Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A horrific though unverified video has leaked out of China, allegedly from a hospital in Wuhan, showing dead bodies laying in a corridor unattended, with sick people sitting next to them waiting for treatment.
Chinese ‘nurse’ claims corpses of coronavirus victims are left lying in a Wuhan hospital crammed with patients as she warns ‘everyone will end up being infected’ in desperate plea for help
- Self-proclaimed medic filmed three corpses unattended in a hospital corridor
- In a post, she accused authorities of covering up the truth of the epidemic
- She claimed doctors refused to issue diagnoses to control the official figures
- She begged the public ‘to save the people of Wuhan’ in a heart-rending thread
- Outbreak of a new deadly virus has killed 26 people and infected 830 in China
By BILLIE THOMSON FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 23:34 AEDT, 24 January 2020 | UPDATED: 23:56 AEDT, 24 January 2020
Corpses of coronavirus victims are being left unattended in a corridor of a hospital flooded with patients in Wuhan as the Chinese city is ravaged by the deadly infection, it has been revealed.
The chilling scene, captured by a woman who claims to be a nurse, was posted to the country’s social media today but quickly censored.
Dozens of videos posted online appear show people lying in the street after collapsing where they stood as they walked through the streets of Wuhan.
MailOnline has been unable to verify the videos, which have been widely circulated.
In a post, the self-proclaimed medical worker described how patients were being sent in non-stop without any quarantine measures, warning that ‘everyone will end up being infected and dying’.
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It was believed to be filmed at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital, one of the facilities appointed by the government to receive suspected and diagnosed coronavirus patients.
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The following is the video reposted on Twitter;
The daily mail article also has an unverified video of people collapsing in the street, with medical attendants rushing to help them.
According to the Daily Mail, the woman who filmed the video claims authorities are concealing the true scale of the outbreak, keeping casualty figures artificially low, by refusing to issue formal diagnosis for many victims of the outbreak. She claims her husband is ill, but there is no hospital willing to accept him.
Nobody knows how contagious the deadly new virus is, but the Corona virus family includes the common cold. If the deadly new strain is a hybrid which contains DNA RNA from a common cold strain, there is a chance it is extremely contagious. Virus hybrids can occur when a person or animal is simultaneously exposed to multiple virus pathogens.
Obvious there is every chance this new virus will be contained; the Chinese government is sufficiently alarmed that their sclerotic bureaucracy is finally starting to respond appropriately, cancelling large public events and imposing travel bans and roadblocks. The USA has also been especially proactive about imposing border checks.
But its only a matter of time until something nasty slips past the watchers. Stories are appearing, people boasting on social media they took drugs to suppress their fever symptoms, to evade airport biosecurity so they could flee the Corona virus outbreak zone.
I understand the temptation to flee at any cost. Fear of deadly infection is a very primal survival instinct, as strong as our fear of heights or fear of fire. You can’t know what it is like until you have felt it yourself.
I once spent a week in a SARS hotzone on a business trip.
All good until I arrived, then it hit me. I was terrified of the possibility of being alone, sick and vulnerable in a foreign country, far away from people who cared about me. I had horrible nightmares of being misdiagnosed and locked in a quarantine facility with genuinely ill people.
Based on my experience I believe the people most likely to flee are people who have the early symptoms of the virus, who have maybe seen some of their friends and family die, but who are still able to move and hide their symptoms with fever suppressant medication, and who are clinging to the irrational hope that what they have is just an ordinary cold.
The world has worse problems than global warming.
Ric Werme provides a link to a virus expert who helped contain the SARS outbreak, who thinks the Corona outbreak is far worse, and that authorities in China missed the opportunity to contain the virus.
Update (EW): South China Post reports the virus has appeared in 29 of China’s 31 provinces, and that large numbers of doctors and nurses are infected.
Here’s a little information on the outbreak:
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/01/24/First-clinical-studies-show-new-coronavirus-similar-to-SARS/4691579901348/?ts_hn=17
No disrespect to anyone of any creed however, I live with some Chinese folk at the moment and based on their habits (Not washing hands after a visit to the bathroom or sneezing/blowing nose for instance. I won’t go in to the state of cleanliness of the kitchen and bathrooms) I am not surprised Chinese seem to be at the centre of most of these infections (SARS, MERS, bird and swine ‘flu etc), now this.
Another good source with better news. http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/studies-highlight-ncov-similarity-sars-family-transmission. It’s a very bad thing if you are sick nd end up in hospital but there is some evidence that the fatality rate is actually very low, possibly as low as 0.1% which would put it with ordinary cold and flu. As for that video, imagine everyone with a sniffle is terrified that they have this bug and need to be in hospital. It seems to me that most of the people in the hallways were not that sick looking. So this may be more about panic than death. Let’s hope that is the case.
