Coronavirus (COVID-19) Wuhan Pneumonia

[GeneChing]

Remember Bird Flu (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?40216-fearable-bird-flu) and Swine Flu (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?53888-Best-remedy-for-Swine-Flu-H1N1)? SARS (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?26550-TCM-and-SARS)? Here's the latest Yellow Fever...



Wuhan pneumonia: Thailand confirms first case of virus outside China (https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3045902/wuhan-pneumonia-thailand-confirms-first-case)
Woman, 61, in hospital since last Wednesday and now recovering
World Health Organisation says it is working with Chinese and Thai officials on case
Elizabeth Cheung
Published: 8:33pm, 13 Jan, 2020


https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/01/13/141ec2fe-35f9-11ea-9933-e21be988cd59_image_hires_221551.JPG?itok=iXyfbZdV&v=1578924958
Passengers on the high-speed train from Beijing to Hong Kong. Thailand’s case is the first reported infection outside China. Photo: May Tse

Thai authorities on Monday confirmed the first case outside China of a patient infected with the new virus behind the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak.
The woman, 61, identified as a Chinese tourist from the city in central Hubei province, has been receiving treatment in a hospital in Nonthaburi near Bangkok since January 8, but is now recovering, according to Bloomberg and Thai media outlets.
An expert said if further investigation found she had not been to Huanan Seafood Market, associated with the outbreak in Wuhan, it would suggest that the virus had spread to other parts of the city.
The news came as Hong Kong health officials on Monday arrived in Wuhan to gain first-hand knowledge of the disease, now known to be a new strain of coronavirus, which has infected at least 41 people in Wuhan and killed one.
Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health said in a press statement that the Chinese woman’s infection was confirmed on Sunday.
The woman now exhibited “no fever and is ready to return to her country”, the statement added.
Calling for calm, Thai public health minister Anutin Charnvirakul said: “We are confident we can control the situation.”
Sixteen other people seated near the woman on the same flight were examined and their results were negative.
The World Health Organisation on Monday confirmed on their Twitter account that they were aware of the woman’s diagnosis and working with Thai and Chinese officials on the case.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KJUcKV9q50
China identifies new coronavirus behind Wuhan pneumonia outbreak

In another press statement released later on Monday evening, WHO said there was a possibility that the virus could spread beyond China.
“The possibility of cases being identified in other countries is not unexpected, and reinforces why WHO calls for ongoing active monitoring and preparedness in other countries,” the global watchdog said. It has issued guidelines on how to detect and treat patients.
In Thailand’s case, the woman was found to be suffering from a fever on arrival at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport on January 8, and was initially diagnosed with mild pneumonia in hospital, according to WHO.
China’s health authorities over the weekend revealed the genetic sequence of the virus, found to be nearly 80 per cent similar to that of the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars). The information was shared with WHO, and has been uploaded onto an online gene bank.
The organisation also called for investigations to continue in China to identify the source of the outbreak, adding that director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus could call for a meeting of the Emergency Committee on short notice.
Professor David Hui Shu-cheong, a respiratory medicine expert from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said there should be an investigation on whether the woman had visited the Wuhan seafood market first identified as ground zero of the outbreak.

“If she has not, it would be a big problem as it means game meat in other markets in Wuhan could also be infected with the virus, which then spread to people,” Hui said, pointing out that there was no clear evidence so far of transmission among humans.
If she has not [been to the Wuhan seafood market in question], it would be a big problem as it means game meat in other markets could also be infected with the virus
Professor David Hui, CUHK
The development in Thailand came as Hong Kong on Monday reported one more suspected case involving a woman, 38, who fell ill after returning from Wuhan. She was later found to be infected with other virus strains not related to the one in question.
Of a total of 68 suspected cases reported so far in the city, 56 have been cleared and discharged.
Meanwhile, a group of Hong Kong health officials, including undersecretary for food and health Dr Chui Tak-yi, arrived in Wuhan on Monday for a two-day trip to be briefed by local authorities on control and treatment measures.
Details of the trip were not disclosed to the public.
Chinese University’s Hui said he hoped the team would be able to obtain more information of patients in Wuhan.
“Now we don’t know the age range of patients, and the routes of transmission,” Hui said. “What are the factors causing severe conditions ... Could they be old age or [several] illnesses?
“By knowing these, we can predict the outcome [of the disease in general],” he added.
Professor Leo Poon Lit-man from the University of Hong Kong’s school of public health, who is familiar with the development of diagnostic tools for infectious diseases, said he expected specific tests for the virus to be ready “in a few days’ time”.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Thailand confirms case of Wuhan virus

[GeneChing]

I caught a weird illness just prior to the holidays and many people I know - all across the U.S. - caught similar bugs. I don't think it was related to this, but plague is one of the horsemen of the apocalypse...


Wuhan pneumonia: Hong Kong widens net for suspected cases but medical workers fear already overstretched hospitals will suffer (https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3046634/wuhan-pneumonia-hong-kong-widens-net-suspected)
Under expanded criteria, people will be reported if they have symptoms and either visited a mainland hospital or had close contact with patient confirmed to have the virus
Public hospitals are already full as the city entered the peak flu season last week
Elizabeth Cheung
Published: 10:40pm, 17 Jan, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/01/17/20f23b7a-3921-11ea-9933-e21be988cd59_image_hires_224019.JPG?itok=MWIwOvuh&v=1579272028
With the flu season under way, hospital bed overall occupancy rate was 105 per cent on Thursday. Photo: Edmond So

The strain on public hospitals, already overstretched by the peak flu season in Hong Kong, could worsen after health authorities widened the net for suspected cases linked to the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak, medical workers fear.
A representative of a health care workers’ union said increasing the turnover rate for hospital beds could be among the solutions to tackle the problem, while a medical expert urged local authorities to step up surveillance by introducing health declaration forms for passengers arriving on flights from Wuhan, which announced its second death of the outbreak on Thursday night.
At least 41 people have been struck down in Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei province, with pneumonia caused by a new coronavirus, in an outbreak linked to a seafood market in the city.
Japan on Thursday confirmed its first case of the disease and Thailand its second one on Friday.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_InqqUdhgM
Wuhan virus: second death reported in China as Japan finds first case

Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection announced on Thursday that criteria to report a suspected case of the coronavirus would be expanded.
Initially, suspected cases were identified as those who had either fever and respiratory infection or pneumonia, and had been to Wuhan within 14 days of falling ill.
Under the latest arrangements, which still include the initial criteria, people would be reported if they had those symptoms and had either visited a mainland hospital or had close contact with a patient confirmed to have the virus.
Dr Arisina Ma Chung-yee, president of the Public Doctors’ Association, said: “If those who visited a hospital on the mainland will also be considered, it is likely the amount of suspected cases will much increase.”
She said that unlike in Hong Kong where patients with common ailments such as the cold or flu would go to a clinic, those seeking help on the mainland were more likely to visit a hospital’s outpatient department and be given intravenous fluids for even minor issues.
Hong Kong’s public hospitals were already full as the city entered the peak flu season last week. Statistics on Thursday showed the overall occupancy rate for beds was 105 per cent.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/01/17/f96b4424-3921-11ea-9933-e21be988cd59_1320x770_224019.JPG
The disease’s development called for an expansion of the screening net, a medical expert says. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

In the 24 hours to Friday noon, three more suspected cases of the Wuhan pneumonia were reported to Hong Kong health authorities and isolated in public hospitals, bringing the total to 81 since December 31. Among them, 75 have already been discharged.
Lau Hoi-man, of the Hong Kong Allied Health Professionals and Nurses Association, echoed the concerns over seeing more patients under the expanded criteria.
He said a possible way to handle the extra number of patients was to speed up bed turnover rates.
“Perhaps patients who have not yet recovered will need to be discharged or sent to a rehabilitation hospital … so beds can be freed up for new patients,” Lau said.
Ma said it would be difficult to use holiday camps for quarantine – as occurred during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak in 2003 – as suspected cases this time had fever and respiratory symptoms that required medical care.
Dr Ho Pak-leung from the University of Hong Kong said that the authorities had no choice but to expand the screening net, given the disease’s development.
“There is a need to strengthen screening and thus the net has to be bigger,” he said. “There could be more than one source of infection.”
He said there were reasons to believe limited human-to-human transmission of the disease had occurred, given the present spreading pattern.
He urged the Hong Kong government to introduce health declaration forms for passengers on flights from Wuhan to identify patients who were sick but not feverish.
Chinese University’s Professor David Hui Shu-cheong said the move to include mainland hospitals among the reporting criteria could reflect a bigger concern.
“They are worried there might be confirmed cases in other mainland cities in the future,” Hui said.
A Department of Health spokesman said expansion of the reporting criteria was “a prudent approach”. The Hospital Authority said it would “dovetail with the widened reporting criteria”.
Meanwhile, Thailand confirmed its second infected case of the new coronavirus on Friday, involving a 74-year-old Chinese woman who arrived in the country on Monday. A source said the woman did not visit any markets or have contact with wild animals in Wuhan.
The second fatality in Wuhan was a 69-year-old man who had a heart muscle infection and tuberculosis. His death took place early on Wednesday but was only announced almost two days later.

Additional reporting by Jitsiree Thongnoi
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Extra pressure on hospitals as net for outbreak widened

[GeneChing]

...here we go...again. :(


US will test for deadly virus at JFK, SFO, LAX Airports (https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2020/01/17/will-test-for-deadly-virus-jfk-sfo-lax-airports/S57zipkiH14bAK3Gb5352J/story.html)
By Michelle Fay Cortez Bloomberg News,January 17, 2020, 5:04 p.m.

https://bostonglobe-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/0rmv6p03NKKGmsGh3MkiQRil5XE=/1280x0/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-bostonglobe.s3.amazonaws.com/public/5WXPVRBZOQI6VN3HYASMMJDPFA.jpg
Passengers went through security at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. AP FILE PHOTO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Passengers flying into three of the busiest US airports from Wuhan, China, or via connecting flights will be screened for a deadly new virus that has sickened dozens in China and already spread in Southeast Asia.

US health and immigration officials will start screening passengers from Wuhan for symptoms such as coughs and fever Friday night at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. San Francisco International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport will be added to the screening on Saturday.

There are expected to be about 5,000 passengers arriving in the next few weeks during the Chinese Lunar New Year, the peak travel time for the 60,000 people who come from Wuhan each year, said Martin Cetron, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of global migration and quarantine.

The agency is taking aggressive action after previous outbreaks of novel viruses from abroad, including severe acute respiratory syndrome, known as SARS, which emerged in 2003, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, which appeared in 2012. The agency last screened airline passengers during the Ebola outbreak in western Africa from 2014 to 2016.

The outbreak of the new coronavirus in China appears to be linked to an outdoor seafood and live animal market in Wuhan, with most of the 45 patients diagnosed so far reporting ties to the facility, which was recently closed for screening. While there have only been two reported deaths, the virus seems to be moving quickly, with four new cases reported in China within the past hour or so, CDC officials said. In addition, two cases have been reported in Thailand and one in Japan, all of whom had traveled to Wuhan.

[GeneChing]

China Virus Spreads to Health Workers; Six Patients Dead (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-21/fourth-china-virus-death-reported-raising-contagion-concerns)
By Sybilla Gross and Dong Lyu
January 20, 2020, 4:02 PM PST Updated on January 21, 2020, 5:08 AM PST
Ailment seen as more infectious than previously thought
China confirms 291 cases as New Year travel approaches

China’s mysterious respiratory virus has caused six deaths and infected a number of medical workers, a sign the outbreak has entered a new phase with the illness spreading from person to person.

Health-care workers contracting the new illness indicates that it is more easily transmitted than previously thought, bringing the outbreak to a higher risk level, reminiscent of the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, pandemic that killed 800 people in Asia 17 years ago. China on Tuesday raised the number of confirmed cases to 291.

As hundreds of millions of Chinese prepare to travel across the country and globally for the Lunar New Year holidays, concern is mounting that China will not be able to slow the spread of the pathogen, which originally emerged in the central city of Wuhan. It has since been found in people in Japan, Thailand and South Korea. Stocks in Asia slumped with China’s currency on the news, while haven assets rose.

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i0KkDfF8BwJY/v0/800x-1.jpg
Medical staff members carry a patient into the Jinyintan hospital in Wuhan on Jan. 18.Photographer: AFP via Getty Images
“The risk from this virus causing pandemonium has increased because it is spreading from different countries, and we are now seeing that it can be more easily transmitted from person to person,” said Sanjaya Senanayake, associate professor of medicine at the Australian National University. In comparison with SARS, he said, “the one good factor, I guess, at the moment seems to be the low mortality rate.”

Both viruses belong to the coronavirus family. Fifteen medical professionals have been affected, with one critically ill, according to a report from China’s state news agency Xinhua. The transmission to medical workers is considered particularly worrisome because of the heavy precautions that were taken in Wuhan to try to minimize infections among health-care staff. Many doctors and nurses were also infected and died in the SARS outbreak.

Wuhan, a city of 11 million, is now under heavy screening: people found to have symptoms like fever at travel checkpoints have been barred from boarding planes and trains. Tour groups have reportedly been banned from leaving the city. The city has reported 258 coronavirus cases as of Jan. 20, with 63 patients in serious or critical condition, mayor Zhou Xianwang told China’s state broadcaster CCTV.

Mounting fears about the deadly virus rocked financial markets, with Asia stocks slumping over the likely hit to retail and tourism during what should have been a peak period for spending. The FTSE China A50 Index of large caps Tuesday logged its biggest drop in six months.

Companies making diagnostic kits, air-cleaning equipment and plastic gloves saw shares surge across Asia.

Despite the worries, the new virus is likely less deadly than SARS, said University of Sydney associate professor Adam Kamradt-Scott.

“It’s important to stress that this virus at the moment has been causing mild illness in the vast majority of people that have been affected,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “There’s around 10% of cases that have ended up in critical condition and there’s been deaths, but the vast majority of the 200-plus people infected have resulted in mild illness.”

Pneumonia Threat Widens
Novel coronavirus cases, first detected in central China, have emerged in Japan, Thailand and South Korea
Sources: National and municipal health authorities

Many viruses cross the barrier between animals to humans, as the Wuhan virus appears to have done, according to David Heymann, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who was formerly with the U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Often it takes time to determine what form the new virus will take, he said.

Some viruses, like rabies, sporadically infect humans through animal contact but can’t spread from person to person. Others, like Ebola, emerge in small outbreaks, recede, and then reappear. Some of the most dangerous, like HIV, evolve into forms that infect humans in a widespread, persistent fashion.

The new virus “could be No. 2 or 3, that’s the concern,” Heymann said in an interview. “We need enough information to make a proper risk assessment.”

Heymann, who also serves on a World Health Organization committee that evaluates infectious hazards, said that it appears so far that the virus is most dangerous to elderly people who have existing disease. That would suggest it’s less of that a threat than SARS, which killed people of all ages, he said.

The WHO has set up three groups in Geneva to gather information and advise on the virus itself, the epidemiology of the outbreak and clinical findings from patients. A small team has also been sent to Wuhan to coordinate with local officials.

The exact source and transmission routes of the virus -- known as 2019-nCoV -- are still unknown. Some of the first group of patients in Wuhan worked or shopped at a seafood market where live animals and wildlife parts were reportedly sold.

These so-called wet markets, where shoppers mingle in narrow spaces with everything from live poultry to snakes, have been a key source in the emergence of new viruses transmitted from animals to humans.

Coronaviruses are a large family. Some cause illness in people, and others circulate among animals, including camels, cats, and bats, according to the CDC. In rare cases, animal coronaviruses can evolve to infect people and then spread between them.

Fourth Death
Health officials in Wuhan confirmed a fourth death on Tuesday. An 89-year-old man, who had a history of hypertension, diabetes and coronary heart disease, was hospitalized on Jan. 18 and died the following day. Other fatalities have included men in their 60s, at least some with pre-existing conditions.

China’s National Health Commission said there were 291 cases of the coronavirus throughout the country as of Jan. 20, as three provinces reported a combined 77 new cases. Wuhan has more than 200 cases, with 136 patients more reported in the city over the weekend as health authorities increased testing of the virus. Of those, the youngest was age 25 and the oldest was 89. The initial symptoms were mostly fever, cough or chest tightness, and difficulty breathing.

Toll of Asia’s Viruses
The most deadly viruses emerged from human contact with live animals
Sources: World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The SARS outbreak began in late 2002 in Guangdong province with sporadic infections, gathering speed as it passed through hospitals before spreading around the world, hurting companies and economies.

China was criticized at the time for initially providing limited information and denying the scope of the problem. With this new virus, health experts have generally praised the speed at which China identified and shared the genetic sequencing of the new coronavirus, allowing other countries to spot cases quickly.

The Communist Party’s top law enforcement body warned officials Tuesday not to cover up disclosures of coronavirus cases, citing the lessons of the 2003 SARS outbreak. In its commentary, the commission noted instructions issued by President Xi Jinping on Monday that the virus must be “resolutely curbed.”

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iVUdofroPwiE/v0/800x-1.jpg
A health worker monitors a thermal scanner at Narita airport in Japan on Jan. 17.Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

China’s health commission will include the coronavirus in the Class B infectious diseases category, which includes SARS, while taking preventive steps typically used for the most-serious ailments, such as cholera and plague, according to a notice posted on its website late Monday.

Other countries are on alert. Singapore’s Changi Airport is stepping up surveillance to all passengers from China, rather than just those arriving from Wuhan. Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. said it will be distributing health-declaration forms and providing face masks and antiseptic wipes at boarding gates for travelers from Wuhan.

The WHO convened a meeting of its emergency committee for Jan. 22 in Geneva, according to an emailed statement. Members will discuss whether the outbreak constitutes “a public health emergency of international concern, and what recommendations should be made to manage it.” The committee will determine whether to recommend restrictions on travel and trade as part of the international response.

— With assistance by Kelly Li, Lin Zhu, and John Lauerman

(Updates with more case reports in sixth paragraph, health expert’s comments from 12th.)
There are a few graphs and a video that I could not copy off the source news - follow the link for those.

[GeneChing]

Combine CNY migration with a highly transmutable new disease and it's a 'perfect storm' for the transmission of the coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia).

It's Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat). Remember what rats did during the Black Plague?


China confirms 139 new cases of SARS-like mystery virus as CNY approaches (https://shanghai.ist/2020/01/20/china-confirms-139-new-cases-of-sars-like-mystery-virus-as-cny-approaches/?fbclid=IwAR3QK_e2K1hSVtoGD1tRiLm7V0wLB2fACqo11H3j PG-VVc2NWPw_q61awAM)
The world's largest human migration will see millions travel out of the epicenter city of Wuhan
by Alex Linder January 21, 2020 in News

https://i2.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/wuhan-virus.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1

Just ahead of the height of the Spring Festival travel season in China, reports of pneumonia caused by a mysterious new strain of coronavirus are beginning to spread across the country.

Thus far, all those infected with the virus spent time in Wuhan, a mega-city in central China that also serves as one of the country’s main transportation hubs. The outbreak began in December but concerns have now been heightened with Chinese authorities reporting a significant increase in the number of people affected.

Health officials in Wuhan announced on Monday they identified 136 new cases of the virus over the weekend, bringing the total number of those infected in the city all the way up to 199.

Of the new patients, 33 are reported to be in serious condition while three have been classified as critical with one of those patients dying. This brings the number of the dead from the virus up to three. The first, a 69-year-old man, died last Wednesday.

Meanwhile, authorities in Beijing have reported two cases of pneumonia patients with the virus while those in Shenzhen have reported one. All three of these individuals are said to have arrived from Wuhan.

Likewise, two cases have been reported in Thailand, one in Japan, and one in South Korea with all the infected travelers having originated from Wuhan.

https://i2.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/wuhan-virus2.jpg?w=800&ssl=1

Authorities have pinpointed Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the possible epicenter of the outbreak. The market has been shut down for disinfection.

Thus far, the virus has not been proved to transmit via human-to-human contact, though Chinese authorities have said that they can not rule out the possibility. For its part, the WHO has said that human-to-human transmission is likely considering other coronavirus outbreaks like SARS, which wreaked havoc in southern China in 2002/2003, killing at least 774.

The response to that catastrophic outbreak was hindered by an attempted government cover-up. Already, experts have accused China of grossly underestimating the number of people infected by this new virus, projecting that there may well be more than 1,700 infections in Wuhan.

China has insisted that the new virus is controllable. Infrared thermometers have been installed at airports, train stations, and bus stations across the city. Of course, this comes weeks after the virus first appeared.

[GeneChing]

Stay healthy everyone.


CDC confirms first US case of coronavirus that has killed 6 in China (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/cdc-to-announce-first-us-case-of-china-coronavirus-that-has-killed-6-cnn-reports.html?__source=facebook%7Cmain&fbclid=IwAR3YoZaxqPAjcXutEx5OSlwq8s8Sw0S3BZf0AnkDd bf-J0bq9J_uTHrMJSM&fbclid=IwAR1DETtmViazGCxyKgQ7mjmiQ6-FXRb-id8JYSxS6gLLAw7y1pV-AAUyFJY&fbclid=IwAR0e0gMEj2qz97B9yBzOhIM9RuNSI2nhq7XfEpDjx ko4nH7BW-y62BNlNMY)
PUBLISHED TUE, JAN 21 2020 1:25 PM EST UPDATED MOMENTS AGO
Berkeley Lovelace Jr.
@BERKELEYJR

KEY POINTS
Public health officials have confirmed the first U.S. case of a mysterious coronavirus that has already killed at least six people and sickened hundreds of others in China, the CDC says.
A male traveler from China has been diagnosed in Snohomish County, Washington State with the Wuhan coronavirus, according to the CDC.

Public health officials have confirmed the first U.S. case of a mysterious coronavirus that has already killed at least six people and sickened hundreds of others in China, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

A male traveler from China has been diagnosed in Snohomish County, Washington State with the Wuhan coronavirus, according to the CDC. The CDC was expected to make the announcement at a Tuesday afternoon media briefing.

Public health officials have confirmed more than 300 cases of the illness, which has evoked memories of the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in China. Health officials have also confirmed cases in Thailand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

This weekend, the CDC and Homeland Security began screening people traveling to the United States from Wuhan, China, where the outbreak is believed to have started.

The World Health Organization is expected to convene a panel of experts in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday to consider whether the illness should be a global health emergency.

The last time WHO declared a global health emergency was in 2019 for the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo that killed more than 2,000 people. The agency also declared global emergencies for the 2016 Zika virus, the 2009 H1N1 swine flu and the 2014 polio and Ebola outbreaks.

Chinese authorities say many of the patients with the new illness had come into contact with seafood markets, suggesting the virus is spreading from animals to people. However, health officials say some “limited human-to-human transmission” occurred between close contacts.

In addition to the health concerns, some experts worried about the economic consequences if coronavirus evolves into a pandemic. They pointed to the fallout from the deadly SARS crisis in 2003. SARS, which emerged in China in 2002 and was identified in 2003, killed nearly 800 people worldwide. It hit Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Beijing the hardest and triggered a severe downturn in the region.

People can protect themselves from the virus by washing their hands with soap and water, avoid touching eyes, nose or mouth and keeping away from sick people, according to the CDC. Many people in China have purchased face masks to protect themselves from the outbreak.

Fears that the coronavirus could disrupt travel and commerce, and slow economic growth sent a chill through global risk markets, hitting Asian stocks hard, depressing copper and oil prices, and sending investors into safe havens, like U.S. Treasurys and German bunds.

—CNBC’s Weizhen Tan contributed to this report.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

[GeneChing]

I've only seen this lone source for this news so far so I find this highly suspicious...



Coronavirus blamed on bat soup as pics emerge of people eating the Chinese delicacy (https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/scientists-blame-coronavirus-bats-pics-21337997?fbclid=IwAR3VW2oyOuJHJQqLLZBoOgb-76ZSAXLUjC8dZtQDAD6-Bb3E_Wdz-vM4JKk)
Bats could "host" the coronavirus, according to experts, and pictures have emerged of locals in Wuhan tucking into bat soup
By Emma Parker Tiffany Lo
19:33, 22 JAN 2020 UPDATED12:30, 23 JAN 2020

The spread of the deadly coronavirus could be down to soup made from bats as photos emerge of people in a Chinese city eating the delicacy.

Experts suggested bats could host the virus, which has killed 17 people, in a paper published in the China Science Bulletin – admitting the pneumonia-like virus was "underestimated" by the research community.

China has confirmed over 500 cases of the disease and has since quarantined Wuhan as the coronavirus continues to spread.

It is not yet clear how the virus has spread between humans and bats but scientists believe “there may be an unknown intermediate”.

But Daily Star Online can reveal the "unknown" link may be down bat soup which is an unusual but widely consumed Chinese delicacy.

https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article21338144.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/83783287_186457289407248_6431469386933993472_n.jpg

Footage of people eating the potentially lethal soup emerged on social media this week.

In one clip, a girl can be seen putting a black bat into her mouth with a pair of chopsticks as she sits down for dinner with friends.

On a separate occasion a Wuhan resident took a picture of a dead bat grinning at the camera before eating it.

https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article21338251.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/1_Screen-Shot-2020-01-22-at-173931-copy.jpg
(Image: EXCLUSIVE DAILY STAR ONLINE)

The animal’s cooked insides can be seen in the disturbing image, with parts of the broth floating inside its stomach, along with its teeth.

In a statement released to the South China Morning Post, scientists said: "The Wuhan coronavirus’ natural host could be bats … but between bats and humans there may be an unknown intermediate."

News of the bat soup comes as the Foreign Office warned Brits not to travel to Wuhan amid fears of a global outbreak.

Figures suggest 552 cases have been confirmed in the country across 22 different provinces.

Actual figures are likely to be much higher, with leading Virologists suggesting billions could be at risk.

https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article21338380.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_0B869BC7000003E8.jpg

The SARS-like virus has seen cases confirmed in China, Japan, Korea and the US.

Chinese authorities have told people to stop travel in and out of Wuhan and cars are believed to have been blocked by authorities.

Professor Neil Ferguson, director of the Medical Research Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, said the estimated number of people infected with coronavirus in Wuhan is around 4,000, with a range between 1,000 and 9,700.

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Chinese Food (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?16444-Chinese-food)

[GeneChing]

China delays blockbusters as cinemas empty out under state orders to control Wuhan virus outbreak (https://www.scmp.com/business/markets/article/3047391/chinas-box-office-reels-deadly-wuhan-coronavirus-outbreak-release)
The release of seven highly anticipated blockbuster movies has been put off indefinitely as China takes steps to contain the deadly pneumonia epidemic
Media stocks face the brunt of sell-off on the last day of trading before the long holiday, with a key gauge slumping 3.8 per cent
Zhang Shidong in Shanghai
Published: 7:10pm, 23 Jan, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/01/23/e5f2c412-3db3-11ea-a16e-39b824591591_image_hires_201752.jpg?itok=7f0xV2n_&v=1579781878
A bicyclist wears a face mask in front of a display for the upcoming Lunar New Year, in Beijing. Chinese health authorities urged people in the city of Wuhan to avoid crowds and public gatherings, as the new viral illness could spread further. Photo: AP Photo

China’s studios have indefinitely delayed the release of seven highly anticipated blockbusters just before the start of the Lunar New Year holiday, yielding to government orders to avoid public gatherings to contain the spread of a deadly viral outbreak.
The postponement of the films, including Boonie Bears: The Wild Life, Legend of Deification and Detective Chinatown III, comes at an inopportune moment as the country’s box office is struggling to recover from a second consecutive year of slowing growth.
Tickets will be refunded because of the quickly spreading epidemic that broke out in the central city of Wuhan in December, producers said in separate statements on Thursday.
The government orders came just a day before the start of China’s long Lunar New Year holiday, casting a shadow over the movie industry that was pinning its hopes on a recovery in box-office revenues during the nation’s most important festival.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/01/23/e59a94b8-3db3-11ea-a16e-39b824591591_972x_201752.JPG
The release of Detective Chinatown III has been delayed to contain the rapidly spreading virus outbreak. Photo: Weibo

Cinemas, along with restaurants, airlines, etc are taking a beating amid concern that quarantine measures would empty out public places precisely at the most important holiday for the nation of 1.4 billion people.
The industry is already grappling with shrinking investment amid increased government scrutiny over the past year.
A gauge of China’s media stocks slumped 3.8 per cent on Thursday, underperforming a 2.8 per cent decline in the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index on the last trading day before the holiday, on concerns the sector will endure a prolonged slowdown.
Wanda Film, owned by billionaire Wang Jianlin, plunged 7 per cent to 17.29 yuan in Shenzhen. Beijing Enlight Media slid 5 per cent to 10.57 yuan after saying it will pick up another time slot for the release of its animated movie Legend of Deification. China Film, which distributes movies and runs a theatre chain, sank 4.8 per cent to 13.81 yuan in Shanghai.
China’s box-office growth slowed to 5.4 per cent in 2019. It was the second consecutive year that industry growth slowed down, as investment shrank amid the increased regulatory scrutiny of content approval and crackdown on tax evasion. Some 1,900 companies producing movies and TV dramas shut down last year, according to the Securities Daily.
China is taking all steps possible to contain the spread of the coronavirus, imposing a lockdown in Wuhan. All public transport in and out of Wuhan, including trains, buses and ferries, stopped at 10am on Thursday as the central government imposed a quarantine to try to contain the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 17 people and infected hundreds more.
China reported 571 cases of pneumonia caused by the virus and 17 deaths, in 25 provinces as of Wednesday, according to the National Health Commission. The outbreak coincided with the nation’s busiest transport season, when an estimated 3 billion tourist trips will be made over the holiday.
Airlines, tourism and consumer companies were among the worst-hit stocks on concern the spread of the epidemic will discourage travelling and deter spending. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), which infected more than 8,000 people and killed almost 800 in 2003, slashed China’s monthly retail sales growth by half and chipped two percentage points off quarterly economic expansion that year.

Additional reporting by Yujing Liu

THREADS
2020 Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)
Legend of Deification (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71621-Legend-of-Deification-Jiang-Ziya)
Detective Chinatown III (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71600-Detective-Chinatown-3)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

U.S. Release of Chinese New Year Films Canceled as Coronavirus Crisis Escalates (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/us-release-chinese-new-year-films-canceled-coronavirus-crisis-1272301)
5:43 AM PST 1/23/2020 by Patrick Brzeski

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape_928x523/2020/01/screenshot1.jpg
'Detective Chinatown 3'

Warner Bros. was set to release Wanda's 'Detective Chinatown 3' on Saturday, giving the action comedy the biggest North American outing to date for a Mandarin-language movie.
China's major movie studios are scrapping the North American release plans for their big Lunar New Year blockbusters after being forced to shelve the projects at home because of the growing coronavirus outbreak.

On Thursday afternoon, the leading studios in Beijing announced simultaneously that all seven of the major films that were set for release on Saturday, the first day of the weeklong Lunar holiday, would be put on hold.

Chinese New Year is the biggest box office period in the world by far, and the coming week was expected to generate as much as $1 billion in ticket sales revenue (think the Christmas/New Year's corridor on steroids). But with confirmed cases of the coronavirus climbing to nearly 600, medical authorities in China warned the public against congregating in crowded places, and distributors interpreted that as applying to cinemas. There were fears that even if the releases went ahead, theaters would be deserted.

Warner Bros had picked up the North American rights to what was looking to be the holiday season frontrunner, Wanda's action comedy sequel Detective Chinatown 3. Warners had set the film for a continent-wide, North American release on Friday. The studio described the release plans — spanning 150 cinemas with limited IMAX engagements — as the biggest outing for a Chinese-language film in recent memory.

Sources at Wanda tell The Hollywood Reporter that the Warners release will be put on hold in tandem with the China release delay.

Dante Lam's patriotic action adventure film The Rescue, produced for upwards of $90 million, was similarly set for a significant North American opening courtesy of China's own CMC Pictures. A source close to CMC says those plans also have been scrapped.

Hong Kong-based Huanxi Media would have been the studio to watch this Chinese New Year season. The fast-growing studio had two of the season's most-buzzed-about projects, Xu Zheng's comedy smash Lost in Russia (a sequel to his beloved 2015 blockbuster Lost in Hong) and Leap, Peter Chan's decade-spanning sports drama, starring Gong Li and Huang Bo, about China's national volleyball team. Both projects had been generating strong word of mouth throughout the industry in Beijing, and a source at Huanxi said the studio was in advanced discussions to sell the U.S. rights to both projects. "These discussions will definitely be impacted now," the source said.

The Chinese studios had several good reasons for making sure their most important movies of the calendar didn't open offshore before at home in China.

The Chinese theatrical market is profoundly trend driven, with online buzz driving or dampening the box office momentum of a film within hours of its release. Chinese films also still make the vast majority of their money in their domestic market. Last year's Chinese New Year champion The Wandering Earth (2018), for example, earned $5.8 million in North America compared to $690 million in China. Studios, naturally, would be very reluctant to risk having the buzz surrounding a comparatively low-value U.S. outing travel back to China to affect the movie's real earning potential. A pirate copy of a tentpole hitting the internet before it opens in China could be even more devastating.

Chinese distributors also are required to get special permission to open a film overseas before its local release, so it's not clear whether going ahead with the U.S. openings would have even been legal.

As news surrounding the coronavirus has worsened, shares in many of China's leading film companies have plummeted on the local stock markets this week. Distributors and theaters are working with ticketing platforms to offer refunds on the more than $50 million in tickets that had pre-sold just for Saturday. The Beijing film industry appears to be in a collective holding pattern, waiting anxiously with the entire country to see how the next phase in the coronavirus crisis will unfold.

THREADS
2020 Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)
The Rescue (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71207-The-Rescue)
Lost in Russia (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71505-Lost-in-Russia)
Detective Chinatown III (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71600-Detective-Chinatown-3)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

I liked the Bat theory (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1317405#post1317405) better (although there is a connection)


Snakes could be the source of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak (https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/22/health/snakes-wuhan-coronavirus-outbreak-conversation-partner/index.html?fbclid=IwAR21103JPAUkUT1Qbfc2LmMEv09Z62-ikoUFN43YiIH4PA9tT8eTWFKLo9w)
By Haitao Guo, Guangxiang "George" Luo and Shou-Jiang Gao, The Conversation
Updated 6:32 AM ET, Thu January 23, 2020

(CNN)Snakes -- the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra -- may be the original source of the newly discovered coronavirus that has triggered an outbreak of a deadly infectious respiratory illness in China this winter.
The many-banded krait (Bungarus multicinctus), also known as the Taiwanese krait or the Chinese krait, is a highly venomous species of elapid snake found in much of central and southern China and Southeast Asia.
The illness was first reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a major city in central China, and has been rapidly spreading. Since then, sick travelers from Wuhan have infected people in China and other countries, including the United States.
Using samples of the virus isolated from patients, scientists in China have determined the genetic code of the virus and used microscopes to photograph it. The pathogen responsible for this pandemic is a new coronavirus. It's in the same family of viruses as the well-known severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which have killed hundreds of people in the past 17 years. The World Health Organization (WHO) has named the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV.
We are virologists and journal editors and are closely following this outbreak because there are many questions that need to be answered to curb the spread of this public health threat.
What is a coronavirus?
The name of coronavirus comes from its shape, which resembles a crown or solar corona when imaged using an electron microscope.
The electron microscopic image, reveals the crown shape structural details for which the coronavirus was named. This image is of the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
Coronavirus is transmitted through the air and primarily infects the upper respiratory and gastrointestinal tract of mammals and birds. Though most of the members of the coronavirus family only cause mild flu-like symptoms during infection, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV can infect both upper and lower airways and cause severe respiratory illness and other complications in humans.
This new 2019-nCoV causes similar symptoms to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. People infected with these coronaviruses suffer a severe inflammatory response.
Unfortunately, there is no approved vaccine or antiviral treatment available for coronavirus infection. A better understanding of the life cycle of 2019-nCoV, including the source of the virus, how it is transmitted and how it replicates are needed to both prevent and treat the disease.

Zoonotic transmission
Both SARS and MERS are classified as zoonotic viral diseases, meaning the first patients who were infected acquired these viruses directly from animals. This was possible because while in the animal host, the virus had acquired a series of genetic mutations that allowed it to infect and multiply inside humans.
Now these viruses can be transmitted from person to person. Field studies have revealed that the original source of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV is the bat, and that the masked palm civets (a mammal native to Asia and Africa) and camels, respectively, served as intermediate hosts between bats and humans.
In the case of this 2019 coronavirus outbreak, reports state that most of the first group of patients hospitalized were workers or customers at a local seafood wholesale market which also sold processed meats and live consumable animals including poultry, donkeys, sheep, pigs, camels, foxes, badgers, bamboo rats, hedgehogs and reptiles. However, since no one has ever reported finding a coronavirus infecting aquatic animals, it is plausible that the coronavirus may have originated from other animals sold in that market.
The hypothesis that the 2019-nCoV jumped from an animal at the market is strongly supported by a new publication in the Journal of Medical Virology. The scientists conducted an analysis and compared the genetic sequences of 2019-nCoV and all other known coronaviruses.
The study of the genetic code of 2019-nCoV reveals that the new virus is most closely related to two bat SARS-like coronavirus samples from China, initially suggesting that, like SARS and MERS, the bat might also be the origin of 2019-nCoV. The authors further found that the viral RNA coding sequence of 2019-nCoV spike protein, which forms the "crown" of the virus particle that recognizes the receptor on a host cell, indicates that the bat virus might have mutated before infecting people.
How influenza jumped from animals to humans
But when the researchers performed a more detailed bioinformatics analysis of the sequence of 2019-nCoV, it suggests that this coronavirus might come from snakes.
The Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, where the coronavirus outbreak is believed to have started, is now closed.

From bats to snakes
The researchers used an analysis of the protein codes favored by the new coronavirus and compared it to the protein codes from coronaviruses found in different animal hosts, like birds, snakes, marmots, hedgehogs, manis, bats and humans. Surprisingly, they found that the protein codes in the 2019-nCoV are most similar to those used in snakes.
Snakes often hunt for bats in wild. Reports indicate that snakes were sold in the local seafood market in Wuhan, raising the possibility that the 2019-nCoV might have jumped from the host species -- bats -- to snakes and then to humans at the beginning of this coronavirus outbreak. However, how the virus could adapt to both the cold-blooded and warm-blooded hosts remains a mystery.
The authors of the report and other researchers must verify the origin of the virus through laboratory experiments. Searching for the 2019-nCoV sequence in snakes would be the first thing to do. However, since the outbreak, the seafood market has been disinfected and shut down, which makes it challenging to trace the new virus' source animal.
3 reasons the US is not ready for a pandemic
Sampling viral RNA from animals sold at the market and from wild snakes and bats is needed to confirm the origin of the virus. Nonetheless, the reported findings will also provide insights for developing prevention and treatment protocols.
The 2019-nCoV outbreak is another reminder that people should limit the consumption of wild animals to prevent zoonotic infections.

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Snakes (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?50682-snakes)

[GeneChing]

Bryan Ke·News·January 23, 2020·2 min read
Snakes, Wolf Puppies and Rats Sold at Market Where Coronavirus Originated (https://nextshark.com/coronavirus-wuhan-seafood-market-origin/?fbclid=IwAR3bc_F4t7QJY36ojydZA0hPUn9yh3lwASWIXAIo Qhs4kZ6mMmnnHW-8yck)

https://cdn.statically.io/img/nextshark.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/wuhanmarket.jpg.webp?quality=100

A menu filled with a variety of exotic wild animals was reportedly sold at a market in Wuhan, Hubei province, China where the coronavirus originated.

Some of the wild animal meat mentioned on the price list of a vendor at the Huanan Seafood Market includes live foxes, crocodiles, wolf puppies, giant salamanders, snakes, rats, peacocks, porcupines and camels.

There are a total of 112 items mentioned on the list, according to AFP via Straits Times.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoSU1GPTeBg

“Freshly slaughtered, frozen and delivered to your door,” the price list of the vendor said. “Wild Game Animal Husbandry for the Masses.”

Although the exact source of the outbreak remains undetermined, Dr. Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese center for disease control and prevention, said in Beijing on Wednesday that authorities believe the virus most likely came from “wild animals at the seafood market.” continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HLpOe4-ucc

However, AFP was unable to directly confirm the authenticity of the circulating list as the news agency’s phone call to the vendors went unanswered and attempts to reach them via social media were rejected.

The same vendor’s now-shuttered storefront was shown in the picture posted by Beijing News on Tuesday while authorities wearing white hazmat suits investigated. It also quoted merchants saying the trade in wildlife took place until the market was shut down for disinfection shortly after the outbreak. continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMc280EtXxs

Sellers in the market were the first few people to become infected with the virus when they fell ill between Dec. 12 and Dec. 29. Earlier this month, a total of 59 people had been infected, but recent reports show that 571 people have now also been infected in just a few weeks, while 17 deaths have been recorded, CNN reported.

The infection, however, is not contained nor limited to China only. The disease has now spread to other Asian countries, including South Korea, Japan and Thailand as well as the United States.

People in China and other Asian countries continue to practice the consumption of many exotic animals that some consider a delicacy or attribute to positive health benefits not yet proven by science.

However, the practice brings growing health risks to humans, according to Dr. Christian Walzer, executive director of the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society’s Health Program. About 70% of all new infectious diseases come from wildlife and chances of the spreading of pathogens increases with habitat encroachment.

“Wildlife markets offer a unique opportunity for viruses to spill over from wildlife hosts,” the doctor said. “It is essential to invest resources not only into discovering new viruses, but more importantly, in determining the epidemiological drivers of… (the) spillover, amplification, and spread of infectious diseases.”


Feature Image via Weibo/Inkstone



THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Chinese Food (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?16444-Chinese-food)

[GeneChing]

...how inauspicious for the Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat). :(


Shanghai Disneyland Closing In Response To Coronavirus Outbreak (https://deadline.com/2020/01/shanghai-disneyland-closing-response-coronavirus-outbreak-1202839957/)
By Nellie Andreeva
Co-Editor-in-Chief, TV
@DeadlineNellie
January 23, 2020 11:33pm

https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/shutterstock_editorial_9624523aa.jpg?w=681&h=383&crop=1
(
Photo by Sipa Asia/Shutterstock

Disney is temporarily closing its theme park in Shanghai as efforts continue to contain the coronavirus outbreak in China.

“In response to the prevention and control of the disease outbreak and in order to ensure the health and safety of our guests and Cast, Shanghai Disney Resort is temporarily closing Shanghai Disneyland, Disneytown including Walt Disney Grand Theatre and Wishing Star Park, starting January 25, 2020,” the company said in a statement posted on the Shanghai Disneyland website. “We will continue to carefully monitor the situation and be in close contact with the local government, and we will announce the reopening date upon confirmation.”

Disney’s decision follows the announcement that all local film releases scheduled for the highly lucrative Chinese New Year period have been canceled as authorities try to stave off a potential spread of the coronavirus.

The cities of Wuhan and neighboring Huanggang were in virtual lockdown, with transport in and out of the cities closed, and restrictions in place in other areas as well. The latest outbreak has killed 25 people and infected more than 800.

The $5.5B Shanghai Disneyland, which opened in mid-2016, was Disney’s first theme park in mainland China. The estimated financial impact on the closure was not immediately clear.

Disney said guests who purchased tickets or booked hotel rooms would be reimbursed for the cost.

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Chinese Theme Parks (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?62642-Chinese-Theme-Park)

[GeneChing]

JANUARY 23, 2020 11:13AM PT
How the Wuhan Coronavirus Infected the Chinese Film Industry (https://variety.com/2020/film/asia/wuhan-coronvirus-infected-chinese-film-1203477077/)
By REBECCA DAVIS and PATRICK FRATER

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/coronavirus-shutterstock_editorial_10536867a-res.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1
CREDIT: YONHAP/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Just days ago, no one would have predicted that China’s most lucrative film-going season was about to be derailed by the escalating epidemic of a novel coronavirus that is now rapidly spreading through the country and beyond.

Variety takes a look at how the box office in the world’s second largest film market has been overturned by a public health crisis that has made gathering in enclosed cinema spaces a health risk.

Pre-Sales and Promotion

Earlier this week, it seemed to be business as usual for the Spring Festival holiday release window. Production teams collectively spent a reported $144 million (RMB1 billion) on publicity for the seven blockbusters scheduled to release this Friday and Saturday, the eve and New Year’s Day of the new lunar year of the rat. The holiday is a time for family gatherings, when millions who’ve saved up all year take one of their few vacations, and head back to their hometowns. It is the largest annual human migration in the world.

It seemed that the biggest setback would be a marketing blow to Peter Chan’s volleyball drama “Leap,” which suddenly changed its Chinese title from “Chinese Women’s Volleyball” to “Win the Championship” the day before pre-sales began.

The new name, unknown to viewers bombarded with posters and materials for the other, is the same as the short made by rival director Xu Zheng that was included in the widely viewed propaganda film “My People, My Country,” and has caused confusion. Chan’s title change decision appears to have been a way to avoid fallout from dissatisfaction within the sports community of how the women’s team is portrayed, rather than government censorship.

Pre-sales for the seven films had already reached a reported $67.5 million (RMB468 million) by Thursday morning. “Detective Chinatown 3” had pulled ahead as the front-runner, setting a new pre-sale record by selling more than $14 million (RMB100 million) worth of tickets in just 23 hours.

Monday: Concern Mounts

By Jan. 20, concerns ramp up about the spread of the coronavirus due to mass travel ahead of Chinese New Year, as the death toll and infection tally mounts. Chinese authorities report three deaths and more than 200 cases in the country and confirm that the disease can in fact spread through human-to-human transmission. Since the first case outside of China was discovered on Jan. 13, the virus has spread to Thailand, Japan and South Korea. On Jan. 21, the first reported case is found in the U.S., in Seattle.

Ticket sales in Wuhan were mounting swimmingly before Sunday (Jan. 19), accounting for around 2% of the national box office, on average. But from Sunday onwards, ticket sales rapidly declined, dropping from 2.2% of the national total to 0.5% in the space of three days. From Monday, film company shares begin to fall, including those for Wanda Film and China Film.

On Wednesday (Jan. 22), China’s major ticketing platforms Maoyan and Tao Piaopiao put out official statements announcing unconditional refunds for any tickets bought in Wuhan.

The same day, Chinese authorities announce a quarantine for the entire city of Wuhan and its 11 million residents, effective from the next day. Travel restrictions are planned to shut down public transit out of the city. Chaos ensues as residents fight to get out of the metropolis before lock down sets in Thursday morning at 10AM local time, with Chinese reports estimating that some 300,000 fled.

Thursday: Box Office Meltdown

By Thursday (Jan. 23) morning, the hashtag “Why don’t the spring festival films change their release dates?” is a top trending item on Weibo, China’s Twitter-equivalent. Production teams are faced with a lose-lose decision: risk angering the public by keeping their film in the line-up, or pull out and lose millions in P&A.

Official film Weibo accounts start to slash promotional material and instead boost posts cheering for “frontline medical workers.” Then, in quick succession, all seven issue statements that they are formally withdrawing their titles. No future release dates have been announced.

Animations “Boonie Bears: The Wild Life” and “Jiang Ziya” pulled out first. “Now that the epidemic is happening, we must stand impregnably united, and focus on the disease prevention and saving lives,” the “Jiang Ziya” promo site said. “We salute those working on the front lines of the epidemic and apologize to theater workers nationwide.”

The other titles swiftly follow. “Movies are just a part of life; life and safety are more important, since ‘movies are short and life is long,'” said the team behind “Leap.” It said it was pulling out after “careful consideration of the risk of disease transmission in a confined space.”

Lam’s “The Rescue” was on-brand and adopting the most rousing tone, writing: “At the moment, many medical and rescue personnel are sticking to their posts, stepping forward bravely at the key moment of danger and disaster! The movie ‘The Rescue’ is about exactly this kind of spirit. Let us as millions, all of one mind, with unshakeably unity, win the battle of preventing an epidemic!”

“Lost in Russia” director Xu Zheng wrote a post expressing his gratitude to Hengdian Film, his producer Huanxi Media, and the marketing team, whose early work has been washed away. “All this is less important than eliminating the hidden dangers of the disease!”

Ticketing platforms Maoyan and Tao Piaopiao now promise to refund all tickets without question, a process that may take up to a week. Cinema chains say they have been overwhelmed with calls from patrons asking for refunds.

Cinemas in Wuhan and other nearby locked-down cities have been entirely shut down, and authorities have issued a mandatory face mask policy there for public spaces. Cinemas elsewhere remain operational for the moment, advertising that they have boosted disinfection measures and ventilation for theaters.

Large-scale cultural activities like temple fairs have been cancelled, and cultural institutions such as museums have slashed activities to reduce visitor tallies. The Forbidden City in Beijing will be shuttered from Saturday.

Over the course of the day, China has locked down some 20 million people in Wuhan and neighboring cities by indefinitely banning planes and trains. The death toll has risen to at least 17, with some 517 affected. The virus has now been detected in Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and the U.S. and U.K. The WHO is currently mulling whether to declare the epidemic a global health emergency.

On Thursday – the last chance for business before a recess of five full trading days for the spring festival holiday – shares of a number of major film companies plummeted. Wanda Film closed almost 7% lower after falling 20% over the previous five trading days, and China Film closed nearly 5% lower, down 17% over the past five trading days.

THREADS
2020 Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)
The Rescue (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71207-The-Rescue)
Lost in Russia (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71505-Lost-in-Russia)
Detective Chinatown III (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71600-Detective-Chinatown-3)
Legend of Deification (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71621-Legend-of-Deification-Jiang-Ziya)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Chollywood rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)

[GeneChing]

Too bad I don't have Huanxi Premium. :(


Chinese Comedy 'Lost in Russia' to Debut Online for Free After Coronavirus Cancellations (Exclusive) (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/chinese-studio-release-comedy-lost-russia-online-free-coronavirus-cancellations-1272552)
6:25 PM PST 1/23/2020 by Patrick Brzeski

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape_928x523/2020/01/lostinrussia.jpg
Huanxi Media
'Lost in Russia'

The film was expected to be one of the big theatrical blockbusters of the Lunar New Year season for studio Huanxi before the epidemic shuttered cinemas nationwide.
China's leading film studios were forced to cancel the holiday release of their biggest movies of the year yesterday after the growing coronavirus epidemic cast a pall over the country's annual Lunar New Year festivities.

Now, rising film company Huanxi Media is responding to the setback with a bold but fan-pleasing move: The studio has decided to release its much-anticipated comedy tentpole Lost in Russia online for free.

Lost in Russia, directed by and starring comedy superstar Xu Zheng, was widely expected to be one of the big winners of China's 2020 New Year box office, which, prior to the coronavirus outbreak, was forecasted to generate as much as $1 billion in ticket sales over the coming week. The first two films in the Lost In franchise earned a combined $473 million in 2012 and 2015 — at a time when China's box office was much smaller than it is now.

Huanxi told The Hollywood Reporter Friday morning that Lost In Russia will be made available for free viewing over its in-house streaming platform Huanxi Premium at midnight tonight. Before the coronavirus cancellation, the film was set to get a huge nationwide theatrical release today.

The move is all but certain to delight fans, as mass moviegoing has become a big Lunar New Year tradition in China, and cinemas across the country are currently shuttered because of the government's advice to avoid congregating in crowded places.

Lost in Russia's Chinese title roughly translates to "Awkward Mother." The film follows the bumpy journey through Russia of a manipulative older Chinese mother and her middle-aged son who still wants to rebel and escape his mother's smothering influence. Xu, famous for his comedy touch, said his goal was to make viewers reflect on the often funny but deeply loving nature of the mother-child relationship in China.

In a blast of promotional material set to be released midday in China announcing the free streaming plan, Huanxi told the anxious Chinese populace to "stay safely at home and watch Lost in Russia with your mom."

Aside from its obvious promotional savvy — and public health benefits — Huanxi's move has an interesting business logic. Underlying the plan is a surprise new deal with internet powerhouse ByteDance, the company behind China's wildly popular Toutiao and Douyin services, and the international social media phenomenon TikTok.

On Friday, Huanxi revealed that it has entered into a cooperation agreement with ByteDance that will involve the companies working together to leverage Huanxi's premium film and television content across both of their video platforms. Under the deal, ByteDance will pay Huanxi a one-time fee of 700 million Hong Kong dollars (just under $100 million). The two companies' video services will pool content, cross-promote and also share advertising and transactional video-on-demand revenue.

The giveaway of Lost in Russia (the local equivalent of Disney deciding to open the paywall to Disney+ and release a new Avengers movie for free) — at a time when hundreds of millions of Chinese are nervously stuck at home with little to do — ensures that the new partnership starts with a bang. The attendant advertising revenue of the free online release could also prove enormous.

In a Friday filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange, where Huanxi is listed, the company said that the current partnership with ByteDance constitutes a "phase 1" agreement that will run for six months. The two parties are currently at work in negotiating a longer-lasting "phase 2" deal, which will entail the joint development of their longform streaming channels, as well as shared investments in producing and acquiring high-end film and TV content.

Huanxi also has retained the theatrical rights to Lost in Russia, should it decide to bring the film out in cinemas after the public health crisis is resolved.

The late-hour surprise online release was made possible by the fact that Huanxi fully owns Lost in Russia, a rarity in China, where nearly all major films are co-financed and cut up into small equity pieces (star Xu Zheng is a significant shareholder in Huanxi and one its founding partners). The company previously had inked a minimum guarantee agreement with distributor Hengdian Film, which was promising a minimum box office performance of RMB 2.4 billion ($345 million) for Lost in Russia. That agreement was voided late Thursday and Huanxi is expected to return the RMB 600 million ($86.5 million) fee that Hengdian had paid for the theatrical rights.

Huanxi also has a large stake in Peter Chan's widely anticipated Chinese New Year film Leap, an inspirational sports drama about China's Olympic volleyball team. Leap and the various other Chinese New Year theatrical tentpoles — including Wanda's comedy action sequel Detective Chinatown 3, Dante Lam's patriotic action epic The Rescue, and animations Boonie Bears: The Wild Life and Jiang Ziya, among others — are currently in a holding pattern, awaiting official indications of how the coronavirus emergency will unfold.

THREADS
2020 Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)
Lost in Russia (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71505-Lost-in-Russia)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

More on bat soup (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1317405#post1317405) here. Interesting how that story was 2017 originally.


‘Sorry about the tasty bat’: Chinese online host apologises for travel show dining advice as Wuhan virus spreads (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047683/sorry-about-tasty-bat-chinese-online-host-apologises-travel-show)
Wang Mengyun says she had no idea the animals are a reservoir of disease when she filmed the programme in Palau three years ago
Emergence of new coronavirus similar to other bat-borne pathogens revives calls for ban on eating exotic species
Laura Zhou
Published: 2:11pm, 26 Jan, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/01/26/04797b4c-4002-11ea-a16e-39b824591591_image_hires_153610.jpg?itok=VANHOqe6&v=1580024175
Wang Mengyun says she is sorry for an online travel show segment about bat soup filmed in 2016. Photo: Sohu

With the death toll from a coronavirus outbreak racing past 50, a Chinese internet celebrity has apologised for posting a video three years ago promoting bat as a tasty food.
Wang Mengyun, host of an online show about international travel, wrote on her microblog that she was not aware that bats could be a virus carrier when she appeared in the video posted in 2017.
“[I] had no idea during filming that there was such a virus,” Wang wrote online on Wednesday. “I realised it only recently.”
She said the video was filmed in Palau, an archipelago in the western Pacific, about three years ago, when she and her team were shooting a tourism programme and trying some local dishes, including bat soup.
In the video, Wang and another Chinese woman hold up a cooked bat and smile to camera.
“The bat tastes very fresh, like chicken meat,” she says.
“I didn’t know that bat is a primary reservoir of viruses ... I really did not check the information or explain its dangerous nature,” she said.
The video was taken down but reposted by Chinese internet users after cases of pneumonia-like illness emerged in the city of Wuhan in central China late last year.
The virus soon spread across the country and overseas, killing 56 people and triggering a fear of contagion.
According to the National Health Commission nearly 2,000 cases of the new coronavirus have been confirmed, with 324 of them in a critical condition.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfcIHUdOI8w
China coronavirus: a look inside the sealed off city of Wuhan

While health officials and researchers are struggling to determine the origins of the virus, scientists from the elite Chinese Academy of Sciences said on Friday that its genome was 96 per cent identical to a bat coronavirus.
This echoed the findings of David Robertson, a bioinformatics specialist at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Virus Research, and statistician Jiang Xiaowei of Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University, who wrote in a medical discussion forum that new coronavirus’ genome data was “most closely related” to three other bat coronaviruses.
The outbreak in Wuhan has also triggered heated discussion on mainland China about banning consumption of exotic animals, which were sold at a wet market thought to be a source of the cases.
Some internet users said Wang should have been aware of the deadly nature of wild animals, given the suspected exotic species origins of a deadly 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), which killed 774 people worldwide.
“[Wang] filmed the video in 2016 but since 2003 Sars we have been warned to say no to wild animal consumption,” one Weibo user wrote. “She said it was [filmed] overseas but what she did was trying to show people that bat was attractively tasted.”
Sign up now for our 50% early bird offer from SCMP Research: China AI Report. The all new SCMP China AI Report gives you exclusive first-hand insights and analysis into the latest industry developments, and actionable and objective intelligence about China AI that you should be equipped with.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: host of online travel show apologises for posting video of eating bat in 2017

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Chinese Food (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?16444-Chinese-food)

[GeneChing]

Wildlife Consumption Linked to Deadly New Strain of Virus (https://wildaid.org/illegal-wildlife-consumption-linked-to-deadly-new-virus/?fbclid=IwAR2mu5k1YdZuHyzeJCoGYNt7tEm9zj5mfvUl6yUp FY-XxUp0X2Q9X2ovdZA)
January 24, 2020

https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/q_glossy,ret_img,w_509/https://wildaid.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Picture1-509x382.png

With more than 800 people infected and 26 confirmed deaths, a new virus outbreak from China has put a spotlight on the consumption of wildlife. While the government has stepped up its efforts to limit such consumption in response, WildAid is working with our partners in China and Vietnam to implement effective and long-term solutions.

The new coronavirus (known as 2019-nCoV) was first reported in Wuhan City, China, on December 31, 2019, and has since been detected in travelers to other countries. The Huanan Seafood Market in the central city of Wuhan came under scrutiny after experts suggested the new type of virus came from wild animals kept in unhygienic conditions and illegally sold for consumption. A menu circulating online lists animals like live foxes, crocodiles, civets, snakes, rats, seafood and other wildlife for sale.

China’s Ministry of Natural Resources, along with numerous other ministries have urged people to immediately stop consuming wildlife and in a recent social media post, they repeated that “refusing to eat wildlife is also a way to protect ourselves.”

The Chinese authorities had been “remarkably open” amid an “enormously demanding” situation, said Prof Neil Ferguson, the director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College in London.

Chinese authorities have issued daily briefings, putting in place strict measures to control the disease, including closing wildlife markets and banning travel in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, as well as in 11 other nearby cities. China’s National Health Commission Vice-Minister Li Bin warned the flu-like virus can be transmitted from human to human and urged the public to minimize public gatherings. The timing of the outbreak is particularly worrisome as hundreds of millions of people are expected to travel for the Lunar New Year beginning on Saturday, January 25th.

“The openness and willingness by the authorities to quickly shut down the markets and call on the public to stop consuming illegal wildlife products has been very encouraging,” said WildAid China Representative Steve Blake. “Momentum to end this dangerous and often devastating consumption of wildlife has been building here for years, but this is the first time we’re seeing such a complete stance to end it from both the government and the public.”

The Chinese public has taken to social media to vent their frustrations, demanding stricter enforcement of wildlife markets and trade. A public service announcement with musician Jay Chou and WildAid, which warns the public about illegally consuming wildlife, has gone viral with over 14 million views in just a few days on Weibo.

“Some people think it’s clever to eat these cute animals, pangolins,” Chou says in the PSA. “In fact, it’s dangerous. There are serious risks of picking up parasites or catching diseases, and the scales for medicine? They’re keratin, just like your fingernails…and these animals are becoming endangered. Never eat pangolins or use their scales. When the buying stops, the killing can too.”

For 20 years, WildAid has been campaigning to end consumer demand for illegal wildlife products to save endangered species, which in turn can help protect public health.

Past epidemics like the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) have entered the human population from animals. China bans the trafficking of a number of wild species or requires special licenses, but many exotic species are still widely consumed illegally.

The coronavirus, which has no known vaccine, has also been reported in South Korea, Thailand, Japan and elsewhere outside China. This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first U.S. case in which a man infected with the virus flew from Wuhan to Everett, Washington. Meanwhile, India, Nigeria, Japan and the United States have all implemented airport screening procedures. Symptoms of the virus include fever, cough or trouble breathing with serious cases leading to pneumonia, kidney failure and death.

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Chinese Food (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?16444-Chinese-food)
WildAid Tiger Claw Champion (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57416-WildAid-Tiger-Claw-Champion)

[GeneChing]

It's really more like sick days off.


China extends Lunar New Year holiday in bid to fight coronavirus (https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/480046-china-extends-lunar-new-year-holiday-in-bid-to-fight-virus)
BY ZACK BUDRYK - 01/27/20 08:53 AM EST 9

https://thehill.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumb_small_article/public/coronavirus2_012720getty.jpg?itok=z_E5sMul
China extends Lunar New Year holiday in bid to fight coronavirus
© Getty Images

Chinese officials on Monday announced they would extend the Lunar New Year holiday in hopes of keeping citizens home and reducing the risk of the spread of the coronavirus that has killed at least 81 people.

The Chinese government said in a statement that it will push back the end of the holiday from Sunday to Thursday to “reduce mass gatherings” and “block the spread of the epidemic,” The Associated Press reported. Officials hope the extension will prevent the potential spread of the disease risked by tens of millions of travelers returning to work by plane, train or bus. Schools are slated to remain closed indefinitely.

Individual cities across China have also taken action to reduce the spread of the virus, with Shanghai extending the holiday to Feb. 9 and ordering the closure of all religious events and sports stadiums.

Premier Li Keqiang visited the city of Wuhan, believed to the origin point of the outbreak through a wildlife market, on Monday to “guide epidemic work,” according to the Cabinet, later visiting a supermarket and mingling with shoppers.

“To get the epidemic under control in Wuhan and the good health of people in Wuhan will be good news for the whole country,” Li told the crowd, the AP reports. “We wish the people of Wuhan a safe, healthy and long life. Let’s go, Wuhan!”

The U.S. consulate in Wuhan said it plans to evacuate diplomats and other American citizens on Tuesday, while the French plans to fly its citizens out of the area and quarantine them in France, while the France-based automaker PSA Peugeot Citroen is moving foreign employees of its Wuhan factory and their families to another city, where they will be quarantined.

U.S. officials confirmed a fourth case of the virus on Sunday, with a patient being diagnosed with it in Los Angeles County.

THREADS
2020 Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

This is a tad sensationalist. While this is a bad flu season, worse than most, a good friend of mine who is a CDC RN tells me that it's still well within normal mortality rates for flu.



https://www.providencejournal.com/storyimage/ZZ/20200124/NEWS/200129882/AR/0/AR-200129882.jpg

Coronavirus terrifies us, but another virus has already killed 6,000 in US (https://www.providencejournal.com/zz/news/20200124/coronavirus-terrifies-us-but-another-virus-has-already-killed-6000-in-us?fbclid=IwAR1N5JBa_upa4Cb4UyQpppyFvYIoYjSXQB2fKT KCfM0r4tCUjcILnDGhEes)
By Liz Szabo, Kaiser Health News
Posted Jan 24, 2020 at 11:55 AM
Updated Jan 24, 2020 at 12:17 PM

Influenza rarely gets the sort of attention that coronavirus has, even though flu has already sickened at least 13 million Americans this winter and killed 6,600 people. In a bad year, the flu kills up to 61,000 Americans.

There’s a deadly virus spreading from state to state. It preys on the most vulnerable, striking the sick and the old without mercy. In just the past few months, it has claimed the lives of at least 39 children.

The virus is influenza, and it poses a far greater threat to Americans than the coronavirus from China that has made headlines around the world.

“When we think about the relative danger of this new coronavirus and influenza, there’s just no comparison,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. “Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison. The risk is trivial.”

The coronavirus outbreak, which originated last month in the Chinese city of Wuhan, should be taken seriously. The virus can cause pneumonia and is blamed for more than 800 illnesses and 26 deaths. British researchers estimate the virus has infected 4,000 people.

A second person in the U.S. who visited China has been diagnosed with the Wuhan virus, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. Public health workers are monitoring 63 additional patients from 22 states.

Influenza rarely gets this sort of attention, even though it kills more Americans each year than any other virus, said Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics, molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Influenza has already sickened at least 13 million Americans this winter, hospitalizing 120,000 and killing 6,600, according to the CDC. And flu season hasn’t even peaked. In a bad year, the flu kills up to 61,000 Americans.

Worldwide, the flu causes up to 5 million cases of severe illness worldwide and kills up to 650,000 people every year, according to the World Health Organization.

And yet, Americans aren’t particularly concerned.

Fewer than half of adults got a flu shot last season, according to the CDC. Even among children, who can be especially vulnerable to respiratory illnesses, only 62% received the vaccine.

If Americans aren’t afraid of the flu, perhaps that’s because they are inured to yearly warnings. For them, the flu is old news. Yet viruses named after foreign places — such as Ebola, Zika and Wuhan — inspire terror.

“Familiarity breeds indifference,” Schaffner said. “Because it’s new, it’s mysterious and comes from an exotic place, the coronavirus creates anxiety.”

Some doctors joke that the flu needs to be rebranded.

“We should rename influenza; call it XZ-47 virus, or something scarier,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Measles in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed 5,000 people in the past year — more than twice as many as Ebola. Yet UNICEF officials have noted that the measles, which many Americans no longer fear, has gotten little attention. Nearly all the measles victims were children under 5.

Some people may worry less about the flu because there’s a vaccine, whose protection has ranged from 19% to 60% in recent years. Simply having the choice about whether to receive a flu shot can give people an illusion of control, Schaffner said.

But people often feel powerless to fight novel viruses. The fact that an airplane passenger spread SARS to other passengers and flight crew made people feel especially vulnerable.

Because the Wuhan virus is new, humans have no antibodies against it. Doctors haven’t had time to develop treatments or vaccines.

The big question, so far unknown, is just how easily the virus is transmitted from an infected person to others. The WHO this week opted not to declare the Wuhan outbreak an international health emergency. But officials warn the outbreak hasn’t peaked. Each patient with the new coronavirus appears to be infecting about two other people.

By comparison, patients with SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, spread the infection to an average of two to four others. Each patient with measles — one of the most contagious viruses known to science — infects 12 to 18 unvaccinated people.

Health officials worry that the new coronavirus could resemble SARS — which appeared suddenly in China in 2002 and spread to 26 countries, sickening 8,000 people and killing 774, according to the WHO.

The U.S. dodged a bullet with SARS, Schaffner said. Only eight Americans became infected, and none died, according to the CDC. Yet SARS caused a global panic, leading people to shutter hotels, cancel flights and close businesses.

Coronaviruses can be unpredictable, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. While some patients never infect anyone else, people who are “super spreaders” can infect dozens of others.

At Seoul’s Samsung Medical Center in 2015, a single emergency room patient infected 82 people — including patients, visitors and staff — with a coronavirus called MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. The hospital partly shut down to control the virus.

“This is one of the finest medical centers in the world, on par with the Cleveland Clinic, and they were brought to their knees,” Osterholm said.

Yet MERS has never posed much a threat to the U.S.

Only two patients in the U.S. — health care providers who had worked in Saudi Arabia — have ever tested positive for the virus, according to the CDC. Both patients survived.

Hotez, who is working to develop vaccines against neglected diseases, said he worries about unvaccinated children. Most kids who die from the flu haven’t been immunized against it, he said. And many were previously healthy.

“If you’re worried about your health, get your flu vaccination,” Hotez said. “It’s not too late.”

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

[GeneChing]

I haven't seen this one, but I have been seeing a lot of disinformation about coronavirus lately. The good ol' interwebz spreads viral fake news...like the plague.


Watch out for this extremely fake, weirdly racist viral post about coronavirus (https://mashable.com/article/racist-fake-viral-coronavirus-post-sydney-food-contamination-china/)
BY CAITLIN WELSH
6 HOURS AGO

From fake Coachella posters and deepfake videos to Trump tweets and clout-chasing tragedy porn, there is no shortage of stuff on the internet trying to convince you of things that aren't true. But an Australia-focused viral misinformation post about the coronavirus, packed with errors, typos, and blatantly made-up details, is still being shared by individuals and business pages on social media despite being both debunked and widely mocked.

The text post, which has been copied and shared on Facebook as well as harder-to-track Instagram Stories, claims "Corna's disease" is "starting to spread in the greater Sydney region," and warns of "contiminated [sic] products" (the spelling mistake is replicated in most iterations of the text).

The post then lists a random collection of popular Asian foods supposedly made in "neighbouring areas" to Wuhan— the Chinese city where the current virus originated — and are thus claimed to contain "traces of corona's disease." These foods include wagyu beef and Yakult (which are Japanese), Nongshim Onion Ring snacks (Korean), Mi Goreng instant noodles (Indonesian), Lipton peach-flavoured iced tea (made and bottled all over the world), fortune cookies, two varieties of rice, and Red Bull (both "Chinese" and "normal").

Even more bizarrely, it claims the "bureau of diseasology parramatta" lists some "areas which people with corona's disease have visited and contaminated," proven by "positive readings" in the air near train stations. A couple of the Western Sydney suburbs listed have large populations of people who are of Chinese (or Vietnamese) birth or descent. The Sydney suburb of Parramatta is not home to a "Bureau of Diseasology," however, as it does not exist.


The post lists a random collection of popular Asian foods claimed to contain "traces of corona's disease"
The name for study of diseases is actually epidemiology — and epidemiologists currently advise that coronavirus has not been proven to be transmitted by contaminated food or air, but rather by respiratory droplets (e.g. sneezing or coughing).

The post has been repeatedly debunked by the (actually real) New South Wales Department of Health throughout the course of Tuesday — with the existence of the mysterious Bureau specifically denied — but it was still being shared on social media as of at least 5 p.m. Sydney time. In some versions, extra suburbs had been added to the list of "contaminated" areas.


Kevin Nguyen
✔
@cog_ink
Fake news and misinformation around the coronavirus is wild. Childcare centres are sharing a post claiming wagyu beef and mi goreng could have traces of the virus and that the "bureau of diseasology Parramatta" is testing the air. Everyone knows that burea relocated to Ryde.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPVScj7VUAAiYkX?format=jpg&name=medium
73
5:49 PM - Jan 27, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
34 people are talking about this


NSW Health
@NSWHealth
1/2 @NSWHealth has been made aware of a social media post that is being widely circulated warning people to not consume certain foods or visit certain locations in Sydney.

This post has not originated from NSW Health or any related entity...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPVu5PdU0AAIibv?format=jpg&name=small
196
7:53 PM - Jan 27, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
206 people are talking about this


Carl Smith
✔
@Carl3Smith
If you spot anything like what's in this picture on social media, do your duty and repeat the NSW Health mantra: 👏*there is no such entity as the "Department of Diseasology Paramatta"*👏 https://twitter.com/NSWHealth/status/1222004812805332993 …

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPWPk5wVAAAqaEo?format=png&name=small
NSW Health
@NSWHealth
Replying to @NSWHealth
2/2 Further, there is no such entity as the “Department of Diseasology Parramatta”.

NSW Health would like to assure the community that the locations mentioned in this post pose no risk to visitors, and there have been no “positive readings” at train stations.

16
10:16 PM - Jan 27, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
See Carl Smith's other Tweets
Four of the five confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia are in the state of NSW, and as most schools began classes on Tuesday, parents of children who have recently been to China were encouraged to keep their kids home until two weeks from their return date. At least one Sydney council also postponed its Lunar New Year celebrations over the previous weekend out of concern over the virus' spread. And lines formed outside pharmacies in the Sydney CBD, as Sydneysiders queued to buy face masks. (Not everyone has invested yet, despite the ongoing bushfire smoke.)

Meanwhile, "Department of Diseasology" trended in Australia on Tuesday afternoon, as Twitter users made jokes and memes about the post.

The text's scattershot, racist targeting of widely popular Asian snack foods and disdain for spellcheck give it a ****post-level absurdity — it's hard to believe anyone meant it to be taken seriously, let alone succeeded.

But its sloppy phrasing might not be a dead giveaway for someone whose English isn't strong — and it's also powered by racist stereotypes about Asian food, people, and standards of hygiene.

Amid the deaths in China and the documented spread of the virus to a handful of other countries, East Asian people are reporting being profiled and avoided on public transport, recalling similar racism experienced during the SARS outbreak.



Terri Chu
@TerriChu
In my Chinese moms chat group, we discussed how to brace ourselves and the kids for the inevitable wave of racism coming our way as this unfolds.

Many of us have never even been to China but know we will not go unscathed. https://twitter.com/akurjata/status/1221165180568002560 …

Andrew Kurjata 📻
✔
@akurjata
Perhaps revealing some naiveté, I'm surprised at the level of vitriol towards Chinese people I'm seeing in the comments sections of stories about the Wuhan coronavirus. And I mean towards the people, not the government. Disheartening.

442
1:31 PM - Jan 25, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
197 people are talking about this


Muqing
@muqingmq
The reason Western coverage of the coronavirus is so racist is bc it feeds orientalizing narratives of Chinese people as a dirty, diseased orientals and provides an excuse for increased Western aggression & "containment" of China as well as suspicion of Chinese in Western nations

26.7K
5:20 PM - Jan 25, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
8,207 people are talking about this
Some of the earliest iterations of the post spotted by Mashable have already vanished from Facebook, where it seems to have originated, but it persists nonetheless. Whether its intent was earnest or not, misinformation like this feeds, and feeds off, racial profiling, ignorance, and fear. As with the arson conspiracy theories and misinformation that thrived once the Australian bushfires hit international headlines, it's likely this misinfo will continue to spread and mutate throughout the internet despite best efforts to debunk it.

As always, take officially-recommended precautions as necessary – and be sure to double check your sources before sharing information on social media.

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBEqV5f8Wag

[GeneChing]

This is good news, finally. But we'll see. Hopeful.


China coronavirus: Hong Kong researchers have already developed vaccine but need time to test it, expert reveals (https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3047956/china-coronavirus-hong-kong-researchers-have?utm_content=article&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3ctJ1Nn-w83QrHFdXrBdFzB0BTrkdsgkQbFRLBtoD5HXUsereqSjA86X4# Echobox=1580224094)
HKU’s Professor Yuen Kwok-yung says his team is working on vaccine, having isolated virus from the city’s first imported case
Scientists in mainland China and the United States are also racing to produce a vaccine for the deadly new coronavirus
Elizabeth Cheung
Published: 10:48pm, 28 Jan, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/01/28/f10939b0-41d9-11ea-9fd9-ecfbb38a9743_image_hires_234758.JPG?itok=RF0ylfgW&v=1580226485
The previously unknown coronavirus has killed more than 100 people and infected thousands. Photo: National Microbiology Data Centre

Hong Kong researchers have already developed a vaccine for the deadly Wuhan coronavirus – but need time to test it, according to infectious diseases expert Professor Yuen Kwok-yung.
Scientists in mainland China and the United States were also separately racing to produce a vaccine for the new coronavirus, which has killed more than 100 people and infected thousands.
Yuen, chair of infectious diseases at the University of Hong Kong, revealed that his team was working on the vaccine and had isolated the previously unknown virus from the city’s first imported case.
“We have already produced the vaccine, but it will take a long time to test on animals,” Yuen said, without giving a specific time frame on when it would be ready for patients.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/01/28/afbb1a14-41d9-11ea-9fd9-ecfbb38a9743_1320x770_234758.JPG
Professor Yuen Kwok-yung did not give a time frame on when the vaccine would be ready. Photo: Winson Wong

But he said it would take months to test the vaccine on animals and at least another year to conduct clinical trials on humans before it was fit for use.
HKU researchers based it on a nasal spray influenza vaccine previously invented by Yuen’s team.
Researchers modified the flu vaccine with part of the surface antigen of the coronavirus, meaning it could prevent influenza viruses as well as the new coronavirus, which causes pneumonia.
The vaccine, if successfully tested, could be the answer to a disease that has infected more than 4,600 people globally and killed over 100 on the mainland, mostly in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak.
Hong Kong had so far seen eight confirmed cases. From noon on Monday to noon on Tuesday, 78 more people were reported as suspected cases. Currently, 103 people are in isolation in public hospitals.
Although mainland media quoted Chinese infectious diseases expert Li Lanjuan on Monday as saying a vaccine targeting the coronavirus was being developed and could be made in around a month at the earliest, Yuen expressed doubts.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_tlM02QGjg
Hong Kong increases measures to contain spread of Wuhan coronavirus

He said the one being developed on the mainland is likely to be an inactivated virus vaccine, which consists of a virus grown in a culture that has had its infectivity destroyed by chemicals or radiation.
To test the vaccine, it will have to be injected into an animal to see if it produces a good immune response, Yuen said. The vaccinated animal would then be exposed to the virus to see if is protected.
“If the vaccine appears effective and safe in a number of animal species, it will go into clinical trials on humans. This takes at least one year even if expedited,” Yuen said.
He was also concerned that the approach taken by the mainland side to develop a vaccine would lead to a major complication, in which people who were vaccinated might develop a more severe disease if exposed to the virus. He said such a reaction for coronavirus had been recorded in reports.
Meanwhile, Xinhua reported that Shanghai East Hospital of Tongji University had urgently approved a project for the development of a vaccine targeting the novel virus.
The vaccine would be co-developed by the hospital and Stemirna Therapeutics, a Shanghai-based biotechnology company.
Company CEO Li Hangwen said no more than 40 days would be needed to manufacture vaccine samples, which would then be sent for tests and brought to clinics “as soon as possible”.


This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Vaccine developed but far from ready, expert says

Here I've been waiting for someone to suggest banlangen or something.

[GeneChing]

The coronavirus panic is turning the UK into a hostile environment for east Asians (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/27/coronavirus-panic-uk-hostile-environment-east-asians)
Sam Phan
Stereotypes are spreading as quickly as the virus. On the bus, in the street, people have started treating us as if we’re infected

Mon 27 Jan 2020 11.15 ESTLast modified on Tue 28 Jan 2020 09.19 EST

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d46eedec63e40d387ecf300a54458fd466246726/0_0_5926_3556/master/5926.jpg
‘The virus has spread to at least eight other countries including Thailand, Japan and the US, and it’s ‘highly likely’ it will reach the UK, according to Public Health England.’ Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/REX/Shutterstock

The atmosphere on my morning commute is tense. As panic over the coronavirus deepens and dominates the headlines, as an east Asian I can’t help but feel more and more uncomfortable. On the bus to work last week, as I sat down, the man next to me immediately scrambled to gather his stuff and stood up to avoid sitting next to me.


