Coronavirus Covid-19 - opšta tema

[Have_Fun]

Stigao u Ukrajinu

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[Lo Zingaro]

Just now, Have_Fun said:

Stigao u Ukrajinu

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Nakon sto su poklekli Andora, San Marino i Monako samo slobodarska Srbija i Vatikan odolevaju zlom virusu.

[duda]

3 minutes ago, lo zingaro said:

Nakon sto su poklekli Andora, San Marino i Monako samo slobodarska Srbija i Vatikan odolevaju zlom virusu.

pa i montenegro, bosna

 

sve otporni dinarci 

[vememah]

I još Slovenija, BiH, Crna Gora, Bugarska, Albanija, Poljska, Mađarska i Moldavija.

Edited March 3, 2020 by vememah

[duda]

haha, balkan otporan 

[villiem]

3 minutes ago, dùda said:

haha, balkan otporan 

 

Imamo to nesto

 

hrvati se ionako samoizbacuju s balkana

Edited March 3, 2020 by villiem

[Have_Fun]

U Poljskoj je svakog dana dezifekcija GSP buseva.
Mogli bi i vozove tako.. just saying (priti pliz)

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[steins]

Čitajući ove gliposti o tome kako je Korona u Americi i Italiji u opticaju još od decembra, sklon sam da poverujem da je kod nas epidemija prošla


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[banecare1]

46 minutes ago, Braća Strugacki said:

mi smo za sada dobili zabranu da idemo na bilo kakva okupljanja, sajmovi, konferencije zabranjeni

 

nas glavni sajam je krajem marta. odlozen je bio do daljnjeg, prosle nedelje su objavili da se odrzava u junu. optimmizam

 

u sangaju

[I*m with the pilots]

10 minutes ago, villiem said:

 

Imamo to nesto

 

hrvati se ionako samoizbacuju s balkana

[kud u maglu Simoviću]

33 minutes ago, dùda said:

pa i montenegro, bosna

 

sve otporni dinarci 

 

[steins]

ARGUMENT

Cults and Conservatives Spread Coronavirus in South Korea

Seoul seemed to have the virus under control. But religion and politics have derailed plans.

BY S. NATHAN PARK | FEBRUARY 27, 2020, 10:45 AM

[https://foreignpolicy]

A South Korean health worker sprays disinfectant as part of preventive measures against the spread of the coronavirus at a residential area near the Daegu branch of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus on Feb. 27. JUNG YEON-JE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

South Korea initially seemed to have the COVID-19 epidemic under control, armed with efficient bureaucracy and state-of-the-art technology. However, since Feb. 18, the number of coronavirus cases in South Korea has exploded to more than 1,700 as of Thursday. The battle plan against the epidemic was derailed by the oldest of problems: religion and politics.

[https://foreignpolicy]

When it came to preparation, it helped that South Korea had one hell of a practice run: the MERS outbreak in 2015 that caused 38 deaths. At the time, the incompetent response by the conservative administration of then President Park Geun-hye put South Korea in the ignominious position of having the greatest number of cases outside of the Middle East. The fallout, which contributed to the public distrust of government that culminated in Park’s impeachment and removal, pushed the South Korean government to significantly revamp its preparation for the next viral event.

South Korea has been preparing for a potential new strain of coronavirus since as early as November 2019. Without knowing what virus would hit the country next, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) devised an ingenious method of testing for any type of coronavirus and eliminating known strains of coronavirus such as SARS or MERS to isolate the new variant of coronavirus.

For the first four weeks of the outbreak, South Korea marshaled high-tech resources to respond aggressively while promoting transparency. The government tracked the movements of travelers arriving from China, for example by tracking the use of credit cards, checking CCTV footage, or mandating they download an app to report their health status every day. For those infected, the government published an extremely detailed list of their whereabouts, down to which seat they sat in at a movie theater.