Isn’t Wuhan the site of an Ebola / SARS research site ?
Some report it as a biological warfare development site .
(GP , Fox news )
If true and ” something escaped ” this can be VERY bad .
Ever have any NBC warfare training ?
This may get ugly .
So IF its realt ugly and the Chinese rapidly ’finds’ a Cure or medicin. The original is allmosa certain not a fishmarket or illegal meat trade.
.
Is it just me? Does anyone else think open borders is not such a good idea after all?
“The USA has also been especially proactive about imposing border checks.”
“Is it just me? Does anyone else think open borders is not such a good idea after all?”
You beat me to it.
open borders is stupid and so is global travel all over 3rd world countries for cheap accom etc backpackig etc the miracle is how few diseases have managed to floow people home.
worms and bacterial/ fungal issues, TB and MRSA and other serious hazards however?
job done all over the planet
and the insane lack of cleaning after EVERY trip of airplanes really needs be addressed!
soiled seats hand head rests and food trays etc should be decontaminated immediately passengers decamp.
People are so easily scared. Its a cold virus. The human species has a diverse immune system so no one virus affects each individual the same way. A new virus for which there is no herd immunity will expose virtually everyone over time. A percentage of people will succumb, but the vast majority recover or never get sick in the first place. The survivors, 99+% in most cases are now immune to this virus, although mutations can allow the virus to reemerge, but most people will have partial immunity
This idea of quarantine and forced vaccination (a vaccine is in the pipeline) is silly. Flocking to hospitals with mild cold symptoms is dumb as it overwhelms hospitals and puts you at higher viral load exposure which could overwhelm your immune system enough to cause symptoms whereas a lower level of exposure simply gives you immunity
I travelled to Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai before and during the SARS outbreak. It was delightful, empty planes, no lines. Had to get past the temperature checks so used aspirin and alcohol wiped (my temp always ran high). In Taipei and Shanghai they had home quarantine but enforcement was lax. Never had a sniffle
a vaccine for this?
uh huh
but they have had a decade..and SARS n MERS have no vax..
and its a zoonotic and has already crossed 2 animal hosts and to humans and is now person to person transmissable and mutating as it goes.
good luck with that!
I still wonder about accurate information from China in general and Wuhan in particular. Early in the progression the local authorities have every incentive to NOT report cases because they may believe that if the rates are high, it will reflect badly on their performance. Maybe true, maybe not but….?
If citizens are truly ‘falling dead in the streets’ the situation is very bad. But we will not know exactly how bad until years after this has gone from the public’s attention.
China really needs to shutdown these live animal markets that have snakes, bats, civets and who knows what other animals all in close proximity. It is recipe for disaster with viruses jumping species. Thousands of people I imagine pass through these markets each day. The animals are likely very poorly treated and near death. Their immune systems are weak.
A couple of my coworkers were hungry and decided to buy some kind of meat on bamboo skewers off of a street vendor. Our Chinese colleague showed up a short time later to tell them they were eating rat.
At least it was cooked. One dish we had at a nice restaurant was a whole raw fish sliced thin, with tail still twitching.
ABC news-
ABC News
“So far, 6,600 people have died and 120,000 people have been hospitalized during the 2019-2020 flu season, according to preliminary estimates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday. Of those deaths, 39 were children, a group that’s particularly vulnerable to the flu and its complications.Jan 17, 2020”
No one is freaked out about the “flu epidemic” we have every year in the US. But this corona virus outbreak is terrifying for some reason.
50,000 people a year die in the US from pneumonia.
…but if the rumored increased mortality rate turns out to be true, you’re going to have top add a zero on the end of those mortality numbers.
So instead of a typical 36,000 or so deaths from flu/pneumonia, you’re looking at 360,000.
Or more.
Key word: ‘rumored’
They’ve already warned that the flu vaccines this year, like last, failed to fully cover what is turning out to be the most virulent strain this flu season. I paid the extra $20.00 to get the Fluzone high dose instead of the standard vaccine over a month ago and am just now recovering from a bout with the flu that that was bad enough that I missed two days of work. (That makes 3 sick days used in the last 11 1/2 years for me. )
I think I contracted the flu while at Disney world last week which is probably one of the germiest places in the US.
