By Vivien Fellegi | April 8, 2020
Teiya Kasahara leans over their balcony in Toronto, with her diamond-strong voice
slicing through the cold breeze to reach neighbors across the street. The opera singer
and multidisciplinary performer raises their arms in supplication as they sing Ave Maria, accompanied by pianist Andrea Grant two floors down. Summoned by the serenade, condo dwellers venture onto their balconies, and joggers stop in their tracks and look up. Kasahara waves. Their performance that March day was the first of 19 shows; the total number of performances is inspired by the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.
“I wanted to do something positive in this panic,” who uses the pronoun “they.”
Kasahara’s compassion has helped them cope with the shock of lost gigs and income due
to COVID-19. Though the performer battled icy blasts and faulty acoustics outdoors, the audience’s response made the effort worthwhile; strangers refueled the singer with surprised smiles, rapt attention and honking horns. This interplay of intimacy continued long past each show, as videos of the concerts went viral on social media, and Kasahara was inundated with muffins, chocolates and grateful emails from new fans. “It’s heartwarming and powerful to know that we can still connect on something as simple as a …song,” they say.
BARCELONA, April 10 – The coronavirus death toll curve in Spain flattened further on Friday as the government discussed different strategies to start phasing out one of the world’s strictest lock downs. Spaniards have been off the streets since mid-March, but a slowdown of the COVID-19 disease’s spread and its death toll has enabled officials to start discussing a gradual easing. “Any step towards de-escalation of such an intense lock down must be done with extreme caution,”
Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias told local TV channel TVE.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has said the formal lock down will probably continue into May, however, some restrictions may be lifted as early as Monday to breathe life into a paralysed economy. Two weeks ago, the government banned all non-essential workers from the streets, effectively shutting down most businesses. From Monday, though, some job categories such as construction workers will be allowed out of their homes again. Though many people were to return to work, social distancing should be maintained, Maria Jose Sierra, the deputy head of health emergencies,
said at a virtual news conference.
“We will give a series of recommendations: The most important is if there is a person who shows the slightest symptom, they should contact the health system and remain in self-isolation,” she said. The number of daily deaths fell again on Friday to 605, the lowest figure since March 24, the health ministry said. The rate of increase has dropped to 4% down from 20% two weeks ago. “We are seeing the curves are on the decline, even though there are still many cases,” Sierra added.
News to stay informed. Advice to stay safe.
Bing COVID-19 tracker: Latest numbers by country and state
Health care workers share video diaries of fighting COVID-19!!!
Science Behind Virus: Potential treatments for coronavirus
The virus typically causes respiratory illnesses like the common cold.
A new study found the virus may have originated in bats and then spread to humans via
a snake or pangolin. Then eventually from Humans to Tigers. Richard Ebright, a professor
of chemical biology at Rutgers University, said in an interview with The Washington Post:
“Based on the virus genome and properties, there is no indication whatsoever
that it was an engineered virus.”
The Washington Post reported most countries have abandoned their bioweapons programs after years of work did not yield satisfactory results. The Scripps Research Institute released a study that rejects the notion that the virus was man-made. Researchers concluded that if the virus were engineered, its genome sequence would more closely resemble earlier and more serious versions of the coronavirus.
“If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness,” the report said. “But the scientists found that the SARS-CoV-2 backbone differed substantially from those of already known coronaviruses and mostly resembled related viruses found in bats and pangolins then into humans and tigers.”
A statement in the Lancet, a medical journal, written by public health officials who have
been following the progression of the virus also asserted that animals are the likely source: “Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”
The statement referenced multiple academic and government sources that supported the Lancet article’s conclusion. These sources include the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Nature; U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine; the New England Journal of Medicine; the Chinese Medical Journal; and the medical journal Infection,
Genetics and Evolution.
Researchers who analyzed the genome of the coronavirus found its sequence shared a very high resemblance to a coronavirus in bats, but it’s possible other animals may have been involved in the transmission process. “2019-nCoV is 96% identical at the whole-genome level
to a bat coronavirus,” a study published in the science journal Nature said.
Another study published in the Lancet found results based on samples collected from nine patients who had contracted the virus corroborated the theory that the virus had come from bats. Researchers concluded the genome sequences of the coronavirus “was closely related … to two bat-derived severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like coronaviruses.”
Although scientists say they believe bats were likely the original host, it’s also very possible,
the study notes, that the virus was transferred from a bat to another animal that may have been at the seafood market in Wuhan. Overwhelming scientific evidence suggests the coronavirus originated in nature, and there is no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Our fact-check sources:
– Statement from The Lancet
– A study published in the science journal Nature
– Lancet: Genomic characterisation and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus: implications for virus origins and receptor binding
– Washington Post: Experts debunk fringe theory linking China’s coronavirus to weapons research
– South China Morning Post: Chinese research lab ‘badly hurt’ by man-made coronavirus rumours
– NY Post: Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab
– Fox News: Bannon on coronavirus fears impacting global economy
– Rush Limbaugh
– Fox News: Tom Cotton on coronavirus origins
– Sen. Tom Cotton’s Twitter
– Science Daily: COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin
– National Academies
– Vox: The conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus, debunked
The origin of the Wuhan virus has been a hotly debated topic, with initial theories
ranging from bats to bio-labs.
