Author of The Blackout Book and the online course Bloom Where You’re Planted
Yesterday, a shocking spike in the increase of novel coronavirus cases was reported. Before that, previous days’ numbers had made it seem as though the cases were beginning to level off, which would have meant the infection was being contained. Unfortunately, that part wasn’t accurate.
Then came yesterday, with approximately fifteen thousand new cases diagnosed. Before this number had regularly been about 2000 new cases per day.
What the heck?
It turns out that this is a bad news/good news situation.
It’s certainly awful to know that there were that many people diagnosed with a potentially deadly illness in one day. That’s the bad part.
But the good news is that the diagnostic criteria has changed, making it easier, faster, and less expensive for cases to be confirmed. And this gives us a much better look at what the world is actually dealing with in regard to the virus, newly named Covid-19.
Why the sudden increase?
For those of us who have been saying from the very beginning that the numbers from China didn’t add up, our fears have been confirmed. The sharp uptick strongly suggests many people who were ill were never confirmed as having Covid-19. Obviously, this lack of diagnoses would also mean that the death tolls we were given were way too low. Zero Hedge also noted that the Chinese government has been far less than forthcoming up to this point, still not allowing the CDC on the ground to aid in containment efforts.
Previously, the only way to get a confirmed diagnosis was to be administered a nucleic acid test. The tests took several days to return results, and they weren’t always accurate. Several people who died of the virus had four or five negative tests preceding their eventual diagnoses, including Dr. Li, the whistleblower who brought this to the world’s attention before succumbing to the virus himself. The nucleic acid test only returns positive results in the later stages of the illness.
The new diagnostic criteria is quick: all it takes is a CT scan of the patient’s lungs looking for certain visible symptoms.
…officials in Hubei now seem to be including infections diagnosed by using lung scans of symptomatic patients. This shortcut will help get more patients into needed care, provincial officials said. Adding them to the count could make it easier for the authorities to decide how to allocate resources and assess treatment options. (source)
At the time of publication, only the Hubei province is using lung CT scans to diagnose Covid-19. But the numbers are staggering and one must wonder, if there was a spike of 15 thousand people in one day, how many people have already had the illness and not been counted…and how many people have died of it and not been added to the official death toll.
We’re looking at a whole new ballgame now.
While this increase is a horrifying number to see, it’s actually a good thing that we’re going to have a clearer picture of things like the R-naught and the spread of the illness. Many health experts have praised this diagnostic change.
First of all, it will allow patients to be diagnosed more quickly. Then they can be isolated and treated with less risk of infecting more people.
Secondly, this confirms the suspicions of everyone from the alternative media to epidemiologists who believe that the true numbers have been inaccurate from the start. Since most of the bodies of those who recently died in China have been quickly cremated, that data is gone forever.
But hopefully, this broader diagnostic criteria will allow the real picture to emerge. Regardless of how ugly that picture is, knowing the truth is the only way to battle what could potentially be a global pandemic of proportions that have not been seen in our lifetime. (At least for those of us younger than 102.)
This thread on Twitter is written by a reporter for the NY Times who is based in China and has some very thorough information on the new diagnostic and treatment methods. Click on the Tweet to see her entire thread – it’s very informative.
1. There's a lot of buzz on the astronomical jump in cases from Hubei on Wednesday — 14,840 new confirmed cases, almost 10 x compared to a day earlier. New deaths rose to 242, more than double fr day b4. The govt has changed the diagnostic criteria used to confirm cases. More ..
— Sui-Lee Wee 黄瑞黎 (@suilee) February 13, 2020
Not all experts agree that this information is helpful. Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, co-director of the University of Washington MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security, says the new method of diagnosis makes the whole thing more difficult to track. “It makes it really confusing right now if they’re changing the whole way they screen and detect,” he said. Now estimating the scale of the epidemic “is a moving target.”
We still don’t know exactly how it spreads
Although we may be seeing a rapid uptick in the numbers on this chart (click “Daily Increase” in the lower right-hand corner), we still don’t know enough about how the virus is spreading. The New York Times reports:
A single infected “super-spreader” can infect dozens of others. Outbreaks can seem to recede, only to rebound in short order, as the weather or conditions change.
Recent clusters of coronavirus cases suggest the new coronavirus not only spreads quickly, but also in ways that are not entirely understood.
In Hong Kong, people living 10 floors apart were infected, and an unsealed pipe was blamed. A British citizen apparently infected 10 people, including some at a ski chalet, before he even knew he was sick.
In Tianjin, China, at least 33 of 102 confirmed patients had a connection of some sort with a large department store.
“This outbreak could still go in any direction,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said on Wednesday. (source)
It certainly does seem to confirm all the numbers we started with were wholly inaccurate. It also explains the rapid and expensive lockdown of millions of Chinese people that seemed like an overreaction with the previous, far-lower numbers.
As bad as it is, I’d rather have accurate information.
I can only believe that having accurate numbers will benefit those researching this virus and the spread of it. While it’s truly awful that so many human beings are becoming ill and dying, the only way to fight this is with knowledge and preparation.
