Like Tree24Likes

Covid-19: 04/16 - Global News

Closed Thread
Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 1 2 3 LastLast
  1. #11

    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Posts
    7,471
    Quote Originally Posted by hullexile:
    Care homes explain most of the UK numbers.

    On the Philippines I wouldn't bother, pre covid19 they are basically meaningless. My neighbour died in December, official reason for death was "being ill" (as a foreigner it was just to confirm he had not been murdered by his wife, known as "Filipino divorce"). Had he been a local no official reason is required.
    Well, may I wish you the best luck in your marriage!

  2. #12

    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    猴山
    Posts
    23,652
    Quote Originally Posted by HK_Katherine:
    The UK is missing a fair number of Covid-related deaths I think.

    I looked at the UK statistics data for the week to end 3 April, and extracted all the flu and all the Covid deaths from the numbers - the residual still shows a highly significant (around 330 a day) additional death rate in the final week. The ONS data is a few weeks delayed, so we should see this more clearly later. (Unless anyone thinks there is any other reason for 330 extra people to die in lockdown?).
    This will all come out over time. The death rate at nursing homes should be lower at some point

  3. #13

    Join Date
    Jun 2016
    Posts
    1,972
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/w...tionalism.html

    As Coronavirus Fades in China, Nationalism and Xenophobia Flare


    Now that the pandemic is raging outside China’s borders, foreigners are being shunned, barred from public spaces and even evicted.











    China’s success in fighting the coronavirus has given rise to a strident blend of patriotism and antiforeigner sentiment. Credit...Kevin Frayer/Getty Images


    By Vivian Wang and Amy Qin



    • April 16, 2020Updated 8:32 a.m. ET







    HONG KONG — After 16 years in China, a Congolese businessman thought he knew what being black there entailed. He had been subjected to racial slurs and denied apartments, but he had also learned Chinese and made local friends. He loved the country; he called it his second home.
    But the businessman, Felly Mwamba, had not anticipated the coronavirus pandemic, during which he would find himself sealed in his home, prohibited from leaving and eyed as a carrier of the disease, simply because he was African.
    “The way they are treating black people, you cannot accept,” Mr. Mwamba said by telephone. “We are not animals.”
    As China tames the coronavirus epidemic now ravaging other countries, its success is giving rise to an increasingly strident blend of patriotism, nationalism and xenophobia, at a pitch many say has not been seen in decades.


    A restaurant in northern China put up a banner celebrating the virus’s spread in the United States. A widely circulated cartoon showed foreigners being sorted into trash bins. African residents in the southern city of Guangzhou, including Mr. Mwamba, have been corralled into forced quarantines, labeled as dangers to the country’s health.
    Some of the uglier manifestations of nationalism have been fueled by government propaganda, which has touted China’s response to the virus as evidence of the ruling Communist Party’s superiority. And recriminations from abroad, including calls to make China pay for the pandemic that began there, have triggered defensiveness on the part of many Chinese.











    Image

    A street in the so-called Little Africa district of Guangzhou, China, in 2018. Africans in the city say they have been evicted and forced into quarantine.Credit...Fred Dufour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

    Whipping up national pride has long been a tool for solidifying the party’s grip on power. In the short term, the nationalism may be useful to the central government, as it seeks to quell lingering discontent over its early attempts to play down the outbreak.
    But if left unchecked, the vitriol risks isolating China internationally, just as the Communist Party seeks to use the pandemic to promote itself as a global leader. In recent days, countries that are usually friendly with China have denounced Chinese xenophobia, while business leaders have warned of difficulties operating there.


    “The real risk that the nationalism poses is to foreign governments’ perception of threat from China,” said Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor at Cornell University who has studied Chinese nationalism.
    Latest Updates: Global Coronavirus Outbreak



