epidemic - Page 2

Prime Minister Boris Jonson is asking British manufacturers to switch their production lines to start mass-producing ventilators, as the nation faces a shortage of the critical machines in the event of a large-scale coronavirus outbreak.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Friday obtained data from the Chinese government that pinpointed the first clear case of the Wuhan coronavirus occuring on November 17, 2019. The Wuhan medical community began suspecting it had an epidemic on its hands in late December, but was suppressed by Communist Party officials who wished to conceal the crisis for as long as possible.

The number of deaths in Italy by the COVID-19 coronavirus passed the 1,000-mark Thursday, jumping by 189 to a total of 1,016 despite drastic measures to contain the virus.

Taiwan’s remarkably low number of coronavirus infections – less than 50 in total, despite the island’s proximity to the outbreak area and extensive travel and commerce with China – has been credited to swift and effective action when the epidemic began, starting with a firm travel ban on China and the semi-autonomous territories of Hong Kong and Macau.

Hospitals will face crisis via a surge of patients infected with coronavirus, warned Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York.

China’s propaganda effort to reframe the coronavirus outbreak as a triumph for communism continued on Monday with an editorial in the state-run Global Times demanding an apology from the United States for its criticism of how Beijing handled the disease and hectoring the U.S. government for its own response.

The Coronavirus outbreak revealed “moral hypocrisy” on the part of global leaders regarding China and Iran, assessed Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

Italy has shut down the entire region of Lombardy and an additional 14 northern and central provinces, quarantining a quarter of the nation’s population, as the country faces the worst outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus in Europe.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, currently presiding over the deadliest coronavirus outbreak in the world, rejected American offers of medical assistance on Wednesday and took the opportunity to complain about U.S. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear weapons program and terrorist activities.

Iranian media on Friday reported the deaths of Hossein Sheikholeslam, formerly ambassador to Syria and an adviser to Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and Mohammed Haj Abolghasemi, an intelligence officer and commander in Iran’s brutal Basij paramilitary unit, a division of the designated terrorist organization known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). 

China’s state-run media attempted to flip the script on the coronavirus by claiming the United States botched its response to the epidemic and is concealing hundreds of infections. An even more insidious line of Chinese Communist propaganda advanced from claiming the virus originated outside China to suggesting it came from America.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a designated terrorist organization, on Wednesday claimed scientists under its control are close to developing a vaccine for the Wuhan coronavirus, which is spreading like wildfire through Iran.

The United Kingdom may shut down parliament to prevent MPs from spreading the coronavirus, as the country saw its largest ever daily increase of cases of the deadly virus. In an attempt to contain an outbreak of the coronavirus, the

A report published by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab on Tuesday charged the Chinese government with heavily censoring news and discussion of the coronavirus outbreak beginning at the end of December. The report noted that China’s broad censorship practices could “restrict vital communication related to disease information and prevention.”

The Iranian government on Tuesday ordered the temporary release of more than 54,000 prisoners, representing about 20 percent of its imprisoned population, to slow the spread of the coronavirus in its notoriously overcrowded and unsanitary jails. The released detainees include some of the regime’s political prisoners, possibly including British-Iranian dual citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who apparently did contract the virus during her stint at Iran’s horrifying Evin prison.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that it is “highly likely” there will be a “growing number” of coronavirus, with the government’s chief medical officer saying that around one per cent of Britons who contract the virus could die.

Some South Korean officials on Monday asked for murder charges to be brought against Lee Man-hee, founder and leader of a religious sect called the Shincheonji Church, and 11 of his top followers because they spread the Wuhan coronavirus across the country and interfered with efforts to track infected persons. The government believes up to 60% of South Korea’s 4,335 coronavirus cases can be traced to the Shincheonji Church.

Donald Trump is handling the coronavirus outbreak better than his predecessors addressed earlier emerging contagions, said Dr. Marc Siegel.

Two medical workers from hospitals in Guangzhou, China, wrote a profoundly disturbing letter to famed British medical journal the Lancet this week, detailing hideous working conditions in coronavirus wards, dire shortages of medical supplies, and an atmosphere of anxiety and despair among nursing staff. The letter was suddenly retracted on Wednesday at the request of the authors, raising suspicions they were pressured to discredit themselves by the Chinese Communist Party.

Uyghur activists say the situation their oppressed people face in China’s Xinjiang province is even worse than previously believed, with hunger sweeping the area and medicine shortages caused by the coronavirus lockdown.

According to Iranian state media, the rapidly-spreading coronavirus epidemic claimed Vice President for Women and Family Affairs Masoumeh Ebtekar as a new patient on Thursday, the first member of President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet to test positive for the disease.

According to Chinese state media reports, five officials in the city of Jingmen – located in Hubei province, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak – have been mildly disciplined for reporting a negative number of virus infections.

Dr. Zhong Nanshan, China’s “top respiratory specialist” according to state-run media, on Thursday floated a completely unsubstantiated theory that the Wuhan coronavirus did not originate in China. 

Schools across the United Kingdom have closed in response to the growing European outbreak of the coronavirus, as two more people have been confirmed to have contracted the virus in England. In Derbyshire, a primary school was closed following the

Chinese state media continued their efforts this week to mitigate political damage from the coronavirus epidemic by claiming Western concerns about the spread of the disease, and complaints about China’s lack of transparency, are founded in “xenophobia” and “white supremacist racism” reminiscent of the “Yellow Peril” hysteria of the late 19th Century.

During the Democrat debate in South Carolina on Tuesday night, the candidates tried to score some points against President Donald Trump by criticizing his administration’s response to the coronavirus epidemic. Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed he played a role in saving “millions of lives” in the United States during the Ebola epidemic that occurred during the Obama administration.

The most likely explanation for the origin of the coronavirus outbreak relates to a biological weapons laboratory in Wuhan, China, said Steven Mosher, expert on China and author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.

Population Research Institute President Steven W. Mosher wrote at the New York Post on Saturday that China’s coronavirus epidemic could have been unleashed by researchers who sold laboratory animals to the notorious “wet markets” of Wuhan for extra cash.

Iraq and Afghanistan confirmed their first cases of the Wuhan coronavirus on Monday. Both cases were detected near the Iranian border and involved patients who recently traveled to Iran, where an outbreak spreading from the city of Qom has officially infected 61 people and killed 12, although a lawmaker from the area claims there have been 50 deaths and 250 people are under quarantine.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) told Breitbart News that all his conversations with President Donald Trump over the past month have involved the coronavirus, offering his remarks on Breitbart News Sunday in an interview with special guest host Joel Pollak.

China’s state-run media launched an all-out political offensive against the United States over coronavirus assistance on Wednesday, simultaneously accusing the U.S. of not doing enough to help and condemning it as racist for offering to help at all.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Saturday published the text of a speech President Xi Jinping gave to the party central committee last week that provided some insight into how the Communists are attempting to manage the political fallout from the coronavirus epidemic. 

Five medical workers in China’s Yunnan province were detained last week for sharing videos about the Wuhan coronavirus on social media, a move that reminded angry Chinese citizens of how the late whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang was persecuted for telling the truth about the epidemic in its early days.

Shenzhen and Guangzhou, two of China’s largest cities, have been granted the authority to “requisition” personal property in order to halt the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus.

A British man who was extradited from Thailand, has collapsed in a UK prison and is feared to have contracted the deadly coronavirus.

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, a blind scholar and Nobel Peace Prize nominee who escaped from house arrest and found asylum with the United States in 2012, wrote about China’s authoritarian response to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak at the Washington Post last week.