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COVID-19 in Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

From Austin Bay:

When COVID-19 struck Iran, the ayatollahs followed the same script. They lied and denied, and the contagion began to kill.

Pompeo’s insinuation that the regime harmed its own people had a factual basis. The day before he offered help, evidence emerged that Iran was a COVID-19 hotspot. Moreover, infected Iranians had spread the pathogen to several other countries.

Pompeo challenged the dictatorship to act responsibly and let competent international actors provide direct aid. Dictatorships like Iran’s use aid as a political tool. They deny aid to dissidents. Iranian political authorities, from low to high, also have a notorious reputation for stealing food and medical aid to either sell on the black market or use themselves. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is reportedly hoarding masks…

No one knows how many Iranians have contracted the virus, though that applies to 50 other nations as well. But Iran has a lot. Estimates range from 2,400 to 10,000. Senior leaders themselves may be responsible for spreading the disease. Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi and vice president for Women and Family Affairs Masoumeh Ebtekar have COVID-19. An Iranian website reported Ebtekar met with President Hassan Rouhani and other ministers shortly before testing positive. One report says 23 members of parliament have the virus.

We don’t know what’s happening in Iran, and not just with COVID-19. But there certainly are signs that the illness is worse there than in most countries. And there is no reason we should trust any report coming from Iran, as was demonstrated by their blatant and obvious lying about the downing of the Ukrainian airplane, Flight 752.

Comments

COVID-19 in Iran — 62 Comments

  1. Early into the first days of reports and videos emerging from Wuhan a few of these accounts contained stories and images of adults collapsing on the streets as they walked along. These were not elderly people, but ordinary looking thirty and forty somethings.

    This same phenomenon has begun to be apparent in Iran now. I’ve seen perhaps seven or eight examples in the last couple of weeks. I haven’t seen this from any other nation.

    This is a wholly anecdotal thing, a not necessarily significant issue. On the other hand, today comes a story suggesting that there may be two novel (related) coronavirus strains abroad and spreading. So, I wonder, are these collapsing younger and middle agers suffering from the worse strain of these suggested two.

    Something? Nothing? Can’t say, but it’s not out of the realm of the possible, I think.

  2. Based on what I’ve seen in watching this story (the virus in general) for a month and a half, I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove waiting for a conclusive, consistent or even necessarily logical response from the community of those who should know more about this stuff than us, at least not anytime soon.

  3. It’s hard to tell what’s going on. My husband got in touch by text with a good friend in Italy, living near Genoa. He says the whole country is shut down.

    China, Iran, and Italy have in common a large number of smokers, which would predispose them to respiratory illnesses. China and Iran have in common top-down central authority which acts to suppress reports rather than to act quickly in response. Perhaps we will learn more from Italy, a much freer country. It has, however, an aging population, which might be why the death rate seems high.

  4. Well, here in the Puget Sound area the media and government are in full on freak out hysteria but if one goes out there is almost no sign of anything different (unless you want to buy disinfectant).

    That nursing home in Kirkland has produced 9 of 10 deaths last I heard and a large portion of the other cases in King and Snohomish counties further proving that this virus is really bad for the sick and elderly but at least here if you are younger and healthier it’s similar to other flu like illnesses.

  5. Yes, I just came here to point out that Italy seems to have lost control of the situation. And that it doesn’t match the pattern of authoritarian China and Iran.

    Glad to see Kate’s thoughts. Yet another theory: the Italian authorities are incompetent

  6. My sister works at the American Embassy School in Delhi. She said that it was announced today that the K-5 portion of the school will be shut down until March 31, but the grades 6-12 are (for now) still in session.

  7. In the realm of unreliable information, I’ve read and heard that either 1) no one under the age of 15 has gotten sick, or 2) no one under the age of 10 has died. Those are two related but radically different claims.

    Another claim that I think has some legitimacy is that in South Korea they have pegged the fatality rate at a little less than 1%. They have done more than 1 million RNA tests for the virus, probably a much higher percentage of the population than any other country. They have found large numbers of infected who didn’t even know they had any illness. So that 1% number is based on all those who have tested positive.

  8. We now have a cruise ship (another Princess) off San Francisco with multiple cases of “flu”. It just came from Mexico.

    It is going to be interesting to see what the Democrats and the 9th Circuit have to say about stopping illegals from crossing the southern border. Also what sanctuary cities and states do as they begin to recognize the danger. Also what liberal politicians say about their street encampments when that population becomes infected.

    There may be a great awakening due to corona virus.