China ‘appoints its top military bio-warfare expert to take over secretive virus lab in Wuhan’,
sparking conspiracy theories that coronavirus outbreak is linked to Beijing’s army.
The truth is, all we really know is that it began in China and I have little desire to speculate beyond that until we get more information. With that said, Sen. Tom Cotton was asking for answers very early on about the origin, wondering why China was seemingly lying about everything and whether Wuhan hosting China’s largest bio-lab had anything to do with it. Cotton was roundly savaged for even suggesting we look into what happened.
(This is what we know.)
A documentary showing a Chinese virologist catching wild bats in mountains have fueled a conspiracy theory, which suggests that the novel coronavirus may have originated in Wuhan’s disease control authority.
The seven-minute film features the centre’s researcher Tian Junhua, who has visited dozens of caves in Hubei province to capture the flying mammal. It has sparked a fresh round of speculation over the origin of the coronavirus, with some people again suggesting that pandemic could be a man-made crisis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLwG2ekEEw0
EXCLUSIVE: Coronavirus Expert Says Virus Could Have Leaked From Wuhan Lab!!!
By Andrew Kerr
A molecular biologist who has been quoted as a coronavirus expert by The Washington Post and MSNBC said Thursday in no uncertain terms that the novel coronavirus could have been unleashed due to a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
China’s top virologist on bat-borne viruses, Shi Zhengli, has sworn on her life that the virus did not leak from her Wuhan lab, saying that its spread was “nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits.” The “Bat Lady” work gave a head start to the scientific research community’s understanding of the origin of the new coronavirus?
And while Shi now tells those who question whether her lab could be connected to the release of the coronavirus to “shut their stinking mouths,” she previously said she lost sleep worrying about the possibility that her lab in Wuhan could have been responsible for the virus’s release. Shi, known by her colleagues as the “bat woman” because of the 16 years she has
spent hunting for viruses in bat caves, told Scientific American in March that she frantically searched for any evidence that her laboratory’s records were mishandled upon learning of the virus’s outbreak in Wuhan in late December.
“Could they have come from our lab?” Shi recalled thinking.
“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she noted, saying that her studies had shown that southern China posed the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping from animals to humans. Shi said she breathed a sigh of relief when results came back showing that the sequences of the coronavirus did not match the viruses she and her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” Shi said.
“I had not slept a wink for days.”
Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology reported in early 2017 that after five years of surveying they had discovered 11 new strains of SARS-related viruses in horseshoe bats from China’s Yunnan Province. The virologist said at the time that the 11 strains contained all the genes to make a SARS coronavirus similar to that of the 2003 outbreak. Shi contributed to a study published in February reporting that the novel coronavirus is 96.2% identical to a viral strain that was detected in horseshoe bats from the Yunnan Province.
However, two Chinese researchers noted in a separate paper in February that the horseshoe bats that are known to carry the nearly-identical viral strain live 600 miles away from Wuhan. The researchers also cited testimonies from nearly 60 people who lived in or visited Wuhan saying that the bat “was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.” “The killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan,” the two Chinese researchers noted in their paper, which was uploaded to Research Gate on Feb. 6.
The paper was removed from Research Gate on Feb. 14 or 15, according to internet archives.
“The content was uploaded to ResearchGate by a user who later removed it from the platform.
Beyond this, we cannot disclose information about individuals who use our platform,” Research Gate spokesman Dan Noyes told the DCNF. The paper’s lead researcher,
Botao Xiao, didn’t return the DCNF’s emails on Thursday seeking comment. Ebright,
the Rutgers University molecular biologist, told Beijing-based news outlet Caixin Global in February that while there is “no basis to suspect the virus was engineered,”
the available data indicates that the virus’s introduction into human populations could be attributed to either natural causes or to a laboratory mishap.
The Washington Post and MSNBC have quoted Ebright saying that theories about the virus being a bio-weapon should be “firmly excluded,” but neither outlet included his belief that the possibility that the virus entered the human population through a lab accident “cannot–and should not–be dismissed.” Shi has furiously denied that the novel coronavirus could have leaked from her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“The novel 2019 coronavirus is nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits.
I, Shi Zhengli, swear on my life that it has nothing to do with our laboratory,” she wrote on a Chinese
social messaging app in early February, according to Caixin Global.
Deadly viruses have a history of escaping from Chinese laboratories.
The SARS virus escaped twice from the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing in 2004, one year after the virus was initially contained. The Chinese government has been widely criticized for misleading the world about the novel coronavirus outbreak from its earliest stages. One of the first doctors in Wuhan to raise the alarm about the spread of a SARS-like virus in the city was detained by police in December and told to “stop making false comments.”