Perhaps it did not occur to these people that I, as a UK citizen, was no more likely than them to be carrying the virus
On the train over the weekend, a group sat opposite me chattering about their weekend plans. One of them seriously advised the rest, “I wouldn’t go to Chinatown if I were you, they have that disease.”

As I made my way towards Chinatown in London, an elderly woman and her friend on the escalators at Leicester Square underground station were casually talking about how dangerous the area now was, and she complained she was obliged to go there for a meeting. “At least I’m old, I have nothing left to lose,” she laughed.

In another loud conversation, I overheard a woman talking about how terrified she was that her friend, who had spent some time working with Chinese students, might have infected her with the virus.

In light of current events, we east Asians in the UK are on high alert, paying close attention to how people interact with us. It is not their concern about health that is problematic, but the stereotyping of all east Asians as a coronavirus risk. At times such as this, even a simple bus trip can feel like a hostile environment.

A friend at a university library experienced something similar: as soon as they sat down at a desk, the person in front of them packed up their things to leave. We’re noticing odd things like this that we never saw happen before.

Perhaps it did not occur to some of these people, so happy to talk loudly in front of me, that I was also concerned about the virus – or that I, as a British citizen, was no more likely than them to be carrying the virus. They grouped all east Asian people together, without factoring in that perhaps we were British or, if not, we were from unaffected areas of China, or even came from other countries in the Chinese diaspora. We were all the same to them.

The virus that originated in Wuhan has spread to at least eight other countries including Thailand, Japan, Australia and the US, and it’s “highly likely” it will reach the UK, according to Public Health England.

As it spreads, the virus has revealed more and more stereotyped judgments about Chinese people. I have also heard accounts from east Asians, even if they are not Chinese, who have recently been profiled while travelling at airports or on trains due to the ignorant perception that all east Asians are Chinese.

George Osborne, editor of the Evening Standard, proudly tweeted his newspaper’s cartoon of a rat with a face mask to supposedly commemorate the lunar new year. Piers Morgan mocked the Chinese language on Good Morning Britain with a tired “ching chang chong” joke. East Asians have been accused of instigating the virus by having “revolting” eating habits. Most Asians know these stereotypes all too well.

These insulting depictions don’t reflect the reality of being Chinese at all, and encourage the misguided perception of more than one billion people being a monolithic and singular group in which everyone speaks, acts and looks the same. In fact, there is a huge diversity.

Language and culture vary massively within the region. Speakers of Hokkien would not be able to converse with people who speak Hakka. And despite Mandarin being the lingua franca, there are more than 200 dialects spoken across China. In fact in Wuhan itself, a beautiful and diverse city with more than 3,500 years of history, many of its population of 11.8 million speak a Wuhan dialect.

Elsewhere, natives of Aksu look completely different to the majority Han Chinese. And the food, too: dim sum from the south of China is vastly different from the tangy, spicy flavours of Sichuan.

This week, my ethnicity has made me feel like I was part of a threatening and diseased mass. To see me as someone who carries the virus just because of my race is, well, just racist.

As the lunar new year celebrations take place across the world, let’s take a moment to think about the way in which east Asians are perceived and how important it is to see us in all our diversity, as individual human beings, and to challenge stereotypes. The coronavirus is a human tragedy, so let’s not allow fear to breed hatred, intolerance and racism.

• Sam Phan is an MA student at the University of Manchester

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)

[GeneChing]

Novel Coronavirus in China (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/warning/novel-coronavirus-china?fbclid=IwAR3XQXhLJsF8AWQ1hW4TEmHqlLyIxM7WQkd tVrrU6rHtJya6BC83H6HUkaw)
Warning - Level 3, Avoid Nonessential Travel
Alert - Level 2, Practice Enhanced Precautions
Watch - Level 1, Practice Usual Precautions
Key Points
CDC recommends that travelers avoid all nonessential travel to China.
There is an ongoing outbreak of respiratory illness caused by a novel (new) coronavirus that can be spread from person to person.
Chinese officials have closed transport within and out of Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province, including buses, subways, trains, and the international airport. Other locations may be affected.

Older adults and people with underlying health conditions may be at increased risk for severe disease.

The situation is evolving. This notice will be updated as more information becomes available.

What is the current situation?
CDC recommends that travelers avoid all nonessential travel to China. In response to an outbreak of respiratory illness, Chinese officials have closed transport within and out of Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province, including buses, subways, trains, and the international airport. Additional restrictions and cancellations of events may occur.
There is limited access to adequate medical care in affected areas.
A novel (new) coronavirus is causing an outbreak of respiratory illness that began in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. This outbreak began in early December 2019 and continues to grow. Initially, some patients were linked to the Wuhan South China Seafood City (also called the South China Seafood Wholesale Market and the Hua Nan Seafood Market).

Chinese health officials have reported thousands of cases in China and severe illness has been reported, including deaths. Cases have also been identified in travelers to other countries, including the United States. Person-to-person spread is occurring in China. The extent of person-to-person spread outside of China is unclear at this time.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses. There are several known coronaviruses that infect people and usually only cause mild respiratory disease, such as the common cold. However, at least two previously identified coronaviruses have caused severe disease — severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus.

Signs and symptoms of this illness include fever, cough, and difficulty breathing. This novel coronavirus has the potential to cause severe disease and death. Available information suggests that older adults and people with underlying health conditions or compromised immune systems may be at increased risk of severe disease.

In response to this outbreak, Chinese officials are screening travelers leaving some cities in China. Several countries and territories throughout the world are reported to have implemented health screening of travelers arriving from China.

On arrival to the United States, travelers from China may be asked questions to determine if they need to undergo health screening. Travelers with signs and symptoms of illness (fever, cough, or difficulty breathing) will have an additional health assessment.

What can travelers do to protect themselves and others?
CDC recommends avoiding nonessential travel to China. If you must travel:

Avoid contact with sick people.
Discuss travel to China with your healthcare provider. Older adults and travelers with underlying health issues may be at risk for more severe disease.
Avoid animals (alive or dead), animal markets, and products that come from animals (such as uncooked meat).
Wash hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. Use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer if soap and water are not available.
If you were in China in the last 14 days and feel sick with fever, cough, or difficulty breathing, you should:

Seek medical care right away. Before you go to a doctor’s office or emergency room, call ahead and tell them about your recent travel and your symptoms.
Avoid contact with others.
Not travel while sick.
Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue or your sleeve (not your hands) when coughing or sneezing.
Wash hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. Use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer if soap and water are not available.
Clinician Information
Healthcare providers should obtain a detailed travel history for patients with fever and respiratory symptoms. For patients with these symptoms who were in China on or after December 1, 2019, and had onset of illness within 2 weeks of leaving, consider the novel coronavirus and notify infection control personnel and your local health department immediately.

Although routes of transmission have yet to be definitively determined, CDC recommends a cautious approach to interacting with patients under investigation. Ask such patients to wear a surgical mask as soon as they are identified. Conduct their evaluation in a private room with the door closed, ideally an airborne infection isolation room, if available. Personnel entering the room should use standard precautions, contact precautions, and airborne precautions, and use eye protection (goggles or a face shield). For additional infection control guidance, visit CDC's Infection Control webpage.

Hope no one was China-bound.

[GeneChing]

UFC strawweight champ Weili Zhang slams Joanna Jedrzejczyk for joking about coronavirus (https://www.cbssports.com/mma/news/ufc-strawweight-champ-weili-zhang-slams-joanna-jedrzejczyk-for-joking-about-coronavirus/)
The Chinese-born champion was not happy at the former champ's joke invoking her homeland
Brent Brookhouse
38 mins ago • 1 min read

https://sportshub.cbsistatic.com/i/r/2018/07/25/71521263-5844-42e9-ae84-c6c2a430e4fc/thumbnail/770x433/aafb46905642d7eda9bc502cf15c6779/joanna.jpg

As Weili Zhang prepares to defend her UFC women's strawweight championship against former champ Joanna Jedrzejczyk, she is also dealing with a crisis in her country. Zhang became a hero in China after winning the title with a 42-second knockout of Jessica Andrade last August. But China is currently struggling with an outbreak of coronavirus, with the country reporting more than 130 deaths and 5,974 confirmed cases of the virus.

Jedrzejczyk posted a photo on her Instagram of a photoshopped magazine cover in anticipation of the fight with Zhang positioned in the foreground and herself in the background wearing a gas mask, apparently a reference to the fast-spreading disease. The attempt at a joke drew a serious response from the champion.

"To make fun of tragedy is a true sign of ones character," Zhang wrote in her own Instagram post. "People are dying, someone's father, someone's mother, someone's child. Say what you want about me if it makes you feel stronger but do not joke about what's happening here. I wish you good health until March 7. I will see you soon."

Zhang and Jedrzejczyk face off on March 7 in the co-main event of UFC 248. The event takes place from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The fight marks the first title defense for Zhang and an attempt for Jedrzejczyk to regain a championship she held from March 2015 to November 2017 while establishing herself as one of the most dominant forces in women's MMA. Jedrzejczyk has lost three consecutive championship bouts.

Jedrzejczyk posted a response on her own Instagram, offering a partial apology in a video while also telling Zhang to not get emotional.

"Hey champ, hey Weili," Jedrzejczyk said. "So sorry to make you feel bad, but I would never make fun of people with an illness or virus. I didn't want you to get offended, but I just made fun of the funny internet meme. So, so sorry, but still, I will see you on March 7 and don't get emotional, OK?"

Here's the image:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPdM8ccWoAAhdQD?format=jpg&name=small

THREADS
Zhang Weili (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71462-Zhang-Weili)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

‘Made in China’: how Wuhan coronavirus spread anti-Chinese racism like a disease through Asia (https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3048104/made-china-how-wuhan-coronavirus-spread-anti-chinese)
Xenophobic chatter about Chinese eating habits is going viral on the internet
Such ignorance isn’t just unpalatable – in misdiagnosing the problem, it’s dangerous, too
Kok Xinghui
Published: 8:00pm, 29 Jan, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/01/29/e48ba384-427f-11ea-9fd9-ecfbb38a9743_image_hires_214442.JPG?itok=D3VP0qBZ&v=1580305491
A video by Chinese social media influencer Wang Mengyun, in which she tries bat soup has been held up by some as evidence of ‘disgusting’ Chinese eating habits – even though the video was shot in Palau. Photo: Sohu

As Singaporeans gathered over the Lunar New Year weekend, jokes were cracked about Chinese eating habits and how a propensity to eat “anything with four legs except the table and everything that flies except planes” had given rise to the Wuhan coronavirus.
One meme said there was no need to worry – the virus would not last long because it was “made in China”.
The jokes, tinged with racism, soon grew into a call for the city state to ban Chinese travellers from entering. A change.org petition started on January 26 had 118,858 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon. Among those calling for health to be prioritised over tourism dollars was Ian Ong, who wrote: “We are not rat or bat eaters and should not be made to shoulder their nonsense.”
Xenophobic chatter about mainland Chinese and their eating habits has spread across the world since the first cases of the novel coronavirus 2019 (2019 n-CoV) emerged in China’s Hubei province in December.
The virus has now infected more than 6,000 people, most of them in mainland China where at least 132 people have died. Dozens of people have been infected in the rest of Asia – including 10 in Singapore and seven in Malaysia.
Some countries, including the Philippines, have stopped issuing visas on arrival to all Chinese nationals. Papua New Guinea has gone further, shutting its air and seaports to all foreigners coming from Asia.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/01/29/fd33392e-427f-11ea-9fd9-ecfbb38a9743_1320x770_214442.JPG
Passengers arriving from Guangzhou, China, at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila. The Philippines has stopped issuing visas on arrival to all Chinese nationals. Photo: EPA

In Malaysia, there have been calls to block Chinese tourists and social media posts claiming the outbreak is “divine retribution” for China’s treatment of its Muslim Uygur population. Some mosques in Malaysia have also closed themselves off to tourists.
In Japan, a shop in a mountain town prompted an apology from tourism authorities after it posted a sign saying: “No Chinese are allowed to enter the store. I do not want to spread the virus.”
From noon on Wednesday Singapore has blocked the entry of tourists who had visited Hubei province in the past 14 days, or who hold passports issued in the province. Malaysia has also stopped issuing visas to Chinese travellers from Hubei.
The Singapore government has said the travel ban was due to global trends showing that most of the infections were in people who had been to the province and the country wanted to minimise import of the virus to Singapore.
The growing stigma has even reached European shores. Graduate student Sam Phan wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian about how a man on the bus in London had scrambled to get up as soon as Phan sat down. “This week, my ethnicity has made me feel like I was part of a threatening and diseased mass. To see me as someone who carries the virus just because of my race is, well, just racist,” he wrote.
In Canada, Toronto website BlogTO said a stigma was also attached to Chinese food, noting that a similar thing happened during the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), which infected 8,000 people globally and killed nearly 800. The website noted racist comments on its Instagram post about a new Chinese restaurant, which some posters urged diners to avoid because it “may have bat pieces in there or whatever else they eat”.
The comments were in part a reference to a video of a Chinese social media influencer tucking into a bowl of bat soup. Some posters have claimed the video is evidence of “disgusting” Chinese eating habits, though the video was in fact filmed three years ago in Palau, a Pacific island nation where bat soup is a delicacy.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/01/29/3de31a0c-4280-11ea-9fd9-ecfbb38a9743_1320x770_214442.JPG
Wrongly accused? The Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. Photo: Simon Song

It is still unknown how the coronavirus made the jump from wildlife to humans, but early on in the outbreak the Huanan Seafood Market in the central city of Wuhan was widely assumed to be the origin of the disease. The market has a thriving wildlife trade, selling animals from foxes to wolf puppies, giant salamanders to peacocks and porcupines.
However, in recent days research has emerged suggesting the market may not be the source of the virus.
The medical journal The Lancet on January 24 said that of the first clinical cases, 13 out of 41 had no link to the market.
The first patient showed symptoms on December 1, meaning human infections must have occurred in November 2019 given the two-week incubation period. Researchers said the virus could have spread in Wuhan before the cluster within the market was discovered.
Similarly, the virus’ genome has been sequenced but researchers are not sure if it comes from bats – as Sars did – or snakes. Still, experts said it is not so much about what meat is eaten, but how thoroughly it is cooked and the hygiene precautions taken during food preparation.
“The chef is at greatest risk,” said infectious disease specialist Leong Hoe Nam, who was closely involved in Singapore’s fight against Sars, which killed 33 people and infected 238 in the city state.
Leong said anybody could catch a virus from an animal.
“It is a case of the right person meeting the wrong virus at the wrong time. It could happen to anyone studying viruses, or meeting the bats in the most inopportune time,” he said, referring to a case in Melaka, Malaysia, when a bat flew into a house and infected a 39-year-old man and his family.
Painting the coronavirus as a Chinese problem was like “dealing with the problem with a sledge hammer, implicating all Chinese nationals rather than dealing with bad food safety practices and diets”, said National University of Singapore sociologist Tan Ern Ser.
Nanyang Technological University (NTU) sociologist Laavanya Kathiravelu said xenophobic social media posts were an extension of colonial-era stereotypes.
“Chinese, in these xenophobic accounts, are seen as taking resources away from deserving local populations, and having uncouth behaviour. More broadly, this can also be seen as informed by older stereotypes of Chinese as dirty, having bad hygiene and undesirable culinary practices,” she said.
Even Singapore government ministers have spoken out.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/01/29/71cc1850-4280-11ea-9fd9-ecfbb38a9743_1320x770_214442.JPG
Singapore’s National Development Minister Lawrence Wong, pictured with Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, has cautioned his countrymen against ‘turning xenophobic’. File photo

Minister for National Development Lawrence Wong, who co-chairs a task force set up to deal with the virus, said on Monday: “I want to assure Singaporeans that the government will do everything we can to protect Singaporeans and Singapore but this does not mean overreacting, or worse, turning xenophobic.”
Singaporean playwright Zizi Azah, who is based in New York, said it was illogical to pin the virus on a race. “Illness knows no geographical or racial boundaries and it really is the luck of the draw, isn’t it? Where something starts and where it gets to,” she said.
Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib, director of the Centre for Interfaith Understanding, cautioned against the effects of dehumanising Chinese people as uncivilised. “It is not due to ‘Chinese-ness’; the fact that these people are Chinese is incidental, not the reason for the emergence and transmission of the virus. The virus could have emerged in any other part of the world, just as Ebola started in Congo and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Singapore’s Minister for Education Ong Ye Kung on Monday called for empathy, saying that Singaporeans would not have liked it if during the Sars outbreak other countries had asked Singaporean expatriates to leave.
“We’re an international hub, we can well be quite hard hit by such epidemics. So I’d say do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you. We all must tackle the problem objectively.”
In Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad clarified that any mosques that had closed themselves off to tourists had not done so on the government’s advice.
“This is not a government policy and it is an irresponsible act,” he said on Wednesday, warning the public against spreading fake news that could stir racial tensions.
“Even though we believe in freedom of expression, it does not mean we can be antagonistic and agitate the feelings of others.”


This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: racism aimed at chinese spreads fear and panic

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Made in China (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?66168-Made-in-China)
Chinese Food (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?16444-Chinese-food)

[GeneChing]

China’s coronavirus cases jump to 7711, Yuan to extend selloff (https://www.actionforex.com/live-comments/267991-chinas-coronavirus-cases-jump-to-7711-yuan-to-extend-selloff/)
By ActionForex.com -Jan 30, 03:26 GMT

China’s National Health Commission reported that, as of January 29, number of confirmed coronavirus case in the country rose 1737 from 1459 to 7711. Serious cases rose from 1239 to 1370. Death toll rose from 132 to 170. Suspected cases rose from 9239 to 12167. Number of people being tracked rose from 65537 to 88693.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva, “in the last few days the progress of the virus especially in some countries, especially human-to-human transmission, worries us.” “Although the numbers outside China are still relatively small, they hold the potential for a much larger outbreak.”

Offshore Chinese Yuan is back under selling pressure today. USD/CNH’s rebound suggests that rise from 6.8452 is resuming for channel resistance (now at 7.0061). Sustained break there should confirm that corrective fall from 7.1953 has completed. Further rally would be seen to 7.0867 resistance next. Nevertheless, break of 6.9420 support will indicate rejection by the channel resistance and turn focus back to 6.8452 low. The economic impact could be devastating on the martial arts world what with us already grappling with the trade war issues. :(

[GeneChing]

I always cherry-pick the news that I post here but even I was taken in by the bat soup story (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1317483#post1317483). :o The news is happening so quickly that it's hard to keep up.


Coronavirus Misinformation Is Spreading All Over Social Media (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-29/coronavirus-misinformation-is-incubating-all-over-social-media)
By Gerrit De Vynck, Riley Griffin, and Alyza Sebenius
January 29, 2020, 1:09 PM PST
Racist rants, dubious claims surface in wake of outbreak
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook trying to suppress misinformation

The new coronavirus roiling financial markets and prompting travel bans is taking on a life of its own on the internet, once again putting U.S.-based social media companies on the defensive about their efforts to curb the spread of false or dangerous information.

Researchers and journalists have documented a growing number of cases of misinformation about the virus, ranging from racist explanations for the disease’s origin to false claims about miracle cures. Conspiracy theorists, trolls and cynics hoping to use the panic to boost traffic to their own accounts have all contributed to the cloud of bad information.

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iyv9gwhSLKY4/v0/800x-1.jpg
Workers clean gates at a Hong Kong High Speed Rail Station on Jan. 29.Photographer: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

“It’s the perfect intersection of fear, racism and distrust of the government and Big Pharma,” said Maarten Schenk, co-founder of the fact-checking site Lead Stories. “People don’t trust the official narrative.”

The novel coronavirus, which originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, has killed 132 people and infected over 6,000, with cases in 19 countries.

One set of tweets and Facebook posts from U.S. conspiracy theory accounts said drinking bleach could protect against the virus or even cure it. On YouTube, a series of videos accusing media organizations of suppressing information had hundreds of thousands of views.

Fact-checkers, medical experts and academics reviewing coronavirus-related misinformation said some of the most viral hoaxes have concerned vaccines that claim to prevent or cure the disease and that would soon be commercially accessible to the public. Though medical authorities and biotechnology companies have begun researching and developing vaccines, they’re far from being stocked on pharmacy shelves.

“Rumors can travel more quickly and more widely than they could” in an era before social media, said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, who has a forthcoming book on the history of disinformation. “That of course lends itself to conspiracies spreading more quickly. They spread more widely and they are more persistent in the sense that you can’t undo them.”

Mapping the Coronavirus Outbreak

Some of the internet traffic and misinformation has been outright racist against Chinese people and Asians in general. Posts attributing the coronavirus to Chinese culinary practices have blown up, and a review of a new Chinese restaurant in Toronto was swarmed by racist trolls.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and some of that can be quite dangerous,” Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s emerging diseases unit, said at a Wednesday press conference in Geneva.

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iOkkWZlQkjZc/v0/800x-1.jpg
Customer wait in line to purchase protective masks at a store in Hong Kong.Photographer: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg

Viruses have always sparked fear and misinformation, striking panic as rumors spread and people desperate for information latch onto whatever snippets they can find -- whether they’re true or not. But the advent of social media has supercharged this process, leading to waves of misinformation over elections, mass shootings, plane crashes and natural disasters.

The outbreak is just the latest test of social networks’ ability to handle the spread of false and dangerous information.

Twitter Inc. is trying to stave off bad information related to coronavirus by directing users to more reliable sources, prompting users who search for “coronavirus” to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. The company has not seen an uptick in disinformation since coronavirus became a worldwide problem, a spokeswoman said. Twitter has a policy against people trying to “mislead” others with “deceptive activity.”

Facebook Inc.’s fact-checking partners -- independent organizations that flag problematic posts on the platform -- have been labeling misinformation about the coronavirus so users know it’s false, according to a company spokeswoman. Facebook is also alerting people who may have shared misinformation before it was fact-checked. On Tuesday, Facebook searches for “coronavirus” and related terms surfaced mostly credible reports from sites like the BBC and CNN, but there were also links touting dubious immune-boosting services and posts from users that questioned whether the virus news was a conspiracy from the World Health Organization.

Information shared in private groups are outside of Facebook’s fact-checking apparatus, and they have been known to incubate conspiracies on many different topics.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google searches for the virus are topped with a special panel linking to the Centers for Disease Control.

On Google’s YouTube, coronavirus was being treated as a news event, so searches for videos related to the outbreak mostly returned results from large, mainstream news organizations, though some conspiracy theory videos slipped through. Much of the dubious information being shared could be considered what YouTube labels “borderline” content. That’s information that isn’t necessarily wrong or racist but peddles unconfirmed conspiracies or shoddy medical information. YouTube said its algorithms are built to lower the number of times “borderline” content is recommended to viewers.

In China itself, where homegrown social media apps like WeChat and Weibo dominate, misinformation has spread alongside protests against the government’s handling of the situation. Generally, social media is closely monitored and censored by the communist party. But the sheer amount of posts criticizing the government and demanding more action mean some have evaded censors. Videos and posts that otherwise wouldn’t have left China have circulated through the internet, giving the world a view into the situation that isn’t totally controlled by the government.

“Early days in an outbreak, there’s so much uncertainty. People don’t like uncertainty. They want answers,” said Timothy Caulfield, a health law professor at the University of Alberta.

“Social media is a polarization machine where the loudest voices win,” he said. “In an outbreak, where you want accurate, measured discourse, that’s kind of a worst-case scenario.”

— With assistance by Kurt Wagner, Kartikay Mehrotra, and Sarah Frier

The racist issues are particularly disturbing. And shameful.

[GeneChing]

A deadly virus is spreading from state to state and has infected 15 million Americans so far. It's influenza (https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/health/flu-deadly-virus-15-million-infected-trnd/index.html)
By Scottie Andrew, CNN
Updated 8:48 AM ET, Thu January 30, 2020
4 ways the flu turns deadly

(CNN)The novel coronavirus that's sickening thousands globally -- and at least five people in the US -- is inspiring countries to close their borders and Americans to buy up surgical masks quicker than major retailers can restock them.
There's another virus that has infected 15 million Americans across the country and killed more than 8,200 people this season alone. It's not a new pandemic -- it's influenza.
The 2019-2020 flu season is projected to be one of the worst in a decade, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At least 140,000 people have been hospitalized with complications from the flu, and that number is predicted to climb as flu activity swirls.
The flu is a constant in Americans' lives. It's that familiarity that makes it more dangerous to underestimate, said Dr. Magaret Savoy, chair of Family and Community Medicine at Temple University's Lewis Katz School of Medicine.
"Lumping all the viral illness we tend to catch in the winter sometimes makes us too comfortable thinking everything is 'just a bad cold,'" she said. "We underestimate how deadly influenza really is."
Even the low-end estimate of deaths each year is startling, Savoy said: The Centers for Disease Control predicts at least 12,000 people will die from the flu in the US every year. In the 2017-2018 flu season, as many as 61,000 people died, and 45 million were sickened.
In the 2019-2020 season so far, 15 million people in the US have gotten the flu and 8,200 people have died from it, including at least 54 children. Flu activity has been elevated for 11 weeks straight, the CDC reported, and will likely continue for the next several weeks.
Savoy, who also serves on the American Academy of Family Physician's board of directors, said the novelty of emerging infections can overshadow the flu. People are less panicked about the flu because healthcare providers "appear to have control" over the infection.
"We fear the unknown and we crave information about new and emerging infections," she said. "We can't quickly tell what is truly a threat and what isn't, so we begin to panic -- often when we don't need to."
The flu can be fatal
Dr. Nathan Chomilo, an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at University of Minnesota Medical School, said that the commonness of the flu often underplays its severity, but people should take it seriously.
"Severe cases of the flu are not mild illnesses," Chomilo said. "Getting the actual flu, you are miserable."
The flu becomes dangerous when secondary infections emerge, the result of an already weakened immune system. Bacterial and viral infections compound the flu's symptoms. People with chronic illnesses are also at a heightened risk for flu complications.
Those complications include pneumonia, inflammation in the heart and brain and organ failure -- which, in some cases, can be fatal.
Chomilo, an internist and pediatrician for Park Nicollet Health Services, said this flu season has been one of the worst his Minnesota practice has seen since the H1N1 virus outbreak in 2009. Some of his patients, healthy adults in their 30s, have been sent to the Intensive Care Unit, relying on ventilators, due to flu complications.
The virus is always changing
Influenza is tricky because the virus changes every year. Sometimes, the dominant strain in a flu season will be more virulent than in previous years, which can impact the number of people infected and the severity of their symptoms.
Most of these changes in the virus are small and insignificant, a process called antigenic drift. That year's flu vaccine is mostly effective in protecting patients in spite of these small changes, said Melissa Nolan, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina's School of Public Health.
Occasionally, the flu undergoes a rare antigenic shift, which results when a completely new strain of virus emerges that human bodies haven't experienced before, she said.
Savoy compares it to a block party: The body thinks it knows who -- or in this case, which virus -- will show up, and therefore, which virus it needs to keep out. But if a virus shows up in a completely new getup, it becomes difficult for the body's "bouncers" -- that's the immune system -- to know who to look for and keep out. The stealthy virus can infiltrate easily when the body doesn't recognize it.
This flu season, there's no sign of antigenic shift, the most extreme change. But it's happened before, most recently in 2009 with the H1N1 virus. It became a pandemic because people had no immunity against it, the CDC reported.
Get your flu shot, experts say
To avoid complications from the flu, Savoy, Chomilo and Nolan have the same recommendation: Get vaccinated.
It's not easy to tell how flu vaccination rates impact the number of people infected, but Savoy said it seems that the years she struggles to get her patients vaccinated are the years when more patients end up hospitalized with the flu, even if the total number of infections doesn't budge.
The CDC reported at least 173 million flu vaccine doses have been administered this flu season so far -- that's about 4 million more doses than the manufacturers who make the vaccines projected to provide this season.
Still, there are some who decide skipping the vaccine is worth the risk. A 2017 study found that people decline the flu vaccine because they don't think it's effective or they're worried it's unsafe, even though CDC research shows the vaccine effectively reduces the risk of flu in up to 60% of the population.
Chomilo said some of his most frustrating cases of the flu are in patients who can't be vaccinated because of preexisting conditions or their age (children under 6 months old can't be vaccinated).
There are two important reasons to get the flu vaccine, he said -- "Protecting yourself and being a good community member." It has been a rough flu season. I know so many who've gotten sick.

[GeneChing]

WHO Declares Coronavirus a Public Health Emergency (https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2020-01-30/who-declares-a-global-public-health-emergency-over-coronavirus)
The decision comes as the virus has spread to nearly 100 people outside of China.
By Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder, Staff Writer Jan. 30, 2020, at 3:53 p.m.

https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/c6e2a7f/2147483647/thumbnail/970x647/quality/85/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.beam.usnews.com%2F87%2F4f %2F7759036d4838a5e5a9663f0c3bd8%2F200130-coronavirus-editorial.jpg
A young girl wears a protective mask at Beijing Railway on Jan. 21, in Beijing, China. As of Thursday some 8,000 cases of the coronavirus had been confirmed.KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY

THE WORLD HEALTH Organization on Thursday declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the main reason for the decision "is not what is happening in China but because of what is happening in other countries."

"Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems and which are ill-prepared to deal with it," he said at a press conference in Geneva.

The health agency last week held off on the declaration, saying the situation was an emergency in China but not necessarily elsewhere.

The decision does not come with any restriction on trade and movement. The organization recommends accelerating the development of a vaccine.

As of Thursday, roughly 8,000 cases of the virus were confirmed, with nearly 100 of those coming from 18 countries outside of China, according to WHO.

There is also proof that the virus can spread from person to person, with cases confirmed in people in the U.S., Japan, Vietnam and Germany who had not previously traveled to China.



Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder, Staff Writer
I'm not sure what this means yet. We'll find out soon.

[GeneChing]

Really Berkeley? Really? Of all the U.S. universities, you'd think Berkeley would have this together.


‘Stop normalizing racism’: Amid backlash, UC-Berkeley apologizes for listing xenophobia under ‘common reactions’ to coronavirus (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/01/31/berkeley-coronavirus-xenophobia/)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/S2H6Z6QOMYI6VACUFCNO63RYUM.jpg&w=1440
Students walk on the University of California at Berkeley campus in Berkeley, Calif., on Aug. 15, 2017. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)
By Allyson Chiu
Jan. 31, 2020 at 4:08 a.m. PST

At first glance, the informational handout recently shared by the University of California at Berkeley’s health services center on Instagram looked like many of the others that have been promoted amid rising worry over the global spread of the deadly coronavirus.

This particular post, which was widely circulated Thursday, focused on “managing fears and anxiety” about the pneumonia-like virus that originated in Wuhan, China, last month and has since infected people in countries worldwide, including the United States. In addition to offering mental health tips and resources, the bulletin identified a handful of “normal reactions” that people may experience as the crisis continues to unfold.

It would be reasonable, the university’s health center wrote, for people in the coming days or weeks to feel panicked, socially withdrawn and angry, among other emotions. But the last “normal” feeling listed was, as one person put it, “very much not like the other.”

“Xenophobia: fears about interacting with those who might be from Asia and guilt about those feelings,” the handout said.

As Asians, especially Chinese people, worldwide have experienced heightened tensions in their communities and an increasing number of racist incidents sparked by fears of coronavirus contamination, the post struck a nerve. Many critics slammed the notice, expressing disbelief that a prominent university with a large Asian student body appeared to be “normalizing racism.”



Dustin R. Glasner, PhD
@drglasner
Hey @UCBerkeley @cal @UCBerkeleySPH @TangCenterCal - as a proud Cal alum (PhD Infectious Diseases '18) and Asian-American, this is really, truly unacceptable. Stop normalizing racism. It is not normal, and racist reactions to the current coronavirus outbreak are NOT OKAY. https://twitter.com/adrienneshih/status/1222986183778689024 …


Adrienne Shih
✔
@adrienneshih
Confused and honestly very angry about this Instagram post from an official @UCBerkeley Instagram account.

When is xenophobia ever a “normal reaction”?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPjrc1YXsBgqTyF?format=jpg&name=medium
22
1:25 PM - Jan 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
See Dustin R. Glasner, PhD's other Tweets
The outcry prompted university officials to take swift action, removing the Instagram post later in the day and issuing an apology for causing “any misunderstanding.”

“We apologize for our recent post on managing anxiety around Coronavirus,” said a statement shared by Berkeley’s Tang Center, which happens to be named after Hong Kong businessman Jack C.C. Tang. “We regret any misunderstanding it may have caused and have updated the language in our materials.”

AD

Thursday’s controversy coincided with the World Health Organization declaring the coronavirus outbreak a “public health emergency” and the State Department elevating its travel advisory for China to Level 4: “Do Not Travel.” According to the most recent figures from Chinese officials, nearly 10,000 people in China, where the pneumonia-like virus originated, have fallen ill, and the death toll in the country has risen to 213. Outside China, the number of international cases has risen to more than 80, with at least four countries, including the United States, reporting person-to-person transmission of the virus.

The latest developments are likely to stoke more fear over the virus’s spread, as experts say a vaccine won’t be ready any time soon. That doesn’t bode well for Asians already being subjected to discrimination and vitriolic attacks — and if history is any evidence, it’s only going to get worse.



Terri Chu
@TerriChu
In my Chinese moms chat group, we discussed how to brace ourselves and the kids for the inevitable wave of racism coming our way as this unfolds.

Many of us have never even been to China but know we will not go unscathed. https://twitter.com/akurjata/status/1221165180568002560 …


Andrew Kurjata 📻
✔
@akurjata
Perhaps revealing some naiveté, I'm surprised at the level of vitriol towards Chinese people I'm seeing in the comments sections of stories about the Wuhan coronavirus. And I mean towards the people, not the government. Disheartening.

513
1:31 PM - Jan 25, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
243 people are talking about this
Going back centuries, “Chinese and Chinese American people have served as scapegoats for infectious disease outbreaks and sanitation failures in the United States and around the world to particularly alarming effect,” wrote Jessica Hauger for The Washington Post.

During the third pandemic of the plague, political cartoons printed in California showed Chinese Americans “eating rats and bunking in crowded, unsanitary lodgings,” according to Hauger, a doctoral student at Duke University who studies healing and colonialism in the indigenous history of North America. Publications labeled China and Chinese people the “breeding place of King Plague.”

continued next post

[GeneChing]

The reactions to the coronavirus outbreak haven’t been all that different.

The hashtag “#ChineseDon’tComeToJapan” has been trending on Japanese social media, and Singaporeans are petitioning their government to bar Chinese nationals from entering the country, the New York Times reported. As of Thursday, there were 11 confirmed cases of the virus in Japan and 10 in Singapore, according to data compiled by The Post.

In France, Asian citizens launched a hashtag, “#JeNeSuisPasUnVirus” (“I’m not a virus”), to fight back against racism, the BBC reported. Le Courrier Picard, a French newspaper, also recently apologized after weathering backlash for running a front-page headline that read, “ALERTE JAUNE,” or “YELLOW ALERT.” So far, the country has confirmed five cases.

Reports of xenophobic behavior in Toronto prompted Mayor John Tory to issue a public statement Wednesday rebuking the treatment of the city’s Chinese Canadian community. Canada has reported three cases of infection.

“We have to be here to stand up and say that kind of stigmatization is wrong,” Tory said at a news conference. “It is ill-founded and in fact, could lead to a situation where we are less safe because it spreads misinformation at a time when people are in more need than ever of real information and real facts.”

The mayor went on to pledge solidarity to Chinese Canadians living in and around Toronto, stressing that quarantines or avoiding Chinese people and businesses are “entirely inconsistent with the advice of our health care professionals.”


John Tory
✔
@JohnTory
Standing with our Chinese community against stigmatization & discrimination, and reminding residents that, as our health care professionals have informed us, the risk of Coronavirus to our community remains low. We must not allow fear to triumph over our values as a city.

Embedded video
722
11:22 AM - Jan 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
327 people are talking about this
Then, Berkeley’s University Health Services publicized its latest coronavirus handout, which went viral Thursday after an image of the Instagram post was shared on Twitter. Critics, a number of whom are current or former students, blasted the university, suggesting that the post amounted to condoning racism against Asians. According to Berkeley’s fall enrollment data, more than 40 percent of last year’s freshman class were Asian.

“This just in from the number one public university in the world: it’s okay to be xenophobic as long as you also feel sort of guilty about it,” one person tweeted.



Michelle Lee
@1michellelee
Very cool take from my alma mater @UCBerkeley - xenophobia as an acceptable “common reaction” to the coronavirus panic. Feeling good about the light fear people have had of me in public all week. https://twitter.com/adrienneshih/status/1222986183778689024 …


Adrienne Shih
✔
@adrienneshih
Confused and honestly very angry about this Instagram post from an official @UCBerkeley Instagram account.

When is xenophobia ever a “normal reaction”?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPjrc1YXsBgqTyF?format=jpg&name=medium
21
1:22 PM - Jan 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
See Michelle Lee's other Tweets
Reactions ranged from shock to disgust, as several people demanded answers from the university.

“Is this a joke @ucberkeley?” a Twitter user asked. Another opined that the handout was “the exact opposite of good public health messaging.”

At least one person pointed out that Thursday also marked the official removal of California lawyer John Henry Boalt’s name from the main classroom building at Berkeley’s law school. Boalt’s anti-Chinese writings helped catalyze the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, according to a university news release.


Top Dog
@DJAL3XGA5
sorry professor i can't come to class today. im xenophobic and i think it might be contagious. please understand https://twitter.com/adrienneshih/status/1222986183778689024 …


Adrienne Shih
✔
@adrienneshih
Confused and honestly very angry about this Instagram post from an official @UCBerkeley Instagram account.

When is xenophobia ever a “normal reaction”?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPjrc1YXsBgqTyF?format=jpg&name=medium
22
1:54 PM - Jan 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
See Top Dog's other Tweets
The revised version of the health-center handout makes no mention of xenophobia. Under “Ways to Manage Fears & Anxieties,” a bullet point reads, “Be mindful of your assumptions about others.”

“Someone who has a cough or a fever does not necessarily have coronavirus,” the handout said. “Self-awareness is important in not stigmatizing others in our community.”


Allyson Chiu
Allyson Chiu is a reporter with The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. She has previously contributed to the South China Morning Post and the Pacific Daily News.Follow

I wonder if Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia) will still be an issue when CMAT (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?36106-Who-s-going-to-Berkeley-CMAT-this-year) happens. It's scheduled for March 14, only a month and a half away.

[GeneChing]

it's here now. :(


CORONAVIRUS
LIVE: Coronavirus: Bay Area's 1st case confirmed in Santa Clara County, CDC says (https://abc7news.com/5895060/)

Updated 15 minutes ago

SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) -- The Bay Area's first case of the coronavirus from China has been confirmed in Santa Clara County, officials say.

The CDC says an adult male resident tested positive for the new coronavirus.

The Santa Clara County case marks the seventh confirmed case in the United States. There are two other cases in California, one in Arizona, one in Washington state, and two in Illinois.

Almost 10,000 people have been infected globally in a two-month period. More than 200 people have died, all in China.

Health officials have announced one confirmed case of coronavirus in Santa Clara County.

The U.S. State Department has issued a "Do Not Travel" advisory to the country.

Delta Airlines, American Airlines and United Airlines are suspending all flights between the U.S. and China.

[GeneChing]

Here I've been waiting for someone to suggest banlangen or something.



Asia & Pacific
Kimchi, cow poop and other spurious coronavirus remedies (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/kimchi-cow-poop-and-other-spurious-coronavirus-remedies/2020/02/02/34c54b5a-43fe-11ea-99c7-1dfd4241a2fe_story.html)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WJD542CFXII6VPDYRIMPPL6O44.jpg&w=1440
An employee works at a traditional Chinese medicine store in Beijing on Saturday. (Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images)
By Anna Fifield
Feb. 2, 2020 at 12:43 p.m. PST

BEIJING — The new coronavirus has killed more than 300 people in China and infected thousands more. As the virus spreads and with no cure in sight, some people are looking to alternative remedies to protect them from infection or cure themselves if they’ve already contracted it.

Here are some of the theories floating around. Some of these have been proposed by medical doctors, and some of them are just common sense. Others, not so much.

As the ads say: If your symptoms persist or get worse, see your physician.

China
Traditional Chinese medicine for humans (and cows and chickens)
Chinese people have been flocking to buy Shuanghuanglian — literally “double yellow connect” — an herbal remedy that follows the principles of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

The liquid is made from the bud of the Lonicera japonica flower, and the fruit of Forsythia suspensa and Scutellaria baicalensis plants.

The Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, part of the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, has said that the medicine could help inhibit the coronavirus.

State media including the Xinhua News Agency and CCTV have reported that clinical trials suggested the medicine might be effective, leading to long queues at TCM outlets around the country. Major Chinese e-commerce platforms including Taobao.com and JD.com are out of stock of Shuanghuanglian.

After some criticism about its endorsement of the product, the Shanghai Institute doubled down, saying its findings were endorsed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology as accurate.

Not all eager customers have found the right product, however. It turns out there are brands of medicine for poultry and livestock called Shuanghuanglian, and some consumers bought the wrong ones.

One Taobao vendor of the livestock remedy happily told local media he never expected so many people would support his veterinary medicine business, while the makers of the product for birds had to urge consumers not to ingest their product.

Chicken soup for the lungs
Speaking of poultry, chicken soup is not just good for the soul. It’s also good for mystery viruses, according to one Wuhan doctor. Zhang Jinnong of Wuhan Union Hospital contracted coronavirus and said he nursed himself back to health with standard medication and chicken soup, all in the comfort of his self-quarantine.

“In terms of diet, you should drink chicken soup often,” Zhang said in an interview with the Changjiang Daily and Wuhan Evening Daily. “When you drink it, you should sweat. The rise in body temperature is good for fighting the virus.”

'Herbs that expel parasites'
The areca nut, or betel nut — usually used to get rid of hookworms, tapeworms and other intestinal parasites — are known as “purgative herbs that drain downward,” according to the TCM site Me and Qi.

The areca nut branch of the China Fruit Association says the nut can also be used to treat coronavirus. Well, it would say that, wouldn’t it? Its claims are, however, backed up by China’s National Health Commission, which has included areca nut in its recommended prescription for the pneumonia-like illness.

The National Health Commission and National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine recommended many TCM remedies to help alleviate symptoms of coronavirus, although they stressed they could not cure the virus.

One of the TCM ingredients was the areca nut, which they said could help detoxify and clear the lungs.

Putting the tea in TCM
A respiratory expert from Hubei People’s Hospital, Hu Ke, recommended people make prevention tea following the principles of traditional Chinese medicine. At a news conference at the provincial government buildings, he gave two precise recipes, which have been listed in Hubei’s recommended treatment for the coronavirus.

One: make a tea bag comprising atractylodes root (three grams), dried bunga mas flower (fice grams), sun-dried tangerine peel (three grams), reed rhizome (two grams), mulberry leaf (two grams) and astragalus root (10 grams).

Two: boil astragalus root (10 grams), tuber of white atractylodes rhizome (10 grams), siler (10 grams), fern rhizome (six grams), dried bunga mas flower (10 grams), eupatorium (10 grams), sun-dried tangerine peel (six grams).

They should be consumed twice a day for seven to 10 days, Hu said.

Warm salty water
The renowned 83-year old pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan, a veteran of the SARS crisis who is considered a national hero, has recommended swishing warm salty water around in your throat and nasal cavities a few times every morning and night to prevent infection.

But experts said this was bogus and that saline would not “kill” the new virus, according to Agence France-Presse. The World Health Organization also told AFP there was no evidence that saline solution would protect against infection from the new coronavirus.

South Korea
Kimchi finds its limits
Koreans have long claimed that kimchi, the spicy fermented cabbage dish that is a requirement at every meal, cures all manner of illnesses. SARS, bird flu, regular flu, you name it. But kimchi appears to have met its match.

“Eating kimchi does not prevent coronavirus infection,” South Korea’s Health Ministry said in a news release, disseminated to quell talk that, on the one hand, eating kimchi could boost immunity against coronavirus and that, on the other, it could spread the virus.

There had been rumors in some corners of the South Korean Internet that kimchi, much of which is made from Chinese cabbage, could contain the virus. The Health Ministry said that the illness could not be contracted from eating kimchi imported from China or receiving a parcel from China.

“The best way to prevent the novel coronavirus is to wash hands frequently,” it said.

India
Cow waste
The urine and dung of cows can be used for treating coronavirus infections, according to Swami Chakrapani Maharaj, president of Hindu Mahasabha, an Indian political party.

“Consuming cow urine and cow dung will stop the effect of infectious coronavirus,” Chakrapani said. If accompanied by a special yagna — or Hindu ritual, performed in front of a fire — it can “kill the novel coronavirus and end its effects on the world,” he said, according to Outlook India.

“A person who chants Om Namah Shivay and applies cow dung on body, will be saved. A special yagna ritual will soon be performed to kill coronavirus,” said Chakrapani.

Beyond that, however, he did not provide any specific recipes to make the cow excretions more, erm, palatable.

Ayurveda and homeopathy
The Indian government released a health advisory based on the traditional medicine practices of Ayurveda, homeopathy and Unani.

The main gist of the ayurvedic recommendations was, well, universal: maintain personal hygiene and wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, cover your face while coughing or sneezing and stay home when you are sick.

The Indian authorities also prescribed Shadang Paniya, a concoction given to fight headache and fever, along with other traditional remedies that included putting two drops of sesame oil in each nostril every morning.

Other suggestions included rubbing roghan baboona, a classical Unani oil-based concoction considered beneficial in treating gout, joint pain and backache, and the scalp and chest.

United States
For some more orthodox information from our public health correspondent in Washington, here’s: “What we know about the mysterious, pneumonia-like coronavirus spreading in China and elsewhere.”

Lyric Li and Liu Yang in Beijing, and Min Joo Kim in Seoul contributed to this report. Good luck with these...especially the cow dung. :rolleyes:

[GeneChing]

Coronavirus: Worldwide cases overtake 2003 Sars outbreak (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51322733)
31 January 2020

The number of coronavirus cases worldwide has overtaken that of the Sars epidemic, which spread to more than two dozen countries in 2003.

There were around 8,100 cases of Sars - severe acute respiratory syndrome - reported during the eight-month outbreak.

But nearly 10,000 cases of the new virus have been confirmed, most in China, since it emerged in December.

More than 100 cases have been reported outside China, in 22 countries.

The number of deaths so far stands at 213 - all in China. In total, 774 people were killed by Sars.

On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency over the new outbreak.

The UK on Friday confirmed its first two cases of the virus.

In another development, the US also declared a public health emergency and said it would bar any foreign nationals who have visited China in the past two weeks from entering the country.

Estimates by the University of Hong Kong suggest the true total number of cases could be far higher than official figures suggest. Based on mathematical models of the outbreak, experts there say more than 75,000 people may have been infected in the Chinese city of Wuhan alone, where the virus originated.

Most cases outside China are in people who have been to Wuhan. But Germany, Japan, Vietnam, the United States, Thailand and South Korea have reported person-to-person cases - patients being infected by people who had travelled to China.

Wuhan's Communist Party chief said on Friday the city should have taken measures sooner to contain the virus.

"If strict control measures had been taken earlier, the result would have been better than now," Ma Guoqiang told state broadcaster CCTV.

As governments around the world acted to contain the virus, WHO spokesman Chris Lindmeier warned that closing borders could in fact accelerate its spread, with travellers entering countries unofficially.

"As we know from other scenarios, be it Ebola or other cases, whenever people want to travel, they will. And if the official paths are not opened, they will find unofficial paths," he said.

He said the best way to track the virus was at official border crossings.

How does this outbreak compare to Sars?

Sars was a type of coronavirus that first emerged in China's Guangdong province in November 2002. By the time the outbreak ended the following July, it had spread to more than two dozen countries.

The new coronavirus emerged only last month. So far, it has spread to fewer countries and - while more people have been infected globally - it has resulted in fewer deaths.

On Wednesday, the number of confirmed cases within China surpassed the Sars epidemic.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12E3C/production/_110727377_virus_comparison_v2-nc.png

Sars was also estimated to have cost the global economy more than $30bn (£22bn).

But economists have said the new coronavirus could have an even bigger impact on the world economy. It has forced global companies including tech giants, car makers and retailers to shut down temporarily in China.

China was also criticised by the UN's global health body for concealing the scale of the original Sars outbreak.

It has been praised for responding to the latest virus with tough measures, including effectively quarantining millions of residents in cities.

But in his interview with CCTV on Friday, the Wuhan Communist Party chief said transport restrictions should have been brought in at least 10 days earlier.

"The epidemic may have been alleviated somewhat, and not got to the current situation," Mr Ma said.

The estimates from the University of Hong Kong suggest the epidemic is doubling in size roughly every week and that multiple Chinese cities may have imported sufficient cases to start local epidemics.

"Large cities overseas with close transport links to China could potentially also become outbreak epicentres because of substantial spread of pre-symptomatic cases unless substantial public health interventions at both the population and personal levels are implemented immediately," Professor Joseph Wu said.

Harder to spot and harder to stop

Why is this outbreak more difficult to stop than Sars?

The answer is not down to China - the speed and scale of the country's response to this new virus is widely considered to be unprecedented. The difference is the way the virus behaves inside the human body.

Sars was a brutal infection that you couldn't miss - patients were contagious only when they had symptoms. This made it relatively easy to isolate the sick and quarantine anyone who might have been exposed.

But the new virus, 2019-nCov, is harder to spot and therefore harder to stop.

From the virus's perspective, it has a far smarter evolutionary survival strategy than Sars.

The best estimate is only one-in-five cases cause severe symptoms, so instead of infected people turning up in hospital, you have to go out and find them.

And we are getting detailed documented cases of people spreading the virus before they even have symptoms.

There is a tendency to focus only on how deadly a virus is. But it is this, in combination with a virus's ability to spread, that determines its true threat.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12914/production/_110725067_china_virus_spread_31jan_pacific_center ed_640_3x_v7-nc.png

How is China handling this?

A confirmed case in Tibet means the virus has now reached every region in mainland China.

The central province of Hubei, where nearly all deaths have occurred, is in a state of lockdown. The province of 60 million people is home to Wuhan, which is at the heart of the outbreak.

The city has effectively been sealed off and China has put numerous transport restrictions in place to curb the spread of the virus. People who have been in Hubei are also being told to work from home.

China has said it will send charter planes to bring back Hubei residents who are overseas "as soon as possible". A foreign ministry spokesman said this was because of the "practical difficulties" Chinese citizens had faced abroad.

The virus is affecting China's economy, the world's second-largest, with a growing number of countries advising their citizens to avoid all non-essential travel to the country.

How is the world responding?

Voluntary evacuations of hundreds of foreign nationals from Wuhan are under way.

The UK, Australia, South Korea, Singapore and New Zealand are expected to quarantine all evacuees for two weeks to monitor them for symptoms and avoid contagion.

Australia plans to quarantine its evacuees on Christmas Island, 2,000km (1,200 miles) from the mainland in a detention centre that has been used to house asylum seekers.

In other recent developments:

Sweden confirmed its first case - a woman in her 20s who arrived in the country on 24 January after visiting the Wuhan area

Russia said two Chinese citizens had been placed in isolation after they tested positive for the virus

Singapore closed its borders to all travellers from China

Germany confirmed its seventh case - a man from a company in Bavaria where five other workers have tested positive

Italy declared a six-month state of emergency after two Chinese tourists in Rome were diagnosed with the coronavirus

Thailand confirmed its first case of human-to-human transmission

Mongolia suspended all arrivals from China until 2 March. It also banned its citizens from travelling to the country

In the US, Chicago health officials reported the first US case of human-to-human transmission

Russia decided to close its 4,300km (2,670-mile) far-eastern border with China

Japan raised its infectious disease advisory level for China

Some 250 French nationals were evacuated from Wuhan

India confirmed its first case of the virus - a student in the southern state of Kerala who was studying in Wuhan

Israel barred all flight connections with China

North Korea suspended all flights and trains to and from China, said the British ambassador to North Korea

Guatemala announced new travel restrictions, saying anyone who had been to China in the past 15 days would be prevented from reaching the country

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
SARS (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?26550-TCM-and-SARS)

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzT1T7l_PCU

[GeneChing]

I had a racist slur hurled at me by some drunk dude last weekend. That hasn't happened to me in years. :mad:


Coronavirus is spreading. And so is anti-Chinese sentiment and xenophobia. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/01/31/coronavirus-chinese-xenophobia-racism-misinformation/2860391001/?fbclid=IwAR3UMzhAZ4wNQwWe4XoAfxKE6YRlp-uB3Aj3m3KFIVA-x0A1DXHMztXSMJk)
Marco della Cava
Kristin Lam
USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, Russell Jeung follows each development with concern.

Jeung, chairman of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, applauds the various measures undertaken to quell the virus by everyone from airlines to the World Health Organization.

But he also cautions that one unhelpful reaction to the China-originating virus — racist reactions towards the Chinese and sometimes anyone merely Asian-looking — just adds hatred to hysteria.

"If you look at social media and some of the news, it's fear of the 'Yellow Peril' all over again," says Jeung, referring to a term that gained traction after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. "'Coughing while Asian' is like 'driving while black,' something you get stereotyped for."

Although San Francisco's Asian-American history dates back to the Gold Rush of the 1850s, Jeung says since the coronavirus scare hit U.S. shores he has seen non-Asians move away from Asian-Americans who are coughing or wearing masks. "The masks are there out of courtesy, but instead they're viewed in other ways," he says.

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/01/30/USAT/bd6436a9-a4c7-4647-b560-6ee9b95baf66-AFP_AFP_1OJ1R4.jpg?crop=4624,3200,x0,y0&width=660&height=457&format=pjpg&auto=webp
Passengers wear face masks to protect against the spread of the Coronavirus as they arrive on a flight from Asia at Los Angeles International Airport, Calif. on Jan. 29, 2020.

Often the reactions are more hurtful than mere shunning. Fear of the coronavirus around the world has so far led to everything from anti-Chinese signs at businesses to misrepresented videos.

South Korean restaurant owners have displayed "No Chinese allowed" signs and Japanese Twitter users made the hashtag #ChineseDontComeToJapan trend. In Singapore, more than 125,000 people have signed a petition urging the government to ban Chinese nationals from entering the city-state.

One social media post that has gone viral speculates on the source of the virus and features a 2016 video of Chinese vlogger Wang Mengyun eating a bat soup in Palau, a nation in Oceania.

Even the University of California, Berkeley, where the student population is about 34% Asian American, faced backlash for a since-deleted post on the coronavirus.

The post featured an infographic listing a range of expected reactions to the virus, including anxiety, worry and panic. But it noted that another common reaction could be "xenophobia: fears about interacting with those who might be from Asia and guilt about those feelings."

UC Berkeley officials soon amended the infographic and apologized for "any misunderstanding."

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/02/03/USAT/abc92f70-076a-48ae-aef9-6f27ac7ed44b-virus004.JPG?crop=2999,1687,x1,y77&width=660&height=372&format=pjpg&auto=webp

Some media influencers also are fanning the flames. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, whose show on Premiere Networks is heard by 27 million people weekly, said Monday that the virus comes from the "ChiComs," a slur referencing the Chinese communist government.

"I don’t see where we’ve put any ban on Chinese passengers being permitted into the country," Limbaugh said. "This is a serious thing that could be brewing out there."

And in France, the newspaper Le Courier Picard featured a front page Sunday with an Asian woman wearing a mask and the headline "Yellow Alert." The color referencing Asian skin tones drew immediate condemnation from French Asians — who started the hashtag #IAmNotaVirus — and an apology from the publication.

The health scare that started in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, overwhelmed local officials in China's Hubei province, as victims suddenly developed pneumonia without clear causes and for which vaccines were not proving effective.

On Monday, patients arrived at Wuhan's Huoshenshan Hospital, the 1,000-bed treatment center constructed in just 10 days to help battle the outbreak. The death toll in China has risen to 361, with more than 17,200 people infected. Outside of China, there have been 151 confirmed cases in 23 countries, and one death in the Philippines.

Based on the latest figures, the coronavirus fatality rate is roughly 2%. That compares to a fatality rate of the 9.6% for the 2002 SARS health scare.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said last week that "this is the time for facts, not fear. This is the time for science, not rumors. This is the time for solidarity, not stigma."

Some observers note that the current administration's hardline stance against immigrants may exacerbate racist incidents until the virus threat abates.

"The headlines have framed the coronavirus as an invasion into our country, and it surfaces the historical xenophobia and perpetual foreigner stereotype for Asian-Americans once again," says Aarti Kohli, executive director at Asian Law Caucus, a civil rights organization focused on Asian Pacific communities.

Kohli says a Filipino staffer with a cold "got weird looks" while at a Los Angeles area airport early this week.

"She isolated herself at a cafe to avoid the feeling of being targeted," says Kohli. "It's a problem when a whole population is being discriminated and being treated as a threat."

That sentiment has deep roots, dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which grew out a desire to block cheap Chinese labor that had in fact been critical to many Western projects, including the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869.

More recently, officials issued travel restrictions for the 2003 outbreak of SARS, a viral respiratory illness that sickened 8,096 people worldwide, eight of whom lived in the U.S..

"The danger here is that more extreme measures are taken," says historian Jeung, recalling past health scares in the early 1900s that caused San Francisco's Chinatown to be quarantined and Honolulu's Chinatown to be burned to the ground.

"The irony of the Hawaiian reaction was that the bubonic plague was caused by rats, so burning down the Chinatown only meant that the rats left and infected other non-Chinese neighborhoods," says Jeung. "This is not an Asian-American problem so much as it is an other people's problem with Asian-Americans. This coupling of xenophobia with health scares needs to get uncoupled."

Follow USA TODAY reporters @kristinslam and @marcodellacava

[GeneChing]

Did NOT see this one coming...:(


ASIA FEBRUARY 3, 2020 9:54AM PT
China Indefinitely Halts Film and TV Production Nationwide As Virus Deaths Surpass SARS (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/china-halts-film-production-coronavirus-surpasses-sars-1203490609/)
By REBECCA DAVIS

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/virus-shutterstock_editorial_10541597k-cr-res.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1
CREDIT: EYEPRESS NEWS/SIPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

China has officially ordered an indefinite halt to all film production in the country as it seeks to stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus that has swept the nation.

The death toll in China stands at 361 – higher now than that of SARS, which killed 349. China has confirmed 17,205 cases as of Sunday, with numbers rapidly rising, and as of Monday, there are 11 confirmed cases in the U.S.

Over the weekend, the producers’ and actors’ associations of the China Federation of Radio and TV Associations co-issued a notice declaring that all film and TV production companies, crews and actors are to suspend film and TV drama shoots until the unspecified time when the period of heightened virus prevention has passed. Those who don’t stop production will be held “responsible,” it said, without providing further detail.

Film industry professionals have the right to refuse to participate in shoots during the epidemic period, and can report shoots that continue unabated to the local authorities and industry associations.

“This is a necessary move given the current special situation,” the producers’ association’s secretary-general Li Gang told the People’s Daily newspaper.

The notice comes after a number of productions and facilities voluntarily shut themselves down, including the mega studio at Hengdian, which announced last Monday that all productions there would halt, and at the giant Qingdao studios.

Chinese citizens nationwide remain isolated in self-imposed quarantine in their homes, and more than a dozen major metropolises have been under lockdown measures restricting travel. In more than half the country, businesses have been ordered to extend their Chinese new year holiday and not resume working until at least Feb. 10, bringing the economy to a standstill.

Chinese reports predicted a definite decline in the number of films and TV shows produced this year, particularly as the epidemic stretches into the spring, a key period for production. “This and next year, there may be a ‘content shortage’ phenomenon,” assessed a local newspaper from Wuhan, the city at the disease’s epicenter.

THREADS
Chollywood rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Coronavirus to test just how reliant the world is on Chinese manufacturers, with Asia braced for shock wave (https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3048950/coronavirus-test-just-how-reliant-world-chinese-manufacturers)
With regions of China accounting for 80 per cent of exports on lockdown, factories around Asia are being forced into looking for alternative supplies
Workers trapped in China amid travel bans, while trade watchers as far afield as California wait for boats from China to stop arriving
Finbarr Bermingham
Published: 8:00pm, 4 Feb, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/02/04/ec26a9c8-4738-11ea-befc-ef9687daaa85_image_hires_212711.jpg?itok=l-CD0Nwh&v=1580822840
The world’s second largest economy remains on lockdown, with factories in 14 provinces covering 70 per cent of China’s gross domestic product and 80 per cent of its exports ordered not to open until Monday at the earliest. Photo: Reuters

Manufacturing and logistics players reliant on China's giant economy are braced for an incoming shock wave from the spread of the novel coronavirus, which is set to test “just how reliant we have grown on Chinese manufacturers”.
The world’s second largest economy remains on lockdown, with factories in 14 provinces covering 70 per cent of China’s gross domestic product and 80 per cent of its exports ordered not to open until Monday at the earliest.
The virus has claimed over 420 lives, the vast majority in China, but has infected people throughout the region, with more than 25 countries having confirmed cases as of Tuesday. In an effort to contain the spread, authorities in the likes of the United States, Singapore and Vietnam have restricted air traffic to and from China, while the movement of Chinese people across borders is also being restricted.
“Anything that limits the free movement of goods or people is bad for shipping,” said Tim Huxley, founder of the Hong Kong container freight shipper, Mandarin Shipping. “The expected demand decline in China is already being factored into prices of commodities and shipping rates. It’s very difficult to make any decisions while we’re still unclear about how long this is going to go on for.”

Anything that limits the free movement of goods or people is bad for shipping. It’s very difficult to make any decisions while we’re still unclear about how long this is going to go on for.
Tim Huxley
Some are sceptical as to whether manufacturing will resume as normal on Monday, given the virus is still spreading, albeit at a slower rate in recent days. Huge numbers of migrant workers are trapped in parts of China that are under an official lockdown covering more than 60 million people, while many others are in areas unofficially closed off by local officials.
“Some entire factories may not reopen at all because their entire management and a good part of their operators are still blocked in Hubei province – and that is true of many factories,” said Renaud Anjoram, partner and CEO of manufacturing consultancy firm Sofeast.
Within mainland China, oil demand has dried up by 20 per cent, Bloomberg reported, amid a freeze in travel, while metal prices have plunged on consecutive days since markets reopened on Monday, a sign of expected weak demand in key industrial sectors.
All this means the optimism that followed the signing of a phase one US-China trade deal barely three weeks ago already feels like a distant memory.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3uQYgeMyxQ
Coronavirus tally in outbreak epicentre Wuhan, China may just be ‘tip of the iceberg’

“While production remained largely normal over the Lunar New Year period, logistical disruptions could mean that metal stocks are building at producers,” wrote Wenyu Yao, senior commodities specialist at ING in a note to clients. “We’ve heard that some alumina smelters are facing the risk of fuel gas shortages.”
Nick Bartlett, director at CBIP Logistics in Hong Kong, said that the company’s fulfilment services have ground to a virtual halt since Chinese trade has dried up so severely.
“Some services remain operating at partial and controlled levels, and in some cases, specific logistic providers have come to a halt until February 9 when another review of things will be taken,” Bartlett said. “This leaves most Chinese-based logistics companies working around limited operations ensuring the safety of its people.”
A survey of businesses in the city released by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong on Tuesday found that more than 80 per cent of companies had been affected to medium or great extent by the coronavirus prevention measures recommended by the Hong Kong government, with 87 per cent having to adjust working practices for employees.
Factory operators in Southeast Asia reliant on Chinese-made materials and Chinese staff are unsure if they can obtain new components – a problem that will only get worse the longer the virus outbreak continues.
“Our components factories are all closed for another week – we do not know what’s going to happen, we have absolutely no idea,” said Larry Sloven, CEO of Capstone International, a lighting manufacturer that recently moved its production from China to Thailand, but which still imports many components from the mainland.
Vietnam, meanwhile, has been toasted as the “real winner” of the US-China trade war since it inherited much of the production capacity leaving China so companies could avoid paying US tariffs. But after the Vietnamese government put a ban on Chinese nationals entering the country last weekend, these producers face a new challenge.

The logistics have barely been affected [yet] but the biggest problem for me now is that I am banned from re-entering Vietnam
Steven Yang
“We export raw materials from China to Vietnam,” said Steven Yang, a Chinese furniture maker who relocated his factory from Foshan in Guangdong province in to Vietnam last year to avoid the escalating tariffs and who spent the Lunar New Year in his hometown. “The logistics have barely been affected [yet] but the biggest problem for me now is that I am banned from re-entering Vietnam.”
Ernie Koh is faced with a similar conundrum. His company, Koda, makes furniture in Vietnam and Malaysia for export around the world.
However, many of the parts come from China, as do many of his management staff. Furthermore, he operates a retail franchise in China – meaning his business and supply chain is heavily exposed to the fallout from the coronavirus. Having decided to wait until after the Lunar New Year holiday to replenish stock from China, Koh is now running low on some inventory lines.
“We need to look for another source and diversify our supply chain,” he said, adding that he had been forced to write a note to Vietnamese staff members assuring them that Chinese workers that returned to the country before the border was closed would be quarantined, over fears that the coronavirus could be spread through factories.
“Some of our staff and middle-management in Vietnam are Chinese and they have not been able to come back after Lunar New Year. We have had to urgently reposition some of our management from Malaysia to make up for it.”

Some of our staff and middle-management in Vietnam are Chinese and they have not been able to come back after Lunar New Year. We have had to urgently reposition some of our management from Malaysia to make up for it
Ernie Koh
Aemulus, a Malaysia-based maker of semiconductor testing equipment, said that it too was looking at contingency plans for its China suppliers, including companies in South Korea and Taiwan, amid fears that the Chinese lockdown will continue.
“We, as well as our vendors definitely have concerns over the cases,” said Sang Beng Ng, Aemulus CEO. “The starting date that vendors were due to come back to work has been delayed and there could be further delays which it's hard to tell at this point.”
The US economy was buoyed overnight by positive manufacturing data, after the Institute for Supply Management’s purchasing managers’ index – a survey of American factory owners – rose by 3.1 per cent to 50.9 per cent. This was in contrast with Asian manufacturing surveys, which performed poorly in January – even though they were conducted before the coronavirus outbreak.


Coronavirus in context
Coronavirus Fatality rate: 2.1% 20,676 427
US seasonal flu* Fatality rate: 0.07% 13,000,000 10,000
Sars Fatality rate: 9.6% 8,437 813
MERS Fatality rate: 34.4% 2,494 858
Ebola Fatality rate: 43.9% 34,453 15,158
H1N1 Fatality rate: 17.40% 1,632,258 284,500

Nonetheless, there is some concern that even the US could be hit with collateral damage.
“Here, we're waiting for the boats from China to stop showing up once Chinese [dock workers] no longer have anything to load. US importers, who normally plan for factories in China to go dark during the annual New Year celebrations, certainly would not have expected those factories not to reopen promptly after the last [cheers] of the holiday,” said Jock O’Connell, Beacon Economics' international trade adviser and a veteran watcher of Californian trade.
“Those importers with taut supply chains should soon be seeing inventory shortages. If this situation persists, we will all eventually see just how reliant we have grown on Chinese manufacturers.”
Additional reporting by Harry Pearl and Cissy Zhou

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Made in China (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?66168-Made-in-China)

[GeneChing]

Indoor exercise boom among Chinese amid efforts to curb novel coronavirus epidemic (http://www.china.org.cn/china/Off_the_Wire/2020-01/31/content_75661741.htm)
Xinhua, January 31, 2020

JINAN, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) -- Fan Dongquan, a fitness coach with Jinan Hot Blood Fitness Studio in east China's Shandong Province, on Thursday conducted a 90-minute fitness course on-line for free.

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has kept millions of Chinese like Fan from outdoors activities since late January, so indoors exercise has become an important way to keep healthy.

The Chinese sports community, from individuals like Fan to the sports authorities at all levels, stood forward to actively promote indoors exercises to fight against the epidemic.

China's State General Administration of Sport has called upon sports departments at all levels to promote simple and scientific exercises at home and further fitness knowledge, and advocate a healthy lifestyle via various media during the epidemic.

"I believe that regular physical exercise can protect against illness, especially in a time of the novel coronavirus epidemic," said Fan, adding that the number of participants increased from 243, the first time, to more than 300.

In fact, sports departments around the country have already released a series of indoors exercise programs with accompanying text, pictures and videos.

For example, the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau released a complete set of workouts at home, including stretching and strength training, on Wednesday.

Rizhao Municipal Sports Bureau of Shandong Province has also released some instructions of Taichi, Yoga and 'Five Animals Play.' Meanwhile, they invited local social sports instructors to demonstrate the methods in videos, so that citizens can follow experts to learn how to work out at home.

Sports Bureaus of Qingdao and Yantai also released on their Wechat platforms, the health-promoting ancient Chinese exercises-Baduanjin with detailed instructions. Beijing Sports University on Wednesday issued a video of Baduanjin via their Wechat account and had more than 100,000 comments.

Chinese Health Qigong Association released on Wechat a combination of Chinese therapeutic exercise; Qigong, which was closely related to Chinese martial arts in the past is free of restrictions like venues and equipments.

The State Council, China's cabinet, issued a new Healthy China guideline in July 2019, which promised support for fitness programs with Chinese characteristics, including Tai Chi and Qigong, which channels the body's inner energy to achieve physical and mental harmony.

Cui Yongsheng, staff with Health Qigong Management Center of State General Administration of Sport, noted that practicing Qigong will play a positive role in the fight against the epidemic.

"In the future, we will make more efforts to promote Qigong, so that more people can benefit from it," said Cui. Enditem

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Qigong as Medicine (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?55537-Qigong-as-Medicine)

[GeneChing]

Published: February 4, 2020 3:19 PM UTC
Bird Flu: China’s Ticking Time Bomb of Infectious Disease (https://www.ccn.com/bird-flu-chinas-ticking-time-bomb-of-infectious-disease/)
As the world grapples with the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, a new disease emerges: a highly-fatal bird-flu known as H5N1.
Author: William Ebbs @ebbs_william

https://www.ccn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/aSfynQv1F2w-768x512.jpg
As China's ascendancy to world power continues, infectious diseases could become the norm. | Image: REUTERS / Bobby Yip / File Photo

A highly pathogenic strain of bird flu, H5N1, has caused an outbreak in China’s Hunan province, near ground zero of the deadly coronavirus.

The disease doesn’t easily infect humans but when it does, it carries a staggering mortality rate of 60% according to the WHO.

China is a hotbed of emerging diseases. As the country rises to economic prominence, this puts the global economy at risk.

For most people who live in first world countries, infectious diseases are not a big concern. We get a cocktail of vaccines as children and go on to live relatively healthy lives. The biggest things we have to worry about are the common flu, the common cold, and occasionally, strep throat. As China rises to global prominence, in a world that has grown increasingly interconnected, things may be changing.

We could be reverting to a time when deadly diseases were a fact of life for everyone – in every country.

As the global coronavirus outbreak grows to infect over 20,000 with 425 fatalities, China finds itself in the cross hairs of a new, dangerous outbreak: bird flu, an infection that can kill poultry and humans alike. While the disease, known as H5N1, hasn’t infected any humans yet, it’s revealing a disturbing pattern with global implications. New diseases are emerging at an alarming rate, and this puts the whole world at risk.

The Coronavirus Is Still At Large

According to the latest data, Wuhan coronavirus has grown to infect 20,680 people – the majority in Hubei province, China. The disease has spread to 27 countries and 427 people have died.

In response, U.S authorities have taken drastic actions to limit contact with China. The State Department has issued a travel warning, airlines are canceling flights and American companies with Chinese operations are shuttering operations in the country.

https://www.ccn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Travel-warning-1.png
Source: twitter.com

Authorities should have the ability to get the coronavirus under control but what will they do when the next massive outbreak crops up? Can the global economy withstand these repeated shocks?

Another Outbreak: Bird Flu

According to China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the nation is experiencing an outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu called H5N1. The disease has already killed 4,500 chickens in Hunan province alone and the government has culled almost 18,000 chickens to prevent its spread.

According to the United States Geological Survey, there’s no need to panic about the term “highly pathogenic” because it refers to the virus’s ability to kill chickens, not humans.

They state the following:


The designation of low or highly pathogenic avian influenza refers to the potential for these viruses to kill chickens. The designation of “low pathogenic” or “highly pathogenic” does not refer to how infectious the viruses may be to humans, other mammals, or other species of birds.

The World Health Organization (WHO) paints a more disturbing picture of the disease.


Human cases of H5N1 avian influenza occur occasionally, but it is difficult to transmit the infection from person to person. When people do become infected, the mortality rate is about 60%.

They go on to elaborate

Influenza viruses constantly undergo genetic changes. It would be a cause for concern, should the H5N1 virus become more easily transmissible among humans.


A 60% mortality rate is staggering. To put this in perspective, note that coronavirus has a mortality rate of only 2.1% while SARS had a mortality rate of 9.6%. With a mortality rate of 60%, the bird flu is as deadly as Ebola. While it doesn’t currently spread well among humans, experts believe it can mutate into more virulent forms.

This is a ticking time bomb.

This article was edited by Sam Bourgi.

William Ebbs @ebbs_william
As a writer with over five years of experience, William Ebbs has contributed to CCN, The Motley Fool and other wonderful clients. He has earned millions of page views with his hard-hitting, opinionated work. He focuses on financial markets and business. When Will isn't writing, he enjoys strategy gaming, heated debates, and researching for his next article. William Ebbs is based in the United States of America and can be reached at qzh8778@outlook.com

THREADS
Bird Flu (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?40216-fearable-bird-flu)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Chinese New Year 2020: The Year Of The Coronavirus (https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/01/27/chinese-new-year-2020-year-coronavirus-14538)
By Alex Berezow, PhD and Phillip Orchard — January 27, 2020

The biggest political and economic effects of pandemics come, not from the disease itself, but instead from public panic and panicked government responses.

https://www.acsh.org/sites/default/files/styles/article-content/public/images/novel_coronavirus_cases_copy.jpeg?itok=lm_nhylO
Credit: Geopolitical Futures

Phillip Orchard is an Analyst with Geopolitical Futures. This article was authored in collaboration with ACSH's Dr. Alex Berezow and originally published at Geopolitical Futures.

Grappling with internal political pressures, a slowing economy, an open rebellion in Hong Kong and an unresolved trade war with the U.S., Chinese leaders may have already been in a less-than-celebratory mood heading into this year’s Lunar New Year festivities, which begin Jan. 25. The last thing the government needed was an outbreak of infectious disease, particularly when hundreds of millions of people are expected to travel throughout the country and beyond. Not only is that exactly what happened, but the disease – a new type of coronavirus – is unknown to science.

The severity of the virus (known as nCoV or the Wuhan Virus) is uncertain, nor is it clear if it will mutate and spread. The World Health Organization has yet to label it a global health emergency. But it’s certainly not yet contained. As of Thursday, there were more than 653 confirmed cases across seven countries, including the United States, and 18 people had died. And despite repeated assurances that it had matters under control, the government on Wednesday began locking down Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei, where the outbreak started, and three nearby cities. Doctors in Wuhan are reportedly expecting the number of infections to exceed 6,000, and local authorities are planning to build a special hospital in just six days to handle the epidemic.

There’s reason to believe the disease isn’t nearly as big a threat to public health as the one posed by the SARS outbreak in 2003, which killed nearly 800 people. Inevitably, though, the biggest political and economic effects of pandemics come from public panic and panicked government responses, not the disease itself. And given Beijing’s checkered track record for managing these sorts of emergencies over the past two decades, the Communist Party of China’s very legitimacy might just prove to be on the line.

How Bad Is It?

Coronaviruses come in a variety of strains. Some, such as the one that’s one of the many causes of the common cold, are relatively harmless. Others, such as those responsible for SARS and MERS, are potentially lethal. The dangerous coronaviruses seem to be linked to animals. SARS may have originated in bats and then spread to humans via civets, which are eaten as a delicacy in China. MERS also came from bats but spread to humans via camels, once again, perhaps through consumption of raw camel milk or meat. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that the new coronavirus is linked to animals that are eaten. Indeed, the reason China is always likely to be ground zero for the next influenza pandemic is that millions of people regularly come into contact with livestock. As Smithsonian Magazine wrote, “Many Chinese people, even city dwellers, insist that freshly slaughtered poultry is tastier and more healthful than refrigerated or frozen meat.”

Whatever the source, it’s now been confirmed to be capable of being transmitted from one human to another. Even so, the new coronavirus will have a limited direct impact on public health. SARS appeared in 2002, spread quickly around the globe in 2003, infected 8,096 people and killed 774. Then, with the exception of a handful of cases, it mostly disappeared. MERS has infected 2,442 people and killed 842. It still lingers throughout much of the world, particularly in the Arabian Peninsula. And though the reported case-fatality rates for both seem high – 9.6 percent for SARS and 34.5 percent for MERS – bear in mind that many mild cases probably went unreported. The real case-fatality rate is likely lower.

https://www.acsh.org/sites/default/files/novel_coronavirus_cases.jpg

The damage inflicted directly by the disease is therefore highly unlikely to have much long-term impact. But, particularly in China, the potential economic and political implications can’t be dismissed.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

Economic Impact

The problem with new outbreaks is that the public and public officials alike can’t exactly wait until all the facts become clear before taking preventative measures. And it doesn’t take much for fear of the unknown to grind public transportation systems to a halt, empty out shopping centers, movie theaters and restaurants, and, most important, persuade revelers to just stay put this year during the Lunar New Year rather than join the hundreds of millions of people who take part in the world’s largest annual human migration.

The costs add up quickly. The SARS outbreak in 2003, for example, dented Chinese gross domestic product by as much as $30 billion, reducing annual growth by between 1-2 percent. Globally, the bill for the pandemic ran up to as much as $100 billion.

Not all economic activity will be lost for good. Short-term hits to the sorts of sectors most exposed to the epidemic – mostly ones tied to consumer spending – often lead to supercharged recoveries. Chinese growth drivers where short-term disruption would have longer-lasting effects, such as manufacturing exports, industrial production and investment, stayed mostly intact in 2003. Indeed, while Chinese GDP growth dropped from 11.1 percent in the first quarter of 2003 to 9.1 percent in the second, it bounced all the way back to 11.6 percent a year later.

