The Arctic Free Press

Things will get worse

Posted on April 3, 2020     Leave a Comment

Things will get worse, there is no magic fix for any of this. There is no last minute “cavalry charge” coming to save the day. All we can do is to turn fully face the storm that is coming and accept that it is coming. Many of you don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to hear this either, but this is where we are and this is our reality. The next 60 days and especially the next 21 will be brutal, brutal in a way that I fear the American public are not prepared for. For most people there has been a slow and dawning realization that things were going bad, but for most this seemed like some far off “over the horizon disaster” that wouldn’t touch us or our homes. The American public, sealed in their bubble of safety and ignorant bliss, didn’t want to believe that such a moment was coming. The moment has arrived and we can cast blame on many places, but there are only two areas where our blame and our coming anger should be focused on; China and ourselves……..how did we get here? In part 1 of a 3 part series, I will lay out what the virus is, how it spreads, and a timeline of how China dropped the ball on this situation.

When this finally ends and the world begins to rebuild from the pain, death and economic loss that we will all feel in one way or another, we will look back and wonder what happened. Our feelings of sadness will turn to anger, and that anger should be initially focused on China. China is ultimately responsible for the initial spread of this virus, there is no other way to look at it. However, before we examine the role of China is causing this catastrophe, we need to address why COVID-19 is as deadly as it is. There are two factors that make COVID-19 uniquely suited to causing so much trouble for humans; the way it is spread and what it does to the human body.

COVID-19 spreads at a rate that is higher than many other pathogens out there. The way that disease spread is calculated is called the R “naught” value. Every single disease out there has a different R naught value, some are very high, some are low, but this value is important to understand. The higher the R naught value, the faster and more exponential the spread. What the R naught value measures is how many additional healthy people does each infected person expose to the pathogen. In viruses like the seasonal flu, the R naught value is 1.3. That means that each person with the seasonal flu infects 1.3 people. A mathematical principle would look like this 1 healthy person infects 1.3 people, 1.3 people would infect an additional 1.3 people, meaning that 1.7 people would then be infected, and they in turn would infect 1.3 people each, scaling up the entire time. A 1.3 R naught value is not great, but COVID-19 has a much, much higher R naught value. The value varies, but one study from Europe shows us that the value is as low as 3.1 up to as high as 6.5. That means that each person could possibly infect 6.5 additional people, which would be catastrophic if true. If the R naught value for COVID-19 is even as low as 3, it means that the virus is 3 times more contagious than the seasonal flu, possibly six times as contagious, but the problem doesn’t stop there.

The COVID-19 virus is called a Novel Corona Virus, because it is novel “or new” to the human race, meaning that we have never encountered this particular pathogen before. This unique organism didn’t even come into existence until November 2019. That matters because as a novel corona virus, it means the human race and our amazing immune systems have never encountered this organism at any point in human history. That means that our immune systems have no built in defense against it and when it is encountered in our bodies, our immune systems are unfamiliar with it and respond with a massive strike on the virus. This “war within our bodies” eventually goes nuclear with all parts of our immune system responding to the virus in a “scorched earth” type of battle. The casualties in white blood cells, dead virus and other cells from this war can lead to significant tissue damage (especially in the lungs), serious complications and the death toll we are seeing. There are historical examples of this type of pathogen killing tens of millions of people throughout history. The deaths of millions of Native Americans from smallpox, measles and other viruses and bacteria were the result of novel pathogens encountering populations that had never been exposed to them before. Fortunately, it appears our fatality rate will be nowhere near what happened to Native Americans in the 16th-18th centuries, but it reflects how deadly novel pathogens can be.

Now that we have reviewed how the virus spreads and briefly discussed what it does to the human body, we should probably talk about the role China has played in this pandemic. The virus came into existence sometime in mid-November 2019, we know this because there are methods to trace the virus’s age by analyzing the genome of the virus. We have also determined that the original species the COVID-19 virus inhabited was most likely a species of bat. Viruses in most cases exist in only one species at a time, to “colonize” a new species a virus needs to do two things; mutate and find a vector, or transmission route into the new host species. In the case of COVID-19 the genetic pathway of mutations remains unclear, we may never know when or where the virus that became COVID-19 jumped out of bats into another species. However, we do know what the other species was, it was most likely Pangolins, a scaly anteater type of animal found in Africa and more importantly South East-Asia.  DNA and protein sequences isolated from pangolin tissue was analyzed by researchers in several locations around the world. The researchers identified protein sequences in sick Pangolins lungs that were 91% identical to the virus proteins found in humans infected with COVID-19. Other species could also be part of this mutation chain, but we now know that bats and pangolins are involved in the mutation of COVID-19.

Knowing the mutation chain is important, but so is understanding the vector method into human beings. In many parts of China, there exists a type of market called a “wet market”, such markets are known for selling live animals such as cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, bats and many other types of wild animals for consumption. Wet markets are named after the melting ice used to preserve the food, as well as the constant washing of the market floors when they are covered in blood from the animals. The markets are unsanitary and are often locations where outbreaks of disease occur. Currently the most likely hypothesis we have is that someone working in the market came into contact with a butchered pangolin and somehow ingested the precursor virus to COVID-19, which in turn mutated inside the body of the first human that was exposed to it, turning into the COVID-19 virus. With a new outbreak of disease, we start to look for a “patient zero”, the first person likely infected with the pathogen in question. With COVID-19, we think we know who the patient zero is. This is important because it tells us that the virus most likely came into existence in Mid-November, and that gives us an opportunity to back track the spread of the virus. Finally, knowing who and where patient zero is from, allows us to take a look at the reality of COVID-19 versus the lies the Chinese government told the world for weeks and weeks.

