Posted on 02/17/2020 4:36:53 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Dr. Michael Ryan, a top World Health Organization (WHO) official, revealed why the organization is not classifying the COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic.
“I think we need to be extremely cautious in using the term ‘pandemic.’ We had lots of controversies during the H1N1 situation, around when it was pandemic and when it wasn’t pandemic, and I think we need to be careful,” he said, referring to the swine flu virus.
A pandemic, Ryan suggested, would have to entail “efficient community transmission outside of China,” where COVID-19, or the Novel Coronavirus, is believed to have originated. He is the executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program.
“At the present time, we’re not observing that. And as such, we’re not in a position to have that discussion. What we’re seeing is, again, as we’ve said previously, the majority of cases outside China have a direct link still back to China,” Ryan said in a news conference on Monday.
It’s important for his organization not to create “fear in the world” by labeling the outbreak as a pandemic, according to the official.
“We’ve said that the risk is very high in China, it’s high regionally and it’s high around the world. That is not, ‘the risk is high of a pandemic.’ The risk is high that the disease may spread further, and I think at face value, that is true,” Ryan remarked.
A day earlier, Dr. Michael Fauci of the U.S. National Institutes of Health said the outbreak of COVID-19 is on the brink of becoming a pandemic.
(Excerpt) Read more at theepochtimes.com ...
I’m in no position to made definitive comments about China’s standards.
I do look at the food situation and it seems questionable.
Then I look at all the flu cases that originate there.
Something just isn’t right with that.
What is it about China that causes it to be the incubator for all this stuff.
Probably 80-90% of our seasonal flu comes from China.
If that figure is off, I welcome someone correcting it. That’s my take on it.
So it’s just an epidemic in China.
It’s important not to “cry wolf” — IMHO, WHO is doing the right thing. If only, equally stringent criteria applied to calls of global “Climate Emergency!!!”.
I read something about China
(Grand)Solar Minimums and plagues.
Maybe something with a localized
weakness in the magnetosphere.
7
“What is it about China that causes it to be the incubator for all this stuff.”
The reason epidemics ran wild in the Western world before modern times is they lived with animals that carried diseases. The unwholesome conditions of poor sanitation and having domestic foul and farm animals in your house in winter caused much illness. The Western world then “discovered” the South and North American Indian populations that had few domesticated animals and had not developed any tolerance for the epidemics that ravaged Europe. It has been estimated that up to 90% of some of those populations died as a result.
The Chinese often live with domesticated farm animals and they eat everything from rats to bats, all of which carry infectious diseases. The origin of the current outbreak, supposedly, came from a “wet” market, where all sorts of animals, including snakes, are butchered. Incidentally, the Level 4 bioresearch lab in Wuhan is about 900 feet from that wet market. Also, a researcher there was bitten and urinated on by one of their 500 bats that are used to study this virus. (Quote from secondary source Tim Pool who quoted a Chinese paper.)
I have no idea.
I would think India with it’s contaminated rivers would be more of a problem, but no it seems to be China.
Winnie Xi Pooh WOULD NOT BE PLEASED
That’s probably closer to the truth. Even if it IS a pandemic, it appears to me, that the WHO will do everything in its power, to cover it up.
Give them time. It might become that way.
Thank you.
There’s some unknown factor with these sorts of infections.
They seem to come on like gangbusters, and then slowly die out.
You would think those contamination rates would continue blossoming out, but they just don’t seem to do it.
I look back on the projections for a number of flu cases, and it seems that just when it looked the bleakest, things started pulling back.
There’s not one nation outside of China that has seen the massive explosion of cases, like it did.
China’s documented “active cases” is on a track that will see the numbers of those cases growing smaller in the next 24-48 hours.
Look, I know hardly any of us trust those numbers, but in a weird way I think those numbers will come to reflect the reality in China.
I think this thing is going to wane over the next few days to a week.
If it doesn’t you can come back and remind me how far off base I was. I’ll be fair game for that.
We’ll see.
The numbers of recovered people is really starting to kick in now. The numbers of resolved cases is now approaching 20%. At this moment, it stands at 19.843%, fatalities (1873) vs Recoveries (12,667).
The numbers of active cases has only gone up by 349 so far today, and that number will shrink later tonight.
Again, these are the Chinese documented cases, and nothing really definitive can be proven with them. I still think they may wind up being more of an indicator of a turn around that folks might think.
Yes, it may get out of hand there in time (so far 3 cases since the 3rd), but India isn’t the petri dish China seems to be.
This case didn’t start there, and I can’t think of any that did.
Africa and China seem to be the petri dishes that give us these problems, for the most part.
And eighty percent of westerners aren’t smokers anymore (okay that was only in the cities, fewer rural people smoked but the decline in smoking has been huge throughout North America and Europe.
“Not that it cant happen over the next few months or years, but there is a wide gap between pandemic and where we are now.”
Debbie Downer. A lot of people insist this becoome a pandemic and now they are going to be mad.
We know it can be efficiently transmitted because it has been. Fortunately the world has done a good job so far of stopping it.
It is on every continent. It is pandemic. Due to the fact one can be contagious before symptoms of disease is what makes it most difficult. People have been cleared to travel because they seemed disease free though they were contagious.
This disease will burn itself out over time as past diseases. Once most have been exposed and the vast majority of these will not die we have what is called "herd immunity." If the herd has had the disease and recovered they are immune and no longer a vector for the disease and the disease thus "burns itself out" for lack of vectors.
I hope I am wrong but this disease has the potential of killing 3 percent or more of the world population.
Today those diagnosed die at about 2% with advanced medical care. If this becomes truly pandemic it will overwhelm our medical facilities to give advanced care and thus the death rate will be much higher.
I pray I am wrong.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.