  9. What’s curious is how the death rate has varied from place to place. In China, it’s currently running at about 3.7%; in Japan, 1.9%; in South Korea, 0.6%; in the rest of the Far East, about 0.9% in aggregate. In Iran, it’s currently running at 3.1%; in the rest of the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia, the rate is 0% – 200+ cases and not one death. In India and points adjacent, the death rate is also 0% – 35 cases and no fatalities. In Italy (and San Marino), the rate is 3.5%; in the rest of Europe, it is < 0.5%.

  10. One theory I’ve seen is it’s lower in warmer climates just like the flu thrives in the colder times of year. And of course competent government and health care systems helps as it seems like South Korea has done a pretty good job and one big reason they have so many cases and so few deaths is they were testing huge amounts of people thus identifying a bunch of mild cases.

    We will probably never know but I would bet the death rate is much lower in China because probably thousands more had very mild cases that weren’t reported or counted.

  11. And it’s nice to see the stock market handling this with rational, reasoned moves. For example the Dow is up 3% (700 points) this week. Sounds nice. Of course to get there it has had consecutive days of +1100, -700, +1200, -900. The machines are running rampant.

  12. One thing that does seem clear is we are well and truly effed if we ever get something that has the communicability of the flu or COVID-19 but a death rate like MERS (34%!!!). The neoliberal global economy can’t function with the restrictions needed to handle an emergency like that.

    Mike

  13. Griffin, that nursing home in Kirkland, WA, is the source of our one case here in Raleigh, NC. A man visited someone there, then flew home on Feb. 22. He began to feel unwell on Feb. 25, and called the county health services. They tested him at home (positive), and he was in self-quarantine, doing well. Except that he decided to go out for supper in a popular local shopping center last weekend. Sheesh. Now they’re trying to find everyone who ate there and might have been near him, besides putting the server in quarantine and the owners having to do an intensive cleaning of the restaurant. I read that a patient in New Hampshire was self-quarantined but felt it urgent to attend a conference last Friday. It’s good to live in a free country. Unfortunately some of our fellow citizens lack civic responsibility.

  15. It’s interesting to read the worldometers site on the virus. They try to include the contact tracking info and many of the new cases around the world can be tracked to Iran or Italy. Iran – probably due to visits to religious sites. Italy – travel for skiing, sports, whatever. But, yes, take with a grain of salt with respect to the reporting country.

    For China – there is the air pollution, smoking, poor sanitary issues (spitting, no hand washing, open markets, etc.) and close living conditions. For Iran – I would suspect poor hygiene, close living and social/religious issues. For Italy – I suspect close living environment as well as social issues.

    Some countries are not even trying to do contact tracking, like Germany. I wonder why? I think some areas of the US are not trying to track (WA, CA) since it would highlight social issues.

    It does bother me that the press is using such dire words in describing the problem. If one or two deaths and fifty+ new cases is described in OMG terms, what’s going to happen when the daily count is in the 100s of deaths and 1000s of new cases. They are using up all the good scare words!!!!

  16. Except that he decided to go out for supper in a popular local shopping center last weekend.

    Publish his name, and these Palookas quit doing it.

  17. County health services are not publishing the name, probably because of medical privacy rules.

  18. MBunge:

    On getting hit with an illness that is highly communicable and highly fatal – you might want to take a look at this previous post of mine:

    I’ve read that for infectious diseases, lethality and ease of contagion are ordinarily (not always) somewhat in opposition. That makes sense, because if a disease is quickly and highly lethal, the sufferer will have much less opportunity to be walking around with it in his or her most contagious stages, and therefore will tend to infect fewer people.

    That’s why many illnesses that are highly widespread – take the common cold, which is called “common” for a reason – are usually mild (although tell that to the cold sufferer).

  19. probably because of medical privacy rules.

    Are we in an emergency or not, Kate?

  20. Art Deco; Griffin; Liz:

    About variation of death and infection rates in different countries, such a phenomenon is not unusual. Please see this previous post, where I quote from this article:

    Worldwide, an estimate of the mortality of the 1918–1919 pandemic is 50 million deaths, with a range of up to 100 million deaths. Taking the 50 million figure, this was about 2.5% of the world population. By contrast, in the United States, mortality was on the order of 0.5%. Clearly, the rest of the world was struck more severely, on average, than the United States.

    India serves as a useful vignette. Mortality in India was staggering, with estimates of 18.5 million persons dead and higher. Indeed, the Indian peasant population was so severely affected that economics Nobel laureate Theodore W. Schultz used the pandemic as a natural experiment in per capita agricultural output.