Still, even if nCoV proves more manageable than SARS, there are reasons to think the impact this year will be worse. For one, the SARS epidemic occurred on the heels of the dot com crash, when consumer spending across the region was already somewhat suppressed. (Incidentally, the resulting reduction of international travel may have helped contain the spread of the virus.) For another, locking down an urban area as large as Wuhan – a city at the center of one of China’s most important internal shipping routes along the Yangtze – will be immensely disruptive.

https://www.acsh.org/sites/default/files/China-Coronavirus.png

Moreover, a substantial portion of the lost holiday spending will never be recovered. This is a problem for Asia Pacific nations that, unlike in 2003, are now highly dependent on Chinese tourists. All told, Chinese people took an estimated 130 million more trips abroad in 2018 compared to 2003, and before the outbreak, the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute predicted that more than 7 million Chinese people would head overseas during the Lunar New Year this year. In Thailand, which has already reported four cases of nCoV, foreign tourism accounts for as much as a fifth of economic growth. Around 57 percent of visitors to Thailand last year were Chinese, including more than 2 million in January and February alone. Japan, which hosts the 2020 Summer Olympics, is estimating an economic loss of nearly $25 billion if the virus spreads as widely as SARS.

The biggest difference for China this time around is that the economy can’t as easily shrug off a major shock. In the early 2000s, annual GDP growth was still climbing well above 10 percent. Today, with a long structural slowdown well underway, Beijing is running up staggering debts just to keep growth from swan-diving below 6 percent. Add to this an unresolved trade war with its largest export customer – along with its scramble to implement critical but growth-sapping measures to stave off a financial meltdown before the next global slowdown strikes – and the epidemic starts to look like the sort of thing that could derail Beijing’s best-laid plans for avoiding an economic reckoning.

Political Impact

The outbreak will also complicate a broader, existential challenge weighing on the CPC: preserving its very legitimacy with the public. Delivering steady gains in prosperity is, of course, at the center of this challenge. But breakneck economic growth has become impossible to sustain – and was never going to be sufficient, anyway. The wealthier a country becomes, the more its citizenry demands quality of life that can’t be sourced solely from rising GDP, things like clean air and water, medical services, social safety nets and responsive, corruption-free governance. This is why President Xi Jinping has encouraged the party to shift its focus to “high-quality growth,” and it’s why he’s put environmental and emergency management initiatives at the center of his sweeping reform agenda. No amount of propaganda or censorship can convince his people that a smog-choked sky is actually blue or make devastation from an earthquake disappear.

The 2003 SARS outbreak laid bare the political risks of mismanaging a public health emergency. The government came under withering public criticism for covering up the scale of the epidemic (inadvertently worsening panic), impeding the World Health Organization’s investigation, and moving slowly to contain the outbreak. Bungled government responses to a number of other crises, such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, a high-speed rail accident in 2011, and a string of scandals involving tainted milk, tainted vaccines and fiery industrial accidents likewise prompted fierce public outcry. Beijing received higher marks in subsequent health scares, particularly the H171 bird flu outbreak in 2013. And this time around, initially at least, it received international praise for its improved transparency and swiftness in moving to contain the virus. Chinese authorities had isolated and published the nCoV genome by the second week in January, allowing foreign governments to develop critical testing procedures for the virus. Xi addressed the emergency personally last week, ordering “all-out prevention and control efforts.” China’s top political body responsible for law and order said officials who withheld information would be “nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity.”

But facts on the ground are once again giving the public reason to doubt its government’s candor and capability. Authorities have been claiming for more than a month that the virus is “preventable and controllable.” Now, they’re taking extreme measures like locking down the Wuhan metro area, home to some 19 million people, and making belated mea culpas. The government has also struggled to abandon its practice of reflexively cracking down on independent sources of information, despite commands to do so from on high. This has led to contradictory messaging and suppressed information that might have helped contain the virus. Chinese censors initially ordered local media outlets to stick to reprinting official reports, according to the Financial Times, effectively silencing independent reporting. And in early January, eight people were reportedly detained for posting information about the outbreak on social media. As also happened in the SARS outbreak, moreover, the government’s rigidly enforced top-down decision-making structure has once again worsened matters by incentivizing, for example, hospitals to under-report cases and local authorities to go forward with high-profile public gatherings deemed politically important.

For all the criticism they are receiving, authorities in Beijing are trying to address a problem that would bedevil any government. China is very large and very dense. As happened with SARS, panic would almost certainly do more damage than the disease itself. And Beijing may reasonably conclude that resorting to drastic measures may truly be in the public interest, even if they’re at odds with public sentiment. Perhaps more than any government, Beijing has given itself the power to surveil its citizenry, to shut down cities, to silence unfounded rumors on social media – all without permission. Such powers certainly could come in handy in this sort of crisis.

But by hoarding authority – by insisting on the right to micromanage the country – the CPC has raised the bar for what the public expects in response when the country is under attack, whether from foreign powers, economic forces or viral mutations. This is a problem when tight centralization has also, paradoxically, created a rigid top-down institutional culture that’s ill-suited to respond nimbly to public demand. When faced with a crisis, the machinery of the state is programmed to default to the tools it knows best. Censorship, disinformation and problem-solving by brute force are hardwired into the Chinese system, often making it at once flat-footed and prone to overcorrection. Yet, the more pressure intensifies, the more Beijing is doubling down on this model. And the stakes riding on its bet are getting higher.

Alex Berezow is Vice President of Scientific Communications at the American Council on Science and Health. Both he and Phillip Orchard are Analysts with Geopolitical Futures.

THREADS
2020 Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Derail Xi Jinping’s Dreams of a Chinese Century (https://time.com/5778994/coronavirus-china-country-future/)

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/coronavirus-china-country-future-xi-jinping.jpg?w=800&quality=85
President Xi Jinping said on Feb. 5 that China is “confident and capable” of handling the coronavirus Paolo Tre—A3/CONTRASTO/Redux

BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL
6:18 AM EST
It took eight hours for a doctor to see Wu Chen’s mother after she arrived at the hospital. Eight days later, she was dead.

The doctor was “99% sure” she had contracted the mysterious pneumonia-like illness sweeping China’s central city of Wuhan, Wu says, but he didn’t have the testing kit to prove it. And despite the 64-year-old’s fever and perilously low oxygen levels, there was no bed for her. Wu tried two more hospitals over the next week, but all were overrun. By Jan. 25, her mother was slumped on the tile floor of an emergency room, gasping for air, drifting in and out of consciousness. “We didn’t want to see my mom die on the floor, so we took her home,” says Wu, 30. “She passed the next day.”

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/TIM200217v1_China.Cover_.jpg?w=800&quality=85
Illustration by Edel Rodriguez for TIME

Because she did not want a spell in jail for dissent to compound her grief, Wu asked TIME to refer to her by a pseudonym–a reasonable request and one that carries with it a measure of what each virus death means to the People’s Republic of China. The novel coronavirus known as 2019-nCoV threatens more than the 24,000 people known to be infected as of Feb. 4 or the 492 it has killed. It also looms over the national rejuvenation project of President Xi Jinping and the rigid, top-down rule being tested by all that the disease brings with it, including distrust in a population the government pledged to keep safe. Since China belatedly acknowledged the severity of the outbreak, every organ of the Chinese state has been harnessed to enforce an unprecedented quarantine on 50 million people across 15 cities. China’s government has unleashed a 1 billion yuan ($142 million) war chest to fight the outbreak amid a frenzy of construction work that, among other feats, erected a 1,000-bed hospital in just 10 days. That there was no cot for Wu’s mother may be understandable, given the time it took to comprehend the disease and how quickly it spread. But what to make of a government that cannot abide the grief of a daughter who took her ailing mother home rather than see her die on a hospital floor?

Transparency is essential to public health. But in China, doctors who reported the reality of the outbreak have been arrested for “spreading rumors.” Officials were pictured pocketing supplies meant for frontline medical staff, who were reduced to cutting up office supplies for makeshift surgical masks. Meanwhile, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has already started leveraging the crisis for propaganda by lionizing cadres leading containment efforts. “No crisis is too deadly that they can’t take a time-out to promote the party through manipulation of it,” says Scott W. Harold, an East Asia expert at the U.S. policy think tank Rand Corp.

In the fall of 2017, Xi took the podium at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to claim that China’s version of one-party autocracy offered an option for “countries that want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.” Western democracy was messy and flawed, the argument went. In the years since that speech, China’s hubris has grown, nurtured by the tumultuous U.S. presidency of Donald Trump and the disintegration of the multilateral world order. But the coronavirus crisis threatens to rattle China’s authoritarian apparatus. “A major test of China’s system and capacity for governance” senior party chiefs called it on Feb. 3.

The 2019-nCoV outbreak is infecting some 2,000 people daily in China and has spread to at least 25 countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a “global health emergency.” And the fear is not limited to health. Global commerce now hinges on China’s $14.55 trillion economy, which in turn is governed by an opaque, authoritarian regime tightly coalesced around one man. Xi, burnished by a resurgent cult of personality, has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. He has leveraged Beijing’s economic clout to forward ambitions at home and abroad but also has struggled as no previous leader. “Since Xi came to power, problem after problem have occurred on his watch that he seems unable to effectively manage,” says Jude Blanchette, a China analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. These include popular unrest in semiautonomous Hong Kong, a disruptive trade war with the U.S. and now an unfolding health crisis.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/coronavirus-china-country-future-wuhan.jpg?w=800&quality=85
An empty highway in Wuhan, the city of 11 million where the outbreak began in a market, on Feb. 3 Getty Images

For decades, the sales pitch for China’s single-party rule was the superior performance of its political system when faced with both short-term crises and long-term challenges. It built thousands of miles of high-speed rail and helped drag hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. By 2022, McKinsey predicts 550 million Chinese will be able to call themselves middle class–about 1.5 times the current U.S. population. Still, that benevolent narrative has deteriorated under Xi. Now the coronavirus threatens to undermine further his mission to have China stake out the next century as America did the last.

In 2019, China overtook Soviet Russia as history’s most enduring communist state. The seven-decade longevity of the CCP can be attributed in no small part to abandoning great chunks of Marxist-Leninism; instead of centralized planning and top-down targets, China embraced markets and devolved considerable power to its regions and cities. Local party bosses were encouraged to make bold decisions to boost the local economy, like setting up heavily subsidized means of production.

As a result, China boomed but also became a network of little fiefdoms and power centers, where local bosses vied for influence and corruption flourished. Xi came into power in 2012 convinced rampant graft posed an existential threat to the party. To him, only an ideological renaissance coupled with an anticorruption crusade could save China from going the way of the Soviet Union.

A bland apparatchik by reputation, Xi climbed the career ladder as a provincial bureaucrat, eventually emerging as a compromise candidate for the post of China’s top leader. His lack of a power base led party elders to believe he would remain malleable and easy to control. Global leaders hoped he might push through long-awaited economic and social reforms.

They were wrong. Soon after taking power, Xi announced his “China Dream” of a grand national rejuvenation, later speaking about returning China to “center stage of the world.” Far from embracing Western-style market reforms, Xi calcified state control over the economy and stocked its bureaucracy with flunkies and yes-men. Today party zealotry permeates all of Chinese society. The head of China’s national Film Bureau has ordered movies “must have a clear ideological bottom line and cannot challenge the political system.” China’s journalists have been instructed to follow “Marxist news values.” Artists can only produce works that “serve the people and socialism.” One advertisement for sperm donors required applicants ages 20 to 45 with “excellent ideological qualities” who “love the fatherland,” and are “loyal” to the party’s “mission.” Mao may have had his Little Red Book, but Xi has a personalized app distributed to all 90 million CCP members, with a directory of his speeches and quizzes on his life and political thought.

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/coronavirus-china-country-future-bus.jpg?w=800&quality=85
Evacuees from Wuhan, mostly German nationals, leave Frankfurt’s main airport on Feb. 1 Thomas Lohnes—AFP/Getty Images

His mission is to forge a singular Chinese identity that restores the nation’s ethnic Han majority to a golden age, on the basis of fealty to his party. “Xi Jinping is fundamentally a Han chauvinist with a ‘historic mission’ to make China, Han China, great again,” says Professor Steve Tsang, director of SOAS China Institute at the University of London.

And he’s willing to go to extreme lengths to do it. In China’s restive Xinjiang province, a systematic campaign of forced internment has transformed the area into a dusty expanse spotted with camps where more than 1 million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities are held extrajudicially, according to the U.N. What began as a campaign to battle radical Islam in the region has mutated into an enormous project of ideological re-education. On the routes where Silk Road caravans once traveled, a sophisticated surveillance apparatus shrouds the wider populace in an AI-powered panopticon, where every action is watched, recorded and judged by algorithm.

Those who fall foul of it are sent to learn the error of their ways. Nurlan Kokeubai, 56, never found out the charges against him. But from August 2017 to April 2018, he was detained in a re-education camp close to the city of Ili, in Xinjiang province. For four hours each morning, Kokeubai says he and his fellow inmates were forced to watch videos of Xi carousing with dignitaries and overseeing military exercises. They were also ordered to memorize Xi’s eponymous “political thought” and documents from the 19th CCP Conference, where Xi removed presidential term limits to enable himself to rule for life. Those that resisted were beaten with sticks or strapped to a metal chair for interrogation. “They weren’t testing our knowledge or loyalty,” Kokeubai told TIME in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to which he has since fled. “They were just filling us with this propaganda.”

President Trump has kept mum on the Xinjiang camps as he negotiated a provisional agreement in the trade war. But when the coronavirus broke, his Administration did not hold back. “I don’t want to talk about a victory lap over a very unfortunate, very malignant disease,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a TV interview on Jan. 30. “The fact is, it does give business yet another thing to consider … I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”

Forty years after Beijing and Washington normalized relations, the two are diverging rapidly. Under Trump, the U.S. has been disentangling its firms and, yes, supply chains from China’s through taxes, tariffs and punitive investment curbs. Western investors are also cowed by ideological hurdles and looking elsewhere, given China’s market is now sophisticated, saturated and tricky to exploit. Washington has banned Huawei, the world’s biggest telecoms equipment manufacturer, from its key infrastructure and urged allies to do the same. In U.S. universities, Chinese researchers have been purged as academia, wary of espionage, lurches into Sinophobic McCarthyism. The patient optimism that colored the George W. Bush and Obama administrations has largely evaporated.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/coronavirus-china-country-future-travel.jpg?w=800&quality=85
Travelers in the arrivals halls at New York City-area airports in early February Thomas Prior for TIME

But it’s a mistake to ignore Xi’s own agency in this process. “[Last year] was a landmark in the structural shift of how the United States views its relationship with China,” says Tsang. “But the decoupling wasn’t started by Donald Trump. It was originally prepared by Xi Jinping himself.” Every one of Xi’s signature economic policies has sought to reduce China’s reliance on the U.S. and grow its own empire. His $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative builds connectivity across Eurasia and Africa. The “Made in China 2025” campaign aims to propel China to the forefront of strategic industries currently dominated by Silicon Valley, such as semiconductors, aerospace, AI and robotics. The Chinese government has even ordered all state departments to remove foreign-made computer equipment within three years.

Xi does not stand alone, though he is surrounded by clients rather than friends. China is now more closely aligned with Russia than at any period since Mao and Nikita Khrushchev fell out in 1956. The Belt and Road Initiative is drawing nations across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East into Beijing’s orbit (and often into its debt). The U.S. may have asked 61 countries to shun Huawei, but only three–Japan, Australia, New Zealand–have acquiesced. The next decade won’t be defined by an iron curtain but two blocs vying for influence within every nation that isn’t firmly in the liberal democratic or autocratic camp. And, for one side, the coronavirus is being sized up as an opportunity. Asked whether import levies on China should be dialed down given the crisis, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro demurred. “Let’s remember why the tariffs are in place,” he said.

Confronting an outbreak requires more than just an ability to throw up hospitals in a few days; it necessitates trust. And from the beginning, China’s public response to the virus has raised questions. Even multinational institutions like WHO are feeling this as the coronavirus worsens. The organization was unable to rule on the severity of 2019-nCoV following its first meeting on Jan. 22, apparently because of resistance from Beijing. (WHO referred to “divergent views.”) Notably, despite WHO’s insisting that travel bans to China would not be necessary, a dozen nations introduced stringent restrictions, including the U.S., Australia and North Korea. If you believe China’s official figures, 2019-nCoV has a fatality rate of just 2%–about the same as regular influenza and a far cry from the 50% of Ebola or the 10% of SARS. Why then, observers might well ask, has China placed entire cities in lockdown, quarantined tens of millions and mobilized troops?

Here is the downside of Xi’s system of top-down control; nobody acted until they got word from the top, and then everyone wildly overreacted in order to satisfy the leader. This was evident in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, where the outbreak began, and the official response lurched from cover-up to overreaction only after Xi addressed the crisis. “The full CCP apparatus didn’t kick into gear to address the coronavirus until Xi had weighed in on the matter,” says Blanchette. Notably, the President himself has kept a low profile since the outbreak began and was not seen in public for eight days after the Lunar New Year.

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/coronavirus-china-country-future-spray.jpg?w=800&quality=85
A medical worker disinfects a hotel converted into a quarantine zone in Wuhan, on Feb. 3 AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Now, throughout China, fear is mixing with inchoate rage. In Hubei province, people from Wuhan are ostracized. But in other provinces, people from anywhere in Hubei are shunned. Videos circulating on social media show vigilantes tooling up to protect their villages. In one video, a man in a dark jacket and wide-brimmed hat guards a bridge with a pistol. In another, a man in an orange puffer jacket sits on a table at the entrance to his village, brandishing an enormous sword. All have signs nearby with a common theme: outsiders cannot pass.

Even in Beijing, apartment building guards are checking the IDs of everyone who enters and banning those from Hubei–rent-paying tenants included. Videos emerge of Hubei residents scuffling with gas station staff who refuse them service. Sometimes mass brawls erupt when a Hubei resident tries to force himself past an improvised roadblock. “Don’t blame us for being rude if you are from Wuhan and you don’t self-quarantine,” wrote one poster on China’s Twitter-like microblog Weibo. “You should just shoot them because they are killing us!” wrote another.

The ideological revival behind Xi’s “China Dream” may have rendered the political system more decisive but also more prone to error. Under Mao, local officials were also hesitant to act until they had clear signals from the top. Rather than assess issues through a purely governance lens, China’s bureaucracy is forced to balance both technocratic and political concerns. Meanwhile nativist vigilantism spreads almost as fast as the virus.

Some questions–whether the virus becomes a pandemic (or reaches epidemic levels on two continents), how many people it infects and how many lives it takes–remain shrouded in uncertainty. But the crisis has already demonstrated that the centralization of political power under Xi has made Chinese society brittle. The question now is what it will endure before it begins to crack.

Wu’s mother was cremated the evening she died. A battered container truck arrived at 9 p.m. and packed her body in with countless others. Instead of 2019-nCoV, her death certificate simply reads “viral pneumonia.” Wu signed a permission slip for the cremation but was told her mother’s ashes won’t be released until the crisis has abated. “They say that there are more than 300 dead now,” says Wu, “but I think there are many more.” Distrust, it turns out, is infectious too.

–With reporting by AMY GUNIA/ HONG KONG

This appears in the February 17, 2020 issue of TIME.

I've been posting every weekday on this thread because coronavirus is the top of many of my newsfeeds given that I monitor news from China assiduosly. There are several threads here that I feed about the rise of China, ie. Chollywood rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising), Chinese Theme Parks (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?62642-Chinese-Theme-Parks), Made in China (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?66168-Made-in-China) etc. The advancement of China as the world's second most influential nation has a direct relationship on Chinese martial arts. Our magazine (http://www.martialartsmart.com/19341.html), which supports this forum here through the promotion of our sponsor MartialArtSmart (https://www.martialartsmart.com/), are under the Tiger Claw (https://www.tigerclaw.com/home.php) umbrella. Tiger Claw is one of the largest wholesale distributors of martial arts gear for all styles in the nation. So much of inventory, whether for Chinese, Japanese or Korean styles, is made in China. Now China shuts down during Chinese New Year (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat) for about two weeks. Tiger Claw, which also supplies some of MartialArtSmart, knows this and orders in advance in anticipation of the holiday break because the factories shut down and everyone goes back to their hometown. This year, with coronavirus, the break has been extended and travel has been restricted, so we don't know exactly when our factories will start production again. I imagine most of the martial arts supply companies are looking at the same situation because we know all the manufacturers (there really aren't that many) so we know that most of the competition uses PRC factories too. Depending how this plays out, there may be delays in the supply chain soon, and what with the rising prices we experienced with the trade war (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71299-Trade-War) already having some impact on driving up prices, this makes it hard on the small school owners, the grassroots of the martial community. Coronavirus is a worldwide problem, but we - the martial community - are on the front lines economically. The U.S. has been divisive when it comes to China, and while some of that is warrented in areas like copyright infringement (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57980-Chinese-Counterfeits-Fakes-amp-Knock-Offs) (and many others) the martial arts world is a global community and we have to stand united if we are to preserve our treasured legacy.

[GeneChing]

Wuhan hospital announces death of whistleblower doctor after confusion in state media (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/li-wenliang-coronavirus-whistleblower-doctor-dies-intl/index.html)
By Yong Xiong, Hande Atay Alam and Nectar Gan, CNN
Updated 4:21 PM ET, Thu February 6, 2020

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200203152718-wuhan-coronavirus-doctor-bed-exlarge-169.jpg
An undated photograph shows Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang on oxygen support in hospital after contracting the coronavirus.

This story has been updated to reflect the latest statement from Wuhan Central Hospital, after confusion in state media reports.

Beijing (CNN)Li Wenliang, the Chinese whistleblower doctor who warned the public of a potential "SARS-like" disease in December 2019, has died, according to Wuhan Central Hospital. The confirmation follows a series of conflicting statements about his condition from the hospital and Chinese state media outlets.
Li died of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan in the early hours of Friday morning (local time).
"Our hospital's ophthalmologist Li Wenliang was unfortunately infected with coronavirus during his work in the fight against the coronavirus epidemic," the latest hospital statement read.
"He died at 2:58 am on Feb 7 after attempts to resuscitate were unsuccessful."
Earlier on Thursday night, several state media outlets had reported Li's death, following which Chinese social media erupted in profound grief and anger.
Hours of confusion followed, with Wuhan Central Hospital releasing a statement saying Li was still alive and in critical condition, adding that they were "making attempts to resuscitate him."
State media subsequently deleted their previous tweets.
The hospital later confirmed his death.

Wuhan's whistleblower

Li had raised the alarm about the virus that ultimately took his life.
In December, he posted in his medical school alumni group on the Chinese messaging app WeChat that seven patients from a local seafood market had been diagnosed with a SARS-like illness and were quarantined in his hospital in Wuhan.
Soon after he posted the message, Li was accused of rumor-mongering by the Wuhan police.
He was one of several medics targeted by police for trying to blow the whistle on the deadly virus in the early weeks of the outbreak, which has sickened more than 28,000 people and killed more than 560. He later contracted the virus himself.
Li was hospitalized on January 12 and tested positive for the coronavirus on February 1.

Confusion over his condition

The Global Times announced Li had died in a tweet at around 10:40 p.m. local time Thursday, linking to a report that cited friends and doctors at Wuhan Central Hospital.
It deleted the post several hours later. Other Chinese media outlets also deleted their reports of his death, without explanation. The World Health Organization released a message of condolence following the initial reports that Li was dead but later updated their statement to say they did not have any information about the doctor's status.
Wuhan Central Hospital issued a new statement confirming his death later that day.
The death toll and number of people infected by the Wuhan coronavirus continues to grow, with no signs of slowing despite severe quarantine and population control methods put in place in central China.
The number of confirmed cases globally stood at 28,275 as of Thursday, with more than 28,000 of those in China. The number of cases in China grew by 3,694, or 15%, on the previous day. There have been 565 deaths so far, all but two of which were in China, with one in the Philippines and one in Hong Kong.

CNN's Amy Woodyatt contributed to this story. I saw news of his death earlier and thought about posting it here but there's just so much news and I already post enough here.

[GeneChing]

The Market’s Reaction to Coronavirus Is ‘Ludicrous,’ Economist Says. Here’s Why. (https://www.barrons.com/articles/coronavirus-could-push-global-economy-into-recession-why-one-economist-calls-market-complacency-ludicrous-51581081300)
By Reshma Kapadia
Feb. 7, 2020 8:15 am ET

https://asset.barrons.com/public/resources/images/ON-DL387_corona_TOP_20200205051209.jpg
China's struggle to contain the deadly coronavirus is deepening concerns about the impact on the world's number-two economy. (Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images

The world’s second largest economy has ground to a virtual halt as coronavirus cases continue to rise. Still, stock markets don’t seem too bothered.

That complacency may be misplaced, especially as the virus hits when both the Chinese and global economies were already fragile, Stephen Roach, former chief economist and chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, says.

The base case for most investors is that China will see a V-shaped recovery if the deadly virus, which has sickened more than 28,000 people globally, shows some indications of containment in the next two weeks. Most analysts and money managers are using the SARS outbreak in 2003 as a template, fueling expectations of a snapback recovery after a painful first quarter.

Barron’s talked with Roach, who is now a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, about how the situation is meaningfully different, why the virus could push the global economy to the brink of recession, and why the market reaction is “ludicrous.”

Barron’s: You were in China when SARS hit. What’s different this time around?

Stephen Roach: The markets have looked at SARS, which was a one quarter shot and then a strong V-shaped recovery. But keep in mind the economy was growing at 10% to 11%, so it was much easier to pull off. Today, the economy is much weaker. Pre-virus it had slowed to 6%. The downside is considerably further in the current environment.

What impact will this have on the global economy?

The IMF estimated global economic growth at 2.9%. That’s only 0.4% above the threshold we would associate with a global downturn. We were weak going into this shock and it is going to take us right to the threshold where we technically may be operating at a global recession pace in the first half. Policy makers have no ammo to address cyclical downward pressures, if in fact the coronavirus pushes us through that threshold.

Markets don’t seem to have gotten the message. The S&P 500 is up 3.6% so far this year and returned to near highs.

This is a market where if you declared it was World War III, they would rally on reconstruction. It’s pretty ludicrous the optimism that is built in.

But what about the stimulus measures China has unveiled?

Right now, the economy is at a full stop. When you are doing quarantines and restrictions on intercity travel and closing plants and even talking about delaying the all-important meetings of the National People’s Congress in early March, what is monetary stimulus going to do to counteract that? Probably nothing. It puts a floor on market turbulence. But it does virtually nothing to arrest the downside of a major public health crisis and near catastrophic reduction in Chinese economic. It’s not like the growth rate is slowing from 6% to 5.5%. Nothing is going on. We have never seen a deceleration from an already weak 6% rate.

So how do you see this playing out?

I’m hopeful they will solve the public health issue. I think possibly it will take longer [than expected] but the economic machine is going to take considerably longer to restart than the virus containment trajectories. Growth will be amazingly weak in the first quarter, spill over into the second quarter—though not as weak. We can hope that it gets a SARS-like rebound but there will be a two-quarter shortfall.

What does that mean for corporate earnings?

Companies’ supply chains are clogged. We have this idea supply chains are perfectly malleable and can resource from one to another. That’s ludicrous. These are long tail events that will take months to resolve. If you can look to some sort of containment on the health side, the companies will have better second-halves.

What will be the lasting consumer and behavioral impact of the virus?

China is leading the world in terms of e-commerce. Its share of retail sales is more than double the U.S. and growing rapidly. That trend will remain strong and get more reinforced. [The virus] will have lasting impact on individual confidence in the government’s ability to manage the public health system. They have started from ground zero. They focused on getting as large a portion of population enrolled in public health but lagged in benefits paid out and quality of public health care.

What happens to the rest of Asia?

When China sneezes, to say the rest of the region catches a cold is an understatement. No one is spared from China-related disruption, either on the production or demand side. And then you add in travel.

The virus makes it that much harder for China to meet its phase one trade commitments. China cut tariffs on the U.S. in half. Was that a goodwill gesture?

They would never have made them [the commitments] anyway. The tariff cut was a goodwill gesture but also long overdue. In phase one, the U.S. cut in half tariffs it had put in place in September so this was a response to that. There is a clause in phase one that says in the event of a natural disaster, there is a loophole.

Thanks, Stephen.

Write to Reshma Kapadia at reshma.kapadia@barrons.com

This is what I was ranting about above (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1317668#post1317668), only on a much larger scale.

[GeneChing]

The coronavirus exposes the history of racism and “cleanliness” (https://www.vox.com/2020/2/7/21126758/coronavirus-xenophobia-racism-china-asians)
While the epidemic may be new, xenophobia has been intertwined with public health discourse for a very long time.
By Nylah Burton Feb 7, 2020, 7:40am EST

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kgLlBo_udCCyHlipwMath4k_utM=/0x0:4000x2666/920x613/filters:focal(2007x379:2647x1019):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66271032/GettyImages_1203626910.0.jpg
A man riding the subway in Brooklyn, New York, wears a medical face mask on February 2, 2020. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

The coronavirus outbreak has created global anxiety since the first cases were reported in Wuhan, China, late last year. So far, over 30,000 illnesses and 635 deaths have been reported in mainland China, with cases in the double digits found throughout Asia, parts of Europe, Australia, and beyond; in the US, 12 people have been found to have the pneumonia-like virus. In response, Chinese cities have been quarantined, borders have been sealed, and travel has been banned. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the coronavirus an international public health emergency.

While panic about a sudden, deadly virus is to be expected, some fears — especially in North America and the West — have been based on something other than health. The panic has exposed a deep-seated xenophobia, and with it, a symptom of its own has surfaced: hostility toward East Asian people.

Washington Post reporter John Pomfret writes, “At a middle school a few blocks from my house, a rumor circulated among the children that all Asian kids have the coronavirus and should be quarantined.” People in Los Angeles and Toronto have also experienced instances of xenophobic harassment, from racist comments made by TSA agents to verbal street harassment. In the UK, Chinese restaurants say they are struggling for business because of widespread misconceptions about the “cleanliness” of their food. Meanwhile, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has touted the crisis in China as an opportunity to increase jobs in America.

While some efforts to contain the virus seem fairly practical — like the suspension of flights to mainland China — others seem to be unfairly targeting Asian people. Australia is quarantining people who’ve recently been to China’s Hubei province, many of whom are of Asian descent, on an offshore island.

Adding to the panic are conspiracy theories. Under the pseudonym Tyler Durden, the founder of a right-wing financial blog called ZeroHedge posted an article, “Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?” sharing the name and personal information of a Chinese doctor and researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, accusing him of collaborating with the Chinese government to develop engineered bioweapons.

The severity of this wave of xenophobia has even been minimized by respected educational institutions. In a now-deleted Instagram post, University of California Berkeley Health Services tried to comfort students and faculty who might be “experiencing” xenophobic thoughts and reactions, by saying bigotry and bias are “normal” and “common” during the coronavirus outbreak.


Adrienne Shih
✔
@adrienneshih
Confused and honestly very angry about this Instagram post from an official @UCBerkeley Instagram account.

When is xenophobia ever a “normal reaction”?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPjrc1YXsBgqTyF?format=jpg&name=medium
3,333
12:53 PM - Jan 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,081 people are talking about this
The fact that some believe racist stereotyping is “normal” shows that the coronavirus isn’t creating xenophobia out of nowhere. It is uncovering what has long been baked into Western culture.

“Misinformation, coupled with the fear that it provokes, can bring existing xenophobia to light,” said Edith Bracho-Sanchez, assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, who has worked on health issues involving international borders. “As human beings, we are afraid of the things we don’t know, but our response should be to educate ourselves, not to further spread and give oxygen to fears and misunderstandings.”

continued next post

[GeneChing]

Xenophobia and the racist stereotypes of “dirtiness”

News of the coronavirus is amplifying a specific form of bigotry, called sinophobia — hostility against China, its people, people of Chinese descent, or Chinese culture. In America, this can even be found in our policy. For example, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned the immigration of Chinese laborers to the US for 10 years. The purpose of the act was to “placate worker demands and assuage prevalent concerns about maintaining white ‘racial purity.’” President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has been restricting immigration for Chinese students and scholars since 2018.

But xenophobia has been intertwined with public health discourse for a very long time, against many different groups, Merlin Chowkwanyun, historian and assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told Vox. “Historically, in both popular and scientific discourse, contagious disease has often been linked, in a blanket way, to population groups thought to be ‘outsiders,’” he said.

Associations between germs and immigrants, for example, was a critical part of the early 20th-century xenophobia that led to immigration restriction in New York City in the 1920s, Chowkwanyun said. “City authorities justified racial segregation by drawing supposed links between germs and Mexican, Chinese, and African American people.” He points out that similar narratives were portrayed against Haitian immigrants in the early days of the HIV epidemic in America, as they were the only group singled out as “high risk” because of their nationality.

While othering often centers the white experience as “superior” and “pure,” fears of “dirtiness” also extend to conflicts outside of Western colonization. In the Dominican Republic, where there is a long and incredibly bloody history of hatred toward Haitians, Bracho-Sanchez says that “many spent more energy asking that Haitians be banned and borders be closed than they spent ensuring their vaccines were up to date” when there was a diphtheria outbreak from 2014-2017.

We see that dynamic here in the US, with the difference in how people react to the coronavirus compared to how they react to the flu. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the US alone the flu has had a devastating impact — leading to at least 19 million illnesses, 180,000 hospitalizations, and 10,000 deaths this season. Cases of measles are also being reported more and more. But there seems to be greater urgency and panic to buy masks and emergency supplies to avoid the coronavirus than there is with getting a flu shot.

In trying to explain part of this dynamic, Chowkwanyun says, “In general, when there is a zeitgeist of racial backlash and xenophobia, it drips down into medical discourse. Given the tensions between the [US] and China now, it’s not surprising to see that happening with coronavirus.”

Refocusing attention on the victims of the virus

There’s also the question of whether focusing solely on the many bigoted Western reactions to the coronavirus is misguided. Mark, an Asian American writer and photographer born in the Philippines to a mother whose parents immigrated there from China, has been concerned about the level of attention given to Western racists. “At a time when thousands of Asian lives and livelihoods across the region are threatened by Chinese institutional failures, it’s racist to try to make it about what white people are doing in Western countries,” Mark, who asked to be identified by his first name, said.

Racism is taking place not only in the West and between non-White countries, he said, but within China itself. “People from Wuhan and its environs have been ostracized throughout the rest of China, let alone the region,” he said.

Bracho-Sanchez says that although the painful experiences many Asian Americans and Asian immigrants have faced must be discussed and confronted, when we do so at the expense of reporting on the crisis that’s happening on the ground we “run the risk of losing perspective on who the real victims [of the coronavirus] are.”

To help address xenophobia and direct people toward ways to help those directly impacted, Bracho-Sanchez says the media should “stick to the facts and try to include context when able.” Instead of creating more panic and chaos, people must begin supporting those directly impacted and those most at risk. “People in countries without the infrastructure to contain this virus and to give the sick adequate and timely medical care are truly the ones who should be most concerned,” she said. “And like with any viral infection, those with pre-existing medical conditions, the very young, and [those who contracted it] early are most likely to suffer complications.”

In Wuhan and other places in China, the situation is dire. As Chinese authorities scramble to build new hospitals, the lack of available beds means many people with the coronavirus are being denied treatment at hospitals. In an interview Tuesday with state broadcaster China Central Television, Jiang Rongmeng, a member of the Chinese National Health Commission’s team studying the virus, said that “the medical resources in Wuhan, especially the ICU team, are not enough to deal with this severe treatment.”

One thing that people can do to help is donate to organizations on the ground that are providing shelter, masks, and medical supplies. They can also appeal to their governments to provide the $675 million in support that the WHO is asking for “in support of nations with weak health care systems.” And when bystanders see xenophobic incidents occurring around them, Bracho-Sanchez says, they should “share their knowledge” to confront the rising spread of misinformation and bigotry.

As I mentioned above:

I had a racist slur hurled at me by some drunk dude last weekend. That hasn't happened to me in years. :mad:

[GeneChing]

The US coronavirus travel ban could backfire. Here's how (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-travel-ban/index.html)
By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
Updated 7:37 AM ET, Fri February 7, 2020

(CNN)Experts say travel restrictions the Trump administration put in place to stop the novel coronavirus from spreading could have unintended consequences that undermine that effort.
It's been days since the US restrictions went into effect, blocking foreign nationals who've visited China in the past two weeks from coming to the US.
Details about the US travel ban's impact are still emerging. But some are already urging the US to reconsider.
"All of the evidence we have indicates that travel restrictions and quarantines directed at individual countries are unlikely to keep the virus out of our borders," Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week. "These measures may exacerbate the epidemic's social and economic tolls. And can make us less safe."
The director-general of the World Health Organization also weighed in this week, calling on countries not to impose travel restrictions.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200204140319-01-coronavirus-us-citizens-0130-exlarge-169.jpg
Passengers board buses after arriving January 29 on an airplane carrying U.S. citizens being evacuated from Wuhan, China, at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, Calif. Under new restrictions, US citizens returning to the United States who have been in China's Hubei province in the two weeks before their return will be subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine.

US officials have defended the government's response, saying they're taking important steps to prepare for the virus and slow its spread -- and that the timing of their efforts is key.
"Hopefully, because of improved global capacity and surveillance and lab capacity, it was caught early, before it spread around the world, and we had this window of time in which they could intervene to slow it down," said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
But several experts who spoke with CNN say there are a number of ways travel bans can backfire when authorities are trying to stop an outbreak. Here's a look at some of them:

Individuals may be more likely to lie

Scientists are still studying how the new coronavirus is transmitted. According to the CDC, it mainly spreads from person to person "via respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes," like the flu.
With this virus, like others that have come before it, one key tool investigators have as they try to treat it and stop it from spreading is the information individuals share about their symptoms and behavior. And a travel ban can get in the way of that, public health experts say.
"On a personal level, it discourages people from coming forward, from being transparent. You're more likely to have people try and go about travel in less direct ways, which would then totally negate the purpose of that," says Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist in Arizona and global health security researcher at George Mason University. "You're forcing people into situations that could more actively promote disease transmission."

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200131110846-05-coronavirus-0130-beijing-airport-exlarge-169.jpg
A man wears a protective mask and goggles as he lines up to check in to a flight at Beijing Capital Airport on January 30.

Governments might also hold back on the truth

The same can be said for how governments could respond once they see travel bans in place, says Dr. Saad B. Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
"A lot of this is dependent on voluntary reporting," Omer says.
And governments might be hesitant to share information about novel coronavirus cases in their countries if they feel they'll be punished for doing so.
"If you're the prime minister of a small- to medium-sized economy, there would be a disincentive for you," Omer says. "It becomes a disincentive for international solidarity and collaboration."

There can be major economic consequences

One reason countries may be wary of sharing information: the economic consequences of a travel ban can be devastating.
"It has massive economic implications," Popescu says.
Eric Carter, an associate professor of geography and global health at Macalaster College who studies the politics of public health, points to what happened in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak as an example.
"First of all, it made it harder to some degree for health personnel to get into the country, to actually do the work they needed to do," he says. "Also, it just so severely damaged the economies of those western African countries that were affected by Ebola, because they were cut off from the rest of the world. Other countries weren't even buying what they produced. That ended up having really dramatic effects."
The latest US restrictions could stop hundreds of thousands of people from visiting the United States each month and "come with huge economic and societal impacts," says Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
"The way it's written, it seems like it's going to be impossible for Chinese nationals to be granted visas," she told CNN. "This is a massive flow that this ban is restricting with very little evidence that it's actually going to benefit the United States."

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200206163201-03-coronavirus-us-travel-ban-exlarge-169.jpg
Security personnel check the temperature of passengers arriving at the Shanghai Pudong International Airport on February 4.

'Fear and stigma' can result

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned this week that travel bans might do more harm than good.
"Such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit," he said Tuesday in Geneva. "Where such measures have been implemented, we urge that they are short in duration, proportionate to the public health risks, and are reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves."
Carter told CNN the past provides plenty of examples of travel restrictions stigmatizing countries and ethnicities. The response to the novel coronavirus, including recent travel restrictions, has happened more quickly than in past epidemics -- and from a public health standpoint, that could be a good thing, he says. But he notes there are also other questions to consider.
"Historically a lot of these border security measures have used public health as a pretext for discrimination. It's very easy to see how a public health rationale would be used to limit immigration for whatever reason," he says. "And I'm not saying that that's actually occurring, but it well could in this particular political climate, not just in the US, but internationally."
CNN's Holly Yan and Nada Bashir contributed to this report. "Fear and stigma' has already resulted.

I remember when travelling during SARS (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/index.php?p=article&article=468). There were these janky temperature reading devices at some airports. They had this outline of the human body and looked more like a life-size Operation! game than a functioning scientific instrument. You had to stand in front of them before boarding, however when I left, the one at my gate wasn't on. Maybe it didn't work. It was more like a token device to assuage fears. Not much you can do for stigma though.

[GeneChing]

WORLD NEWS FEBRUARY 7, 2020 / 12:45 AM / UPDATED AN HOUR AGO
Scientists question work suggesting pangolin coronavirus link (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pangolins/china-scientists-identify-pangolin-as-possible-coronavirus-host-idUSKBN2010XA)
Kate Kelland, Tom Daly
3 MIN READ

LONDON/BEIJING (Reuters) - Independent scientists questioned research on Friday that suggested that the outbreak of coronavirus disease spreading from China might have passed from bats to humans through the illegal traffic of pangolins.

https://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20200207&t=2&i=1487138421&w=1200&r=LYNXMPEG160Q0
FILE PHOTO: A man holds a pangolin at a wild animal rescue center in Cuc Phuong, outside Hanoi, Vietnam September 12, 2016. REUTERS/Kham
South China Agricultural University, which said it had led the research, said on its website that the “discovery will be of great significance for the prevention and control of the origin (of the new virus)”.

China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that the genome sequence of the novel coronavirus strain separated from pangolins in the study was 99% identical to that from infected people. It said the research had found pangolins - the world’s only scaly mammals - to be “the most likely intermediate host.”

But James Wood, head of the veterinary medicine department at Britain’s University of Cambridge, said the research was far from robust.

“The evidence for the potential involvement of pangolins in the outbreak has not been published, other than by a university press release. This is not scientific evidence,” he said.

“Simply reporting detection of viral RNA with sequence similarity of more than 99% is not sufficient. Could these results have been caused by contamination from a highly infected environment?”

Pangolins are one of Asia’s most trafficked mammals, despite laws banning the trade, because their meat is considered a delicacy in countries such as China and their scales are used in traditional medicine.

The outbreak of disease caused by the new coronavirus, which has killed 636 people in mainland China, is believed to have started in a market in the city of Wuhan that also sold live wild animals.

Virus experts think it may have originated in bats and then passed to humans, possibly via another species.

Jonathan Ball, a professor of molecular virology at Britain’s University of Nottingham, said that while the South China Agricultural University research was an interesting development, it was still unclear “whether or not the endangered pangolin really is the reservoir”.

“We would need to see all of the genetic data to get a feel for how related the human and pangolin viruses are, and also gain an understanding of how prevalent this virus is in pangolins and whether or not these were being sold in the Wuhan wet markets,” he said.

Dirk Pfeiffer, a professor of veterinary medicine at Hong Kong’s City University, also said the research was a long way from establishing a link between pangolins and the new coronavirus outbreak in humans.

“You can only draw more definitive conclusions if you compare prevalence (of the coronavirus) between different species based on representative samples, which these almost certainly are not,” he said.

Additional reporting by Dominique Patton in Beijing. Editing by John Stonestreet, Peter Graff and Giles Elgood

THREADS
Pangolins (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70061-Pangolins)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmRtws6xQZ4
TCM medical staff practice Ba Duan Jin to prevent respiratory diseases during coronavirus outbreak

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Baduanjin (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56712-Baduanjin-(8-section-brocade))

[GeneChing]

As I mentioned on the Birds of Prey thread this morning (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70784-Birds-of-Prey&p=1317724#post1317724), the female-strong trend in films is flopping so far. Mulan is the next up to bat (not a Harley Quinn pun, but it should be). I've got my fingers crossed for this one more than all of the others.


FEBRUARY 7, 2020 8:52AM PT
Disney Remains Committed to ‘Mulan’ Global Release, Even if China Film Biz Stays Closed (https://variety.com/2020/film/asia/disney-mulan-global-release-china-film-business-closed-1203496248/)
By PATRICK FRATER
Asia Bureau Chief

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/mulan.jpg?w=887&h=499&crop=1
CREDIT: NULL

The final trailer for Disney’s Mulan was one of the highlights of the weekend’s Superbowl LIV. It was fast-moving, spectacular and seemingly well-received by fans on social media. It was also a reaffirmation of the studio’s commitment to releasing the family blockbuster in late March.

The film faces an unexpected headwind in one of its key markets: China. There, a dangerous virus outbreak has closed cinemas since the end of January and stirred up a storm of problems across the length of the entire film industry, from local production, through exhibition, to Hollywood distribution.

It would be disappointing for Disney if China cannot be part of the film’s synchronized global launch. But the studio faces an unenviable choice – leave the China release to a later date, or delay the entire global campaign until a time when the Wuhan coronavirus has died down. Not only is it currently unclear when that might be, but the film’s marketing and promotional campaign would also have to be restarted.

That would be an unwelcome additional expense on top of what may well be the most costly non-franchise movie of all time: “Mulan” has a production budget of $200 million.

A significant portion of that may have been spent giving “Mulan” the best shot at working in China, the world’s second largest theatrical market with a box office last year exceeding $9 billion.

Based on a well-known Chinese legend about a female warrior from the fourth century AD, the film-makers went back to the original source material, the folksong “Ballad of Mulan,” for inspiration for both the screenplay and the film’s design.

The title role went to Crystal Liu, a young but already celebrated singer-actress, better known in China as Liu Yifei. Other lead roles go to mainland Chinese superstars Gong Li and Jet Li, and the popular Hong Kong-based Donnie Yen.

But while “Mulan” is a story that’s culturally specific to China, it’s a movie that Disney sees as appealing to markets all around the world. Presented largely in English, and directed by New Zealander Niki Caro, the film plays up the contemporary concept of a female hero, as well as trading in adventure, spectacle and martial arts action.

Significantly, “Mulan” was not made as an official U.S.-China co-production. While a co-production might have offered the studio a greater share of the China box office revenue, the complications of working in China can outweigh the benefits. Among those is the requirement that an overseas release cannot precede the Chinese release.

As such, “Mulan” will suffer the slight disadvantage of being treated as an import into China, but Disney will enjoy the flexibility of setting its own release dates around the planet – from March 25 in Finland and France, and March 27 in North America.

Disney’s China reps had anticipated “Mulan” obtaining a slot that would have allowed a day-and-date or near simultaneous outing, concurrent with its Asian and North American sorties. But the firm had not yet received an authorized release date by the time China ground to a virus-induced halt.

If Disney is ultimately unable to include China as part of the film’s global release pattern, there is a danger that online pirated versions of “Mulan” may leak into the country. (The studio has not altered its release plans in Asia-Pacific, where there will be Chinese-language versions of the film.) Piracy could shrink or compromise the box office success of the film’s eventual China release, though the Chinese government which maintains ultimate control over the Internet in China, has the ability to stamp out much of it.

But, important as “Mulan” is for the studio, Disney has greater headaches in China brought on by the virus outbreak. On a conference call this week, Disney chairman Bob Iger warned that the group would lose out on $175 million of operating income if the Shanghai and Hong Kong Disneyland theme parks remain closed for two months.

THREADS
Mulan (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

May is our Tiger Claw Elite Championships (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71553-2020-Tiger-Claw-Elite-Championships-amp-KUNG-FU-TAI-CHI-DAY-May-16-17-San-Jose-CA) and prior to this viral outbreak, we had an opportunity to bring 5 major grandmasters to the U.S., each for the first time for our event. Hopefully that will still be an option, assuming this has subsided significantly. More immediately however is the impact to our Tiger Claw (https://www.tigerclaw.com/home.php) suppliers.


FEBRUARY 10, 2020 / 5:44 PM / UPDATED 22 MINUTES AGO
Expert sees coronavirus over by April in China, WHO still alarmed (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health/coronavirus-death-toll-surges-as-fears-grow-for-chinese-economy-idUSKBN20504Y)
David Kirton, Stephanie Nebehay
5 MIN READ

GUANGZHOU, China/GENEVA (Reuters) - The coronavirus outbreak in China may be over by April, its senior medical adviser said on Tuesday, but deaths passed 1,000 and the World Health Organization feared a “very grave” global threat.

As the epidemic squeezed the world’s second-biggest economy, Chinese firms struggled to get back to work after the extended Lunar New Year holiday, hundreds of them saying they would need loans running into billions of dollars to stay afloat.

Company layoffs were beginning despite assurances by President Xi Jinping that widespread sackings would be avoided, as supply chains for global firms from car manufacturers to smartphone makers ruptured.

China’s foremost medical adviser on the outbreak, Zhong Nanshan, told Reuters numbers of new cases were falling in parts and forecast the epidemic would peak this month.

“I hope this outbreak or this event may be over in something like April,” added Zhong, 83, an epidemiologist who won fame for his role in combating an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday 1,017 people had died in China where there were 42,708 cases.

Only 319 cases have been confirmed in 24 other countries and territories outside mainland China, with two deaths: one in Hong Kong and the other in the Philippines.

World stocks, which had seen rounds of selloffs due to the coronarivus’ impact on China’s economy and ripple effects round the world, kept rising towards record highs on Zhong’s comments.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was less sanguine, however, appealing for the sharing of virus samples and speeding up of research into drugs and vaccines.

“With 99% of cases in China, this remains very much an emergency for that country, but one that holds a very grave threat for the rest of the world,” he told researchers in Geneva.

https://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20200211&t=2&i=1488776382&r=LYNXMPEG1A0XZ
A worker is seen inside a convenience store following an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, Hubei province, China February 11, 2020. REUTERS/Stringer

For graphic comparing new coronavirus to SARS and MERS, click: tmsnrt.rs/2GK6YVK

For more Reuters graphics on the new coronavirus, click: tmsnrt.rs/2GVwIyw

SACKINGS START
With travel curbs, lockdowns and production suspensions all affecting China’s economy, many were trying to calculate and predict the probable impact.

JPMorgan analysts downgraded forecasts for Chinese growth this quarter, saying the outbreak had “completely changed the dynamics” of its economy.

Investment bank Nomura’s analysts said the virus seemed to have had “a devastating impact” on China’s economy in January and February and markets “appear to be significantly underestimating the extent of disruption”.

Norway’s biggest independent energy consultancy Rystad Energy predicted the outbreak will cut growth in global oil demand by a quarter this year. However, two European Union officials said the impact on the bloc from damage to China’s economy would only be “marginal”.

Inside China, more than 300 companies are seeking bank loans totalling 57.4 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) to help cope with the disruption, banking sources said.

Prospective borrowers include food delivery giant Meituan Dianping (3690.HK), smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp (1810.HK) and ride-hailing provider Didi Chuxing Technology Co.

Chinese firm Xinchao Media said on Monday it had laid off 500 people, or just over a tenth of its workforce, and restaurant chain Xibei said it was worried about how to pay its roughly 20,000 workers.

Authorities said they would roll out measures to stabilise jobs, in addition to previously announced cuts to interest rates and fiscal stimulus designed to minimise any downturn.

Hubei, where the flu-like virus emerged from a wildlife market in the provincial capital of Wuhan in December, remains in virtual lockdown, its train stations and airports shut and roads blocked.

Nevertheless, its health authority reported 2,097 new cases and 103 new deaths on Feb. 10.

With public anger rising, Hubei’s government dismissed the provincial health commission’s Communist Party boss Zhang Jin and director Liu Yingzi, state media said.

The virus has caused chaos around Asia and beyond, with many flights suspended and entry restrictions imposed.

The Diamond Princess cruise ship with 3,700 passengers and crew remained quarantined in Japan’s port of Yokohama, with the number of confirmed cases from the Carnival Corp-owned (CCL.N) vessel at 135.

Thailand said it had barred passengers from getting off another Carnival Corp ship, Holland America Line’s MS Westerdam, even though no confirmed infections have been found on board.

“Now we are back in limbo,” passenger Stephen Hansen told Reuters by email.

Reporting by David Kirton in Guangzhou; Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Huizhong Wu, Shivani Singh, Gabriel Crossley, Min Zhang, Liangping Gao, Lusha Zhang in Beijing; Yilei Sun, David Stanway in Shanghai; Tom Westbrook in Singapore.; Writing by Robert Birsel and Nick Macfie; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Andrew Cawthorne

THREADS:
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
TCEC 2020 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71553-2020-Tiger-Claw-Elite-Championships-amp-KUNG-FU-TAI-CHI-DAY-May-16-17-San-Jose-CA)

[GeneChing]

yuanherong1229 (https://www.instagram.com/p/B7-IlwhJdqH/?utm_source=ig_embed)
•

https://scontent-sjc3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e35/p1080x1080/84162093_485215648807700_4254541519159546821_n.jpg ?_nc_ht=scontent-sjc3-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=108&_nc_ohc=h7gK957B27oAX-_Ouin&oh=b132339057a96ea0a08f80b38af57185&oe=5EBF4062

yuanherong1229
171 cases of new pneumonia were cured and 15238 suspected cases were found. The healers are all treated through traditional Chinese medicine and other symptomatic treatment. We will try our best to do a good job in prevention and treatment💪
1w



THREADS
Yuan Herong (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71593-Yuan-Herong-Bodybuilder-TCM-medic-amp-Kung-Fu-fan)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

The coronavirus appears to be sparing one group of people: Kids (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/11/the-coronavirus-appears-to-be-sparing-one-group-of-people-kids.html)
PUBLISHED TUE, FEB 11 2020 2:59 PM EST UPDATED TUE, FEB 11 2020 3:56 PM EST
Berkeley Lovelace Jr.
@BERKELEYJR

KEY POINTS
The new coronavirus, named COVID-19, has sickened more than 43,100 people worldwide, but very few children appear to be among the confirmed cases.
About 80% of people who died from the virus in China were over the age of 60, and 75% had pre-existing conditions, according to a recent report from China’s National Health Commission.
A small study published Jan. 30 in the medical journal The Lancet found the average age of patients was roughly 55 years old.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106377091-1581009901772gettyimages-1197376799.jpeg?v=1581009967&w=630&h=354
Bangladeshi students wear masks for protection against Coronavirus on January 29, 2020.
Mehedi Hasan | NurPhoto | Getty Images

The new coronavirus that has already killed more people than the 2003 SARS epidemic appears to be sparing one population group: kids.

Of the more than 43,100 people it’s infected since Dec. 31, World Health Organization officials say the majority are over 40 years old and it’s hitting those with underlying health conditions and the elderly particularly hard.

“Increasing age increases the risk for death,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said Thursday at a news conference at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. “It appears even over 80 is the highest risk factor.”

Fortunately for many worried parents, there appear to be few confirmed cases of the virus among children so far. Officials caution that the virus is so new, there is still a lot that they don’t know about it and the data they are seeing today will likely look different a month from now.

About 80% of people who died from the virus in China were over the age of 60, and 75% had pre-existing conditions such as heart disease or diabetes, according to a recent report from China’s National Health Commission. A small study published Jan 30 in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet found that the average age of coronavirus patients was roughly 55 years old. The study looked at 99 patients at Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, China, from Jan. 1 to Jan. 20.

Last week, Singapore confirmed a case in a 6-month-old baby whose parents were also both infected, and an infant in China was born Feb. 2 with the virus. The baby’s mother also tested positive. But infections in children appear to rare for now, according to a Feb. 5 study in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association.

Symptoms can include a sore throat, runny nose, fever or pneumonia and can progress to multi-organ failure or even death in some cases, world health officials say.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106376781-15810044745912020_coronavirus_ages.png?v=158100449 8&w=630&h=354

Some infectious disease specialists and scientists say older adults may be more vulnerable to the virus, which has been named COVID-19, due to their weaker immune systems.

With age, immune systems weaken, leaving the elderly at an especially higher risk of developing serious complications from a respiratory illness, public health officials say.

“It’s usually the very old, sometimes the very young and certainly people with other medical conditions who typically have more severe manifestations,” said Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the University of Toronto.

The apparent lack of children among confirmed coronavirus cases could also be because they are getting infected but developing more mild symptoms and aren’t being reported to local authorities, according to Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. World health officials say they are working to improve surveillance of the disease and expect more mild cases to be reported. It could be a while before we have a clear picture on cases, Lipsitch said.

“The data is coming out in so many places and so many forms,” he said in a recent interview.

The differences in symptoms among different age groups are seen in other respiratory illnesses as well. The seasonal flu, which infects millions in the U.S. each year, can usually be more severe in adults than children.

Thousands of children are hospitalized each year from the flu, but death is rare, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, between 50% and 70% of flu-related hospitalizations in the U.S. occur in people 65 years and older, and between 70% and 85% of deaths occur in the same age group, the CDC says.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106369525-1581511923776global_spreadareachart.png?v=15815119 43&w=630&h=354

The lack of confirmed cases in children was also seen in another coronavirus. During the 2003 outbreak of SARS, which sickened 8,098 people and killed about 800 over nine months, the vast majority of cases infected older adults, according to WHO data. The case-fatality ratio for people age 24 or younger was less than 1%, according to WHO.

Even if children are only developing mild symptoms, Lipsitch said scientists still need to know whether they can still infect others at high rates. “This is a key uncertainty that needs to be resolved,” he said.

When asked whether mild cases are transmitting the virus, Kerkhove of WHO said Thursday that more studies need to be conducted.

“We need to look at mild individuals all the way to severe individuals,” Kerkhove said. “That systematic data collection and that sampling of mild cases, as well as severe cases, is something that is really urgently required for us to get a clear handle on this.”

Read CNBC’s live updates to see the latest news on the COVID-19 outbreak.

Correction: Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove is head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit. An earlier version misspelled her name.

Adding 'COVID-19' to the title of this thread

[GeneChing]

Wuhan coronavirus update: 1,114 deaths, 44,747 infections and 16,067 suspected cases (https://shanghai.ist/2020/02/12/wuhan-coronavirus-update-1114-deaths-44747-infections-and-16067-suspected-cases/?fbclid=IwAR0mMtgr5LrAHx8GuDqgyKJI402omlG9lXSb-z6zjFLnhCaPoDV0gQ5Ln08)
Has the outbreak reached a turning point?
by Alex Linder February 12, 2020 in News

https://i0.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/wuhan-virus35.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1

With the release of official statistics from Wednesday, the question now on everyone’s mind is, has the Wuhan coronavirus finally peaked?

For the second straight day, the number of new reported cases has declined — now all the way down to 2,039 new confirmed cases over the past 24 hours, the lowest figure since January 30.

Meanwhile, the total number of suspected cases has dropped precipitously. Down from 21,675 on Tuesday to 16,067 on Wednesday.

Here’s a look at the number of new confirmed cases (red) and suspected cases (purple) reported each day in China:

https://i2.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/wuhan-virus48.png?resize=1320%2C370&ssl=1

While these figures would seem to hint towards a trend, the virus’s death toll has not yet slowed down.

97 new deaths were reported over the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths attributed to the virus up to 1,114.

In brighter news, the number of those who have recovered from the virus and been discharged from the hospital is also at a record high with 822 people being cured over the past 24 hours, bringing that total tally up to 4,820.

I'm hearing so many projections from random people every day now about what might happen next. Maybe they should write their own articles, but most of them are just repeating headlines they misread.

[GeneChing]

Well this is bad. :(



China Reports Over 15,000 Coronavirus Cases in Single Day Using New Diagnostic Guidelines (https://gizmodo.com/china-reports-over-15-000-coronavirus-cases-in-single-d-1841657069)
Matt Novak
Today 7:00AM

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_1600/mbr57soyirpxkckurbay.jpg
Residents wear protective masks as they line up in a grocery store on February 12, 2020 in Wuhan, China.
Photo: Getty Images

China reported 15,152 new cases of the coronavirus on Thursday, according to state broadcaster Xinhua, the largest jump in a single day and up significantly from the few thousand confirmed cases China typically reports daily. Chinese health authorities also reported 254 new deaths, the largest number in a single day since the crisis began in December 2019.

The wild jump on Thursday is likely due to new guidelines for reporting patients with the coronavirus in Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak. Doctors in Hubei are now diagnosing some cases through CT scans of a patient’s lungs as well as a patient’s history of exposure to others, rather than just lab tests looking exclusively for the coronavirus.

There are now over 60,000 confirmed cases of the virus worldwide, with 1,369 deaths. Roughly 13,332 cases of the coronavirus, which causes an illness that was recently dubbed COVID-19, were clinically diagnosed using the new method, according to a tweet early this morning from the World Health Organization (WHO).

The lab tests for coronavirus are in short supply in China, given the high number of cases, and doctors around the world are reporting false negatives. The Centers For Disease Control (CDC) held a press conference on Wednesday to announce that hundreds of tests distributed in the U.S. were faulty and informed patients that they didn’t have the disease when, in fact, they do. The U.S. has just 14 confirmed cases of the virus but experts like the former head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Scott Gottlieb, says he expects that number could grow in the coming weeks.

Gottlieb told the Washington Post yesterday that he believes American doctors are detecting maybe 25 percent of coronavirus cases “at best” adding, “We’re going to see those outbreaks start to emerge in the next two to four weeks.”

While some health experts outside of China seem cautiously optimistic that the new reporting methods in Hubei will provide a more accurate picture of the public health crisis currently unfolding in Asia, and perhaps show that the disease is less deadly than earlier believed, others are concerned that CT scans may pick up other pneumonia cases that were not caused by the new coronavirus specifically. One public health expert who was skeptical of the new diagnostic methods told the New York Times, “we’re in unknown territory.”

The new reporting methods are not being used outside of Hubei province, according to Shanghai Health Commission spokesperson Zheng Jin, who gave a press conference on Thursday. It’s not immediately clear if other large Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai, which have just 366 and 315 confirmed cases respectively according to a John Hopkins virus tracker, will start using the new method soon.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_1600/f69ix1tukywat9ci9h77.jpg
A Chinese boy is covered in a plastic bag for protection as he arrives from a train at Beijing Station on February 12, 2020 in Beijing, China.
Photo: Getty Images

The Chinese Communist Party has come down hard on some local leaders, firing the party secretary of Hubei province, Jiang Chaoliang, on Thursday, after public sentiment in the hard hit region turned increasingly sour. Jiang will be replaced by the mayor of Shanghai, Ying Yong, according to the New York Times.

Large public gatherings have been banned in China, with tens of millions of people on virtual lockdown, but event organizers and civic organizations around the world are also scaling back their activities. The World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain, which was scheduled to start February 24, announced on Wednesday that its event had been cancelled. Many large companies that planned to have exhibits at the mobile phone conference, including Facebook, Cisco, AT&T, Sprint, and Sony, had already pulled out a week earlier.

And closer to China, the Hong Kong Catholic Church has even suspended mass for two weeks, citing concern over the virus.

“The next two weeks will be a crucial time to suppress the epidemic. To avoid gatherings, the Diocese has decided to suspend all the public Masses on Sundays and weekdays for two weeks, including the Liturgy of Ash Wednesday, from 15th to 28th of February,” Cardinal John Tong Hon, Apostolic Administrator of Hong Kong, said in a statement posted online. “Some Church members may be disappointed. However, I hope that everyone can understand this is not an easy decision.”

The cardinal encouraged people to attend mass through the church’s online services and make sure to take care of the sick and the elderly.

“At this difficult time, everyone should not panic. We must deepen our trust in God and implement our Christian love for our neighbors and all people.”



Matt Novak
Matt Novak is the editor of Gizmodo's Paleofuture blog

[GeneChing]

I was planning a trip back to Shaolin this year before Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia) broke out. 2020 marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of my master's school. Shi Decheng (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?44742-Shi-Decheng) actually closed his brick-and-mortar schools (he had two in Dengfeng) around a decade ago, but he has a group of students that are still loyal and are housed in Chen Tongshan's school. Decheng is planning a celebration and invited all his disciples and students back. I've been looking forwafrd to returning because it's been over a decade and a half since I've walked the rugged soils of Shaolin, but we'll see how this all works out. I was in PRC for SARS and that was horrible. (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/index.php?p=article&article=468) However, if this gets contained by then, it might be an opportune time to travel because tourism will be down.


'It Will Be Catastrophic.' Asia's Tourism-Dependent Economies Are Being Hit Hard by the Coronavirus (https://time.com/5783505/thailand-asia-tourism-covid-19-china-coronavirus/)

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/GettyImages-1199592625.jpg?w=800&quality=85
An airport staff member wearing a protective face mask stands at an information desk at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok on Feb. 9, 2020. MLADEN ANTONOV/Afp/AFP via Getty Images
BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL / KRABI, THAILAND
4:09 AM EST

Klong Khong beach on the southern Thai island of Koh Lanta is a long sweep of coarse silver sand fringed by Indian almond trees and palms. A knot of beach shacks offer tourist staples—massages, fruit shakes, grilled seafood—in signs written in English and, in similar prominence, Mandarin Chinese.

Yet few Chinese faces grace Koh Lanta these days as fallout spreads from the coronavirus outbreak that has so far infected more than 60,000 people and claimed at least 1,360 lives. Although the Thai government has not joined many of its neighbors by imposing a complete ban on Chinese visitors, the suspension of tour groups from the People’s Republic, combined with a drop in visitors more generally in response to the crisis, is hitting Koh Lanta hard.

“Last month, there were many, many Chinese staying here,” says Khun Mohammed, whose family runs the Lanta Lapaya Resort in Klong Khong. “Now it’s just one room.”

While the spread of the coronavirus has rattled manufacturers and upset supply chains the world over, the tourism-dependent economies of Southeast Asia are particularly vulnerable. China’s rapidly swelling middle class sparked a boom in tourist visits abroad, which soared from 20 million in 2003 to 150 million in 2018.

Besides Thailand’s, it is the tourism industries of Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan that are most exposed to the Chinese travel market. “If this lasts for three to six months, it will be catastrophic for the tourism industry,” says Stuart McDonald, founder of the TravelFish independent travel guide to Southeast Asia.

Today, Chinese visitors account for 30% of Thailand’s total tourist footfall, spending $18 billion in 2019. Direct tourism spending accounts for an estimated 12% of Thai GDP with Chinese visitors playing “an increasingly important role in underpinning the Thai tourism economy,” according to London-based business information provider IHS Markit.

The fallout is being felt across the self-styled “Land of Smiles.” In Thailand’s stupa-strewn northern capital of Chiang Mai, the 20-room SugarCane boutique guesthouse has suffered cancellations of almost 150 room nights of with almost no new bookings in last two weeks. “The speed with which demand dried up is quite shocking,” says general manager Stuart Cavaliero.

The drop in Chinese tourist numbers from January to April alone could cost the Thai economy $3.05 billion, according to The Tourism Authority of Thailand, not counting the revenue loss of other nationalities choosing to stay away. Arrivals booked by the Association of Thai Travel Agents dropped 99% from China and 71% overall for the first ten days of February compared with the same period last year, reports Reuters.

Other nations face a similarly grim reality. The damage to Vietnam’s tourism sector due to the coronavirus will range between $5.9 billion and $7.7 billion, according to Vietnam National Administration of Tourism estimates. Indonesia’s tourist island of Bali has seen 20,000 hotel bookings canceled, even though Indonesia does not have a confirmed case of coronavirus to date.

Thailand has 33 cases and the public is growing uneasy at the government’s reluctance to close the border to Chinese, who are subject to stringent travel bans by Japan, Australia, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam.

In many places, fears about the virus’s spread have infused and emboldened long-held anti-Chinese prejudices. In Australia, a Malaysian student of Chinese heritage was evicted from her home due to her landlord’s fears about the virus. In Singapore, a petition calling for a ban on Chinese tourists, which collected over 100,000 signatures, claimed the virus was a result of “self-inflicted unhealthy food consumption.”

For Ruby Thiagarajan—editor-in-chief of Mynah Magazine and author of a feature exploring how the coronavirus has emboldened xenophobia in Singapore— the outbreak has “conveniently also given Singaporeans who harbor anti-Chinese sentiments justification for how they feel.”

In Thailand, the decision to allow Chinese tourists to visit has also been “divisive locally,” says Cavaliero. Yet he hopes the decision not to implement a ban “may end up providing a reciprocated goodwill dividend in the future.”

Still, despite the absence of a wholesale ban, widespread fear and misinformation persists across Thailand’s hospitality industry. Images of a sign reading “No Chinese” put up by a restaurant in Chiang Mai went viral on social media, prompting the local officials to order its removal. In the royal beach resort of Hua Hin, one Chinese mother and child were almost forced to sleep on the street after no hotel would take them, according to local media.

When Charles Turner, proprietor of the Food4Thought restaurant in Chiang Mai, organized a training session among staff in response to the coronavirus, he had to quell requests to ban Chinese customers.

“Many of my staff​ were disturbingly under-informed about how viruses spread, the mixed verdicts about the efficacy of masks, and so on,” he tells TIME. “If I were to guess, the story of business owners denying entry to Chinese customers​ is more prevalent that most realize.”

For TravelFish founder McDonald, it’s important tourists from elsewhere do not exacerbate the looming economic shock by staying away when there’s objectively no great need. Instead, they can take advantage of thinner crowds and cheaper prices to boot.

“China is a separate situation,” he says, “but for Southeast Asia, I don’t really see any pressing reason to change travel plans.”

WRITE TO CHARLIE CAMPBELL AT CHARLIE.CAMPBELL@TIME.COM.

[GeneChing]

Blackstone Teams With Martial Artist Jet Li for Virus Donation (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-12/blackstone-teams-with-martial-artist-jet-li-for-virus-donation)
By Amanda L Gordon
February 12, 2020, 10:21 AM PST

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iZVTc4JZ4pQo/v0/1200x-1.jpg
Jet Li Photographer: Frederic Nebinger/Getty Images

Blackstone Group Inc.’s charitable foundation is giving $1 million to expand distribution of supplies and aid to more than 30 communities in China.

The money will go to the One Foundation, founded by martial arts star Jet Li in 2007. It will be used for such items as kits to diagnose coronavirus and ECG monitors for pregnant women.

Key Speakers At The Business Roundtable CEO Innovation Summit
Stephen SchwarzmanPhotographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
“This has been an extremely, an exceptionally difficult situation for China,” Blackstone Chief Executive Officer Stephen Schwarzman said in a telephone interview. “Some of the people I know have described the impact as being similar to the Chinese as 9-11 was for Americans. As a firm, we wanted to show some support.”

Schwarzman said the virus “has been enormously disruptive for anyone doing business in China” and that communicating with staff in the region is a priority. Blackstone offices in China reopened on Feb. 10. Employees in mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore are encouraged to work from home, in line with government recommendations.

“The most important thing is to let people know that you’re thinking about them,” Schwarzman said. “The second thing is to explain what the virus is. At the beginning, large groups didn’t have access to that information. It’s easier for us to talk to the heads of pharmaceutical companies, who have much more familiarity.”

One Foundation has worked with local agencies to distribute millions of masks and gloves in 16 cities in Hubei province, the epicenter of the virus. The group has a network of more than 2,000 volunteers and staff conducting disinfection and prevention training across the country, Blackstone said Wednesday in a statement.

Separately, a program Schwarzman created modeled after the Rhodes Scholarships and based at Tsinghua University in Beijing has adjusted to the outbreak. Some students have traveled home or to other locations, while safety protocols have been put in place for those wishing to stay, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Spring term will include online classes, the person said.

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666)
Jet Li’s ONE Foundation (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?36920-Jet-Li%92s-ONE-Foundation)

[GeneChing]

TELEVANGELIST SELLS $125 'SILVER SOLUTION' AS CURE FOR CORONAVIRUS (https://www.newsweek.com/televangelist-show-guest-promotes-silver-solution-cure-coronavirus-1487069?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2dQwATgwIq7jR7Dxc2asPPvpKtj7i-pzE_6RPSoNL6cpH9cHMN4isiUBA#Echobox=1581569038)
BY HUNTER MOYLER ON 2/12/20 AT 5:35 PM EST

A guest on televangelist Jim Bakker's show suggested on Wednesday that a product sold on Bakker's website might be effective at protecting against and killing the novel coronavirus.

The guest, naturopathic Dr. Sherrill Sellman, said that Silver Solution—a product that can be purchased on Bakker's web store—has been found to be effective on viruses related to the one from Wuhan. Further, she said Silver Solution could bolster a person's immune system and potentially make their bodies less susceptible to the virus.

"Well, let's say [Silver Solution] hasn't been tested on this strain of the coronavirus, but it's been tested on other strains of the coronavirus and has been able to eliminate it within 12 hours," she said. "Totally eliminate it. Kills it, deactivates it. And then it boosts your immune system so then you can support the recovery, because when you kill the virus, then the immune system comes into action to clear it out. So you want a vibrant immune system as well as an ability to deactivate these viruses."

Newsweek contacted Sellman via her website for further comment and clarification but did not receive a reply before publication.

The novel coronavirus emerged from the Chinese city in late 2019. The virus has since spread to 24 other countries, including the United States, though the majority of those infected remain in China. As of Wednesday, the virus has infected over 45,000 people and killed at least 1,100, according to the World Health Organization.

According to its page on Bakker's website, Silver Solution is a product that "works faster, longer and more efficiently than other silvers to support your immune system." Information on the website does not state how the product is to be used. It currently sells on Bakker's website in a variety of packages with a 16-ounce bottle costing 40, but shoppers can purchase bundles of the product that cost up to $300. The label states that the solution contains deionized water, but no other ingredients.

However, similarly marketed products also include colloidal silver which according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) provides no known health benefits. Ingesting it can cause side effects including argyria, or discoloration of the skin or other tissue, and poor absorption of other medications by the body.

Do we need a naturopathy thread here? :rolleyes:

[GeneChing]

ASIAFEBRUARY 13, 2020 6:19AM PT
Chinese Shoots to Resume Despite Virus Threat, While Beijing Throws Industry a Lifeline (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/coronavirus-china-hengdian-studios-1203502111/)
By REBECCA DAVIS

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/hengdian-production-facility-169.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1
CREDIT: BAO KANGXUAN/AP

Hengdian World Studios, one of China’s largest, cautiously reopened for business today after it shut down all production in recent weeks to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

The move comes a day after Chinese authorities released an official statement pledging government support for the struggling entertainment sector.

Huge portions of the world’s second largest economy have been at a standstill since the virus swept the country. Though work officially began again Monday after an extended holiday for the Chinese new year, many are still working remotely as China continues intensive measures such as travel restrictions to keep a lid on the disease’s spread.

Hengdian had closed off to all tourists on Jan. 25 before shutting down all production on Jan. 27, at a time when Chinese reports estimate 20 crews were filming and 11 preparing to begin.

It will now resume work in stages, the studio said in work guidelines posted Monday night. Those set to resume shooting will be film and TV crews who stayed on-site throughout the Spring Festival period and have had no contact with people from highly infectious areas, as well as production firms “with adequate prevention and control measures in place,” although their eligibility well pend review. Employees in highly infectious areas have been advised to postpone their return.

The next stage of operations will be “determined according to the circumstances of epidemic prevention and control,” it said.

A spokesman for local government in charge of Hengdian’s district told Chinese news outlet Sina Entertainment that though many applications to resume shooting have been filed since Feb. 3, so far, none have been approved. “Resumption of work will have to wait until Zhejiang Province lifts its Grade I [high-level public health emergency] response.”

Given that actors will be unable to wear masks, Chinese reports said shooting teams have been advised to stay small, limiting to 20 people when possible.

On Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, TV actress Zhang Lingzhi wrote that when she heard the news of Hengdian re-opening for shoots, she was very concerned for her husband, actor Johnny Chen (“The Climbers”), who has remained confined to his hotel room while his shoot there was halted for the past 15 days.

“Is it really possible to resume work now?” she asked. “[Feeling] so worried, so sad, so helpless.”

The production shutdown has delayed the output of new dramas and put severe financial pressure on firms. With daily actor fees accruing and the possibility of selling completed product postponed, smaller companies with fewer reserves have been particularly hard-hit, as reported by Variety earlier this week.

Beijing breaks silence on entertainment

To address such problems, Beijing’s film bureau said Wednesday that it will provide financial support to production companies and cinemas hard hit by recent cinema closures and production stoppages. It did not, however, provide details as to how or when.

Beijing’s municipal government recently issued two documents outlining measures to support businesses — particularly small and mid-sized enterprises — as they deal with the impact of the capital going into effective lockdown.

Though vague on detail, the Beijing Film Bureau’s statement on Wednesday indicated that it was working to ensure entertainment firms “are connected to these policies and receive practical benefits.”

To protect hard-hit companies, the bureau said it would soon issue “relevant policies to increase support for film and TV cultural enterprises” and subsidize the operating costs of production firms and cinemas “to help companies overcome their difficulties.”

The bureau will also intervene in actual production.

“In order to meet the expectations of audiences across the country, and ensure that there will be adequate theatrical content after the epidemic is over, there is a plan to open a ‘green-light channel’ for the key films of this year and next, and key projects that have been severely affected by the epidemic this year,” it said.

For such films, it promised “financial assistance, creative guidance, filming support, and so on to ensure that important projects will not have to stop, be aborted or lower their standards.”

The bureau also expressed plans to “very proactively solicit film and TV works that reflect achievements in fighting the epidemic and offer subsidies to support them.”

To help streamline censorship and other film approvals and reviews, it said paperwork can now be initiated via an online submission only, and physical documents either delivered in-person at a later date or mailed in. A fast-track for approvals of “special projects” will also be established. The statement noted that its normal review and approval mechanisms hadn’t stalled during the quarantine period.

THREADS
Chollywood (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

This is exactly what I was ranting about above (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1317668#post1317668). :(


FEBRUARY 12, 2020 / 7:24 PM / UPDATED 18 HOURS AGO
Stranded by coronavirus blockade, Chinese man fights to get back to work (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-stranded/stranded-by-coronavirus-blockade-chinese-man-fights-to-get-back-to-work-idUSKBN20709B)
3 MIN READ

BEIJING (Reuters) - Tian Bing has spent six straight nights curled up in the back of his white sedan, stranded at an expressway service station in eastern Jiangsu province in China because of a blockade aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus.

https://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20200213&t=2&i=1489555542&w=1200&r=LYNXMPEG1C072
Tian Bing, who has not been able to return to Taixing city for work due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, poses for a selfie on the backseat of his car in Yizheng service station, Jiangsu province, China February 12, 2020. Tian Bing/Handout via REUTERS

On Sunday, the 35-year-old completed a near-2,000 km (1,243 mile) drive from his hometown to Taixing, a city of about 1 million people in Jiangsu, to return to work. But policemen guarding the highway exit to the city, where he runs a home appliances repair business, told him turn back.

The reason: Tian is not considered a local resident under China’s Byzantine hukou system, barring him from entry due to the city’s recent decision to keep out outsiders.

“I think I’ve done everything I can do,” he said. Before setting off on the near two-day drive, Tian got a health certificate showing he was virus-free and called ahead to the city officials, who assured Tian he would face no problems.

Tian subsists on biscuits and instant noodles, with most restaurants at the service station shut down. He sleeps with a seat cushion as his pillow, huddled in the back with the engine shut off on fear that the exhaust might poison him in his sleep.

He is not the only one stuck in such a rest stop limbo. Posts on China’s social media platforms show several people trapped in unfamiliar places, under quarantine or abandoned in no man’s land amid travel and entry restrictions that sprang up throughout the country.