    See more updatesUpdated 9m ago

    More live coverage: Markets U.S. New York





    China’s heightened us-against-them mentality is perhaps most apparent in its recent strictures aimed at foreigners. Though the Chinese government denounced racist attacks against Asians overseas when the outbreak was centered in China, it now casts people from other countries as public health risks.
    Last month, China barred virtually all foreigners from entering, even though it had criticized other countries for closing their borders. Officials emphasize that most of China’s new cases are now imported — often without mentioning that many are Chinese citizens returning home.
    Fear of imported infections has at times exploded into, or provided cover for, xenophobia.
    In Beijing and Shanghai, foreigners have been barred from some shops and gyms, supposedly as part of a campaign to combat the virus. “We are temporarily not accepting foreign friends and people whose temperature is above 37.3,” read a sign in a hair salon near Beijing’s central business district.
    A salon employee said she didn’t see it as discrimination. “It is an epidemic, after all,” she said.
    John Artman, the American editor of a Chinese tech publication, said his office building in Beijing reopened last month after closing during the outbreak. But he was told that the building was not admitting foreigners.
    By coincidence, the company was already planning to move its office. But when he tried to visit the new office two weeks later, a colleague said the new site, too, would not permit foreigners to enter. Mr. Artman is still working from home.


    In Yiwu, a city in Zhejiang Province, Lucky Destiny, a Nigerian jewelry exporter, said that whenever he went outside during the past two weeks, locals would cover their noses or move away. Shopkeepers shooed him away, and people got off buses when he boarded.
    He has taken to buying food only at night, when the streets are emptier.
    “I had a plan for business, being able to build something for my family,” said Mr. Destiny, 28. “If this continues, I will try to leave.”











    Image

    The international arrivals area at Beijing Capital International Airport on March 28. Almost all foreigners have been forbidden to enter China.Credit...Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

    The authorities have said their outbreak prevention measures apply equally to Chinese and non-Chinese. But they have sometimes singled out foreigners in the same breath. A recent editorial in China Daily, a state-run newspaper, denied discrimination against foreigners, even as it said that “some foreigners choose to flout China’s rules” on containment.
    Some expressions of antiforeigner sentiment have made no pretense about public health concerns. Last month, a porridge restaurant in the northeastern city of Shenyang displayed a banner that read: “Celebrating the epidemic in the United States and wishing coronavirus a nice trip to Japan.”
    Sign up to receive an email when we publish a new story about the coronavirus outbreak.


    Sign Up


    Perhaps nowhere has xenophobia manifested itself more strongly than in Guangzhou, a manufacturing hub with a large African population.
    In recent days, African residents have reported being evicted from their homes and hotels, after five Nigerians there tested positive for the virus. Africans have also been ordered to undergo 14-day quarantines at their own expense, even if they have no recent travel history or have already tested negative.


    Images shared on social media showed groups of black people sleeping on a sidewalk, and a sign banning black people from a McDonald’s.
    Mr. Mwamba, the Congolese trader, said he and other community leaders spent one night last week walking around the city, looking for lodging for Congolese students who had been ejected from their hotel. Soon after, his apartment door was taped shut with Mr. Mwamba inside, and local officials told him he could not go out for 14 days, he said.
    The events in Guangzhou have drawn sharp — and unusual — condemnation from officials in Africa, where China has cultivated close ties and economic reliance through billions of dollars in loans and investments.
    Ghana’s foreign minister on Saturday criticized the “inhumane treatment” of Africans in China. A group of African ambassadors wrote a letter to China’s foreign minister denouncing “stigmatization and discrimination.”
    Foreigners are not the only targets of China’s swelling nationalism. Chinese people deemed insufficiently admiring of the government have been subjected to vitriolic online attacks by China’s army of “little pinks,” a nickname for the generation of young digital warriors who pounce on any criticism of the Communist Party.











    Image

    Masks hung up to dry in Guangzhou.Credit...Alex Plavevski/EPA, via Shutterstock

    They recently targeted a novelist, Fang Fang, who for two months published a daily journal of life under lockdown in Wuhan, where the outbreak began. She wrote of the bravery of ordinary people around her, while also vowing to hold local government officials to account.


    When news emerged last week that her diary would be translated and published in English, she faced a torrent of abuse, accusing her of helping foreign governments undermine her own country.
    “Her writings are being used to blackmail China, to demand that China pay compensation, to bring China to trial, to interrogate China,” Sima Nan, a Maoist scholar and well-known defender of Communist Party rule, said about Fang Fang in an interview. “She has become a political tool.”
    Fang Fang has likened the harassment to her childhood during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when anyone seen as even mildly critical of Mao Zedong risked torture or imprisonment.
    A few prominent voices have warned of the dangers of excessive national pride. In a recent essay, Hua Sheng, a respected economist, urged more introspection.
    “Some people say if we investigate our country’s culpability, we would be giving evidence to outsiders and giving them a sword with which to hurt our national interests,” he wrote. “I must say, it’s precisely the opposite.”
    There are signs that the nationalism already threatens to create a backlash that could undermine China’s economic and diplomatic status.
    Jörg Wuttke, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, recently said that the scope of limitations on foreigners in China was “much deeper” than in other countries and “excludes us from a lot of public spaces.” The chamber has called China’s restrictions on arriving foreigners an “unprecedented challenge” for corporations.