    See also this article that I quoted in that same post. The article focuses on the 1918 flu in India and other third-world countries vs. first-world countries:

    Though other countries lost a higher fraction of their populations—Western Samoa (now Samoa) lost 22 percent, for example, compared to 6 percent in India—because of the larger size of the Indian population, that 6 percent translated into a staggering slew of death. Between 1918 and 1920, an estimated 18 million Indians lost their lives to influenza or its complications, making India the focal point of the disaster in terms of mortality. Asia as a whole experienced some of the highest flu-related death rates in those years, but the story of how the disease ravaged the continent is relatively unknown. The 1918 flu pandemic has been called the “forgotten” pandemic, and ironically the continent that seems to have forgotten it most thoroughly is the one that bore the brunt of it…

    Hunger weakens the immune system, and hunger was rife in many regions of the world in 1918, partly due to disrupted supply lines. Other infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and typhus, had made inroads into human populations, capitalising on the disruption wrought by war and rendering their victims more vulnerable than usual to a new respiratory infection. Large numbers of people, both troops and refugees, were on the move, providing the ideal vehicle for disseminating that infection. Meanwhile, the very lack of mobility of one group may have helped brew a particularly lethal germ that year, or at least kept it lethal for longer. Once the virus reached the Western Front—the 16-kilometre-wide system of trenches that gashed France from the Belgian to the Swiss border—it encountered large numbers of young men who, packed into those trenches, did not go anywhere for weeks or months. Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, has argued that under such exceptional conditions, the evolutionary pressure on the virus to moderate its virulence may have been relieved. It became the mobile one in the host-virus relationship, and it raced through the trenches, killing as it went.

    Flu pandemics have a characteristic structure, engulfing the world in waves. The first wave, sometimes called the herald wave, is often quite mild, resembling a seasonal flu. This tends to be followed by a more deadly second wave, and in some cases, subsequent waves of varying severity. The flu pandemic of 1918, though unusually virulent, was no different in this respect. There was a mild herald wave in the northern-hemisphere spring of 1918, a much more lethal second wave in the latter part of that year, and a final recrudescence in the early months of 1919, which was intermediate in severity between the other two. The pattern was repeated in the southern hemisphere, but it was staggered in time with respect to the north, meaning that the waves tended to strike later there. The pandemic is conventionally considered to have been over by March 1920, although earlier this year, the epidemiologist Dennis Shanks and his colleagues at the University of Queensland in Brisbane reported that it dragged on in the Pacific islands for another year, with cases still being reported in New Caledonia in July 1921.

  21. Art Deco

    Violation of HIPPA regulations are a big deal in the real world. County health departments probably don’t want to fund a lawyers retirement or incur the wrath of the Federal Government.

  22. Art Deco:

    Kate is reporting the policy, not setting the policy.

    What would you propose? Revealing the person’s name and setting the Twitter mobs upon them?

    Or making the person carry a bell, as used to occur with lepers?

    Or quarantining the person in a facility, a la Typhoid Mary?

    I suppose the person could wear an ankle bracelet if he or she keeps violating the quarantine. But I am relatively sure there are other people walking around with the virus who don’t know it.

  23. What would you propose? Revealing the person’s name and setting the Twitter mobs upon them?

    Yep.

  24. Violation of HIPPA regulations are a big deal in the real world.

    We’re either in an emergency or we aren’t. Can’t let the lawyers run this one.

  25. About variation of death and infection rates in different countries, such a phenomenon is not unusual.

    The curio at this point in time is that countries with similar levels of affluence have quite different mortality rates. See Iran v. the rest of the Near East &c. See Italy v. the rest of Europe. See Japan v. the rest of the Far East. The American case is partially explained by the virus infecting a nursing home in surburban Seattle. That accounts for eight of the 12 deaths reported in the U.S. so far. We’re still doing poorly even deducting that particular disaster.

  26. “It’s interesting to read the worldometers site on the virus”

    Yes, I like their formatting of the info. This site’s software doesn’t like the URL for some reason and silently discards comments containing it. For the record
    www dot worldometers dot info slash coronavirus

  27. “Publish his name, and these Palookas quit doing it.” – Art Deco.

    If only it were that easy. You would think that previous publicized cases would have an impact on their behavior (the Ebola nurse was pretty roundly criticized), but, sadly, no. Somehow, the selfish people who do things like this never seem to realize that the prior situations also apply to them, and the prohibitions most certainly do not.
    And, of course, at this point, the damage is already done.

    However, I will grant the occasional salutary effects of publicity.
    When my mother was president of our local library board, they had a serious problem with over-due books. On her suggestion, they published a notice in the town paper that, at the end of the month, any still lagging patrons would have their names listed in that edition.
    Books flooded in.
    Not all of them, of course, but enough — having lived there all her life, she knew most of the people on the late list, and was pretty sure they would not like to gain a reputation for being so un-civic-minded.
    These days, most people don’t know enough others, don’t care about their local reputations (some apparently don’t even care about their national reputations), and the newspaper would be sued for libel.