The police guarding the expressway exit to Taixing have said Tian can come in if officers in the compound of his rented home agree to pick him up. But Tian said the community officers refused because they don’t want to be responsible for anything that goes wrong.

“They (the officials) don’t care if you die on highway because you have nowhere to stay,” Tian said at the service station near another city about 90km from Taixing.

Tian is not ready to give up, however. He calls the city government every day, even though his wife is pleading with him to go someplace else that will accept him, even if under quarantine.

“I want to get off this expressway to deal with my business as soon as possible,” Tian said. “My seven employees need to eat and pay their rent too; that’s absolutely my responsibility.”

Reporting by Lusha Zhang, Colin Qian and Se Young Lee; Editing by Gerry Doyle

[Jimbo]

It makes me wonder about all those people who are acupuncturists, or work in TCM and who especially depend on getting supplies from China.

[GeneChing]

LIke I said already...


Here I've been waiting for someone to suggest banlangen or something.


China Tries 3,000-Year-Old Traditional Remedy on Virus Patients (https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/world/china-tries-3000-year-old-traditional-remedy-on-virus-patients/ar-BB102l0K)
Bloomberg News 1 day ago

China is administering its centuries-old traditional medicine on patients affected by the coronavirus disease, a top health official said.

https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB101KTA.img?h=746&w=1119&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=700&y=896
© Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg Herbs used in the preparation of traditional Chinese medicines are arranged for photograph inside a Eu Yan Sang store in Singapore, on Friday, Feb. 8, 2013. Eu Yan Sang International, the largest seller of traditional Chinese medicine in Asia outside of China, plans to add its signature herbs to Western health supplements such as vitamins to broaden its customer base.

Treatment in Wuhan hospitals combine Traditional Chinese Medicine, popularly known as TCM, and western medicines, said Wang Hesheng, the new health commission head in Hubei, the province at the center of the virus outbreak. He said TCM was applied on more than half of confirmed cases in Hubei.

“Our efforts have shown some good result,” Wang said at a press conference on Saturday, without elaborating. Top TCM experts have been sent to Hubei for “research and treatment,” he said.

No drugs or preventives have yet been approved against the virus, which has already claimed the lives of 1,523 people in China and affected about 66,500 people.

https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BBZnJlF.img?h=582&w=1119&m=6&q=60&u=t&o=f&l=f&x=896&y=995 © Courtesy of IVDC, China CDC via GISAID/Reuters
A Transmission Electron Microscopy image of the first isolated case of the coronavirus, as obtained by Reuters on Jan. 27.

Just weeks into the epidemic of the novel coronavirus, reports of treatments and vaccines against those infected have caused pockets of excitement. The first reported use of an experimental Gilead Sciences Inc. drug to fight the coronavirus has encouraged doctors to support further testing of the medication.

Some 2,200 TCM workers have been sent to Hubei, Wang said.

Wang is one of the officials at the forefront of an effort by Beijing to reset its approach to the epidemic, after anger grew across China at a lack of transparency throughout the crisis that has shut down large swathes of the economy. Earlier this week, China sacked the top leadership in the embattled province, including Wang’s predecessor.

Wang, who is also deputy head of the National Health Commission, was appointed a member of Hubei’s standing committee, the province’s top decision-making body. Days after his appointment, Hubei announced a shock adjustment in its method of counting infections to include those diagnosed with CT scans, a move that added nearly 15,000 cases to Hubei’s total count and dashed hopes the epidemic was coming under control.

Hubei has been decimated by the crisis and its medical facilities are at breaking point. While thousands of doctors have been sent from around China to the province to help and two new hospitals were built in a matter of days, it is still struggling with a shortage of supplies and medical staff. There are widespread reports of deaths in Hubei that could have been prevented, but weren’t due to a lack of adequate medical care.


It makes me wonder about all those people who are acupuncturists, or work in TCM and who especially depend on getting supplies from China.
We get everything from China - tech components, textiles, fundamental building blocks of so many industries, and as I've been saying, martial arts gear. :o

[GeneChing]

...because tobacco hasn't been in China for 3000 years. It's an American product.


Could tobacco cure coronavirus? Don’t laugh. (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/15/could-tobacco-cure-coronavirus-115329)
The Pentagon's medical research arm credited the use of tobacco plants in 2012 for the quick development of 10 million doses of flu vaccine.

https://static.politico.com/dims4/default/fb9d7df/2147483647/resize/1160x/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2Fa3%2F9c%2 F2cf9c39f479a8dfe5f7857f97913%2F200214-tobacco-ap-773.jpg
Public health experts say infecting tobacco plants with a genetically modified coronavirus, if successful, could be scaled up quickly to respond to an international outbreak. | Patrick Sison/AP Photo

By SARAH OWERMOHLE
02/15/2020 07:00 AM EST

One of the most criticized industries in America is joining the race to stop the coronavirus epidemic.

Reynolds American, the North Carolina cigarette giant behind the Camel, Newport and Pall Mall brands, is infecting fast-growing tobacco plants with a genetically modified coronavirus to see if they can produce antibodies for a possible vaccine.

It’s a decades-old idea Reynolds tried with limited success during the Ebola crisis in 2015 and could offset declining cigarette sales, new tobacco age restrictions and a possible menthol ban. Public health experts say the experiment, if successful, could be scaled up quickly to respond to an international outbreak.

The Pentagon's medical research arm credited the use of tobacco plants in 2012 for the quick development of 10 million doses of flu vaccine. "Plant-based solutions” could over time prove more effective than the typical process — growing a virus in eggs — said Alan Magill, program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the time, adding, “the research is very promising."

But big hurdles remain. It would take thousands of doses to come up with an experimental treatment. Reynolds’ work is in the very early stages, meaning the outbreak could subside before a cure is close to perfected. And some vaccines may not be 100 percent effective against all the strains of a target disease, as was the case with Ebola. Such factors have kept most big drug companies away from the vaccine business: Moderna Therapeutics and Johnson & Johnson are the only companies who’ve publicly acknowledged working on a coronavirus vaccine, both with government support.

The science behind past tobacco industry efforts to branch into medicine haven't always matched the hype. Though nicotine has been shown to improve memory in pre-dementia patients, one highly touted treatment failed in four clinical trials — and some efforts to expand research into other conditions haven’t borne fruit. Two non-plant-based Ebola vaccines were found to be more effective than the treatment Reynolds worked on, which has never been approved by the FDA.

https://static.politico.com/dims4/default/e78f543/2147483647/resize/1160x/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F4f%2F4c%2 F4115a52b46359e0b45e407f37670%2Fcoronavirus-core-chart-feb-14.jpg
Patterson Clark/POLITICO

The tobacco companies are still pushing forward. Besides Reynolds’ tiny Kentucky BioProcessing subsidiary, which is testing the coronavirus, Philip Morris has taken a 40 percent stake in Medicago, a firm using the similar tobacco-growing technology to try to develop a flu vaccine.

“People can be cynical. But the fact is that we might be able to help,” said Hugh Haydon, Kentucky BioProcessing’s chief executive officer.

The company has contacted the Trump administration’s health department about its coronavirus work and said it could provide a sample to the government by early March.

“You can go from the gene sequence to a greenhouse or a warehouse full of plant materials in a very short period of time,” said Kenneth Palmer, a microbiologist at University of Louisville whose focused on plant-based vaccines. Palmer receives no tobacco industry funding but said the university has paid Kentucky BioProcessing to produce plants for it in the past.

The pivot to drugmaking comes at a pivotal time for some tobacco giants. Teen tobacco use had steadily fallen for two decades before e-cigarettes swung the trend around in 2018, earning promises of a federal crackdown on the sector the companies have increasingly leaned on while traditional smoking has continued to decline. Congress in December also raised the nationwide age to purchase tobacco to 21, while lawmakers continue to debate an all-out menthol tobacco ban that would hit many of Reynolds’ best-selling products.

Reynolds, owned by British American Tobacco, had been looking to diversify for several years. Before buying the Kentucky lab, the tobacco giant was “pulling apart the tobacco plant” looking for other uses than cigarettes, recounts James Figlar, executive vice president of research and development.

Coming up with new business lines is one thing, but chasing an epidemic that's sickened in excess of 60,000 people in more than two dozen countries is quite another.

Reynolds American bought the Kentucky lab in January 2014, just two months before World Health Organization flagged the first cases of what would, over the next two years, become the deadliest Ebola virus outbreak on record, killing more than 11,000 people in West Africa. Kentucky BioSciences quickly focused all of its resources on producing a tobacco-derived component for the combination therapy ZMapp, one of the first experimental Ebola treatments to become available.

Hopes were high in the early days of the outbreak. The FDA fast-tracked a safety review in 2015 and public health officials authorized its use as cases climbed. But over time, data began to show two other treatments were markedly more effective than ZMapp. The results were significant enough for researchers to halt a study early and recommend that health care workers abandon ZMapp in favor of the others.

Reynolds and others behind ZMapp were not the only companies to pour millions into Ebola treatments or vaccines that may never be used again. It’s a big risk for companies, especially in emergencies where health officials may ask for thousands of doses of a still-unapproved experimental treatment that shows promise.

“You invest hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to scale up on something that you hope might work. That’s the real glitch there,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at an Aspen Institute event this week. “It is going to be a challenge to get a major company to do that.”

“There is no question that a lot of them lost a lot of money on trying to make an Ebola vaccine,” said Ron Klain, who was President Barack Obama’s Ebola "czar."

Growing vaccines on tobacco plants could still hold the promise of lower overhead and less financial risk for companies, because the plants can start producing needed compounds in a matter of weeks, the University of Louisville's Palmer said.

Moreover, the prospect of making drugs rather than hooking new smokers is posing new questions about tobacco's place in the world.

“As a scientist and a researcher, I am not enthusiastic about the business of producing and selling tobacco products," Palmer said. "But I think that tobacco companies are probably drawing on a lot of experience ... It is perhaps logical and perhaps beautiful that tobacco companies are involved.”

These drug companies, both 3000-year old, tobaccanists, and whatever else is trying to grab the spotlight... ****ing vultures. :mad:

[GeneChing]

James Bond flick ‘No Time to Die’ scraps China plans over coronavirus (https://nypost.com/2020/02/16/james-bond-flick-no-time-to-die-scraps-china-plans-over-coronavirus/)
By Lee Brown February 16, 2020 | 7:31pm

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/no-time-to-die-china-web.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=618&h=410&crop=1
Daniel Craig in the upcoming "No Time to Die."Mega; EON prod

Well, it is called “No Time to Die.”

James Bond appears to have finally met his match: The Chinese premiere and a huge planned publicity tour of the country for the movie franchise’s latest installment have been cancelled because of the deadly coronavirus.

Daniel Craig and other key stars in the upcoming 25th Bond blockbuster were due to travel to China for the flick’s premiere, which was set for April in Beijing, the Sunday Times of London said.

But COVID-19, which has infected more than 69,000 people, has obliterated those plans.

More than 70,000 cinemas across China are currently closed because of the health scare, the report said, and a studio insider added that the key stars are unlikely to get clearance to travel there even if the cinemas start opening again by April.

Deadline confirmed the 007 tour of China also was off because of “uncertainty surrounding the evolution of the epidemic.”

With China being the world’s second biggest box-office market after the US, the Sunday Times said the situation could likely scupper expectations for “No Time to Die” to be the highest-grossing movie in Bond history. The flick is Craig’s last turn as the suave UK spy.

“When you talk about film making $1 billion worldwide, you don’t usually do it without a big chunk of that total coming from China,” Jeff Bock, a senior analyst at entertainment research firm Exhibitor Relations, told the paper.

Other Hollywood films postponed in China because of the health crisis include “1917,” “Doolittle,” “Little Women” and “Jojo Rabbit,” the paper noted.

THREADS
No Time to Die (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71114-No-Time-to-Die)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

...I did a cursory search on IMDB and HKMDB and turned up nothing. It's making me ponder the overall effect of COVID-19 on the Chinese film industry.


ASIAFEBRUARY 17, 2020 2:04AM PT
Virus Kills Chinese Film Director and Family in Wuhan (https://variety.com/2020/film/asia/virus-kills-chinese-film-director-family-wuhan-1203505614/)
By VIVIENNE CHOW

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/wuhan-hospital-shutterstock_editorial_10557396b-cr-res.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1
CREDIT: CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

A Chinese film director and his entire family have died from the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.

Chang Kai, a film director and an external communications officer at a Hubei Film Studio subsidiary, died in hospital on Feb. 14 from the virus now called COVID-19, according to a statement from the studio. He was 55.

But Chang’s death was not the first in his family—the Chinese media reported that Chang’s father and mother were infected and died one after the other. Chang and his sister, who looked after their parents at home, were both infected with the virus as a result. His sister died just hours later. Chang’s wife is also infected, still alive, and is still battling the virus in an intensive care unit.

A note written by Chang, said to be his last words, has gone viral on the Chinese Internet. Chang wrote that his father succumbed to the illness on the first day of the Lunar New Year (January 25). “My father had a fever, cough and trouble breathing. [We] tried to send him to the hospital but none of the hospitals we visited took him, because they had no more beds,” he wrote.

Instead, Chang brought his father home where ha died a few days later, having passed on the virus to the other family members. Chang’s note said that he and his wife were denied the opportunity to be treated early. Wuhan built a new hospital in six days, but capacity to handle the virus remains strained. Chang bade farewell to his family, friends and his son, who is reportedly studying in the U.K.

Popular on Variety
Chang enrolled in Wuhan University’s journalism school to study photography in 1989, and joined Hubei Film Studio upon graduation. The studio praised Chang for his contribution to the studio’s development, saying that he was a well-respected colleague and his death was a painful loss.

As of Feb. 17, the virus has infected 71,330 —70,548 in mainland China—and claimed 1,775 lives (1,770 in mainland China), surpassing the death toll of SARS in 2003.



THREADS
Chollywood (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Hot Dry Noodles: The Traditionally Vegan & Addictive Dish From Wuhan (https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/hot-dry-noodles-traditionally-vegan-addictive-dish-from-wuhan/)
By Sally Ho Last updated Feb 14, 2020

https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/wuhan-noodles-sohu.jpeg
4 Mins Read
Whilst China and other countries around the world continue to battle the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, which the World Health Organisation recently declared a global public health emergency, fears about the spread of the coronavirus has been accompanied by a spike in anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia. Wuhan has been hardest hit with racist stereotyping and has been making international headlines, but many of us have forgotten the traditional Wuhan delicacy, which happens to be 100% plant-based.

A few words on racism

https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/mask-coronavirus-reuters.jpg
Source: Reuters

There are serious and substantiated concerns regarding the current novel coronavirus and its spread, but it has awakened prejudices, racist vitriol and stereotyping against people of mainland Chinese or Asian descent.

This not only contributes nothing to help quell the disease epidemic, it comes with the threat of overshadowing long-standing cultural traditions that all of us can appreciate. In particular, Wuhan, the epicentre of the novel coronavirus, has come under attack internationally and from other cities and provinces in mainland China.

The internet is awash with criticism and misleading claims about the apparent thirst for consuming wild animals in Wuhan peoples’ diets, stemming from the reports that the disease emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan that also sold a number of live animals.

While the novel coronavirus has thrust the danger and cruelty of the wild animal trade into the limelight, the demand for wild animals isn’t limited to Wuhan, nor is it confined within the borders of China alone. In fact, the supply chain extends throughout the world, stretching from Asia, Africa and elsewhere, including the United States. It is a global problem that the world must tackle if we are to prevent future disease epidemics, not to mention the animal welfare and wildlife conservation issues that stem from the trade.

Hot dry noodles: the addictive vegan dish from Wuhan

https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Wuhan-noodles-zhihu.jpg
Source: Zhihu

As a Hong Kong-based journalist hailing from Wuhan reminded us in a heartfelt open letter, it’s time to take stock and reflect on some of the traditions her hometown is known for, including the beloved local dish “Hot Dry Noodles”–which happens to be accidentally vegan and so delicious.

Re gan mian, which translates to hot and dry noodles, is the traditional dish of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China. Also known as the “Wuhan noodle”, this dish has had a long-standing history in Chinese food culture for almost 100 years, and is unique because unlike many Asian noodle dishes, the noodles aren’t served in soup. Instead, the dish is served “dry” with the vegan-friendly alkaline noodles coated in a rich, thick and creamy sesame sauce and topped with fresh spring onions. While the main seasoning is sesame paste, sometimes, the noodles are also topped with pickled spicy radish, which also originates from Hubei province.

And true to Wuhan cuisine, which shares with its nearby Sichuanese counterpart, the dish makes extensive use of chillies. Chillies are deeply embedded within both Wuhan and Sichuan food culture because the regions face a humid climate, which can be balanced out with hot and spicy foods in traditional Chinese medicinal beliefs. While preparing the seasoning and sauce of hot dry noodles, Wuhanese people typically use chilli oil and fresh coriander to bring out both the delicious taste of sesame and give a kick of heat.

This dish is so significant in Wuhan food culture that it is a popular breakfast food in the city, often sold in street carts and restaurants across towns as early as 5am in the morning, all throughout the day until the evening, where the famous dish appears at night markets as a late-night snack.

Make your own hot dry noodles

https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Woks-of-life-hot-dry-noodles.jpg
Source: Woks of Life

“Wuhan noodles” calls for alkaline noodles, the most common type of ramen noodle available in most supermarkets across Asia, which are made out of wheat flour and kansui (alkaline water) to give its salty taste and springy quality. If they happen to be unavailable, they can be easily substituted for spaghetti (cooked al dente) for a similar texture and taste, or gluten-free versions to suit individual dietary preferences.

For the seasoning and sauce, hot dry noodles typically contain five spice powder, a blend of cinnamon, cloves, fennel, star anise and Sichuan peppercorns, sesame paste, sesame oil, light and dark soy sauce and salt. Once the sauce is mixed in to coat the cooked noodles, top the dish with a sprinkle of chopped green onions, pickled radish, chilli oil and coriander.

Lead image courtesy of Sohu.



THREADS
Noodles (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69740-Noodles)
Vegetarian (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?19996-Vegetarian)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Here again is what I was alluding to in my 2/6 post (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1317668#post1317668). So many industries get parts and supplies from China. All PRC factories shut down during Chinese New Year (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat), so any company relying on Chinese-made parts like us (http://www.tigerclaw.com/) have ordered ahead in preparation for their down time. But no one anticipated this, and now the CNY is over, the factories remain closed. It's going to affect so many industries. We are on the verge of a potential global economic disaster.


FEBRUARY 18, 2020 / 6:49 AM / UPDATED AN HOUR AGO
Jaguar Land Rover to run out of Chinese parts for UK production after two weeks: CEO (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-jaguarlandrover/jaguar-land-rover-to-run-out-of-chinese-parts-for-uk-production-after-two-weeks-ceo-idUSKBN20C1WP)
1 MIN READ

https://s2.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20200218&t=2&i=1491977415&w=1200&r=LYNXMPEG1H14G
FILE PHOTO: Signs are seen outside the Jaguar Land Rover plant at Halewood in Liverpool, northern England, September 12 , 2016. REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo

WARWICK, England (Reuters) - Jaguar Land Rover (TAMO.NS) has enough parts from China to maintain its British production for the next two weeks but not beyond that at the moment, Chief Executive Ralf Speth said on Tuesday.

The head of Britain’s biggest carmaker also told reporters that sales were not currently happening in China.

Reporting by Costas Pitas; writing by Kate Holton; editing by Alistair Smout

[GeneChing]

Coronavirus forces One Championship to put Singapore MMA show behind closed doors (https://www.scmp.com/sport/martial-arts/mixed-martial-arts/article/3051078/coronavirus-forces-one-championship-put)
‘King of the Jungle’ will still be broadcast live on February 28 but tickets for Singapore Indoor Stadium will be refunded
‘My team and I had the option to cancel the event altogether, but we chose not to,’ says CEO Chatri Sityodtong
Nick Atkin
Published: 10:54am, 18 Feb, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/02/18/8f5fa582-51f6-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_image_hires_105412.jpg?itok=mLvTmgRQ&v=1581994457
Stamp Fairtex pummels Puja Tomar in Bangkok. She will headline the ‘King of the Jungle’ card in Singapore. Photos: One Championship

One Championship has decided to press ahead with its “King of the Jungle” card in Singapore on February 28, but the event will play out behind closed doors because of the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus.
Chatri Sityodtong, CEO of the Asian MMA promotion, said all tickets bought for show at the 12,000-capacity Singapore Indoor Stadium would be refunded, after deciding against cancelling it altogether. The event, headlined by Stamp Fairtex defending her atomweight kick-boxing title against Janet Todd, will still be broadcast live on television and digital platforms.
The Singapore government had already raised the DORSCON (Disease Outbreak Response System Condition) alert level to orange last week, with the Ministry of Health urging organisers to cancel or defer non-essential events.
“My team and I had the option to cancel the event altogether, but we chose not to cancel it,” Sityodtong said in a statement.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/18/335d577c-51f4-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_972x_105412.JPG
Demetrious Johnson will now get his One flyweight title shot in Jakarta, instead of Chongqing.

“Let us unite as a country and let us show strength as a continent to conquer this coronavirus,” he added. “We will get through these tough times together. Majulah Singapura! Jiayou China!”
There have been 77 reported cases of the coronavirus in Singapore, but no deaths. China’s health authorities on Tuesday reported 1,886 new coronavirus cases and 98 deaths on the mainland, taking the totals to 72,436 and 1,868 respectively, as of midnight on Monday.

The coronavirus has already seen One relocate its April 10 show from Chongqing in China to Jakarta, Indonesia.

One flyweight grand prix winner and former UFC champion Demetrious Johnson will aim to add more gold to his resume when he takes on flyweight champion Adriano Moraes, in the first of four bumper “One Infinity” cards in 2020.

The UFC has also been affected by the outbreak of the coronavirus in Asia. Strawweight champion Zhang Weili has twice had to move her training camp, first from Beijing to Thailand, and then to Abu Dhabi, ahead of her UFC 248 title defence on March 7 against Joanna Jedrzejczyk.



Nick Atkin

Nick is a production editor on the South China Morning Post’s sport desk, where he covers mixed martial arts (MMA). He was previously a sports writer and editor for ESPN.

THREADS
ONE Championship (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71006-ONE-Championship)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Zhang Weili (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71462-Zhang-Weili)

[GeneChing]

Misguided Virus Fears Hitting Asian American Businesses In Bay Area, Nation (https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/02/18/coronavirus-covid-19-fears-asian-american-businesses-impact/?fbclid=IwAR1SKJNq6FPE33DoTFJZ24y-Oqns-nqu32BNVe6FZwzhNFRRYg8t1vICwD4)
February 18, 2020 at 9:00 amFiled Under:Asian American, Coronavirus, Coronavirus Outbreak, COVID-19, Discrimination, Oakland, Oakland news

OAKLAND (CBS / AP) — In Arizona, a burgeoning Asian American community fields xenophobic calls about a planned night market featuring Asian street foods. In New York, a dim sum restaurant owner worries he won’t make rent. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a local Asian American-owned restaurant chain is mulling temporarily shuttering one of its properties because of the downturn in trade.

In major U.S. cities, Asian American businesses are seeing a remarkable decline in customers as fear about the viral outbreak from China spreads. City and health officials are trying to staunch the financial bleeding through information campaigns and personal visits to shops and restaurants, emphasizing that, with just 15 cases diagnosed in the entire country, there is no reason to avoid them.

Business owners, some of whom have seen their customer traffic cut by more than half, are anxiously waiting for things to return to normal.

The situation is dire enough that Sunny Wong’s family is considering temporarily closing one of the four restaurants they own in Oakland Chinatown. Even some of his friends and patrons have told him about hearing of untrue rumors of people getting sick at one of his restaurants.

“People just are clueless. They hear stories and rumors and they just don’t really look for the facts in a situation,” said Wong, adding that he has had to cut back hours for his workers.

Carl Chan, president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, said business owners have reported a drop of roughly 50% to 75% in business. The chamber is planning a Chinese New Year celebration, with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf encouraging residents to patronize Chinatown restaurants.

Mesa, Arizona’s freshly crowned Asian District was deep into organizing its night market when news broke that a case of the illness known as COVID-19 was confirmed at nearby Arizona State University.

Xenophobic comments on social media and phone calls started almost immediately, according to Arizona Asian Chamber of Commerce CEO Vicente Reid.

“I probably should stop picking up my phone altogether,” Reid said. “One lady was like, ‘Well, aren’t people coming to your event that are the cause of it?'”

The Feb. 29 food festival, modeled after popular outdoor Taiwanese markets, was designed to get the public acquainted with the district.

Mesa Mayor John Giles called the xenophobia directed at the event “ridiculous.”

“We certainly take any health crisis seriously but to make those kinds of connections is just offensive,” he said.

Organizers will be handing out specially made masks with playful Asian-food theme slogans like “Bao to me” and “Insert lumpia here.”

The virus has sickened tens of thousands of people, mostly in China. Fifteen people have been diagnosed with the virus in the U.S., all but two who recently traveled from China. U.S. citizens have also been diagnosed abroad, including 14 who were on a cruise ship quarantined off Japan and have been brought to hospitals in the U.S.

Vegetarian Dim Sum House has been a fixture in Manhattan’s Chinatown for 23 years, but suddenly owner Frankie Chu said he will not be able to make his rent this month.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/15116056/2020/02/AP_20046063503349.jpg?resize=640,427
In this Feb. 13, 2020, photo, Frankie Chu, owner of Vegetarian Dim Sum House in New York’s Chinatown, sits in his empty restaurant usually bustling with customers, in New York. Sales have plunged 70% over the last two weeks. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Chu said sales have plunged 70% over the last two weeks at his no-frills restaurant. Three couples trickled in for lunch on a recent weekday. Normally, Chu said he gets up to 30 customers for lunch. At dinnertime, his narrow restaurant is usually packed with about 70 diners. These days, he gets about four.

Chu has sent some of his staff on vacation to cut costs. Under the circumstances, he will ask his landlord to forgive a 5% late fee normally charged.

“I don’t know how long I can stay here,” Chu said. “After 9/11, it wasn’t this bad.”

The crisis has alarmed New York City officials and business leaders, who have launched a campaign to lure people back to hard-hit communities in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn.

“Chinatown is bleeding,” said Wellington Chen, executive chairman of the Chinatown Partnership, a local business and community group. “This thing is thousands of miles away. This fear is really out of proportion.”

Small businesses in Manhattan’s Chinatown have reported sales drops of between 40% and 80% the past month as the viral outbreak in China spread, Chen said. In Flushing, business is down an estimated 40%, according to the Flushing Chinese Business Association.

For some businesses, it’s much higher. Derek Law, senior vice chairman of the America China Hotel Association, said business has dropped about 70% at a spa he owns in Flushing.

New York City is home to more than half a million Chinese Americans, the biggest population of any U.S. city. Some New Yorkers of Chinese descent are frustrated at being made to feel like foreigners because of a disease outbreak that feels as far away to them as any other resident.

“I’m probably more American than a lot of the people asking me about coronavirus. It’s a little annoying to be honest,” said Christina Seid, owner of the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, a neighborhood fixture that her father founded four decades ago with flavor offerings like mango and green tea.

Seid, whose great-grandparents immigrated to New York from China, said business has been slower than usual but added that the winter months are never good for ice cream shops. She said she feels optimistic that things will soon return to normal, relying on New Yorkers’ determination to get on with life.

With no confirmed cases of the virus in New York City, officials and politicians are trying to drive home the point that there is no reason to avoid any neighborhood, with many eating at Chinese restaurants and tweeting out photos under the hashtags #supportchinatown.

In Boston, Mayor Marty Walsh has launched a similar social media campaign, encouraging people to share photos of themselves supporting small businesses in the neighborhood with the hashtag #LoveBostonChinatown.

Allison Arwady, the Chicago Department of Public Health commissioner, said she and her colleagues “continue to field rumors” about threats to public health. She said the health risk is low and urged people to not fear visiting and spending time at restaurants or stores in Chicago’s Chinatown.

“Please do not allow stigma, xenophobia or fear to control your decisions,” Arwady said.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently visited Nom Wah Tea Parlor, the oldest restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

The restaurant has seen a 40% drop in business over the past three weeks, said manager Vincent Tang, whose cousin Wilson Tang took over the restaurant from his father. Normally, the restaurant fills up at lunchtime. But during a recent weekday, nearly half the tables were empty, although it was at least busier than many of its lesser-known neighbors.

“We’re lucky to have loyal customers,” said Tang, sitting near an row of green stools that he used to swing around in as a child. “Usually at this time we are packed and there is a line outside.”

Customers at Nom Wah said they were perplexed that others were staying away.

“It didn’t cross my mind at all,” said Kate Masterson, an artist digging into dumplings with her uncle at a booth beneath signed framed photographs of celebrities like Kirsten Dunst.

“It’s not happening here,” she said of the outbreak.

We have been aggressively sanitizing the office. That's something I've always felt should be done. But yeah, “It’s not happening here,”

[GeneChing]

This reminds me of that Wayne Wang movie - Life Is Cheap... But Toilet Paper Is Expensive (1989)



Coronavirus: Chinese toilet paper makers say there’s ‘plenty of stock’ after panic buying in Hong Kong (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3051462/coronavirus-chinese-toilet-paper-makers-say-theres-plenty-stock)
Mainland manufacturers say supply hasn’t been affected and there hasn’t been a noticeable increase in orders from over the border
Researcher says city’s supply is ‘never a problem’ and stockpiling was driven by fear
SCMP
Guo Rui and Mandy Zuo in Shanghai
Published: 10:26pm, 19 Feb, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/02/19/868a2e0a-5318-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_image_hires_224643.JPG?itok=G_nwIVsj&v=1582123609
A shopper stocks up on toilet rolls at a supermarket in Hong Kong on February 5 amid fears over the coronavirus outbreak. Photo: Nora Tam

Guangzhou lawyer Ding Yaqing just could not understand it when she saw images of people panic buying toilet paper over the border in Hong Kong because of the coronavirus outbreak.
“I saw [on the news] that Hong Kong people are stockpiling toilet paper,” Ding said. “But why? How could Hong Kong ever run out?”
In Haizhu district where Ding lives, the supermarkets and convenience stores are well stocked with the bathroom necessity, and there are fewer shoppers around because of measures to control the spread of the deadly virus.
For Ding, who has been working from home like many people in mainland China and Hong Kong amid the outbreak, running out of toilet paper is not a concern – she can buy it online.
“I can always order it online and my understanding is that many manufacturers have resumed production, so there is really nothing to worry about,” she said, referring to the extended break after the Lunar New Year holiday because of the epidemic.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/19/83c37d70-5318-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_1320x770_224643.JPG
Hongkongers have been panic buying toilet paper in recent weeks. Photo: Reuters

Toilet paper has become a highly sought after item in Hong Kong in recent weeks, with shoppers emptying supermarket shelves of the product and stockpiling tissues, disinfectant and liquid hand soap as the city braces for more cases of the virus.
The new coronavirus strain, which causes a disease now known as Covid-19, has killed more than 2,000 people and infected over 74,000, since the outbreak began in December. In Hong Kong, 63 cases have been reported and two people have died from the pneumonia-like illness.
The panic buying was apparently driven by a fear that Hong Kong would close its border with Shenzhen, disrupting the supply of daily necessities like toilet paper as mainland China struggles to control the outbreak.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHNER686Ngk&feature=emb_logo
Armed gang steals 600 toilet rolls as panic buying continues in Hong Kong amid coronavirus outbreak
continued next post

[GeneChing]

A spokesman for Hengan Group, a leading personal hygiene products manufacturer based in Fujian province, said even with the spike in demand from Hong Kong and the Lunar New Year break, production levels were normal.
“Our supply of toilet paper for Hong Kong has remained stable and we have plenty of stock despite the Lunar New Year holiday,” said a public relations manager for Hengan, surnamed Chen.
“We’re not changing our sales strategy [because of what’s happened in Hong Kong],” she said, adding that the company – whose toilet paper brands include Pino – had not seen any noticeable increase in orders from the city in recent weeks.
Guangdong-based Ho-Comfort, another personal hygiene products maker, also said the run on toilet paper in Hong Kong had not had any impact on its business.
Liu Yuanquan, a vice-president of the company, said while production had been stalled by the slow return to work after the Lunar New Year break, sales to Hong Kong were normal.
“Our production capacity is down by half because fewer workers have returned but our supply to Hong Kong has not been affected because the city only accounts for about 10 per cent of our output,” Liu said.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McZn6niKo0M&feature=emb_logo
China’s delivery workers risk infection as online sales surge amid coronavirus outbreak

Guo Yukuan, a senior researcher with the China Society of Economic Reform, a state-backed think tank, said the panic buying was irrational.
“This is purely driven by panic and stress,” Guo said. “China’s production capacity [for toilet paper] can supply not just Hong Kong but the whole world, and as a free port, Hong Kong can always import from other sources,” he said. “Hong Kong’s supply is never a problem and the market will eventually adjust itself.”
Purchase the China AI Report 2020 brought to you by SCMP Research and enjoy a 20% discount (original price US$400). This 60-page all new intelligence report gives you first-hand insights and analysis into the latest industry developments and intelligence about China AI. Get exclusive access to our webinars for continuous learning, and interact with China AI executives in live Q&A. Offer valid until 31 March 2020.




Guo Rui
Guo Rui is a China reporter covering elite politics, domestic policies, environmental protection, civil society, and social movement. She is also a documentary filmmaker, recording modern Chinese history and social issues through film.

Mandy Zuo
Mandy Zuo joined the Post in 2010 and reports on China. She has covered a wide range of subjects including policy, rural issues, culture and society. She worked in Beijing before relocating to Shanghai in 2014.

THREADS
Chinese toilets (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65867-Chinese-toilets)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

I'll be posting an announcement about our company very soon. Yes, as I've been saying, we are on the front lines. And we are seeing one of the first effects upon us right now.


Sputtering restaurant sales, obstacles to adoption, xenophobia: All the unexpected ways the coronavirus has impacted the world (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/19/world/coronavirus-unexpected-effects-trnd/index.html)
By Scottie Andrew, CNN
Updated 7:16 AM ET, Wed February 19, 2020

Coronavirus outbreak shows no sign of slowing down
(CNN)There are still several unknowns surrounding the novel coronavirus: How quickly it spreads, the symptoms it presents (or lack thereof) and the impact it will ultimately have on the global population.
But the virus is already affecting pockets of business, travel and life in unexpected ways in China, where it originated, and beyond.
Chinese nationals bear the brunt of the coronavirus's impact -- most of the people it's sickened or killed are Chinese. But the virus and fear surrounding it have hurt business at Chinese restaurants across the world, dented Disney's annual earnings and even impeded American families meeting their adopted children in China because of travel restrictions.

Top companies are seeing profits drop

Brands such as Starbucks, Nike and Capri Holdings, which owns luxury brands including Versace, have closed thousands of stores in China because of mandatory lockdowns. The stores that remain open operate under limited hours and see few customers.
And Apple, one of the most profitable companies on Earth, warned investors this week it won't meet revenue guidelines it provided for the upcoming March quarter. The virus outbreak and ensuing closures and shortages have limited the number of devices it can make and sell in China.
Disney, another major investor in China, could lose as much as $280 million while its theme parks in the region are shuttered. Both Shanghai Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland are closed indefinitely, and the company said its 2020 earnings will likely suffer as a result.

There are fewer parts for the world's cars

China makes more cars than any other country, so extended closures at plants and suppliers could have a global impact. Major automakers source many of their parts from China, which is considered the international manufacturing base for electric car parts.
Car plants were ordered to shut down since the Lunar New Year in January, and many have remained closed since. Toyota, the world's second-largest carmaker, only reopened a few of its production plants this week.

Oil demand is shrinking for the first time in 10 years

Because the virus has forced factories to close and kept people shut in, the amount of oil needed to keep the global economy running has sharply declined. Global oil demand is expected to drop by 435,000 barrels in the first three months of 2020 compared to the same period last year.
It's the first quarterly decline in a decade, according to the International Energy Agency.
It's too early to tell exactly how lower oil demand will affect the global economy, but the agency has some predictions: "Consequences will vary over time, with the initial economic hit on transportation and services, likely followed by Chinese industry, then eventually exports and the broader economy," it said in a statement.

Fear of the virus is fueling racism and xenophobia

Misinformation campaigns have falsely linked the outbreak to Chinese people eating wild animals, backed up by misleading photos that predate the outbreak by several years. They've contributed to xenophobic rumors surrounding the coronavirus, all targeted at people of Chinese and East Asian descent.
Unfounded fears have traveled overseas: Chinese restaurants in Australia, Canada and prominent Chinatowns in the US have seen sales sputter as fewer people visit them. A viewer sent CNN a sign outside of a restaurant in Vietnam that said, "No Chinese." A French newspaper published an image of a Chinese woman in a mask alongside the headline, "Yellow Alert."
The xenophobia surrounding the coronavirus is evocative to the racism Chinese people faced in the 19th century US or in 2003 during the SARS outbreak, CNN's Jessie Yeung said.

Airlines suspended flights to China

More than 20 airlines have suspended flights to and from China since the outbreak began. In the US, those include American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta. The third airline suspended all flights until the end of April.
Click here to read the rest of the airlines that have suspended travel to and from China.

Families can't meet their newly adopted children

Several American families' plans to adopt children from China have been temporarily derailed by the virus -- the State Department has issued a "Do Not Travel" advisory for China for all US citizens, including adoptive families.
As a result, the adopted children are stuck in Chinese orphanages, though the facilities have not allowed visitors or caregivers to stay on the property to avoid infecting children there.
Adoptive parents told CNN they've been given no timeline as to when they can meet their children.

China is cleaning or destroying cash

Buildings in affected areas in China are disinfecting elevator buttons, door handles and now, cash.
The People's Bank of China announced last week it would begin deep cleaning cash to prevent the spread of the virus. Every bank in the country will disinfect it using ultraviolet light and high temperatures, then store it for a week to two weeks before it's approved for use by customers.


CNN's Jessie Yeung, Harmeet Kaur, Seth Fiegerman, Jill Disis, Charles Riley and Michelle Toh contributed to this report.

[Jimbo]

I wouldn’t be surprised if the PRC government is secretly happy about Covid-19, because it effectively put an end to the Hong Kong protests.

[GeneChing]

Chinese medic in hazmat suit teaches coronavirus patients martial arts to keep them active during quarantine (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8003703/Doctor-hazmat-suit-teaches-coronavirus-patients-Tai-Chi-help-exercise-quarantine.html)
The nurse is seen giving coronavirus patients a lesson in quarantine units
Tai Chi is a style of Chinese martial arts and is known for its health benefits
The medic claims the exercise can help patients stay active and optimistic
Coronavirus has infected over 64,400 people globally with at least 1,383 deaths
By EMILIA JIANG FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 07:28 EST, 14 February 2020 | UPDATED: 13:41 EST, 14 February 2020

Chinese medical workers have started to teach coronavirus patients martial arts to help them stay active during quarantine.

A new video has captured one hazmat suit-clad medic giving his patients a Tai Chi lesson in a hospital ward in Anhui Province, eastern China.

The footage comes after medics in Wuhan's makeshift coronavirus hospitals leading their patients to dance during isolation to help them keep fit.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/11/24735396-8003703-image-a-17_1581679274738.jpg
A Chinese medical worker is seen giving coronavirus patients a Tai Chi lesson to help them stay active during quarantine at hospital in Hefei, a city of Anhui province in eastern China

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/11/24735394-8003703-image-m-22_1581679319966.jpg
The hazmat suit-clad medic, Zhang Chao, who is in his early 20s, demonstrates a few simple Tai Chi moves and encourages patients with minor symptoms to keep exercising

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/11/24735392-8003703-image-m-24_1581679338858.jpg
Zhang explains that simple Tai Chi moves can help the coronavirus sufferers stay active and maintain a positive attitude towards the illness as he is pictured practising the movements

The video was filmed on Monday at a hospital in Hefei, the provincial capital of Anhui.

The nurse is called Zhang Chao and in his early 20s.

In the clip, a patient with minor symptoms is seen practising the moves. The health worker tells him to 'do it slowly because you are still quite weak'.

Tai Chi is a school of Chinese martial arts and it is known for its self-defense purposes and health benefits.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/10/24734654-8003703-image-a-8_1581677854446.jpg
Tai Chi is a school of Chinese martial arts and it is known for its health benefits. In the picture above, an elderly woman is seen practising at a park in Beijing during the coronavirus outbreak

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/18/24749878-8003703-image-a-3_1581705688251.jpg
The novel coronavirus, formally known as COVID-19, has infected over 64,400 people globally and claimed at least 1,383 lives. The majority of the cases and fatalities happened in China

Chinese people believe the exercise can improve one's health and balance, especially for the elderly.

Zhang explains that simple Tai Chi moves can help coronavirus sufferers stay active and maintain a positive attitude towards the illness.

'It is harder than it looks,' the nurse tells his patients as he is giving them a demonstration, 'just take it easy and practise slowly'.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/18/24694442-8003703-Due_to_the_restrictions_to_large_crowds_in_public_ places_imposed-a-1_1581705622824.jpg
Due to the restrictions to large crowds in public places imposed by the authorities after the coronavirus outbreak, patients have decided to move the exercise to the quarantine units

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/10/24734318-8003703-image-a-1_1581677041571.jpg
The deadly virus continues to affect the daily life of millions of people across China as a woman pictured in front of the Forbidden City, one of the top tourist attractions in Beijing
continued next post

[GeneChing]

The novel coronavirus, formally known as COVID-19, has infected over 64,400 people globally and brought the total number of deaths to 1,383.

Nine cases have been confirmed in the UK after a woman flew in London from China a few days ago and was diagnosed with the virus.

A line of Chinese senior officials were removed from their posts on Thursday, including the Communist Party chiefs of Hubei and Wuhan, after being accused of shirking responsibilities during the outbreak.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/10/24734378-8003703-image-a-7_1581677181276.jpg
A health worker is pictured talking on her phone as she leaves for Wuhan from Nanchang and joins other medical staff on the front line at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/10/24734352-8003703-image-a-2_1581677057423.jpg
The picture shows a group of medical workers in hazmat suits at a checkpoint for registration

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/14/18/24735770-8003703-Nine_cases_have_been_confirmed_in_the_UK_after_a_w oman_flew_in_L-a-2_1581705622907.jpg
Nine cases have been confirmed in the UK after a woman flew in London from China a few days ago and was diagnosed with coronavirus. 116 British people are in quarantine with 11 untested



WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE DEADLY CORONAVIRUS IN CHINA?
Someone who is infected with the coronavirus can spread it with just a simple cough or a sneeze, scientists say.

Over 2,000 people with the virus are now confirmed to have died and more than 75,000 have been infected. But experts predict the true number of people with the disease could be as high as 350,000 in Wuhan alone, as they warn it may kill as many as two in 100 cases. Here's what we know so far:

What is the coronavirus?

A coronavirus is a type of virus which can cause illness in animals and people. Viruses break into cells inside their host and use them to reproduce itself and disrupt the body's normal functions. Coronaviruses are named after the Latin word 'corona', which means crown, because they are encased by a spiked shell which resembles a royal crown.

The coronavirus from Wuhan is one which has never been seen before this outbreak. It has been named SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. The name stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2.

Experts say the bug, which has killed around one in 50 patients since the outbreak began in December, is a 'sister' of the SARS illness which hit China in 2002, so has been named after it.

The disease that the virus causes has been named COVID-19, which stands for coronavirus disease 2019. The virus itself is called SARS-CoV-2.

Dr Helena Maier, from the Pirbright Institute, said: 'Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that infect a wide range of different species including humans, cattle, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats and wild animals.

'Until this new coronavirus was identified, there were only six different coronaviruses known to infect humans. Four of these cause a mild common cold-type illness, but since 2002 there has been the emergence of two new coronaviruses that can infect humans and result in more severe disease (Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses).

'Coronaviruses are known to be able to occasionally jump from one species to another and that is what happened in the case of SARS, MERS and the new coronavirus. The animal origin of the new coronavirus is not yet known.'

The first human cases were publicly reported from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where approximately 11million people live, after medics first started publicly reporting infections on December 31.

By January 8, 59 suspected cases had been reported and seven people were in critical condition. Tests were developed for the new virus and recorded cases started to surge.

The first person died that week and, by January 16, two were dead and 41 cases were confirmed. The next day, scientists predicted that 1,700 people had become infected, possibly up to 7,000.

Just a week after that, there had been more than 800 confirmed cases and those same scientists estimated that some 4,000 – possibly 9,700 – were infected in Wuhan alone. By that point, 26 people had died.

By January 27, more than 2,800 people were confirmed to have been infected, 81 had died, and estimates of the total number of cases ranged from 100,000 to 350,000 in Wuhan alone.

By January 29, the number of deaths had risen to 132 and cases were in excess of 6,000.

By February 5, there were more than 24,000 cases and 492 deaths.

By February 11, this had risen to more than 43,000 cases and 1,000 deaths.

A change in the way cases are confirmed on February 13 – doctors decided to start using lung scans as a formal diagnosis, as well as laboratory tests – caused a spike in the number of cases, to more than 60,000 and to 1,369 deaths.

Where does the virus come from?

According to scientists, the virus has almost certainly come from bats. Coronaviruses in general tend to originate in animals – the similar SARS and MERS viruses are believed to have originated in civet cats and camels, respectively.

The first cases of COVID-19 came from people visiting or working in a live animal market in the city, which has since been closed down for investigation.

Although the market is officially a seafood market, other dead and living animals were being sold there, including wolf cubs, salamanders, snakes, peacocks, porcupines and camel meat.

A study by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, published in February 2020 in the scientific journal Nature, found that the genetic make-up virus samples found in patients in China is 96 per cent similar to a coronavirus they found in bats.

However, there were not many bats at the market so scientists say it was likely there was an animal which acted as a middle-man, contracting it from a bat before then transmitting it to a human. It has not yet been confirmed what type of animal this was.

Dr Michael Skinner, a virologist at Imperial College London, was not involved with the research but said: 'The discovery definitely places the origin of nCoV in bats in China.

'We still do not know whether another species served as an intermediate host to amplify the virus, and possibly even to bring it to the market, nor what species that host might have been.'
continued next post

[GeneChing]

So far the fatalities are quite low. Why are health experts so worried about it?

Experts say the international community is concerned about the virus because so little is known about it and it appears to be spreading quickly.

It is similar to SARS, which infected 8,000 people and killed nearly 800 in an outbreak in Asia in 2003, in that it is a type of coronavirus which infects humans' lungs.

Another reason for concern is that nobody has any immunity to the virus because they've never encountered it before. This means it may be able to cause more damage than viruses we come across often, like the flu or common cold.

Speaking at a briefing in January, Oxford University professor, Dr Peter Horby, said: 'Novel viruses can spread much faster through the population than viruses which circulate all the time because we have no immunity to them.

'Most seasonal flu viruses have a case fatality rate of less than one in 1,000 people. Here we're talking about a virus where we don't understand fully the severity spectrum but it's possible the case fatality rate could be as high as two per cent.'

If the death rate is truly two per cent, that means two out of every 100 patients who get it will die.

'My feeling is it's lower,' Dr Horby added. 'We're probably missing this iceberg of milder cases. But that's the current circumstance we're in.

'Two per cent case fatality rate is comparable to the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 so it is a significant concern globally.'

How does the virus spread?

The illness can spread between people just through coughs and sneezes, making it an extremely contagious infection. And it may also spread even before someone has symptoms.

It is believed to travel in the saliva and even through water in the eyes, therefore close contact, kissing, and sharing cutlery or utensils are all risky.

Originally, people were thought to be catching it from a live animal market in Wuhan city. But cases soon began to emerge in people who had never been there, which forced medics to realise it was spreading from person to person.

There is now evidence that it can spread third hand – to someone from a person who caught it from another person.

What does the virus do to you? What are the symptoms?

Once someone has caught the COVID-19 virus it may take between two and 14 days, or even longer, for them to show any symptoms – but they may still be contagious during this time.

If and when they do become ill, typical signs include a runny nose, a cough, sore throat and a fever (high temperature). The vast majority of patients – at least 97 per cent, based on available data – will recover from these without any issues or medical help.

In a small group of patients, who seem mainly to be the elderly or those with long-term illnesses, it can lead to pneumonia. Pneumonia is an infection in which the insides of the lungs swell up and fill with fluid. It makes it increasingly difficult to breathe and, if left untreated, can be fatal and suffocate people.

What have genetic tests revealed about the virus?

Scientists in China have recorded the genetic sequences of around 19 strains of the virus and released them to experts working around the world.

This allows others to study them, develop tests and potentially look into treating the illness they cause.

Examinations have revealed the coronavirus did not change much – changing is known as mutating – much during the early stages of its spread.

However, the director-general of China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, said the virus was mutating and adapting as it spread through people.

This means efforts to study the virus and to potentially control it may be made extra difficult because the virus might look different every time scientists analyse it.

More study may be able to reveal whether the virus first infected a small number of people then change and spread from them, or whether there were various versions of the virus coming from animals which have developed separately.

How dangerous is the virus?

The virus has a death rate of around two per cent. This is a similar death rate to the Spanish Flu outbreak which, in 1918, went on to kill around 50million people.

However, experts say the true number of patients is likely considerably higher and therefore the death rate considerably lower. Imperial College London researchers estimate that there were 4,000 (up to 9,700) cases in Wuhan city alone up to January 18 – officially there were only 444 there to that date. If cases are in fact 100 times more common than the official figures, the virus may be far less dangerous than currently believed, but also far more widespread.

Experts say it is likely only the most seriously ill patients are seeking help and are therefore recorded – the vast majority will have only mild, cold-like symptoms. For those whose conditions do become more severe, there is a risk of developing pneumonia which can destroy the lungs and kill you.


Can the virus be cured?

The COVID-19 virus cannot currently be cured and it is proving difficult to contain.

Antibiotics do not work against viruses, so they are out of the question. Antiviral drugs can work, but the process of understanding a virus then developing and producing drugs to treat it would take years and huge amounts of money.

No vaccine exists for the coronavirus yet and it's not likely one will be developed in time to be of any use in this outbreak, for similar reasons to the above.

The National Institutes of Health in the US, and Baylor University in Waco, Texas, say they are working on a vaccine based on what they know about coronaviruses in general, using information from the SARS outbreak. But this may take a year or more to develop, according to Pharmaceutical Technology.

Currently, governments and health authorities are working to contain the virus and to care for patients who are sick and stop them infecting other people.

People who catch the illness are being quarantined in hospitals, where their symptoms can be treated and they will be away from the uninfected public.

And airports around the world are putting in place screening measures such as having doctors on-site, taking people's temperatures to check for fevers and using thermal screening to spot those who might be ill (infection causes a raised temperature).

However, it can take weeks for symptoms to appear, so there is only a small likelihood that patients will be spotted up in an airport.

Is this outbreak an epidemic or a pandemic?

The outbreak is an epidemic, which is when a disease takes hold of one community such as a country or region.

Although it has spread to dozens of countries, the outbreak is not yet classed as a pandemic, which is defined by the World Health Organization as the 'worldwide spread of a new disease'.

The head of WHO's global infectious hazard preparedness, Dr Sylvie Briand, said: 'Currently we are not in a pandemic. We are at the phase where it is an epidemic with multiple foci, and we try to extinguish the transmission in each of these foci,' the Guardian reported.

She said that most cases outside of Hubei had been 'spillover' from the epicentre, so the disease wasn't actually spreading actively around the world.

THREADS
Tai Chi as medicine (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?50553-Tai-Chi-as-medicine)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

‘China will win the coronavirus battle’: Ip Man star Donnie Yen donates HK$1 million to frontline medical workers in Wuhan (https://www.scmp.com/sport/martial-arts/article/3051414/china-will-win-coronavirus-battle-ip-man-star-donnie-yen-donates?utm_content=article&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3UmWZm3uW09eRP0a67X61I9W_Ko2FnPm2Bg-v_xjr6I-K8ViN3XN9H1dI#Echobox=1582106918)
The 56-year-old star and film producer posts a 28-second video clip on Weibo thanking frontline medical staff
The Hong Kong actor’s donation comes at the back of two successful movie releases lately
Unus Alladin
Published: 5:50pm, 19 Feb, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/02/19/2965cdc2-52f7-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_image_hires_233842.jpeg?itok=cYRz-X_o&v=1582126732
A sombre Donnie Yen thanks medical workers in his 28-second video clip on Weibo. Photo: Weibo

Ip Man star Donnie Yen Ji-dan will donate HK$1 million to medical staff working on the frontline in the fight to eliminate the coronavirus. And he believes China will win the battle.
Yen has been in the news lately with his finale of the Ip Man franchise bringing the curtain down on a highly successful series. His latest movie release, Enter the Fat Dragon, has also received positive reviews, giving him a solid foothold in the martial arts movie industry this year.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/19/cec4fedc-52f7-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_1320x770_233842.JPG
Donnie Yen gets serious in Ip Man 4: The Finale. Photo: Mandarin Motion Pictures

The 56-year-old Hong Kong martial arts star and film producer turned to a more serious note when he told thousands of his followers on Chinese website, Weibo, that he wanted to thank all medical workers in China in their fight against the coronavirus.
The Guangzhou-born star said paintings drawn by his two children, Jasmine and James, would also be donated to Wuhan to help “spread cheer” to frontline workers.
Wuhan is the epicentre of the coronavirus that has ravaged much of Hubei province and other parts of China. The deadly virus has spread to more than 25 countries.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/19/e46f9044-52f7-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_972x_233842.JPG
Ip Man 4 is a fitting end to the franchise. Photo: Mandarin Motion Pictures

Speaking in Mandarin, Yen made a 28-second video which he posted on Weibo. A sombre-looking Yen said: “Hello everyone, I am Yen Ji-dan. I want to take this opportunity to thank all the medical frontline workers [in China]. In this critical moment, everyone please protect yourself well by wearing a mask and washing your hands more often. Distance yourself from the virus but don’t distance love. I believe our country [China] will win the battle against the virus and have the situation under control. Wuhan add oil [come on], China add oil.”
Ip Man 4 star Donnie Yen ‘very disappointed’ by Quentin Tarantino’s Bruce Lee depiction
12 Dec 2019

Having wowed movie audiences with the fourth and final instalment of the highly popular Ip Man series in Ip Man 4: The Finale, Yen has enjoyed a new lease of life with his latest movie, an action-packed buddy-cop comedy, Enter the Fat Dragon, which was released during the Lunar New Year holidays.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/19/ad2b9b00-52f7-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_1320x770_233842.JPG
Donnie Yen in a still from Enter the Fat Dragon. Photo: Mega-Vision Pictures

Ip Man 4: The Finale broke box office records in several Asian markets such as Taiwan and Malaysia, ending the series on a bright note as one the most popular martial arts franchises in movie history.
His HK$1 million donation, which has been reported by the mainland media, triggered some positive love from his fans on Weibo. “Donnie is awesome and what he says is so warm and full of love!” said one Weibo user.
Yen is a well-known philanthropist, donating millions of dollars to charity over the years.
In 2012, Yen and his wife Sissy Wang, co-founded Go.Asia, an online charity platform that encourages individuals to participate in charity work while serving local communities. Yen also served as an ambassador for the international charity Save the Children in 2015 and has supported other noble causes.
Yen is not the first Hong Kong martial arts star to help the Wuhan cause.
Fellow kung fu superstar Jackie Chan reportedly offered to pay one million yuan as a reward to whoever develops a vaccine for the coronavirus.


Unus Alladin
Unus Alladin is an award-winning sports journalist. He has covered the Hong Kong and international sports scene for more than 35 years, ranging from Formula One to the Olympic Games.


I'm going to see Enter the Fat Dragon (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70631-Enter-the-Fat-Dragon-redux-with-Donnie-Yen) tonight.

THREADS
Donnie Yen: Uber Awesome !! (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?58046-Donnie-Yen-Uber-Awesome-!!)
Enter the Fat Dragon (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70631-Enter-the-Fat-Dragon-redux-with-Donnie-Yen)
Ip Man 4 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69747-Ip-Man-4-The-Finale)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERKsmscU8AA95JY?format=jpg&name=medium

We hope to get our container cleared by this weekend. If so, subscriptions will go out early next week. It is a top priority.

THREADS
Spring 2020 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71664-Spring-2020)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Baduanjin (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56712-Baduanjin-(8-section-brocade))

[GeneChing]

China's coronavirus predicted in 1981 US novel (https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3875669)
American author predicts coronavirus-like outbreak and names disease ‘Wuhan-400’
By Ching-Tse Cheng, Taiwan News, Staff Writer
2020/02/13 15:50

https://tnimage.s3.hicloud.net.tw/photos/2020/02/13/1581574167-5e44e81738ff9.jpg
"Wuhan virus" mentioned in "The Eyes of Darkness." (Twitter photo)

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — As the Wuhan virus claims new victims around the world, Twitter users have pointed out that in the 1981 novel, "The Eyes of the Darkness," there is a disease called "Wuhan-400."

The American author, Dean Koontz's suspense thrillers have often appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list. In chapter 39 of his book, Koontz writes about a virus developed in military labs near the city of Wuhan by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a biological weapon, reported Liberty Times.

The scientist leading the Wuhan-400 research is called Li Chen (李陳), who defects to the U.S. with information about China's most dangerous chemical weapons. Wuhan-400 affects people rather than animals and cannot survive outside the human body or in environments colder than 30 degrees Celsius.

The similarities between the made-up virus and the Wuhan virus has got Twitter users struggling to comprehend the improbable coincidence. One big difference: Wuhan-400 has a 100 percent kill-rate, while the Wuhan virus does not.

Some people were skeptical about Koontz's prediction 39 years ago, however, pointing out that earlier editions of the book refer to the virus as Gorki-400, a production of the Soviet Union. In response, several netizens have posted pictures of the book's newer editions to explain the name of the virus was indeed altered, possibly due to the end of the Cold War in 1991, reported SET News.

https://image.taiwannews.com.tw/photos/2020/02/13/1581574161-5e44e8110ca70.jpg
Dean Koontz's Wuhan-400 appears to have similarities with the Wuhan virus. (Twitter photo)

https://image.taiwannews.com.tw/photos/2020/02/13/1581574148-5e44e80461f90.jpg
"The Eyes of Darkness," 1996 edition. (Twitter photo)

https://image.taiwannews.com.tw/photos/2020/02/13/1581574176-5e44e82035850.jpg
Older versions of the book refer to the disease as "Gorki-400." (Twitter photo)
Anyone here read Koontz? I read one or two of his books years ago. I can't remember which now though.

[GeneChing]

...anyone who does any global business could see this coming.


FEBRUARY 19, 2020 / 7:21 PM / UPDATED 12 HOURS AGO
Manufacturers entangled in logistical nightmare as virus-hit China limps back to work (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-asia-supplychain-insight/manufacturers-entangled-in-logistical-nightmare-as-virus-hit-china-limps-back-to-work-idUSKBN20E0B6)
Josh Horwitz, Chayut Setboonsarng
6 MIN READ

SHANGHAI/BANGKOK (Reuters) - Blocked highways. Stranded workers. Dwindling supplies. Shipping and air freight companies also hamstrung.

https://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20200220&t=2&i=1492662781&w=1200&r=LYNXMPEG1J077
FILE PHOTO: Workers wearing face masks load cargo to a truck next to containers at a railway cargo terminal, as the country is hit by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China February 17, 2020. Picture taken February 17, 2020. cnsphoto via REUTERS

The Chinese manufacturing engine that powers much of the world economy is struggling to restart after an extended Lunar New Year break, hindered by travel and quarantine restrictions imposed to curb the coronavirus epidemic and still in place in many parts of the country.

Case in point: in the southern China manufacturing hub of Dongguan, a factory that makes vaporizers and other products had just half of its workforce of 40 last week and was struggling to function without key personnel.

“The quality inspectors, they’re all out,” said Renaud Anjoran, who runs the factory. “One is stuck in Hubei, the other is in an area with no transportation open.”

Anjoran said other Dongguan manufacturers were also scrambling with half their normal staff levels, with some having even less than that.

The problems are exacerbating pain inflicted by loss of business from the U.S.-China trade war and present huge logistical challenges as companies, many dependent on migrant workers, grapple with a myriad of restrictions that differ by province, city and local district.

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) on Monday rescinded a quarterly sales target made just weeks ago, saying the ramp up of factories in China was slower than anticipated. Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS) and Nissan Motor Co (7201.T) have had to suspend some production - not just in China but also at home - for lack of parts.

Some smaller firms, particularly in Southeast Asia and reliant on supplies from China, are having to make tough decisions.

Taiwan’s Sica New Materials abruptly shut its factory in Thailand at the end of January, laying off about 350 workers.

“They couldn’t produce because raw materials weren’t being sent from China,” said Pairote Panthakarn from the government’s welfare and labor protection office in Kanchanaburi province, where the factory is located. Sica New Materials did not respond to a request for comment.

Sinoproud Cambodia Garments Co Ltd, whose customers include fashion retailer Zara’s parent Inditex (ITX.MC), told Reuters it may scale back production as stocks of fabric were getting low.

“We hope we get the product in March and if we don’t get the product in March, we might just have to cut back and put the workers on half pay,” said general manager Tu Ailan.

Nearly half of 109 U.S. companies responding to a poll by Shanghai’s American Chamber of Commerce said plant shutdowns have already had an impact on their supply chains, while almost all of the remainder expect an impact within the next month.

The outbreak, slow pace of business resumption and its impact on the global economy is set to dominate discussions at this weekend’s G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in Riyadh, though Chinese counterparts will not attend as they focus on efforts to limit the fallout.

The coronavirus, described by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva as a global health emergency and “our most pressing uncertainty” is set to knock 0.5 percentage points off global growth in the first quarter for a growth rate of 2.5%, Morgan Stanley economists estimate. They predict China’s GDP will expand just 4.2% in the quarter from a year earlier, down from 6% in last quarter.

FREIGHT ACHES
Even if factories have enough workers, the transportation of supplies and finished goods has also been a major headache.

“The resumption of motor transport is very slow and curbs production,” said an executive at a steel mill in the eastern province of Shandong, citing insufficient drivers and a plethora of checkpoints slowing down traffic.

“The situation is easing now, but total recovery might need to wait till the end of the month,” said the executive who was not authorized to speak to media and declined to identified.

The shortage of workers at Chinese ports has resulted in fewer calls from container shipping lines, a situation likely to result in months of delivery delays, while some air cargo firms such as Lufthansa (LHAG.DE) have reduced services in response to crew health concerns and uncertain demand.

FedEx Corp (FDX.N) told Reuters it was starting to see a slow pick-up in demand and that it was in discussions with many local governments as there were different restrictions in different cities.

The magnitude of the challenges presented by the new coronavirus crisis is much greater than SARS in the early 2000s, said Karen Reddington, president of FedEx Express Asia Pacific.

“China is so much more connected, the fact that China now represents so much of the world’s economy I think that’s why, it seems so much more impactful at this time,” she said.

Mathieu Montelon, general manager of France’s Bigben Interactive, which makes smartphone accessories in the southeast province of Guangdong, said the disruptions underscored the complexity of inter-connected supply chains.

“Even when the factory is in a position to open and take orders, their subcontractors might have issue with other local authorities, so they cannot open, or they don’t have the workers,” he said.

He added that Bigben is switching up the mix of products it offers retailers, pushing goods made in other countries less affected by the virus.

Others are looking at more drastic action, accelerating a broader shift of production out of China that took off with the trade war.

Anjoran, the operator of the factory in Dongguan, is considering setting up a second assembly center in Mexico to serve U.S. customers with minimal reliance on China.

“People are seeing China as a major source of risk,” he said.

Reporting by Chayut Setboonsarng in Bangkok, Josh Horwitz and Emily Chow in Shanghai, Clare Baldwin in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, Min Zhang and Gabriel Crossley in Beijing, Krishna Das and Liz Lee in Kuala Lumpur, Melanie Burton in Melbourne; Yimou Lee in Taipei, and Sonya Dowsett in Madrid; Writing by Brenda Goh; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Edwina Gibbs

[GeneChing]

This is the impact of the Coronavirus on business (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/why-is-coronavirus-a-global-business-risk/)
Traders wearing face masks are seen on the trading floor at a flower auction trading centre following an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the country, in Kunming, Yunnan province, China February 10, 2020.

https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/large_1q58lbXlhEPAej-GARJydCmsQyPoEGSaLxbUeVvWF-I.jpg
The coronavirus outbreak is sending ripples around the world
Image: REUTERS/China Out/Stringer

21 Feb 2020
Richard Smith-Bingham
Director, Marsh & McLennan Advantage Insights
Kavitha Hariharan
Director, Healthy Societies, Marsh & McLennan Advantage Insights

The outbreak of COVID-19 highlights cracks in global trust and the pitfalls of global interdependency.

Epidemics are both a standalone business risk and an amplifier of existing trends and vulnerabilities.

Businesses that invest in strategic, operational and financial resilience to emerging global risks will be better positioned to respond and recover.

Pandemics top national risk-management frameworks in many countries. For example, pandemic influenza tops the natural hazards matrix of the UK National Risk Register, and emerging infectious diseases are tagged as of considerable concern. Seen as a medical problem, each outbreak of a potentially dangerous infection prompts authorities to ask a rational set of questions and dust off the menu of response options that can be implemented as needed in a phased manner.

Reality, however, is generally more disruptive, as national governments and supranational agencies balance health security, economic and social imperatives on the back of imperfect and evolving intelligence. It’s a governance challenge that may result in long-term consequences for communities and businesses. On top of this, they also need to accommodate human behaviour.

Management dilemmas and falling trust

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is no exception. The disease - an epidemic that could become a global pandemic - emerged in a densely populated manufacturing and transport hub in central China and has since spread to 29 other countries and regions (as of 20 February 2020), carried along by Chinese New Year and international travel.

In contrast to the Western Africa Ebola emergency of 2013-2016 – more deadly but less contagious, arguably more isolated, and eventually contained in part by richer countries putting money into Africa – COVID-19 presents larger, more interdependent economies with management dilemmas. It has also surfaced at a time of eroding trust within and between countries – with national leadership under pressure from growing societal unrest and economic confrontations between major powers.

Effective governance of cross-border crises such as pandemics involves preparedness, response and recovery at local, national and international levels. Epidemic preparedness assessments show many countries, especially in regions where new pathogens might emerge, are not well equipped to detect, report and respond to outbreaks.


Considerable progress has been made since the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014–2016, but health systems worldwide are still under-prepared for significant outbreaks of other emerging infectious diseases... no country is fully prepared to handle an epidemic or pandemic.

—The Global Risks Report 2020
Denial, cover ups and governance failures

Response strategies vary, for example: playing up or playing down crises and staying open for business as long as possible versus seeking to reopen quickly. COVID-19 has highlighted tendencies in many countries to deny or cover up red flags in order to avoid economic or political penalties, but this approach can misfire.

With tens of millions of workers now in quarantine and parts in short supply, China is struggling to get economic activity back on track. Countries with well-honed crisis risk-management arrangements are faring better at slowing the spread of infection, although that does not make them immune to political and economic pressures.

COVID-19 has also shown how governance failures may involve inaction or over-zealous action by ill-prepared authorities scrambling to maintain or regain stability. Both ends of the spectrum undermine trust and cooperation among citizens and countries. Centralized control measures may seem necessary to stop or delay the spread of the virus, and compensate for weak individual and community resilience, but may also cause harm.

Mass quarantines in cities or cruise ships stigmatize those under lockdown and increase mental health risks as people experience stress, anxiety and a sense of isolation and loss of control over their lives. Travel bans result in social, economic and political penalties, which can discourage individuals and government bodies from sharing information and disclosing future outbreaks. Weak or overwhelmed health systems struggle to limit the spread of infection or cope with surging care needs, further reducing confidence in the competence and character of the institutions and individuals in charge.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://assets.weforum.org/editor/responsive_large_eAOdu29pFsykZYkRA7sVT_kY8j60IviW8 KLnV0MZ6RI.jpg
Passengers stand silhouetted on the deck of MS Westerdam cruise ship as it arrives at port in Sihanoukville, where it has been granted permission to dock following nearly two weeks at sea after being turned away by five countries over fears that someone aboard may have the coronavirus, Cambodia February 13, 2020.
Image: REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun

Panic spreads faster than pandemics

Social media poses a further challenge to trust: panic spreads faster than pandemics, as global platforms amplify uncertainties and misinformation. Emotionally visceral content from anyone—such as data, anecdotes or speculation that spark fear can go viral and reach far more people than measured, reassuring advice from experts. Even in the absence of human or automated trolls seeking attention or disruption, well-meaning individuals can spread panic worldwide by escalating or misinterpreting early, provisional, or context-free information. Such fear will fray citizens’ trust in governments’ ability to protect them from risk, and increase the likelihood of psychologically defensive and societally damaging measures such as panic-buying and prejudice.

What’s the impact on business?

Where a stringent policy response is deemed necessary, business will inevitably be impacted, with both near-term effects and less-expected longer-run consequences.

Travel restrictions and quarantines affecting hundreds of millions of people have left Chinese factories short of labour and parts, disrupting just-in-time supply chains and triggering sales warnings across technology, automotive, consumer goods, pharmaceutical and other industries.

Commodity prices have declined in response to a fall in China’s consumption of raw materials, and producers are considering cutting output.

The mobility and work disruptions have led to marked declines in Chinese consumption, squeezing multinational companies in several sectors including aviation, education abroad, infrastructure, tourism, entertainment, hospitality, electronics, consumer and luxury goods.

Overall, China’s GDP growth may slow by 0.5 percentage points this year, taking at least 0.1 percentage point off global GDP growth. This will ripple through developed and emerging markets with high dependencies on China – be that in the form of trade, tourism or investment. Some of these countries exhibit pre-existing economic fragilities, others (acknowledging an overlap) have weak health systems and thus lower resilience to pandemics. Many Asian and African countries lack surveillance, diagnostic, and hospital capacities to identify, isolate, and treat patients during an outbreak. Weak systems anywhere are a risk to health security everywhere, increasing the possibility of contagion and the resulting social and economic consequences.

https://assets.weforum.org/editor/responsive_large_hUF4fFs2d1UknML_MA5-Yv3omH4JNucUIOVKnRGV-aY.JPG
Image: COVID-19 impact/Statista

Why business should invest in pandemic-resilience

Epidemics and pandemics are hence both a standalone business risk as well as an amplifier of existing trends and vulnerabilities. In the longer run, COVID-19 may serve as another reason – besides protectionist regulations and energy efficiency needs – for companies to reassess their supply chain exposure to outbreak-prone regions, and to reconfigure regionally.

Businesses may also have to contend with intensifying political, economic, and health security risks – for example, resumption of trade hostilities between China and the United States. A prolonged outbreak or economic disruption could fan public discontent in Hong Kong and mainland China, prompting repressive measures that stifle innovation and growth. Stumbling growth in emerging markets may fail to absorb fast-growing workforces, leading to societal unrest, political uncertainty, and an inability to invest in health systems.

Beyond standard concerns related to business operational continuity, employee protection and market preservation, businesses – and countries – should take a fresh look at their exposure to complex and evolving inter-dependencies that could compound the effects of pandemics and other crises. Given the panic and neglect cycle of pandemic preparedness, once COVID-19 is contained, much of the world is likely to return to complacency and remain under-prepared for the inevitable next outbreak. Businesses that invest in strategic, operational and financial resilience to emerging global risks will be better positioned to respond and recover.



Written by
Richard Smith-Bingham, Director, Marsh & McLennan Advantage Insights
Kavitha Hariharan, Director, Healthy Societies, Marsh & McLennan Advantage Insights
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

The White Horse of the apocalypse?

[GeneChing]

There's so much talk about how PRC has failed to contain the virus, but that's moot now. Now we'll see how if the rest of the world can contain it.


Coronavirus epidemic enters new phase as cases outside of China spike (https://fortune.com/2020/02/21/coronavirus-epidemic-new-phase-cases-china-south-korea/)
BY JEFF SUTHERLAND AND BLOOMBERG
February 21, 2020 1:39 AM EST

South Korea has more than 150 cases. Those for Singapore and Japan have topped 85. And then there are the 600-plus from a quarantined cruise ship in Japan.

As the cases of coronavirus infections mount, worries are growing that the outbreak is entering a concerning next phase. Where China had the vast majority of cases and deaths before, there are now signs that infections are spreading more rapidly within other Asian countries beyond its borders.

For now, China still remains the center of the crisis, with 75,000 infections. But as the number of net new cases there declines, attention is shifting to the risks in other countries where the growth in infections is accelerating. Anxiety is already creeping into global financial markets, as investors weigh the impact of a wider regional outbreak on economic growth and corporate earnings.

“The sudden jump in infections in other parts of Asia, notably in Japan and South Korea, has sparked renewed concerns,” said Khoon Goh, Singapore-based head of Asia research at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. “This points to a new phase in the outbreak, and one which will see continued disruption and more economic impact than previously thought.”

Marked Uptick
The epidemic that emerged in early December has yet to become a pandemic, which is defined as a situation where the virus is spreading across multiple continents. So far, the numbers outside of China remain small: out of 2,247 deaths, only 11 have occurred in other countries. Yet there’s been a marked uptick in non-China cases this week.

South Korea has seen a five-fold increase in infections, with a surge of cases tied to a cluster from a religious sect in Daegu. At least 82 cases involve those who may have attended church services with a person who was confirmed with the virus earlier this week.

South Korean Health Minister Park Neung-hoo said authorities are aware of transmission channels and the current situation is “manageable.” Daegu has shut down public facilities and advised residents to stay indoors to try to contain the disease.

More alarming is the situation in Japan, which has emerged as one of the riskiest places for the spread of the coronavirus. Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said on Sunday that Japan had lost track of the route of some of the infection cases, which have tripled in the past week to more than 90.

Diamond Princess
Japan is seeing cases in multiple, unconnected areas across the country and authorities have been scrambling to understand where they’re coming from. The government is being faulted for being too slow to bar visitors from China and too lax in its 14-day quarantine of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the vessel with 3,700 passengers and crew that’s been under the global spotlight.

At least 636 of them have been infected by the virus and two have died.

The situation has the potential to escalate given the presence of high-risk factors like Japan’s elderly population and a societal work ethic where taking a sick day is often frowned upon. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a Level 1 alert for Japan, which doesn’t discourage travel to the country but urges caution.

Containment Efforts
To be sure, Japan’s advanced health-care system puts it in better stead to fight the outbreak than poorer states with fewer resources like China’s neighbor North Korea, and countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

There’s also progress being made in Asian cities where strict containment measures have been put into place. The Chinese-controlled territory of Macau, the world’s biggest gambling hub, hasn’t reported a new infection in more than two weeks, as casinos were shut and travel to mainland China was restricted.

While Singapore has more than 80 cases, the rate of new infections has been steady, and 37 patients have so far recovered.

Hong Kong similarly hasn’t seen a surge. That could change, however, with the case of a police officer infected with the virus. He had a meal with 59 other officers, who are now in quarantine.

Powder Keg
Some believe that the Diamond Princess cruise ship could be a potential powder keg as more than 1,000 quarantined passengers leave by the end of Friday. With people aboard hailing from more than 50 nations and now returning back home, their travels could spawn a fresh wave of global infections. On Friday, two people evacuated to Australia from the cruise ship tested positive for the virus.

“It’s entirely possible to get tested, be negative and get on an airplane and be positive once you land,” said Keiji Fukuda, the director of the School of Public Health at Hong Kong University and a former World Health Organization official who has led responses to outbreaks. “That’s just how infections work.”

For now, the WHO says the situation is still manageable, but warns that if countries don’t take the situation more seriously, the spread will become a wider global threat.

“The virus is very dangerous and it’s public enemy No. 1,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing in Geneva Thursday.

[GeneChing]

Expert highlights traditional Chinese medicine in fight against novel coronavirus (http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-02/19/c_138796388.htm)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-19 00:16:03|Editor: huaxia

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-02/19/138796388_15820691002131n.jpg
Renowned Chinese respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan speaks at a press conference in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Feb. 18, 2020. (Xinhua/Deng Hua)

GUANGZHOU, Feb. 18 (Xinhua) -- Renowned Chinese respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan on Tuesday highlighted the studies on traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) in the fight against novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

Speaking at a press conference held in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Zhong said the herbal prescription called "Pneumonia No. 1" applied on Jan. 23 had proved effective in the treatment of COVID-19 patients in the province.

According to Zhong, researchers are testing on the already widely used TCM drugs, such as Liushenwan and Lianhuaqingwen, to find out whether they can kill the virus, reduce the virus' access to the cell and lower the incidence of a cytokine storm, meaning the massive inflammation which may lead to death.

These tests may provide some evidence for the application of the TCM during the early and middle stages of the COVID-19, he said.

Yang Zifeng, a professor with the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health and a member of Zhong's team, said through in vitro experiments on 54 existing TCM drugs available on market, researchers have found five that can effectively inhibit the novel coronavirus infection.

"Indicating the anti-viral and anti-inflammation effects of the drugs made from TCM, the experiments give some hope for the treatment of the novel coronavirus. But more clinical experiments are needed to test their clinical effect," he said.

TCM has never missed a single fight against epidemics throughout Chinese history. TCM classics have provided sufficient evidence of how TCM cured epidemic diseases such as smallpox over the past several thousand years.

A specific chapter detailing TCM treatment during a patient's medical observation, clinical treatment and recovery has been included in the latest version of the COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment scheme released by the National Health Commission.
There's so much COVID-19 news nowadays that I could spend all morning posting articles.

[GeneChing]

If pestilence is the 1st horse of the apocalypse, fake news should be the next one.


Fake Facts Are Flying About Coronavirus. Now There's A Plan To Debunk Them (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/21/805287609/theres-a-flood-of-fake-news-about-coronavirus-and-a-plan-to-stop-it)
February 21, 2020 11:33 AM ET
MALAKA GHARIB

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2020/02/19/who169_wide-6436296a4edf29c3b11d3074826bc7b9840353f0-s1600-c85.png
The World Health Organization is sharing social media posts to debunk widely circulated rumors about coronavirus cures.
Facebook/ Screengrab by NPR

The coronavirus outbreak has sparked what the World Health Organization is calling an "infodemic" — an overwhelming amount of information on social media and websites. Some of it's accurate. And some is downright untrue.

The false statements range from a conspiracy theory that the virus is a man-made bioweapon to the claim that more than 100,000 have died from the disease (as of this week, the number of reported fatalities is reported at 2,200-plus).

WHO is fighting back. In early January, a few weeks after China reported the first cases, the U.N. agency launched a pilot program to make sure the facts about the newly identified virus are communicated to the public. The project is called EPI-WIN — short for WHO Information Network for Epidemics.

"We need a vaccine against misinformation," said Dr. Mike Ryan, head of WHO's health emergencies program, at a WHO briefing on the virus earlier this month.

