Do Not Imagine You Can Avoid Coronavirus By Going To Moscow

The Moscow Times reported yesterday that Russia-- like other socially backward countries, Trump-America included-- hasn't been testing and thereby reports low numbers of people with COVID-19. No one trusts Russia's reports which show that "With 116,000 tests for the coronavirus carried out and 114 returning positive, Russia’s ratio of tests to positive cases is 0.09%, the lowest among all of the countries infected by the coronavirus. The second lowest ratio is Taiwan’s 0.3%-- three times higher than Russia’s... 'The figures are likely a lot higher,' Alexei Kurinny, a deputy on the State Duma’s health protection committee, told the Moscow Times. 'Unfortunately we were slow to get around to doing comprehensive testing.'"

Putin and Trump-- two self-obsessed, incompetent assholes. And speaking of self-obsessed assholes, Richard Burr (R-NC), chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, found out what was going to befall this country early. So what did he do? He warned his biggest campaign donors-- though not his constituents-- and withdrew about a million dollars from the stock market before it crashed.

On Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin judged the situation in Russia “under control.” But the country has nonetheless revved into gear over the past few days, announcing that it will ban the entry of foreign nationals and stateless people until May 1 in an effort to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, Moscow has banned all public events larger than 50 people until April 10.

But despite these measures, medical experts are now questioning whether Russia’s official coronavirus statistics reflect reality in the country-- which ranked 116th last year in the Global Health Security Index for “detecting” pandemics.

If the numbers are significantly higher, officials may have missed their opportunity to stem the tide-- leaving the weight on the shoulders of doctors already stretched thin by a teetering healthcare system.

Jeremy Rossman, reporting for Newsweek yesterday, wrote that the countries not reporting big and increasing numbers of coronavirus cases are the countries, like Russia, not testing. The spread of the pandemic has depended movement of people. Countries with extensive dealings with China and the ones where the disease exploded first and with the most virulence. The dozen countries with the most interaction with China all show tremendous outbreaks-- except the ones that haven't been testing. These are the dozen countries in order of inbound travel with China and the number of cases reported:

• South Korea- 8,162
• Japan- 814
• Russia- 63
• U.S- 3,083
• Mongolia- 1
• Laos- 0
• Philippines- 140
• Singapore- 226
• India- 108
• Canada- 255
• Thailand- 114
• Vietnam- 56

Just 63 cases in Russia which has very strong travel, emigration, immigration and trade relationships with China? Rossman reported that "Some countries with very good travel, migration and trade links with China still have comparable low case numbers (both Japan and Singapore have fewer than 1,000 cases). For these countries, there has been early and extensive border screening, control and surveillance, which has probably held the localised transmission in check. If these measures hold, these countries will probably see only slow increases in case numbers over the coming weeks. It is interesting to see that most of the global cases are found north of the tropic of cancer. At present, there are only 2,025 cases south of the tropic of cancer. Case numbers in countries residing in the tropics or current southern hemisphere winter make up just 1.29% of the global cases. This could reflect global travel and trade relationships with China or could reflect impacts of climate on COVID-19 transmission. It is also possible that the broad range of tropical infectious diseases has masked the identification of COVID-19 cases that often present with mild, non-specific symptoms... [T]he low levels of reported cases in many countries may be due to a lack of testing or a lack of reporting. Many countries are actively pursuing policies in which only those with serious illness and a travel history to an area with strong local transmission will be tested, including the UK. This will lead to a dramatic under-reporting of case numbers and can jeopardise the ability to contain the pandemic, as the WHO has stated: 'You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is. Find, isolate, test and treat every case, to break the chains of transmission.'"

It is of particular concern that with the close relationships to China and extensive national resources, Russia has only reported 63 cases. While it is possible that this low number reflects their active border control and screening there is a concern that this reflects either a lack of screening or a lack of reporting. Combined with the recent evidence that Russia has been behind several recent COVID-19 disinformation campaigns, this raises the concern that Russia may be playing a dangerous game with global health. Hopefully this is simply a case of good border control or low rates of testing, but time will tell.

This is a dynamically unfolding pandemic that will require the concerted efforts of counties around the world to control. As the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says: “we’re all in this together.”

Nero Lives: Part II by Nancy Ohanian

Meanwhile, in hard-hit Italy "a silent surge in fatalities in nursing homes, where dozens of patients a day are dying untested for the virus... 'There are significant numbers of people who have died but whose death hasn’t been attributed to the coronavirus because they died at home or in a nursing home and so they weren’t swabbed,' said Giorgio Gori, mayor of the town of Bergamo." [So far 19 long-term care facilities in Florida have either confirmed or suspected cases of the coronavirus. It won't be long before you will be able to add a zero to the number. Oh, and by the way, no one will divulge the names of the facilities, which seems criminal, no?]

Immediately after the virus emerged in northern Italy on Feb. 21, care homes cut off access to visitors to limit the contagion risk to elderly patients most vulnerable to the disease.

Walter Montini, president of ARSAC, the association grouping 30 old people’s homes in Cremona province, said that at one small care home with 36 beds, there were 7 deaths in a day.

“There has obviously been an increase in deaths. You just have to look at the local daily (newspaper) in Cremona. Normally there’s a page of death notices. Today there were five.”

He launched an appeal for more masks for staff on March 2 but, given the shortages, hospitals were judged to have a greater need. He said staff needed to be tested but that was not happening.

Local health authorities say they have received government directions on testing and treatment which say that hospitalization is only indicated for patients with “significant respiratory symptoms.”

...With the health system pushed to its limits and funeral services overwhelmed by the hundreds of dead every day, there is no capacity to conduct autopsies or test bodies for coronavirus.

The bodies are wrapped in special protective plastic bags and buried or cremated with no more than a quick blessing from a priest. Any family commemoration will have to wait until a ban on public gatherings is lifted.

In case you missed it yesterday, it's worth mentioning a Reuters report by Gene Emery that asserts that the virus "can remain viable and infectious in droplets in the air for hours and on surfaces up to days, according to a new study... The tests show that when the virus is carried by the droplets released when someone coughs or sneezes, it remains viable, or able to still infect people, in aerosols for at least three hours. On plastic and stainless steel, viable virus could be detected after three days. On cardboard, the virus was not viable after 24 hours. On copper, it took 4 hours for the virus to become inactivated."