  28. “The curio at this point in time is that countries with similar levels of affluence have quite different mortality rates.”

    A portion of the problem is the mess with the testing. If I understand correctly, there is this complex real-time reverse transcriptase PCR machine that comes with a software suite to automate its operation. The first step in using it is running the self-test.

    I recall using these $30K Hewlett Packard dual channel dynamic signal analyzers. Among the 50 buttons is one called Self-Test. Press that button and wait 3 minutes. Usually it tells you it passed, but on numerous occasions it failed. Send it back to the company and wait 6 months.

    I heard just minutes ago that the number of detected cases in NY state just doubled over night. So whatever mortality rate NY had yesterday (maybe zero?), it was perhaps cut in half today. What happened? Four days ago a total of 15K testing kits had been shipped in the US. One or two days ago a million testing kits had been shipped in the US. We’re counting testing kits that actually work, as opposed to last week’s faulty testing kits that only succeed in wasting people’s time.

  29. Well, Art Deco, we may be in an emergency, but it’s not an “emergency” emergency.
    And the lawyers always get to run things.
    Unless you cut down all the laws in England.

    https://www.redstate.com/elizabeth-vaughn/2020/03/03/pelosi-delayed-vote-on-coronavirus-funding-so-dccc-could-run-super-tuesday-ads-against-7-gop-candidates/

    Pelosi’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’: She Held Back Coronavirus Funding Bill so DCCC Could Run Super Tuesday Ads Against GOP
    Posted at 7:00 pm on March 3, 2020 by Elizabeth Vaughn

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a despicable woman with no redeeming qualities.

    During her weekly press conference last Thursday, she said, “Lives are at stake. This is not a time for name-calling or playing politics.”

    Shortly after it had ended she was criticizing President Trump over his administration’s response to the coronavirus crisis as anemic, opaque, too late and often chaotic.

    All the while, Pelosi was holding back a House bill to provide funding to fight it.

  30. Art Deco has the answers regarding other persons rights, responsibilities, human behavior, and of course the law too. Cloud coo coo land, and get off my lawn.

  31. The question that has been raised is whether this is a serious enough emergency to justify throwing out privacy laws and freedom for individuals. My vote would be no. This isn’t Ebola, or SARS, or the middle eastern one, with very high death rates. The more we learn about the real infection rate, the more it seems that, like flu, older people with pre-existing health problems are most at risk, and at a rate similar to flu. As a nurse friend has pointed out to me, we don’t quarantine people for flu, although tens of thousands die from it in the US every year.

    If I found out the name of the idiot who went out to supper in Cameron Village, I wouldn’t respect him. Would I go burn down his house? No. But somebody might. As it is, I would support the restaurant owner if he decided to sue the jerk for the cost of cleaning up his restaurant, and the possible loss of business.

  32. Kate on March 5, 2020 at 8:43 pm said:
    The question that has been raised is whether this is a serious enough emergency to justify throwing out privacy laws and freedom for individuals. My vote would be no. This isn’t Ebola, or SARS, or the middle eastern one, with very high death rates. The more we learn about the real infection rate, the more it seems that, like flu, older people with pre-existing health problems are most at risk, and at a rate similar to flu. As a nurse friend has pointed out to me, we don’t quarantine people for flu, although tens of thousands die from it in the US every year.

    If I found out the name of the idiot who went out to supper in Cameron Village, I wouldn’t respect him. Would I go burn down his house? No. But somebody might. As it is, I would support the restaurant owner if he decided to sue the jerk for the cost of cleaning up his restaurant, and the possible loss of business.

    * * *
    Sometimes, lawyers can be good for something.
    Whether there are relevant statutes supporting the suit are something else, but (I actually do agree with Art Deco), there should be some painful consequences for being a selfish lout.

    As for “but if it were really serious” – that didn’t work out too well either.
    And the lawyers were the the bad guys in this one. That’s the way our system works. (This is not about the same patient, by the way, but it’s the same mindset)

    https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2020/03/04/coronavirus-patient-screw-quarantine-pal/

    New Hampshire’s first confirmed coronavirus patient was discovered recently and as has been happening in many places around the country, the hospital worker was told to stay home and remain isolated for 14 days. Seems like a solid plan, right? Perhaps not so much. We’ve now learned that there was some sort of “invitation only” event on Friday that the patient really wanted to attend. So they [sic, and I hate it] did. Without telling anyone.