The info was also presented (with names removed) in an interactive website that allows the public to trace the movement of every single individual with coronavirus. To be sure, there were real privacy concerns—as when one unfortunate patient in Daejeon had news of their visit to a risqué lingerie store blasted to every smartphone in their city. Yet on balance, these disclosures did much to calm the nerves and prevent unnecessary panic in the population. By Feb. 17, South Korea’s tally of COVID-19 patients stood at 30, with zero deaths. Ten patients were fully cured and discharged, with some of the discharged patients declaring the disease was “not something as serious as one might think.” The government seemed ready to declare victory.

That all came to a crashing halt last week thanks to the 31st case. Patient No. 31, discovered on Feb. 18, was a member of a quasi-Christian cult called Shincheonji, one of the many new religious movements in the country. Founded in 1984, Shincheonji (whose official name is Shincheonji, Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony) means “new heaven and earth,” a reference to the Book of Revelation. Its founder Lee Man-hee claims to be the second coming of Jesus who is to establish the “new spiritual Israel” at the end of days. The cult is estimated to have approximately 240,000 followers, and claims to have outposts in 29 countries in addition to South Korea.

Shincheonji’s bad theology makes for worse public health. Shincheonji teaches illness is a sin, encouraging its followers to suffer through diseases to attend services in which they sit closely together, breathing in spittle as they repeatedly amen in unison. If they were off on their own, that might be one thing—but according to Shin Hyeon-uk, a pastor who formerly belonged to the cult, Shincheonji believes in “deceptive proselytizing,” approaching potential converts without disclosing their denomination. Shincheonji convinces its members to cover their tracks, providing a prearranged set of answers to give when anyone asks if they belong to the cult. Often, even family members are in the dark about whether someone is a Shincheonji follower. The net effect is that Shincheonji followers infect each other easily, then go onto infect the community at large.

Although Patient No. 31 ran a high fever, she attended two Shincheonji services which held more than a thousand worshippers each, in addition to attending a wedding and a conference for a pyramid scheme.It is not yet clear exactly how Shincheonji cultists were infected with COVID-19 in the first instance. (KCDC said Patient No. 31 is likely not the first Shincheonji follower to be infected, given the timeline of her symptoms.) Although investigations are still pending, South Korean authorities have been focusing on the funeral of the brother of Shincheonji’s founder held in early February. Shincheonji has 19 churches in China, including in Wuhan, and it may be possible that followers from around the world attended the funeral.

The infected Shincheonji members then spread coronavirus by sharing closed-off spaces, refusing to be quarantined, and hiding their membership. Although Patient No. 31 ran a high fever, she attended two Shincheonji services which held more than a thousand worshippers each, in addition to attending a wedding and a conference for a pyramid scheme. She visited a clinic after being involved in a minor traffic accident, but ignored the repeated recommendations by the doctors to receive testing for COVID-19. In other cases, a self-identified Shincheonji follower who came to a hospital complaining of high fever ran off during examination when the doctors informed her she may be quarantined. One woman who donated her liver to her mother for transplant belatedly admitted she belonged to Shincheonji when her fever would not drop after the surgery. (Both cases led to a temporary shutdown of the hospitals involved, making the public health response to the coronavirus that much more difficult.) In a tragicomic instance, one of the Daegu city officials in charge of infectious disease control was revealed to be a Shincheonji follower only after a diagnosis confirmed he was infected with coronavirus.

READ MORE

[https://foreignpolicy]

North Korea Isn’t Ready for Coronavirus Devastation

Since the discovery of Patient No. 31, the number of COVID-19 cases in South Korea jumped from 30 to 977 in eight days. Nearly all of the new cases are Shincheonji followers, or traceable to them. Particularly tragic is the case of Cheongdo Daenam Hospital, where the funeral for Lee Man-hee’s brother was held. This hospital alone saw 114 cases, most of whom were long-term psychiatric patients. Because these patients never left the hospital, much less traveled abroad, they were not tested early for coronavirus, nor were they properly quarantined. This led to an advanced stage of the disease among many of the psychiatric patients, resulting in seven out of the 12 coronavirus deaths thus far.