    Further hostility could intensify existing pressure for countries to reduce their reliance on China. Last week, Japan — historically a target of Chinese nationalism — announced a $2.2 billion fund to help companies shift production out of China.
    The next day, Larry Kudlow, a top economic adviser to President Trump, suggested that the United States follow suit and “pay the moving costs of American companies from China back to the U.S.”
    Mr. Mwamba, who exports motorcycle parts and construction materials, has been contemplating a move of his own, despite his deep ties to the country.
    “This week made me really think a lot,” he said. “I love China, but sometimes, I’m feeling tired.”




    Listen to ‘The Daily’: Kicked Out of China

    As the coronavirus escalated to a worldwide crisis, China expelled our journalists from the country, surveilling our correspondents to prevent reporting.










    Listen 29:58

















    Vivian Wang reported from Hong Kong and Amy Qin from Taipei, Taiwan. Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing.


  4. #14

  5. #15

    Join Date
    Jun 2019
    Posts
    7,463

    The streets of Paris during quarantine:


  6. #16

    Join Date
    Jun 2019
    Posts
    7,463

    How quarantines are handled around the world:

    shri likes this.

  7. #17

    Join Date
    Jun 2019
    Posts
    7,463

    This is a great piece analyzing the pitfalls of the WHO while also calling out the problematic approach of Trump to de-fund the organization:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...failed/610063/

    HK_Katherine and Mefisto like this.

  8. #18

    Join Date
    Dec 2013
    Location
    Hong Kong
    Posts
    12,323
    Quote Originally Posted by justjoe86:
    Yes I guess underreporting is inevitable but it's certainly happening. Here's another chart with similar findings:

    Attachment 81298
    That's the main chart where I got the numbers. I could see that the uplift looked smaller than the Covid line (plus the flu line, which also has an uptick) so wanted to check if my eye-balling was accurate.

    Presumably however these people died, the death certificate did not mention anything respiratory because it it had, under the way the ONS categorises, it should have fallen into either the Covid or the flu line. My experience with my Dad's death in the UK was that the person categorising deaths like this like to be more expansive rather than less (they put a bunch of possible causes on the certificate) and the ONS says if Covid is mentioned, even if something else is considered the main cause, then they add it to the Covid line.
    Which begs the question - what symptoms did these people have?

  9. #19

    Join Date
    Dec 2013
    Location
    Hong Kong
    Posts
    12,323
    Quote Originally Posted by hullexile:
    Care homes explain most of the UK numbers.

    On the Philippines I wouldn't bother, pre covid19 they are basically meaningless. My neighbour died in December, official reason for death was "being ill" (as a foreigner it was just to confirm he had not been murdered by his wife, known as "Filipino divorce"). Had he been a local no official reason is required.
    But surely someone adds up raw numbers of all causes? I was amazed to find no statistics at all less detailed than an annual figure from 2 years ago!!!!

    I just wondered what the actual uptick in total deaths was, since I think if the UK is mis categorising up to a third of deaths then the number is much higher in other places.

  10. #20

    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    Pampanga, Philippines
    Posts
    29,763
    Quote Originally Posted by HK_Katherine:
    But surely someone adds up raw numbers of all causes? I was amazed to find no statistics at all less detailed than an annual figure from 2 years ago!!!!

    I just wondered what the actual uptick in total deaths was, since I think if the UK is mis categorising up to a third of deaths then the number is much higher in other places.
    The UK doesn't count deaths in care homes or at home. The Philippines doesn't do care homes really and people are hospitalised or monitored closely at home. Those quarantined get priority in terms of free food and financial assistance. From now on people will be quarantined in the 3000 new centres. So I actually have more faith in the Philippines tracking covid19 deaths than the UK which is strange but a result of the different strategies.

    As to stats, try and look up any stats here and it is usually years out of date because collection is or was manual. There is no requirement for an autopsy and the family has to pay for it.