    Now the original patient is supposedly back home and in self-quarantine,but so are all of the event attendees who came in “close contact” with them. How many people each of them came in close contact with before being quarantined remains unknown. (NBC Boston)
    …
    I’ve pretty much given up on asking whether or not we learned anything from the Ebola outbreak back in 2014 because we’ve obviously learned nothing. A self-quarantine solution only works if every single person involved goes along with it. If you have ten infected people and nine of them stay in isolation, the one person who refuses can infect ten more people in no time flat.
    …
    How do we know this is always going to happen? Because it always happens. Let’s take a short stroll down memory lane for a moment and remember a young lady named Kaci Hickox from Maine. She’s a nurse who was overseas treating people with Ebola in 2014. When she returned home, her flight arrived in New Jersey and she was ordered to go into quarantine while doctors figured out what to do. How did she respond? She sued the Governor and threatened to just leave anyway, claiming that mandatory quarantines were cruel and inhuman.

    Hickox flew the coup and went back to Maine where she was supposed to be staying inside her home. But she was soon seen out bicycling around the neighborhood. That cause the state government in Maine to move to make her home quarantine mandatory. So she threatened a fresh round of lawsuits.

    And keep in mind that we’re talking about a nurse. A nurse who literally worked with Ebola patients. If anyone should have known better it was her, but she just flipped everyone the bird and did as she pleased. And now we’re seeing the same pattern in New Hampshire. I’m still holding out hope that this virus remains non-lethal for the vast majority of infected persons. If so, it may yet just wash over the country with most people never even needing to go to the hospital and leave the population with native immunity. But if this thing morphs into Captain Trips, our chance at containing it is probably already lost. And self-quarantines aren’t going to be the answer.

    Now would be a good time for “the government” and “the public” to talk about what would be the “red line” that flips us from America’s social-conscience-dependent self-quarantine tradition, and going full authoritarian. If we wait for the moment to come to us, I guarantee the wrong decision will be made, regardless of which path the government takes.

    Of course, we knew in 2014 that we needed to make these decisions, and kicked the can down the road politically (I don’t know if CDC made any headway on protocols, but they aren’t the government and may not have enforcement authority).
    NOTE: there was more than just one Ebola patient jumping quarantine.

    https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2014/10/27/nurse-doctors-fiancee-released-from-hospital-quarantines/

    Those protocols could be better designed and applied more consistently, but the truth is that exposure to Ebola cases have already infected three American health-care professionals, with two of those infections in the US, and we’ve had at least one traveler who became patient zero for those secondary infections. After the CDC’s errors and the failures of Spencer and Vinson to self-isolate effectively, a more hygienic and mandatory response to protect American population centers should not be out of the question.

    It’s not out of the question, but we don’t seem to have come up with the answers.

  33. The question that has been raised is whether this is a serious enough emergency to justify throwing out privacy laws and freedom for individuals. My vote would be no.

    This bozo at Dartmouth – who is a medical center employee, hopefully a discharged medical center employee – was told to stay home for 14 days, and instruction to which he gave lip service. He then leaves his home, quite gratuitously, to par-tay. His frivolity has infected one other person (verified) and has sent public health officials chasing down a few dozen others that he needlessly exposed. You either treat this sort of behavior harshly – and I mean take him out into the public square and lock him in a pillory – or you will not suppress it. He’s a carrier. He ain’t got no rights.

    As for the ‘privacy laws’, some aspects are an innovation of the last 30-odd years (the regulations governing HIV information were exceptionally silly when I was in the trade). They are optional conventions of a certain utility. And that is all. If you’re serious about something, you do not put lawyers in charge of it, because all they do is prevent others from doing their jobs. People also have property rights. In an emergency situation, they can obey an evacuation order or accept that they aren’t going to be rescued if things go south for them.

  34. If only it were that easy. You would think that previous publicized cases would have an impact on their behavior (the Ebola nurse was pretty roundly criticized), but, sadly, no. Somehow, the selfish people who do things like this never seem to realize that the prior situations also apply to them, and the prohibitions most certainly do not.And, of course, at this point, the damage is already done.

    Do you want to improve matters or not?

    As for the ebola nurse, she shouldn’t have been criticized. She should have been tossed in jail. When permitted to emerge, she should have been stripped of her nursing license.

  35. https://www.cnsnews.com/article/national/melanie-arter/dr-fauci-80-percent-coronavirus-patients-spontaneously-recover

    NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Senate Subcommittee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Tuesday that 80 percent of the 90,000 people who have been infected by the novel coronavirus, also referred to as COVID-19, “spontaneously recover,” meaning they get better without any specific intervention.

