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.
Well again the main modern reason for spreading of new Virus’s and diseases quickly can be linked to air travel. In this day and age you can travel from an infected area on an aluminum tube in the sky for 14 to 18 hours with recirculated air to save the airlines a little fuel and money. So if someone is on the plane that has the new disease and they are in the communicable stage of that said disease then the chances of a major outbreak increase dramatically. The incubation period of this virus is said to be around two weeks. So if cases are showing up in different countries then there should be an uptick in the reported cases in the two week period at or around the new locations. The CDC in the states is “monitoring” the situation and they are a long way from issuing a directive to limit air travel.
In the past we have seen outbreaks of Cholera in Los Angles where an infected person from India went about his business in LA spreading the infection while still showing slight symptoms of the disease. Another time the Canadian Health Department told the people of Canada there was NO worry from the last Ebola outbreak from Africa and all travelers from the area were been quarantined. A week later it was discovered that a male member of a family who had just buried his mother and she had died of Ebola. They totally missed that guy because he traveled through Spain on his way back and the border agents did not ask him if he had been to the infected area. It took two weeks to track that individual down to actually put him in quarantine. A little late for the rest of the people who were in contact with this case. Luck is a big factor in this and if you are depending on the government to protect us you maybe disappointing.
Remember all those Zika deaths? This one could be just as bad.
Not to trivialize, but most of us should be more worried about getting enough sleep, exercise and eating our Wheaties. Heart disease and stroke are the top killers of people worldwide, at around 54 % of deaths in 2016, and those two have held this position for the last 15 years.
WHO link: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-causes-of-death
Lower respiratory infections have faded from third- to fourth- highest cause of mortality between 2000 and 2016. The top infectious disease killers are still COPD, tuberculosis and malaria.
I know there’s a story at the micro-level here, the virologists and the epidemiologists who are finding cures, but the real meta-story is how fast humans are learning to combat our diseases, live longer, live better. Our technologies change so fast that our diagnoses, treatments and communication about disease outbreaks outstrip our ability to make sense of them. Our reactions are still pretty primal. (Witness the ongoing alarm over the weather Gods). When AI finally learns to manage our public health resources, a thermal imaging satellite will spot the rural province of China where the next infectious virus is incubating, a robotic drone will descend on the farm and a laser will vaporize the animal in its pen before the animal-to-human mutation ever takes place.
Till then, we are like the Chinese guy caught on camera in the airport tasked with checking temperatures on foreheads with an infrared imaging gun that we don’t quite understand. As each masked individual in the long queue approached, he gently pushed back the individual’s hair or hat with his left hand, took a reading with the gun in his right, then waved the next person forward. Having the tools is one thing, knowing what to do with them is another.
Meanwhile, the massive shutdowns of cities is an over-reaction that can only be understood in terms of the Chinese history of social manipulation and engineering. It is certainly causing more fear than is necessary. Government culling of millions of pigs with African swine flu created a shortage of the most popular meat in China, leading to illicit meat sources coming in the “back door”. The laws of unintended consequences in full display.
An interesting note, the virus in China has spread to Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, but not to North Korea. Says much about NK.
This morning news is saying that the corona virus is infectious during its incubation period of 1 to 14 days. This is different from SARs and previous versions of the corona. That doesn’t sound very good.
There are cases popping up in Asia, USA and Australia of people who bought it back from infected areas. If it’s as bad as they say, expect clusters to quickly develop around them. Keep an eye on death rates in these countries. Not only will reporting be more honest, but first world health and hygiene goes a long way. I guess we’ll know within two or three weeks if this is another beat-up. My rule of thumb is that media panic is inversely proportional to actual threat.
How soon before this is blamed on Climate Change?
As for monitoring the response of the Chinese government to this could satellite imaging show the extent of a blockade of road, rail and air transportation? Could this be used to estimate the area quarantined? Photos from third party satellites appeared quickly after the missile strike on the air base in Iraq.
Also awaiting accounts of people evacuated from area affected.
The Wuhan coronavirus may be much more dangerous than SARS based on two new pieces of information that was just released from China.
1) People are contagious with Wuhan coronavirus before they have a fever or are sick.
2) China’s National Health Commission said the transmission ability of this virus is getting stronger which if true would mean the Wuhan coronavirus has mutated. A mutation to that increases virus’s ability to be transmitted is possible.
Our systems (look for sick people and isolate sick people, measure temperature of people at airports, train stations, and so on) to stop SARS worked because people who were infected with SARS were not contagious, until they got a fever and at which time they were seriously sick.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/26/health/coronavirus-spread-symptoms-chinese-officials/index.html
(CNN) China’s health minister Ma Xiaowei made a startling statement Sunday about the Wuhan coronavirus: He said people can spread it before they become symptomatic.
“This is a game changer,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a longtime adviser to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It’s much harder to contain a virus — to track down a patient’s contacts and quarantine them immediately — if the patient was spreading the disease for days or weeks before they even realized they had it.
“It means the infection is much more contagious than we originally thought,” said Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “This is worse than we anticipated.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51254523
This is a significant development in our understanding of the virus and the lengths China will have to go to, to stop it.
People with Sars (the last deadly coronavirus outbreak to hit China) and Ebola are contagious only when symptoms appear.
Such outbreaks are relatively easy to stop – identify and isolate people who are sick and monitor anyone they came into contact with.
Flu, however, is the most famous example of a virus that you spread before you even know you’re ill.
We are not at the stage where people are saying this could be a global pandemic like swine flu.
There are still crucial questions – how infectious are people during the incubation period, and did any of the patients outside China spread the disease in those countries before becoming sick?
And why did China’s National Health Commission say the transmission ability of this virus is getting stronger?
It will be a disaster for whole world, I read somewhere that “Corona Virus” starts from “Bat Soup” serving in some cities in China. Oh God, people recorded videos with live CCTV cam, boiling bats in sore soup.
Here are a few new headlines today on the virus, a 33 year old German catches the virus from a friend visiting from Shanghai. … https://globalnews.ca/news/6472303/german-coronavirus-human-to-human-transmission/
and … https://globalnews.ca/news/6475792/china-coronavirus-health-death-toll-132/
Along with that last link is the claim that there were 1500 new cases from yesterday which brings their total to 6,000+.
Release date December 6 2019
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DVeiKu2XnVCg&ved=2ahUKEwjKt62TnajnAhWrLqYKHTW3CnwQo7QBMAB6BAgAEAI&usg=AOvVaw1tVFNld2b4HqJxhIMxcb0i
You all better hope they are crisis actors and this is all fake because global collapse is coming.
Eric, so we “denials” finally landet “where we belong” – at conspiracy theories. Hold your breath.