And that knowledge can only come from accurate information.
About Daisy
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, globe-trotting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and runs a small digital publishing company. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
How many people in Wuhan are actually dead now? There is no way of knowing for sure. However, I watched a Youtube, video, yesterday, the 12th, which showed a corona of some kind of pollution around Wuhan. There are no industrial buildings, near or in the city, that could potentially cause this kind of pollution.
The conclusion the Youtube narrator said was: “they are burning bodies”. OMG.
China is flat out lying to the world to “save face”.
Please, God, protect us.
Mae, yes they are being cremated as fast as possible after they die. China never tell the real truth! Please check out Edge of Wonder’s expose on China’s history, horrible government!!!
I would hate to think that air pollution was caused by burning bodies. It could be people burning coal to keep themselves warm. China is an industrialized 3rd world nation.
There is little you can do right now. All the more reason to be kind to each other and forgive often. Nobody gets out of this life alive.
I think a lot of the problem was in the testing. Not enough test kits or time to administer a nd days to run the tests. Thankfully The Scan seems to be more efficient.
What is sad is so many ill and so many deaths.
Containment is the only help against spread and its already in many different nations.
What actually kills the people? Is it complications from the flu ? Are only the old and young dying? Or regular people?
this virus seems to have an affinity for lung tissue. it causes pneumonia at a higher rate than does influenza. the killer is the pneumonia. unless it turns out that this virus causes a cytokine storm, most victims are likely to be elderly, very young, or having a medical condition already, like asthma, copd, diabetes, etc.
Sis, for answers to those question and a good source for evidence-based information about COVID-19, check out the excellent videos on Dr. John Campbell’s YouTube channel.
I read an article on ZeroHedge last week which indicated Coronavirus is POSSIBLY a man-made bio-weapon. Has there been any determination of that yet? I haven’t heard any more about that possibility.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/coronavirus-contains-hiv-insertions-stoking-fears-over-artificially-created-bioweapon?fbclid=IwAR3ajCToOPe8_JtspsHUmH384NAQBgpNmy3bxLu00WoW9eaOsXT9tWlbXS4
There’s lots of conjecture, but at this point, no solid proof. It’s possible but we just don’t know.
Here’s your possible proof.
2 Chinese researchers (as part of a team) published a paper in 2015 where they altered a gene on a Coronavirus found in bats. This Chimeric virus grew in animals and test tubes so it was able to “jump” species. They claimed it was to proactively protect against a possible super virus by getting a vaccine. All attempts to do a vaccine failed. Their actions were criticized by others as irresponsible as “if it got out, it would be hard to predict what would happen.” They now work in Wuhan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta5HTsokWKw. Go to 13:55
Science magazine reports controversy:
“The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.
In October 2013, the US government put a stop to all federal funding for gain-of-function studies, with particular concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has funded such studies because they help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement at the time. “These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better.”
Baric’s study on the SHC014-chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium was announced, and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not fall under the new restrictions, Baric told Nature. But some researchers, like Wain-Hobson, disagree with that decision.
The debate comes down to how informative the results are. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, told Nature. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502
Original paper. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502
Randall, I’ve been following this closely and all the reputable scientists and medical professionals I’ve heard online say no, it was not man-made; it is a zoonotic virus that likely started in bats, then spread to another animal species (possibly a snake or a pangolin) and then infected one or more humans working or shopping at a wet market in Wuhan. This is very similar to how the SARS virus developed, and this new virus reportedly is very closely genetically related to the SARS virus. (I suspect this new virus will turn out to be a natural mutation from the original SARS virus. Keep in mind that viruses have been mutating all the time in nature, for thousands of years, without any help from humans).
I’m not fully convinced, although I hold no firm opinion either way. This article suggesting it escaped from the lab in Wuhan cites quite a few mainstream sources.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/smoking-gun-chinese-scientist-finds-killer-coronavirus-probably-originated-laboratory-wuhan
While I don’t think we should grab onto conspiracy theories with both hands, refusing to consider any less suspicious points of view, I also think it’s unwise to dismiss alternative theories completely.
Quote from the article above:
hat has now changed, however, with what may be a “smoking gun” report, first noted by Harvard to the big house, from a scientist at the prestigious South China University of Technology in Guangzhou China. A pre-print published by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, titled “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus” whose abstract is the following…
The 2019-nCoV has caused an epidemic of 28,060 laboratory-confirmed infections in human including 564 deaths in China by February 6, 2020. Two descriptions of the virus published on Nature this week indicated that the genome sequences from patients were almost identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus. It was critical to study where the pathogen came from and how it passed onto human. An article published on The Lancet reported that 27 of 41 infected patients were found to have contact with the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. We noted two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus in Wuhan, one of which was only 280 meters from the seafood market. We briefly examined the histories of the laboratories and proposed that the coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory. Our proposal provided an alternative origin of the coronavirus in addition to natural recombination and intermediate host.
… and an especially ominous conclusion:
In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.
“not man made.”
Lol. Evidently you have not seen the reports coming from scientists (not on the government payroll or control).