  36. “If you’re serious about something, you do not put lawyers in charge of it, because all they do is prevent others from doing their jobs. ” – Art Deco
    “Do you want to improve matters or not?” – Art Deco

    Those really are the $64,000 questions aren’t they?

    I think it really boils down to the meaning of “improve” and “matters.”
    And we aren’t agreeing on either of those.
    In fact, we are fighting over the answers in every election.

    The socialists want to improve matters (to their specifications), and are pretty serious about doing it; so far as I can tell, their lawyers are only in charge of making sure no one else can do their jobs.
    Now, write the same sentence substituting “capitalists,” “fascists,” “anarchists,” “liberals,” and “conservatives” and see if anything changes – I think it does.

    We don’t seem to have the answers, but that doesn’t mean we should stop asking the questions BEFORE we have to have them.

    At some point, all societies reach the limit in some situation where you have to tell people “do this or take the consequences,” and then make sure you have (a) told them the right thing to do; and (b) impose the consequences.

    The only thing guaranteed is we will get something wrong, most of the time; but that will hopefully be balanced by doing more things right.

    And I know: hope is not a plan.

  37. “As for the ebola nurse, she shouldn’t have been criticized. She should have been tossed in jail. When permitted to emerge, she should have been stripped of her nursing license.”

    Isn’t this incandescently obvious?

    Letting this woman wander around loose was roughly like letting someone licensed to carry a gun drive around shooting at random people.

    Bad idea.

  38. Okay, not they’re talking about something serious.

    https://www.hoover.org/research/scourge-pandemics

    Fester N Boyle Tom • 2 hours ago
    I have been in multiple cities and the groceries often have samples out. Castco as marzzz points out, Sams Club I assume are the same. The local grocery has cubes of cookies or cake in the bakery, and cheese at the deli. Bubba thinks those toothpicks are for his teeth as he grabs 3 pieces with his grubby fists to chow down upon.

    The American public has very poor hygiene habits. The buffet restaurants are about to be wuhanned out of existence.

    Wuhanned is now a verb, BTW.

    “I think I got Wuhanned in Tulum Mexico two weeks ago.”
    “People of Qom probably ( i heard) decided to dont get wuhanned and started fleeing from the possibility of a city lock down.”
    “looks like the thread is being Wuhanned now”

  39. JimNorCal on March 5, 2020 at 4:04 pm said:
    Yes, I just came here to point out that Italy seems to have lost control of the situation. And that it doesn’t match the pattern of authoritarian China and Iran.

    Glad to see Kate’s thoughts. Yet another theory: the Italian authorities are incompetent
    * * *
    Just coincidentally ran across an old, very unPC joke, along those lines.
    No offense to the Italians among us, but it’s a very equal-opportunity-ethnic offender. *

    “When I was a girl, my father joked that Heaven had French chefs, German engineers, Italian lovers and British police. Hell, meanwhile, had French engineers, German lovers, Italian police and British chefs.”

    Nobody’s medical authorities are mentioned, but the joke is older than the NHS in Britain and its EU cognates.

    Colorado is on the COVID map now, but both patients (presumably) caught it in Europe.

    https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/coronavirus/colorado-reports-first-confirmed-case-of-covid-19-in-summit-county

    *The joke is from this rather maddening, and yet hilarious, post about Britain.
    https://www.lawliberty.org/2020/03/04/the-great-trans-rights-post-brexit-looniness/

  40. “Bubba thinks those toothpicks are for his teeth as he grabs 3 pieces with his grubby fists to chow down upon.”

    It’s enraging to see how often these think-tank minions attack Americans as dirty savages.

    This discussion was inspired by a deadly disease that very likely originated in either a so-called “wet’ market where our foreign betters chop up just about every species of mammal for consumption without any sort of sanitary considerations whatsoever, or in a virology lab that had safety protocols so lax that this deadly disease escaped by mere accident, killing vast numbers yet undetermined.

    But no, Americans, we’re the problem.

    **** you, Hoover.org, and all your globalist friends.

  41. https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/03/north-koreas-ballistic-bluster-may-mask-major-epidemic/

    In these days of infection and fear, a recent propaganda photo sums up the image North Korea wants to show the world, as well as its people: Soldiers with black surgical masks surround leader Kim Jong Un, ensconced in a leather overcoat and without a mask as he oversees a defiant military drill.

    As a new and frightening virus closes in around it, North Korea presents itself as a fortress, tightening its borders as cadres of health officials stage a monumental disinfection and monitoring program.

    That image of world-defying impregnability, however, may belie a brewing disaster.

    North Korea, which has what experts call a horrendous medical infrastructure in the best of times, shares a porous, nearly 1,450-kilometer (900-mile) border with China, where the disease originated and has since rapidly spread around the world. The North’s government has also long considered public reports on infectious disease — or, for that matter, anything that could hurt the ruling elite — matters of state secrecy.