While this is not the first health crisis that has been characterized by online misinformation — it happened with Ebola, for example — researchers are especially concerned because this outbreak is centered in China. The world's most populous country has the largest market of Internet users globally: 21% of the world's 3.8 billion Internet users are in China.

And fake news can spread quickly online. A 2018 study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does." The reason, say the researchers, may be that the untrue statements inspire strong feelings such as fear, disgust and surprise.

This dynamic could cause fake coronavirus cures and treatments to fan out widely on social media — and as a result, worsen the impact of the outbreak, says Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Over the past decade, he has been tracking the effect of digital technology on issues such as global health and economic development.

The rumors offer remedies that have no basis in science. One untrue statement suggests that rubbing sesame oil on the skin will block the coronavirus.

If segments of the public turn to false treatments rather than follow the advice of trusted sources for avoiding illness (like frequent hand-washing with soap and water), it could cause "the disease to travel further and faster than it ordinarily would have," says Chakravorti.

There could be a political agenda behind the fake coronavirus news as well. Countries that are antagonistic toward China could try to hijack the conversation in hopes of creating chaos and eroding trust in the authorities, says Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux, research director for Harvard Belfer Center's Security and Global Health Project.

"Disinformation that specifically targets your health system or your leaders who are trying to manage an emergency is a way of destroying, undermining, disrupting your health system," she says.

In the instance of vaccines, Russian bots have been identified as fueling skepticism about the effectiveness of vaccination for childhood diseases in the U.S.

The World Health Organization's EPI-WIN team believes that the countermeasure for misinformation and disinformation is simply to tell the truth.

It works rapidly to debunk unjustified medical claims on social media. In a series of bright blue graphics posted on Instagram, EPI-WIN states categorically that neither sesame oil nor breathing in the smoke of fire or fireworks will kill the new coronavirus.

Part of this truth-telling strategy involves enlisting large-scale employers.

The approach, says Melinda Frost, an officer on the EPI-WIN team, is based on the idea that employers are the most trusted institution in society, a finding reflected in a 2020 study on global trust from the public relations firm Edelman: "People tend to trust their employers more than they trust several other sources of information."

Over the past few weeks, Frost and her team have been organizing rounds of conference calls with representatives from Fortune 500 companies and other multinational corporations in sectors such as health, travel and tourism, food and agriculture, and business.

The company representatives share questions that their employees might have about the coronavirus outbreak — for example, is it safe to go to conferences? The EPI-WIN team gathers the frequently asked questions, has their experts answer them within a few days, and then sends the responses back to the companies to distribute in internal newsletters and other communication.

Because the information is coming from their employer, says Frost, the hope is that people will be more likely to believe what they hear and pass the information on to their family and community.

Bourdeaux at Harvard calls this approach a "smart move."

It borrows from "advertising techniques from the 1950s," she adds. "They're establishing the narrative before anybody else can. They are going on offense, saying, 'Here are the facts.' "

WHO is also collaborating with tech giants like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and TikTok to limit the spread of harmful rumors. It's pursuing a similar tactic with Chinese digital companies such as Baidu, Tencent and Weibo.

"We are asking them to filter out false information and promote accurate information from credible sources like WHO, CDC [the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and others. And we thank them for their efforts so far," said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, in a briefing earlier this month.

Google and Twitter, for example, now actively bump up credible sources such as WHO and the CDC in search results for the term "coronavirus." And Facebook has deployed fact-checkers to remove content with false claims or conspiracy theories about the outbreak. Kang-Xing Jin, head of health at Facebook, wrote in a statement about one such rumor that it has eliminated from its platform: that drinking bleach cures coronavirus.

Chakravorti applauds WHO's coordination with the digital companies — but says he's particularly impressed with Facebook's efforts. "This is a radical departure from Facebook's past record, including its controversial insistence on permitting false political ads," he wrote in an op-ed in Bloomberg News.

[Facebook and Twitter did not respond to requests from NPR for comments. Facebook is one of NPR's financial sponsors.]

Still, there is no silver bullet to fighting health misinformation. It has become "very, very difficult to fight effectively," says Chakravorti of Tufts University.

A post making a false claim about coronavirus can just "jump platforms," he says. "So you might have Facebook taking down a post, but then the post finds its way on Twitter, then it jumps from Twitter to YouTube."

Fake News: How To Spot Misinformation
LIFE KIT (https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774541010/fake-news-is-scary-heres-how-to-spot-misinformation)

In addition to efforts by WHO and other organizations, individuals are doing their part.

On Wednesday, The Lancet published a statement from 27 public health scientists addressing rumors that the coronavirus had been engineered in a Wuhan lab: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin .... Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus."

Dr. Deliang Tang, a molecular epidemiologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, says his friends from medical school and his research colleagues in China find it difficult to trust Chinese health authorities, especially after police reprimanded the eight Chinese doctors who warned others about a pneumonialike disease in December.

As a result, Tang's network in China has been looking to him and others in the scientific community to share information.

Since the outbreak began, Tang says he has been answering "30 to 50 questions a night." Many want to fact-check rumors or learn about clinical trials for a potential cure.

"My real work starts at 7 p.m.," he says — morning in China.

[GeneChing]

China to avoid competing in all international university sport events until May amid coronavirus outbreak (https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1090876/china-university-events-coronavirus?fbclid=IwAR2HVxY5qJemek8aTvEo__l6aSCl7 t4oL2-fya2JJihNxiYcriJxF6RPWhA)
By Daniel Etchells Saturday, 22 February 2020

FUSC has cancelled the participation of its athletes in all international events until May over the coronavirus outbreak

https://www.insidethegames.biz/media/image/170963/o/FUSC.jpg

The Federation of University Sports of China (FUSC) has cancelled the participation of its athletes in all international events until May over the coronavirus outbreak, it has been announced.

In a statement, the International University Sports Federation (FISU) revealed the decision was taken "keeping the safety of participants and organisers in mind".

It means FUSC's athletes will not compete in this year's first three World University Championships (WUCs), namely those in cross-country in Marrakech on March 7, speed skating in Amsterdam from March 10 to 13 and ski orienteering in Rovaniemi from March 23 to 27.

"FISU extends its best wishes to all Chinese university athletes for their continued training and looks forward to their renewed participation at the earliest appropriate opportunity," the statement reads.

FISU also warned it will "continue to monitor the situation closely" ahead of the two WUCs due to take place in China in July.

https://www.insidethegames.biz/media/image/170964/o/EasPjwg4OrMC4N5E
Latest Chinese figures put the death toll from coronavirus at 2,236 people and total infections at more than 75,000 ©Getty Images

WUC Wushu is scheduled to be held in Liaoyang from from July 11 to 14, while WUC Squash is set to be staged in Shanghai from July 17 to 23.

"With more than four months to go, FISU is hopeful that these events will go ahead as planned," the statement added.

"FISU would like to reiterate its full confidence in the organisers of these events and in China’s capacity to effectively tackle the outbreak."

The latest figures from China put the death toll from coronavirus at 2,236 people and total infections at more than 75,000.

The virus has also spread around the globe, with more than 1,000 cases and several deaths in the rest of Asia, in Europe, the United States and Africa.




About the author
Daniel Etchells Senior reporter

Daniel Etchells graduated from the University of Huddersfield with a BA honours degree in Media and Sports Journalism in 2010. Before joining insidethegames.biz, Daniel covered football for various national newspapers through the Wardle Whittell Agency and undertook placements writing for the official website of his beloved Manchester United, the Manchester Evening News and BBC Sport.

THREADS
Wushu at the Universiade (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69746-Wushu-at-the-Universiade)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

If Covid-19 is still surging, I’m wondering if there will even BE a Tokyo Olympics, even I though Japan isn’t the epicenter of it. Look at how faraway countries, like Italy, Iran, etc., are being affected. Indeed. I just posted on how it's affected the Universaide (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69746-Wushu-at-the-Universiade&p=1317951#post1317951).

Then there's this:

Tokyo Governor criticises "inappropriate" offer from London to host Olympics because of coronavirus crisis (https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1090862/tokyo-governor-london-row-olympics)
By Liam Morgan Friday, 21 February 2020

https://www.insidethegames.biz/media/image/170950/o/DSETPVkBG0KesDHI
©Getty Images

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike has criticisied an "inappropriate" offer from London to step in to replace the city as hosts of this year's Olympic and Paralympic Games because of the coronavirus outbreak.

London Mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey claimed the city "can host the Olympics in 2020" and the world "might need us to step up" due to the virus, which has so far killed 2,250 people and infected over 76,000 worldwide.

Bailey is a candidate for the Conservatives, the same party that Britain's current Prime Minister Boris represents, and added he would "make sure London is ready to answer the call and host the Olympics again" if he is elected Mayor.

Johnson was the Mayor of London when the city hosted the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012.

In response, Koike claimed it was "not appropriate to try to make it an issue in a Mayoral election".

"A reason why this issue has attracted global attention is due to the cruise ship," Koike, referencing the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan which is thought to have 600 cases of the virus, said.

"But the cruise ship’s nationality belongs to Britain.

"I wish aspects like these would be well understood."

https://www.insidethegames.biz/media/image/170953/o/4w8bUVOFInCcTq32
More than 600 cases of the virus have been reported on the quarantined cruise ship ©Getty Images

Two people on the cruise ship, which has been docked in Japan since February 3, have died from the virus so far.

Tokyo 2020 and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have insisted the Games will not be postponed or cancelled because of the virus, given the official title of COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO).

John Coates, chair of the IOC Coordination Commission for Tokyo 2020, claimed this week the organisation was "satisified" the event will be safe to attend.

During a project review of Tokyo 2020 last week, Coates claimed the WHO had told the IOC there was no case for cancelling or postponing the Games.

Tokyo 2020 President Yoshirō Mori has also remained defiant and blasted what he claimed were "irresponsible" rumours surrounding whether the Games would take place as planned.

Koike claimed she does not foresee any changes to the schedule for the Games, which begin with the Olympics Opening Ceremony on July 24.

"I think we are not yet reaching that point," Koike said.



About the author
Liam Morgan Senior chief reporter
Since joining insidethegames.biz, in 2015 Liam Morgan has covered a variety of international multi-sport events and conferences, including the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics, the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games and the Lillehammer 2016 Winter Youth Olympics. He also reported from the 2017 IOC Session in Lima and three editions of the FIFA Congress. He graduated from Southampton Solent University in 2014 with a BA First Class honours degree in Sports Journalism.

THREADS
2020 Tokyo Olympics (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?64475-2020-Tokyo-Olympics)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

MARKETS
Dow plunge tops 1,000 points on fears coronavirus will tank global economic growth (https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/dow-plunges-950-points-fears-coronavirus-will-tank-global-economic-n1141546?fbclid=IwAR3kjqzFjb72u3Vw8dT_zJLJymnsrIGJ Q5M1RLQjDAHKMBileNornZL7LpE)
All three major indices plummeted at Monday's opening bell as reported cases of the epidemic surged worldwide.

https://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2020_09/3241711/200224-stock-exchange-cs-917a_2517dd0c7592d4b3e561ff24c2d64752.fit-2000w.jpg
The challenge investors face is that no one knows how long this epidemic will last, or how dangerous it ultimately will be to populations.Richard Drew / AP file

Feb. 24, 2020, 6:32 AM PST / Updated Feb. 24, 2020, 6:42 AM PST
By Martha C. White and Lucy Bayly

Wall Street plunged Monday after a spike in the number of reported cases of coronavirus fueled fears that the epidemic would have a serious impact on global economic growth.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted by 1,003 points in midday trading Monday, after a volatile session that saw the blue-chip index lose 979 points at the opening bell, erasing all gains for the year. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell by 4 percent, with the S&P 500 dropping 3.2 percent.

Travel-related stocks continued to take heavy hits as the epidemic restricted movement and discouraged vacationers, with Delta Air Lines and American Airlines falling by 7 percent. Casino operators Wynn Resorts and MGM Resorts each tumbled by around 4 percent.

Monday's selloff came as South Korea raised the country's coronavirus alert to its highest level and Italy saw 130 new cases of the disease. While the World Health Organization stopped short of calling the outbreak a pandemic, it did note on Monday that the virus has "unlimited potential."

Scientists say the new virus, dubbed COVID-19, is both more easily transmitted and less deadly than the SARS epidemic, but much still remains unknown. As a result, Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said, “Markets are now slaves to the news flow.”

Investor reaction to the wider spread of coronavirus led to a volume of trading so heavy that some clients even had difficulty accessing their accounts, CNBC reported.

“Due to higher-than-usual volumes, some clients may have experienced delays in accessing some online features as the market opened but our systems are fine and up and running,” Schwab Public Relations told CNBC. Fidelity, the largest online broker, said, “Some clients are experiencing technical issues and we are working as quickly as possible to resolve."

The rate at which the virus was spreading in China appears to be slowing. An announcement of 409 new cases Monday was the fifth day in a row that the number of new daily cases had fallen below 1,000. Outside of China, though, a spate of outbreaks presented fresh cause for concern.

“The spike in infections in South Korea, mostly concentrated in the congregation of a single church, a surge in cases in Italy, and news of an outbreak in Iran, where the health care system is of uncertain quality and the government is secretive, has triggered fears that China's aggressive quarantining efforts won't keep the virus from spreading globally,” Shepherdson wrote in a client note.

“Global growth is likely to be impacted in a meaningful way due to fears of the coronavirus,” Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for the Independent Advisor Alliance, said.

The challenge investors face is that no one knows how long this epidemic will last, nor how dangerous it ultimately will be to populations.

“Stock markets around the world are beginning to price in what bond markets have been telling us for weeks,” Zaccarelli said. “Bond yields have continued to move lower, despite the fact that stocks quickly shrugged off the coronavirus risks last month,” he said, adding that this indicated that the stock market’s initial resilience was unlikely to last.

Nigel Green, CEO and founder of the deVere Group, predicted that markets could fall by as much as 10 percent — a possibility he said most investors are not yet pricing into valuations. “Many investors remain complacent about the far-reaching impact of coronavirus, which is continuing to spread — and a faster pace. This will inevitably hit financial markets,” he said. “In general terms, stocks have hardly been deterred by the coronavirus outbreak. This complacency is concerning.”

Green added that the virus was emerging at a time when many key global economies were already vulnerable. “Coronavirus has struck at a time when major economies, including Japan, Germany, India and Hong Kong are facing a downturn due to other factors such as the U.S.-China trade dispute and political protesters, which could hit the world economy,” he said.

“This threat to global growth is real and should not be ignored,” Zaccarelli said, but he added that — provided the United States stays out of recession — the virus impact will be unlikely to hurt the retirement goals of long-term investors.

“We will move past this challenge, and the economic expansion will continue in 2020,” he said.

Martha C. White
Martha C. White is an NBC News contributor who writes about business, finance and the economy.

Lucy Bayly
Lucy Bayly is the business editor for NBC News.
I launched this thread on 1/14 and have been cherry-picking news articles (so many) every working day to post here.

On 2/6, I mentioned the impact this might have on the market. (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1317668#post1317668)

On 2/19, I posted how it has directly affected our business because we are on the front lines. (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1317891#post1317891)

Does anyone know anyone who has contracted this yet?

[GeneChing]

If Covid-19 is still surging, I’m wondering if there will even BE a Tokyo Olympics And right after our discussion above, this gets posted.


CORONAVIRUS 12:25 P.M.
The Coronavirus Is Already Affecting the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/the-coronavirus-is-already-affecting-the-2020-tokyo-olympics.html)
By Adam K. Raymond

https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2020/02/24/24-tokyo-olympics-mask.w700.h467.jpg
Masked spectators look on at the Olympic torch relay rehearsal in Tokyo. Photo: Du Xiaoyi/Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

The opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics is still five months away, and officials insist the Games will go on as planned, despite the global coronavirus panic. But the deadly and still-mysterious infection caused by the virus, known as COVID-19, has already begun to affect preparations for the Summer Games. Movement of athletes has been limited, qualifying events have been disrupted, and plans to train tens of thousands of volunteers have been postponed.

In public, Japanese officials are doing everything they can to calm fears. “There are no considerations of canceling the Games, nor will the postponements of these activities have an impact on the overall Games preparation,” officials said Friday after training for Olympic volunteers in Tokyo was postponed. Training for the 80,000 volunteers has been pushed back to May in what officials called “part of efforts to prevent the spread of infection.”

Japan has seen the fourth most cases of coronavirus, not counting the hundreds of cases aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Ahead of it are Italy, South Korea, and China, where the disease originated and at least 77,150 have been infected. The numbers in Japan could increase soon though. Last week, as passengers were allowed to leave the cruise ship, critics said the disorganization could lead to a spike in cases throughout the country.

Already, coronavirus fears have led to the cancellation of high-profile public gatherings in Tokyo. Last week, participation in the Tokyo Marathon was restricted to only elite athletes, limiting the field to about 200.

Next month, the Olympic torch is set to begin a four-month relay though Japan. Roughly 10,000 torchbearers are expected to carry the torch through all 47 of Japan’s prefectures. A dress rehearsal for the relay, held earlier this month, provided a glimpse of what the real thing looked like. As participants carried the torch, spectators lined the streets in masks.

Even if the Tokyo Olympics go off as planned, and the summer heat quells the spread of the virus, as many hope, it will have made an impact on the Games. The preparation of some athletes, especially those in China, has already suffered, Reuters reports:


At home, many of China’s Olympic hopefuls are confined to closed training bases, unable to venture abroad due to entry restrictions placed by countries to contain the virus that has killed more than 2,500 people in China.

Overseas, a slew of China’s national teams remain in hastily arranged training camps scattered across the globe, unable to return home for fear of being swept up in virus-related travel restrictions.

China’s gymnastics team was also kept from participating in a recent international competition in Australia due to travel restrictions, and China’s national women’s soccer team spent two weeks under quarantine in Brisbane.

There are also emerging questions about how many people will be willing to travel to watch the Olympics. Coronavirus fears have led to a huge drop in tourism to Asia. Travelers from within China are staying put, and those from outside the region are wary to enter it. Olympic organizers are hoping five months is enough time to turn that trend around.

THREADS
2020 Tokyo Olympics (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?64475-2020-Tokyo-Olympics)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

China Bans Trade, Consumption of Wild Animals Due to Coronavirus (https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-02-24/china-bans-trade-consumption-of-wild-animals-due-to-coronavirus)
Feb. 24, 2020, at 8:58 p.m.
U.S. News & World Report

https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/15d240c/2147483647/thumbnail/970x647/quality/85/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.beam.usnews.com%2Fb6%2F17 06d32361357ed2eef75655e7c7b0%2Ftag%3Areuters.com%2 C2020%3Anewsml_LYNXNPEG1O04U%3A22020-02-25T021529Z_2_LYNXNPEG1O04U_RTROPTP_3_CHINA-HEALTH-WILDLIFE.JPG
FILE PHOTO: Butchered dogs are displayed for sale at a stall inside a meat market during the local dog meat festival in Yulin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China June 21, 2018. REUTERS/Tyrone SiuREUTERS

HONG KONG (REUTERS) - China's top legislature said it will immediately ban the trade and consumption of wild animals, in a fast-track decision it says will allow the country to win the battle against the coronavirus outbreak.

The announcement, made late on Monday according to the official Xinhua News Agency, comes after an initial suspension of the trade and consumption of wildlife in January.

Scientists suspect, but have not proven, that the new coronavirus passed to humans from animals. The disease has now killed almost 2,700 people in China and spread to countries around the globe.

Some of the earliest infections were found in people who had exposure to a wildlife market in Hubei's provincial capital Wuhan, where bats, snakes, civets and other animals were sold.

"There has been a growing concern among people over the consumption of wild animals and the hidden dangers it brings to public health security since the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak," said Zhang Tiewei, a spokesman for the top legislature's Legislative Affairs Commission.

Zhang said it was both urgent and necessary for the decision to be made at the "critical moment for the epidemic prevention and control".

The decision, made by the National People's Congress, stipulates the illegal consumption and trade of wildlife will be "severely punished" as will be hunting, trading or transporting wild animals for the purpose of consumption.

The use of wild animals for non-edible purposes, including scientific research, medical use and display, will be subject to strict examination, approval and quarantine inspection.

Prior to the announcement, traders legally selling donkey, dog, deer, crocodile and other meat told Reuters they planned to get back to business as soon as the markets reopen.

Many academics, environmentalists and residents in China have joined international conservation groups in calling for a permanent ban. Online debate within China has also heavily favored a permanent ban.

(Reporting by Farah Master; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Anyone here ever eat dog? (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?61165-Anyone-here-ever-eat-dog)

[GeneChing]

I really hope they can get production fired up again soon. So many backorders. :(


China struggles to revive manufacturing amid virus outbreak (https://apnews.com/11d2888249475767f0abeea33fe1878b)
By JOE McDONALD
today

https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/0b1ae7e24a1b41cc98b792d2a99df96f/800.jpeg
In this Feb. 17, 2020, file photo released by Xinhua News Agency, workers assemble Audi A6 L cars at a workshop of FAW-Volkswagen Automobile Co., Ltd. in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province.Factories that make the world's smartphones, toys and other goods are struggling to reopen after a virus outbreak idled China's economy. But even with the ruling Communist Party promising help, companies and economists say it may be months before production is back to normal. (Zhang Nan/Xinhua via AP, File)

BEIJING (AP) — Factories that make the world’s smartphones, toys and other goods are struggling to reopen after a virus outbreak idled China’s economy. But even with the ruling Communist Party promising help, companies and economists say it may be months before production is back to normal.

The problem is supply chains — the thousands of companies that provide components, from auto parts to zippers to microchips. China’s are famously nimble and resourceful, but they lack raw materials and workers after the most intensive anti-disease measures ever imposed closed factories, cut off most access to cities with more than 60 million people and imposed travel curbs.

In smartphones, an industry that relies on China to assemble almost all its handsets, some components suppliers say production is as low as 10% of normal levels, according to Nicole Peng of Canalys, a research firm.

“The bad news is that there will be further impact, and the impact is worse than a lot of people initially expected,” said Peng.

Travel and retail businesses that need Chinese customers have suffered the most so far from the partial shutdown of the second largest economy. But brands including Apple Inc. say it is starting to disrupt their supplies.Analysts warn the longer that disruption lasts, the more damage will spread to wider industries and other economies.

Global brands have used low-cost Chinese labor to assemble goods for three decades. Now, they increasingly depend on China to supply auto, computer and other components. D disruptions can make this country a bottleneck, choking off their sales.

The most optimistic forecasts call for bringing the virus under control by March, allowing manufacturing to rebound. Gloomier outlooks say the outbreak might last until mid-May or later. Or, as the World Health Organization warned this week, authorities might fail to stop its global spread.

Automakers and other factories are reopening, but analysts say they won’t restore normal production until at least mid-March.

“If factory work does not spike in the coming weeks, a global parts shortage would likely emerge,” Taimur Baig and Samuel Tse of DBS said in a report.

There is no indication yet of an impact on consumers abroad, but retailers are starting to warn some products might be late or unavailable.

China also is a major supplier of chemicals for the global pharmaceutical industry. The outbreak has prompted concern supplies might be disrupted but there is no indication that drug production has been affected.

President Xi Jinping has put his personal authority behind reviving industry.

Beijing is promising tax cuts, though economists say financial help will have limited impact when anti-disease controls still in effect are still keeping workers away from factories and disrupting the movement of goods.

On Sunday, Xi said “low-risk areas” should change disease-control measures to fully restore production while high-risk areas focus on fighting the epidemic, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Manufacturers face a shortage of workers after millions who visited their hometowns for the Lunar New Year holiday were stranded there by the suspension of plane, train and bus services.

Officials must “unblock transportation channels,” Xinhua cited Xi as saying.

The government of Yiwu, a southeastern city known for its thousands of suppliers of buttons, doorknobs and other components to export manufacturers, says it arranged planes and trains to help their employees get back to work.

China accounts for about one-quarter of global manufacturing when measured by the value added in its factories. But it is the final assembly point for more than 80% of the world’s smartphones, more than half of TVs and a big share of other consumer goods.

Apple, which has most of its iPhones and other products assembled by contractors in China, rattled stock markets when it warned Feb. 17 that revenue would suffer due to supply disruptions.

“We would certainly expect to see more news like that,” said Simon Weston of AXA Investment Managers in Hong Kong.

Other global companies that need Chinese plastics, chemicals, steel and high-tech components also “face reduced production,” according to Kaho Yu of Verisk Maplecroft, a consulting firm. Yu said that is likely to last through the quarter ending in September.

The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said last week half of 109 companies that responded to a survey reported their global operations already are affected. It said 78% reported they lacked sufficient staff to run production lines.

Some companies including Ralph Lauren Corp. already were moving out of China due to rising costs and U.S. tariff hikes in a fight over Beijing’s technology ambitions and trade surplus. But many still depend on China for components or some stages of manufacturing.

Samsung is “feeling the heat” because it shifted smartphone assembly to Vietnam but needs experienced Chinese managers to run those factories, Peng said. She said they visited China for the Lunar New Year and are blocked from returning to their jobs.

Other companies including global automakers that rely increasingly on the Chinese market are restarting production but say the pace depends on whether they can get components.

China accounts for about one-quarter of global auto production and according to UBS provides 8% of global exports of auto components. Many use “just in time” manufacturing, delivering components when needed. Those factories have limited stockpiles to ride out disruptions.

Volkswagen, the country’s biggest-selling auto brand, said Monday its challenges include “slow national supply chain and logistics ramp-up.”

In China, factory production in export-oriented coastal provinces is back above 70% of normal levels, according to Cong Liang, the general secretary of the Cabinet’s planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission.

“Companies are working overtime,” Cong said at a news conference. He insisted the epidemic’s impact is “short-term and generally controllable.”

Private sector forecasters are less upbeat.

Economic activity is “likely 45% back on track,” said a Citigroup report.

Coal consumption, one way to measure industrial activity, is 60% of the average level in the same period during 2017-19, according to UBS. It said real estate sales are 10% of normal.

Haier Group, one of the world’s biggest home appliance manufacturers, said its suppliers are back to about 80% of normal production. The company said its own factories will be operating normally by the end of February.

Some smaller companies that lack the resources of global industrial giants but might be the only source of a critical component are struggling to reopen.

In the southern city of Shenzhen, a computer monitor maker is closed because some of its managers are in Hubei and cannot get back to work, according to Global Sources, a company that links buyers to Chinese suppliers.

Others manufacturers are looking for alternative suppliers but say foreign sources can’t match Chinese prices or service, according to Global Sources.

[GeneChing]

Chinese anti-coronavirus inspector uses his kung fu moves to prevent a man from returning to his home after his village was locked down (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8041665/Chinese-coronavirus-inspector-uses-kung-fu-moves-prevent-villager-entering.html)
A video shows the villager arriving on his bike and trying to go back home
The officer performs martial art moves to prevent the resident from crossing
The intimidated man then gets back on his motorbike and rides off in a hurry
The village has reportedly imposed self-isolation measures amid the outbreak
Coronavirus has killed 2,705 people and infected over 80,326 people globally
By EMILIA JIANG FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 06:44 EST, 25 February 2020 | UPDATED: 09:18 EST, 25 February 2020

A Chinese officer has been caught on camera performing martial art moves to stop a villager from returning to his home after his village was locked down due to the coronavirus.

The video shows the community worker and his colleague standing guard behind a red ribbon stretched across the entire width of a road, preventing outsiders from entering.

The male resident is seen in the footage arriving on his small electric bike and trying to cross the blockade.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/25/10/25165782-8041665-image-a-13_1582627407691.jpg
The video shows the community worker and his colleague standing behind a red ribbon stretched across the entire width of a road, blocking outsiders from entering the area

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/25/10/25165778-8041665-image-a-12_1582627399532.jpg
The villager is pictured trying to enter his neighbourhood. He is taken by surprise when the inspector screams and performs a back flip, followed by another spinning sweeping kick

The cyclist says to the two black-suited officers: 'Just for a short while. I want to go home and have a look.'

The villager is taken by surprise when the inspector screams and performs a backflip, followed by a spinning sweeping kick.

The officer then does another kung fu move while the intimidated traveller gets back on his motorbike and rides off in a hurry.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/25/10/25165780-8041665-image-a-15_1582627433288.jpg
The officer then does another kung fu move to prevent the visitor from crossing the blockade

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/25/10/25165776-8041665-image-a-14_1582627410687.jpg
The traveller, who appears to be scared, gets back on his motorbike and rides off in a hurry

It is believed that the incident took place in Shandong Province, eastern China as the visitor speaks with a heavy local accent.

The officer was allegedly one of the volunteering villagers who acted as checkpoint security guards during the coronavirus outbreak.

The village has reportedly imposed self-isolation measures amid the deadly epidemic, with no one allowed to enter or leave the area.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/25/10/25166488-8041665-image-a-21_1582627777152.jpg
The village has reportedly imposed self-isolation measures amid the epidemic of coronavirus. The picture shows villagers with masks guarding a checkpoint in a rural area of Beijing, China

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/25/10/25166484-8041665-image-a-20_1582627773360.jpg
Villages across China have reportedly set up temporary fences in an effort to contain the coronavirus outbreak. A villager in Beijing is seen driving his tractor through a checkpoint

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/25/10/25166490-8041665-image-a-19_1582627764490.jpg
The picture shows passengers with masks travelling on the underground in Shanghai, China

The novel coronavirus, which was first discovered in Wuhan, has so far killed 2,705 people and infected over 80,326 people globally.

Iran's coronavirus death toll has risen to 15 today with the regime refusing to seal off the holy city at the centre of the crisis and pilgrims spreading the virus around the Middle East.

Italy now has at least seven deaths as the country imposes drastic security measures to contain the first major outbreak in Europe.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/25/10/25166440-8041665-image-a-22_1582627802298.jpg
People are seen wearing protective masks walking through a market in Wan Chai, Hong Kong

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/25/10/25165966-8041665-image-a-18_1582627526059.jpg
The novel coronavirus has killed 2,705 people and infected over 80,326 people globally

South Korea has confirmed an additional 84 cases of the coronavirus, bringing the total number of infections nationwide to 977.

China's top legislative committee on Monday passed a proposal to ban all trade and consumption of wild animals, a practice believed responsible for the country's deadly disease.

Experts believe that the new coronavirus has been passed onto humans by wildlife sold as food, especially bats and snakes.

THREADS
Successful Street Applications (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?49825-Successful-Street-Applications)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

The PRC's ability to quarantine mass populations has been fascinating. I've been corresponding with several people under quarantine. Is the U.S. capable of such a unified effort at this time? I hope so for all our sakes.



Trump’s DHS head has a brutal exchange on coronavirus — courtesy of a GOP senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/25/chad-wolf-john-kennedy-coronavirus/?fbclid=IwAR1vQS5FRo0W2lCVh_4BoK_jKRGz7Rhholglbumr fxUA_-UJXIz8cevQgfc)
Acting secretary of homeland security Chad Wolf struggled to provide facts about the virus when he was questioned by Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) (C-SPAN)
Image without a caption
By
Aaron Blake
Feb. 25, 2020 at 12:46 p.m. PST

The Department of Homeland Security is coordinating the U.S. government’s response to the increasing threat of the novel coronavirus. The agency has also been under the control of acting head Chad Wolf for more than four months, with no full-time replacement selected.

And Wolf’s testimony Tuesday morning wasn’t exactly confidence-inspiring — particularly for one GOP senator.

Appearing in front of a Senate appropriations subcommittee, Wolf was on the receiving end of a brutal line of questioning from Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.). Throughout the exchange, Wolf struggled to produce basic facts and projections about the disease. Perhaps most strikingly, the hearing came at a time of heightened fears about the disease, with the stock market plunging over new estimates about its spread into the United States. It’s a moment in which you’d expect such things to be top of mind for someone in Wolf’s position.

Wolf got started on the wrong foot almost immediately, when Kennedy asked him how many cases of the coronavirus there were in the United States. Wolf stated there were 14 but was uncertain about how many cases had been repatriated back to the United States from cruise ships, placing the number at “20- or 30-some-odd.”

Asked how many DHS was anticipating, Wolf didn’t have an answer and suggested this was the Department of Health and Human Services’ territory. “We do anticipate the number will grow; I don’t have an exact figure for you, though,” Wolf said.

“You’re head of Homeland Security, and your job is to keep us safe,” Kennedy responded, asking him again what the estimates might be. Wolf talked around the question, which led Kennedy to say, “Don’t you think you ought to check on that, as the head of Homeland Security?”

“We will,” Wolf responded. He referred to a task force that is working on that issue.

“I’m all for committees and task forces,” Kennedy said. “I think you ought to know that answer.”

Things didn’t get much better from there.

Kennedy then asked Wolf how the coronavirus was transmitted, to which Wolf responded that there were “a variety of ways” including “human to human.” That, though, wasn’t what Kennedy was asking; he was asking how it was transmitted between humans.

“How is it transmitted?” Kennedy cut in, making clear he wanted specifics.

“A variety of different ways,” Wolf again responded.

“Tell me what they are,” Kennedy quizzed him, clearly skeptical that Wolf knew the answer.

When Wolf again referred to “human-to-human” transmissions, Kennedy cut in. “Well, obviously human to human,” Kennedy said. “How?”

Wolf could muster only that it was “being in the same vicinity” and “physical contact.”

Kennedy then sought to compare mortality rates for the coronavirus — which is about 2 percent — and for influenza “over the last 10 years in America.” Wolf, who was clearly on his heels, responded somewhat haltingly that the flu was “also right around that percentage, as well” — referring to the 2 percent.

“You sure of that?” Kennedy asked.

“Yes, sir,” Wolf said.

The mortality rate for influenza in the United States is significantly lower than that — only around 0.1 percent, according to the CDC, with some differences depending on how you define an influenza-related death. In other words, while about 1 in 50 people are dying from the coronavirus, only about 1 in 1,000 Americans die of the flu. Wolf may have been referring to the worldwide flu mortality rate, which is indeed significantly higher than in the United States. He began answering the question as Kennedy was saying “America.”

It was more of the same from there. Kennedy asked whether we have enough respirators, and Wolf again wasn’t totally sure. “To my knowledge, we do.” Kennedy responded the committee had been told that wasn’t the case. Wolf seemed to think Kennedy was asking only about equipment for DHS officials and not the broader public.

A similar exchange occurred on masks. Wolf then tried to push back, noting Kennedy was asking him about “a number of medical questions.”

“I’m asking you questions because you’re the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security,” Kennedy shot back, “and you’re supposed to keep us safe. And you need to know the answers to these questions.”

Kennedy then asked when a vaccine for the disease might be ready, and Wolf said “several months.” Kennedy again said that conflicted with what the committee had been told elsewhere.

“Your numbers aren’t the same as CDC’s,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy concluded by again begging Wolf to have answers to these questions. But as Wolf tried to respond, Kennedy was apparently finished with the whole thing, and he instead yielded his time back.

The scene was jarring, but it wasn’t without precedent from Kennedy. The Louisiana senator has occasionally sent a message to the Trump administration by lighting into the president’s judicial picks — including in 2017 and last year. He also told administration officials during a hearing on the opioid crisis two months ago, “I don’t speak B.S.”

Tuesday was particularly striking, though, given who Wolf is. President Trump has left acting officials in charge of major departments and in other Cabinet-level jobs for months and months without picking successors that people like Kennedy would vote to confirm. The downside of that is the people in charge haven’t been vetted as closely for situations such as a potential outbreak of a disease. (DHS has actually been under acting control for more than 10 months now.)

Whether any one of Kennedy’s individual questions was fair or not, Wolf’s exchange with Kennedy suggested someone who was wasn’t terribly plugged in to what’s going on. That’s not a great sign.



Aaron Blake
Aaron Blake is senior political reporter, writing for The Fix. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Hill newspaper

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbjACXp-SE


THREADS
Tai Chi as medicine (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?50553-Tai-Chi-as-medicine)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Ninja Castle in Tokyo has heartwarming message for foreign tourists in midst of coronavirus (https://soranews24.com/2020/02/26/ninja-castle-in-tokyo-has-heartwarming-message-for-foreign-tourists-in-midst-of-coronavirus/)
Oona McGee 3 hours ago

https://sociorocketnewsen.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/ninja-castle-asakusa-tokyo-coronavirus-coivd-19-news-tourism-japan-travel-japanese-tourist-sites-spots-.jpg?w=768&h=431

Japanese shadow warriors work to “eliminate corona discrimination” in its tracks.

As the coronavirus continues to spread in Japan, fear of contracting the illness is also spreading throughout the country. Worrying news reports are now surfacing, with one commuter pushing the emergency button on a passenger who coughed without wearing a mask on a train and business owners flatly denying entry to people who aren’t Japanese.

With everyone on edge at the moment, one business in Tokyo is putting a smile on people’s faces with a refreshingly friendly approach to foreigners in the midst of the current health crisis. As one of the city’s most popular tourist spots, Ninja Castle in Asakusa is used to welcoming foreign visitors through its doors, and now they’ve decided to take a stand against “corona discrimination” with an all-inclusive message that’s caught everyone’s attention.

▼ Twitter user @MAD_adnap snapped this photo of the message outside Ninja Castle.


天晴れ富士 CHLOER ☆
@MAD_adnap (https://twitter.com/MAD_adnap/status/1232181949218770944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5 Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1232181949218770944&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsoranews24.com%2F2020%2F02%2 F26%2Fninja-castle-in-tokyo-has-heartwarming-message-for-foreign-tourists-in-midst-of-coronavirus%2F)
Saw that today and it warmed my heart 💗

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERmW8VYUYAAg3_m?format=jpg&name=900x900
941
9:54 PM - Feb 24, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
251 people are talking about this
The message reads:

“We welcome everyone. So foreigner (sic) and of course Chinese too. The bad thing is the virus not you who come to Japan. So come in with ‘peace of mind’. Eliminate corona discrimination. Ninja Castle.”

This level-headed approach towards foreigners at a time when many are labelling them as possible high-risk carriers for the virus is a welcome change to some of the sad stories of racist behaviour floating around online at the moment.

In light of the massive drop in tourist numbers from China and other places around the world due to coronavirus fears, many businesses in Japan are currently facing an uncertain future as they struggle to stay afloat. Down in Kyoto, a city that’s usually weighed down by problems related to overtourism, merchants have even started an “empty” tourist campaign to encourage more people to visit the area.

While Ninja Castle relies on its foreign customers in the same way Kyoto does, it’s nice to see them acknowledge their customer base and proactively create a message to make them feel at ease. As they say, “the bad thing is the virus not you who come to Japan”.

Coronavirus doesn’t discriminate, people do, so hopefully we see more of these welcome messages in the future as opposed to fear-based signs denying people entry to businesses solely on the basis of race.

Source: Twitter/@MAD_adnap
Top image: Flickr/go.biwako

THREADS
Ninja Museum (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70112-Ninja-Museum)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

I'm headed up to SF this weekend for my birthday. Nothing like heading into an emergency for celebrate.


San Francisco declares state of emergency over coronavirus. Here's what that means (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/26/health/san-francisco-coronavirus-emergency-declaration/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3MQzB3pQiaPPb8ftLd0v4cBtlpNY DtG-yTyrCdIfg0Lzi9os3SdG8AgwI)
By Jason Hanna, CNN
Updated 3:16 PM ET, Wed February 26, 2020

(CNN)San Francisco's mayor on Tuesday declared a local emergency to make it easier for the populous city and international travel hub to combat novel coronavirus if it comes -- even while stressing that it isn't there yet.
The move will, among other things, help the city get reimbursed by state and federal governments for money it spends on preparedness, Mayor London Breed said at a news conference
"This declaration of emergency is all about preparedness," Breed said.
The announcement follows similar declarations in California's Santa Clara and San Diego counties. The move came as US health officials warned they expect to eventually see a continual spread of coronavirus in the United States.
Breed's declaration is effective immediately for seven days, though the board of supervisors will vote on its continuation March 3.

How the emergency will help the city prepare
These are some ways the emergency declaration will help the city prepare, health officials said at the news conference:
• It allows staff to be pulled away from nonessential duties so they can focus on preparedness and prevention. This includes public health nurses, case managers and social workers, who will assess situations in the city.
• Clinicians will be on call at all times to answer questions from anyone who calls the city's customer service number, 311, with clinical questions about coronavirus.
• "It allows us to look at things like shelters, and other opportunities for us to expand, in the event that that's necessary, and do a broader assessment of the city's capacity to respond in the event that there is an outbreak," city Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax said.

The city also will focus on making sure health care workers -- because they'd have the most contact with symptomatic people -- have the supplies they need to lower the chances they would become sick, city health officer Dr. Tomás Aragón said.
Media coverage of the declaration itself can raise awareness about how to prevent the spread of the virus, officials said.
So far, there is no cure or vaccine for the virus. Clinical trials to evaluate whether a certain antiviral drug can treat the illness are underway in the United States and China.
"We're going to depend on a lot of core, traditional public health measures -- things like washing your hand(s), making sure that you don't touch your face and your nose, making sure that if you're sick, you stay home from school or from work or from social events," Aragón said.

City official: Separate the disease from ethnicity
The virus has has infected more than 80,000 people, mostly in China where it originated, and killed over 2,700 worldwide in the past few months.
The number of coronavirus patients in the United States was at 59 on Tuesday, most of whom who returned to the US after being aboard a cruise ship that was traveling in Asia.
San Francisco's hospitals have treated three coronavirus patients who were transferred there from other areas, but there are otherwise no active cases in the city, officials said.
City officials addressed San Francisco's travel links with Asia and China, where the outbreak started in December. The city has a large Asian American population, and usually robust transit to and from Asia, though airlines have recently suspended many routes to and from China.
"Given the high volume of travel between San Francisco and mainland China and the spread of the virus to other countries, there is a growing likelihood that we will see cases in San Francisco," Colfax said.
He emphasized that the virus transmission was not about race or ethnicity, but travel.
"We are monitoring hundreds of people who have recently returned from travel in mainland China and are helping them to self-quarantine and watch for symptoms," and so far none has tested positive, Colfax said.
City Assessor Carmen Chu, an Asian American, also urged people to separate the disease from ethnicity.
"I think we see many of our restaurants, not only in Chinatown, but across our neighborhoods, that are sitting empty on days that would normally be filled to the brim with people who were going there for eating," she said.
"We ... want to share a message of making sure that we don't let this disease turn us into racists. At the end of the day ... this is about contracting a virus because someone traveled," Chu said.
Breed encouraged people to "continue to live their daily lives."
"There is no recommendation to cancel social gatherings at this time, and we should continue to support the neighborhoods we love, like Chinatown," the mayor said.

[GeneChing]

The CDC has thoughts about soul patches and mutton chops – and preventing coronavirus (https://wgno.com/news/the-cdc-has-thoughts-about-soul-patches-and-mutton-chops-and-preventing-coronavirus/)
NEWS
by: CNN Wire
Posted: Feb 26, 2020 / 02:31 PM CST / Updated: Feb 26, 2020 / 03:08 PM CST

When it comes to novel coronavirus safety, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has some suggestions about facial hair.

Side whiskers, soul patches, lampshades and handlebar moustaches are good to go, according to a CDC infographic. But styles like long stubble, a beard, the Dali and mutton chops are not recommended because they are likely to interfere with a facepiece respirator.

Masks and respirators are being utilized around the world to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has reached more than 80,000 cases globally.

A respirator covers at least the nose and mouth and protects against particles including infectious agents, the CDC said. However, the CDC does not recommend routine use outside of workplaces.

Facial hair poses a risk to the effectiveness of respirators because it may keep the exhalation valve from working properly if the two come into contact, the infographic said.

No matter the style choice, the hair should not cross the respirator sealing surface, the infographic said.

A goatee, horseshoe and villain mustache are okay, with caution, the infographic noted.

Take a look at the infographic below:

CDC: Facial Hairstyles and Filtering Facepiece Respirators
https://www.kron4.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2020/02/BEARD.jpg?w=900

Nice to know the U.S. government has labelled all these facial hair styles. Didn't get mine tho. I'm uncategorizable. :cool: The closest would be the Imperial without the mustache. And I'm not shaving. My beard hides a keyloid scar that looks like a witch's wart on my chin. Plus I know how to tuck my beard up in my mask. This isn't my first pandemic rodeo (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/index.php?p=article&article=468)...

[GeneChing]

About that global economy...


Budweiser APAC takes a hit in China as biggest Lunar New Year campaign runs into coronavirus outbreak (https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3052600/budweiser-apac-takes-hit-china-biggest-lunar-new-year-campaign)
Sales to nightclubs and restaurants has come to a halt amid the public health crisis sparked by coronavirus outbreak
Net profit fell 2 per cent in 2019, partially due to weaker sales to nightclubs and restaurants last quarter
Yujing Liu
Published: 12:04pm, 27 Feb, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/02/27/c75b3c3a-5912-11ea-b438-8452af50d521_image_hires_120432.JPG?itok=rF0ffO3F&v=1582776277
Packs of Budweiser beers are displayed in a Shanghai's supermarket. The brewer says on February 27 that there’s “almost no activity in the nightlife channel and very limited activity in restaurants.” Photo: AFP

Budweiser Brewing Company APAC, the most profitable brewer in Asia, said revenue in China plunged in the first two months of this year as nightclubs and restaurants were shut across the country amid the coronavirus outbreak.
The Asia-Pacific unit business of Anheuser-Busch InBev estimated its China sales to have declined by US$285 million in January and February compared to the same period last year, it said in notes to its 2019 financial results on Thursday. The hit is equivalent to about 4 per cent of its revenue last year, based on its latest accounts.
Profit also declined by US$170 million over the period, the company said in the report, referring to its normalised earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation or Ebitda. That is about 8 per cent of its full-year figure in 2019. The company’s top beer brands in China include Budweiser, Corona, Hoegaarden and Harbin.
“The impact of the virus outbreak on our business continues to evolve,” Budweiser said in the financial report. “We have observed almost no activity in the nightlife channel and very limited activity in restaurants.”
Other retail channels also recorded a meaningful decline, it said, but e-commerce sales growth accelerated significantly.
The viral outbreak has so far infected more than 82,000 people and killed at least 2,800, mostly in mainland China. The hit put a halt to a strong start in the opening three weeks of 2020 just as Budweiser was launching its largest ever Lunar New Year campaign, prompting the brewer to also shut some of its breweries including in the epicentre of Wuhan.
Budweiser said it has reopened over half of its beer factories in China and obtained permission to reopen the rest, except for one in Wuhan, after the country extended the Lunar New Year holiday by a week to contain the virus.
The firm also expressed concerns over its business in South Korea, where the novel virus is spreading rapidly, adding to pressure from price competition last year. South Korea recorded a surge in infection and death this week, stoking concerns about a wider contagion.
Budweiser said net profit fell 2 per cent to US$994 million last year, while revenue was little changed at about US$6.55 billion. Still, total volume sold last year declined by 3 per cent from the previous year, mainly “due to a challenging industry and competitive environment in South Korea and softness in the China nightlife channel,” it said.
Hong Kong-listed shares of Budweiser fell by 3.1 per cent to HK$23.55 as of 10:40am local time, bringing the loss to 13 per cent from its IPO price of HK$27. Budweiser raised US$5 billion in its listing plan, one of the five biggest IPOs in the world’s last year.




Yujing Liu
Yujing Liu is a business reporter with a passion for understanding and explaining the fascinating complexities of China’s economy and society. Originally from Beijing, she joined the Post in 2017 after graduating from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in politics and journalism.

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Beer... (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?6266-Beer)
2020 Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)

[GeneChing]

Wearing a mask, Gwyneth Paltrow cracks a coronavirus joke: ‘I’ve already been in this movie’ (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-02-26/gwyneth-paltrow-kate-hudson-face-mask-coronavirus)

https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/7497ec0/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2048x1363+0+0/resize/840x559!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F44%2Fce%2F06566b66f2 03693b971ce323e8a3%2Fla-oe-goldberg-ebola-crisis-management-2014101-001
Gwyneth Paltrow played patient zero of a viral epidemic in “Contagion.”(Claudette Barius / Warner Bros.)
By CHRISTIE D’ZURILLASTAFF WRITER
FEB. 26, 2020 12:02 PM

Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Hudson are among those locking it down in the air when it comes to the coronavirus. At least they think they are.

“En route to Paris. Paranoid? Prudent? Panicked? Placid? Pandemic? Propaganda? Paltrow’s just going to go ahead and sleep with this thing on the plane,” the Goop founder said on Instagram, where she posted a picture of herself on a flight wearing an appropriately stylish Airinum+Nemen mask.

“I’ve already been in this movie,” she said. “Stay safe. Don’t shake hands. Wash hands frequently.”

Paltrow was joking about her role in “Contagion,” the 2011 Steven Soderbergh film where she played a Midwestern woman who stops for a fling on her way from a business trip in Hong Kong, only to die soon after she gets home, much to movie-husband Matt Damon’s dismay. Her patient-zero affliction quickly turns into a global pandemic.


gwynethpaltrow
Verified (https://www.instagram.com/p/B9BxGPqFfpw/?utm_source=ig_embed)
•
https://scontent-sjc3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e35/s1080x1080/83848546_187283899214629_1630140004971625951_n.jpg ?_nc_ht=scontent-sjc3-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=1&_nc_ohc=4aqHJBECjIsAX9W3HgD&oh=0ffaebd44e3d6182684795088d2b7737&oe=5E85CDCD

gwynethpaltrow's profile picture
gwynethpaltrow
Verified
En route to Paris. Paranoid? Prudent? Panicked? Placid? Pandemic? Propaganda? Paltrow’s just going to go ahead and sleep with this thing on the plane. I’ve already been in this movie. Stay safe. Don’t shake hands. Wash hands frequently. 😷

Hudson, meanwhile, posted a shot of herself in what appears to be a surgical mask, tagging her picture with the caption, “Travel. 2020.”

Commenters were quick to note that her mask wouldn’t do much good when it came to protecting her from coronavirus. Frequent soap-and-water hand-washing, experts say, is a better preventative measure.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the role of such face masks is “patient source control,” to prevent contamination of the surrounding area when a person who has contracted the virus coughs or sneezes.


katehudson
Verified
• (https://www.instagram.com/p/B9AcCXAnVoH/?utm_source=ig_embed)

https://scontent-sjc3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e35/s1080x1080/83682872_195274531680123_7253178010943462932_n.jpg ?_nc_ht=scontent-sjc3-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=1&_nc_ohc=AIiqxxm0MCkAX8V237r&oh=053c4614fcf1768fa9830cf8a481ef50&oe=5E815D42
katehudson's profile picture
katehudson
Verified
Travel. 2020. #😳

Paltrow’s mask, however, was the equivalent of an N95-filtering facepiece respirator, the medical version of which, the CDC says, is recommended for healthcare professionals and could wind up in short supply in a pandemic.

Paltrow’s reusable, $99 limited edition Urban Air Mask 2.0 is currently sold out, along with everything else on the Airinum website, but the company has a wait list going. According to its maker, the mask “combines Scandinavian minimalist design with Italian textile and dyeing research,” neither of which has anything to do with virus transmission.

(Incidentally, the respirator appears to match the actress’ eye mask, which might be the same black silk one that’s available on the Goop website for $50.)

More seriously, the CDC has chimed in via Instagram as well.

“While #CDC considers #COVID19 a serious situation and is taking preparedness measures, the immediate health risk in the U.S. is thought to be low, based on what we know,” the government agency said. “Everyone should always take simple daily precautions to help prevent the spread of respiratory illnesses. Learn more at www.cdc.gov.”


cdcgov
Verified (https://www.instagram.com/p/B86j151l3Ze/?utm_source=ig_embed)
•

https://scontent-sjc3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/fr/e15/s1080x1080/84345601_685955738818801_9135672238442432465_n.jpg ?_nc_ht=scontent-sjc3-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=1&_nc_ohc=6IcwfnIhCxgAX_cYPUH&oh=73f0e9db1c4f43e7242d1919c8394ef0&oe=5E88D2ED
cdcgov's profile picture
cdcgov
Verified
While #CDC considers #COVID19 a serious situation and is taking preparedness measures, the immediate health risk in the U.S. is thought to be low, based on what we know. Everyone should always take simple daily precautions to help prevent the spread of respiratory illnesses. Learn more at www.cdc.gov. #publichealth #coronavirus


Christie D’Zurilla
Christie D’Zurilla covers breaking entertainment news. A USC graduate, she joined the Los Angeles Times in 2003 and has 30 years of journalism experience in Southern California.

THREADS
Gwyneth & Goop (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69410-Gwyneth-amp-Goop)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

To all our subscribers, thank you for your patience, support and understanding.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERzSX6RUYAALaE6?format=jpg&name=900x900

THREADS
Spring 2020 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71664-Spring-2020)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Baduanjin (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56712-Baduanjin-(8-section-brocade))

[GeneChing]

From CMAT's facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/300647849984977/):

Unfortunately it is with regret that I must announce that CMAT 28 will be postponed until next year. I apologize any inconvenience that this decision may have cost any of you. The CMAT committee did not easily make this decision. But, as of today only 79 competitors have signed up for the competition. From further investigation, we realized many people are not willing to travel because of the coronavirus, or to take part in big events. Certainly, we understand everyone's concern, and make your safety and health our main concern.

So we will resume next year. Hopefully, by that time we will have the virus under control!

Please, stay in touch through our various channels for latest developments in CMAT, and Collegiate Wushu.

Thank you for your support.

Sifu Bryant Fong

CMAT Chair

and CMAT 28 Committee

THREADS
CMAT (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?36106-Who-s-going-to-Berkeley-CMAT-this-year)
Covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

ASIA MARCH 2, 2020 5:14AM PT
China’s Box Office Loses Up to $214 Million in Two Months Due to Coronavirus (https://variety.com/2020/film/asia/china-box-office-coronavirus-1203520600/)
By VIVIENNE CHOW

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/china-cinema-closed.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1

View of a closed cinema after the Chinese government discouraged public gatherings due to a virus outbreak, in Beijing, China, 27 January 2020. China warned that the coronavirus outbreak is accelerating further, deepening fears about an epidemic that has affected more than 2,700 people worldwide and killed at least 80 people in the country.China coronavirus outbreak accelerating further, Beijing - 27 Jan 2020
CREDIT: WU HONG/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
China’s box office might have lost as much as RMB 1.5 billion ($214 million) in the first two months of this year due to the coronavirus outbreak, but a nationwide resumption of movie theaters and production is unlikely to happen any time soon.

“Judging from the current situation, the film industry is not equipped to resume business yet, and we have not approved industry’s demands to resume business as of now,” said Chen Bei, deputy secretary general of the Beijing municipal government.

Local data company Ent Group has estimated that box-office receipts in January and February have totaled only RMB 220 million ($31.3 million), compared to RMB 1.45 billion ($217 million) in the same period in 2019 and RMB 1.51 billion ($241.6 million) in 2018.

Ent Group estimated the decline in box office could be as high as RMB 1.5 billion ($214 million) due to the fact that the Lunar New Year holiday season started on Jan. 25, much earlier compared with the usual beginning of or mid-February. “An early holiday season should’ve given more time for the box office to grow,” the report said.

But cinemas were forced to shut down just before the Lunar New Year holiday and Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province were locked down on Jan. 23.

The estimated figures came after the release of a joint directive from Beijing Center for Diseases Prevention and Control, and Beijing Municipal Film Bureau on Feb. 26, which stipulates strict guidelines for cinema operators and film crews if they wish to resume business.

Cinema operators must seek approval from the authorities to re-open movie theaters and adopt stringent measures such as selling tickets on alternate rows, requiring movie-goers to register with their real names and personal details, and auditoriums to be thoroughly disinfected after each screening.

Film crews with less than 50 people can resume filming in Beijing if they are approved, but only if their body temperature does not exceed 37.3 degree celsius. All film crew members must wear masks throughout the production, except for performers.

But film crews with more than 50 people will not be allowed to resume filming in Beijing until the plague is gone. Crew members travelling from affected areas such as Hubei province are not allowed to take part in any production in the city.

Ent Group added in the report that cinemas in China are not likely to re-open in March. As of March 2, Covid-19 has already infected more than 80,000 in mainland China and killed 2,914 people.

THREADS
Chollywood rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)

[GeneChing]

Empty Cities and Stalled Industrial Production, New Analysis Shows Coronavirus Has Cut China's Carbon Emissions by 100 Million Metric Tons (https://time.com/5786634/coronavirus-carbon-emissions-china/?fbclid=IwAR0tn_kvTMYGJv_iOlftpVzMasQM9leXZQXyFUPq 7rf9J-2ggXRECFSqHUg)

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/coronavirus-carbon-emissions-china.jpg?w=800&quality=85
A view of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing's Tiantan Park on Feb. 19, 2020. Artyom Ivanov—TASS/Getty Images

BY AKSHAT RATHI AND JEREMY HODGES / BLOOMBERG FEBRUARY 19, 2020

One of the deadliest epidemics in decades has dented energy demand and industrial output in China, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by about 100 million metric tons—close to what Chile emits in a year.

A new analysis by the climate nonprofit Carbon Brief found that the widespread impact of the virus—including travel restrictions, longer holidays, and lower economic activity—means that neither has recovered from the usual lull around the Chinese New Year, a roughly two-week festival that began this year on January 25.

The report looked at emissions during the two-week period beginning 10 days after the start of the festival and compared that to the same period for each of the previous five years. Over that period in 2019, China emitted 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide; this year’s figure is likely closer to 300 million metric tons.

Coal consumption also has yet to recover from its usual holiday breather. A month before the Lunar New Year, burning of the dirtiest fossil fuel was in line with previous years’ rates. Since then, it’s fallen to a four-year low, according to the analysis.

China’s economy is grinding to a halt as the government scrambles to stop the spread of the deadly Wuhan coronavirus, fueling fears that efforts to contain the outbreak will have
Although pictures of empty city centers and public transport might seem like evidence for the large decline in emissions, the fact is that China’s energy consumption is dominated by industry. The reduction in emissions is mostly a result of lower output from oil refineries and lower coal use for power generation and steel-making, as China’s government struggles to control the epidemic. The death toll from the virus on mainland China reached 2,000 on Feb. 18.

There were 72,436 confirmed cases of people infected with Coronavirus in mainland China as of Feb. 17, according to the National Health Commission with the death toll at 1,868.

If the short-term reductions last, annual emissions for the country will fall by just 1%. But there’s no guarantee that they will. China has plenty of spare capacity in both power generation and industries to ramp up output once the infection rate starts to come down and protections ease.

Research from BloombergNEF released Tuesday shows that, despite the erosion in China’s productivity, the country’s emissions could still increase due to an infrastructure-focused stimulus package being prepared by the government, which will require the country to continue burning coal and increase its use of cement and steel.

THREADS
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
China's Pollution Problem (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?67175-China-s-Pollution-problem)

[GeneChing]

http://image5.sixthtone.com/image/5/24/532.jpg

Voices & Opinion
The Challenge Facing China’s Wild Animal Trade Ban (http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005240/the-challenge-facing-chinas-wild-animal-trade-ban-?fbclid=IwAR0y7IjykNky_t8gDGFRSywZAeNONKYE8j020nZm irqWISpkWYDUkOpOwT0)
If the country is serious about curbing the wild animal trade, it needs to rethink its approach.


Feb 27, 2020 5-min read
Voices
Zhou Hongcheng
Professor of food culture
Zhou Hongcheng is an assistant professor of Chinese food culture at Zhejiang Gongshang University.

On Feb. 24, China announced it would implement a “comprehensive” and immediate ban on the trade and consumption of wild animals nationwide. The move cemented an earlier emergency ban enacted amid the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic, which has killed 2,800 and sickened over 80,000 worldwide as of Feb. 27.

But whether it will have a lasting impact is another question. This isn’t the first time a zoonotic coronavirus has devastated China or sparked a legislative and popular backlash against wild animal consumption. SARS, which some scientists believe jumped to humans from masked palm civets at a wet market in southern China, killed nearly 800 people around the world from 2002 to 2004. While recent research has cast doubt on the theory that COVID-19 originated in a live animal market in the central city of Wuhan, virologists still believe it was likely transmitted to humans from wild animals, possibly endangered pangolins.

In the wake of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak, China updated its existing rules governing the wildlife trade, but a combination of loopholes and muddled enforcement has continued to render them largely ineffective. If we want this time to be different, we first need to understand the cultural and commercial drivers of the trade, as well as the flaws in the current regulatory and enforcement system.

Chinese have consumed wild animals for thousands of years, though contrary to stereotypes abroad, they are hardly a fixture of the country’s dinner tables. In its most basic form, the practice was a matter of survival: China had a large population, limited arable land, and a long history of natural and man-made disasters. In times of need, many ordinary Chinese turned to wild animals and plants for sustenance.

In non-emergencies, the traditional notion that “like nourishes like” led many to believe that eating animal parts could have a beneficial effect on the diner’s corresponding body part. For example, braised beef tendon was seen as a curative for frail knees, and sheep’s ***** as a virility booster.

As the above examples show, such customs aren’t necessarily tied to the consumption of wild or exotic animals. But there is a long-standing belief in China that the rarer something is, the greater its value. Rare or hard-to-obtain meat was — and sometimes still is — thought to have extremely potent medicinal effects. It could also be a powerful symbol of filial piety, love, and respect, as in the folk story of the woman who cut flesh from her thigh to cook a medicinal porridge for her mother-in-law.


One domestic media outlet found over 100 possible exceptions to the new rules, including sika deer, red deer, and ring-necked pheasant.
- Zhou Hongcheng, professor
These customs have been reinforced by the tenets of traditional Chinese medicine, which makes liberal usage of ingredients extracted from wild animals — such as tiger bone, pilose antler, and deer fetus. Pangolins are another common source of curatives. And while the consumption of pangolin meat is illegal in the country, an exception for TCM practitioners has long allowed the scales of farm-bred pangolins to be prescribed for medicinal use — a loophole that has greatly complicated efforts to protect the species.

China has had a wildlife protection law on the books since 1988, but its single-minded focus on encouraging the commercial rearing and breeding of species over conservation has led many critics to dub it the “wildlife exploitation law.” In particular, species categorized as one of the “three haves” — having “ecological, scientific, or social value,” like pangolins — were eligible to be bred and sold by licensed farms, which have become a key pillar of rural economies in impoverished parts of the country.

In addition to forming a regulatory blind spot — the relevant authorities generally lack the resources to ensure wildlife farms are operating legally and within regulations — farm-raised wildlife muddies the waters for what is and isn’t legal to consume. The latest ban, despite its claim to be “comprehensive,” does little to clear things up. One domestic media outlet found over 100 possible exceptions to the new rules, including sika deer, red deer, and ring-necked pheasant.

It doesn’t have to be this way. On Feb. 25, the day after China announced its nationwide ban on the wild animal trade, the southern megacity of Shenzhen unveiled its own version of the rules, including a white list with just nine types of meat on it. On the city’s black list were a number of species, including turtles, snakes, and some types of birds that local authorities believed posed a risk to public health, despite still being legal to raise under national law.

That’s a far simpler and more effective approach than the convoluted new national ban, but it may not be enough on its own. One of the primary reasons China is so vulnerable to zoonotic diseases is the very nature of its cities — and the places where animals, both wild and domesticated, are sold.

Wet markets have been linked to numerous infectious disease outbreaks in China over the years, from SARS to bird flu, and their close proximity to residential areas makes them a sizeable community risk. COVID-19 might not have originated in a Wuhan wet market, but the market’s central location almost certainly helped accelerate its spread.

Wet markets’ reputations as incubators for disease makes them easy targets during epidemics, and local governments around the country have responded to the current crisis with bans and cleanup campaigns. The eastern province of Zhejiang, for example, has not just cracked down on the wild animal trade, but also the sale of live poultry.

These campaign-style enforcement efforts cannot achieve lasting change. As long as small markets are allowed to sell and slaughter live animals, resource-strapped local governments will be hard-pressed to monitor and regulate their compliance with health and sanitation codes. To reduce the risk of animal-to-human transmission, slaughter and packaging operations should be moved to large-scale, advanced, and easier-to-monitor operations away from residential areas.


The guiding principles of any legislation should be clarity and practicability
- Zhou Hongcheng, professor
Ultimately, the guiding principles of any legislation should be clarity and practicability. Banning the wildlife trade altogether while carving out a broad array of exceptions for different species and market needs clearly hasn’t been effective. And although Shenzhen’s new guidelines are admirably clear, they likely go too far: One of the delights of any cuisine is variety, and banning all but the most common livestock outright will likely cause resentment that could set back the conservation movement. We need to assess the risks and conservation needs of each individual species before making a clear and definite decision one way or the other.

Meanwhile, we should take steps to lower demand for wild animals. There is research showing young Chinese are already less interested in wild animal consumption than older generations. We should encourage this trend through health and scientific education, such as by pointing out the lack of scientific evidence for most TCM remedies. Higher taxes can also be used to slowly discourage consumption of wild animal byproducts.

Changing long-ingrained eating habits will take time. Rather than rushing in with a blanket ban, we should rationally examine the issue, identify the core problems, and work to resolve them, step-by-step.

Translator: David Ball; editors: Wu Haiyun and Kilian O’Donnell.

(Header image: A Chinese pangolin strolls in the soil, June 2017. IC)

THREADS
Pangolins (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70061-Pangolins)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Chinese food (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?16444-Chinese-food)
Weird stuff in TCM...... List it! (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?50433-Weird-stuff-in-TCM-List-it!)

[GeneChing]

NEWS FEBRUARY 28, 2020 6:15AM PT
Hollywood Studios Assembling Coronavirus Strategy Teams (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/hollywood-coronavirus-no-time-to-die-mulan-1203518001/)
By BRENT LANG
Executive Editor of Film and Media
@https://twitter.com/BrentALang

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/b25_25594_r-e1575469208183.jpg?w=1000&h=562&crop=1.
CREDIT: NICOLE DOVE

As coronavirus continues its deadly march across the globe, the outbreak is wreaking havoc with Hollywood’s efforts to launch major movies and shows. In the process, companies are asking employees to delay work trips to countries such as China, Japan, Italy and South Korea, the regions that have been the most affected by the disease, and they are scuttling promotional campaigns for several upcoming blockbusters.

Studios have already cancelled plans for China premieres for films such as Disney’s “Mulan” and the James Bond adventure “No Time to Die” — moves that could cost those movies tens of millions in box office revenue. Sony’s “Bloodsport” was also expected to screen in China, but that release date remains up in the air. Most of these films hadn’t gotten the official word from Chinese authorities that they would be allowed to screen in the country, but there’s little chance that will come any time soon, as movie theaters in China remain closed. There are also indications that several upcoming movies such as “Mulan,” “The Grudge,” and “Onward” will delay their release in Italy, where the number of cases recently jumped to 400. No major U.S. films will debut in the country this weekend. Globally, the disease, named COVID-19, has infected over 82,500 people and killed 2,810. Healthcare experts expect that number to climb as coronavirus continues to spread to other parts of the world.

No studios were willing to go on the record about their response to the crisis, but privately they said they were taking “a wait-and-see” approach as the number of hotspots expands. Many are in regular contact with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization as they assess the rapidly changing situation.

Most of the major studios have begun assembling advisory teams comprising members of their production, marketing, finance, and human resources staff to assess the potential impact of the disease. Part of their task is to figure out how staff in these affected areas can remain safe. In some cases, they’re encouraging people in areas where there are a growing number of cases to work from home, and helping to ensure the technology is in place to make that happen.

Another topic of discussion is the business ramifications of a health crisis that has the potential to grow into an epidemic or pandemic. Studios are trying to determine if they should move major releases to avoid debuting films in parts of the world where coronavirus is spreading. At the same time, they’re assessing what impact such moves will have on other movies that are scheduled to debut later in 2020 and 2021. Studio executives believe that the theater closures in China and Italy, as well as the spread of the disease in major markets such as South Korea could result in billions of dollars in lost ticket sales.

“Mulan,” a $200 million adventure film with a cast of Asian actors, was expected to resonate in markets such as China, where it may not play for weeks or months. Rival studios say they are watching to see how Disney handles the challenges of debuting the film at a time when theaters in some countries are closed and people are hesitant to spend time in public spaces, before determining what to do with their own upcoming releases. The Bond film, “Wonder Woman: 1984,” and the ninth “Fast & Furious” movie are among the major films debuting in the coming months that had planned robust international rollouts. Those could be impacted if the disease continues to spread. The latest 007 adventure had originally intended to take a promotional swing through China, South Korea, and Japan, but those plans have been abandoned.

So far, studios such as Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, and Disney are also still expected to attend CinemaCon along with the stars of their upcoming movies. The annual exhibition industry trade show is being held in Las Vegas at the end of March and brings attendees from across the globe — though Chinese companies have cancelled on account of the travel ban. In a note to participants this week, Mitch Neuhauser, managing director of CinemaCon, and John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theatre Owners, the group behind the convention, said they still expected the event to be well-attended.

“An encouraging measure of the impact of coronavirus is that the number of concerned emails or phone calls coming to us are minimal,” they wrote. “We are, though, inundated with our normal number of emails and calls that are all about the planning of the convention.”

Justin Kroll contributed to this report.

THREADS
Chollywood (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
No Time to Die (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71114-No-Time-to-Die)
Mulan (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Or you could just get it here: 6 Healing Sounds (Liuzijue) DVD With Instruction Manual (https://www.martialartsmart.com/dvd-hq003.html)


Video丨Six Healing Sounds Qigong recommends for COVID-19 patients (http://english.eastday.com/Latest/u1ai8666358.html)
By:Zheng Qian | From:english.eastday.com | 2020-03-02 11:52

As traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has proved to be effective in the treatment of the novel coronavirus-related pneumonia, many people are beginning to try the therapy.

For those patients in the stage of recovery, a set of Six Healing Sounds (also called Liuzijue in Chinese) Qigong is recommended by TCM experts.

http://english.eastday.com/images/thumbnailimg/month_2003/ed162b9f12c6493e9e5df43bc0657501.jpg
Wang Zhenwei,Deputy Chief Physician fromYueyang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine,Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine,demonstrates the Six Healing SoundsQigong. [Photo/kankannews.com]

The Six Healing Sounds is a breathing technique devised by the ancient Chinese to improve health and promote healing and longevity. The earliest record of the breathing technique is believed to appear during the Southern and Northern Dynasties written by Tao Hongjing, a well-known TCM doctor, Taoist, alchemist as well as astrologer who lived from AD 456 to 536.

According to the TCM theory, the five major organs — heart, liver, spleen, lung and kidney — are each assigned an element (fire, earth, metal, water or wood). Every organ also has an associated sound which the organ resonates with. By using the associated sound, stale and congested qi can be expelled from the affected organ and be replaced with fresh and clear qi.

Therefore, the Six Healing Sounds practice helps to move congested qi and allow the body to get rid of it by creating different internal vibrations and pressures within different parts of the body through the inhaling and exhaling of air. In other words, when people make the six healing sounds, they are giving the internal organs a good massage to expel stale qi.



Subtitles: Zheng Qian;

Video source: Yueyang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine,Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine

THREADS
six healing sounds 六字訣 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?64600-six-healing-sounds-%26%2320845%3B%26%2323383%3B%26%2335363%3B)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Coronavirus: 85 per cent of patients in China benefiting from traditional Chinese medicine, officials claim (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052763/coronavirus-80-cent-patients-china-benefiting-traditional?fbclid=IwAR129Nc5__J9bI8bcrm1bYy1uaLDP jwHrdd-8ptQkpO5VmHSNavG61eAY-I)
Ancient remedies play a complementary role to Western drugs in fighting the potentially deadly infection, officials, doctors say
But others say TCM works only as a placebo and that people who say they have benefited would have recovered anyway
Echo Xie in Beijing
Published: 10:00am, 28 Feb, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/02/28/68364f28-588c-11ea-b438-8452af50d521_image_hires_130345.jpg?itok=pVh5o8J1&v=1582866232
Some doctors are using traditional Chinese medicine to treat coronavirus patients. Photo: Xinhua

More than 80 per cent of coronavirus patients in China are being treated with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) alongside more mainstream antiviral drugs, according to local health officials.
While acknowledging that the ancient practice has no specific treatments for Covid-19 – the pneumonia-like disease caused by the virus, which has sickened over 82,000 people and killed more than 2,800 since the outbreak began in central China in December – some experts said they had witnessed a higher recovery rate among those using both TCM and Western drugs, than solely mainstream treatments.
Xu Nanping, a vice-minister of science and technology, said last week that about 85 per cent of patients in China had been given the combined treatment.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/28/5a72d7a8-588c-11ea-b438-8452af50d521_1320x770_130345.jpg
The novel coronavirus has infected more than 82,000 people. Photo: Xinhua

China’s National Health Commission prescribes the use of TCM alongside Western drugs in its guidelines for the treatment of people infected with the coronavirus.
Song Juexian, a doctor with the integrated TCM and Western medicine unit at Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing, said traditional Chinese medicine had the benefit of enhancing the patients’ “internal balance”.
“Chinese medicine has been practised for at least 3,000 years. It is the wisdom of our ancestors and it is [still] progressing,” she said. “I believe the effects of combined use of TCM and Western medicine will become better and better.”
Gao Xiaojun, a spokesman for the Beijing Health Commission, was equally keen to promote the use of the ancient technique, saying TCM had made a significant contribution to patients’ recovery.
“Traditional Chinese medicine has played an active role in improving the recovery rate and lowering the mortality rate among patients,” he told a press conference on Monday.
According to him, 87 per cent of coronavirus patients in Beijing had been given traditional medicines and 92 per cent of those had shown improvement.


https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/28/885d6ade-588c-11ea-b438-8452af50d521_1320x770_130345.jpg
A spokesman for the Beijing Health Commission says the use of TCM has made a significant contribution to patients’ recovery. Photo: Xinhua
Wang Xianbo, director of the integrative medicine department at Beijing Ditan Hospital, said 90 per cent of the confirmed coronavirus cases at his hospital were receiving traditional Chinese medicine as part of their treatment.
The efficacy rate of TCM was 87.5 per cent and the figure rose to 92.3 per cent with the addition of Western drugs, he said.
However, a doctor in Guangzhou, the capital of south China’s Guangdong province, said people should not overstate the effectiveness of traditional Chinese remedies.
“Those patients would have recovered even if they hadn’t taken the Chinese medicine,” he said. “After all, 80 per cent of them had relatively mild symptoms.”
The doctor, who declined to give his name due to the sensitivity of the issue, also questioned why so many patients were being treated with TCM.
“At least in my hospital, I would not want so many patients to take TCM, because if they do we can’t observe the effectiveness of the Western medicines,” he said.
A surgeon from the city of Shenzhen in Guangdong, who also declined to give his name, said that regardless of the treatments they used, doctors must always be scientific in their approach.
“Science is the foundation of medicine and science needs to be verifiable,” he said.
“No matter what kind of medicine, it’s irresponsible to use them on patients before verifying their effectiveness and safety.”




Echo Xie
Echo is a Beijing-based reporter focusing on Chinese politics and policy. She joined the SCMP in 2019. Previously, she worked for CSMonitor Beijing Bureau and Jiemian news.

Echo is a great name.

[PalmStriker]

South Korea's big outbreak started in a Christian cult with it's leader claiming to be Jesus and instructing his following to ignore the virus. Now this out of Iran. Same itinerary only multiplied to the max. https://www.foxnews.com/health/advisor-irans-supreme-leader-dies-from-coronavirus-1150-cases-middle-east-linked-to-country

[PalmStriker]

Building up your immune system in advance to the spread of the virus is something I would suggest for helping to ward off the impact of encountering this epidemic. For 8 years solid I was able to keep from getting a cold or it's symptoms by using echinacea combined with vitamin C during the winter months. Last winter I caught a cold that wiped me out that I had to deal with by not preparing myself as much as I usually did. This winter I have not taken any chances and have not had a cold thus far. The use of echinacia (cone flowers) originates with the native American (Plains Indians). They even kept their horses from catching pneumonia by having them breath the smoke from the leaves of the plant in their campfires. I grow the stuff in my butterfly garden. :)
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/252684

[GeneChing]

Here are all the major tech conferences canceled so far because of coronavirus (https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/27/21156676/coronavirus-facebook-f8-canceled-major-tech-conferences-covid-19)
The cancellations of some of the biggest tech events of the year could be a sign of what’s to come in other sectors.
By Shirin Ghaffary Updated Feb 28, 2020, 3:14pm EST

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xB5stxlnAdnL-8gcq-ustfH6bLA=/0x0:5718x3812/920x613/filters:focal(1590x1691:2504x2605):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66395030/1140405777.jpg.0.jpg
Facebook canceled its annual F8 conference in San Jose, California, over coronavirus concerns. Amy Osborne/AFP via Getty Images

The Covid-19 coronavirus is prompting major tech conferences around the world to cancel their events — so far, several major ones have been called off entirely, including Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference. It’s an unprecedented disruption to the usual packed lineup of annual tech events every spring.

The cancellations of some of the biggest tech events of the year seem to be a sign of what’s to come in other sectors as fears mount that the coronavirus will become a pandemic. The US tech industry shares close ties to China, where the outbreak started, and some in the industry were so concerned about the virus that they took early precautions, like discouraging handshakes and requiring employees who have recently traveled to China to work from home.

Here’s a running list of notable tech conferences, which typically draw between 500 to 100,000 attendees a year, that have been canceled so far due to coronavirus:

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona
Facebook Global Marketing Summit in San Francisco
Facebook F8 in San Jose, California
EmTech, Asia in Singapore
Google News Initiative Global Summit in Sunnyvale, California
Shopify’s developer conference, Unite, in Toronto

The tech event cancellations also come at the same time public health leaders are considering how other, larger global events outside of tech, like the Tokyo summer Olympics, should respond if the outbreak continues to spread in the months ahead. Japan’s prime minister recently took the drastic step of closing all of the country’s schools for a month to try to contain the virus’s spread.

Covid-19 has taken the lives of 2,867 people as of Friday and infected more than 80,000 people. In the past week, the number of new cases of the virus outside of China, in the US, Italy, Japan, and other countries has been surging. That worries global health experts, who say there’s now less of a chance that it can be contained.

On Thursday, Facebook said that due to concerns about the virus, it’s canceling F8 — its biggest event of the year, which last year attracted thousands of attendees from dozens of countries. Instead, it will put on smaller “locally hosted events, videos and live streamed content.”

F8 is one of several big tech conferences, including Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, that has been canceled altogether or negatively impacted due to coronavirus. Also on Thursday, Microsoft and Epic Games pulled out of one of the video game industry’s major conferences, Game Developers Conference, in San Francisco on March 16-17.

Industry leaders are particularly concerned about events in tech’s capital in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has some of the highest travel rates to and from China compared to other regions in the US. Earlier this month, Facebook canceled a 5,000-person marketing event in San Francisco scheduled in March due to similar concerns.