Life’s a crap shoot, rah. Ya pays yer quarter and ya takes yer chances…
I had a flue shot in Sept 2018, right before I had cardiac artery bypass graft surgery in October. In February 2019, I contracted a bout of flu that lasted 6 days (probably H3N1 strain, which the flu shots did not cover). It transitioned into pneumonia that eventually put me in the hospital for 7 days and tried real hard to kill me. Had more than a liter of fluid extracted from around my left lung and finally left the hospital weak as a kitten… but alive. Upright and above room temperature is a real good thing!
How long before it is claimed as a climate change impact?
FluTrackers.com provides by far the best coverage of this ongoing health disaster.
The various experts providing input there have noted that on the plus side, the disease is mostly killing the older people, unlike the Spanish Flu, which struck down the younger adults preferentially. Also, there seem to be asymptomatic carriers, which indicates the disease is not uniformly virulent.
On the minus side, the mortality rate of the people sick enough to be hospitalized is likely over 20%, based on the experience with the initial set of victims. Moreover, as the local hospitals are now overwhelmed and likely increasingly short of supplies because of the quarantine, the treatment level is sure to deteriorate.
That suggests a very much higher toll is likely.
“Also, there seem to be asymptomatic carriers,”
That might be a problem.
This new virus has been made worse by climate change.
Please ask your local politician to increase climate change research funding.
Thank you!
Okay, about the SARS epidemic: Supposedly an infectious disease was brought to this continent by an infected Chinese national on a plane to Toronto. Thousands of Chinese nationals arrive in North America every day, but apparently only one of them had this extremely infectious disease, which then got loose in a hospital in Toronto and began killing people. No other city in Canada was similarly affected. There were only 27 cases total in the entire United States.
SARS symptoms were basically like the flu or pneumonia which are common and, in many cases, fatal, which suggests that SARS was merely a rare strain of those illnesses. If SARS had been a distinct disease that was as infectious and deadly as the Toronto medical authorities had claimed, there would have been severe outbreaks all over the world within the space of a week. That didn’t happen.
Meanwhile, in Toronto, people were made afraid by wild media reports to ride the subway, and you couldn’t go into a hospital without wearing a surgical mask. The medical authorities who announced the epidemic were lionized instead of condemned for starting a panic over a mild, freak outbreak, and the panic severely impacted Toronto’s tourism industries. Then the epidemic just kind of died out, not because it had been eradicated, but because the authorities just started reporting SARS cases as regular cases of pneumonia or the flu, probably under pressure from business leaders who wanted the epidemic (which never existed as such in the first place) to go away. That’s what happened.
People believe authorities, and news media love creating sensations.
Incidentally, there isn’t a childhood obesity epidemic either. Go to a local school yard and watch the children play at recess. They’re not fat and they’re not inactive. That’s a popular story but anyone who thinks about it can see that it isn’t true.
I don’t have school age kids any more, but the local NH evening news covers high school basketball. Some of the girls are certainly overweight, some may be obese.
Aristotle approached science as something you would think about to determine fundamental truths. Others think that philosophy means that we lost our chance to get off this planet by hundreds of years.
“videos show people collapsing in the streets of Wuhan? ”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7923981/Coronavirus-Disturbing-videos-claim-people-collapsing-Wuhan.html?ito=facebook_share_article-top&fbclid=IwAR1PT9dzOpF0JV9c1VWzkvfLn6_cuUzEz8kLGwRXjdzJgdvFPKb9zGJn8ZU
The claim that the victims are mainly people with pre-existing conditions is questionable. I have also read this disease is like SARS, it kills by triggering a cytokine storm – their own immune system goes crazy and kills them. People with young, healthy immune systems are the most vulnerable to cytokine storms, the strength of the storm is related to the strength of the person’s immune system.
Similarly people with auto-immune conditions such as Lupus, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis HIV and Rheumatoid Arthritis for example likely to be more vulnerable?
The virus has now leaked out of China and we are so far not seeing any significant spread so the fear that it could be as contagious as the common cold seem at this point unfounded. Corona virus such as MERS and SARS can spread through body fluids. So far the only cases I am seeing are people who were in China or who were in “intimate contact” (which is generally code for a sex partner) with someone who was.
If this virus were that contagious we would be seeing larger numbers of cases outside of China by now. Also note that this is also flu season in China and while China massively under-reports flu deaths, they are estimated to number in most years around 100,000 or more. The US alone had 15,000 flu deaths a few years back and is currently at over 6000 deaths so far this season. Flu and this virus have similar symptoms and both will kill people with other underlying conditions. It’s probably normal to see hallways with dead people in a city like Wuhan (three times the population of Los Angeles) during flu season.
The thing to watch is how the disease spreads outside of China and so far it doesn’t appear to be anything to massively worry about. Your chances of dying from flu are much higher.
