Other big stories tonight: Prince Harry and the duchess Meghan stepping back from the royal family; the Iran air crash coverage; and the story on Iran’s weapons capability.
The beginning of this pandemic was a fiasco of misinformation, a perfect example of the fog of war that envelops outbreaks of new pathogens. It was a mix of panicky confusion in Wuhan hospitals, lies from local health officials and erroneous guesses by health agencies, viral experts and journalists, me included.
The Jan. 8 story was the second The Times did about the virus. The first, on Jan. 6, described China grappling with a mystery pneumonia that, according to local health officials, had hospitalized a few dozen people with ties to a local seafood and meat market. It had killed no one and did not appear to spread from person to person, Wuhan health officials said. Here in the United States, that led to lots of speculation: that it was the return of SARS in a milder form; that it was contaminated vapes, which were then killing American teenagers, that maybe China’s raging epidemic of African swine fever had jumped to humans. Also, last year’s flu season was turning ugly, and flus cause lots of pneumonia.
The news peg on Jan. 8 was that Chinese state media said unnamed local scientists had concluded that the mysterious pneumonias were caused by a previously unknown coronavirus. I filed a few background paragraphs to Sui-Lee, including the information that there had been no deaths and no human-to-human transmission. She asked why I thought that. I sent her the American C.D.C.’s latest travel alert for China, which had been issued Jan. 6 and was only a level 1 “practice usual precautions.” It said there had been 59 cases with no deaths and “no reports of spread from person to person or to healthcare workers.”
In retrospect, neither Sui-Lee nor I, nor the C.D.C. nor the World Health Organization knew then that, as of Dec. 31, Wuhan’s politically ambitious mayor had ordered a cover-up. He had the market closed and hosed down and eight doctors trying to raise the alarm arrested. He even misled Beijing. So all the information from that time is dicey. Even now, different timelines from that period (examples here, here and here) disagree on basic facts.
The gravity of the situation wasn’t confirmed until Jan. 20, when Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a pulmonologist sometimes called “China’s Fauci,” finished his investigation and said on state TV that Wuhan had a disaster on its hands; the city was locked down on Jan. 23.
Even during the harsh lockdown in Hubei Province, doctors were unsure of the scope of their problem. In mid-February, their P.C.R. testing system was still so overwhelmed that they changed their case definition to include diagnoses by CT scan; their case count went up by 10 times overnight. Lest we sneer: the same thing happened in New York in March and is, to some extent, happening across the United States even now: when you can’t process P.C.R. tests fast enough, you don’t know your real case count. You’re flying blind. — Donald G. McNeil Jr., science and health reporter
"time" - Google News
January 04, 2021 at 01:05AM
https://ift.tt/2JDXFeY
News of 2020, From the Overnight Emails of The New York Times - The New York Times
"time" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3f5iuuC
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "News of 2020, From the Overnight Emails of The New York Times - The New York Times"
Post a Comment