The outbreak of this disease began in China in December 2019 in the city of Wuhan, in Hubei province which is in south Central China. The first week of December saw the emergence of the so called patient zero, with additional individuals admitted to Wuhan hospitals in the first 21 days of December. With several people showing similar, yet unique symptoms, the doctors in Wuhan had to know they were dealing with something new. Looking back at reports from China, the timeline of COVID-19 spread for December and January looks like this:

DECEMBER 2019

• 06 December 2019: a 53-year-old woman whose husband had previously been admitted for pneumonia-like symptoms presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.

• 21 December 2019: Wuhan doctors begin to notice a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause.” A cluster of cases points to community spread and an unknown cause points to a possible new pathogen. At this point the government of China should have informed the World Health Organization and key members of the international community, including the G-20 nations and the UN.

• 25 December 2019: Chinese medical staff in two hospitals in Wuhan are suspected of contracting viral pneumonia and are quarantined. This moment confirms human to human spread, and the fact that China enacted a quarantine is an indicator that they were aware that this was something new and different. Yet at this time still no action was taken.

• 31 December 2019: Dr. Li Wenliang sent a message to a group of other doctors warning them about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), urging them to take protective measures against infection. The government of China severely reprimanded him for speaking to doctors outside of China and Dr Li subsequently died while treating COVID-19 patients in Wuhan.

January 2020

• 01 January 2020: An employee of one genomics company received a phone call from an official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission, ordering the company to stop testing all samples from Wuhan related to the new disease and destroy all existing samples. Also, according to a New York Times study of cellphone data from China, close to 200,000 people leave Wuhan that day on vacations around the world. It is estimated close to two dozen airlines have direct flights to Wuhan.

• 03 January 2020: China’s National Health Commission, the nation’s top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease and to destroy samples of the virus.”

• 04 January 2020 Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention receives a summary paper of the virus and what is happening in China from Chinese colleagues. Redfield informs the Department of Health and Human Services.

• 06 January 2020: The CDC  “issued a level 1 travel watch — the lowest of its three levels — for China’s outbreak. It said the cause and the transmission mode aren’t yet known, and it advised travelers to Wuhan to avoid living or dead animals, animal markets, and contact with sick people.” This is damning towards the government of China, they knew human to human transmission was occurring and they didn’t tell anyone what was happening. In my opinion, this is the day when the ability to stop the pandemic was lost. The government of China didn’t tell the world how the virus was spreading, and absent clear information, other governments put in standard travel restrictions.

• 08 January 2020: The US offers to send a crisis response team from the Centers for Disease Control, the government of China refuses to accept the offer of aid. also on this day the Chinese government claims, “there is no evidence that the new virus is readily spread by humans, and it has not been tied to any deaths.”

• 13 January 2020: The government of Thailand announces a case of the virus in a 61-year-old Chinese woman who was visiting from Wuhan, becoming the first case outside of China.

• 14 January 2020: Six weeks after the first evidence of human-to-human transmission in Wuhan, the World Health Organization releases a statement that says: according to Chinese investigations, there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). This is a flat out lie, at this point human to human transmission has been observed for over six weeks. Again, the government of China and the WHO lied to the world about the severity of this threat.

• 15 January 2020: Japan confirms its first case of COVID-19. Also on this day, the government in Wuhan, China states that human to human transmission of this virus is possible, but further spread of this virus is unlikely.

• 18 January 2020: Health and Human Services Secretary Hank Azar presents President Trump with the first briefing on the COVID-19 situation.

• 20 January 2020: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission declares for the last time in its daily bulletin, “no related cases were found among the close contacts. From this point forward, the Chinese government begins to slowly acknowledge that the virus is able to spread by human to human transmission.

• 21 January 2020: The CDC confirms the first case of COVID-19 in the US, a man from Snohomish county, Washington. who returned from China 6 days earlier. At this point it is estimated that 9 million people had visited Wuhan and had left to travel across China or to other countries around the world. Even if only 1% of the 9 million had been exposed to COVID-19 that would be 90,000 people possibly spreading the virus on their travels, seeding it in any country or location they visited.

• 23 January 2020: Chinese authorities announce their first steps for a quarantine of Wuhan. Also on this day, Vietnam and Singapore record their first confirmed cases of COVID-19. By this date an unknown number of Chinese citizens had travelled around the world as carriers of the virus. The average citizen from China is not to be blamed for this spread, but the Chinese government knew, they knew what they had by this point and they still were only just beginning to engage in quarantines of cities like Wuhan.

• 24 January 2020: Vietnam reports person-to-person transmission, and several countries record their first instance of human to human transmission. Within 3 days, the US sees cases in 5 other locations, meaning that the chances for stopping the pandemic have come and gone.

• 25 January 2020: France, Canada, Malaysia and Australia record their first cases of COVID-19, meaning that the virus is now present on 4 of the 6 populated continents on Earth.

• 31 January 2020: The U.K., Russia, Sweden, and Spain confirm their first 2019-nCoV cases. The World Health Organization declares the 2019-nCoV outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. The United States CDC states that COVID-19 is a public health emergency and begins screening people entering the country from China.

The government of China had close to sixty days to tell the world what was happening in their country. Instead, they engaged in a propaganda campaign designed to confuse the world about what was happening. The cost of this deception is already extremely high and will continue as the virus continues to spread. When this is all said and done, there must be a reckoning with China. The US and the world must take concrete steps to both punish China and work to bring back certain segments of our manufacturing and pharmaceutical bases. We must take these steps to ensure that the next time this happens, and there will be a next time, we are able to take care of our citizens without having to rely on a despotic regime that is in all intents and purposes our enemy. Part II will focus on how Europe and the United States fail to prepare adequately for COVID-19 and how unserious our responses were.