They say the genetic sequencing does NOT naturally occur. Thus it is manufactured.
This is not a novel virus. It was created in a lab and likely some time ago. The solution is consumption of high quantities of bio-available Vitamin-C. No need for any health emergencies or coming forced vaccinations.
Joe, please list your sources for those as yet unsupported assertions.
Zabeth Sez: “Joe list your sources for your unsupported assertions.”
I know you wish the wuhan virus naturally occurring.
I know you wish that the government is telling the truth and that everything will be alright.
It is called normalcy bias. You cannot see the storm bearing down upon you, so you assume that things will continue as they have been.
You, and many others, are in for a rather shocking realization.
Prepare now before the panic hits the masses.
Who cares (outside of academia) if it was manufactured or naturally occurring.
It is on the loose, in the wild, and has a distinct possibility of spreading across the world on a massive scale, not just the hand fulls here and there.
An actual Pandemic.
That is what you should be concerning yourself with.
Dont bother with going down rabbit holes you cannot independently verify. And the point is moot.
“Who cares if it is manufactured or naturally occurring.”
You don’t care that the US ,Canada, Britain, China, and God knows who else are manufacturing bio weapons that endanger the world?
You don’t care that the WHO, and CDC are complicit in running the labs that manufacturing these plagues on humanity?
You don’t care that there have been two previous releases of SARS from the same lab in Wuhan?
You don’t care that Dr. Francis Boyle who wrote the Bio weapons legislation says that Limes Disease was a bio weapon accidentally released from a US lab?
John Roberts, on this one I agree with you. For about a week there was a possibility – and a lot of hope – that it was a natural virus that jumped from bats. But the PhD experts weighed in with some inconvenient facts, and by the end of Jan it was no longer anything but a bioweapon:
– The bats were the wrong species to carry Corona virus at that geographic lattitude
– The bats would have been hibernating at this time of the year
– The Virus went INTO the Wet Market before it came out of it. 14 of 41 of the original cases had no connection with the Wet Market
– The symptoms can take up to 24 days to manifest, all the while you are contagious
– The mysterious payload that delivers (kills) at the very end, with a massive hurl blood & tissue from the lungs.
– The 14 plus aggressive mutations the Virus accomplished in a few weeks.
– and so on. 100% chance of a man made bio-weapon! Perhaps it would be wise to get over it, and plan it it spreading.
Speaking of which: https://twitter.com/felixdennis123/status/1228124581967409154?s=20
Somebody is getting trolled, or there really are over 1,000 cases in the USA in 32 states. We’ll know probably before the weekend is up. Or we’ll have a mass shooting or some sort of distraction in the media .
By the way, Dr Nancy Messonier (CDC) is Rod Rosenstein’s sister. Look it up, and it will be important to the CDC’s handling of this event and overall virus progression. If you have to ask why… nevermind. Just look at the above link and the images.
John, thanks for the recommendation on the Clean Air Teapills. Mine arrived today!
RBI sez:
“Thank you for the recommendation of clean air teaqills.”
You are welcome. They are highly effective if the lungs have fluid and phlegm, especially if it is yellow in color, which is typical of pneumonia.
If you take antibiotics it is a very useful adjunct. If you can’t get to a doctor it can save your life.
I clicked the link. I am banned on twitter, but I was able to read it.
I further agree that the virus attacks the lungs, that is why a mask is even more important than goggles. The mask blocks the primary entry way through the mouth and nose.
Those who survive the Wuhan induced pneumonia tend to have fibrosis in their lungs which does not go away.
Yes, Rod Rosen is the brother of Nancy Messioner MD. Anyone who thought that Trump would clean house is looking very foolish, and yet in a perpetual state of denial.
Yes of course they are covering it up. They are stalling to buy some time. If the truth came out, the global stock market would crash, and the grocery stores would be empty in 24 hours, and there would be panic and rioting in the street.
Oh, brother is that a lame response.
What? By saying “I care!” gives me power to prevent any of that? By saying “I care!” I can stop any of your response from happening?
You dont have the power to control anything beyond yourself. Instead of going down rabbit holes, do what you can to protect you and yours to the best of your capability.
That is what I am saying.
Jar head sez:
“Lame response.”
If you don’t like what I have to say, then just ignore it.
Then you will not have to resort to emotional overreaction and name calling.
North Korea and China will never release all the numbers. At this point China might not even know the real numbers.
The percentages of death vs infection still remain about the same so that’s good news.
Containment here is holding so that’s good news.
Continue to prepare in a steady fashion without panic, watch for false information and gurus like many of the comments and click bait websites are putting out.
Stay as healthy as possible by working out, eating right and controlling your weight. Those things matter when you do get sick.
Talk with your clan about it and maybe solidify some plans such as an isolation area, triggers to get off the X, who’s at risk within the group etc.
Pray if you believe and hope and wish for the best no matter what.
Numbers still don’t add up. How many CT scans can a machine make in a day…..maybe one per hour so 24. 15,000 new cases, that means they have 630 CT scan machines in that city? Possible, but not likely. My assumed numbers may be wrong, but you get the idea….can only make so many CT scans a day.