The cult isn’t the only ideology helping push the virus forward. Conservatives, still recovering from Park Geun-hye’s impeachment and removal in 2017, have held large-scale rallies in the middle of Seoul each week for months. Even as large corporations are advising their employees to work remotely and people are canceling meetings, these conservative groups—largely made up of a high-risk older population—continue to hold rallies, cavalierly ignoring the Seoul government’s advisory to the contrary. Shouting down Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon’s plea to stop the rally, the conservative group leader and pastor Jeon Gwang-hun implausibly claimed it was impossible to contract coronavirus outdoors, while those attending claimed “God was making the wind blow to drive out the virus.”

The more well-heeled South Korean conservatives, in the legislative halls or at the editorial desk, are not much more a help. Since the outbreak began, South Korea’s conservatives have been a broken record, demanding over and over again that the government place a complete travel ban against China. United Future Party chairman Hwang Gyo-ahn said on Feb. 24: “We once again strongly urge a ban on travel from China. That is virtually the only available response.” On the same day, the right-leaning newspaper JoongAng Ilbo made the extraordinary move of putting its editorial at the top of the front page titled: “Implement Total Ban of Foreigners Entering from China Now.” (Apparently with no sense of irony, JoongAng Ilbo ran a large story immediately below the editorial complaining of the “Koreaphobia” displayed by the Israeli government when it turned away Korean tourists visiting Jerusalem.)

It is a cynical attack that is both red-baiting and race-baiting. Since the election of the liberal President Moon Jae-in, one of the conservatives’ major attack points has been that Moon was too soft on China’s Communist government. With COVID-19, South Korea’s conservative politicians found a neat way to connect this point with the viral outbreak originating from China: Moon is too afraid of China to shut down travel from China. This line of attack also whips up xenophobia against ethnic Chinese immigrants to South Korea, a convenient target, as South Korea is holding legislative elections in April.

To remind the public of the connection between the coronavirus and China, South Korea’s conservative politicians and press persist in calling the viral disease “Wuhan pneumonia” or “Wuhan corona” in lieu of the official name. The United Future Party went so far as to hold up the formation of a special legislative committee for COVID-19 response because it opposed any committee that did not have the word “Wuhan” in the name. (The United Future Party finally relented on Feb. 26, allowing the committee to form.) All this comes despite the proven failure of travel bans and experts’ consensus against them—not to mention that there was no crossover between Shincheonji and ethnically Chinese areas. As if to illustrate the point, United Future Party leadership, including parliamentary leader Shim Jae-cheol, was briefly quarantined following a large meeting with the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations to criticize  the Moon administration’s education policy, as the president of the association was infected with COVID-19. (The association’s president apparently was infected through his wife, who met with a Shincheonji follower.)

And yet, the government is carrying on. Despite the sudden explosion of cases, South Korea is in the rare position of having an effective means of detecting the disease and the transparency to report the results accurately. The seeming explosion compared to other countries may be a matter of testing as well as contamination. Thus far, KCDC has administered more than 40,000 tests for coronavirus, and more than 7,500 coronavirus tests a day with an eye toward being able to test more than 10,000 a day by the end of February. (In contrast, the United States has tested fewer than 500 people.)

Unlike the draconian quarantine measures implemented in China, the city of Daegu is still open for business, trusting its citizens to take adequate precautions. The Moon administration’s efforts to respond to the outbreak has been earning high marks overall, with a recent survey showing 64 percent approval in the government’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Moon visited Daegu on Feb. 25, urging for a “clear inflection point within this week” in the number of cases. As the virus spreads worldwide, South Korea’s response may serve as a model for how a high-tech liberal democracy can respond to a global pandemic that pressures the weakest points of society.