And on Tuesday, the mayor of San Francisco declared the city to be in a state of emergency, although there are still zero confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the city. Concerns are increasing after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that a person in Solano County, in Northern California, has been diagnosed with the virus who seemingly had no ties to anyone overseas with the disease, suggesting that the coronavirus may now be spreading person-to-person in the US.

Meanwhile, some other major tech conferences, such as the RSA IT security conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, which attracts some 40,000 attendees annually, carried on as planned this week and featured speakers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google. IBM, AT&T Cybersecurity, and Verizon, however, pulled out over coronavirus fears. Organizers reportedly encouraged attendees to knock elbows instead of shake hands and placed ample hand sanitizer stations in the conference halls.

Considering Facebook and other major tech companies have canceled or pulled out of conferences, it raises questions about whether other major conferences will do the same.

Google and Apple are also scheduled to have major conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area in May and June, respectively. Google confirmed that it is currently planning to host its I/O conference on May 12 to 14 in Mountain View, and that it’s following World Health Organization and CDC best practices.

Recode is also hosting its annual Code tech conference in May in Los Angeles. The conference is considerably smaller than others that have been canceled, such as Mobile World Congress, which had more than 100,000 attendees last year.

“We are watching this closely to see what happens between now and the end of May. The health and safety of our community is of utmost importance to Recode and Vox Media,” Shannon Thompson, the executive director of conferences for Recode, said.

South By Southwest, another conference that attracts many people in the tech industry and that draws over 30,000 people, said it plans to continue with the event on March 13 to 22. A spokesperson sent the following statement to Recode:


The SXSW 2020 event is proceeding as planned. Safety is a top priority for SXSW, and we work closely with local, state, and federal agencies year-round to plan for a safe event. Where travel has been impacted, especially in the case of China, we are seeing a handful of cancellations. However, we are on par with years past in regard to registrants who are unable to attend. We are increasing our efforts to prevent the spread of disease per Austin Public Health’s recommendations. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and will provide updates as necessary.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

The facebook & Google cancellations affect us here locally. One of my Kung Fu brothers that does infrastructure gigs for these lost 4 jobs over the last month. A lot of locals lost jobs because these conventions employ a lot of infrastructure.

[PalmStriker]

Hey Gene ! Here's the link : https://www.foxnews.com/world/coronavirus-south-korea-outbreak-controversial-religious-group

[GeneChing]

Just wow. :(


Hey Gene ! Here's the link : https://www.foxnews.com/world/coronavirus-south-korea-outbreak-controversial-religious-group

[GeneChing]

We've worked with Master Jin on this for years. It's a local TKD tournament that attracts about 500+ competitors every year. Here is the website (https://www.santacruzopen.com/).

Below is his emailblast:

Dear Grandmasters, Masters, Instructors, Referees, and Students,

I am sorry to announce that I have decided to cancel the Santa Cruz Open Tae Kwon Do Championship this year, March 7, 2020. While there is no imminent threat of coronavirus to our participants, we are committed to the good health and well-being of all.
If you have paid already you will receive a refund of the tournament fee.
Thank you for your continued support of the Tae Kwon Do community.
My very best wishes to you for continued health and success.

Tournament Director

Grandmaster Sang Jin


THREADS
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Taekwondo (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?42906-Tae-Kwon-Do)

[GeneChing]

Entertainment giants brace for outsize hit from theme park closures, cinema shutdowns (https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/entertainment-giants-brace-outsize-hit-theme-park-closures-cinema-shutdowns-n1147506)
"China alone is a third of the world’s movie screens. I can’t think of anything comparable," said one entertainment expert about the financial impact of cinemas across China remaining shuttered.

https://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2020_10/3252246/200302-shanghai-disney-ew-550p_6d83d1f27be6bb5b0f9e971ef96725ea.fit-2000w.jpg
A security guard wearing a protective facemask is seen at the temporarily closed Shanghai Disney resort in Shanghai on Feb. 23, 2020.Noel Celis / AFP - Getty Images file
March 3, 2020, 6:02 AM PST
By Claire Atkinson

Major entertainment and media conglomerates have been grappling with the unstoppable coronavirus contagion in Asia and Europe, and now it’s arrived on American shores.

COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, has already claimed six lives in the United States, with almost 100 confirmed cases nationwide, making some Americans cautious about spending time in public spaces.

"This virus has so many unknowns and is clearly highly contagious. Why take the risk, being in huge public places like theme parks or contained on a cruise ship?” Stacey Bendet, chief executive of Alice+Olivia fashion company, told NBC News.

Shares of some entertainment stocks fell on Monday, with Live Nation, SeaWorld Entertainment and Six Flags showing declines for the day. Disney and Netflix stocks rose — along with fitness company Peloton — as interest in "at-home" entertainment gathers strength.

“If [the virus] is a major issue in the U.S. into the May/June time frame, all bets are off," said James Hardiman, a managing director at Wedbush Securities. "I wouldn’t think we are there yet,” he said, noting that the big regional parks aren’t yet open for the season.

China has not been so lucky. Shanghai's $5.5 billion Disney Resort and Hong Kong Disneyland both closed indefinitely on Jan. 26, which Disney said would ding its bottom line by $175 million. In Japan, the two Disney-branded theme parks in Tokyo are closed until March 16 as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus.

"The precise magnitude of the financial impact is highly dependent on the duration of the closures," Disney's Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy said last month.

Universal's Osaka theme park has also closed down for two weeks as part of the government mandate. Universal Beijing Resort, a giant theme park under construction and penciled for a spring opening, has emergency staff back on the job. They are being monitored with thermal equipment and some have been encouraged to work at home, according to a spokesperson for the company. Universal is owned by Comcast, the parent company of NBC News.

Television show production has also been hurt. CBS said on Friday it would postpone filming on its global adventure TV series, “The Amazing Race,” citing "increased concerns and uncertainty regarding the coronavirus around the world."

Film producers have been left in limbo. “This has thrown a wrench into filming schedules,” said Rob Cain, a partner in Pacific Bridge Picture, which works closely with Chinese companies. Cain said it was unclear how insurance policies would deal with the problem, given all the lost revenue.

China began closing some 70,000 movie theaters on Jan. 23, with no word on when they might open again.

"China alone is a third of the world’s movie screens,” Cain said. “I can’t think of anything comparable, and I’ve been in the business 30 years."

Global box office revenue clocked in at $42.5 billion in 2019, with China representing $9.2 billion.

“It is an enormous impact,” said Stanley Rosen, an expert in U.S.-China relations and a professor of political science at the University of Southern California. He pointed to the potentially delayed release of Disney’s $200 million Chinese warrior movie “Mulan” in the China market, which is slated to open in late March globally.

In Europe, AMC Theatres closed its cinemas in Northern Italy to help local governments contain the spread of the disease. Half of all Italian cinemas are now closed, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The Cannes Film Festival said it was monitoring the epidemic, but would move ahead with its May event, even though a Cannes resident tested positive for the virus.


Claire Atkinson
Claire Atkinson is the senior media editor for NBC News.

THREADS
Chollywood rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
Chinese Theme Parks (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?62642-Chinese-Theme-Parks)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

It has already cost us (https://www.martialartsmart.com/) thousands, with more inevitable costs on the horizon. :(



Coronavirus may cost Disney’s ‘Mulan’ remake millions (https://www.nme.com/news/film/coronavirus-disney-mulan-live-action-remake-2619741)
The 27 March release date has been postponed in China
Ella Kemp
26 seconds ago

https://www.nme.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/disney-mulan-696x442.jpg
Liu Yifei as Mulan

Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Mulan could face major losses amid the coronavirus outbreak which began in China.

The March 27 release date has been postponed until further notice, and the country has closed nearly 70,000 cinemas, with plans to keep them closed until at least April.

The budget for Mulan exceeds $200 million, making it the company’s most expensive adaptation to date. Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore, explained the situation to Yahoo Finance.

“China can represent a huge percentage of a film’s international and global box office revenue, so this is going to have an impact on any movie that was slated,” he said.

Niki Caro’s take on Mulan features an all-Asian cast, somewhat departing from Disney’s usual releases, and also rates as a PG-13.

“The upside is that China will release all of these movies down the road, Dergarabedian continued, “but right now the whole release slate is in flux and there are no hard dates that they can put on these films.”

Elsewhere, coronavirus has affected the theatrical box office in Italy as well, which has seen a 75% decrease in takings, against the same period last year, according to Deadline.

Over half the country’s cinema screens have been closed, as Italy now has the third-biggest number of cases after China and South Korea.

https://www.nme.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/liu-yifei.jpg
Liu Yifei (Photo by TPG/Getty Images)

Liu Yifei, who plays the eponymous hero in the upcoming Mulan, spoke on the topic of coronavirus recently to The Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s really heavy for me to even think about it,” Yifei said.

“People are doing the right thing. They are being careful for themselves and others. I’m so touched actually to see how they haven’t been out for weeks,” she said. “I’m really hoping for a miracle and that this will just be over soon.”

Mulan will be released in UK cinemas on March 27.

THREADS
Mulan (2020) (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/photos/000/754/75459.ngsversion.1474459626714.adapt.945.1.jpg
Patients lie in an influenza ward at a U.S. Army camp hospital in Aix-les-Baines, France, during World War I.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CORBIS

1918 Flu Pandemic That Killed 50 Million Originated in China, Historians Say (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/)
Chinese laborers transported across Canada thought to be source.
6 MINUTE READ
BY DAN VERGANO, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

PUBLISHED JANUARY 24, 2014

THE GLOBAL FLU outbreak of 1918 killed 50 million people worldwide, ranking as one of the deadliest epidemics in history.

For decades, scientists have debated where in the world the pandemic started, variously pinpointing its origins in France, China, the American Midwest, and beyond. Without a clear location, scientists have lacked a complete picture of the conditions that bred the disease and factors that might lead to similar outbreaks in the future.

The deadly "Spanish flu" claimed more lives than World War I, which ended the same year the pandemic struck. Now, new research is placing the flu's emergence in a forgotten episode of World War I: the shipment of Chinese laborers across Canada in sealed train cars.

Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/photos/000/756/75624.jpg

Writing in the January issue of the journal War in History, Humphries acknowledges that his hypothesis awaits confirmation by viral samples from flu victims. Such evidence would tie the disease's origin to one location.

But some other historians already find his argument convincing.

"This is about as close to a smoking gun as a historian is going to get," says historian James Higgins, who lectures at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and who has researched the 1918 spread of the pandemic in the United States. "These records answer a lot of questions about the pandemic."

Last of the Great Plagues

The 1918 flu pandemic struck in three waves across the globe, starting in the spring of that year, and is tied to a strain of H1N1 influenza ancestral to ones still virulent today.

The outbreak killed even the young and healthy, turning their strong immune systems against them in a way that's unusual for flu. Adding to the catastrophic loss of lives during World War I, the epidemic may have played a role in ending the war.

"The 1918 flu was the last of the great plagues that struck humanity, and it followed in the tracks of a global conflict," says Humphries.

Even as the pandemic's origins have remained a mystery, the Chinese laborers have previously been suggested as a source of the disease.

Historian Christopher Langford has shown that China suffered a lower mortality rate from the Spanish flu than other nations did, suggesting some immunity was at large in the population because of earlier exposure to the virus.

In the new report, Humphries finds archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu.

He also found medical records indicating that more than 3,000 of the 25,000 Chinese Labor Corps workers who were transported across Canada en route to Europe starting in 1917 ended up in medical quarantine, many with flu-like symptoms.

Origins Debated

The Spanish flu reached its height in autumn 1918 but raged until 1920, initially gaining its nickname from wartime censorship rules that allowed for reporting on the disease's ravages in neutral Spain.

Physicians began debating the origin of the pandemic almost as soon as it appeared, Higgins says, with historians soon joining them.

France's wartime trenches, ridden with filth, disease, and death, were originally seen as the flu's breeding ground. The flu's tendency to strike young adults was explained as the disease targeting itself to young soldiers in trenches. The theory also purported to explain how the illness spread from Europe to cities such as Boston and Philadelphia by pointing a finger at returning troop ships.

A decade after the war, Kansas was identified as another possible breeding ground, due to reports of an influenza outbreak there that spread to a nearby Army camp in March 1918, killing 48 doughboys.

But in his study, Humphries reports that an outbreak of respiratory infections, which at the time were dubbed an endemic "winter sickness" by local health officials, were causing dozens of deaths a day in villages along China's Great Wall. The illness spread 300 miles (500 kilometers) in six weeks' time in late 1917.

At first thought to be pneumonic plague, the disease killed at a far lower rate than is typical for that disease.

Humphries discovered that a British legation official in China wrote that the disease was actually influenza, in a 1918 report. Humphries made the findings in searches of Canadian and British historical archives that contain the wartime records of the Chinese Labor Corps and the British legation in Beijing.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

Sealed Railcars

At the time of the outbreak, British and French officials were forming the Chinese Labor Corps, which eventually shipped some 94,000 laborers from northern China to southern England and France during the war.

"The idea was to free up soldiers to head to the front at a time when they were desperate for manpower," Humphries says.

Shipping the laborers around Africa was too time-consuming and tied up too much shipping, so British officials turned to shipping the laborers to Vancouver on the Canadian West Coast and sending them by train to Halifax on the East Coast, from which they could be sent to Europe.

So desperate was the need for labor that on March 2, 1918, a ship loaded with 1,899 Chinese Labor Corps men left the Chinese port of Wehaiwei for Vancouver despite "plague" stopping the recruiting for workers there.

In reaction to anti-Chinese feelings rife in western Canada at the time, the trains that carried the workers from Vancouver were sealed, Humphries says. Special Railway Service Guards watched the laborers, who were kept in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Newspapers were banned from reporting on their movement.

Roughly 3,000 of the workers ended up in medical quarantine, their illnesses often blamed on their "lazy" natures by Canadian doctors, Humphries said: "They had very stereotypical, racist views of the Chinese."

Doctors treated sore throats with castor oil and sent the Chinese back to their camps.

The Chinese laborers arrived in southern England by January 1918 and were sent to France, where the Chinese Hospital at Noyelles-sur-Mer recorded hundreds of their deaths from respiratory illness.

Historians have suggested that the Spanish influenza mutated and became most deadly in spring 1918, spreading from Europe to ports as far apart as Boston and Freetown, Sierra Leone.

By the height of the global pandemic that autumn, however, no more such cases were reported among the Chinese laborers in Europe.

Medical Evidence

Humphries concedes that a final answer to the mystery of the Spanish flu's origins is still a ways off.

"What we really need is a sample of the virus preserved in a burial for the medical experts to uncover," Humphries says. "That would have the best chances of settling the debate."

For the last decade, experts such as Jeffery Taubenberger, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have sought burial samples across continents, seeking to find preserved samples of the virus in victims of the outbreak.

Taubenberger led a team in 2011 that looked at flu virus samples taken from autopsies of 32 victims of the 1918 outbreak.

The earliest sample found so far was from a U.S. soldier who died on May 11, 1918, at Camp Dodge, Iowa, but the team is looking for earlier cases.

A broad number of samples from flu victims before and after the pandemic might finally narrow down its origins. Essentially, scientists would need a genetically identified sample of the influenza's H1N1 virus taken from a victim who died before the first widespread outbreak of the pandemic in spring 1918 to point to a time and place as the likely origin point of the pandemic.

One from China in 1917, for example, would fill the bill.

"I'm not sure if this question can ever be fully answered," Taubenberger cautions, noting that even the origin of a smaller flu pandemic in 2009 still eludes certainty.

Ultimately, "these kinds of [historical] analyses cannot definitively reveal the origins and patterns of spread of emerging pathogens, especially at the early stages of the outbreak," Taubenberger said, of the new historical report.

In the end, however, knowing the origin of the disease might provide information that could help stop a future pandemic, making the search worthwhile.

"I would say that the takeaway message of all of this is to keep your eye on China" as a source of emerging diseases, Higgins says. He points to concerns about avian flu and the SARS virus, both arising from Asia in the last decade.

The SARS outbreak claimed perhaps 775 lives in 2003, and avian flu A (H5N1) has killed 384 people since 2003, according to the World Health Organization, which is carefully watching for signs of an outbreak of the diseases.

"We have seen a lot of emerging diseases travel around the world in recent decades," Higgins says.

History has a way of repeating, he says, and research into the origins of the 1918 flu could help prevent a scourge like that from happening again.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to correct the location of Camp Dodge.
Follow Dan Vergano on Twitter.
Fascinating historical backstory on Chinese and plague.

[GeneChing]

...what the heck is in Qingfei Paidu soup?


16:06, 25-Feb-2020
Traditional Chinese medicine used to treat 85% of COVID-19 patients (https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-02-25/TCM-used-to-treat-85-of-COVID-19-patients-OmQG7PIGWs/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3dV8zWah_DFP8S-pG7h6JAffzxeTmjLXUZQtOkoR6Q0Q2VUeuT9RFn7xw)
Updated 16:54, 25-Feb-2020
By Hu Chao

As the fight against the novel coronavirus continues, traditional Chinese medicine or TCM has been widely used to treat COVID-19 patients in China. The National Administration of TCM said TCM was used to treat over 85 percent of confirmed coronavirus patients, and a combined treatment of TCM and Western medicine has proven to be effective.

A work unit of the Shanxi Provincial TCM Hospital in the capital city of Taiyuan has been working round the clock to produce TCM treatment for the coronavirus infection.

The hospital has so far given free TCM treatment to over 13,000 patients and medical staff. Over 90 percent of the confirmed patients in the province have used TCM in the early stages of their treatment.

Wang Xixing, former deputy president of the Shanxi Provincial TCM Hospital, is a renowned TCM doctor in Shanxi. He has been actively participating in the treatment of coronavirus patients.

"We follow the basic TCM theory, which is to treat patients according to their different symptoms. We ensure that everyone's prescription is individually tailored," he said.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d41444e346b6a4e32417a4d7955444d3249444f31457a6333 566d54/img/0b8d6efa53194a218345499fda9d2987/0b8d6efa53194a218345499fda9d2987.jpg
Local TCM hospitals in Shanxi have recommended a preventive prescription against the coronavirus to the public. /CGTN

The National Health Committee and the National Administration of TCM have jointly recommended a TCM prescription of Qingfei Paidu soup, or a soup for lung clearance and detoxication in English, to treat coronavirus patients. Nearly all confirmed patients in Shanxi have taken it.

Shanxi set up a provincial TCM expert group against the novel coronavirus as soon as it spread to the province. Li Tingquan is the leader of the group and also the president of the Affiliated Hospital of Shanxi University of Chinese Medicine.

"After taking three sets of the Qingfei Paidu soup, 60 percent of patients experienced a reduction in the severity of their symptoms. While the condition of 30 percent of confirmed asymptomatic patients has remained stable," Li said.

Cover image: TCM doctors observe the tongue of a COVID-19 patient in Shanxi Province. /CGTN

[GeneChing]

Tiger Claw HQ (https://www.tigerclaw.com/home.php) has initiated an aggressive program of sterilizing all handles, knobs, phones, keyboards, etc every day. Yesterday Jonny even took my temperature with a new thermometer. srsly.


FITNESS STUDIOS ARE TAKING PRECAUTIONS AGAINST COVID-19—AND CANCELLATION POLICIES SHOULD REFLECT THAT (https://www.wellandgood.com/how-coronavirus-is-affecting-gyms/)
ZOE WEINER, MARCH 4, 2020

https://www.wellandgood.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/GettyImages-907482770-600x400.jpg
Photo: Getty Images/skynesher

In the last few days, fitness enthusiasts have seen their inboxes flooded with e-mails about the “medical grade hand disinfectants” and “extra precautions” that their go-to studios are taking to guard against COVID-19. Orangetheory is encouraging people to skip the high fives, Barry’s will add disposable wipes and hand sanitizers at studios, Equinox is sanitizing its gyms multiple times a day, and SLT is asking patrons to wipe down their machines before and after they use them. By and large, boutique fitness studios across the country are requesting that people “stay home if they don’t feel well,” but there’s one catch: Many cancellation policies aren’t reflecting that.

To their credit, some are. Classpass and Solidcore will both be offering more leniency in waiving late cancellation fees for members who are feeling unwell, and Y7 is encouraging students to contact their studio if they’re too sick to come to class. “If you’re sick, you should have the ability to cancel and not be penalized for it,” says Jason Tetro, microbiologist and author of The Germ Files. “If gyms can provide the assurance that if you’re sick and have to cancel, you won’t be charged for a class, that can increase the confidence that people will only show up when they are healthy.”

Understandably, studios financially incentivize people to show up to classes, but these hard-and-fast rules are contributing to the problem. As of Tuesday afternoon, 100 cases of COVID-19—and nine virus-related deaths—had been reported in the United States. According to the CDC, the virus is mainly spread from person-to-person, “between people who are in close contact (within about 6 feet) of one another, through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.” These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people nearby, or possibly be inhaled into their lungs. It may also be possible that the disease is spread when someone touches a surface with the virus on it and then touches their mouth or nose.

While this is a cause for concern in any public place, it becomes even more problematic in the context of a gym or fitness studio. “The gym is up there in places where you would have the highest risk for the spread of the Coronavirus,” says Tetro. “You have a lot of people who are exerting themselves, which means they’re breathing a lot and may be sputtering and coughing. And if these people are starting to get sick or develop the infection, there’s a likelihood that they may be spreading that from their lungs into the environment around them.”

Doubling down on sanitation efforts—which many studios have committed to doing—can help protect against the virus, to an extent. “Soap, hot water, and detergent can kill it, so if you’re religiously adhering to the effort of using a disinfectant before and after you use a machine, you’re probably increasing the safety for yourself as well as for everyone else,” says Tetro.

But the best way to keep the virus from spreading at the gym is to keep it from ever getting there. The CDC recommends that anyone who feels sick stays home, and pros echo this sentiment across the board. “The only way to contain the virus is to stay home when you are sick. You aren’t helping the greater good if you spread the illness,” says Erika Schwartz, MD and founder of Evolved Science.” If you get sick stay home—be considerate and don’t infect others.”

And hey studios, in the meantime, how about some leniency?


Cleaning Gear (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?39613-Cleaning-Gear)
Orangetheory (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71352-Orangetheory)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

well, this is just great. as if my credit cards weren't maxxed out already... :(



Banknotes may be spreading coronavirus, World Health Organisation warns (https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/who-world-health-organisation-coronavirus-banknotes-warning-111019361.html?fbclid=IwAR2d1e3gUuHW06RTBC3jRWrUzg if5-Svfe6fGXJCqmHHHRn_nnftPwGQ_E4&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZmFjZWJvb2suY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKQLjRcrOMBr7YQUJiunljsp0uSN mkLTOj7rVgaiXWzUzUQetyLGkpl8wWSMCxBGm84Uvwl-0LcZUa6Or4I520ylaFzOy2By_zezzKiwzgmC3JjLiHIjpOP0Kp eTqjFRNpEXLSUmtwXW3KK_e2HxlpXLK75-QOxuDUyRSmmXRD7i)
Yahoo Finance UK Kalila Sangster Yahoo Finance UK 3 March 2020

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/Ak13gFEZO7oyQI.L0NiHuw--~A/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAw/https://media-mbst-pub-ue1.s3.amazonaws.com/creatr-images/2020-03/dd8fba70-5d37-11ea-bff9-0dc5ddcd7366
Banks in China began disinfecting and isolating used banknotes last month as part of efforts to stem the spread of coronavirus. (Feature China/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has advised people to use contactless technology instead of cash as banknotes may be spreading coronavirus.

The infectious COVID-19 virus could be carried on the surface of banknotes for several days, the WHO warned on Monday night.

To stop the spread of the disease, people should use contactless payments where possible and wash their hands after handling cash, a WHO spokesman said.

The Bank of England also recognised that banknotes “can carry bacteria or viruses” and encouraged frequent hand washing.

Last month banks in China and Korea began disinfecting and isolating used banknotes as part of efforts to stem the spread of the deadly virus.

Ultraviolet light or high temperature is being used to disinfect and sterilise banknotes, before the cash is sealed and stored for up to 14 days before being recirculated, China’s central bank said at a press conference.

A Bank of England source said there were no plans to do the same in the UK.

A Bank of England spokesman told the Telegraph: “Like any other surface that large numbers of people come into contact with, notes can carry bacteria or viruses.

“However, the risk posed by handling a polymer note is no greater than touching any other common surface, such as handrails, doorknobs or credit cards.”

Coronavirus can be spread through contaminated objects as well as droplets and direct contact with infected patients, the WHO said.

“We know that money changes hands frequently and can pick up all sorts of bacteria and viruses,” a spokesman told the Telegraph.

“We would advise people to wash their hands after handling banknotes, and avoid touching their face.

“When possible it would also be advisable to use contactless payments to reduce the risk of transmission.”

It is not yet known how long the coronavirus can survive outside the human body.

It has been suggested that human coronaviruses can remain infectious on contaminated objects for as long as nine days at room temperature in an analysis of 22 earlier studies of similar viruses, including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) published online this month in the Journal of Hospital Infection.

However, common disinfectants can swiftly remove them, and they may also be destroyed by high temperatures, the authors wrote. It is not yet clear whether the new coronavirus also behaves in this way.

[Jimbo]

well, this is just great. as if my credit cards weren't maxxed out already... :(

In my lifetime, I’ve never seen this level of worry and panic over ANY other disease outbreak, not even AIDS or Ebola. ANYBODY should know that money (paper as well as coins) is absolutely filthy. That’s nothing new, and something that people have known since forever. The rapidity of COVID-19’s spread worldwide and the level of panic in every sector has me doubting that its true point of origin was some fish market in Wuhan.

[GeneChing]

Arnold Sports Festival cancels convention due to coronavirus, will allow athletes to compete (https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/dewine-ginther-set-press-conference-on-arnold-classic/)
LOCAL NEWS
by: Shawn Lanier, NBC4 Staff
Posted: Mar 3, 2020 / 04:07 PM EST / Updated: Mar 4, 2020 / 08:46 AM EST

COLUMBUS (WCMH) — Government and health officials announced Tuesday evening that this year’s Arnold Sports Festival will go on as scheduled, but due to concerns about the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, spectators are barred from the event and the trade show is canceled.

The competition for athletes, however, will be allowed to continue.

One exception for spectators is the Arnold Classic World Bodybuilding Championship finals, scheduled for Saturday night at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. The finals had prepaid tickets and are in an arena-style setting, minimizing the fear of the spread of the virus.

Gov. Mike DeWine and Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther held a joint press conference Tuesday announcing the change. Arnold Schwarzenegger joined the press conference via telephone.

DeWine said new guidance Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control on large public gatherings led to the decision to close the convention and trade show.

“We all decided to move forward with the athlete competition of the Arnold Classic, but not to allow spectators or the trade show to continue, with the exception of the Arnold Classic Finals on Saturday night at the convention center,” DeWine said.

Columbus Public Health will be monitoring more than 22,000 athletes as they arrive for the competitions. The health department will be meeting the athletes at the airport and questioning them about their recent travel.

Myshieka Robert, the Columbus Public Health commissioner, said the health department has the staff to monitor that number of people coming into Columbus, but can’t screen more than that.

Robert said the department won’t monitor athletes from five countries where there’s an outbreak of COVID-19.

“All athletes from China, Italy, Japan, Iran, and South Korea will be excluded from participating in the event,” she said.

Columbus Public Health staff members have already screened five athletes at John Glenn International Airport who are in Columbus for the Arnold.

They asked them the places they’ve traveled in the past two weeks and if they’ve been in contact with anyone who has COVID-19 over that same period of time. They will then ask if they had a fever in the past 24 hours and then take their temperature on the spot before the athletes are allowed to go to their hotels.

Initially, Ginther was set to hold a press conference with city health officials early on Tuesday, but that conference was canceled. The joint press conference with DeWine and state health officials was scheduled a few hours later.

“This situation is going to continue to spread,” said Amy Acton, director of the Ohio Department of Health. “We will see cases in Ohio eventually. We will see them and we will eventually see community spread.”

All the athletes participating in the event have received prevention messages from health officials and the festival. Those preventions include hand washing, coughing and sneezing into your elbow, and staying away from the public if you are showing symptoms of illness.

Both the convention and the trade show are expected to be rescheduled. However, details have not been released. Details regarding ticket refunds have also not been released.



Arnold
✔
@Schwarzenegger
It’s a sad day for me and everyone at the @ArnoldSports team. But we will always put our fans’ health first. After discussions with @GovMikeDeWine, @MayorGinther, and the CDC, we will be postponing the expo because we can’t risk bringing 250,000 people together with #COVID19.

Embedded video
6,644
3:35 PM - Mar 3, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,676 people are talking about this
Started in 1989, the Arnold is named for bodybuilder, actor, and former California governor Schwarzenegger. The event plays host to several sporting competitions including bodybuilding, fencing, gymnastics, pickleball, and many more.

The event was expected to bring 250,000 people to Columbus, Schwarzenegger said, from 80 different countries.

“We would never choose making money over people’s health,” he said.

This is the first time the event has been interrupted.

All told, the event was expected to bring an estimated $50 million to the region.

For the athletes participating, the event is this weekend, March 5-8, at the Convention Center, the Columbus Expo, and other locations in central Ohio.


The rapidity of COVID-19’s spread worldwide and the level of panic in every sector has me doubting that its true point of origin was some fish market in Wuhan. I'm not really that concerned with where it started at this point. I'm worried about where its going.

[GeneChing]

James Bond: No Time To Die Delayed SEVEN Months Due To Coronavirus (https://screenrant.com/james-bond-no-time-die-release-date-delay-coronavirus/?utm_source=SR-FB-P&utm_medium=Social-Distribution&utm_campaign=SR-FB-P&fbclid=IwAR0yL-hyMRMdRc84jbEeUJBeHqGp1ZroUTlbfEM3Ow4v41dHHG2wDVqx bsQ)
No time to Die's release date has been pushed back seven months to November 2020 due to concerns about coronavirus.
BY CHRIS AGAR
MAR 04, 2020

https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Daniel-Craig-in-No-Time-to-Die.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=960&h=500&dpr=1.5

No Time to Die's release date has been delayed seven months due to coronavirus. The film had already been impacted by the outbreak of the disease, with its Chinese premiere and press tour cancelled due to concerns. However, No Time to Die remained on track for its theatrical rollout in April 2020, with MGM putting together a very visible marketing campaign to hype up Daniel Craig's final adventure as James Bond (including a rather expensive Super Bowl TV spot). Excitement was continuing to mount for the movie, which was projected to possibly break the all-time James Bond opening weekend record at the box office.

With No Time to Die right around the corner, coronavirus continues to be a serious concern around the world. DC Comics recently cancelled convention appearances, Mission: Impossible 7 paused production in Italy, and Hollywood studios are forming coronavirus strategy teams as they deal with the situation. And now, the team behind No Time to Die has made the decision to postpone the film's release globally for several months.

Today on the official James Bond Twitter account, it was announced the film has been pushed back from its original April 2020 date and will now debut on November 12, 2020 in the U.K. and November 25, 2020 in the U.S. Other worldwide release dates will be revealed later.


James Bond
✔
@007
MGM, Universal and Bond producers, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, announced today that after careful consideration and thorough evaluation of the global theatrical marketplace, the release of NO TIME TO DIE will be postponed until November 2020.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESR6FznXsAElEJo?format=jpg&name=medium
14.2K
9:00 AM - Mar 4, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
9,615 people are talking about this
The tweet mentions the "global theatrical marketplace" as a deciding factor here. In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, just about all of Chinese movie theaters have been closed, and it's possible locations in other countries eventually follow suit. China is the world's second-biggest film market (behind only the U.S.), so it's understandable why the No Time to Die team chose to delay the movie. Obviously, the studios and producers are hoping coronavirus is contained by November, allowing them to conduct business as usual around the globe. The Bond films have always been massive worldwide draws and have done sizable business during Craig's tenure. Spectre grossed $880.6 million back in 2015, and 2012's Skyfall crossed the $1 billion mark. MGM and Universal want No Time to Die in a position to be as successful as possible - particular since it has the highest production budget in Bond history. It'll be interesting to see if any other Hollywood studios shuffle their tentpoles around now that one domino has fallen.

With the move, No Time to Die is now in a more competitive window than before. Instead of being the biggest blockbuster in town (getting a three-week jump start on the summer movies), it'll now share the spotlight with titles like Eternals (November 6) and Godzilla vs. Kong (November 20), assuming those movies don't change release dates to avoid competition with 007. That being said, No Time to Die should still do very well in the fall; the Bond films have historically released in November (the last six came out in that month) and this one is a proper event to boot, being Craig's swan song. Even amidst the other genre picture, there'll be plenty of excitement for No Time to Die.

THREADS
No Time to Die (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71114-No-Time-to-Die)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[Jimbo]

I'm not really that concerned with where it started at this point. I'm worried about where its going.

Me, too.

However, unless we also eventually find out its true cause/origin point, even if/when this is put under control, these types of epidemics/pandemics will continue to happen again and again and again, with nobody ever being the wiser. And they are happening at an accelerated rate. If we ignore history, we are doomed to repeat it. And although the PRC government acted much quicker than with SARS, they were still in denial at the onset long enough before they took action, which allowed thousands to come and go.

[GeneChing]

Team Singapore athletes show support for healthcare workers (https://www.tnp.sg/sports/team-singapore/team-singapore-athletes-show-support-healthcare-workers)

https://www.tnp.sg/sites/default/files/styles/rl780/public/articles/2020/03/05/NP_20200305_SPORT05_5500331.jpg?itok=PhVG6TEf
Tan Xiang Tian (first from right).PHOTO: SPORT SINGAPORE
Mar 05, 2020 06:00 am

Team Singapore athletes such as wushu exponent Tan Xiang Tian yesterday showed their appreciation for medical workers at the forefront of the coronavirus battle.

They mingled with healthcare workers at Sport Singapore's office, and presented them with cards, jerseys and plush toys.





If we ignore history, we are doomed to repeat it. And although the PRC government acted much quicker than with SARS, they were still in denial at the onset long enough before they took action, which allowed thousands to come and go. Truth. That being said about the PRC reaction, how do you feel about the US reaction so far?

[GeneChing]

That being said about the PRC reaction, how do you feel about the US reaction so far?
And then there's New Zealand...


CP CURRENT PAGE:WORLD | TUESDAY, MARCH 03, 2020
Tithe-paying Christians are protected from coronavirus by Psalm 91, pastor Brian Tamaki claims (https://www.christianpost.com/news/tithe-paying-christians-are-protected-from-coronavirus-by-psalm-91-pastor-brian-tamaki-claims.html)
By Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter| Tuesday, March 03, 2020

https://cdn.christianpost.com/files/cache/image/13/82/138258_w_760_663.jpg
Brian Tamaki is senior pastor of Destiny Church in New Zealand. | Facebook/Destiny Church

Tithe-paying, Bible-believing, Holy Spirit-filled Christians have a Psalm 91 “protection policy” against COVID-19, also known as the coronavirus, according to New Zealand's popular multi-campus Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki.

Speaking to his congregation in Auckland on Sunday, Tamaki said God allows "epidemics, pestilence and famine" when people have departed from faith in Him. But for Bible-believing, born-again Christians who pay their tithes, God assures them protection from the virus in Psalm 91.

“This latest coronavirus is a little round thing like a tennis ball with little spikes. It has to get to the lungs this one. It’s what makes it so dangerous. Gets on the lungs and then begins to mutate the cells in your lungs and eats it away, OK. No problems. It’s a bit like the last one they had, it was the SARS, were all related to the respiratory system,” Tamaki explained in his sermon streamed on the church’s website.

"You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday,” he said, reading from Psalm 91. "We needn't fear it. There is a lot of hysteria that has been engendered by certain elements about this pandemic," he said.

Tamaki claimed that because viruses travel through the air controlled by “satanic spirits” that energized their spreading, only Christians covered by God can avoid being affected by the virus.

“The prince of the power of the air, Satan, has control of atmospheres, unless you’re a blood-bought born-again, Jesus-loving, Bible-believing, Holy Ghost-filled, tithe-paying believer. You are the only one that can walk through atmospheres and has a, literally a protection — the Psalm 91 protection policy around you,” Tamaki said. “I don’t care if you don’t believe it. It’s all right. I’m just giving you so you understand.

The Rev. Helen Jacobi, vicar at central Auckland's St Matthew-in-the-City, told the New Zealand Herald that Tamaki’s advice is "incredibly unsafe."

"People should be following public health advice. I think it is very dangerous and wrong for any public leader to contravene that. Certainly in the Anglican Church we have been sharing the message to follow public health advice, and we follow it in our own gatherings. It is also quite offensive, saying his followers are safe and no-one else, which is the absolute opposite of the Christian belief,” she said.

The vicar further challenged the use of Psalm 91 as Tamaki’s protection policy since it was used by "the devil" to tempt Jesus.

“We can’t compete with the megachurch in our town!”, “A new church was started two blocks from us. We’ve got plenty of churches without them!”, “The church brought another one of their campuses near us. It’s totally unethical what they are doing.”

"It is very amusing he has chosen that psalm, given it was used by 'the devil' to test Jesus," Jacobi said.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said Tuesday that public health officials are now operating in "uncharted territory" in seeking to stem the coronavirus which had infected more than 90,000 people across 73 countries and territories as of Monday evening, CNN reported.

"We have never before seen a respiratory pathogen that is capable of community transmission, but which can also be contained with the right measures," Ghebreyesus said.

While it hasn’t yet called the coronavirus a global pandemic, the WHO warned it could make that call in the near future.

To date, there have been 172 deaths reported outside mainland China, raising the global death toll from the virus, which has spread to every continent except Antarctica, to 3,115.

Epidemics of the virus in Iran, Italy and South Korea show no signs of slowing even as governments work to devise plans to combat the pathogen without causing widespread social disruption and economic upheaval, The New York Times reported Tuesday. There are also now more than 100 confirmed cases in 15 states and six deaths linked to the virus in the United States.

The Christian Post recently highlighted several ways Christians can make sense of the virus.

Psalm 91 is one of my favorites, quoted in the classic gospel song 'My Sisters and Brothers'

Psalm 91 King James Version (KJV)
91 He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

2 I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

3 Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.

4 He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

5 Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

6 Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

7 A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

8 Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

9 Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation;

10 There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.

11 For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

12 They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.

13 Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

14 Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

15 He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.

16 With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.

[GeneChing]

The effect this has had on me personally with the direct impact on Tiger Claw (https://www.tigerclaw.com/home.php) and Kung Fu Tai Chi (https://www.martialartsmart.com/19341.html), along with my karma work volunteering as a psychiatric consultant, continues to spread. :(

I sincerely hope that all our members here stay healthy.


Yes, it is worse than the flu: busting the coronavirus myths (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/03/yes-worse-than-flu-busting-coronavirus-myths-covid-19)
The truth about the protective value of face masks and how easy it is to catch Covid-19
Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
@hannahdev
Tue 3 Mar 2020 05.50 ESTLast modified on Tue 3 Mar 2020 20.56 EST

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6f286cdd1d29d6c958a9f023133c3c1e7224637f/0_350_5934_3561/master/5934.jpg
Commuters wearing face masks in Bangkok. Photograph: Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images

Claim: ‘It is no more dangerous than winter flu’
Many individuals who get coronavirus will experience nothing worse than seasonal flu symptoms, but the overall profile of the disease, including its mortality rate, looks more serious. At the start of an outbreak the apparent mortality rate can be an overestimate if a lot of mild cases are being missed. But this week, a WHO expert suggested that this has not been the case with Covid-19. Bruce Aylward, who led an international mission to China to learn about the virus and the country’s response, said the evidence did not suggest that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate. This would make Covid-19 about 10 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which is estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.

Claim: ‘It only kills the elderly, so younger people can relax’
Most people who are not elderly and do not have underlying health conditions will not become critically ill from Covid-19. But the illness still has a higher chance of leading to serious respiratory symptoms than seasonal flu and there are other at-risk groups – health workers, for instance, are more vulnerable because they are likely to have higher exposure to the virus. The actions that young, healthy people take, including reporting symptoms and following quarantine instructions, will have an important role in protecting the most vulnerable in society and in shaping the overall trajectory of the outbreak.

Claim: ‘Face masks don’t work’
Wearing a face mask is certainly not an iron-clad guarantee that you won’t get sick – viruses can also transmit through the eyes and tiny viral particles, known as aerosols, can penetrate masks. However, masks are effective at capturing droplets, which is a main transmission route of coronavirus, and some studies have estimated a roughly fivefold protection versus no barrier alone (although others have found lower levels of effectiveness).

If you are likely to be in close contact with someone infected, a mask cuts the chance of the disease being passed on. If you’re showing symptoms of coronavirus, or have been diagnosed, wearing a mask can also protect others. So masks are crucial for health and social care workers looking after patients and are also recommended for family members who need to care for someone who is ill – ideally both the patient and carer should have a mask.

However, masks will probably make little difference if you’re just walking around town or taking a bus so there is no need to bulk-buy a huge supply.

Claim: ‘You need to be with an infected person for 10 minutes’
For flu, some hospital guidelines define exposure as being within six feet of an infected person who sneezes or coughs for 10 minutes or longer. However, it is possible to be infected with shorter interactions or even by picking the virus up from contaminated surfaces, although this is thought to be a less common route of transmission.

Claim: ‘A vaccine could be ready within a few months’
Scientists were quick out of the gates in beginning development of a vaccine for the new coronavirus, helped by the early release of the genetic sequence by Chinese researchers. The development of a viable vaccine continues apace, with several teams now testing candidates in animal experiments. However, the incremental trials required before a commercial vaccine could be rolled out are still a lengthy undertaking – and an essential one to ensure that even rare side-effects are spotted. A commercially available vaccine within a year would be quick.

Claim: ‘If a pandemic is declared, there is nothing more we can do to stop the spread’
A pandemic is defined as worldwide spread of a new disease – but the exact threshold for declaring one is quite vague. In practice, the actions being taken would not change whether or not a pandemic is declared. Containment measures are not simply about eliminating the disease altogether. Delaying the onset of an outbreak or decreasing the peak is crucial in allowing health systems to cope with a sudden influx of patients.

• This article was amended on 2 March 2020 to expand the answer relating to face masks.

[GeneChing]

...that being said, almost every news story I read features photos of Asians. Waiting for photos of Italians and Iranians... and non-Asian Americans. :rolleyes:


Mar 3, 2020,1:13 am EST
Stop Using The Coronavirus As An Excuse To Be Racist (https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/03/03/stop-using-the-coronavirus-as-an-excuse-to-be-racist/#333ed1a97be9)
Janice Gassam
Senior Contributor
Diversity & Inclusion
I help create strategies for more diversity, equity, and inclusion.

https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/1208328328/960x0.jpg?fit=scale
GETTY

The coronavirus has been the topic of global conversation for the last month, causing mass hysteria and worldwide panic. Stores have been unable to keep protective face masks in stock and Corona beer sales have declined, given the association to the coronavirus name. Apple warns that there may be iPhone shortages due to the virus and U.S. stocks continue to plummet, mimicking 2008 lows. Saudi Arabia has suspended travel to one of the holiest sites in the religion, Mecca, because of health concerns. The travel industry continues to be devasted by the virus as many businesses and travelers have growing concerns over flying. Companies are taking the necessary precautions to ensure their employees are safe by encouraging employees to work remotely. Consumers have raided grocery stores as some supplies become limited and gas prices have plummeted. As the virus continues to spread, people are taking the measures they deem necessary to keep themselves safe.

The frenzy that the coronavirus has caused has unsurprisingly sparked more xenophobia and racism. CNN reported a few weeks ago that a man on a Los Angeles subway was overheard saying that Chinese people are filthy and bring diseases from China. The same CNN report features multiple stories from people of Asian descent who have been attacked or the victim of a physical or verbal assault in the last few weeks. The racism that many people of Asian descent are currently experiencing is strangely reminiscent of the U.S. in the 1800s after The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed. The act was passed based on the false belief that the decreased wages and economic hardship that the West Coast was facing at the time were due to the Chinese workers. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that bigotry and bias has followed the spread of a virus. In 2014, the Ebola virus was causing concern all around the world. As the number of Ebola cases increased, so did the incidents of racism against those of African descent. The Ebola outbreak and the reaction that followed is akin to what has shadowed the spread of the coronavirus. Fear and ignorance are a dangerous combination and have catalyzed into the spreading of fiction and falsehoods.

So, what are the facts? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) people of Asian descent are no more likely to get the coronavirus than anyone else. Secondly, despite the 24/7 reporting about the virus, which is officially called COVID-19, the likelihood of someone within the U.S. contracting the virus is relatively low. Also, individuals who are quarantined pose little to no risk to the general population. It’s important to share the facts with others to stop the spread of false information. Organizational leadership can play a vital role in both educating employees and stopping discriminatory behavior from taking place. It is critical to send employees updates with the facts, as well as preventative measures that should be taken to avert contracting the illness. In addition, leadership should stress the importance of nipping prejudiced behavior in the bud. Anyone that witnesses the perpetuation of negative stereotypes should be encouraged to speak up and report it. Bystander training is an invaluable investment that every company should be making, especially during times of crisis. It’s also important to help employees understand how easy it is to lean on our stereotypes during times of fear and uncertainty. Ensuring that employees are equipped with the facts and are prepared to intervene if they witness discrimination taking place will help you cultivate a culture of inclusion inside and outside of the workplace.


Janice Gassam
I am the founder of BWG Business Solutions-a company designed to help businesses foster more inclusion. Through my company I deliver keynote speeches and I host Diversity Dinner Dialogues, which are informal conversations around diversity-related topics, discussed over delicious food. I have a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology and teach graduate and undergraduate courses in Management. I spend my free time getting lost in a good audio book and perfecting my Jollof rice recipe.

[GeneChing]

Des temples bouddhistes de Montréal complètement vandalisés (VIDÉO) (https://www.narcity.com/nouvelles/ca/qc/montreal/des-temples-bouddhistes-de-montreal-victimes-dactes-de-vandalisme?fbclid=IwAR2cXBrBT97Lqqx9_wcOjiN2y33hCM dsGwF6I8k3MVH04ODEyvPTnKDdm0g)
Louis Angot 1 day ago
Updated on March 04 @ 08:47 AM

Montréal est la terre d'accueil de nombreuses communautés culturelles, qui en retour contribuent à faire de notre ville la métropole cosmopolite qu'elle est aujourd'hui. Toutefois, avec l'épidémie du coronavirus qui sévit en ce moment, les personnes asiatiques de la ville sont parfois visées par du racisme. Depuis quelques jours, des internautes ont signalé que des temples bouddhistes de Montréal aurait été visés par des actes de vandalisme.

Dans une publication sur Facebook, un Montréalais a fait part de son ras-le-bol face à ce qu'il perçoit comme des attaques répétées envers des lieux symboliques de la communauté asiatique à Montréal.

Le temple bouddhiste Quan Am, situé dans le quartier Côte-des-Neiges, aurait d'ailleurs été vandalisé il y a trois semaines. Selon l'internaute, un individu cagoulé aurait fracassé la tête des statues de lions à l'entrée du temple à l'aide d'un grand marteau.

Le temple aurait été à nouveau visé plus récemment.

https://www.narcity.com/u/2020/03/03/8faf500e301373cf652329ff3bfcc8f.png_640xrel.png
Narcity Media

Narcity s'est rendu sur les lieux, mardi le 3 mars, afin d'évaluer l'état des lieux.

Ces images exclusives montrent plusieurs statues du Chua Quan Am détruites.

https://www.narcity.com/u/2020/03/03/533a12bfd8a4d5977a5b90e1459a4e68.png_640xrel.png
Narcity Media

Dans le quartier chinois, au centre-ville, d'autres statues de lion ont également été vandalisées. Accueillant les visiteurs au pied de l'arche au coin du boulevard Saint-Laurent et de la rue Viger, elles ont été couvertes de graffitis, notamment de croix.

Contactée par Narcity, l'arrondissement de Ville-Marie a confirmé qu'une équipe serait envoyée pour nettoyer les sculptures.

D'après la publication de l'internaute, les temples bouddhistes Thuyen Ton et Huyen Khong, tous deux situés dans le quartier de La Petite-Patrie, ont également été visés par des vandales dans les dernières semaines.

Le SPVM n'a pas pu donner de détails sur les événements à Narcity, mais a toutefois affirmé que si des plaintes ont été déposées, une enquête serait ouverte par le service de police.

Dernièrement, la mairesse Valérie Plante a invité les Montréalais à fréquenter le Quartier chinois, qui souffre économiquement depuis le début de l'épidémie.

Elle a aussi demandé à la population d'éviter la peur, la désinformation ainsi que les préjugés par rapport au COVID-19.

*La vidéo ci-haut est un reportage de nos collègues de MTL Blog.

googtrans

Completely vandalized Buddhist temples in Montreal (VIDEO)
Louis Angot 1 day ago
Updated on March 04 @ 08:47 AM

Montreal is home to many cultural communities, which in turn help make our city the cosmopolitan metropolis it is today. However, with the coronavirus epidemic raging at the moment, Asian people in the city are sometimes targeted by racism. In recent days, Internet users have reported that Buddhist temples in Montreal have been targeted by acts of vandalism.

In a Facebook post, a Montrealer said he was fed up with what he saw as repeated attacks on symbolic places of the Asian community in Montreal.

The Quan Am Buddhist temple, located in the Côte-des-Neiges district, was also vandalized three weeks ago. According to the surfer, a hooded individual would have smashed the head of the statues of lions at the entrance of the temple using a large hammer.

The temple would have been targeted again more recently.

Narcity Media

Narcity went to the scene on Tuesday March 3 to assess the situation.

These exclusive images show several destroyed Chua Quan Am statues.

Narcity Media

In downtown Chinatown, other lion statues have also been vandalized. Welcoming visitors at the foot of the arch at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Laurent and Rue Viger, they were covered with graffiti, in particular crosses.

Contacted by Narcity, the Ville-Marie borough confirmed that a team would be sent to clean the sculptures.

According to the publication of the surfer, the Buddhist temples Thuyen Ton and Huyen Khong, both located in the district of La Petite-Patrie, have also been targeted by vandals in recent weeks.

The SPVM could not give details of the events at Narcity, but nevertheless stated that if complaints were made, an investigation would be opened by the police service.

Recently, Mayor Valérie Plante invited Montrealers to visit Chinatown, which has suffered economically since the start of the epidemic.

She also asked the population to avoid fear, misinformation and prejudice regarding COVID-19.

* The video above is a report from our colleagues at MTL Blog.

THREADS
Destruction of Buddhist Icons (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71222-Destruction-of-Buddhist-Icons)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[Jimbo]

Truth. That being said about the PRC reaction, how do you feel about the US reaction so far?

Not too great. The idea that the coronavirus is some made-up plot by the Dems to overthrow the president shows a level of paranoia, narcissism, and stupidity in the extreme. Who knows? Maybe he doesn't really believe it himself, and is merely throwing that out there because he's clueless about how to deal with the problem, and he knows that some people will believe anything he says.

BTW, I don't like either political party, so I'm not on anybody's bandwagon.

[GeneChing]

My SARS journey again (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/index.php?p=article&article=468), if you missed it earlier.


I Lived Through SARS and Reported on Ebola. These Are the Questions We Should Be Asking About Coronavirus. (https://www.propublica.org/article/i-lived-through-sars-and-reported-on-ebola-these-are-the-questions-we-should-be-asking-about-coronavirus?utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=publishtweet&utm_source=social&fbclid=IwAR1XPsEsN0J83as_z3vRQn24vV4gmhKMyd2Gadpcw OnhTllPub-e1H9-4OA#178290)
For concerned civilians and journalists covering the coronavirus, the figures and projections can be overwhelming, frightening or confusing. Here’s what reporter Caroline Chen is focusing on to keep things as accurate and clear as possible.
by Caroline Chen March 5, 3:58 p.m. EST

https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/_threeTwo800w/20200305-SARS-coronavirus-3X2.jpg
Thai nurses and doctors check temperatures of travelers coming from Hong Kong at the Bangkok International Airport in April 2003, during the SARS outbreak. Reporter Caroline Chen lived through SARS, and she covered Ebola, Zika and, now, coronavirus. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

I grew up in Hong Kong and was 13 when SARS swept through the city, infecting about 1,750 people and killing nearly 300. As a teenager, the hardest part was being stuck at home and missing my friends. I only started to pay attention to the daily death toll after my parents decided that’s what would dictate when I could go back to school. But the experience shaped me. I picked up personal hygiene habits, like pressing elevator buttons with my knuckles. And I developed a deep respect for front-line medical workers, many of whom labored around the clock until they, too, succumbed.

That was only my first experience with an outbreak.

In 2014, I was a rookie reporter on the Bloomberg News health desk helping to cover the growing Ebola crisis in West Africa when we got word that the U.S. had its first diagnosed patient. My editor looked down his row of reporters and his eyes fell on me, the one with no familial obligations. “Hey Caroline,” he said, “want to go to Dallas today?” The experience gave me a deeper look into how governments and scientists grapple with a fast-moving, deadly target. I learned about contact tracing as I tagged along with CDC disease detectives. A colleague and I delved deep into how the government’s cumbersome contracting process delayed the development of a possible treatment for Ebola. I later covered Zika, reporting on Florida’s lonely fight against the virus, as Congress gave the state little assistance.

Every time, I’ve seen the same gaps emerge in the public’s understanding of what’s really happening. On one side, I have epidemiologists and lab directors explaining to me, in excruciating detail, nuanced models and technicalities, like how PCR assays work. On the other side, I see oversimplified headlines and misleading statistics touted by government officials.

Now I’m on ProPublica’s coronavirus reporting team, speaking to dozens of sources every day, from epidemiology experts and worried medical workers to members of the public, who are not sure what to take from the headlines they’re seeing. ProPublica specializes in accountability journalism, and our goal is to find out what’s happening and let the public know of any shortfalls in emergency response.

Here’s what you need to know:

Testing Is Still Limited

On Tuesday, after days of growing clamor to make more testing available, Vice President Mike Pence announced that the administration was issuing new guidance that “will make it clear that any American can be tested” for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and said that 2,500 kits would be sent out this week, an equivalent of 1.5 million tests.

Lifting restrictions on testing criteria is a much-needed step, but if your takeaway was that hundreds of thousands of Americans will be able to walk into doctors’ offices by Friday and immediately get tested, you’d be wrong.

It doesn’t matter if boxes upon boxes of kits are available if labs are struggling to set up the tests or are short on staff to run them. At the end of the day, what I want to know (and I imagine, what everyone wants to know) is how many people can be tested. That’s the unit that I am pressing public health officials and lab directors for when I interview them.

Here are some basics that may be useful to keep in mind: The CDC test kits can be thought of somewhat like a Blue Apron meal kit; there’s some assembly required before a lab can begin testing. It’s not like a protein bar, ready to eat straight out of the wrapper.

As of Wednesday, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents public health labs across the United States, told me that each CDC test kit can run about 700 specimens. Note the “about” — you might have heard that each CDC test kit can run 1,000 specimens. That’s also true, but labs use up a certain amount of material in the process of setting up the kit and also to ensure that all the results from actual patient samples are accurate. So that’s where the “about 700” number is coming from.

None of those numbers, so far, are in units of what I care about — patients. We’re still talking about samples and specimens. APHL says the labs are running two specimens per patient, to double-check the result. So that means you actually can only test 350 people per kit.

Reporters, if an official gives you a number that’s in samples, I urge you to follow up.

Instead of asking: How many test kits do you have?

Ask this: How many samples are you running per patient?

So that’s the kits. Let’s turn to staffing.

APHL told me on Wednesday that each public health lab can run about 100 samples per day. One hundred public labs received test kits from the CDC. When they’re all up and running, they’ll have a cumulative capacity of 10,000 samples a day. Remember, since we care about patients and not samples, divide by two. That’s 5,000 patients a day. (As of Thursday morning, 67 labs were taking patient samples, so that would come out to 3,350 patients a day.)

Many experts say we need far more testing capacity. A former FDA commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, told me that he’d like everyone with an influenza-like illness who tests negative for the flu to be able to get tested for COVID-19, which, given that we’re still in the midst of flu season, means a massive ramp-up would be required. In order to do that, the U.S. urgently needs academic medical centers to also come on board. Under pressure to expand capacity, the FDA loosened restrictions on Saturday to allow academic hospital labs to start testing. Some have. You can read more about that here. Testing giants Quest and LabCorp are also aiming to be online next week, which will help tremendously.

I urge reporters to keep labor capacity in mind when talking to their local labs.

Instead of asking: How many samples can you run?

Ask this: How many samples is your lab testing per day right now? How about at maximum capacity? How many hours does it take to get a result?

One last thing that’s good to know: There are commercial manufacturers at work to create off-the-shelf versions of these tests — the microwavable meal equivalent, if you will. But those companies have not given a precise timeline. Last week, Cepheid, a manufacturer based in California, told ProPublica it’s targeting the second quarter of this year for the release of its test.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

The Death Rate Is Only an Estimate

The mortality rate is an awfully squishy number that’s being reported as if it’s a stone-cold fact. On Tuesday, a number of headlines trumpeted that the World Health Organization was saying the death rate was 3.4%. Some hand-wringing ensued over how this number was higher than the previous estimate of 2%.

Here’s what WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died.” Let’s zoom in on the word “reported.” The WHO puts out a daily situation report that you can find here. It defines confirmed as “a person with laboratory confirmation of COVID-19 infection.” As of Tuesday, the total number of deaths reported globally (3,112) as a fraction of the total number of confirmed cases reported globally (90,869) was 3.4%.

Here’s the problem, though. That denominator is laboratory-confirmed cases. As we know, in the U.S., it’s pretty hard to get tested right now. In fact, based on this definition, as of Wednesday night, the U.S. mortality rate based on CDC numbers — 9 reported deaths and 80 laboratory-confirmed cases — was 11%. You know that’s bogus. You know that’s because there’s not enough data, the denominator is pitifully small and we need to be testing a whole lot more people.

Over the last few weeks, many more countries have realized that the coronavirus has hit their shores. Some, like South Korea, are doing tons of testing and generating lots of data. Others, like the U.S., aren’t, as ProPublica has reported. The rate will also depend, country by country, on demographics (this virus is more deadly to the elderly) and resources (like ventilators). It’s not surprising that the global mortality rate based on confirmed cases might fluctuate for a while.

When most people talk about fatality rates, they’re thinking: If I get this, will I die? The only way to actually answer that question is to know how many people have been infected, and for now, that’s nearly impossible. As Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health points out, deaths are the most obvious and easy thing to catch, whereas infected people who stay at home and those with no symptoms are incredibly hard to account for. That tends to skew the fatality rate higher, especially earlier on in an epidemic.

What we do know for now is that it’s more deadly than the seasonal flu, which generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected, and less deadly than a disease like SARS, which killed about 10% of those infected during the outbreak in 2002-3.

When I write about the mortality rate, I try to use caveats like “estimated” or “scientists understand it to be around” so readers understand it’s not fixed in stone.

Instead of saying: The mortality rate is X%.

Say this: Scientists estimate the mortality rate is X%, based on the information they have.

Be Careful with Projections

Another slippery number out there is what’s known as the basic reproduction number, R~0~ (pronounced R-naught). It’s a measure of contagion, the average number of people who will catch the disease from a single infected person. For similar reasons as above, this number is currently a moving target, as more data is gathered from around the world. So far, estimates have largely been in the range of 2 to 3.

What this means for reporters is that if someone tries to say something like, there’s going to be X number of cases by a certain date, that can’t be a hard and fast number. I’d want to know what assumptions were used to calculate that forecast. What was the R~0~ presumed? How about the serial interval, the duration between the onset of symptoms between one case and its secondary cases? Tweaking either of those numbers by just a bit can result in very different forecasts, which you can see by playing around with this interactive tool by the University of Toronto. Generally, I shy away from putting a projection in a headline, where any hope of nuance might be lost, but if I have to, a range is safer than a single number that readers might interpret as somehow immutable.

Furthermore, as of early March, there are many fundamental questions about the novel coronavirus that scientists still don’t fully understand. For example, while it’s clear that the primary method of transmission is via droplets, drops of fluid from the mouth or nose emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes, it’s not clear if it can transmit as an aerosol, meaning it is airborne and floats around (this is considered to be unlikely). It’s also not conclusive if the virus can be spread by infected people before they present any symptoms.

Instead of asking: How many cases will there be at X point in time?

Ask this: What assumptions were used to calculate your prediction? What’s the upper and lower range of your projection?

Information Is Changing Quickly and May Soon Be Out of Date

One last thing I’d like to add: Even more so than usual, things are moving quickly. I’ve been on interviews where the information I was given was outdated — as in just plain wrong — by the time I filed my draft 12 hours later. This is, of course, terrifying as a reporter. So I’m trying my best to put information like “as of Wednesday morning” alongside facts and figures in my stories, and I’m encouraging my sources to update me as often as they can.

OK, but How Do I Protect Myself?
Over the last two days, I’ve gotten numerous DMs over Twitter from concerned members of the public, asking me what they should do to be safe. Honestly, this breaks my heart and speaks to a failure of local health officials to educate them. I’m having the same conversations over and over again, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here. I’m not a medical professional, so this is not medical advice.

Start by knowing yourself. Are you elderly or immunocompromised? Young and healthy? Your risk varies depending on your personal profile. If you’re concerned about your health, I encourage you to talk through your fears with your doctor. I’m 29; I know there’s little chance that this virus would kill me given the information I’ve seen. (In data published last month by the Chinese CDC, out of more than 72,000 diagnosed cases, 8.1% were 20-somethings, and the fatality rate in that age bracket was 0.2%.) That said, given my personal medical history and tendency to get bronchitis, I would really prefer not to get infected.

So how does that translate into action? Here have been my personal choices so far. I’m still flying; I just got off a plane to attend a reporting conference in New Orleans. (I would not attend a conference in the Seattle area, however, given how signs are pointing to widespread community transmission.) I don’t see how being on a plane increases my personal risk any more than being on the New York City subway. That said, I am not shaking any hands at this conference, and I’m ramping up my hygiene game: washing my hands more frequently and encouraging my colleagues to do so as well.

I’m aware of the possibility that I may need to work from home in the near future, if I or my husband get sick, or if there’s an explosion of cases in New York City and social distancing measures are encouraged. So we are slowly but methodically picking up a little bit of extra food with every grocery run (for our two cats as well!), just so that we’d have enough at home if we need to be indoors for a few weeks. I’m not panicked, nor should you be. I’d encourage you to check on your neighbors — especially the older ones, or those with young children, and see if you can pick up some additional groceries for them.

Even if we have to stand a little ****her apart from one another, the best way to get through this is with a bit of extra compassion to bridge the gap.

If you have expertise or tips you’d like to share with me and members of my reporting team, please fill out this form or email us at coronavirus@propublica.org.


Not too great. The idea that the coronavirus is some made-up plot by the Dems to overthrow the president shows a level of paranoia, narcissism, and stupidity in the extreme. Who knows? Maybe he doesn't really believe it himself, and is merely throwing that out there because he's clueless about how to deal with the problem, and he knows that some people will believe anything he says.

I feel ya, Jimbo. Some so-called Christians welcome the apocalypse because they assume they will experience the rapture. That's a big assumption, especially for anyone hoping for Pestilence, War, Famine, & Death.

[GeneChing]

MGM to Take $30 Million-Plus Hit After Moving Bond Film 'No Time to Die' (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mgm-take-30-million-hit-moving-bond-film-no-time-die-1282803)
3:54 PM PST 3/5/2020 by Tatiana Siegel

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape_928x523/2020/01/b25_25594_r_rgb_copy.jpg
Nicola Dove
'No Time to Die'

The studio was facing a much costlier alternative given that worldwide theater closures could have resulted in a minimum of 30 percent shaved off the final box office tallies.
After weighing the pros and cons of keeping a scheduled April 10 bow for its main action tentpole amid the coronavirus outbreak, MGM opted for a cautious route by pushing the upcoming James Bond outing No Time to Die to November. But how much will the move, prompted by growing disruptions due to the epidemic, cost the studio that fully financed the film?

Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that MGM will likely take a $30 million to $50 million hit by moving the film's release back by seven months when the dust settles. Although the bulk of the marketing campaign for the Cary Joji Fukunaga-directed pic — the 25th installment in the storied 007 franchise — had yet to roll out, the marketing outlay already was significant with just four weeks to go before the release, including a $4.5 million Super Bowl spot that ran in February. MGM declined comment.

Still, the alternative MGM was facing was far more costly, and even an eight-figure loss will be easier for a film like No Time to Die to withstand considering the broader profit margins on a Bond film. The production budget for the latest installment is on par with the $245 million budget for the last Bond film, 2015's Spectre. Sources say the studio’s decision to move No Time to Die to Nov. 12 in the U.K. and Nov. 25 in North America — which was made on Tuesday, one day before announcing the delayed release — was largely based on the economic reality that large swaths of theaters across the world have been shuttered in recent weeks, stretching from Japan to Italy. That could have resulted in a minimum of 30 percent shaved off the final box office tallies — a possible $300 million out of a likely $1 billion global haul.

The producers had already been bracing for the prospect of a release date move in recent days. "They obviously are doing the right thing by putting the public safety, world safety, first," No Time to Die producer Barbara Broccoli told THR on Feb. 26. Added producer Michael Wilson, "How will coronavirus affect the whole world markets and affect trade in general? We’re just one of the people that have to work in that environment."

In China alone, some 70,000 theaters have been closed since January, with no plans to reopen anytime soon. Spectre made $84 million in the Middle Kingdom, representing roughly 10 percent of its $881 million worldwide cume. Smaller Asian markets likewise are being impacted due to the virus, and there’s concern that the outbreak in Italy could spread across Europe. The U.K., where the fictitious Bond originated and which appears vulnerable to theater closures, represents a huge slice of No Time to Die's expected revenues (Spectre earned $125 million there).

No Time to Die, which marks the final outing of Daniel Craig as 007, had been set to launch with a world premiere in London on March 31. Some promotional events or brand tie-ins cannot be rescheduled or stalled. Craig, who is set to host NBC's Saturday Night Live this weekend, was in the middle of rehearsals when news broke of the film’s move. It would have been impossible for SNL to pivot to a new host on such short notice, and Craig will carry on as planned.

Likewise, Omega last month launched a 007 edition watch, which already has begun to hit stores. Given that the watch is not necessarily a No Time to Die timepiece but rather a Bond-inspired product, stores will continue to sell it and not hold back the luxury item until the fall. Swatch also went ahead with its Thursday release of a limited-edition watch tied to No Time to Die. Adam Holdsworth, managing director of N.Peal, the brand behind a navy ribbed army sweater worn by Craig's Bond in the film and available for preorder this week, said he had not been notified of the pic's release being pushed back to November ahead of the Wednesday announcement. "We fully understand and appreciate the reasons for the delay given the potential disruption of the virus in the coming weeks — so we fully support the decision," he said. The sweater will also be relaunched in the fall, tied to the release.

Meanwhile, MGM is scrambling to salvage ad buys it already had made for the coming four weeks and move them to the fall. So far, the studio’s partners have been accommodating. But other pricey purchases can’t be recouped, like the Super Bowl spot that ran in February. (The studio, however, doesn’t see that money as lost, given that it likely would have run the ad during television’s most-watched event of the year even if the film was originally dated for November.)

Still, a fall campaign will come with added expenses. Broadcast ads that run in the fourth quarter of the year are typically more expensive than the spring, given that the quarter coincides with the kickoff of the new TV season as well as football. The film will also be competing for ad space with other studios' awards-facing prestige titles and major holiday offerings, as Disney's Marvel film Eternals and Warner Bros.' tentpole Godzilla vs. Kong will also be released in November.

But opening a tentpole amid a global epidemic, which is expected to turn into a pandemic, became untenable for MGM. So far, no other studios have followed its move, though that could change as the number of cases across the U.S. and the world increase by the hour. On Wednesday, California declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus outbreak as it marked its first death. There are currently 98,059 cases of coronavirus worldwide and 3,356 deaths caused by it.

Pamela McClintock and Lindsay Weinberg contributed to this report.

THREADS
No Time to Die (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71114-No-Time-to-Die)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

With new coronavirus cases, Santa Clara County calls for cancellation of large events, reducing travel (https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/05/discovery-museum-san-jose-preschool-closed-for-the-week-after-coronavirus-exposure/)
A San Jose preschool and Discovery Museum closed this week after employees had exposure to the virus
By THY VO | tvo@bayareanewsgroup.com and JOHN WOOLFOOLK | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: March 5, 2020 at 2:08 p.m. | UPDATED: March 6, 2020 at 4:18 a.m.

As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Santa Clara County reached 20 on Thursday, public health officials called for new measures to prevent the virus from circulating in the community, including cancelling large gatherings like sports games and conventions, and for businesses to suspend non-essential travel.

At a press conference Thursday afternoon, county officials confirmed six new cases of novel coronavirus, known officially as COVID-19, and said, given the number of cases where the transmission of the disease is unknown, people need to act to slow the spread of the virus throughout the community.

“Our cases to date indicate to us that the risk of exposure to the virus in our community is increasing,” said county health officer Dr. Sara Cody, adding that the number of cases is expected to increase.

The guidelines include cancelling events like concerts, sports games, conferences and other large gatherings to minimize close, person-to-person contact, said James Williams, county counsel and director of the county’s Emergency Operations Center.

Asked to clarify whether the request applies to specific events like San Jose Sharks hockey games, Santa Clara County Emergency Operations Center Director James Williams said it would apply to the NHL team.

“This would include sharks games, yes,” Williams said. “It’s not just a question of Sharks games. There are many organizations that host large gatherings…we have an obligation to make this apply to everyone.”

“The bottom line here is people aren’t in spaces where they’re among many, many other people without being able to keep a distance from others.”

He clarified, however, that it doesn’t apply to Mineta San Jose International Airport.

“We’re not treating San Jose airport as a large gathering place,” Williams said.

Employers are also being asked to suspend nonessential employee travel, minimize employees working within arm’s length of one another, and allow employees to work from home and maximize sick leave benefits.

Cody noted that most of the people who have caught the illness do not become seriously ill. But risk generally increases with age, starting from age 50 and escalating for older adults.

Anyone with underlying health conditions or severely weakened immune systems also at greater risk. Those individuals should avoid large gatherings, Cody said.

The recommendations also say people should avoid visiting hospitals, long term care facilities or nursing homes as much as possible, or limit time at such facilities and stand at least six feet away from patients and employees.

The county is not, however, recommending the closure of schools, noting that “very few children” are affected by the virus.

“If a staff member is confirmed to have COVID-19, we will consider the event based on the specific facts and circumstances to determine whether that school should close,” said Cody. “We really want children to go along with their lives..the school closure issue is a very large one, with the potential to have tremendous impact, particularly for working parents.”

On Thursday, a private preschool in San Jose closed for the rest of the week after a teacher tested positive for coronavirus, and the Discovery Museum is also closed after an employee was exposed to a confirmed coronavirus patient.

Administrators at Action Day Primary Plus announced Thursday that the preschool’s Moorpark location will close for the rest of the week for a “deep cleaning,” after a teacher at the Moorpark school tested positive for coronavirus.

The teacher has not returned to work since Feb. 26 and is receiving medical care, administrators said. Its nine other schools remain unaffected.

The Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose is also closed for the rest of the week, after an employee was exposed to a confirmed case of coronavirus, according to Cecilia Clark, interim director of marketing for the museum.

The six additional cases confirmed Thursday include four people who are isolated at home and two people who are hospitalized, according to county officials. Some of those cases include people who had contact with known coronavirus cases, while the transmission of the virus is unknown in others.

Of the 20 total cases, 4 are travel-related, 9 where people had contact with other known cases, and 7 cases where the patient had no known travel history or close contact with a patient.

Read the county’s full list of recommendations on the county website (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/news/Pages/new-guidance-new-covid-19-3-5-2020.aspx).

Again COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia) hits home. The San Jose McEnery Convention Center where where we hold TCEC (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71553-2020-Tiger-Claw-Elite-Championships-amp-KUNG-FU-TAI-CHI-DAY-May-16-17-San-Jose-CA) is right smack in the middle of Santa Clara County. It is California's 6th most populous county.

[GeneChing]

Who makes up these predictive stats? Are they ever on the mark? :rolleyes:


BOX OFFICE MARCH 5, 2020 8:44AM PT
Box Office: ‘Mulan’ Eyes Huge $85 Million-Plus Opening Weekend (https://variety.com/2020/film/box-office/disney-mulan-box-office-opening-weekend-tracking-1203524872/)
By REBECCA RUBIN
News Editor, Online
@https://twitter.com/rebeccaarubin

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/mulan.jpg?w=887&h=499&crop=1
CREDIT: NULL
Despite fears that coronavirus could impact moviegoing across the globe, Disney’s “Mulan” is expected to pull off solid opening weekend ticket sales at the domestic box office.

According to early estimates, the live-action remake should collect $85 million when it debuts in U.S. theaters on March 27, though some tracking services predict that number could reach above $90 million. The higher end of that range would put it in the company of the studio’s recent “Aladdin” reboot, which debuted to $91.5 million last May.

“Mulan” cost $200 million to make, meaning it’ll need to bank on global appeal to turn a profit. That could prove problematic since theaters in China, where “Mulan” was expected to strongly resonate, have been closed due to threats of coronavirus. So far, the U.S. box office doesn’t appear to be threatened by the novel virus that’s infected and killed thousands.

Though coronavirus has already hurt the movie business in China, South Korea and Italy, Disney has no plans to alter the release date for “Mulan.” However, a studio spokesperson said the film will open in certain foreign markets at a later date. It was announced on Wednesday that the launch of the James Bond movie “No Time to Die” would be postponed, from April to November, because so many multiplexes are closed in areas like China, where the disease has been the most prevalent. So far, no other major movies have plans to postpone or alter release plans.

Niki Caro directed “Mulan,” which stars Chinese actress Liu Yifei as the eponymous heroine. Like the original animated version, “Mulan” centers on a warrior who disguises herself as a man to spare her elderly father from having to serve in the army. It’s the first of Disney’s live-action remakes to be rated PG-13, due to sequences of violence. The non-PG rating could limit younger audiences from buying tickets.

Disney’s live-action remakes have debuted to mostly huge commercial success. “The Lion King,” “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast” all cracked $1 billion at the global box office, while “The Jungle Book” grossed over $950 million. However, “Dumbo” ended its theatrical run with $353 million worldwide, disappointing receipts — if only by Disney’s standards.

THREADS
Mulan (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

If there's one thing the Chinese are good at, it's talking in code. ;)


‘Noodles’ and ‘Pandas’: Chinese People Are Using Secret Code to Talk About Coronavirus Online (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/epgqpj/chinese-internet-users-have-some-ingenious-ways-of-getting-around-coronavirus-censorship)
"Vietnamese pho noodles," anyone?
By David Gilbert
Mar 6 2020, 5:35am

https://video-images.vice.com/test-uploads/articles/5e623bc503a008009d20ddca/lede/1583500686058-AP_20066382989579.jpeg

Chinese citizens angry at their government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak have come up with some ingenious ways to express their outrage and circumvent the extreme censorship measures imposed by Beijing.

In a bid to control the narrative, Beijing authorities have censored sensitive topics, silenced WeChat accounts, tracked down those who are sharing criticism of the government, and disappeared citizen journalists.

But all those efforts still haven't silenced people online, and angry citizens are now relying on coded words and phrases to express their dissatisfaction.

The most common example is “zf” which is the abbreviation for the Chinese word “government. To refer to the police, the letters “jc” are used, while “guobao” (meaning "national treasure") or panda images are used to represent the domestic security bureau. Citizens talking about the Communist Party’s Publicity Department use “Ministry of Truth” from the George Orwell novel "1984," instead.

One of the ways Beijing has sought to stem the flow of information out of China is by cracking down on the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) as a way of circumventing its censorship system, known as the Great Firewall. So discussing this technology online has also become taboo.

Instead, citizens have been talking about how to use the technology by referring to “Vietnamese pho noodles” or “ladders.”

China’s embattled president Xi Jinping is among the most censored topics on Chinese social media. A Citizen Lab report this week showed that WeChat ramped up censorship efforts in recent weeks by adding a number of Xi-related words and phrases to its blacklist.

In an attempt to get around these restrictions, Chinese citizens have begun referring to their president as a “narrow neck bottle” because the Chinese pronunciation of the phrase is similar to that of "Xi Jinping."

But despite the obscure nature of this reference, China’s censors managed to pick it up when they removed a question posting on Zhihu (China’s version of Quora) asking “how to wash a narrow neck bottle?”

“To fully appreciate conversations on China’s social media platforms, merely knowing Chinese is not enough,” an Amnesty International researcher located in China who did not want to be identified told VICE News. “To combat systematic internet censorship, netizens in China have created a new vocabulary to discuss ‘sensitive issues.’ This language keeps evolving as the government constantly expands its list of prohibited terms online. Those not keeping up with the trend could easily be left confused.”

Part of the reason for China’s strict censorship of online comments is that the government is keen to change the way the world is talking about coronavirus and in particular China’s role in the outbreak.

Beijing wants to dispel the suggestion that coronavirus is a Chinese virus and instead position itself as the country that saved the world from a much worse situation. China is hitting out at other country’s failure to take the necessary measures to contain outbreaks, particularly taking aim at the U.S. and Donald Trump.

On Friday, China reported that all new cases of coronavirus came from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, further bolstering the government’s claims that it has managed to get the outbreak under control.

But there has been an unprecedented backlash against the government’s attempts to portray the situation in Hubei province as a positive one, and on Thursday that online backlash spilled over into the real world, with a very rare public display of criticism of the government.

During a tour of Wuhan, a city of 12 million people that has been in lockdown for six weeks, residents locked in their apartments openly berated a senior government official.

Footage of the incident that has been spread virally online shows residents shouting “Everything is fake” and “It’s all fake” as officials show Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan around the city at the center of the coronavirus outbreak.

Cover: An employee clad in a protective suit waits on customers at a supermarket in Beijing, China on March 6, 2020. (The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images)

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Noodles (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69740-Noodles)
Pandas (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?54939-Pandas!)

[GeneChing]

Ultra Music Festival in Miami was cancelled earlier this week (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/downtown-miami/article240878956.html). Next up to fall, Coachella.


SXSW 2020 Canceled Due to Coronavirus (https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/03/sxsw-2020-canceled-due-to-coronavirus/?fbclid=IwAR1EWJIru7RSv3UuEWBOBPc82ZKIJjOnXHFrX1x2 Uz6fFs2tgaMCG92AQPs)
Austin's mayor has declared a countywide "state of disaster"
BY ALEX YOUNGON MARCH 06, 2020, 2:03PM

https://consequenceofsound.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/south-by-southwest-sxsw-coronavirus-not-canceled.png

South by Southwest 2020 has been canceled due to growing concerns over the coronavirus epidemic.

On Friday afternoon, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, declared a countywide “state of disaster” and issued a formal order canceling the popular music, film, and tech conference. In a subsequent statement, SXSW organizers said they “will faithfully follow the city’s directions.”