That doctor, Li Wenliang, died from coronavirus in February.
Whistleblower Silenced by China could have stopped the global coronavirus spread |
60 Minutes Australia
Another Chinese doctor, Ai Fen, claimed she was silenced by her bosses when she tried
to warn about the virus during its early stages. Dr. Ai Fen, the courageous Chinese doctor
credited with being one of the first persons to reveal to the world the existence in Wuhan
of the killer disease now called COVID-19, has gone missing in China. Ai’s whereabouts as
of Sunday are currently unknown, according to 60 Minutes Australia, sparking fears that
she has been detained.
And on Wednesday a top Chinese health official announced that the country will begin counting coronavirus cases from patients that show no symptoms, a tactic acknowledgment that Beijing had under reported its official tally of known coronavirus cases since
the start of the pandemic.
(RELATED: Chinese Government Finally Acknowledges Underreporting Coronavirus Cases)
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas told the DCNF on Wednesday it is wholly appropriate to question whether the coronavirus outbreak originated from labs in Wuhan that were studying coronaviruses. “The reason I have raised these questions from the very beginning is because of China’s statements and their actions,” Cotton told the DCNF. “After concealing the virus for many weeks in December and then minimizing its severity for most of January, they then peddle an origin story about the food market in Wuhan.” “Given their dishonesty and the proximity of these labs, which we know were working with coronaviruses, it is only reasonable and responsible for us to ask the question and demand the answers.”
With criticism I always offer up some treatment information…. unlike double talking politicians that point fingers?
Dr Danny Pulido a Pulmonary & Critical Care Specialist at Baptist Medical Center Beaches ….Dr. Pulido says he successfully treated a COVID 19 patient using a similar drug called Plaquenil… you posted this outcome to facebook this weekend and so far it’s been shared more than 6 thousand times….this is giving people some hope.
University of Alberta materials engineering professor, Hyo-Jick Choi, has come up with
an innovative solution that turns the masks into virus killers. Existing masks and respirators may trap virus-laden droplets but the virus is still infectious on the mask. Choi took on the challenge of improving the masks, using a simple weapon: salt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8EgAOoY4Gg
Edgy Edge — Hope everyone is safe during this coronavirus pandemic! A lot is going on daily, but I thought to make this video on this potential coronavirus treatment/medication regimen. Although currently, there is no FDA approved treatment for coronavirus (Covid-19), there are a handful of medications that researchers and sceinetists are hopeful. In this video, I talk about Zinc and Chloroquine and how these 2 medications have potential to treat and manage patients infected with the coronavirus. These 2 medications have not gone through a randomized control study/trial, however they show merit to be considered for further study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdKSR_SHZmY
In this video Minh D. Ta will examine carefully the clinical evidence concerning the usage
of hydroxychloroquine in combination with zinc in the treatment of Covid-19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FbEwpj1vJw
In this video, Dean Willis, Lecturer in Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology at University College London about ibuprofen and other anti-inflammatory drugs and their
effect on our body. To contact The Physiological Society: pressoffice@physoc.org
Transcript: Stories have been circulating online about the use of ibuprofen in the treatment
of coronavirus. But what is ibuprofen and how does it work? Ibuprofen is a class of what’s known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories.
These are drugs that help to reduce inflammation. Inflammation is the body’s immune system’s response to an irritant, such as a virus or bacteria. And ibuprofen acts to block your body’s production of certain natural substances that cause inflammation, which in turn can help to relieve pain. To learn more about inflammation and what happens when it does wrong, we spoke to Dean Willis, Lecturer in Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology at University College London Inflammation is absolutely required for the continued well-being of an individual. We require an optimal immune reaction, both innate and adaptive and an optimal inflammatory response.
The problem is, is inflammation itself can also cause damage when inappropriate. And we see this characterised in many inflammatory-type diseases, a classical example is things like rheumatoid arthritis, where we see inflammation associated with the joints initially, in asthma, where it’s in places like the lung. So for most people inflammation is a process our body uses to deal with infection, or injury, but for some people,
inflammation can cause problems.
So do we use anti-inflammatory drugs to treat these people?
We can inhibit inflammation but the downside is that we always have some degree of increased susceptibility to infections and this is the major problem. So with something like COVID-19, you may want to increase the activity of the immune system, or anti-viral system to try and clear the virus, however at the same time, an over-activation of your immune system, leading to more inflammation, can actually be quite serious, and it’s a delicate balance which, to be honest, it’s difficult to address. For the time being, there is currently no strong evidence that ibuprofen can make coronavirus (COVID-19) worse. But until we have more information, the UK Government advise taking paracetamol to treat the symptoms of coronavirus, unless a doctor has said paracetamol is not suitable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vQfmZqSPp4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzEivjm7YtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvbyRdRRb7o