Nathan Park is an attorney at Kobre & Kim LLP based in Washington DC, and an expert in East Asian politics and economy.


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[vememah]

Quote

Especially in the social media there is "a lot of drama" and the risks of the disease are overemphasized, criticized the director of the Institute of Virology of Charite Berlin, Christian Drosten, at a press conference. "I don't honestly see that at the moment", said Drosten. He said that the case mortality rate for coronavirus infection currently lies within a corridor of 0.3 to 0.7 percent. He expects this rate to fall even further.

The virologist expects that up to 70 percent of Germans could fall ill with the virus. What is important here, however, is the time frame in which this will happen. He sees no reason to panic. For most of the infected people, the disease is similar to a cold. And: "People die anyway, and about 850,000 die every year," says Drosten.

 

https://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Experten-warnen-vor-Panikmache-article21613896.html (engleski prevod by Deepl)

Cela KZŠ na nemačkom:

 

[steins]

Pih, ti švabovi stalno kvare žurku, tsko su i H1N1 usrali


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[vememah]

Rast je bitan, ljudi ionako umiru, kažu Nemci. A još ako se smanji pritisak na penzioni sistem, čist win-win za njih, dodao bih ja.

Quote

 

European Nations Diverge on How to Curb Virus Outbreak

Governments struggle to find the right balance between protecting public health and shielding the economy from disruption

 

By Bojan Pancevski in Berlin, Giovanni Legorano in Rome and Jason Douglas in London
Updated March 2, 2020 5:31 pm ET

 

European governments are divided in their response to the coronavirus, which has rapidly hopped across borders on the densely populated continent, as they seek to balance protecting public health with economic disruption.

Countries including Italy, France, Britain and Switzerland have taken an aggressive approach, banning large events and ordering large-scale blanket screenings. Germany, Austria, Spain and most Scandinavian countries, on the other hand, have stressed the need for moderation to limit the impact of the disease—and of the response—on society and the economy.

The different approaches highlight the difficulty in coordinating a crisis-management system on a continent where political borders offer little barrier to the spread of the virus. They also expose anxiety among Europe’s leaders that the economic impact of the epidemic could turn a lingering downturn into a full-blown recession.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said over the weekend that Europe’s most populous nation and its biggest economy would be measured and moderate in its response. Germany has reported around 160 infections.

“We must not allow for this virus to damage or ruin the economic upturn that has just emerged on the horizon,” Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said Monday.

Ms. Merkel and her Austrian counterpart Sebastian Kurz agreed during a phone call last week to avoid border closures or any steps that would interrupt supply chains and adversely affect business, said people familiar with the talks.

And while Italy has announced measures to cushion the economic impact of the epidemic in the country’s economically strong northern region, the location of Europe’s worst outbreak so far, officials in Berlin and Vienna said they weren’t now planning any fiscal stimulus.

The novelty of the virus means governments have largely improvised their responses. Still, the World Health Organization has praised China’s draconian response to the virus. After the outbreak started there, Beijing sealed off entire regions and millions of people were put under lockdown—hitting the local and global economy hard.

The WHO’s recommendation for affected countries has been to trigger the top general health alert level and test all patients with atypical pneumonias for the presence of the virus. While about 80% of novel coronavirus patients only experience mild discomfort, others can develop severe respiratory problems and organ failure.

Germany, Austria and other countries haven’t followed up on those guidelines, nor have they banned large public events or ordered mass closures of schools and kindergartens. Germany set its alert level to “moderate” on Monday. It and others have limited testing to people with symptoms who had traveled to affected areas or had contact with infected individuals. People with severe influenza symptoms have occasionally been tested.

On Monday, the German government servers hosting information about the virus became overloaded and hotlines clogged. Many doctors have complained about the absence of guidelines or material support from the country’s regional health authorities—their first resource in an emergency.

