Factual Dispatch #43 - Wuhan Got Us All In Check

When the Ebola scare hit NYC back in 2014, I was eating soup in the Operating Room micro-cafeteria on one of Mount Sinai’s surgical wards. I was fixing computers and taking pictures/video of heart surgery and was on break while our leaders tried to allay the fears of a tense city. For all of the uninformed media clucking, Mount Sinai’s immunology department and the CDC were quite effective at ensuring no harm came to Americans. With another foreign invader being tracked and hyperbolized (Editor’s Note: that is so not a word) about once again, it’s time to strap on your respirator masks and dive in to understand what’s going on in China, what a Coronavirus is, and what the hell a wet market is. Finally, yes the masks your friends are wearing are most likely trash and we’ll get to that at the end.

As of 9:14am 1.24.2020, 40 million people have seen their travel restricted, with a full quarantine encompassing 13 million, something never attempted before by man. Starting with Wuhan, 2019-nCoV spread to Huangang and Ezhou earlier this week, with cases eventually being found in 32 of 34 Chinese provinces. Bloomberg, Al-Jazeera, and other outlets have created live update pages to track the contagion. Some quick points to cut through the miasma of fear:

• 848 cases confirmed, with only China currently coping with more than 100 confirmed cases. Additionally with 25 deaths worldwide, many who died were elderly, infirm, or suffering from other chronic illnesses.

• This would be less of a problem if this wasn’t taking place during Chunyun, or the annual Lunar New Year migration, where 3 billion trips are taken over a 10 day period.

• While there has been a ton of local press around the world about people being “screened” for the Coronavirus, there have only been confirmed cases outside of China in the USA (Snohomish County, WA), Thailand (5 confirmed cases), Japan, South Korea (two each), Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore. Saudi Arabia was thought to have one as well but the case was later denied.

• The capital has issued $144 million dispensed to fight the epidemic, while also restricting tourism to important sites and tamping down the Lunar New Year festivities. beijing shutters New Years festivities & restricts site tourism.

• As the nightmare of SARS is fresh in everyone’s mind, there has been massive pressure on Chinese authorities to be more transparent than last time, when their censorship of information allowed the disease to spread. However, journalists who tried to break the story say they were threatened, that hospitals refused to admit people connected to the first cases, and that symptoms were seen in December.

• The pressure has been turned up on the Wuhan Mayor who might not keep his job if this gets much worse. A 1000-bed hospital is being constructed in six days to help relieve the strain on the city’s at-capacity medical system. 

• The virus looks to have originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a notorious wet market, where an unnerving menagerie of animals, alive and dead, were available for purchase. Wet markets were tampered with after Avian Bird Flu, but they remain a part of the Chinese food supply.

• The Chinese krait & Cobra might be responsible for the virus, with further speculation & argument that the virus came from bats who were consumed by the snakes, before the snakes were sold at the wet market.

• The NIH is using the structures and development techniques we built for SARS & Ebola to kickstart research on the vaccine for 2019-nCoV, but we are still a few months out from testable preventative measures of course.

Yes, you read that right, this Coronavirus is different from the ones you’d heard about, so we have to figure out novel vaccines and antiviral treatments for it. Here’s a quick infographic on them from AJLabs.

For all of the conspiracy minded among you, this is why the lunacy you’re reading about Bill Gates owning a patent and creating the virus to profit from the vaccine is wrong and harmful. You can’t vaccinate against a class of virus, only a specific viral signature, which is why you need to get a new flu shot every year. But don’t worry tin foil hat people, Johns Hopkins recently (as in, last November), ran a pandemic simulation called Event 201, which tried to capture how we’d respond to a fast-spreading Coronavirus. How did we do? From the report:

Thankfully, while this Coronavirus is fast-spreading, it doesn’t appear to be particularly lethal. This has led WHO to hold off on calling this a global epidemic. But that hasn’t stopped companies from cashing in on the feat jamboree. Taobao, one of the online stores owned by Alibaba, sold 80 million surgical face masks in two days this week. And to be frank, not the good ones.

While some of them are fashionable, comfy to wear, or match your pants, if they’re not rated as N95 respirators, they only help you not infect other people. That’s right, the reason why surgeons wear face masks is because they’re trying to not cough gross into the open chest wound they’re working on. To keep yourself safe from a fast-spreading virus like SARS, the respirator has to be part of a full solution that we’re still studying the effectiveness of.

But, this is probably not going to be something you have to worry about unless you live in Hong Kong. And it looks like the Chinese have some of the best gallows humor out there, as a virus simulation/pandemic mobile game topped China’s Apple App Store this week.

Eye-Watering Data Visualization of the Week: Just think of how he could change electoral politics if that money was spent on down ballot races at the local or state level.

Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: We are so unprepared for the hacking and misinformation operations the 2020 election is going to bring, it’s not even funny. Also, that Clearwater AI company claims their facial recognition tech helped the NYPD with catching a terrorist. The NYPD disagrees. 

Impressive Grift of the Week: Doordash has engineered a system in which it pays its workers, on average, $1.45/hr after expenses. Also, remember those dark patterns and kiddie slot mechanics that I told you game companies were using on adults & teens? Disney made a billion dollars inflicting them on kids. 

Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: Not only do college degrees no longer make families wealthier, those tax incentives for state and local businesses that you hear parochial politicans prattle on about? Yea, they don’t work.

“Huh, Interesting” Read of the Week: We’ve been fantasizing about the perfect city for centuries, and AI is breathing fresh life into those capitalist-friendly semi-utopian ideas.

Royal Sampler

The production of almond milk is ravaging honeybee populations, because the way we make almonds is extremely taxing on a very delicate natural process.

75% of knowledge workers would quit a job for a different one that offered them the ability to work remotely. 

Institutional Investor is now talking about the capitalists getting a little too wacky?

Trucking in China is so similar to trucking in the USA, you really gotta give it to the people who came up with “One Struggle.”

Remember those conspiracy theories about Reagan delaying the release of Iranian hostages? They’re true!

Tik Tok has already surpassed Amazon Prime in Time Spent.

Tough and powerful piece from the Atlantic on a museum trying to do the right thing with stains on its record.

Cosmopolitan did a depressingly insightful piece exposing the abusive inner world of the Amish.

In case you didn’t hear, RIP to Mr. Peanut, WWII veteran.

January has lasted a thousand years, and none of them had snow.

Yours,T

P.S. Busta is one of my favorite rappers. If you didn’t hear this song in your head all week, I’m somehow both sorry and jealous at the same time.