Given what people who’ve been to China confided in several posts above about the relative lack of modern sanitation protocols there, I suspect that this virus is probably best spread under those conditions–zoonotic exposures, unsanitary eating and dishwashing practices and filthy toilets not to mention the sheer density of these urban populations. Just washing one’s hands might make a resounding difference.
BTW, if you’d like to boost your immunity to every passing bug, the single best thing you can do besides hand-washing is to banish SUGAR from your diet. The amount of sugar contained in just one soft drink suppresses the action of your T-cells down to almost nothing for 6 full hours after consumption. Might want to re-think that Big Gulp!
“The amount of sugar contained in just one soft drink suppresses the action of your T-cells down to almost nothing for 6 full hours after consumption. Might want to re-think that Big Gulp!”
Goldrider,
I’m no fan of sugar or carbs, esp,. the processed kind, but do you have any links to studies proving that sugar lowers the T-cell immune response? Scientists think it has been suppressed by by our cleanliness as children don’t pick up bugs that activate them when young. They think that could be one reason for the rise in asthma. Our air is cleaner than its been in 100 years so, contrary to Obama, our air is not causing asthma. The CDC corrected him on his statement because we simply don’t know what causes it. T-Cells are a possible culprit but it has certainly not been proven that’s it’s due to sugar.
In the past, polio was a middle class disease (or, rich–think FDR). The children of the poor did not get polio having built up the immune response by playing in dirt etc. when young, activating T-celss which fought it off.
We know there is a much lower incidence of asthma in the children of farmers who are exposed to much dust from birth. That is another area of study that supports the this theory as the cause, not air..
Eliminating all other factors for the cause of diseases and signaling out one, is extremely
difficult.
If there is current research that points the finger at sugar for a failure of T-cells to activate, I’d like to see it.
Interesting articles in The Lancet on the 24th, albeit based on on a very small sample size of around 40 cases. Seems like a Lower Repository Tract infection that has a tendency to induce a cytokine storm, and if memory serves, thats what made the Spanish Flu so deadly, with folk tales of victims who were standing at breakfast time and gone by afternoon tea.
The embarrassing video’s that made it out through the Great Wall seem to have ceased, and Twitter may well be suppressing material that casts doubt on the real situation.
My guess would be that this new zoonotic is far enough out of the starting blocks to have all governments worried about scaring the horses. If you hold airline shares, it may be an idea to dump them and reinvest in 3M products 🙂
If you drive about 30 minutes up-wind from the epicenter in Wuhan you’ll find you’re near China’s Class4 biological research facility.
This virus is a war crime.
Wuhan is the location of China’s only laboratory designed to handle the most virulent of infectious diseases.
Makes one wonder if they’ve been playing with something particularly lethal & somebody’s let it out.
Shutting down all travel out of the area, building a new 1,000 bed hospital in 5 days.
None of this was done with the SARS outbreak.
They’re very worried.
Here is a video of the area where they are frantically working to build a 1,000 bed tent hospital. They plan to have it up and running in 7 days. … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRKovtB4L90
I was in china during the sars outbreak. I remember flying on a plane which was leaking hydraulic fluid from the engine next to me. The guy next to me says in broken English ‘Jeff, you fraid sars’. I looked out the window at the engine and turned back to him and shook my head vigorously saying ‘nope’.
Extinction Rebellion activists have been asked to go to China to assist in blocking all travel and movement, in light of their developed expertise. Sadly so far, no Extinction Rebellion volunteers have come forward.
Great idea.
I think there should be a U S Congressional delegation sent there to get the real facts. Schiff, Nadler, Waters and Pelosi would be good candidates for that.
Most likely this virus came from Andromeda.
That Strain’s my credulity, but I don’t have a better suggestion.
“…showing dead bodies laying in a corridor unattended…”
That’s quite an image.
https://www.britannica.com/story/lay-lie-lied-lain-when-do-we-use-which
Where’s that Simpsons cartoon?
Time to “Break open your neighbours heads and feast on the goey bits”?
We have an information vacuum and it is too soon to trust anyone.
We can read the closure of Wuhan any way we want,authoritarian states do things their way.
And if this is The Pandemic” we are constantly warned of?
Face it we are doomed to do the pandemic cycle,our current leadership and institutions are too stupid and toothless to prevent anything.
Even if the threat was clearly defined.
Look back to the 1918 flue pandemic,now add air travel,tourism and human rights declarations..
Trying to stop a flu like virus from spreading, while continuing trading goods and services?
Damn near hopeless.
That Strain’s my credulity, but I don’t have better suggestion.