Officials have pushed back against the criticism, saying they had to balance several priorities. “We cannot do what China has done here, as that would start a panic, runs on supermarkets and banks, and any contingency measure has a negative effect on businesses and the real economy,” said a senior German government official involved in the crisis management.

Christian Drosten, head of the virology department at Berlin’s Charité hospital, the country’s largest, told a press conference on Monday “people die anyway, and at the rate of around 850,000 a year” in Germany.

Officials in Spain, which had reported 114 patients by Monday night, said it was focused on containing pockets of coronavirus outbreak, but has no plans to cancel public events. Spanish authorities said they may consider temporarily shutting some schools in the Madrid and Basque Country regions and banning public gatherings such as sport events, should the number of infections rise.

Many cases in Spain have been imported from Italy, said Spanish authorities. For instance, a group of five Italian tourists tested positive in the Canary Islands. About 1,000 people at the hotel where they were staying were put under quarantine last week.

“Right now in Spain we are maintaining a phase of containment. In this phase, at this time, we are not recommending the suspension of social events,” said Fernando Simón, director of the center for health alerts and emergencies at the Ministry of Health. In particular, he cited planned demonstrations throughout Spain scheduled for International Women’s Day on Sunday March 8.

By contrast, Italy’s government declared a state of medical emergency on Jan. 31, which gives the central government power to override local authorities. On the same day, Italy banned all direct flights to and from China, the only EU country to do so.

The measures, however, didn’t prevent Italy from becoming the center of the coronavirus crisis in Europe, with 2,036 people confirmed infected by Monday, according to Italy’s Civil Protection Agency. Of those, 52 have died and 149 have fully recovered. Italy now has the world’s third-highest number of cases after China and South-Korea.

Italy has sealed off entire towns in its heavily affected northern region and tested 20,000 people, many with no symptoms. After these blanket tests returned a high percentage of negative results, authorities have adopted a more targeted approach, testing only symptomatic patients.

In neighboring Switzerland, all events involving over 1,000 participants—including soccer games and political rallies—were banned. The government has summoned a crisis summit for next week with business, unions and local authorities to discuss a possible fiscal and monetary stimulus, according to a government statement.

France, which has roughly the same number of cases as Germany, has banned all gatherings of over 5,000 people, with some regions barring all public events. To help curb the contagion, the government has advised people to stop shaking hands and abandon the customary greeting of a kiss on the cheek.

In the U.K., where 40 cases of coronavirus infection have been confirmed, health authorities have tested more than 13,500 people for the virus in an effort to track down potential carriers. The efforts have so far focused on those returning from Asia, Iran and Italy and those who have been in contact with an infected person. At Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest, medical personnel are examining travelers arriving from China for symptoms around the clock.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday chaired a meeting of senior ministers and medical officials to discuss further measures. The government has granted health professionals the legal powers to detain patients at risk of spreading the illness. An information campaign about best practices to slow the transmission is due to roll out within days.

The U.K. has stopped short of canceling sporting events or other large gatherings for now. Mr. Johnson said Monday people should in most cases go about their business as usual.

The U.K. government is due to announce further steps to combat the virus Tuesday. They will include encouraging workers to stay at home if possible and drawing up a register of retired healthcare professionals who can be pressed into service if needed, Downing Street said late Monday.

“It is highly likely coronavirus will spread more widely in the coming days and weeks, which is why we’re making every possible preparation,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement.

 

—Sara Germano in Berlin contributed to this article.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-nations-diverge-on-how-to-curb-virus-outbreak-11583176995?emailToken=6123ba589fc0c9837ac8d9fd29b394dbgqOdacto8TEBp7LIN46zNaCyAGqRWV/s+4eUomxFmY4SJYb7Q/B2eDPGoPt41rIV2lPYr+IaZk3VJ1Xhr0EiiOhn6Ulk4dBnr6EIPCgRdNAkN4sbNBKy2nTnqKaRHCAV&reflink=article_copyURL_share