  42. “It’s enraging to see how often these think-tank minions attack Americans as dirty savages.“

    That’s at the heart of the attacks on Trump over this virus and a lot else. Elites in any society develop their own customs, their own values, their own social signifiers. They invest such importance into those things that they eventual become disconnected from what they are supposed to signify.

    Take the New York Times, for example. All smart and sophisticated people are supposed to read the NYT. But the one is meant to follow the other. “I’m smart, therefore I read the NYT.” In actuality, most of our elites have it backward. “I read the NYT, therefore I am smart.” Instead of signifiers, these behaviors and attitudes become validators.

    Then Trump comes along, doesn’t give a damn about any of these elitist social conventions, and then succeeds in part because of that indifference. He proves such arbitrary conventions are just that. Arbitrary conventions. They don’t prove anything. They don’t signify anything. They don’t mean anything.

    That’s why they obsess over Trump maybe not using exactly the right verbiage when talking about the virus while not caring at all about how he’s actually handling the crisis. Trump hasn’t read the briefing book. He hasn’t memorized the carefully conceived catch phrases and talking points. Because THAT is what they think is important. Not dealing with the problem. What matters is how well you follow the approved script.

    Mike

  43. I have revised my opinion on the Raleigh COVID-19 patient, based on news reports this morning. He returned Feb. 22 from Seattle. He began to feel mildly ill on Feb. 25, but was well enough, he thought, to go out to dinner on Feb. 29 and to attend church on March 1. On March 3, having read the news about the outbreak in Seattle, he called the health department and was tested. Meanwhile, the church where he went was used as a polling place for the primary election on March 3.

    It sounds like we’re going to have a cluster of cases around here.

  45. It’s enraging to see how often these think-tank minions attack Americans as dirty savages.

    That was a disqus comment left at the Hoover blog by some jack-wagon who signs himself Fester N Boyle. It wasn’t posted by a Hoover employee.

  46. While we’re at it, Fester N Boyle appears to be a hybrid-version crank. The disposition is what you see on the boards at The Unz Review, but his menu of targets is somewhat different. (Unz types commonly loathe blacks and have convoluted obsessions with Jews that slide into loathing). Not a snooty think tank fellow. My guess would be someone with a highly inflated opinion of his skills and intellect steamed he never got the promotions and salaries he thought he deserved.

  47. The Dow Jones hit a low this morning that was 14.7% below recent highs. Also a barrel of oil below $43, and the 10-year Treasury yield was below 0.7%. Well, it’s a Friday and the cowboy traders don’t want to be long over a potentially scary weekend. This certainly seems to be a big over reaction at this point.

  48. I was looking around for a map of the US cases since they are increasing. I went back to the John Hopkins COVID site (query John Hopkins and corona virus and the site is usually at the top of the list).

    If you click on USA in the list on the left hand side, then click at the bottom of the list for city/state, the details change. The boxes on the right side show the deaths & recovered cases by city/state. On the map, you can also click on any red dot and a box pop ups with “confirmed,deaths, recovered, active” data.

  49. That was a disqus comment left at the Hoover blog by some jack-wagon who signs himself Fester N Boyle. It wasn’t posted by a Hoover employee.

    Yes, I know. But my recollection of that institute of globalist nonsense is “enhanced’ by what Victor Davis Hanson said about his colleagues after the 2016 election.

    That is, pretty much all of them except Hanson looked down upon Trump and Trump’s supporters as exactly the sort of boobs that would spread a deadly pandemic- well, just like how the Chinese spread it.

    Except it would never occur to the these folks to condemn the Chinese or any other foreigners for lack of hygiene or anything else, nor would I expect that they’d allow such nasty comments aimed at them to remain on their site.

    But I admit my opinion of them is such that I’m not going to check to see if I’m right.

  50. That is, pretty much all of them except Hanson looked down upon Trump and Trump’s supporters as exactly the sort of boobs that would spread a deadly pandemic- well, just like how the Chinese spread it. Except it would never occur to the these folks to condemn the Chinese or any other foreigners for lack of hygiene or anything else, nor would I expect that they’d allow such nasty comments aimed at them to remain on their site.

    IOW, Hoover employees are culpable for what’s swimming around in your imagination.

  51. IOW, I don’t care to read the opinions of people who are proud to despise the American people, except for their globalist friends.

  52. “Hoover employees are culpable for what’s swimming around in your imagination.”

