This year’s broadcast started with a six-minute celebration of China’s international Belt and Road infrastructure projects — as interpreted via ethnic dance.
Then came the traditional musical salute to the Lunar New Year, with women waving feathered fans and men dressed like caped superheroes. A pair of comedians took the stage, followed by a boy band-style rendition of Wild Wolf Disco, one of the country’s top hits.
Finally, a half-hour in, things got serious. String music swelled and TV screens across China filled with images of gowned and masked hospital workers in Wuhan, bravely attending to victims of the COVID-19 virus outbreak. And the six hosts of state television’s annual Spring Festival Gala stood in a line before the camera, doing their best to soothe the fears of the estimated 1.3 billion people watching at home.
“The central government is doing all they can to succeed!” one proclaimed.
“We are quarantining the virus, but not quarantining love,” said another.
“Please believe China, all will be better!” promised a third.
Men wearing face masks sit on a bench with a cat underneath, at a park in Beijing on Friday. China remains in the grips of the novel coronavirus outbreak. (Reuters)
A month after that Jan. 24 broadcast, it’s clear that such optimism was at best, premature. The number of novel coronavirus cases in China has expanded dramatically, with 77,042 people having contracted the disease as of Sunday, according to the World Health Organization, and 2,445 deaths — a 3.0 per cent mortality rate.
And while there are indications the rate of infection within the country might be slowing, the flu-like illness continues its spread in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Iran and beyond, with 1,769 cases and 17 associated deaths across 28 countries. Canada accounted for eight of those confirmed illnesses, with a ninth presumptive case, but none of the fatalities.
This, against a backdrop of unprecedented measures to contain the disease. A staggering 60 million people in Hubei province remain on lockdown, largely confined to their homes, with schools and businesses closed. A total of 780 million people across China are under strict travel restrictions. And almost two dozen airlines have severely curtailed, or flat-out cancelled, their flights in and out of the country.
But questions now swirl about what the Chinese knew during the first, crucial few weeks of the outbreak, and if information about the severity and spread of the disease was being suppressed instead of shared. A possible repeat of what happened during the early days of the SARS crisis in 2002-03, when the country’s Communist leadership downplayed a similar illness that eventually moved around the world, infecting more than 8,000 people, and killing 774, including 44 in Canada.
“They promised transparency, they promised everything would change, they promised a new rule book,” says Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author who has tracked global outbreaks and epidemics for decades.
Garrett, who was based in Beijing during the SARS outbreak, says China’s COVID-19 statistics have given her a strange case of déjà vu.
“When you started seeing this long period where the numbers either didn’t budge, or even one day went backwards, to me that just looked like completely fabricated figures,” she says. “There was absolutely no reason to believe that was true, especially if this was a SARS-related virus.”
Medical staff at the dedicated isolation ward of Wuhan’s People’s Hospital wish everyone a Happy New Year, saying: “We’re here, don’t worry [and celebrate Spring Festival]” – a hashtag that’s now propagated online to ease the <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/coronavirus?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#coronavirus</a> panic. <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/%E6%9C%89%E6%88%91%E4%BB%AC%E5%9C%A8%E5%A4%A7%E5%AE%B6%E5%AE%89%E5%BF%83%E8%BF%87%E5%B9%B4?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#有我们在大家安心过年</a> <a href=”https://t.co/byWLd8DJ1i”>pic.twitter.com/byWLd8DJ1i</a>
Yanzhong Huang, a professor of global health studies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that China’s early reports on the illness were severely flawed.
“It seems very clear that either local government officials or the health authorities messed up in their response to the outbreak,” he says. Low-balled case numbers and inaccurate information about how the disease was spreading meant that health-care workers failed to take adequate precautions to isolate patients or even protect themselves, he says.
“When the preparation fails, you are guaranteed to see how a small outbreak evolves into an epidemic and takes a heavy toll on the economy and a society,” he says. “At least two weeks were squandered.”
A changing timeline
There has been widespread outrage in China over the case of Dr. Li Wenliang, a Wuhan ophthalmologist who was among the first to report a cluster of strange, SARS-like pneumonia cases at a local hospital. After Li shared his observations in an online chat group with his medical school classmates on Dec. 30, he was questioned by police, and ultimately forced to sign a statement declaring that his insights were “incorrect” and “illegal.”