As recently as Wednesday, city officials had expressed confidence in SXSW moving forward as planned. “Right now there’s no evidence that closing South by Southwest or other activities is going to make this community safer,” Austin Public Health Mark Escott said at the time.

However, speaking less than 48 hours later, Escott said there was now “evidence that [SXSW] may accelerate the spread and it may make that happen sooner. After careful deliberation, there was no acceptable path forward that would mitigate the risk enough to protect our community.”

“We are devastated to share this news with you. ‘The show must go on’ is in our DNA, and this is the first time in 34 years that the March event will not take place,” SXSW organizers said in their statement. “We are now working through the ramifications of this unprecedented situation.”

Even before today’s cancelation, SXSW was in dire straits. Throughout the week, as more positive coronavirus tests were detected across the US, major media companies began pulling out of the event. Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter canceled their participation in the tech portion of the festival, while Apple, Netflix, and WarnerMedia scrapped scheduled film premieres and Q&As. Several prominent musicians who were also part of the programming, including Beastie Boys, Trent Reznor, and Ozzy Osbourne, also canceled their appearances.

Of course, the sudden cancelation will have major implications for the thousands of aspiring musicians who had already booked their trip to SXSW and do not have the same financial resources as a major tech company. To that point, SXSW said, “We are exploring options to reschedule the event and are working to provide a virtual SXSW online experience as soon as possible for 2020 participants. For our registrants, clients, and participants we will be in touch as soon as possible and will publish an FAQ.”

“We understand the gravity of the situation for all the creatives who utilize SXSW to accelerate their careers; for the global businesses; and for Austin and the hundreds of small businesses – venues, theatres, vendors, production companies, service industry staff, and other partners that rely so heavily on the increased business that SXSW attracts,” the statement continued.

This is a developing story…

[GeneChing]

SF already cancelled this year's St. Patrick's Day parade (https://sfist.com/2020/03/07/sunday-streets-st-patricks-day-parade-called-off-as-coronavirus-worries-snowball/), which is a big deal around here.


Coronavirus: Cork City cancels St Patrick's Day parade as Mary Lou says Dublin cancellation is 'inevitable' (https://www.thejournal.ie/st-patricks-day-lord-mayor-council-5038055-Mar2020/)
A number of other parades across the country have been postponed or cancelled.
8 hours ago

https://c3.thejournal.ie/media/2020/03/st-patricks-561-752x501.jpg
St Patrick's Day in Dublin last year. St Patrick's Day in Dublin last year.

Image: Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie
Updated 21 minutes ago

CORK CITY HAS cancelled its St Patrick’s Day parade while Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has said she thinks it’s “inevitable” that the parade in Dublin will not go ahead.

In Sligo, organisers have confirmed the town would also be cancelling its parade this afternoon, citing guidelines from health authorities.

“The health and well-being of our community is our first priority and having reviewed the guidelines from the HSE and the uncertainty surrounding the Covid-19, the committee feel it is appropriate to cancel this years event,” Finbarr Filan, the chairperson of Sligo’s St Patrick’s Day committee, said in a statement.

It was announced this afternoon that the Cork City St Patrick’s parade would be cancelled.

On Friday, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said “there is no recommendation to cancel mass gatherings at this stage” amid global concerns about coronavirus.

No official decision has yet been made on the 17 March festivities but Health Minister Simon Harris has said this morning that ‘clarity’ on this should be expected within 48 hours.

Cancelled and postponed

The Wicklow town St Patrick’s parade has been cancelled, the committee announced in a statement earlier.

The parade was cancelled in the interest of public health and safety. The committee said it “did not make this decision lightly”.

Other parades have been cancelled or postponed:

Mallow, Co Cork
Churchtown, Co Cork
Kealkill, Co Cork
Greystones, Co Wicklow
Newbridge, Co Kildare
Castlegregory, Co Kerry
Mountmellick, Co Laois (called the Boglands Festival)

The parade in Durrow, Co Laois has also been cancelled this year, but out of respect for the passing of the committee’s treasurer, a community group said on Facebook.

Carlow TD Jennifer Murnane O’Connor has called on organisers of the Carlow parade to postpone due to coronavirus fears, Carlow Live reports.

Clare TD Cathal Crowe said he believes it is “imperative” that large public events and gatherings such as St Patrick’s Day parades should be “cancelled in the interest of public health”.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with Seán O’Rourke programme, Mary Lou McDonald said “steady and determined leadership” was needed.

“I’m very glad to hear the indication from the Six Nations that the matches are going to be postponed until the autumntime. I think that is a very wise and responsible thing to do. I think there is an ongoing conversation across the land about St. Patrick’s Day and parades, we need a decision on that. It seems to me inevitable that the parade will be postponed, again my personal view is that that is the responsible and necessary thing to do,” the Dublin Central TD said.

Not to create panic but on the contrary, to assurances to people that there is steady and determined leadership and that we are prepared to take the necessary actions to keep people safe.

French media are reporting that the Six Nations rugby match scheduled for this coming weekend is set to be postponed.

In Dublin City Council, Independent councillors Christy Burke and Anthony Flynn are tabling a motion at an emergency meeting of Dublin City Council this morning for the Dublin parade to be cancelled indefinitely.

The St Patrick’s parade in Maynooth has been postponed to minimise the spread of Covid-19, it was confirmed today.

“We intend to run the 2020 parade later in the year when it is deemed to be safe and that the spread of Covid-19 has ceased,” chair of the Maynooth St Patrick’s Day Parade Committee and county councillor Naoise Ó Cearúil said in a statement.

The planned parade in Youghal, Co Cork was cancelled last week.

Speaking last night, Burke said the fear among members of the people is “unbelievable”.

“My phone is ringing non-stop with concerned people over the spread of the coronavirus – especially over the past 48 hours. Cllr Flynn and I believe we will have the full backing of our motion by all councillors on Tuesday. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar needs to finally listen to people on this and the feelings out there,” he said.

“The public don’t want the parade to go ahead as people are going to be 20 deep and in close quarters trying to view it. It also makes its way from Parnell Square in the north of the city down to the south-side.”

“I’ve had people coming to be telling me they are leaving the city to get away from crowds of people for a few days,” Burke said. “It’s not about saving face any longer and the might of big business – it’s about people’s lives and health and safety. Ordinary people are scandalised that the government don’t seem to be taking this situation more seriously.

Burke said that “people want to see spray machines in public and to see the government more hands-on”.

“Our European counterparts are taking the coronavirus crisis very seriously and we as a nation need to take a more serious note out their books.”

With reporting from Dominic McGrath, Céimin Burke and Orla Dwyer

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Happy St. Patrick's Day (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?53541-Happy-St-Patrick-s-Day)

[GeneChing]

ASIAMARCH 8, 2020 9:37PM PT
Shanghai Disney Resort, Closed in January due to Coronavirus, Set to Partially Reopen Monday (https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/shanghai-disney-resort-disneyland-reopen-china-coronavirus-1203527299/)
By REBECCA DAVIS

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/shanghai-disney.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1
CREDIT: IMAGINECHINA/AP

The Shanghai Disney Resort has said it will reopen some of the shopping, dining and entertainment options on Monday, though the main theme park will remain closed to prevent further spread of the coronavirus.

The move is the “first step of a phased reopening,” it said in a statement posted Monday to its website. The resort has been closed since January 25.

Certain facilities at Disneytown, Wishing Star Park and the Shanghai Disneyland Hotel will operate with limited capacity and at reduced hours, and parking lots will reopen, the resort said. The Disneyland theme park itself will stay closed as the park “continue(s) to closely monitor health and safety conditions.”

Visitors will be required to wear masks during their entire time within the Disney Resort area, submit to temperature screenings upon arrival, and “present their Health QR code” when entering dining areas.

Walt Disney Co. owns a 43% stake in the Shanghai Disney Resort. It is one of four Disney-branded theme parks in Asia, alongside one in Hong Kong, which has also remained shut since late January, and two in Tokyo.

In an earnings call, Disney said a two-month closure of the Shanghai park could cost $135 million in lost earnings, while a two-month of closure of Hong Kong could cost $145 million.

In Japan, the Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea parks shuttered for a two-week period starting Feb. 29 to stem the spread of coronavirus, and are expected to re-open on March 16. In a normal year, they welcome about 30 million visitors.

This has got to be so tough. I'm sure Shanghai Disney was looking to cash in on the Year of the Rat (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71622-2020-Year-of-the-Rat)(mouse).

THREADS
Coronavirus (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Chinese Theme Parks (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?62642-Chinese-Theme-Park)

[GeneChing]

Coronavirus ‘highly sensitive’ to high temperatures, but don’t bank on summer killing it off, studies say (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3074131/coronavirus-highly-sensitive-high-temperatures-dont-bank-summer)
Pathogen appears to spread fastest at 8.72 degrees Celsius, so countries in colder climes should ‘adopt the strictest control measures’, according to researchers from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong province
But head of WHO’s health emergencies programme says it is ‘a false hope’ to think Covid-19 will just disappear like the flu
Simone McCarthy
Published: 2:24pm, 8 Mar, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/03/08/0b4fb292-6104-11ea-be3e-43af5536d789_image_hires_143724.JPG?itok=9P1y-zlo&v=1583649454
A new study suggests the spread of the coronavirus could slow in warmer weather. Photo: AFP

The virus that causes Covid-19 may have a temperature sweet spot at which it spreads fastest, a new study has suggested, but experts say people should avoid falling into the trap of thinking it will react to seasonal changes in exactly the same way as other pathogens, like those that cause the common cold or influenza.
The study, by a team from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, the capital of south China’s Guangdong province, sought to determine how the spread of the new coronavirus might be affected by changes in season and temperature.
Published last month, though yet to be peer-reviewed, the report suggested heat had a significant role to play in how the virus behaves.
“Temperature could significantly change Covid-19 transmission,” it said. “And there might be a best temperature for viral transmission.”


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDIs8-CzMpw&feature=emb_logo

The “virus is highly sensitive to high temperature”, which could prevent it from spreading in warmer countries, while the opposite appeared to be true in colder climes, the study said.
As a result, it suggested that “countries and regions with a lower temperature adopt the strictest control measures”.
Many national governments and health authorities are banking on the coronavirus losing some of its potency as the weather warms up, as is generally the case with similar viruses that cause the common cold and influenza.
However, a separate study by a group of researchers including epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that sustained transmission of the coronavirus and the rapid growth in infections was possible in a range of humidity conditions – from cold and dry provinces in China to tropical locations, such as the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in the far south of the country and Singapore.
“Weather alone, [such as an] increase of temperature and humidity as the spring and summer months arrive in the Northern Hemisphere, will not necessarily lead to declines in case counts without the implementation of extensive public health interventions,” said the study, which was published in February and is also awaiting scientific review.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/03/08/36916892-60f5-11ea-be3e-43af5536d789_1320x770_143724.jpg
Sustained transmission of the virus was reported in tropical Singapore. Photo: EPA-EFE

The Guangzhou team based their study on every novel coronavirus case confirmed around the world between January 20 and February 4, including in more than 400 Chinese cities and regions. These were then modelled against official meteorological data for January from across China and the capital cities of each country affected.
The analysis indicated that case numbers rose in line with average temperatures up to a peak of 8.72 degrees Celsius and then declined.
“Temperature … has an impact on people’s living environments … [and] could play a significant role in public health in terms of epidemic development and control,” the study said.
It said also that climate may have played a part in why the virus broke out in Wuhan, the central China city where it was first detected.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleJCHtI5NI&feature=emb_logo

Other experts, like Hassan Zaraket, an assistant director at the Centre for Infectious Diseases Research at the American University of Beirut, said it was possible that warmer, more humid weather would make the coronavirus less stable and thus less transmissible, as was the case with other viral pathogens.
“We are still learning about this virus, but based on what we know of other coronaviruses we can be hopeful,” he said.
“As temperatures are warming up, the stability of the virus could decrease … if the weather helps us reduce transmissibility and environmental stability of the virus, then maybe we can break the chain of transmission.”
However, even if this were the case, the benefit would be greatest in areas that had yet to see widespread community transmission of Covid-19, he said.
Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organisation’s health emergencies programme, also urged people not to assume the epidemic would automatically subside in the summer.
“We have to assume the virus will continue to have the capacity to spread,” he said.
“It’s a false hope to say, yes, it will disappear like the flu … we can’t make that assumption. And there is no evidence.”

Purchase the China AI Report 2020 brought to you by SCMP Research and enjoy a 20% discount (original price US$400). This 60-page all new intelligence report gives you first-hand


This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Hot weather could slow spread of virus
I truly hope this burns off. We shall see.

[GeneChing]

I cherry-pick articles for this thread and try to limit my news sharing here as I'm sure you all are getting a lot through your normal news channels and you probably don't come here to get inundated by more of the same. However, the impact upon Chinese martial arts, our magazine (http://www.martialartsmart.com/19341.html) and Tiger Claw (https://www.tigerclaw.com/home.php) has been significant. As purveyors of Asian culture, particularly Chinese, we're on the front lines. And consequently, so are all of you. It is my mission to keep you, our loyal readership, informed.


The U.S. Isn’t Ready for What’s About to Happen (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/us-isnt-ready-whats-about-happen/607636/)
Even with a robust government response to the novel coronavirus, many people will be in peril. And the United States is anything but prepared.
MARCH 8, 2020
Juliette Kayyem
Former Department of Homeland Security official and author of Security Mom

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/_XWpO1BltXubSJx948heKjya6Ro=/0x154:3600x2179/720x405/media/img/mt/2020/03/RTS34XHD/original.jpg
JASON REDMOND / REUTERS

For the professionals who try to manage homeland-security threats, reassuring the public after a natural disaster or terrorist attack—or amid a coronavirus outbreak like the one the world now faces—is just part of the job. I am a former federal and state homeland-security official. I study safety and resiliency issues in an academic setting, advise companies on their emergency-response plans, and trade ideas with people in public health, law enforcement, and many other disciplines. Since the beginning of the disease now known as COVID-19, I’ve also been receiving more and more text messages from nervous relatives and friends. The rash decisions that panic breeds have never made any emergency better. So like many others in my field, I’ve been urging people, in as calm a tone as I can muster, to listen to experts and advising them about concrete steps they can take to keep their families, communities, and businesses safe. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Avoid large gatherings. Don’t panic, and prepare as best you can.

Disruptions are almost certain to multiply in the weeks to come. Airlines are scaling back flights. Conferences, including Austin’s signature event, South by Southwest, are being canceled. The drop in imports is hurting global supply chains. Corporations are prohibiting their employees from traveling and attending mass gatherings. Stanford University just canceled its in-person classes for the rest of the winter quarter, and other institutions are likely to take similar steps. Government agencies and private companies alike will activate continuity-of-operations protocols, as they are called in my field. Get used to it.

Aggressive steps are essential to protecting the public from a deadly virus. Last week, the World Health Organization assessed the fatality rate at a shocking 3.4 percent, much higher than previously believed. Early on, many American medical experts withheld judgment about the limited data coming out of China, but information from around the world has now confirmed how severe COVID-19 is and how rapidly it is spreading. As Dr. Margaret Bordeaux, my colleague at the Security and Global Health Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told me, “None of us want to be Chicken Little, but there is too much consistent data to not begin to rattle the cage pretty loudly.”

Even if the United States were far more ready for COVID-19, the consequences could still be grievous. In my field, adequate preparation means having the plans, money, equipment, and expertise in place to avert all but a tiny percentage of the harms that might otherwise occur. Yet because of the nature of pandemics, even a level of preparation that looks robust to homeland-security experts could still fail to prevent thousands of deaths.

I live in Massachusetts. During the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, three people died at the finish line, as two homemade bombs ripped through the crowd of spectators. It was a tragedy for their families and the people of Boston. Nearly 300 other people were injured. Fortunately, the city has a large number of hospitals with excellent trauma centers and was therefore unusually well prepared for such an emergency. Some people were treated on the scene; 127 others—many of whom lost limbs—were transported to local hospitals. Not a single patient who survived the initial blast died. Was this good news? Unequivocally yes. The efforts of so many first responders and health professionals, and the public, saved those who might have otherwise died. But success is relative. That even careful preparations could still leave some people dead and others badly harmed is both a fact of life and appalling to accept.

A threat as dire as the new coronavirus exposes the weaknesses in our society and our politics. If Americans could seek testing and care without worrying about co-pays or surprise bills, and if everyone who showed symptoms had paid sick leave, the United States could more easily slow the spread of COVID-19. But a crisis finds a nation as it is, not as its citizens wish it to be.

The coronavirus—and the measures enacted to stop it—could quickly change the rhythms of Americans’ daily lives. The United States is seeing its first deaths, first emergency declarations, first school closings, first mandatory work-at-home policies. If the number of COVID-19 cases spikes quickly, hospitals could soon be deluged with patients seeking care. This is a predictable consequence of any epidemic, but few Americans’ personal experience gives them any reason to understand how disruptive these changes could be if the epidemic continues to worsen.

Ironically, the officials now urging citizens to keep calm understand far more acutely than the general public how much else can go wrong. A municipal police chief in the Boston area recently urged me to imagine that a school district closed for even three weeks. Take just one child, raised by a single parent who is a police officer. The child is home, so the parent must stay home. Other officers in the same patrol will be affected even if they don’t have kids in school. Shifts will change, nonessential functions will be put off, and the department will have less flexibility to respond to problems unrelated to the epidemic—even as, with more teens unsupervised, rates of car accidents and certain crimes could well increase.

Emergency-response officials are hesitant to play out these dangers in public. This police chief asked me not to identify him because, like so many others in positions of responsibility, he worries that misgivings like his will become self-fulfilling prophecies—that citizens will panic if their local authorities give voice to their own doubts.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and his administration have vacillated between ignoring the threat and making wildly unrealistic promises about it. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised 1.5 million coronavirus tests, but The Atlantic reported Friday that, according to all available evidence, fewer than 2,000 had been conducted in the United States. Trump himself is simply lying about basic facts about the COVID-19 response; despite the testing kit shortfall, he has publicly stated that everyone who wants to get tested can get tested.

China’s aggressive containment of the new virus in the early weeks of this year gave other nations time to ready themselves for what was inevitably going to come: a shortage of test kits and personal protective equipment for a virus that spreads as quickly and causes as many deaths and hospitalizations as COVID-19 does.

The United States wasted that opportunity. Trump’s initial impulse to downplay the risk, at least until the stock market took note, wasn’t just fanciful; it was dangerous. He has consistently minimized the number of sick, blamed Barack Obama’s administration for a shortage of test kits, and publicly mused about the potential of a vaccine being found quickly. The American response to the new disease should be based on something more than hunches and magical thinking.

The whole time, people like me have been dutifully advising friends, family, and everyone else to take prudent precautions and avoid panicking. That’s still good advice, because any measures that slow the spread of the disease and lower the death rate could save thousands of lives. But Americans should also understand that even the best preparation humanly possibly wouldn’t be perfect—and that what the United States has done so far falls far short of that. Especially at this point, even a more vigorous response will not preclude a lot of people from getting sick. Preventing all infections is no longer a possibility, and the measure of success is how much public-health authorities can reduce the number of people who die or fall seriously ill.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.


JULIETTE KAYYEM, a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Obama, is the faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home.

[GeneChing]

https://japantoday-asset.scdn3.secure.raxcdn.com/img/store/a1/e7/8540e9ab5c476de21a3480b37797c641182b/sumo3/_w850.jpg
Sumo wrestlers perform on the dohyo with no spectators present in Osaka on Sunday. Photo: KYODO

Sumo tournament begins without spectators for 1st time (https://japantoday.com/category/sports/Sumo-tournament-begins-without-spectators-for-first-time-it-its-history?)
Mar. 8 06:42 pm JST 20 Comments
By JIM ARMSTRONG
TOKYO

Japan's ancient sport of sumo is grappling with the harsh reality of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Spring Grand Sumo Tournament kicked off on Sunday in Osaka at Edion Arena with no spectators as part of Japan's extraordinary efforts to halt the spread of the virus. It was the first time in the sport's history for a tournament to be held with no spectators.

Wrestlers arrived wearing face masks and were required to use hand-sanitizing spray before entering the arena. They were also required to take their temperatures before entering the raised ring. If a wrestler has a temperature above 37.5 degrees for two or more days, he will be forced to sit out the tournament.

Sumo officials have said if a wrestler is diagnosed with the new coronavirus, the 15-day tournament will be immediately halted.

Usually contested before a packed house, Sunday's opening day was eerily quiet as wrestlers sat next to judges at ringside to watch the action against a backdrop of empty stands.

“It will be a new experience for all of us," said sekiwake wrestler Asanoyama. “I want to get used to the atmosphere as soon as possible and get focused on the competition."

Wrestlers will maintain the time-honored tradition of offering a ladle of “chikara mizu" or power water to another wrestler but will only go through the motions and not put their mouth to the ladle.

Normally, wrestlers often use public transportation to go the arena but are being chauffeured in taxis or hired cars to avoid contact with the general public.

The long colorful banners that display the wrestlers names were not on display on Sunday nor were the tradition taiko drums that greet fans as they arrive at the stadium.

Sumo is just one of the main sports in Japan that is taking measures to halt the spread of the virus. Japanese preseason baseball games are being played at empty stadiums, professional J.League soccer games have been cancelled through the first half of March while the season-opening women's JPGA golf tournament in Okinawa was called off.

With Japan set to host the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in just over four months, the government is taking a series of urgent measures to combat the outbreak including cancelling school.

Ït's a real shame," said sumo fan Yuji Hoshino, who caught a few minutes of opening day action on TV at a Tokyo electronics store. “But the safety of the wrestlers is the most important thing. I hope they all stay healthy.”

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Sumo (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56343-Sumo)

[GeneChing]

2020.03.07 (SIGNED) FINAL Order Prohibiting Gatherings at City-Owned Locations (Order C19-02) (https://www.scribd.com/document/450672862/2020-03-07-SIGNED-FINAL-Order-Prohibiting-Gatherings-at-City-Owned-Locations-Order-C19-02)
Uploaded byJoe Eskenazi
Description:City bans events for two weeks coronavirusFull description

1
City and County of Department of Public HealthSan Francisco Order of the Health Officer
ORDER OF THE HEALTH OFFICER No. C19-02
DATE ORDER ISSUED: March 7, 2020
Please read this Order carefully. Violation of or failure to comply with this Orderconstitutes a misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both. (California Healthand Safety Code §§ 120295,
et seq.
)UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF CALIFORNIA HEALTH AND SAFETY CODESECTIONS 101040, 101085, AND 120175, THE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE CITY ANDCOUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO (“HEALTH OFFICER”) ORDERS:1.Effective as of the date of this Order, and for the limited two-week duration asspecified in Section 7 below, no City-Owned Facility (as defined in Section 4 below)shall permit any Non-Essential Group Event (as defined in Section 5 below) fromoccurring onsite. Such City-Owned Facilities may otherwise remain open forbusiness during the duration of this Order.2.This Order is issued on the basis of scientific evidence and best practices ascurrently known and available to protect vulnerable members of the public fromavoidable risk of serious illness or death resulting from exposure to CoronavirusDisease 2019 (COVID-19). The age, condition, and health of a significant portion of the population of the City and County of San Francisco (the “City”) places them atrisk for serious health complications, including death, from COVID-19. Althoughsome individuals who contract COVID-19 do not have severe symptoms, personswith mild symptoms and asymptomatic persons with COVID-19 may place othervulnerable members of the public at risk, especially when attending Non-EssentialGroup Events. This Order is issued in accordance with, and incorporates byreference, the March 4, 2020 Proclamation of a State of Emergency issued byGovernor Gavin Newsom, the February 25, 2020 Proclamation by the MayorDeclaring the Existence of a Local Emergency issued by Mayor London Breed, andthe March 6, 2020 Declaration of Local Health Emergency Regarding NovelCoronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) issued by the Health Officer.3.This Order focuses on City-Owned Facilities to support the City’s efforts toimplement the social distancing recommendations of the Department of PublicHealth (a copy of which is attached to this Order), to reduce the occasions whengroups of people come together for Non-Essential Group Events, and to serve as amodel for other owners and operators of facilities where similar events may be heldin the City and other affected jurisdictions. This is a preliminary step by the HealthOfficer to require compliance at certain City-Owned Facilities, following the HealthOfficer’s issuance of the City-wide advisory on March 6, 2020, which includes arecommendation to cancel or postpone large gatherings and non-essential events.The Health Officer will continue to assess the quickly-evolving situation and mayfrom time to time expand or revise this Order, or issue additional Orders, coveringother venues and events.


City and County of Department of Public HealthSan Francisco Order of the Health Officer
ORDER OF THE HEALTH OFFICER No. C19-02
2

4.

For purposes of this Order, the term “City-Owned Facility” means only thefollowing buildings that are owned by the City:a.

City Hall (1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, San Francisco 94102);b.

Moscone Center (747 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94103) and allassociated buildings;c.

Bill Graham Civic Auditorium (99 Grove Street, San Francisco 94102);d.

New Conservatory Theatre (25 Van Ness Avenue, Basement suite, SanFrancisco 94102);e.

War Memorial & Performing Arts Center (Davies Hall, Opera House, andVeterans Building; 201 - 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco 94102);f.

The Palace of Fine Arts Theatre (3601 Lyon St, San Francisco, CA 94123)(only the main theatre at this time);g.

The San Francisco Public Library (100 Larkin St, San Francisco, CA 94102);h.

Pier 27 (The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA); andi.

Pier 35 (The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA).5.

For purposes of this Order, the term “Non-Essential Group Event” means anycongregation of 50 or more people for any social, cultural, entertainment, or otherspecial event or other non-essential purpose where people are not separated byphysical space of at least four feet (which is slightly longer than an average arm’slength). These events include, without limitation, the following: (a) any theatrespace with fixed seating or other setup where chairs are placed adjacent to eachother in rows; (b) any space where event attendees stand in close proximity to eachother, such as a concert or other performance that includes “standing room only”sections; or (c) an admission or concession line/queue. This Order does not prohibitthe usual operation of the identified City-Owned Facilities for the public’s business,including, but not limited to, events for government purposes, such as publicmeetings of the Board of Supervisors, committees of the Board of Supervisors, andof each City board and commission or advisory body or their respective committeesor working groups. But, for such public meetings, the official in charge of operatingsuch City-Owned Facility shall (1) ensure signs are posted advising attendees of theguidance of the Department of Public Health regarding social distancing and (2)ensure that (i) the building has hand washing capabilities, (ii) hand sanitizer andtissues are available during the meeting, and (iii) high-touch surface areas like doorhandles, countertops, tables, and handrails in the meeting area are frequentlycleaned.6.

This Order does not restrict in any way first responder access to any City-OwnedFacility during an emergency. Further, this Order does not restrict state or federalofficers, investigators, or medical or law enforcement personnel from carrying outtheir lawful duties at any City-Owned Facility.

Follow the link to see the full document. :(


Coronavirus Outbreak Prompts Bay Area Event Cancellations, Venue Closures (https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/03/06/coronavirus-outbreak-prompts-bay-area-event-cancellations-venue-closures/)
March 6, 2020 at 11:49 pmFiled Under:Coronavirus, COVID-19, Novel Coronavirus

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — The expanding coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic has prompted local officials and businesses to cancel events, postpone meetings and shutter locations in an attempt to contain the outbreak.

• City Hall

• Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

• War Memorial and Performing Arts Center

• Palace of Fine Arts Theatre

• San Francisco Main Public Library (100 Larkin St.)

• Pier 27 and Pier 35

• San Francisco Symphony has canceled concerts for the next two weeks

• St Patrick’s Day Parade in San Francisco March 14 is canceled

• Sunday Streets season opener on Valencia Street, originally scheduled for March 8, has been canceled

• The Walt Disney Family Museum will be closed March 6-8 for deep cleaning and sanitation

• American Lung Association “Fight for Air” fundraiser March 7 is canceled

• 40th Annual Black Cuisine Festival in the Bayview is canceled

• San Francisco Public Works is canceling the Arbor Week Eco Fair and tree-planting event Saturday, March 7

• Bob Ross LGBT Senior Center in San Francisco has canceled programs and activities through March 9

• The International Ocean Film Festival, scheduled March 12 – 15 at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason is postponed until summer

• New Conservatory Theatre Center on Van Ness Ave has canceled all performances through March 21

SOUTH BAY

• Stanford University has canceled the final two weeks of their winter quarter effective March 9. Classes will be held online

• Cinequest Film Festival cancels Week 2 events (effective March 9), rescheduling for August 16-30

• The Tech Interactive is canceling two events this weekend: the Youth Climate Action Summit that was planned for Saturday and test trials for the Tech Challenge scheduled for Sunday

• Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose will be closed until March 10

[GeneChing]

...most of us should survive this.


More than half of coronavirus patients globally have recovered (https://nypost.com/2020/03/04/more-than-half-of-coronavirus-patients-globally-have-recovered/)
By Natalie O'Neill March 4, 2020 | 2:51pm | Updated

The coronavirus death toll is climbing worldwide — but so is its recovery rate.

More than 50,000 people globally have bounced back from the flu-like illness since it was first reported in December, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Of the more than 94,000 total cases reported as of Wednesday afternoon, more than 51,000 people have recovered, the vast majority of whom are in China, where the virus originated, according to the university.

In total, its tracker showed the deadly virus, also known as COVID-19, has been reported in 73 countries, including the US.

In Iran, where 2,922 cases have emerged, 552 people have recovered. The recovery rate in the US, where there have been 126 cases, was not immediately clear.

People who don’t suffer from underlying conditions and are not elderly are generally expected to recover, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Saturday.

“However, every once in a while you’re going to see a 25-year-old person, who looks otherwise well, that’s going to get seriously ill. But the vast majority of people who get into trouble do have these underlying conditions,” Fauci said.


Coronavirus recovery rates expected to be high, health experts say (https://nypost.com/2020/03/03/coronavirus-recovery-rates-expected-to-be-high-health-experts-say/)
By Kate Sheehy March 3, 2020 | 5:48pm | Updated

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/coronavirus-mask.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=618&h=410&crop=1
A pedestrian wears a face mask in Manhattan.Stephen Yang

So here’s the good news about the coronavirus.

The average healthy person who gets the virus might suffer a dry cough, fatigue and fever and be sidelined for a week or two, experts said Tuesday.

But after that, they should be fine.

“You stay at home, you’re not going out, and if it gets more serious, you check in’’ at a medical facility or go to the ER, Manhattanville College Professor Anna Yeung-Cheung said of patients.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t be cautious,’’ she said. “I’m saying you shouldn’t go too crazy, like, ‘I’m dying.’”

Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, predicted that the recovery percentage rate for the virus would likely reach “the high 90s.”

“One of the problems with this is it’s an evolving scenario, and people jump to the worst-case scenario,” said Siegel, also medical director of SiriusXM’s Doctor Radio.

“It’s too much doomsday stuff.”

He said that at the end of the day, he expects the coronavirus death rate to be under 1 percent, albeit “a little worse” than the flu.

Of the more than 92,000 people who’ve contracted the virus worldwide, mainly in China, nearly 49,000 have already recovered, while about 3,130 have died. Siegel said that as more cases inevitably surface, this will bring the survival figure up and the death percentage down.

Yeung-Cheung said, “Each virus is like people — they have their personality.

“The interesting thing about this virus is it’s not that difficult to kill, like Ebola and norovirus,” using a little Clorox solution or Purell, she said.

The microbiologist added that the virus is unique in that the very young are faring better than they usually do with their compromised immune systems.

“That’s a blessing in a way,” Yeung-Cheung said. “On the other hand, that means they can also [silently] carry it.’’

[GeneChing]

On a positive note...
...most of us should survive this. Perhaps I should recant... :(



Coronavirus outbreak may have unleashed panic buying of Hostess Twinkies and Ding Dongs (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-outbreak-may-have-unleashed-panic-buying-of-hostess-twinkies-and-ding-dongs-210034011.html)
Brian Sozzi
Editor-at-Large
Yahoo Finance March 5, 2020

Alongside those coronavirus prep bags being filled by shoppers with bleach and hand sanitizer may be boxes of long shelf life Twinkies and Ding Dongs.

“We are seeing that,” Hostess Brands CEO Andy Callahan said on Yahoo Finance’s On the Move, when asked if he is seeing a bump in business as people stock up, should they be trapped at home due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Added Callahan, “We are benefiting likely in the short-term due to traffic. That’s the great thing about Hostess, we are there to celebrate things. We are there to comfort things. So we are seeing a slight uptick in traffic. It’s too early to tell, a lot of our point of sale data lags.”

Even without the bump in business, Hostess has been doing just fine.

Fourth quarter sales rose 6.7% from the prior year to $216.7 million on the back of momentum for breakfast items such as Donettes. Adjusted operating profits increased 6.3% year-over-year to $52.4 million.

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/rqVWDhOzA5ZRS5EhL0Fzgw--~A/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAw/https://media-mbst-pub-ue1.s3.amazonaws.com/creatr-images/2020-03/30f88970-5f23-11ea-90fe-81398d63907e
Hostess Twinkie snack cakes and Donettes are on display at a store.. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

Hostess shares are up 8% over the past year, outperforming the Dow’s slight gain and the S&P’s 500 7.5% gain. Since joining Hostess as CEO in 2018, Callahan has looked to streamline the business, ramp up product innovation. He also pulled the trigger on the $320 million acquisition of cookie maker Voortman.

“Hostess has been increasingly improving its base for improved go-forward revenue growth — first, with Metropoulos & Co. and Apollo out of bankruptcy; and now, with Andy Callahan as CEO. We’re simply in late stage two of an operational turnaround, which we like,” wrote Jefferies analyst Rob Dickerson in a note to clients.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and co-anchor of The First Trade at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

I suppose there's some logic behind this. Twinkies don't go bad, amirite?

[GeneChing]

Handshaking Rule Suspended at USA Fencing Events (https://www.usafencing.org/news_article/show/1093278)
03/06/2020, 6:30PM CST BY NICOLE JOMANTAS

In response to concerns regarding the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19), the Referees’ Commission has announced the temporary suspension of the section of Rule T.122 which states that fencers must shake hands with their opponent at the conclusion of a bout. Athletes must still perform the fencer’s salute at the start and conclusion of the bout. This action will be in place effective March 7, 2020 for all USA Fencing sanctioned tournaments and will remain until further notice.



Coronavirus Updates (https://www.usafencing.org/coronavirus)

USA Fencing is continuing to monitor the global situation regarding the coronavirus (COVID-19). The top priority for USA Fencing is the safety and well-being of all members and participants in fencing events held both in the United States and abroad.

At this time, the upcoming national and international events scheduled to be held in the United States during the coming months will remain as scheduled. If there are changes to national or international event calendar, updates will be made at www.usafencing.org/coronavirus.

We will continue to follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and are working in partnership with the Federation Internationale d’Escrime, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and local and state public health authorities in order to create a safe environment for all participants.


Tips for Fencers, Coaches, Staff, etc.

Stay home from practice or competition if you feel sick.
Wash your hands frequently or use hand sanitizer with 60-90% alcohol when restrooms are unavailable.
Avoid direct physical contact with others (keep a six-foot distance when possible).
Salute or elbow bump competitors, coaches and referees rather than shaking hands.
Do not touch your face during a bout or training session.
Do not share water bottles.
Do not put your mouth on water fountains.
Tips for Club Owners and Tournament Organizers

Make sure to have hand sanitizer and tissues in high traffic areas throughout the training or competition space, including near bout committee tables, water dispensers, score tables, etc.
Wash all shared gear and use sanitizng wipes on weapons in between uses. Read tips on how to wash masks.
Keep sanitizing wipes near reels and other frequently touched equipment.
As always, make sure restrooms and locker rooms are properly cleaned on a frequent basis.
Clean and disinfect frequently touched surfaces regularly.

The CDC recommends preventative actions regarding respiratory illnesses, including:

Stay home when you are sick.
Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.
Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.

If soap and water are not readily available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol. Always wash hands with soap and water if hands are visibly dirty.


THREADS
Fencing (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?9851-Fencing)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

I hope this is so...


China sees 'coming victory' over coronavirus as global alarm spreads (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/03/03/coronavirus-global-developments/4936938002/)
Kim Hjelmgaard
Deirdre Shesgreen
USA TODAY

In Iran, a close adviser to adviser Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died after contracting coronavirus. The head of a religious sect in South Korea got down on his knees and bowed deeply out of shame for his organization's role in the disease's spread. Italy has quarantined churches and urged doctors to come out of retirement.

The new and frightening virus that has tightened borders, led to massive disinfection programs and roiled global markets has been detected in at least 70 countries with 90,000 cases and 3,100 deaths. China, where COVID-19 originated, remains the hardest-hit nation, with 80,151 cases and 2,943 deaths, but its ambassador to the United Nations said late Monday that it has turned a corner in battling the disease.

"We are not far from the coming of the victory," said Zhang Jun, ahead of daily figures released Tuesday that showed new cases in China dropped to 125, a six-week low.

But the optimism in China contrasts with a growing sense of alarm in other parts of Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States. South Korea saw its largest daily increase in new cases Tuesday, with 851 new infections, bringing the country's total reported cases to 5,186. President Moon Jae-in called the outbreak "a grave situation."

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the leader of the World Health Organization, said the outbreaks in South Korea, Italy, Iran and Japan were the agency’s greatest concern.

"We are in uncharted territory," Tedros said.

Here is what is happening across the globe on coronavirus:

Pope Francis tested negative for the coronavirus after suffering a slight cold which led him to cancel several public gatherings, newspaper Il Messaggero reported. The pope is 83. At least 52 people have died in Italy from the virus.

Australia’s Central Bank cut interest rates and signaled it was prepared for further monetary easing measures in order to make up for an economic slowdown in China caused by the virus. The U.S. Federal Reserve followed suit. Most global stock market indexes gained Tuesday, although Tokyo's benchmark Nikkei 225 lost 1.2%

Iranian state media reported that 23 lawmakers now have the disease. The death of Mohammad Mirmohammadi – Khamenei's adviser – came as Iran announced the virus had killed at least 77 people among 2,336 confirmed cases. Public health experts worry that Iran’s percentage of deaths to infections, around 3.3%, is higher than other countries. Iran suffers from a chronic shortage of essential medical supplies, partly blamed on years of U.S. sanctions. It also stands accused of concealing information about the spread of the disease. Iran's supreme leader mobilized the army Tuesday to help tackle the outbreak. State media in Iran also reported that the head of country’s emergency medical services is ill with the virus.

North Korea still claims zero infections, more than a month after the WHO declared the virus a Public Health Emergency of International concern and despite the metastasizing presence of it in South Korea. "Unfortunately, the international community has no idea if the coronavirus is spreading inside North Korea,” said East Asia expert Jessica Lee in a recent report for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank in Washington. "The fact that we know nothing about the level of infection or deaths within North Korea is extremely problematic and, left unchanged, could have serious public health implications."

Britain's government forecast that about a fifth of the country's workforce could be off sick if the virus, at its peak, turns into a full-blown pandemic. Like other nations, Britain is drafting emergency plans that would see the government close schools, limit large-scale events and implement a policy of "social distancing" if necessary. Under a worse-case scenario it could also call in the army and give police and medical professionals powers to detain people suspected of having COVID-19. So far, Britain has fewer cases of the disease than some other nearby European countries such France, with only 40 confirmed infections.

Ukraine confirmed its first case of the virus, on the heels of reported cases for the first time in Gibraltar, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Amid mounting pressure on its health system, South Korea has started testing people for coronavirus via drive-through-type stations. Motorists are met by health officials in protective plastic suits who take samples from their throats and nasal passages. About 60% of South Korea's coronavirus cases have been traced to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a secretive religious community. One of the church's leaders, dubbed "Patient 31" by South Korea's Center for Disease Control and Prevention, is thought to have infected at least 31 people alone as she attended church services in Daegu, a city in southeastern South Korea.

The world's top finance ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) nations held a global teleconference Tuesday over potential concerted action by policymakers to stem the damage the virus has caused to the global economy. Countries from Germany to Vietnam have cancelled large annual events from car shows to technology fairs. Commercial airlines have cancelled hundreds of flights. Tourism has ground to a halt. Large corporate employers have advised staff to work from home where possible. The virus risks a worldwide recession. Finance ministers and central bank governors said they stand ready to cooperate as needed.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that his government was requisitioning all current and future stocks of protective face masks. These are needed for health workers and those already sickened by the disease. France on Tuesday reported 204 cases, up 13 from a day prior, and a total of 4 deaths.

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/03/08/USAT/bca0b4be-d00a-4383-b198-43513d11f8a7-AFP_AFP_1PP6NF.jpg?crop=2698,1518,x0,y138&width=660&height=372&format=pjpg&auto=webp

[GeneChing]

Boycott Mulan, anyone? Brie Larson, The Rock face backlash after tweeting support for Disney film starring Crystal Liu Yifei (https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3074270/boycott-mulan-anyone-brie-larson-rock-face-backlash-after)
Hollywood stars’ social media posts looking forward to release of Disney’s Mulan, starring Crystal Liu Yifei, prompt acid response from Hong Kong internet users
That’s because in August, the Chinese-American actress voiced support for Hong Kong police – accused of acts of brutality – amid anti-government protests
SCMP Reporter
Published: 4:11pm, 9 Mar, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/03/09/54ad632a-61d2-11ea-8e9f-2d196083a37c_image_hires_161131.jpg?itok=MWOqwch2&v=1583741516
Workers man a promotional stand for the Disney move Mulan in an almost empty shopping mall in Beijing. The film’s release in China and Hong Kong has been postponed amid the coronavirus outbreak. Some Hong Kong film fans are unlikely to welcome its eventual release. Photo: AFP

Hollywood stars Brie Larson and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson became the latest focus of Hong Kong’s anti-government protesters after showing their enthusiastic support for the upcoming movie Mulan on social media.
Disney’s live-action remake of the popular 1998 animated film has been a lightning rod for many Hong Kong cinema-goers – and the target of a boycott campaign – since August 2019, when the film’s Chinese-American star Crystal Liu Yifei voiced support for the Hong Kong police, frequently accused of using excessive force and perpetrating brutality on citizens during the increasingly violent protests.
So when Larson, best known for her portrayal of the superhero Captain Marvel and her Oscar-winning role in Room , showed her passionate anticipation for Mulan on Friday, many Hong Kong internet users were swift to respond.
Under Larson’s tweet, “I cannot wait to see this movie. Every trailer has made me burst into tears.”, one of the most liked replies reads, “You know what makes Hong Kongers burst into tears every night? #HKPoliceBrutality, a #HumanRightsViolations that #Mulan lead actress #LiuYifei openly supports.”



Brie Larson
✔
@brielarson
· Mar 5, 2020
I cannot wait to see this movie. Every trailer has made me burst into tears. https://twitter.com/thr/status/1235601603027259392 …


The Hollywood Reporter
✔
@THR
Disney's #Mulan is targeting a heroic U.S. debut of $85 million or more, according to early tracking http://thr.cm/eIKycg0


#SOSHK Fight for Hong Kong
@Fight4HongKong
You know what makes Hong Kongers burst into tears every night?#HKPoliceBrutality, a #HumanRightsViolations that #Mulan lead actress #LiuYifei openly supports.#BoycottMulan

Embedded video
705
12:26 AM - Mar 8, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
268 people are talking about this
Another reply reads: “Disney is bursting into tears tooCrying face #LiuYifei has single handedly ruined the box office. Her decision to disrespect #HumanRights and openly supporting #China backed #PoliceBrutality in HK … well … led to big time #BoycottMulan.”
Dwayne Johnson has been attracting similar feedback after he tweeted on Friday, “Been waiting for this one! Pumped to see it! Great job team @asadayaz”. Asad Ayaz is the president of marketing of the Walt Disney Studios.



Dwayne Johnson
✔
@TheRock
· Mar 5, 2020
Been waiting for this one! Pumped to see it! Great job team @asadayaz
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mulan-tracking-heroic-85m-us-bow-1282674 …


https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1235600898572701698/8QgRpo2b?format=jpg&name=600x314
'Mulan' Tracking for Heroic $85M-Plus U.S. Opening
Disney's latest live-action remake of a classic animated movie opens in late March.

hollywoodreporter.com

Lai King
@laiking7394
Mulan actress Liu Yifei supports police brutality in Hong Konghttps://time.com/5653973/mulan-boycott-liu-yifei/ …

https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1236131030081265669/f8kGpA9h?format=jpg&name=600x314
Here's What to Know About the Mulan Boycott
The actor playing Mulan in Disney's live-action reboot was met with a backlash after voicing support for the Hong Kong police

time.com
55
1:50 PM - Mar 5, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
See Lai King's other Tweets
Meanwhile, the Hong Kong branch of Walt Disney Studios has announced that the film’s release in the city, slated for March 26, had been postponed until further notice. “We will announce a new release date soon, depending on the situation surrounding Covid-19. Please stay tuned,” read a statement from the studio, referring to the global coronavirus epidemic.
finance
Unlike those in mainland China, Hong Kong cinemas have remained open throughout the epidemic; in the coming two weeks, at least 10 new films are scheduled to open in the city. Asked for comment on the postponement of Mulan’s release in Hong Kong, Disney’s Hong Kong office declined to add to its earlier statement.

THREADS
Mulan (2020) (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Hong Kong protests (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?23536-Hong-Kong-protests)

[GeneChing]

Italy’s massive coronavirus quarantine provokes panic and prison riots; stocks fall 11% (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/italys-quarantine-provokes-panic-italian-stocks-plunge.html)
PUBLISHED MON, MAR 9 20205:05 AM EDTUPDATED 3 HOURS AGO
Holly Ellyatt
@HOLLYELLYATT

KEY POINTS
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte signed a decree imposing restrictions to the movement of people in the region of Lombardy and 14 other northern provinces.

The measures affect more that 16 million people, banning them from moving in and out of those areas.

Rumors that the extended quarantine measures Saturday night were to be implemented prompted scenes of panic among residents trying to get out before the restrictions came into force.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106431755-1583741233636gettyimages-1206116203.jpeg?v=1583741262&w=740&h=416
Passengers get off the train arriving from Milan (Milan), at the Garibaldi central station train in Naples, southern Italy. The Italian authorities are taking all necessary measures to close the entire northern Italian region of Lombardy, which is home to around 16 million people, in an attempt to stop the COVID 19 coronavirus.
KONTROLAB

Italy’s extended quarantine restricting the movement of people in its industrial northern heartland have provoked panic among residents and accentuated the country’s north-south divide.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte signed a decree on Sunday imposing restrictions to the movement of people in the northern region of Lombardy — the epicenter of the outbreak in Italy — and 14 other provinces across the north, until April 3. The measures (an extension of a preexisting lockdown of 11 towns in Lombardy and Veneto) now affect more than 16 million people, banning them from moving in and out of those areas.

The publication of a draft decree Saturday afternoon by a newspaper revealing the forthcoming, wider quarantine measures prompted panic among residents trying to get out before the restrictions came into force after midnight.

Media reports said bars and restaurants emptied and thousands of people tried to leave the region in cars and trains, where there were reports of shoving and pushing by passengers.

Violent protests have broken out in 27 Italian prisons against coronavirus restrictions with many inmates asking for an amnesty due to the virus emergency, news agency ANSA reported Monday, citing local sources.

Some 20 inmates had managed to break out of Foggia prison in Puglia during a riot Monday morning, ANSA said citing local sources. Shop keepers in the area were told to close their shops in the vicinity of the prison.

Prison unrest broke out in a prison in Modena Sunday after inmates were informed that visits from relatives had been banned to prevent the spread of infection. In the south, relatives of detainees in a Poggioreale prison in Naples clashed with police against the government ban.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106431862-1583747680435gettyimages-1206110464.jpeg?v=1583747701&w=740&h=416
Relatives of the detainees in Poggioreale prison clash with the police to protest the government’s ban on visiting detainees to prevent infection with Coronavirus (COVID-19) in prisons.
KONTROLAB

Italian stocks on the blue-chip FTSE MIB initially failed to open Monday along with other European markets. When the index did open, stocks were trading down around 2,290 points, or around 11% lower.

Italy now has 7,375 confirmed cases of the virus and 366 deaths. The outbreak has been concentrated in Italy’s wealthiest northern regions of Lombardy (where there are 3,372 confirmed cases), Emilia-Romagna (with 1,097 cases) and Veneto and has highlighted Italy’s north-south economic and cultural divide.

‘Don’t come down here’

The presidents of the southern regions of Campania, Puglia and Calabria — which have far few cases of the virus — have pleaded with their own inhabitants studying or working in the north not to bring the virus back down south, telling people “don’t come down here.”

Those regions, as well as Basilicata and Molise, have signed decrees ordering anyone who does arrive from the affected northern regions into a self-imposed quarantine for two weeks. Puglia’s president said those who ignored the order were committing a crime and could be prosecuted.

“I speak to you as if you were my children, my brothers, my nephews and nieces: Stop and go back,” Michele Emiliano, Puglia’s president, said on Facebook Saturday.

“Get off at the first train station, do not catch planes for Bari and Brindisi, turn back in your cars, get off your buses at the next stop. Do not bring the epidemic that has hit Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna to your Puglia,” he said, appealing to the region’s citizens stuck in the affected areas.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106431888-1583748294020gettyimages-1206117182.jpeg?v=1583748352&w=740&h=416
Medical officers check the temperature of a traveler of a bus coming from several Italian cities in Salerno, Italy on March 8, 2020.
Anadolu Agency

La Repubblica newspaper quoted Jole Santelli, the governor of Calabria, as telling people that “returning from the north in an uncontrolled way puts our country in danger. ... Don’t do it, stop!”

“The government must block an exodus to Calabria, which risks triggering a disastrous bomb,” said Jole Santelli, the president of Calabria.

Economists predict that Italy’s economy, weak before the outbreak, will go into recession and the government has already announced that it will spend billions of euros to try to mitigate the economic impact of the virus on businesses and to help the north’s beleaguered health-care system.

Will U.S. Little Italy neighborhoods be affected like U.S. Chinatowns have been?

[GeneChing]

Chinese nurse teaches coronavirus patients Qigong amid treatment (http://www.china.org.cn/china/Off_the_Wire/2020-03/07/content_75785840.htm)
Xinhua, March 7, 2020

HOHHOT, March 7 (Xinhua) -- Some of Chinese medical staff have been teaching COVID-19 patients Qigong, a traditional Chinese system of deep breathing excercise, to help them stay active during treatment.

A newly posted video on Weibo, WeChat and other social media platforms captured a hazmat-suited nurse teaching his patients Baduanjin, a traditional aerobics form, in a hospital ward in Wuhan, Hubei Province.

The nurse in the video is Liu Dongming, one of the more than 800 medical workers from north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to help the epidemic control efforts in Hubei.

Liu worked in Wuhan Youfu Hospital where most patients were with mild symptoms.

"Some patients were under great psychological pressure and often stayed in bed," he told Xinhua in a phone call interview on Saturday. "My favorite sport Baduanjin might do some good to them, as the smoothing movements could comfort their body and mood," he added.

Besides medical care, Liu taught his patients Baduanjin and urged them to practice. Sometimes his activities were limited by the hazmat suit, and he demonstrated it over and over again.

"More and more patients started to learn and many of them felt refreshed after exercise," he said.

As a nurse of Baotou Traditional Medicine Hospital, Liu fell in love with Baduanjin several years ago during a preparation for a regional Qigong competition, in which he won the third place.

His wife and 8-year-old son also became Qigong lovers encouraged by him.

"I tried to teach more patients as well as my colleagues and would like them to benefit from this kind of Qigong," he said. Enditem

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Baduanjin (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56712-Baduanjin-(8-section-brocade))

[GeneChing]

But he's protected by the Psalm 21 protection policy (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1318094#post1318094), amirite?


Priest with coronavirus handed out communion and shook hands with over 500 parishioners (https://deadstate.org/priest-with-coronavirus-handed-out-communion-and-shook-hands-with-over-500-parishioners/?fbclid=IwAR0p1Z0sqIf8GQCXTDBgyiH1wedOIErrW_IGB7s--HK_lAZLmW9f-aw2fxk)
By Sky Palma Posted on March 9, 2020

https://deadstate.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/christ-church-.jpeg
A priest in the Washington D.C. area has tested positive for the coronavirus and officials are now advising anyone who attended his services to self-quarantine.

CBS affiliate WUSA is reporting that Rev. Timothy Cole attended three services last Sunday at Christ Church Georgetown, which were attended by 550 people. During those services, Cole shook hands with many of those people and handed out communion to them.



Sam Sweeney
✔
@SweeneyABC
BREAKING: A D.C. priest has Coronavirus. He offered communion and shook hands with more than 500 worshippers last week and on February 24th. All worshippers who visited the Christ Church in Georgetown must self-quarantine. Church is cancelled for the first time since the 1800's

28.3K
7:13 AM - Mar 9, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
16.4K people are talking about this
In a message posted to Twitter this Monday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser recommended that anyone who visited the church between February 24 through March 3 should self-quarantine for 14 days.

“Visitors to Christ Church, Georgetown Episcopal on Feb 24th, and between Feb 28th and Mar 3rd could’ve been exposed to COVID-19, and DC Health recommends that anyone who visited on those dates isolate themselves at home for 14 days from the last time they visited the church,” he tweeted.

In the meantime, Christ Church has suspended all services and all other church-related activities until further notice.

Featured image via Christ Church Georgetown (Facebook)

[PalmStriker]

:) ON The Way In The U.S.A. and Beyond. Hopefully this vaccine will be fast-tracked before next Flu Season : https://www.foxnews.com/media/john-price-coronavirus-vaccine-greffex

[GeneChing]

https://www.emeraldcitycomiccon.com/RNA/RNA_EmeraldCityComiccon/2020/_img/_framework/eccc-logo-header.png?v=637067601852583332

A Statement From Reedpop –
Organizers Of Emerald City Comic Con (https://www.emeraldcitycomiccon.com/About/A-Statement-From-Reedpop/)
March 6, 2020, [1:30]pm eastern-

Each year the Emerald City Comic Con team works their hardest to do right by the thousands of fans that come together in Seattle. We want to create a space for you to gather, be yourselves and make memories with those who matter to you most. We have been closely monitoring the situation around the COVID-19 virus in Seattle, and, after many hours of conversation internally and consultation with local government officials and the tourism bureau, we have decided to move next week’s Emerald City Comic Con to Summer 2020 with date and detail announcement forthcoming. We did everything that we could to run the event as planned, but ultimately, we are following the guidance of the local public health officials indicating that conventions should now be postponed.

Our hearts go out to the entire Seattle community, everyone impacted by the COVID-19 virus, and all of you, the nearly 100,000 amazing human beings who look forward to this event each year. Our team was incredibly excited to see you at Emerald City Comic Con next week, however, fans, artists, exhibitors and the rest of the community are what make Reedpop events so special and it is our duty to make sure that your safety comes first.

We know that this decision is going to greatly impact many of our individual creators, small businesses and service workers. To those whose careers depend on ECCC - we will do everything that we can over the coming days and weeks to highlight your work and we ask that our entire community support you as we realize your personal livelihoods may be impacted.

To all of our fans – you will receive a refund on your tickets, no further action is needed on your part. Due to the volume, we expect you will receive your refund in 30 days. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Reedpop remains determined and committed to running Emerald City Comic Con in 2020 and we are working closely with Visit Seattle and the Washington State Convention Center to secure alternate dates this summer. As we explore options for new dates, please know that our priority is to bring you an equally amazing event.

We appreciate all the messages that we have received over the course of the past week. The feedback was invaluable in helping us determine next steps.

Stay tuned to our website and social channels for additional information about when we will next see you in Seattle.

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Comic Cons (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70242-Comic-Cons)



:) ON The Way In The U.S.A. and Beyond. Hopefully this vaccine will be fast-tracked before next Flu Season I'll believe in a vaccine when it's available. Otherwise, these claims are no different than the TCM claims (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1318078#post1318078). But thanks for keeping tabs on this one. There's so much news that it's hard to parse.

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIccp00GNoA&feature=emb_logo

THREADS
2020 Tokyo Olympics (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?64475-2020-Tokyo-Olympics)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Define 'proves' here.

TCM formula proves to be effective virus curb at community level (https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/05/WS5e60e4a7a31012821727cadc.html?fbclid=IwAR2l54yyD iUaZZIneyXzNAshkl8vc35-BaeMqKbSY2fW637bPSyFT2UX9_M)
By Zhang Yangfei | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2020-03-05 19:38

https://img2.chinadaily.com.cn/images/202003/05/5e60e4a7a31012820658ebae.jpeg
A pharmacist of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) arranges doses of TCM decoctions to help combat the novel coronavirus epidemic at Xiaogan Chinese Medical Hospital in Xiaogan city, central China's Hubei province, Feb 25, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]

Wuhan's Wuchang district in Central China's Hubei province has distributed a traditional Chinese medicine formula to local residents, and this measure has been proved effective in curbing the novel coronavirus epidemic at the community level.

A residential community is the first line of defense in curbing the spread of the epidemic, said Tong Xiaolin, a traditional Chinese physician and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, after he arrived in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, on Jan 28.

After consulting patients at local fever clinics, he developed a TCM recipe that was then distributed to residents for prevention and to patients while they were waiting to be diagnosed or admitted to hospitals at that time.

The measure was later dubbed the "Wuchang Model", which is to use TCM to prevent and control the epidemic at a community level in the face of major public health emergencies, especially when medical resources are in short supply and no vaccine or specific medicine is available, said Xiang Yue, deputy head of Wuchang district.

Such a model can help earn more time for patients to be treated and reduce mortality and severe illness, she added.

Xiang said at the early stage of the outbreak, Wuchang was short on hospital beds, doctors and medical supplies, and no modern medicine showed efficacy in inhibiting the disease.

"At that time, we thought we couldn't conjure up more beds, medical staff or materials, but at least we could help people start to take medicine first," she said.

Two community health centers then prescribed some TCM recipes and sent them to medical staff and local people, and as a result, no one was infected after taking the medicine. "We felt TCM could be an effective way," she added.

After arrival, TCM expert Tong checked patients and talked with local experts, then he formulated a general recipe in the hope of curbing the disease.

Tong said ideally a TCM recipe is personalized according to each patient's condition, but with a large number of patients waiting to see a doctor, it was impossible for doctors to consult each patient carefully. "At this special moment, the priority is to let patients use the medicine first," he said.

He said the initial symptoms of novel coronavirus infection were very similar, and the involvement of TCM at an early stage could help prevent the symptoms from becoming more severe.

Tong also contacted a pharmaceutical company in Jiangsu province to produce the recipe in granules and the Chinese Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences also developed a mobile phone software where patients could receive suggestions from online doctors by scanning a QR code, uploading pictures of their tongues and leaving comments of their symptoms.

This method greatly reduced the work pressure of frontline community doctors and their risk of being infected, Tong said.

Xiang said the decision to use TCM was more like a desperate move at first because there was no other way, but "now it proves to be a very correct choice".

"People didn't trust it at first. They still wanted to geta hospital bed. But later they saw there were hundreds of people cured by taking TCM, so they began to believe in it," Xiang added.

Tong said this model has fully demonstrated TCM's role in preventing the disease and also provided a new solution to dealing with major public health events. So what is the TCM medicine exactly?

[GeneChing]

It's ramped up from 'calls for' to 'orders'

More to come soon...


County of Santa Clara Issues Order to Cancel Mass Gatherings Due to Increasing Rates of COVID-19 (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/news/Pages/order-health-officer-03092020.aspx?fbclid=IwAR3-61RCRvdDiZeDPahE8btvrlDe_GwfWVZ50C4iERXeB1jO3gvCOf qQl_M)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 9, 2020

Contact: County of Santa Clara Emergency Operations Center/Public Health Department 408-808-7863 pio@eoc.sccgov.org

COUNTY OF SANTA CLARA ISSUES ORDER TO CANCEL MASS GATHERINGS DUE TO INCREASING RATES OF COVID-19
SANTA CLARA COUNTY, CA — In light of significantly increasing rates of COVID-19 in Santa Clara County, the County’s Public Health Department is taking further steps to protect the health of our community.

Today, the Public Health Department is announcing a mandatory order issued by the Public Health Officer requiring the cancellation of mass gatherings in the County. This order will take effect at 12:00 a.m. on March 11, 2020 and will remain in place for three weeks as more wi​despread testing becomes available and we are able to learn more about the spread of COVID-19. We are also announcing new, stronger guidance for the general public and for many specific groups designed to reduce the spread of the virus in our community.

“This is a critical moment in the growing outbreak of COVID-19 in Santa Clara County. The strong measures we are taking today are designed to slow the spread of disease,” said Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County Health Officer. “Today’s order and new recommendations will reduce the number of people who develop severe illness and will help prevent our healthcare system from becoming overwhelmed. This is critically important for anyone with healthcare needs, not just those most vulnerable to serious illness from COVID-19.”

It is important that all individuals, including those who are not at higher risk for severe illness, follow this guidance. Even individuals who are not a higher risk can inadvertently transmit the virus to vulnerable people.

Earlier Monday, the Public Health Department announced the first death from COVID19 in the county. The person who passed away was an adult woman in her 60s, had been hospitalized for several weeks, and was the third case of COVID-19 reported by the County Public Health Department on February 28, 2020. She was the first person in the County confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 without any known history of international travel or contact with a traveler or infected person, suggesting she contracted COVID-19 in our community.

Six more cases of COVID-19 were confirmed on Monday in the County of Santa Clara, bringing the countywide total to 43.

For more information visit: www.sccphd.org/coronavirus

www.cdc.gov​

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
TCEC (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71553-2020-Tiger-Claw-Elite-Championships-amp-KUNG-FU-TAI-CHI-DAY-May-16-17-San-Jose-CA) i

[GeneChing]

Coronavirus-infected centenarian discharged from hospital after recovery (http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/07/c_138853115.htm)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-07 18:33:10|Editor: huaxia

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/07/138853115_15836239012631n.jpg

A medical worker from the military shows the nucleic acid test negative report of a 100-year-old man at the branch of Hubei's Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital at the Optics Valley in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province, March 7, 2020. A 100-year-old man has recovered and been discharged from hospital Saturday after 13 days of treatment for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), becoming the oldest recovered patient to date. (Photo by Zhao Jiaqing/Xinhua)

WUHAN, March 7 (Xinhua) -- A 100-year-old man has recovered and been discharged from hospital Saturday after 13 days of treatment for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), becoming the oldest recovered patient to date.

He was among the group of more than 80 COVID-19 patients who were discharged from the branch of Hubei's Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital at the Optics Valley in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province and the epicenter of the outbreak.

Born in February 1920, the elderly man just marked his 100th birthday.

He was admitted to the hospital on Feb. 24 due to a coronavirus infection, with underlying health problems such as Alzheimer's disease, hypertension and heart failure.

Due to his complicated conditions, medical professionals from the military held multiple consultations, and a variety of methods including antiviral treatment through traditional Chinese medicine and convalescent plasma therapy were adopted in the treatment.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/07/138853115_15836239013061n.jpg
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/07/138853115_15836239013501n.jpg
A 100-year-old man is discharged from the branch of Hubei's Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital at the Optics Valley in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province, March 7, 2020. A 100-year-old man has recovered and been discharged from hospital Saturday after 13 days of treatment for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), becoming the oldest recovered patient to date. (Photo by Zhao Jiaqing/Xinhua)


THREADS
Give it up to the elderly!!!!! (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57037-Give-it-up-to-the-elderly!!!!!)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Ultra Music Festival in Miami was cancelled earlier this week (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/downtown-miami/article240878956.html). Next up to fall, Coachella. This was inevitable given the course of COVID-19 :(

TOURING
Coachella & Stagecoach in Talks to Move to October Due to Coronavirus (https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/touring/9330145/coachella-stagecoach-move-festivals-october)
3/9/2020 by Dave Brooks

https://static.billboard.com/files/media/2018-Coachella-Valley-Music-And-Arts-Festival-billboard-1548-1024x677.jpg?1
Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Coachella
Festivalgoers attend the 2018 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Field on April 13, 2018 in Indio, Calif.

It’s not a done deal but organizers should know in about 48 hours if the festivals can be saved, say high level sources.

Officials with promoter Goldenvoice are working on a plan to try and move the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, California, to the weekends of Oct. 9 and Oct. 16 in an attempt to save the event from cancellation amid concerns about the coronavirus outbreak, according to high level sources. The AEG-owned concert promoter is also working to move the Stagecoach country music festival to October as well, possibly to Oct. 23.

Fearing that Riverside County officials will have to pull the 20-year-old event's permit to bring 250,000 fans over two weekends to Indio, California, conversations with city officials and talent agents began late Sunday as the hope for staging the festival in April began to diminish. Earlier Monday (March 9) three more cases of coronavirus were confirmed in Riverside County where the festival takes place.

Postponing the massive festival series until October is a huge endeavor involving hundreds of artists and their representatives, as well as hundreds of contractors and vendors and tens of thousands of employees. Artists are frequenting touring during the fall months and while organizers aren't likely to get all the performers to agree to move, sources say that if enough of the big headline acts -- this year's Coachella headliners include Frank Ocean, Rage Against the Machine and Travis Scott -- then the festival can be moved. Stagecoach is being headlined by Thomas Rhett, Carrie Underwood and Eric Church.

Organizers hope to know within the next 48 hours if the move is possible. If not, the 2020 versions of Coachella and Stagecoach will likely be canceled.

Coachella is one of the largest music festivals in the world, with north of a half-million people descending on the desert each year. It was originally set to take place over two weekends next month, starting April 10 and wrapping up April 19.

The news follows an announcement Friday that Austin’s annual South by Southwest will be canceled this year. The Winter Music Conference and Ultra Music Festival, both in Miami, have also been canceled. Globally, high-profile events including Tomorrowland Winter in France and Ultra Abu Dhabi have been shut down as well.

[GeneChing]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESwnzNKU4AAr6Tn?format=jpg&name=medium

THREADS
2020 Tiger Claw Elite Championships & KUNG FU TAI CHI DAY, May 16-17, San Jose CA (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71553-2020-Tiger-Claw-Elite-Championships-amp-KUNG-FU-TAI-CHI-DAY-May-16-17-San-Jose-CA)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
WildAid Tiger Claw Champion (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57416-WildAid-Tiger-Claw-Champion)
The Ku Yu-Cheung Bak Sil Lum Championship (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70634-The-Ku-Yu-Cheung-Bak-Sil-Lum-Championship)
Songshan Shaolin Champion (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?60021-Songshan-Shaolin-Champion)
IWSD Grand Champions (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71741-IWSD-Grand-Champions)
Tiger Claw Heavy Guandao Championship (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71742-The-Tiger-Claw-Heavy-Guandao-Championship)

[GeneChing]

It's overwhelming how viral this has gone.


World
Coronavirus Conference Gets Canceled Because of Coronavirus (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-10/coronavirus-conference-gets-canceled-because-of-coronavirus)
By David Welch
March 10, 2020, 2:11 PM PDT

We’re tracking the latest on the coronavirus outbreak and the global response. Sign up here for our daily newsletter on what you need to know.

So much for keeping business rolling during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Council on Foreign Relations has canceled a roundtable called “Doing Business Under Coronavirus” scheduled for Friday in New York due to the spread of the infection itself. CFR has also canceled other in-person conferences that were scheduled from March 11 to April 3, including roundtables in New York and Washington and national events around the U.S.

The CFR’s confabs are joining a long list of canceled or postponed gatherings, including the annual New York auto show. The Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association said Tuesday that the car show will be rescheduled to late August.

Events in metro New York are coming under close scrutiny due to an increase in cases in the city and, in particular, an outbreak in the suburb of New Rochelle. The National Guard will be sent to the town to help close public gathering spaces in an effort to slow the spread of the outbreak, Governor Andrew Cuomo said at a press conference.

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/inHpktzLHLXc/v0/800x-1.png

Across the U.S., the spread of the novel virus has so far scuttled more than 50 major corporate events with an estimated attendance of almost 1 million people, according to data (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-10/coronavirus-travel-how-your-business-trip-could-change) collected by Bloomberg News.

[GeneChing]

In science, this is called a sampling error. If we don't test, we don't test positive.


One chart shows how many coronavirus tests per capita have been completed in 8 countries. The US is woefully behind. (https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-testing-covid-19-tests-per-capita-chart-us-behind-2020-3)
Aylin Woodward and Skye Gould Mar 9, 2020, 4:20 PM

https://i.insider.com/5e60bb6dfee23d4f25340163?width=1200&format=jpeg&auto=webp
Medical staff guiding drivers at a "drive-thru" virus-test facility in Goyang, South Korea, on February 29. Getty Images
As the novel coronavirus spreads globally — more than 100 countries have reported cases — governments are ramping up testing.

South Korea and China have tested hundreds of thousands of cases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US has tested fewer than 2,000.

The US has performed five coronavirus tests per million people, compared with South Korea's 3,692 tests per million people.

More than 113,000 coronavirus infections and nearly 4,000 deaths have been confirmed. About 70% of cases and deaths are in China.


As of Sunday, 1,707 Americans had been tested for the novel coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. South Korea, by contrast, has tested more than 189,000 people. The two countries announced their first coronavirus cases on the same day.

In the US, test-kit shortages have hampered health authorities' ability to get a clear sense of how many Americans are infected. Compared with many other countries affected by the coronavirus, in fact, the US has done the fewest COVID-19 tests per capita.

South Korea's testing total so far, when broken down into number of tests performed per million citizens, seems to be about 700 times as high than the US's.

How many people have been tested per capita in 8 countries
https://i.insider.com/5e66b72584159f21ad7f0617?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp
Skye Gould/Business Insider

Because China has not published national data about its coronavirus testing, its Guangdong province is used here for purposes of comparison.

Not every country reports their testing numbers using the same metric. The UK reports it as "people tested," the US reports number of "patients," and Japan reports it as "persons." South Korea reports their testing total as "cases," Israel, Guangdong, and the Netherlands as number of "tests," and Italy as number of "swabs."

"The infectious-disease community and the public-health community desire to do much more testing than is currently feasible," William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee, told Business Insider on February 26.

"Other countries are testing much more broadly than we are," he added. "We are trotting along while they're racing along."

It's likely that the US has done more tests than the CDC's reported figure suggests, since the agency isn't tallying tests performed at state and private labs in the past week. The US Food and Drug Administration's commissioner, Stephen Hahn, said on Friday that the US had actually conducted 5,861 coronavirus tests, CNN reported. That number did not include tests conducted at private and commercial labs, Hahn added.

https://i.insider.com/5e60670bfee23d350b367ba2?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp
People in the New York City subway on March 3. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

But even that higher number of tests per capita would still put the US behind the other seven countries listed above, with 18 tests per million people.

Testing influences what we know about the coronavirus' death rate

Without adequate testing, it's challenging for US public-health officials to grasp the scope of the outbreak's spread and determine how dangerous it is. More widespread testing could alter the disease's known death rate, a basic calculation that divides the number of reported deaths by the number of confirmed cases.

The US has one of the highest death rates in the world — about 3.6% as of Monday — but that's probably because so few mild cases have been counted.

Because testing capacity has been limited in the US, the CDC initially held stringent standards for who qualified. Until last week, the agency tested only people who had recent exposure to a confirmed patient, had traveled to a country with an outbreak, or required hospitalization.

So the US still probably has not tested or provided diagnoses to some patients with mild cases. Twenty-two Americans have died out of about 600 cases.

https://i.insider.com/5e66a24784159f0761088a46?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp
A healthcare worker preparing to transport a patient at Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, on February 29. David Ryder/Getty Images

South Korea, which has the third-highest number of cases behind Italy and China, has a death rate of just 0.7% — 50 people have died out of 7,478 cases.

Many patients are still hospitalized, however, so their conditions could change with time.

A disease's death rate is also different from its mortality rate — the latter is the number of deaths out of the number of people in an at-risk population. The death rate is not a reflection of the likelihood that any given person will die of infection.

Aria Bendix contributed reporting.

[GeneChing]

Coronavirus: 103-year-old woman becomes oldest person to beat disease (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-latest-103-year-old-woman-recovers-wuhan-hubei-china-a9393991.html)
Centenarian recovers after just six days of treatment at hospital in virus epicentre
Chiara Giordano
32 minutes ago

A 103-year-old woman has become the oldest person to beat coronavirus and return home.

Zhang Guangfen recovered from the disease after receiving treatment for just six days at a hospital in Wuhan – the Chinese city at the centre of the outbreak.

The centenarian’s quick recovery was down to her having no underlying health conditions apart from mild chronic bronchitis, her doctor Dr Zeng Yulan told reporters.

She was diagnosed at Liyuan Hospital, Tongji Medical College, in Wuhan on 1 March, Chutian Metropolis Daily reports.

The newspaper published a video showing the woman being escorted out of the hospital to a waiting ambulance by a group of medical workers as she was discharged on Tuesday.

Older people and those with pre-existing medical conditions are more at risk of developing severe coronavirus symptoms.

The grandmother has become the oldest person to recover from the deadly disease so far – days after a 101-year-old man also beat the virus in Wuhan.

A 100-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease, hypertension and heart failure also recovered from the virus in Wuhan this week after being treated by military doctors.

Wuhan’s 11 million residents have been in lockdown since late January.

The disease has infected more than 80,700 people in China and killed more than 3,000.

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2020/03/11/12/coronavirus-discharge1.jpg?w660
103-year-old Zhang Guangfen has been discharged from hospital in Wuhan, China, after recovering from coronavirus. (Chutian Metropolis Daily/screen grab)

Latest figures from the National Health Commission on the spread of the virus showed 24 new cases across China, and 22 more deaths as of Tuesday.

All of the latest deaths occurred in Wuhan.

However new infections in the wider Hubei province continue to stabilise, with new cases declining for the sixth day. All 13 new cases in Hubei were recorded in Wuhan.

Additional reporting by agencies.


THREADS
Give it up to the elderly!!!!! (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57037-Give-it-up-to-the-elderly!!!!!)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

This isn't quite Tai Chi as medicine (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?50553-Tai-Chi-as-medicine), unless you count COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia) quarantine activities as medicine. However, if I ever get quarantined like this, It'll surely be my Kung Fu practice that keeps me sane.


Fresno couple first heard of coronavirus on Hawaii cruise. Now they await another quarantine (https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article241073411.html)
BY CARMEN GEORGE
MARCH 11, 2020 08:13 AM
BY BETHANY CLOUGH

Paula and Tom Yost of Fresno, both 80, have been doing more of their tai chi martial arts exercises lately as a way to stay active during a coronavirus quarantine that’s kept them confined to their room on the Grand Princess cruise ship.

They and many other passengers haven’t been able to leave their rooms since Saturday – also the first day the Yosts learned of the contagious virus that’s been causing worldwide concern. The California couple didn’t have internet access during a four-day journey from Hawaii across the Pacific Ocean. The Grand Princess docked in Oakland on Monday.

Paula said she’s not worried about catching coronavirus – even though at least 26 people on the Grand Princess tested positive for the virus.

“I think I’m making a lot of memories,” Paula said positively on Tuesday from her room on the Grand Princess, “and will have a lot of things to talk about in the future.”

Paula said while she and her husband hadn’t been tested for the virus, they haven’t experienced virus symptoms and felt OK.

COVID-19 has killed more than 30 people in the U.S. and more than 4,000 people around the world. Thousands more have fallen ill and recovered.

https://www.fresnobee.com/latest-news/wbtvwt/picture241084896/alternates/FREE_1140/coronavirus7.png
Paula Yost, pictured at right, with a plastic baby doll on the Grand Princess cruise ship; and people dressed in hazmat suits in the Port of Oakland, as seen from a balcony of the ship that docked in Oakland on March 9, 2020. PAULA YOST SPECIAL TO THE BEE

The Yosts were still waiting Tuesday night to be unloaded from the Grand Princess – what they think will happen Wednesday. From there, the Yosts expected to bused to a California military base for a 14-day precautionary quarantine.

State officials said the nearly 1,000 Grand Princess passengers who reside in California will be taken to Travis Air Force Base, near Fairfield, or Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, near San Diego.

The Yosts’ quarantine has been a very unexpected ending to a fun Hawaiian vacation for their 62nd wedding anniversary, but they have been making the most of their confinement.

Paula has been keeping herself busy with crafts and movies, including “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” about beloved children’s show host Mr. Rogers.

Tom was standing on the balcony of their room Tuesday, watching the world below with interest as buses zipped in and out of a parking lot where people dressed in hazmat suits moved back and forth.

https://www.fresnobee.com/latest-news/x3m63x/picture241084476/alternates/FREE_1140/coronavirus4.JPG
Ambulances and buses near the Grand Princess, as seen from the balcony of Tom and Paula Yost’s cruise ship room. The ship docked in the Port of Oakland on March 9, 2020. PAULA YOST SPECIAL TO THE BEE

They left California at the end of February for a journey that took them to several Hawaiian islands. The ship bypassed its last planned stop, in Mexico, on the way back because some passengers had coronavirus.

People dressed in hazmat suits have been delivering food to their room, which has its own balcony, bathroom, and small fridge. The Yosts have been keeping in touch with their children and grandchildren by telephone and Facebook.

https://www.fresnobee.com/latest-news/v5whnn/picture241084461/alternates/FREE_1140/coronavirus3.jpg
Paula Yost’s plastic baby doll next to information about how to disembark the Grand Princess cruise ship, which docked in the Port of Oakland on March 9, 2020. PAULA YOST SPECIAL TO THE BEE

Paula posted three photos on her Facebook as the Grand Princess entered the Port of Oakland – two featuring a small plastic baby doll that she likes to put in various travel photos. One shows the doll next to information about how to disembark the ship, with the caption, “Guess who is having a good time. Lots of chocolate on board.”

Despite her upbeat attitude, Paula said is eager to leave the ship and be able to resume her daily 2-mile walks.

She doesn’t know what to expect next, but said she isn’t concerned about a military base quarantine. Her husband is a former Marine.

Paula said she and her husband didn’t have any immediate upcoming plans, but their cat will now have to stay with a cat sitter a little longer than expected.

“I feel very safe. I feel taken care of. If you could see all of this, you’d understand,” Paula said of what’s been happening in and around the Grand Princess. “The ship organized it very good. … If people would just see how hard these people are working. I would like to thank every one of them.”

Any other messages to share with the public? From Paula’s standpoint: Don’t let coronavirus mess with your vacation plans.

“I would say that if they got a trip planned, go ahead and do it,” Paula said. “Don’t let them stop you from enjoying life.”

[GeneChing]

Don't panic.


THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS
Coronavirus: COVID-19 Is Now Officially A Pandemic, WHO Says (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/11/814474930/coronavirus-covid-19-is-now-officially-a-pandemic-who-says?origin=NOTIFY&fbclid=IwAR0jcaJPInnkvlYSKK-EV0ZlPylncOQYrRrOync2dn5od1RJXry3QfZWBT4)
March 11, 202012:30 PM ET
BILL CHAPPELL

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2020/03/11/pandemic-coronavirus-facemask-818c384804b9456e403f58338850bf34f5da5fcb-s1200-c85.jpg
The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 viral disease a pandemic Wednesday. Here, workers in Spain place a mask on a figure that was to be part of the Fallas festival in Valencia. The upcoming festival has been cancelled over the coronavirus outbreak.
Alberto Saiz/AP

Updated at 2 p.m. ET

The COVID-19 viral disease that has swept into at least 114 countries and killed more than 4,000 people is now officially a pandemic, the World Health Organization announced Wednesday.