    The Hoover names both Condoleeza Rice and John Yoo as “fellows.” You know, George. W. Bush’s “work wife” who was part of the worst foreign policy debacle in a generation and the guy who authored the “torture memos” in the Bush Administration then later went on to pen a New York Times op-ed where he stated he had “grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power.”

    As good a job as Trump has done as President and as awful as the alternatives are, he most needs to be re-elected so he can hopefully continue to cut out the rot in the GOP and the conservative movement.

    Mike

  53. Oh noes, the “torture memos” and the dreaded waterboarding. What evil didn’t Darth Bush inflict on the world? His evil knows no bounds. Without a doubt Darth Bush was responsible for 9 11 too.

    And of course Condoleeza Rice is cut from the same cloth as Valerie Jarret and Samantha Power.

    IOW MBunge has found his hobby horse again, back in the saddle he is.

  54. Hoover Fellows include Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Thomas Sowell as well as Victor Davis Hanson. It would be better to disagree with individuals on the list rather than condemn the whole group together.

  55. Without a doubt Darth Bush was responsible for 9 11 too.

    Where did that proverbial buck stop, anyway?

    Apparently, anywhere except with who was preezy on 9/11.

    I don’t think I been around here long enough to pick up on MBunge hobby horse, but this one is mine.

    I am thoroughly, viscerally tired of the endless stream of excuses from our supposed betters, such as every member of the Bush family, Condi Rice, John Yoo, the facility of the Hoover Institution, the GOP establishment, and myriad others.

    They’re a shambling miserable menagerie of incompetent failures, yet they are never held accountable for their relentless idiocy.

    Not only was George Bush president on 9/11, thereby earning some considerable responsibility for the event, he subsequently never ended the policies that made it possible nor did he hold to account the bureaucrats directly responsible for failing to stop it. In fact he appointed at least one of them- Jamie Gorelick- to the 9/11 commission. Bush followed this up with a multi-trillion dollar foreign aid expedition to Iraq and then a catastrophic economic collapse. While not busy with that, he watched tens of thousands of factories depart the United States- including the last one to make penicillin, in 2004- without objection, or even comment. Politically, Bush was such a numb incompetent that he almost lost to John Kerry, traitor, and a traitor lately busy attempting to wreck US policy against the murderous dictatorship of Iran. In fact, I believe Bush would have lost in 2004 except the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth shut Kerry up for about 40 days during the campaign, but enough.

    I will note, however, that recalling what John Yoo has written previously about presidential power I was mildly surprised to see he had “grave concerns” about Trump. So I looked him up on Amazon and he’s writing a new book- Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power.

    There’s that at least. Good for him.

  56. Hoover Fellows include Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Thomas Sowell as well as Victor Davis Hanson. It would be better to disagree with individuals on the list rather than condemn the whole group together.

    Point taken, but just in case my last comment didn’t make it clear, I’m fed up with the whole lot, even if there are a swarm of individuals mixed in that I still respect.

  57. So, someone else has a hobby horse. Darth Bush was actually in cahoots with OBL, that’s why BHO killed OBL …. Keep it rockin’, that horse never sleeps.

    Memory is a selective and not entirely reliable human faculty. 😉

  58. Meanwhile, back on topic, this “country” (what is Singapore, anyway?) has drawn at least one red line.

    https://nypost.com/2020/03/06/singapore-threatens-jail-fines-for-coronavirus-patients-who-lie-to-investigators/

    Health and government officials in Singapore are threatening coronavirus patients with thousands of dollars in fines — or even jail time — if they lie to investigators about their travel history.

    At least 117 cases of Covid-19 have been diagnosed in Singapore as of Friday , according to the Singapore Ministry of Health, and officials are expected to monitor every step taken by those patients.
    …
    The city-state has also begun stripping people “of their permanent-resident status and revoking foreigners’ work passes over virus-related infractions,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

    Singapore is serious about a lot of things we blithely disregard in America.
    You might say they take the “broken windows policy” to the max.
    https://www.goabroad.com/articles/study-abroad/singapore-laws-to-know-before-you-go

    Answer from Wikipedia: “Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign city-state and island country located in maritime Southeast Asia.”

  61. When Great Britain was a more serious country they transported criminals to Australia for theft, and executed people for taking the Kings deer IIRC. The past is a curious place.

  62. Based on everything I have seen to date, this virus is relatively mild which means that most people who have it will get better and won’t even know that they had COVID-19. The exception is, of course, is in the elderly and people with pre-existing respiratory conditions and compromised immune systems.

    This means that it may be impossible to contain. We may have to simply accept that most of the world’s population will be infected. It will be a personal tragedy for those who lose loved ones, but it will not affect the world’s economy much, because we won’t lose any significant percentage of our workforce.

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