Li’s death on Feb. 7 from the very virus he had been accused of fabricating touched off public mourning and expressions of dissent on social media, and many consider him a martyr to both science and free expression.
However, we now know that Li was not the only one to sound the alarm.
A report from another Wuhan doctor, Zhang Hong, published in The Lancet medical journal earlier this month, revealed that seven other area physicians were cautioned by police after flagging suspicious pneumonia cases in early December.
And while China did inform the World Health Organization (WHO) about the unexplained illnesses on Dec. 31 — blaming animal-to-human transmission at a local market — it took authorities almost three weeks more to disclose other major developments such as the first confirmed person-to-person transmission on Jan. 3, the spread of the sickness to health-care workers on Jan. 7, and the initial COVID-19 death on Jan. 9.
The Chinese public was also kept in the dark. Local papers in Wuhan reported sparingly on the illness in early January, mostly denying that it existed, or was in any way related to SARS. The People’s Daily, the country’s national newspaper, made no mention of the outbreak whatsoever until Jan. 21, the day President Xi Jinping finally acknowledged the problem, decreeing that the virus “must be taken seriously,” in remarks reported by state television.
Travellers are seen at the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station on Tuesday, what should have been the last day of the Spring Festival travel rush. (Aly Song/Reuters)
And the timeline of who knew what, when, keeps changing.
Last week, official Chinese media reported on a speech Xi gave at the beginning of February in which the president claimed he had demanded measures to “prevent and control” the coronavirus during a Jan. 7 gathering of the Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s highest authority.
Some observers of Chinese politics suggest the speech has been highlighted in an effort to portray Xi as a take-charge leader and insulate him from domestic criticism over his government’s handling of the crisis. But the disclosure raises other questions.
“The official story to the outside world and the rest of China was, ‘It’s all under control,'” says Laurie Garrett. “[Xi] clearly knew that was a false narrative because, you know, a small outbreak of 40 people in one city, all connected to an animal market does not warrant an intervention by the head of state — in any country.”
Global consequences
If the Chinese were concealing the true extent of the coronavirus outbreak through the first weeks of January, they didn’t do the rest of the world any favours.
When the WHO met on Jan. 22 and 23 to debate whether to declare a global health emergency, it was understood that there were 571 confirmed cases with 17 fatalities in China, and 10 more illnesses across seven other territories and countries.
The WHO committee held off on the emergency — a label that frees up funds and international assistance — because of the relatively small number of reported infections and China’s aggressive lockdown in Hubei.
In retrospect, it may have been a costly deferral. By the time the declaration was ultimately made on Jan. 30, the number of coronavirus illnesses in China had grown to 7,736 confirmed and 12,167 suspected cases, with 170 deaths. And the disease had spread to 18 countries, with 82 people having fallen sick.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, has praised China for its response to the outbreak. (Denis Balibouse/Reuters)
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director general, has been effusive in his praise for the “extraordinary measures” that China is taking to combat COVID-19.
“The speed with which China detected the outbreak, isolated the virus, sequenced the genome and shared it with WHO and the world are very impressive, and beyond words. So is China’s commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries,” he said shortly after the emergency was declared. “In many ways, China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response. It’s not an exaggeration.”
And there are continued questions about the country’s case numbers as authorities keep changing the diagnosis criteria, making it difficult to tell how much progress is actually being made in the battle against the coronavirus.
The politics of fear
Kelley Lee, the director of global health studies at Simon Fraser University, has studied and followed the WHO since the 1990s. She says the crisis is highlighting the “disconnect” between a body that was created in 1948, and the realities of a transnational epidemic in a modern, inter-connected world.
“It’s during an outbreak like this that we find out if our political institutions and our politicians are helping or hindering,” says Lee.
Chinese President Xi Jinping inspects the novel coronavirus prevention and control work at the Anhuali Community in Beijing on Feb. 10. (Xinhua via Reuters)
The WHO doesn’t have the authority to tell Xi Jingping what to do, let alone take over the fight on the ground. All it can do is engage in what is known as disease diplomacy, and try to convince China that its interests and the world’s concerns are completely aligned.
“In some ways the SARS outbreak taught the WHO that you have to have the country that is most affected — the epicentre of the outbreak — on its side. It can’t risk alienating the Chinese,” says Lee. “I’m sure they know that they’re not getting full co-operation, but they’re still trying to encourage that.”
