couple weeks.
Italy is considered Europe's first major outbreak and the largest outside of Asia. The number of infected cases jumped to 152, compared to just three 10 days ago.
The country is currently scrambling to disrupt the spread of the virus which has seen 110 cases in Milan, its financial district and Venice, known as a famous hub for tourists throughout the world. Events and soccer matches were canceled in the country, while some of its movie theatres were reportedly shuttered, including Milan's legendary La Scala.
“We are worried about the situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran and in Italy,” World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Stockholm via a video link.
Cases in South Korea increased to 763 on Monday, with 161 more people infected within the last 24 hours. The country had just 28 infected cases on Feb. 14.
President Moon Jae-in called for "unprecedented, powerful" steps on Sunday to fight the virus which is spreading rapidly throughout the country -- including the capital Seoul.
“The coming few days will be a critical time for us,” Jae-in said. “The central government, local governments, health officials and medical personnel and the entire people must wage an all-out, concerted response to the problem.”
He raised the threat level to "red alert," its highest national threat level for the first time in a decade.
More than 140 of South Korea's new cases were from Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people. Five of the countries seven deaths occurred at a hospital near the city.
The country has the third-highest infected total behind China and Japan -- where most of the countries infected were from the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
“In Daegu [South Korea], the number of new cases that are being confirmed by tests is quite large, and if we fail to effectively stem community transmissions in this area, there would be a large possibility (that the illness) spreads nationwide,” South Korean Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip said in a briefing.
Gang-lip said health officials will test all of Daegu's residents that have cold-like symptoms, which could be 28,000 people. Investigators were looking into the Shincheonji Church of Jesus -- where 129 of the new 161 cases were connected to. A woman in her 60s reported attended a couple of church services before testing positive.
Iran reported its first person infected with the coronavirus on Wednesday and now its health ministry has confirmed there are 43 cases. Countries have closed their borders with Iran, taking similar steps most of the world took with China roughly a month ago.
Two cases in Israel were also reported from passengers who returned to the country from the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Bahrain also reported cases of the coronavirus.
China reported 409 new cases of the virus on Monday, increasing its total number of infected to 77,150. 150 new deaths were also recorded in the mainland, with the country's total now at 2,592.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Warning: The posts of this forum member may contain trigger language which may be considered offensive to some.
Music was better when ugly people were allowed to make it.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