However, that baked-in skepticism about the Chinese numbers is being harnessed and exploited by other actors.
A conspiracy theory suggesting the novel coronavirus actually originated in a Chinese bioweapons laboratory has been making the rounds online, amplified by people like U.S. President Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon. Earlier this month, Sen. Tom Cotton, raised the idea — flatly discredited by experts — during a Fox News appearance.
“We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” said the Arkansas Republican. “But because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.”
A similar, and equally false, online claim suggests the COVID-19 virus was stolen by Chinese spies working at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg.
A staff member is seen inside a Wuhan pharmacy with disinfectants placed at its entrance. (Reuters)
Where this all leads China and the world remains impossible to predict. But the fears associated with a spreading and deadly disease have a way of lingering long after the outbreak peters out.
Journalist Ian Young, a former international editor of the South China Morning Post, thinks of the legacy of SARS in Hong Kong.
“It was a psychologically shaping event for a lot of Hongkongers because it changed the way a lot of people lived their lives,” he says. “It ended up killing about 300 people. It doesn’t sound like a vast toll, but in the early stages of the outbreak, we had no idea exactly how deadly it was going to be — how transmittable it was going to be and there were massive levels of fear.”
Young likens it to what happened in North America with the Sept. 11 attacks, when governments shifted to a war footing in the course of a single morning and air travel changed forever as terrorism went from being a distant threat to a live-on-TV reality.
“It changes people’s behaviours and perceptions of the world. And perceptions of risk,” he says.
Making COVID-19 just the latest twist on the old saw about history repeating.
Watch: Terence McKenna’s documentary report on the lessons to be learned from China’s handling of the coronavirus crisis on CBC TV’s The National, Monday night.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.
There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.
The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.
Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.
Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.
Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.
“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.
But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.
That includes his own teenage daughter.
“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.
It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.
“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.
New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.
“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.
Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.
It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.
Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.
Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.
The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.
The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Patients who are older, don’t speak English, and don’t have a high school education are more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay in Canada, according to new research.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information measured preventableharmful events from 2023 to 2024, such as bed sores and medication errors,experienced by patients who received acute care in hospital.
The research published Thursday shows patients who don’t speak English or French are 30 per cent more likely to experience harm. Patients without a high school education are 20 per cent more likely to endure harm compared to those with higher education levels.
The report also found that patients 85 and older are five times more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay compared to those under 20.
“The goal of this report is to get folks thinking about equity as being a key dimension of the patient safety effort within a hospital,” says Dana Riley, an author of the report and a program lead on CIHI’s population health team.
When a health-care provider and a patient don’t speak the same language, that can result in the administration of a wrong test or procedure, research shows. Similarly, Riley says a lower level of education is associated with a lower level of health literacy, which can result in increased vulnerability to communication errors.
“It’s fairly costly to the patient and it’s costly to the system,” says Riley, noting the average hospital stay for a patient who experiences harm is four times more expensive than the cost of a hospital stay without a harmful event – $42,558 compared to $9,072.
“I think there are a variety of different reasons why we might start to think about patient safety, think about equity, as key interconnected dimensions of health-care quality,” says Riley.
The analysis doesn’t include data on racialized patients because Riley says pan-Canadian data was not available for their research. Data from Quebec and some mental health patients was also excluded due to differences in data collection.
Efforts to reduce patient injuries at one Ontario hospital network appears to have resulted in less harm. Patient falls at Mackenzie Health causing injury are down 40 per cent, pressure injuries have decreased 51 per cent, and central line-associated bloodstream infections, such as IV therapy, have been reduced 34 per cent.
The hospital created a “zero harm” plan in 2019 to reduce errors after a hospital survey revealed low safety scores. They integrated principles used in aviation and nuclear industries, which prioritize safety in complex high-risk environments.
“The premise is first driven by a cultural shift where people feel comfortable actually calling out these events,” says Mackenzie Health President and Chief Executive Officer Altaf Stationwala.
They introduced harm reduction training and daily meetings to discuss risks in the hospital. Mackenzie partnered with virtual interpreters that speak 240 languages and understand medical jargon. Geriatric care nurses serve the nearly 70 per cent of patients over the age of 75, and staff are encouraged to communicate as frequently as possible, and in plain language, says Stationwala.
“What we do in health care is we take control away from patients and families, and what we know is we need to empower patients and families and that ultimately results in better health care.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