"This is the first pandemic caused by coronavirus," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared at a briefing in Geneva.

Even as he raised the health emergency to its highest level, Tedros said hope remains that COVID-19 can be curtailed. And he urged countries to take action now to stop the disease.

"WHO has been in full response mode since we were notified of the first cases," Tedros said. "And we have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear."

Eight countries — including the U.S. — are now each reporting more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19, caused by the virus that has infected nearly 120,000 people worldwide.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=840&v=XnhxjYCVHp8&feature=emb_logo
YouTube

"In the past two weeks, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased 13-fold, and the number of affected countries has tripled," Tedros said.

By subscribing, you agree to NPR's terms of use and privacy policy. NPR may share your name and email address with your NPR station. See Details. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

"In the days and weeks ahead, we expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected countries climb even higher."

The WHO is "deeply concerned, both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction" by world leaders in response to the outbreak, Tedros said.

"We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic," he declared.

Still, Tedros said people should not fear the designation and that it should not be taken to mean that the fight against the virus is over.

"Describing the situation as a pandemic does not change WHO's assessment of the threat posed by the virus," Tedros said. "It doesn't change what WHO is doing. And it doesn't change what countries should do."

The WHO had declared the outbreak a global health emergency in January, as cases surged in China, where the novel coronavirus was first detected.

In Italy, more than 630 people have died of COVID-19 and the total number of cases continues to rise sharply. The country now has 10,000 cases, second only to China. There are 9,000 cases in Iran, and more than 7,700 in South Korea.

Those four nations are all imposing drastic measures in an attempt to slow the spread of the COVID-19 illness, which has a higher fatality rate for elderly people and those with underlying health conditions.

Those countries also have more than 90 percent of current cases, Tedros noted, adding that both China and South Korea have had success in reining in their epidemics. Data from China, he said, showed that the number of new cases there peaked in late January and early February.

"We cannot say this loudly enough, or clearly enough, or often enough: All countries can still change the course of this pandemic," Tedros said.

However, the viral disease continues to spread around the globe.

"In the Americas, Honduras, Jamaica and Panama are all confirming coronavirus infections for the first time," NPR's Jason Beaubien reports. "Elsewhere Mongolia and Cyprus are also now reporting cases."

As the outbreak has ballooned, so has speculation that the WHO would declare it a pandemic. But Tedros said WHO experts had previously determined that the scale of the coronavirus's impact didn't warrant that description. And he noted that declaring the outbreak a pandemic would raise the risk of a public panic.


It's now up to other countries to prove they can stop the disease, Tedros reiterated.

"The challenge for many countries who are now dealing with large clusters or community transmission is not whether they can do the same," he said. "It's whether they will."

"People, we're in this together, to do the right things with calm and protect the citizens of the world," Tedros said as he concluded his remarks.

"It's doable."

Coronavirus symptoms and prevention

To prevent the coronavirus from spreading, the CDC recommends washing hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds or using a hand sanitizer if a sink isn't available. The World Health Organization says people should wear face masks only if they're sick or caring for someone who is.

"For most people, COVID-19 infection will cause mild illness; however, it can make some people very ill and, in some people, it can be fatal," the WHO says. "Older people, and those with pre-existing medical conditions (such as cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease or diabetes) are at risk for severe disease."

The most common symptoms of COVID-19, according to a recent WHO report that draws on more than 70,000 cases in China: fever (in 88% of cases); dry cough (68%); fatigue (38%); sputum/phlegm production (33%).

Shortness of breath occurred in nearly 20% of cases, and about 13% had a sore throat or headache, the WHO said.

[GeneChing]

Postponing TCEC 2020 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1318200#post1318200) was the way to go.


Cancel Everything (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-cancel-everything/607675/?fbclid=IwAR2oN1_OHe6C12s0OL5BFjP67S03XYVmaAv6Z3Ri aEi72QljAiG49K-hC5c)
Social distancing is the only way to stop the coronavirus. We must start immediately.
MARCH 10, 2020
Yascha Mounk
Contributing writer at The Atlantic

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/qCCtvwbOs-JP2IQ_cufwF_f0RvM=/0x624:6000x3999/720x405/media/img/mt/2020/03/GettyImages_1210980412/original.jpg
SPENCER PLATT / GETTY

We don’t yet know the full ramifications of the novel coronavirus. But three crucial facts have become clear in the first months of this extraordinary global event. And what they add up to is not an invocation to stay calm, as so many politicians around the globe are incessantly suggesting; it is, on the contrary, the case for changing our behavior in radical ways—right now.

The first fact is that, at least in the initial stages, documented cases of COVID-19 seem to increase in exponential fashion. On the 23rd of January, China’s Hubei province, which contains the city of Wuhan, had 444 confirmed COVID-19 cases. A week later, by the 30th of January, it had 4,903 cases. Another week later, by the 6th of February, it had 22,112.

The same story is now playing out in other countries around the world. Italy had 62 identified cases of COVID-19 on the 22nd of February. It had 888 cases by the 29th of February, and 4,636 by the 6th of March.

Because the United States has been extremely sluggish in testing patients for the coronavirus, the official tally of 604 likely represents a fraction of the real caseload. But even if we take this number at face value, it suggests that we should prepare to have up to 10 times as many cases a week from today, and up to 100 times as many cases two weeks from today.

The second fact is that this disease is deadlier than the flu, to which the honestly ill-informed and the wantonly irresponsible insist on comparing it. Early guesstimates, made before data were widely available, suggested that the fatality rate for the coronavirus might wind up being about 1 percent. If that guess proves true, the coronavirus is 10 times as deadly as the flu.

But there is reason to fear that the fatality rate could be much higher. According to the World Health Organization, the current case fatality rate—a common measure of what portion of confirmed patients die from a particular disease—stands at 3.4 percent. This figure could be an overstatement, because mild cases of the disease are less likely to be diagnosed. Or it could be an understatement, because many patients have already been diagnosed with the virus but have not yet recovered (and may still die).

When the coronavirus first spread to South Korea, many observers pointed to the comparatively low death rates in the country to justify undue optimism. In countries with highly developed medical systems, they claimed, a smaller portion of patients would die. But while more than half of all diagnosed patients in China have now been cured, most South Korean patients are still in the throes of the disease. Of the 7,478 confirmed cases, only 118 have recovered; the low death rate may yet rise.

Meanwhile, the news from Italy, another country with a highly developed medical system, has so far been shockingly bad. In the affluent region of Lombardy, for example, there have been 7,375 confirmed cases of the virus as of Sunday. Of these patients, 622 had recovered, 366 had died, and the majority were still sick. Even under the highly implausible assumption that all of the still-sick make a full recovery, this would suggest a case fatality rate of 5 percent—significantly higher, not lower, than in China.

The third fact is that so far only one measure has been effective against the coronavirus: extreme social distancing.

Before China canceled all public gatherings, asked most citizens to self-quarantine, and sealed off the most heavily affected region, the virus was spreading in exponential fashion. Once the government imposed social distancing, the number of new cases leveled off; now, at least according to official statistics, every day brings more news of existing patients who are healed than of patients who are newly infected.

A few other countries have taken energetic steps to increase social distancing before the epidemic reached devastating proportions. In Singapore, for example, the government quickly canceled public events and installed medical stations to measure the body temperature of passersby while private companies handed out free hand sanitizer. As a result, the number of cases has grown much more slowly than in nearby countries.

These three facts imply a simple conclusion. The coronavirus could spread with frightening rapidity, overburdening our health-care system and claiming lives, until we adopt serious forms of social distancing.

This suggests that anyone in a position of power or authority, instead of downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus, should ask people to stay away from public places, cancel big gatherings, and restrict most forms of nonessential travel.

Given that most forms of social distancing will be useless if sick people cannot get treated—or afford to stay away from work when they are sick—the federal government should also take some additional steps to improve public health. It should take on the costs of medical treatment for the coronavirus, grant paid sick leave to stricken workers, promise not to deport undocumented immigrants who seek medical help, and invest in a rapid expansion of ICU facilities.

The past days suggest that this administration is unlikely to do these things well or quickly (although the administration signaled on Monday that it will seek relief for hourly workers, among other measures). Hence, the responsibility for social distancing now falls on decision makers at every level of society.

Do you head a sports team? Play your games in front of an empty stadium.

Are you organizing a conference? Postpone it until the fall.

Do you run a business? Tell your employees to work from home.

Are you the principal of a school or the president of a university? Move classes online before your students get sick and infect their frail relatives.

Are you running a presidential campaign? Cancel all rallies right now.

All of these decisions have real costs. Shutting down public schools in New York City, for example, would deprive tens of thousands of kids of urgently needed school meals. But the job of institutions and authorities is to mitigate those costs as much as humanly possible, not to use them as an excuse to put the public at risk of a deadly communicable disease.

Finally, the most important responsibility falls on each of us. It’s hard to change our own behavior while the administration and the leaders of other important institutions send the social cue that we should go on as normal. But we must change our behavior anyway. If you feel even a little sick, for the love of your neighbor and everyone’s grandpa, do not go to work.

When the influenza epidemic of 1918 infected a quarter of the U.S. population, killing tens of millions of people, seemingly small choices made the difference between life and death.

As the disease was spreading, Wilmer Krusen, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, allowed a huge parade to take place on September 28; some 200,000 people marched. In the following days and weeks, the bodies piled up in the city’s morgues. By the end of the season, 12,000 residents had died.

In St. Louis, a public-health commissioner named Max Starkloff decided to shut the city down. Ignoring the objections of influential businessmen, he closed the city’s schools, bars, cinemas, and sporting events. Thanks to his bold and unpopular actions, the per capita fatality rate in St. Louis was half that of Philadelphia. (In total, roughly 1,700 people died from influenza in St Louis.)

In the coming days, thousands of people across the country will face the choice between becoming a Wilmer Krusen or a Max Starkloff.

In the moment, it will seem easier to follow Krusen’s example. For a few days, while none of your peers are taking the same steps, moving classes online or canceling campaign events will seem profoundly odd. People are going to get angry. You will be ridiculed as an extremist or an alarmist. But it is still the right thing to do.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

YASCHA MOUNK is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a senior adviser at Protect Democracy. He is the author of The People vs. Democracy.

[GeneChing]

I guess exponential math is hard for some?



When a danger is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/10/coronavirus-what-matters-isnt-what-you-can-see-what-you-cant/?fbclid=IwAR3RkPryjesqr0xksw4OvyU1A71ru6JE56Ds0Hns 9Y-w_4QTeAfogzft058)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NG3YOHDDBII6VCUOLRJTNMZHMA.jpg&w=1440
A used face mask in the underground in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday. (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/AFP/Getty Images)

By Megan McArdle
Columnist
March 10, 2020 at 3:33 p.m. PDT

There’s an old brain teaser that goes like this: You have a pond of a certain size, and upon that pond, a single lilypad. This particular species of lily pad reproduces once a day, so that on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, and so on.

Now the teaser. “If it takes the lily pads 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway?”

The answer is 47 days. Moreover, at day 40, you’ll barely know the lily pads are there.

The latest updates on the coronavirus

That grim math explains why so many people — including me — are worried about the novel coronavirus, which causes a disease known as covid-19. And why so many other people think we are panicking over nothing.

During the current flu season, they point out, more than 250,000 people have been hospitalized in the United States, and 14,000 have died, including more than 100 children. As of this writing, the coronavirus has killed 29 people, and our caseload is in the hundreds. Why are we freaking out about the tiny threat while ignoring the big one?

Quite a number of people have suggested that it’s because the media just wants President Trump to look bad. Trump seems particularly fond of this suggestion.

But go back to those lily pads: When something dangerous is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t. In the early days of the Wuhan epidemic, when no one was taking precautions, the number of cases appears to have doubled every four to five days.

The crisis in northern Italy is what happens when a fast doubling rate meets a “threshold effect,” where the character of an event can massively change once its size hits a certain threshold.

In this case, the threshold is things such as ICU beds. If the epidemic is small enough, doctors can provide respiratory support to the significant fraction of patients who develop complications, and relatively few will die. But once the number of critical patients exceeds the number of ventilators and ICU beds and other critical-care facilities, mortality rates spike.

Daniele Macchini, a doctor in Bergamo, Italy, recently posted a heart-stopping account to Facebook of what he and his colleagues have endured: the hospital emptying out, the wards eerily silent as they waited for the patients they couldn’t quite believe would come … and then, the “tsunami.”

“One after the other the departments that had been emptied fill up at an impressive pace. … The boards with the names of the patients, of different colors depending on the operating unit, are now all red and instead of surgery you see the diagnosis, which is always the ****ed same: bilateral interstitial pneumonia.”

A British health-care worker shared a message from a doctor in Italy, who alleged that covid-19 patients in their hospital who are over 65, or have complicating conditions, aren’t even being considered for the most intensive forms of supportive treatment.

Trump may think he can sugarcoat coronavirus, but media critic Erik Wemple says it is time for the government to speak with one clear voice about public health. (Erik Wemple/The Washington Post)
The experts are telling us that here in the United States, we can avoid hitting that threshold where sizable regions of the country will suddenly step into hell. We still have time to #flattenthecurve, as a popular infographic put it, slowing the spread so that the number of cases never exceeds what our health system can handle. The United States has an unusually high number of ICU beds, which gives us a head start. But we mustn’t squander that advantage through complacency.

So everyone needs to understand a few things.

First, the virus is here, and it is spreading quickly, even though everything looks normal. Right now, the United States has more reported cases than Italy had in late February. What matters isn’t what you can see but what you can’t: the patients who will need ICU care in two to six weeks.

Second, this is not “a bad flu.” It kills more of its hosts, and it will spread ****her unless we take aggressive steps to slow it down, because no one is yet immune to this disease. It will be quite some time before the virus runs out of new patients.

Third, we can fight it. Despite early exposure, Singapore and Hong Kong have kept their caseloads low, not by completely shutting down large swaths of their economies as China did but through aggressive personal hygiene and “social distancing.” South Korea seems to be getting its initial outbreak under control using similar measures. If we do the same, we can not only keep our hospitals from overloading but also buy researchers time to develop vaccines and therapies.

Fourth, and most important: We are all in this together. It is your responsibility to keep America safe by following the CDC guidelines, just as much as it is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s or President Trump’s responsibility to lead us to safety. And until this virus is beaten, we all need to act like it.

[GeneChing]

I had to postpone two research projects I was working on because they focused on PRC-based subjects and contact became difficult. I'm still waiting on responses from those two but I'm starting to hear from others. There is hope.


CHINA CLAIMS PEAK OF CORONAVIRUS EPIDEMIC HAS PASSED AS NEW CASES DECLINE AND MORE THAN 60,000 HAVE RECOVERED (https://www.newsweek.com/china-says-passed-peak-coronavirus-epidemic-covid-19-1491863)
BY DAVID BRENNAN ON 3/12/20 AT 4:44 AM EDT

Chinese officials have claimed that the country has passed the peak of the coronavirus outbreak that has spread worldwide and put tens of millions of under lock down.

A spokesperson from the country's National Health Commission and the deputy director of the Department of Publicity held a press conference Thursday to say that the peak of the epidemic has now passed and that the number of new cases is declining, the state-backed Xinhua news agency reported.

Mi Feng, the NHC spokesperson, told reporters, "Broadly speaking, the peak of the epidemic has passed for China… The increase of new cases is falling," according to Reuters.

The officials noted that medical treatment work will remain the top priority and that work to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus will continue.

The coronavirus outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, in December 2019. China has dealt with more than 80,900 cases, 3,100 deaths and more than 63,000 recoveries, according to DXY.cn, which compiles data from the National Health Commission and regional government sources.

Reuters noted that Chinese authorities recorded eight new infections in Hubei, which marks the first time since the outbreak that the province recorded a daily tally of fewer than 10. As the number of new infections fall, Hubei will lift certain travel restrictions and will allow some industries to resume production.

The outbreak has spread across the globe with more than 126,000 infections and more than 4,600 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 68,000 people have recovered so far.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared the outbreak a pandemic—the first since the H1N1 "swine flu" in 2009.

https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/1573273/whuna-china-coronavirus-peak-announce-new-cases.webp?w=790&f=c8028e9417ab02bb7d689167266afc18
A medical staff member works at Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on March 11, 2020.
STR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES/GETTY

World Health Organization advice for avoiding spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19)
Hygiene advice

Clean hands frequently with soap and water, or alcohol-based hand rub.
Wash hands after coughing or sneezing; when caring for the sick; before; during and after food preparation; before eating; after using the toilet; when hands are visibly dirty; and after handling animals or waste.
Maintain at least 1 meter (3 feet) distance from anyone who is coughing or sneezing.
Avoid touching your hands, nose and mouth. Do not spit in public.
Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue or bent elbow when coughing or sneezing. Discard the tissue immediately and clean your hands.
Medical advice

If you feel unwell (fever, cough, difficulty breathing) seek medical care early and call local health authorities in advance.
Stay up to date on COVID-19 developments issued by health authorities and follow their guidance.

Mask usage

Healthy individuals only need to wear a mask if taking care of a sick person.
Wear a mask if you are coughing or sneezing.
Masks are effective when used in combination with frequent hand cleaning.
Do not touch the mask while wearing it. Clean hands if you touch the mask.
Learn how to properly put on, remove and dispose of masks. Clean hands after disposing of mask.
Do not reuse single-use masks.

[GeneChing]

Is Cannes Happening Despite Coronavirus? Festival President Says “Oui” (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/03/coronavirus-cannes-film-festival)
The festival’s president is “reasonably optimistic” that the Covid-19 epidemic will hit its peak well before Cannes.
BY YOHANA DESTA
MARCH 11, 2020

https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5e68f0cb5a28f70008cd562c/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/GettyImages-1143465659.jpg
Pierre Lescure attends the Cannes official selection presentation at UGC Normandie in Paris on April 18, 2019.BY MARC PIASECKI/GETTY.

The Cannes Film Festival is holding firm in the wake of coronavirus panic, despite the fact that France has one of the largest outbreaks of the disease in Europe—and, as a result, gatherings of more than 1,000 people have officially been banned in the country. Festival president Pierre Lescure told French outlet Le Figaro that Cannes is still going ahead as planned, though he added that if the situation gets worse, he will have no choice but to cancel the glitzy event.

“We remain reasonably optimistic in the hope that the peak of the epidemic will be reached at the end of March and that we will breathe a little better in April,” he said. Lescure did, however, add this: “But we are not oblivious. If not, we will cancel.”

The festival, which is set to take place May 12–23, would certainly break the threshold of the 1,000-person ban. An estimated 40,000 attended the 2019 festival, flying into the country from all around the world.

There have been more than 1,600 reported cases of Covid-19 in France, the third-biggest outbreak in Europe following Italy and Spain. A reported 33 people have died. The outbreak has impacted several sports and entertainment events. Madonna canceled two shows scheduled for Paris this week, while the Louvre, which usually receives over 30,000 visitors per day, was temporarily closed for three days. The museum reopened after taking certain precautionary safety measures, such as limiting direct contact between employees and visitors purchasing tickets.

In the Le Figaro interview, Lescure said that if Cannes must be canceled, the festival will be able to withstand the financial losses that will occur.

“The endowment fund that we have set up allows us to face at least one year without revenue,” he said. That puts Cannes in a better position than Austin’s SXSW, which was canceled in the wake of the spreading virus and thus had to lay off one third of its full-time staffers.

It was previously reported that Cannes did not have insurance, which could cause trouble if the festival were forced to cancel. Lescure cleared that up in the interview, saying that the fest was offered insurance “about 10 days ago, but it was totally disproportionate. We were only offered to cover ourselves up to $2.3 million, while our budget is $36 million. It was really peanuts. The company was clearly playing the bounty hunters, and we of course declined this proposal.”

As of now, Cannes is slated to carry on as planned. This year’s jury president will be Oscar winner Spike Lee. Lescure also added, once again for good measure, that “we remain optimistic.”

THREADS
Cannes (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?53853-Cannes)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Mulan (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020)) is still on at this point. I'm scheduled to go to the screener soon.


Hollywood Coronavirus Cancellations: A List of Film, TV, and Entertainment Events Impacted By Pandemic (https://www.slashfilm.com/hollywood-coronavirus-cancellations/)
Posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2020 by Ethan Anderton

https://d13ezvd6yrslxm.cloudfront.net/wp/wp-content/images/hollywood-coronavirus-combo.jpg

The coronavirus strain known as COVID-19 isn’t going away anytime soon, and the spread of the infection has already been classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. This has resulted in the cancellation and postponing of many major film, TV and entertainment events around the world, as well as shutting down certain film and TV productions, or at the very least changing how they operate. Because the updates are coming so fast and fierce, we’ll be keeping an updated list as new coronavirus cancellations and interruptions are announced each day.

Coronavirus Cancellations (Constantly Updated)
We will update this list as required. The dates signify when the cancellation took place with information gathered from various sources, including and especially USA Today and IndieWire, who have been keeping track of the ongoing cancellations and delays.


March 12
Fast and Furious 9 (F9) Release Delayed to 2021 – Universal Pictures has decided to delay the global release of Fast and Furious 9 by an entire year. It is now slated to open in April 2, 2021 in North America, but specific international dates were not revealed at this time.

The Lovebirds Release Delayed – Variety reports Paramount Pictures has delayed the romantic comedy The Lovebirds starring Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae. Originally slated for release on April 3, the movie now has new release date.

A Quiet Place Part II Release Delayed – The worldwide release of A Quiet Place II was reported by Deadline. Originally intended for release overseas starting on March 18 and in the US on March 20, but the movie has yet to be given a new release date. Get more in our full story.

Scott C’s Great Showdowns Gallery Events Canceled – Scott C’s latest art show at Gallery 1988 is canceling all in-gallery events, as well as a planned global scavenger hunt for prints, but will still have scheduled print releases and livestreams.

Universal Television Delays Production on Shows – Deadline reports the second seasons of Netflix’s Russian Doll and AppleTV+’s Little America, as well as the first season of Rutherford Falls for Peacock, have all been delayed due to coronavirus concerns. Most of the shows require international travel, which is largely why the decision was made to delay production start.

Broadway Usher Tests Positive for Coronavirus – A part-time Broadway usher who worked at the productions of Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? at the Booth Theatre between March 3 and March 7 and Six at the Brooks Atkinson on the evening of February 25 and the afternoon of March 1 has tested positive for coronavirus.

Both of the productions will continue, according to Deadline, and the two theater owners, Shubert Organization, owner of the Booth, and the Nederlander Organization, owner of the Brooks Atkinson, said the venues will have a deep cleaning performed. However, if any ticket holders wish to exchange for a future performance instead, they may do so.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

March 11
California Governor Urges Cancellation of Large Gatherings – The Los Angeles Times reported that California Governor Gavin Newsom and state health official are recommending and urging the cancellation of upcoming gatherings of 250 or more people across the entire state in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus. This recommendation does not come with the force of law to stop these events, but that could change if the coronavirus situation continues to get worse.

Hollywood Agencies and Companies Starting to Work Remotely – Deadline reports Hollywood talent agencies like CAA, UTA, ICM Partners and Paradigm are making adjustments to have their employees work from home in order to help slow the spread of coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Viacom, who owns Paramount Pictures, MTV, Comedy Central and more, said they will start testing whether or not they can have their employees also working from home instead of going into offices at this time.

Cinema Con 2020 Canceled – Variety reported the cancellation of CinemaCon 2020, the annual trade show for theater owners from around the world where the latest developments and advances in exhibition, distribution, marketing, publicity, advertising, social media, theater equipment and concessions are showcased. The event was slated to take place from March 30 through April 2.

Here’s the official statement from John Fithian and Mitch Newhauser from the National Association of Theater Owners:

“It is with great regret we are announcing the cancellation of CinemaCon 2020. Each spring, motion picture exhibitors, distributors and industry partners from around the world meet in Las Vegas to share information and celebrate the moviegoing experience. This year, due to the travel ban from the European Union, the unique travel difficulties in many other areas of the world and other challenges presented by the Coronavirus pandemic, a significant portion of the worldwide motion picture community is not able to attend CinemaCon. While local outbreaks vary widely in severity, the global circumstances make it impossible for us to mount the show that our attendees have come to expect. After consultation with our attendees, trade show exhibitors, sponsors, and studio presenters, NATO has decided therefore to cancel CinemaCon 2020. We look forward to continuing the 10-year tradition of presenting the largest movie theater convention in the world and joining our attendees in future celebrations of the moviegoing experience.”

PaleyFest 2020 Postponed – The annual television showcase of some of the biggest and best television shows has been postponed with new dates for the festival yet to be announced. Shows like Modern Family, The Mandalorian, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Boys, Star Trek: Picard, Schitt’s Creek, and more were slated to be featured at the festival, but they will have to wait for the event to be rescheduled. Here’s the full statement from the Paley Center for Media:

“As you are aware, the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to remain of the utmost public concern. For several weeks now, the Paley Center, along with our venue host, The Dolby Theatre, has monitored the situation closely, staying in daily contact with local, state, and federal partners, as well as following the recommendations issued by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and following the guidelines of the local health department. Based on the most recent news and out of an abundance of concern, we have made the difficult decision to postpone this year’s PaleyFest. While we were looking forward to presenting another stellar lineup of PaleyFest events, the safety of our event participants, guests, and staff is the highest priority. We are exploring options to reschedule the festival and all ticket purchases will be honored for the new dates.”

NBA Suspended 2019-20 Basketball Season – The NBA announced the suspension of the current season of basketball after Utah Jazz player Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19. The news came just before the Utah Jazz were set to play an away game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Gameplay will be suspended entirely until further notice and will determine when they can resume play as the coronavirus situation develops.

Talk Shows Avoid Having Studio Audiences – Deadline confirmed New York’s late night network talk shows The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah will not have studio audiences for their tapings. In addition, cable talk shows Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Watch What Happens with Andy Cohen will follow suit.

Los Angeles talk shows have not announced any sweeping changes to their recording plans yet with live audiences, but The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The View and Live With Kelly And Ryan will not film with audiences either. Conan is currently on a two-week hiatus, but their filming plans could easily change in the future.

Riverdale Production Suspended – Production on The CW series was suspended after a person working on the show was recently in contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. Warner Bros. TV told Deadline:

“We are working closely with the appropriate authorities and health agencies in Vancouver to identify and contact all individuals who may have come into direct contact with our team member,” the statement continued. “The health and safety of our employees, casts and crews is always our top priority. We have and will continue to take precautions to protect everyone who works on our productions around the world.”

Survivor Production Delayed – CBS has delayed the production of the next two seasons of Survivor. As of now the premiere dates for those seasons in September 2020 and February 2021 have not been delayed, but that could change if the production does not begin with enough time to spare. Read our full story on the matter over here

HBO’s Night of Too Many Stars Postponed – USA Today reported the event hosted by Jon Stewart and presented by HBO in partnership with NEXT for AUTISM has been pushed back. The show was slated to take place on April 18 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. No new date has been set yet.

Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards Postponed – Variety reported annual awards show from Nickelodeon where kids pick their favorite movies, TV shows, movie stars, musicians and more has been postponed until further notice. No new date has been set yet.

E3 (The Electronic Entertainment Expo) Canceled – Kotaku reported the tradeshow for video games slated to take place from June 9 through June 11 has been canceled. In place of the event, there will be “an online experience to showcase industry announcements and news in June 2020.”

GLAAD Awards Canceled – The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation announced the cancellation of their awards intended to take place on March 19. It’s not clear if thy will be rescheduled.

Adam Sandler Postpones March Comedy Tour Dates – In a post to Twitter, the comedian announced that March tour dates would be postponed until a later time. It is not clear when they will be rescheduled and more dates could be canceled.

March 10
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Production Halted – The Marvel Studios series was slated to shoot an entire week in Prague, but they stopped before finishing due to spreading coronavirus concerns. It is not clear when and where production will finish the scenes meant to be shot there. Get more in our full story.

Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway Release Delayed – Deadline reported the global release of the children’s movie sequel has been pushed back to August 7 by Sony Pictures.

Game Shows Filming Without Audiences – Deadline reported Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune announced they would be taping episodes without live studio audiences, especially since much of the audiences of those shows consists of older viewers more susceptible to coronavirus.

March 6
SXSW Festival Canceled – The movie, TV, music and tech festival was canceled by the city of Austin one week before the event was slated to begin on March 13. Festival organizers may reschedule the festival, but the cancellation has created severe problems for them, and it might prevent the fest from returning in 2021.

March 4
No Time to Die Global Release Delayed – Sony Pictures made the decision to delay the global release of No Time to Die from April to November. The film will now open in the UK on November 12 and in the US on November 25. Read more in our full story over here.

February 24
Mission: Impossible 7 Production Halted in Italy – After the outbreak worsened significantly in Italy, USA Today reported Paramount Pictures chose to halt production on Mission: Impossible 7. It’s not clear when/if shooting will still take place there in the future.

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
No Time to Die (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71114-No-Time-to-Die)
Mission Impossible (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68128-Mission-Impossible)
F&F9 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70501-Fast-amp-Furious-9)

[@PLUGO]

STATEMENT FROM COMIC-CON REGARDING COVID-19 (https://www.comic-con.org/wca/wondercon-anaheim-2020-has-been-postponed)


March 12, 2020

To protect public health and slow the rate of transmission of COVID-19, the California Department of Public Health announced a recommendation that gatherings and events of more than 250 people should either be postponed or cancelled. Comic-Con (organizer of WonderCon) will abide by this recommendation. Therefore WonderCon Anaheim, scheduled for April 10-12, 2020 in Anaheim, California, will be postponed until a later date. We will begin processing refunds in the coming days.

We continue to work closely with officials in San Diego and at this time no decision has been made regarding the rescheduling of Comic-Con slated to take place this summer; July 23-26, 2020. We urge everyone to follow the recommendations set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and your local health officials.

THREADS
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Comic Cons (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70242-Comic-Cons)

[GeneChing]

Remember now? (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1317796#post1317796)


Missouri Sues Televangelist Jim Bakker For Selling Fake Coronavirus Cure (https://www.npr.org/2020/03/11/814550474/missouri-sues-televangelist-jim-bakker-for-selling-fake-coronavirus-cure?utm_campaign=npr&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews&fbclid=IwAR3Rzh6KTeQNjO0CUcANisBeCDH5pkkg0JIFaVCcu 9YPh8V-xRIVQ-WTpqQ)
March 11, 20204:35 PM ET
MATTHEW S. SCHWARTZ

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2020/03/11/ap_18061681803595-0f77667808e173242b1c40833e979fd4e98617ec-s600-c85.jpg
Televangelist Jim Bakker, shown here in 2018, faces a legal challenge from the state of Missouri for selling a false remedy against the coronavirus. The COVID-19 disease currently has no cure.
Chuck Burton/AP

Televangelist Jim Bakker held up a blue and silver bottle, gazing intently at the label, as he questioned the woman sitting next to him.

"This influenza that is now circling the globe," Bakker said on the Feb. 12 broadcast of The Jim Bakker Show, "you're saying that Silver Solution would be effective."

His guest, the so-called "natural health expert" Sherrill Sellman, falsely implied that the liquid would likely be effective. The coronavirus impacting more than 120,000 people worldwide does not yet have a known treatment or cure.

"Well, let's say it hasn't been tested on this strain of the coronavirus, but it has been tested on other strains of the coronavirus and has been able to eliminate it within 12 hours," Sellman said. "Totally eliminate it. Kills it. Deactivates it."

Silver Solution "has been proven by the government that it has the ability to kill every pathogen it has ever been tested on, including SARS and HIV," Sellman continued. Four 4-ounce bottles could be yours, a message on the screen said, for just $80.

Selling a fake "treatment" for the COVID-19 disease violates state and federal law. On Tuesday, the state of Missouri filed a lawsuit against Bakker and his production company to stop them from advertising or selling Silver Solution and related products as treatments for the coronavirus.

By subscribing, you agree to NPR's terms of use and privacy policy. NPR may share your name and email address with your NPR station. See Details. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Bakker and Morningside Church Productions have violated Missouri law by "falsely promising to consumers that Silver Solution can cure, eliminate, kill or deactivate coronavirus and/or boost elderly consumers' immune system and help keep them healthy when there is, in fact, no vaccine, pill, potion or other product available to treat or cure coronavirus disease 2019," the Missouri Attorney General's Office wrote in its application for a temporary restraining order. Bakker and his company are based in the state.

Bakker gained fame in the 1970s and '80s as the host of The PTL Club, a Christian television program he hosted with his then-wife, Tammy Faye. He stepped down from PTL after a sex scandal and later spent several years in prison after a jury found that he had defrauded his viewers out of millions of dollars.

Missouri is the first state to file a lawsuit against Bakker for selling his coronavirus "treatment," but others have also been warning him to stop peddling his snake oil. On March 3, the New York Attorney General's Office sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bakker, accusing him of defrauding the public.

"Your show's segment may mislead consumers as to the effectiveness of the Silver Solution product in protecting against the current outbreak," wrote Lisa Landau, chief of the New York Attorney General's Office's health care bureau. The World Health Organization "has noted that there is no specific medicine to prevent or treat this disease," the letter said. It gave Bakker 10 business days to comply or face legal action.

A few days after New York's letter, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission warned Bakker that his website and Facebook page were selling "unapproved new drugs" in violation of the law.

By Wednesday, Bakker's website was no longer selling the solution. Bakker's production company did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the Missouri Attorney General's Office told NPR that even though Silver Solution is no longer being sold, the office would continue seeking the temporary restraining order. "That way they can't come back in months or years and start selling solution as a miracle cure again," the attorney general's press secretary, Chris Nuelle, said.

Bakker's solution did not escape the attention of late-night comedians. "That is ridiculous," John Oliver said on Last Week Tonight. "Silver does not kill coronavirus. Silver kills werewolves. Which means first you need to get your coronavirus bitten by a microscopic werewolf." Oliver then offered his "Premium Werewolf Solution" for $49.99 per bottle, which he promised contained "millions of microscopic werewolves."

In addition to The Jim Bakker Show, the FDA sent warnings on Monday to six other companies that were selling colloidal silver, teas, tinctures or essential oils as treatments for the coronavirus. "There already is a high level of anxiety over the potential spread of coronavirus," said FTC Chairman Joe Simons. "What we don't need in this situation are companies preying on consumers by promoting products with fraudulent prevention and treatment claims."

For the past two decades, the FDA's message has been clear: Silver doesn't work to combat serious diseases. Over-the-counter drugs that contain colloidal silver ingredients "are not generally recognized as safe and effective," it says. According to the National Institutes of Health, very little evidence backs up the health-related claims of silver. "Colloidal silver can be dangerous to your health," the NIH says.

[GeneChing]

Wuhan closes the last of its makeshift hospitals as virus cases plunge (https://shanghai.ist/2020/03/10/wuhan-closes-the-last-of-its-makeshift-hospitals-as-virus-cases-plunge/?fbclid=IwAR1oltdJoODMYBuyTrHtC7-6Uag5vrkdnnpuGEojxRcU4bcWWiUl7G_PjeM)
The epicenter of the coronavirus reported just 17 new cases on Monday
by Alex Linder March 10, 2020 in News

https://i0.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/wuhan-makeshift-hospital2.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1

In another sign of return to normalcy in China, Wuhan has closed every single one of its temporary hospitals, with the facilities receiving a good scrubbing down before eventually going back to their original use.

All 16 of Wuhan’s makeshift hospitals have been shuttered after discharging the last of their patients, local media outlets reported on Tuesday.

Back in January, the sports centers, conference centers, and schools were converted into temporary hospitals to treat patients with mild coronavirus symptoms after the city’s existing medical facilities began to buckle under the weight of people seeking treatment for the Covid-19 virus.

https://i1.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/wuhan-makeshift-hospital.jpg?w=899&ssl=1https://i2.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/wuhan-makeshift-hospital5.jpg?w=899&ssl=1https://i0.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/wuhan-makeshift-hospital4.jpg?w=899&ssl=1

The makeshift hospitals had raised some concerns, packing dozens of patients together in large rooms. A patient who one of the hospitals had declared “recovered” went on to die from the virus a few days later.

However, the facilities appear to have been mostly effective in treating patients and keeping them contained.

Wuhan reported just 17 new coronavirus cases on Monday, the lowest that number has been since January 17.

Now, can the rest of the world follow?

[GeneChing]

Coronavirus: China’s first confirmed Covid-19 case traced back to November 17 (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus-chinas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back?utm_content=article&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0MNR3vEO14Z_Dq4AV41eXOS5wK_MdYI3ny8Npr6 4FeWq6GZSs5PEWOg_o#Echobox=1584058338)
Government records suggest first person infected with new disease may have been a Hubei resident aged 55, but ‘patient zero’ has yet to be confirmed
Documents seen by the Post could help scientists track the spread of the disease and perhaps determine its source
Josephine Ma
Published: 8:00am, 13 Mar, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/03/13/8ec50efe-646c-11ea-8e9f-2d196083a37c_image_hires_084731.JPG?itok=dF-qMscc&v=1584060458
The first known case of Covid-19 in China dates back to November, but the hunt for “patient zero” goes on. Photo: EPA-EFE

The first case of someone in China suffering from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, can be traced back to November 17, according to government data seen by the South China Morning Post.
Chinese authorities have so far identified at least 266 people who were infected last year, all of whom came under medical surveillance at some point.
Some of the cases were likely backdated after health authorities had tested specimens taken from suspected patients.
Interviews with whistle-blowers from the medical community suggest Chinese doctors only realised they were dealing with a new disease in late December.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTtqB-zVUAw&feature=emb_logo

Scientists have been trying to map the pattern of the early transmission of Covid-19 since an epidemic was reported in the central China city of Wuhan in January, two months before the outbreak became a global health crisis.
Understanding how the disease spread and determining how undetected and undocumented cases contributed to its transmission will greatly improve their understanding of the size of that threat.
According to the government data seen by the Post, a 55 year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to have contracted Covid-19 on November 17.
From that date onwards, one to five new cases were reported each day. By December 15, the total number of infections stood at 27 – the first double-digit daily rise was reported on December 17 – and by December 20, the total number of confirmed cases had reached 60.
On December 27, Zhang Jixian, a doctor from Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, told China’s health authorities that the disease was caused by a new coronavirus. By that date, more than 180 people had been infected, though doctors might not have been aware of all of them at the time.
By the final day of 2019, the number of confirmed cases had risen to 266, On the first day of 2020 it stood at 381.
While the government records have not been released to the public, they provide valuable clues about how the disease spread in its early days and the speed of its transmission, as well as how many confirmed cases Beijing has recorded.
Scientists are now keen to identify the so-called patient zero, which could help them to trace the source of the coronavirus, which is generally thought to have jumped to humans from a wild animal, possibly a bat.
Of the first nine cases to be reported in November – four men and five women – none has been confirmed as being “patient zero”. They were all aged between 39 and 79, but it is unknown how many were residents of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei and the epicentre of the outbreak.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efr2TKbdznM&feature=emb_logo

It is possible that there were reported cases dating back even earlier than those seen by the Post.
According to the World Health Organisation’s website, the first confirmed Covid-19 case in China was on December 8, but the global body does not track the disease itself but relies on nations to provide such information.
A report published in medical journal The Lancet by Chinese doctors from Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, which treated some of the earliest patients, put the date of the first known infection at December 1.
Dr Ai Fen, the first known whistle-blower, told People magazine in an interview that was later censored, that tests showed that a patient at Wuhan Central Hospital was diagnosed on December 16 as having contracted an unknown coronavirus.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/03/13/c6b76f88-646b-11ea-8e9f-2d196083a37c_1320x770_084731.jpg
According to government reports, a 55 year-old from Hubei province was the first person to fall sick with Covid-19. Photo: Reuters

Accounts by other doctors seem to suggest the medical community in Wuhan became aware of the disease in late December.
Previous reports said that although doctors in the city collected samples from suspected cases in late December, they could not confirm their findings because they were bogged down by bureaucracy, such as having to get approval from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, which could take days. They were also ordered not to disclose any information about the new disease to the public.
As late as January 11, Wuhan’s health authorities were still claiming there were just 41 confirmed cases.

Interesting. Anyone seen data on Patient Zeroes in other countries yet?

[GeneChing]

I wouldn't bet on this right now. There's still plenty of time to push it back.


ENTERTAINMENT
‘Black Widow’ isn’t delayed, but MCU Phase 4 could still be in trouble (https://bgr.com/2020/03/12/mcu-phase-4-timeline-coronavirus-pandemic-might-ruin-release-schedule/)
MCU Phase 4 Timeline
By Chris Smith @chris_writes
March 12th, 2020 at 3:19 PM

https://boygeniusreport.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/marvel-avengers.jpg?quality=98&strip=all&w=1024

Marvel’s Black Widow will launch on May 1st in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly because Disney can’t really afford to delay any of its movies and TV series. Postponing Black Widow might delay other shows since all the stories are connected.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a limited TV series for Disney+, should follow in August, but the coronavirus outbreak already has had an impact on the show’s production.
Similarly, other MCU Phase 4 TV series that are in production might be affected by delays caused by the new disease.
Watching a brand new movie in cinemas might be a thing of the past until the coronavirus pandemic is under control, at least in those regions seeing a surge in daily infections. Sony is one of the tech giants that’s been among the first to withdraw from events that draw plenty of crowds, including MWC, PAX East, and GDC, to minimize COVID-19 transmission risks. Avoiding large gatherings of people is one of the things you can do to protect yourself against infection, and Sony is acutely aware of that. It’s also very aware that the coronavirus will have a significant impact on certain sectors of the economy and its bottom line, and the company is already taking measures to protect its business. The company delayed two movie releases, including the brand new James Bond as well as Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway. The delay of No Time to Die was particularly surprising, given that it’s one of the most highly anticipated films of the year.

Not all studios can afford to do the same thing with their upcoming 2020 creations, and that includes Disney’s Marvel. Earlier this week, Marvel released the final trailer for Black Widow, reiterating plans to release the first MCU Phase 4 flick on May 1st, as previously announced. Unlike Sony, which might have plenty of wiggle room with its movie releases, Disney might be forced to go forward with Marvel movies regardless of any potential financial hit.

As I explained before, Disney has no choice but to launch Black Widow on schedule, and the same goes for The Eternals in November. That’s because the films are just two titles of the 14 MCU Phase 4 stories scheduled to be released in 2020 and 2021, of which two more are supposed to launch on Disney+ later this year.
Black Widow will be followed by The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in August, with WandaVision set to start streaming at some point this winter after Eternals hits theaters. All these stories are intertwined, and Marvel has to release them in order. Events from Black Widow might ripple through Falcon as well as other films and TV series. That same goes for each title that follows the standalone Black Widow film.

Black Widow would easily conquer the box office during its launch weekend, but the coronavirus might hurt its overall take. Even so, the film is tracking for a huge opening weekend — $90 to $130 million, an estimate says. Things could change down the road but no matter what happens, Black Widow will surely open on May 1st.
That said, the coronavirus might still ruin the MCU going forward, and I’m not even referring to Disney’s bottom line. Plenty of the upcoming MCU Phase 4 films are in pre-production or shooting right now, and the pandemic might significantly affect some or all of them. One such example is The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Disney has just halted shooting in Prague over coronavirus fears, as Deadline reported:

The show has been shooting for months in Atlanta, but they began a short shoot in Prague last Friday that was to be completed in about a week. Today, the studio shut down the production and called everybody home to Atlanta. No word at the moment whether the show will return to Prague, but it seems unlikely.

The same might happen with other TV series that are in the works, especially if they’re shooting in places where local governments have started enforcing stricter rules and restrictions. Any such delays might force Disney to delay the actual launch of the Marvel series on Disney+.

https://boygeniusreport.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/black-widow-trailer-scarlett-johansson.jpg?quality=98&strip=all&w=1024
Image Source: YouTube

Not to mention that there’s always the chance that some of the stars involved in these huge Marvel projects, as well as the crew working on them, could get infected. Anyone testing positive for COVID-19 will have to be quarantined in a hospital until they recover.

If that’s not enough, there’s even a rumor going around that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier plot would have featured a pandemic threat. That’s something Disney has removed from the script over the actual novel coronavirus outbreak, which has just been declared a pandemic — from MurphysMultiverse’s report from a few weeks ago:


By the time The Falcon and The Winter Soldier streams in August, it is likely that the disease will have met the criterion to be considered a true pandemic (the last global pandemic was the H1N1 virus which killed as few as 151,000 and as many as 575,000 people worldwide, according to the CDC). From what I’ve been hearing, Disney may be proactively trying to get ahead of what could be a potential disaster for the studio by rewriting and, as a result, reshooting parts of the series, with a heavy emphasis on the season’s first couple of episodes.

Given all the significant connections between all these movies, and considering Black Widow is already locked, there may be elements in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier script that can’t be altered too much. But it’s absolutely clear that the coronavirus will have an impact on this Disney+ original show, and the pandemic might similarly affect other Phase 4 TV series set to start streaming next year.

Aside from the two TV series scheduled to hit the streaming service in 2020, eight other MCU Phase 4 shows should launch on Disney+ next year, starting with Loki in early 2021. And if Black Widow does get delayed, we might see all other Phase 4 pushed back accordingly.



Chris Smith started writing about gadgets as a hobby, and before he knew it he was sharing his views on tech stuff with readers around the world. Whenever he's not writing about gadgets he miserably fails to stay away from them, although he desperately tries. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

THREADS
Black Widow (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70643-Black-Widow)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

NEWS MARCH 12, 2020 9:48PM PT
Marvel’s ‘Shang-Chi’ Suspends Production as Director Self-Isolates (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/marvel-halts-shang-chi-director-self-isolating-1203531975/)
By JUSTIN KROLL
Film Reporter
@https://twitter.com/krolljvar

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/destin-daniel-cretton.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1
CREDIT: INVISION/AP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Following a number of release dates moving and premieres being cancelled, Marvel and Disney have decided to temporarily shutter production on “Shang-Chi.”

The delay comes due to director Destin Daniel Cretton being asked by a doctor to self-isolate. Cretton was not feeling symptoms of COVID-19, but chose to be tested as a precaution since he is a new father. He is self-isolating as he awaits his test results.

The movie had been shooting in Australia since February. The second unit will continue production at this time.

Marvel’s note to the crew read:

“As many of you know, Destin, our director, has a new born baby. He wanted to exercise additional caution given the current environment and decided to get tested for Covid-19 today. He is currently self-isolating under the recommendation of his doctor. While he waits for the results of the test, we are suspending 1st unit production in an abundance of caution until he gets the results this coming week. Second unit and off production will continue as normal. We will reach out to everyone by Tuesday for the latest update.

This is an unprecedented time. We appreciate everyone’s understanding as we work through this.”

It is unknown when the shoot was going to end and if it will impact the February 2021 release date at this time.

The film stars Simu Lu, Awkwafina and Tony Leung with Cretton directing.

The original Marvel Comics “Shang-Chi” follows Shang, a half-Chinese, half-American superhero created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Jim Starlin. In the comics, Shang-Chi is a master of numerous unarmed and weaponry-based wushu styles, including the use of the gun, nunchaku, and jian. Shang-Chi first appeared in Special Marvel Edition #15 in 1973.

Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige is producing the film. Marvel’s Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, and Jonathan Schwartz are executive producers on the project.
THREADS
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71109-Shang-Chi-and-the-Legend-of-the-Ten-Rings)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Mulan (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020)) is still on at this point. I'm scheduled to go to the screener soon. Aw ******. I got my screener cancellation notification first thing this morning. :(


'Mulan' Release Pushed Back Amid Coronavirus Pandemic (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/mulan-release-pushed-back-coronavirus-pandemic-1284275)
MARCH 12, 2020 2:50PM by Mia Galuppo

The Disney movie was set to hit theaters in North America on March 27.

Disney is pushing the release of its upcoming live-action tentpole Mulan amid growing concerns around the coronavirus, the studio said Thursday. The movie was set to hit theaters in North America on March 27.

Also being pushed is the long-delayed New Mutants, which was due out April 3 via 20th Century Studios, and the Guillermo del Toro-produced Antlers, which was set for an April 17 release via Searchlight Pictures.

Disney is looking into new release dates for all of the titles later this year.

Mulan director Niki Caro posted on her personal instagram about the release date push, writing, "We are so excited to share this film with the world, but given the current ever-shifting circumstances we are all experiencing, unfortunately, we have to postpone the worldwide release of Mulan for now. Our hearts are with everyone the world over who is affected by this virus, and we hope that Mulan’s fighting spirit will continue to inspire those who are working so hard to keep us all safe."

Mulan is the latest studio release to be pushed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Universal postponed the ninth Fast & Furious film by a year, while Paramount dealyed the release of the Issa Rae-starring comedy The Lovebirds and A Quiet Place Part II.

While no theaters are yet closed in the U.S. because of the coronavirus, there is growing concern that some cinemas could go dark in areas where cases of COVID-19 are proliferating, or where business has slowed. That is in addition to the ongoing blackout on moviegoing in China. (Mulan did not yet have a Chinese release date.)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom late Wednesday recommended canceling or postponing gatherings of 250 or more people "at least through March" as the state grapples with the coronavirus outbreak. The recommendation directly impacts larger auditoriums, which may have to stagger seating.




The Hollywood Reporter
MIA GALUPPO
mia.galuppo@thr.com
@miagaluppo


THREADS
Mulan (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

UFC’s bungled coronavirus response proves yet again, athletes are secondary concern (https://www.mmafighting.com/2020/3/13/21177871/ufcs-bungled-coronavirus-response-proves-yet-again-athletes-are-secondary-concern)
By Mike Chiappetta@MikeChiappetta Mar 13, 2020, 9:00am EDT

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Lc6Snui_sWeOPPh9AFsdArOpt2A=/204x113:3801x2519/920x613/filters:focal(1602x898:2234x1530):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66495681/513970142.jpg.0.jpg
Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

Like dominos falling, sports and entertainment events were knocked down yesterday as organizations came to the realization that the show must not go on. Not right now, when a virus that our own government has said is 10 times more lethal than the flu has been declared a global pandemic. This includes the NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball, the NCAA, Formula 1, Champions League, Disney Parks and all of Broadway. Almost every major producer of such events weighed in on their plans by announcing postponements or cancellations, pointing to concern for customers and employees as a priority.

There was one glaring exception: the UFC.

With a regular touring schedule, the UFC touches more parts of the globe than almost any of the aforementioned entities. Last week, they were in Las Vegas. On Saturday, they have a scheduled show in Brasilia, Brazil. Next week, they’re supposed to be in London.

But how is the organization planning to handle this coronavirus outbreak? It took forever to find out. Most of Thursday came and went without a word.

While multiple outlets, including MMA Fighting, reported that at least this week’s Brazil event would go on without fans present, the UFC remained silent. Some of this can be excused. To be fair, this is an extraordinary circumstance that in the midst of an unrelenting schedule, can take some time to parse. It is OK to time some time to collect information before making a decision, but it would have been helpful to say they were monitoring the situation and considering options. Instead, they left people to wonder.

Finally, we got a bit of clarity late Thursday night when UFC president Dana White spoke to ESPN, saying they’d go on with events, some with fans, and some without. That is a decision that is misguided at best and dangerous at worst, considering the continued rise of cases, transmission rates, the possibility that the virus may be most infectious when symptoms are mildest, and with the finding that it is spread through breathing, even without coughing. With athletes, teams and production team members converging upon Brasilia from countries including the U.S., Denmark, Ukraine, France, Russia and Canada, among others, there is the possibility of coming into contact with an infected party, then bringing the virus back to their families and communities, possibly infecting others with underlying vulnerabilities who may not be able to fight it off in the way a healthy athlete can.

True, it is safer than an event with a full arena, but given the close confines of the cage and locker room, it’s the wrong call. There’s a reason the other leagues canceled or postponed events, and there’s a reason experts have urged social distancing as a means of controlling the spread of the virus. The NCAA, for one, earned an estimated $933 million on its March Madness tournaments last year, money they are forfeiting with their decision to cancel. You think they took this step lightly?

Worse, the organization plans to allow an audience at its London event next week, this despite UK numbers spiking over the last 24 hours, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying up to 10,000 people may already have the virus, many without yet knowing.

Such a decision to proceed with a packed event is irresponsible, bordering on malfeasant. Sadly, it’s not surprising that the UFC has chosen to flout the advice of experts when it comes to the treatment of their independent contractors. Because the fighters are not unionized or organized in any way, they have no voice in how things will move forward. Contrast that with Wednesday night’s NBA game, where the New Orleans Pelicans decided they would not take the floor after learning an assigned referee had officiated a game with a player, Rudy Gobert, who tested positive for coronavirus.

Most UFC fighters won’t speak up, and frankly, most of them can’t because they need the money. At this point they have put in weeks of camp, likely working through injuries and suffering through minimal, meticulous diets to reach their contracted weights. Their money isn’t guaranteed, so they are willing to risk injury—or illness—to earn it.

The UFC is quite capable of canceling this event, swallowing its cost and paying the fighters what they were supposed to earn, but they are loathe to share the riches with the plebeians. Remember, it was just a couple of weeks ago The New York Post reported that the UFC dipped into its cash reserves to approve a $300 million dividend to its investors — a number that is reportedly twice as much as it paid all of its fighters combined in 2019. There is always money when it comes to something ownership cares about: itself.

Meanwhile, the organization tried to frame its decision as some act of benevolence.

“They want to fight, they want to compete, and we’re going to do everything we can to keep them safe,” White said during his ESPN interview.

The best way to keep them safe—everyone safe—is to pay them the fighters their purses and to keep them away from gatherings. If the UFC doesn’t see this, can’t see this, it would be nice if their parent company did. Endeavor is a powerful entity that could easily step in and put a stop to the proceedings. It also holds sway over the Euroleague, which on Thursday morning—surprise, surprise—suspended league play. But the truth is, Endeavor doesn’t care any more about the athletes than the UFC does. It’s mostly interested in milking its cash cow.

So for now, the show will go on for the UFC. Of course it will. It was less than a week ago when White told us he “didn’t give a s—t about the coronavirus.” Thursday’s response proved it.

THREADS
UFC lawsuits and scandals (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?50188-UFC-lawsuits-and-scandals)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

A first-hand account. READ Battling COVID-19 in Beijing (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/ezine/article.php?article=1540) by Greg Brundage

http://www.kungfumagazine.com/admin/site_images/KungfuMagazine/upload/5865_20201213-C19.jpg

THREADS
The Silk Road (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68861-The-Silk-Road)
Covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Coronavirus: Production Hub South Africa Declares National State of Disaster (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/production-hub-south-africa-declares-national-state-disaster-1284801)
3:46 AM PDT 3/16/2020 by Scott Roxborough

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape_928x523/2017/03/tomb_raider_still.jpg
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
MGM's 'Tomb Raider' reboot shot in South Africa

The country bans gatherings of 100-plus people and issues travel stops for visitors from hard-hit countries, including the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy and China.
South Africa, one of the world's leading centers for international film and television production, is shutting its borders to foreign visitors amid the coronavirus crisis.

The South African government declared a national state of emergency Sunday and issued travel bans on nationals from several countries hard hit by the virus. Nationals from the U.S., U.K., China, Italy, Germany, South Korea, Iran and Spain will be denied visas to enter South Africa, while any foreigners who have visited a high-risk country in the past 20 days will also be refused entry, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a televised address to the nation. Travelers from medium-risk countries, such as Portugal, Hong Kong and Singapore, will be required to undergo high-intensity screenings.

South African citizens returning from countries with high incidences of the virus will be subject to testing and self-isolation or quarantine on their arrival. Thirty-five of the country’s 53 land ports of entry are shut as of Monday, while two of its eight sea ports will be closed for passengers and crew changes.

South Africa also issued new regulations to stem the spread of coronavirus within the country, including banning public gatherings of more than 100 people and shutting schools.

“We have decided to take urgent and drastic measures to manage the disease, protect the people of our country and to reduce the impact of the virus on our society and on our economy,” Ramaphosa said. “There can be no half measures.”

The new restrictions are certain to have a major impact on the South African film and television industry. The region is one of the most popular international locations for studio productions. Columbia Pictures' Escape Room 2, the sequel to the 2019 horror hit, shot in Cape Town, as did MGM's video game franchise reboot Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider 2 was expected to begin production in the region later this year.

Among the productions affected is Viacom18 Motion Pictures’ 'Forrest Gump' remake 'Laal Singh Chaddha,' starring Aamir Khan




SCOTT ROXBOROUGH
Scott.Roxborough@THR.com
sroxborough



THREADS
Tomb Raider 2 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71471-Tomb-Raider-2)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

MARCH 15, 2020 11:04PM PT
China’s Economy Heading for Historic Reverse, Reflecting Virus Impact (https://variety.com/2020/biz/asia/china-economy-historic-reverse-virus-impact-1203535186/)
By PATRICK FRATER
Asia Bureau Chief

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/china-money.jpg?w=700&h=393&crop=1
CREDIT: REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

An historic shift into reverse gear for the Chinese economy could be one of the next consequences flowing from the spread of the novel coronavirus. That prospect threw Asian stock markets into reverse on Monday, despite economic stimulus measures in the U.S.

The U.S. Federal Reserve, on Sunday (Monday morning in Asia) announced a full percentage point cut in its benchmark interest rate, reducing it to close to zero. The Fed also promised to inject liquidity into the economic system by buying at least $500 billion of Treasury securities and at least $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority followed the U.S. central bank’s example and cut its own base rates.

But financial markets were unimpressed. Australia’s ASX index crashed by more than 9% on Monday to 5,002. New Zealand’s NZX 50 index fell 3.6%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, already a bear market since Friday, was down 2.2% at the lunchtime trading break. South Korea’s KOSPI index headed for a loss of more than 1%, though Japan’s Nikkei index rose 0.7%, apparently in anticipation of stimulus measures.


Mainland Chinese markets were firmly down, with the SSE Shanghai Composite benchmark down more than 2%.

Chinese data unveiled on Monday showed that industrial production in the world’s manufacturing hub fell by 13.3% in January and February. That has never happened before in the modern era.

Other data showed Chinese retail sales down by 20.5% in the same two months, and fixed asset investment down by 24.5%.

Despite China, now seeming to get back to work after new Covid-19 infections have peaked in the country, many economists are now forecasting an historic decline in China’s GDP when data for the January-March quarter is completed.

In total, China has incurred some 81,000 coronavirus infections and over 3,100 deaths. On Monday, it reported 16 new coronavirus infections and 14 deaths, numbers that are significantly down on the past trend. Since the weekend, mainland authorities have been saying that most new cases are not local infections, but are imported with foreigners arriving in China.

That pattern may also explain the latest fall in Asian stock markets. The recent decision by Apple to close its retail stores outside Greater China hurt many of its Asian suppliers. iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision fell 4.3% to TWD71.3 per share by mid-Monday. Sunny Optical slumped 10.6% to HK$105.9. LG Display was 2.2% lower at KRW11,050. Sharp bucked the trend with a 2.2% gain to JPY989.

The pain being incurred by Chinese businesses was reflected in additional share price losses for Alibaba and Tencent. The Hong Kong-traded units of Alibaba dropped 5% on Monday to HK$182.10, while Tencent fell 4.2% to HK$349.60.

There was no new bad news for China’s media sector. But the longer that mainland cinemas stay shut, the deeper the problems become for companies including: Wanda Film (whose shares were down 4.4% to CNY17.12); China Film Co. (down 2.4% to CNY12.96); and Huayi Brothers (down 3.5% to CNY3.77). Hong Kong-traded Imax China on Monday fell 3.5% to HK$13.94.

THREADS
Chollywood rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
Made in China (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?66168-Made-in-China)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Now it's up to the rest of the world to follow.


1:49 a.m. ET, March 15, 2020
China is lifting travel restrictions and life is returning to normal (https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-2-03-15-20-intl-hnk/h_00633a0135cea337eda02ce7e6c854e3)

https://dynaimage.cdn.cnn.com/cnn/digital-images/org/1dcc46a8-5506-48a8-9603-87829e538ad6.jpeg
Children play in a garden in Beijing, China, on Saturday, as travel and movement restrictions begin to lift. Credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

Life in China is beginning to return to normal now that the coronavirus outbreak has largely been contained across the country, with lockdowns lifting and employees returning to work.

China only reported 20 new cases today -- a drastic drop from just a few weeks ago, when the country was recording thousands of new infections a day.

The new cases are no longer spread out across the country -- now, new cases are mostly either imported from international travelers or concentrated in Hubei Province, the epicenter of the outbreak.

Domestic travel is resuming: During the worst of the outbreak, 1,119 highway entrances and exits across the country were closed. Now, all but two have reopened, according to state media outlet Xinhua.

Hundreds of previously-closed roads in counties, towns, and provinces have also reopened. The national road network is "basically running normally," and 28 provinces have resumed inter-provincial travel, Xinhua reported.

Of 12,028 health and quarantine stations set up on highways, 11,198 have been removed.

This is a huge contrast to February. Just a month ago, much of China was essentially locked down. Many residents weren't allowed to leave their apartment complexes, let alone the city. Some stayed indoors for weeks on end.

Even within cities, public transport was restricted; in Wuhan and other locked-down cities, subway trains were halted and most taxis suspended, with only a small number of government-issued shuttles and cars operating.

[GeneChing]

...while I certainly support gesture, racists will think what they want. It's a global problem now.


More than 200 civil rights groups demand Congress publicly reject coronavirus racism (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/more-200-civil-rights-groups-demand-congress-publicly-reject-coronavirus-n1158116?fbclid=IwAR3P0bwbKHrhpjhSPlzw0nrZqz2G3QEZ NmoehGeoubJFF-PC6VvppJZ0LGg)

https://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2020_11/3268736/200313-judy-chu-ew-1021a_e554f1900567b54dfeda7d53b3e3f0d8.fit-2000w.jpg
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, center, is joined by, from left, House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, as they speak to reporters about the 2020 census on Capitol Hill on March 5, 2020.J. Scott Applewhite / AP

March 13, 2020, 11:36 AM PDT
By Kimmy Yam

More than 200 civil rights groups have demanded that the House and Senate leadership take “tangible steps to counter the hysteria" around the coronavirus, offering the passage of a joint resolution denouncing the racism and xenophobia as one solution.

“The level of disruption COVID-19 has had on everyday life has caught many by surprise and left even more people understandably concerned about their health and the health of their loved ones,” Gregg Orton, national director of the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, told NBC News. “For millions of Asian Americans, there is added anxiety in the way the virus has been racialized. For our country’s leaders to come together and set the tone, that despite the uncertainty of these times, we need to stand united against racism — that is a powerful statement.”

In a letter spearheaded by the council and sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., this week, a number of racist incidents were cited around the country that were fueled by the virus, including two Hmong guests in Indiana who were harassed and barred from staying at a Super 8 motel and then a Days Inn. In a separate incident, a woman wearing a mask in New York was called a “diseased b----.”

The groups also acknowledged that the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus had previously sent a letter to their fellow members of Congress. The caucus had called on the lawmakers to “help us prevent hysteria, ignorant attacks, and racist assaults that have been fueled by misinformation pertaining to the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19)” by only sharing confirmed and verifiable information. The organizations called on the other legislators to take the caucus’ lead.

“In the face of this growing threat, the American people need to hear from leaders such as yourselves, that we must face these circumstances together, rather than allow fear and misinformation to divide us,” the letter reads.

Pelosi has publicly condemned the racism tied to the pandemic on Twitter, writing that “Bigoted statements which spread misinformation and blame Asians and the Asian American community for #coronavirus make us all less safe.” She has also called on McCarthy, who tweeted the term “Chinese coronavirus,” to delete the words and apologize.

McCarthy, however, has responded to criticisms by pointing to outlets that have used the same language. The Asian American Journalists Association released guidelines for responsible reporting in February to guard against “fueling xenophobia and racism that have already emerged since the outbreak.”

Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., the chair of the caucus, says she “commends” the groups for speaking out. “Despite warnings from health experts and government officials” to avoid labeling the virus by country or ethnicity, members of the GOP have continued to do so, Chu said. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., used the term “Wuhan virus” as recently as Thursday.

“It’s been especially appalling to see this rhetoric coming from President Trump and House Republican leader McCarthy, who should be working to bring our country together during this public health crisis rather than stoking xenophobia and fear,” she said. “If Republicans will not listen to the experts, perhaps they can understand the experiences of those impacted.”

On Tuesday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, agreed when questioned by Rep. Lois Frankel, D-Fla., at a House hearing that it was "absolutely wrong and inappropriate" to use the term “Chinese coronavirus.”

While GOP legislators have since continued to identify the disease by country or ethnicity, Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., previously said that the rhetoric could be a possible tactic to distract from Trump’s handling of the pandemic. She believes it’s likely some officials are using China or Asian Americans as scapegoats “versus actually dealing with the problem at hand.”

Kimmy Yam
Kimmy Yam is a reporter for NBC Asian America.

[GeneChing]

3.13.2020
AND THEN THEY CAME AFTER MULAN (http://blog.angryasianman.com/2020/03/and-then-they-came-after-mulan.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR0msifh5rT5-tof8aPEDC9v1q-i4DNyIsHEvnqc57uk24XBxY2JeWJpOqU)
And Other Things to Know From Angry Asian America.

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-esEpSHJVpMQ/Xmxung4pseI/AAAAAAAAPmg/Zmop6k-ndVUUaDQ3gR9TKQ-35sO37x9oACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/toxicmadeinwuhan.jpg

So yeah, this happened.
This Mulan poster, spotted in Pasadena, California, was defaced with graffiti. If you can't make it out, that's a mask spray-painted on her face and the words "TOXIC. MADE IN WUHAN." Yes, I know there are people boycotting this movie because of Liu Yifei's remarks in support of Hong Kong police. This is not about that.

THREADS
Mulan (2020) (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

The risks in going to the gym during the coronavirus pandemic, explained by experts (https://www.vox.com/2020/3/13/21178261/coronavirus-risks-gym-barrys-soulcycle-quarantine)
What gyms should do and are doing to help keep clients safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
By Alex Abad-Santosalex@vox.com Updated Mar 15, 2020, 10:22pm EDT

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UREUjSZ-v_GszU2rJo51AGbMqwU=/0x0:3000x2000/920x613/filters:focal(1453x551:1933x1031):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66499457/968413012.jpg.0.jpg
A pop-up Barry’s bootcamp class. Anna Webber/Getty Images for CMT

Update March 15, 2020: Since this article was published, the coronavirus outbreak has escalated in the US and New York City in particular. Though Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo haven’t ordered gyms to close, both Barry’s and Peloton have closed their studios. And in an email to some of its Flatiron members, fitness center Equinox said one of its patrons had tested positive for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. As the experts we consulted said, spread of the virus makes visits to the gym, and all social interactions, riskier. Follow the guidance of local health and government officials concerning social distancing, even if gyms remain open.

Around 20 minutes into a group boot camp fitness class at the Upper East Side location of boutique workout studio Barry’s Friday morning, each one of us was ushered out of the room, like kids in a fire drill. Our instructor, Michael Pugliese, shooed everyone out while he and the cleaning staff grabbed disinfectant wipes and spray; then they began wiping down the entire sweaty room — from benches, mirrors, weights, and treadmills to the floor.

Six minutes later, we were let back in and allowed to continue with the workout.

The mid-session cleaning break, extra sanitizing wipes and hand sanitizer in each studio, and shortening all classes by 10 minutes to give staff 20 minutes to spray down and clean the room, are just some of the changes Barry’s has implemented in light of the coronavirus pandemic. And according to public health experts, Barry’s intense cleaning is the type of measure all gyms and boutique fitness classes should be taking.

In light of the coronavirus, we’ve learned how to wash our hands for 20 seconds, memorized what percentage of alcohol is necessary in hand sanitizer to kill the virus (at least 60 percent), and analyzed every informational blast — social distancing, canceled events, transmission guidance — released by public health officials.

But while guidelines from health officials are helpful and awareness about the coronavirus is valuable, it’s difficult to figure out which aspects of daily life we should change and which ones we can maintain in order to have some semblance of normalcy in our lives. With all the information out there, it feels as though we are simultaneously being told to brace for the worst and to keep calm, carry on, and try to live our lives as normally as possible.

For the millions of consumers worldwide that have helped make gyms and boutique fitness into a $94 billion industry, according to statistics from the International Health Racquet and Sportsclub Association, it is part of our lives. Fitness is therapy, exercise, and a de-stressor, which is why in these times of uncertainty, it’s a go-to.

Granted, if worse comes to the worst, I fully understand that putting a hold on the gym is a no-brainer. And in the grand scheme of things, clearly, not being able to go to the gym isn’t so dire.

But to get a better understanding of where things stand in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak — barring any further escalation — I asked public health experts and officials specializing in transmission and cleanliness protocol for the best practices for going to the gym. And that includes whether we should be going at all.

Going to the gym means taking precautions like wiping down all your equipment

The CDC and the WHO recommend several basic measures to help prevent the spread of Covid-19:

Wash your hands often for at least 20 seconds.
Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects.
Stay home when you are sick.
Contact a health worker if you have symptoms; fever and a dry cough are most common.
DON’T touch your face.
DON’T travel if you have a fever and cough.
DON’T wear a face mask if you are well.
Guidance may change. Stay informed, and stay safe, with Vox’s guide to Covid-19 (https://www.vox.com/2020/3/5/21162138/vox-guide-to-covid-19-coronavirus).
continued next post

[GeneChing]

Sweat is a constant at gyms and fitness classes. Every piece of equipment you touch has been touched by someone else’s sweat. And it’s even more so when you do the math of how long gyms have held on to their equipment, multiplied by the number of people in and out of a gym in any given hour, afternoon, day, or year.

So is coronavirus-laced sweat a possibility? Can the illness be transmitted through our buckets of sweat?

“As a respiratory virus, sweat isn’t generally a transmission route, though contaminated skin and hands can be,” Dr. Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University, told me over email. “Think more about how you might touch your nose and then touch equipment, or cough on a hand and touch equipment, than about the sweat itself.”

The possibility of the virus living on weights or mats makes the gym a risk for transmission. The precise risk of Covid-19 coronavirus infection from surfaces is not yet known, but gym-goers, SoulCyclers, and Barry’s Bootcampers, should wipe down all the surfaces they’re touching with an approved disinfectant. They should take on that responsibility even if the gym or facility cleans the equipment as well.

“I study MRSA (a bacterium that can survive on surfaces) so I always wipe off equipment both before and after using it because you never know if the person ahead of you did a good job, but now is a good time to be extra careful about thorough cleaning,” Smith told me.

Smith also recommends distancing yourself from fellow gym-goers. This may mean doing something as simple as not going during the gym’s busy hours (usually before and after work), but those hours might be different given the pandemic. It also means no high-fives or handshakes at the gym.

But maintaining the recommended six feet of social distance from others is all but impossible in sold-out group fitness classes where bikes and stations are planted next to each other. Smith says to consider that before booking.

The experts maintain, however, that fitness studios and gyms aren’t any more or less hazardous than any other social setting we might place ourselves in — that is, barring the virus rapidly escalating and dependent on case/transmission rate in your area.

Gyms are not any more risky than “anywhere else where you would be touching things and in somewhat close contact with people — but as the virus is spreading, all of those activities are becoming increasingly risky, especially if you are in a group that is likely to be more severely affected by Covid-19,” Smith said. “I think individuals may want to consider any aspect of how they go out in public during these times, both for themselves and the rest of their community, particularly vulnerable individuals.”

But the most important thing public health experts have stressed over and over applies to everyone and everywhere, including the gym: Stay home if you’re not feeling well.

“The biggest thing right now is to stay home if you’re sick,” Dr. Saskia Popescu, an infection prevention epidemiologist and biodefense researcher, told me. “If you’re well, try and practice social distancing and basic infection control measures. This means don’t go to the gym if you’re sick. If you’re well and want to work out, try to avoid larger group classes, wipe down your equipment with disinfection wipes, before and after use, use hand hygiene frequently, and avoid touching your face.”

Gyms and group fitness studios like Barry’s and SoulCycle are adapting stricter cleaning routines. But some are shutting down for now.

Barry’s decision to require a break mid-class to disinfect the room seems to be the type of “stepping up” that Smith stresses. I also noticed the studio had new sanitizing wipe dispensers, and hand sanitizer in addition to hand soap in the restrooms. Barry’s also said it would cut the number of spots in each class by half beginning Monday, allowing its clients to maintain a safe distance from fellow bootcampers.

A spokesperson for the company told Vox that it would “continue to follow all CDC and Department of Public Health guidelines, and will follow best practices as they are released.”

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/l0UCVBfoMBp9H_fVgn7BRXDP-rA=/0x0:5000x8113/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:5000x8113):format(webp):no_upsca le()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19798054/unnamed__1_.png
Barry’s newsletter to its New York City clients.

SoulCycle, the expansive and ubiquitous spin class company, has also taken measures like removing the hand weight section from its classes, per a statement issued on March 12. Usually, SoulCycle classes involve an “arms” series, in which cyclers take a break from pedaling to perform bicep, tricep, and shoulder exercises. Those are now eliminated. The company also said it, too, was ramping up the availability of disinfecting wipes and hospital-grade cleaning solution. On Friday, SoulCycle sent an email to its riders saying that it would cut class sizes in half — a move that seems to be in line with the guidance of social distancing.

National gyms like Equinox and Crunch have also stepped up efforts, sending emails to clients about hygiene practices and promising to step up cleaning efforts with detailed information as to what they plan to do.

There are also online classes, including Peloton and its vaunted bike. In Beijing, online fitness classes have become trendy as officials there have urged civilians to stay inside and curb their social gatherings during the coronavirus outbreak.

For some gyms and group fitness studios, though, the best practice was shutting down. Chelsea Piers, a fancy gym and fitness facility with outposts in New York City and Connecticut, has closed through March 31, 2020. Rowgatta, a New York City-based fitness class that combines weightlifting and rowing, has temporarily shut down.

“We must do our part to protect our staff and to keep our Athletes safe,” Rowgatta said in an email to its clients. “In a time when there is a lack of clear direction from authorities, we must do what we can to lead and contribute to the wellbeing of the community in which we live.”

Similarly, Barry’s has temporarily shut down international locations in Italy, Sweden, and Norway, and has promised to waive cancellation fees for clients.

In light of these closings, improvements, and cleaning measures being taken, I asked Smith and Popescu what are the most important things gyms should be doing to protect their clients.

“I think they should be stepping up the cleaning they’re doing of all equipment in order to minimize the risk of transmission from weights, machines, mats, and also doorknobs and other surfaces,” Smith said. “We all know that some gym patrons are just terrible at doing this, so gyms should be extra vigilant to do so. Remind clients to spread out as much as possible in fitness classes, and emphasize hand-washing.”

Popescu offered similar advice.

“Gyms should be really reinforcing that people should not be there if they’re sick — both employees and clients — and providing ample opportunity for hand hygiene (reminders are great), and disinfecting wipes for equipment,” Popescu said, explaining that sanitizing wipes and disinfecting really help.

“I also encourage people to really be mindful of not touching their face and take some breaks for hand hygiene,” Popescu added. “If you’re in a fitness class, try to do one with a smaller group of people in a more open space, so you can all have about three to six feet between you. This is a great time to use the fitness apps and home gyms!”

We're near Santa Clara County, one of the nation's largest breakout regions, so most everything is shutting down. Today (https://www.today.com/health/coronavirus-spreads-it-safe-go-gym-t175945) stated "When it comes to healthy younger people who have no symptoms and live in areas where there’s no widespread disease, it’s safe to go to the gym, said Dr. Michael Ison, an infectious disease physician at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago." However this is really ignorant because one of the factors that is causing the spread is that symptoms don't show with young contagious carriers right away. The mission here is not only to not get sick, but to flatten that curve and inhibit the spread.

THREADS
Cleaning Gear (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?39613-Cleaning-Gear)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

...I stand with China on this one.


ASIA MARCH 13, 2020 7:57PM PT
China’s ‘Mulan’ Fans Welcome News Of Release Delay (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/china-mulan-delay-coronavirus-liu-yifei-gong-li-1203534355/)
By REBECCA DAVIS

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/yifei-liu.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1
CREDIT: CHELSEA LAUREN/SHUTTERSTOCK

“Mulan” fans in mainland China on Friday welcomed the news that Disney will postpone the global release of the new live-action blockbuster, happy that they’ll likely now get the chance to see the film in theaters in sync with the rest of the world.

The new “Mulan” was scheduled to release worldwide outside of China, one of Disney’s most crucial overseas markets, on March 27. Chinese cinemas have been closed since late January due to the coronavirus epidemic.

Disney’s potentially costly decision to move ahead without China came despite the firm’s efforts to specifically cater to mainland audiences in its new retelling of the classic Chinese ballad, particularly in the decision to cast popular China-born starlet Liu Yifei as the titular heroine.

Chinese fans took to social media on Friday to express their relief that the film had been pulled — both for health reasons, and out of fears of piracy and spoilers as the last ones to get a theatrical release.

“Thank god!!!! Now I won’t be spoiled,” said one poster to China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform. Another enthused: “Finally they’ve pulled it! They should’ve done so long ago. Now everyone can watch it at the same time together.”

Most wrote of their support for the decision to prioritize health concerns. “Safety first! We’ll pull out the red carpet for the film at a better time,” wrote one commenter, adding: “Maybe now you can do the premiere in China?” The film had its initial U.S. debut in Hollywood on March 9.

By Friday evening, the Weibo hashtag “Mulan Global Release Cancelled” had been viewed 630 million times.

Disney released all four of its 2019 live action remakes in the mainland last year. China was the highest grossing overseas territory for October’s “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” ($48.8 million) and July’s “The Lion King” ($120 million), and the second largest foreign market for May’s “Aladdin” ($112 million) and March’s “Dumbo” ($21.9 million).

Directed by New Zealand’s Niki Caro, “Mulan” is most expensive live-action feature to ever be helmed by a woman, with a budget of at least $200 million. It will obviously be seeking to earn big in China, one of the world’s most censorious nations where these days, it’s hard for any cultural phenomenon to sidestep t***** politics.

Earlier, the film had come under fire after Liu publicly expressed support across all her social media channels for the Hong Kong police force accused of excessive violence in attempts to quell pro-democracy protests there, leading for some to call for a boycott of the title.

More recently, she’s come under fire on mainland social media from Chinese nationalist trolls who have criticized local fans for identifying with and taking pride in a star who technically gave up her Chinese nationality to gain a U.S. passport.

“Liu Yifei is too miserable — beyond the Great Firewall [of internet censorship] the pro-Hong Kongers smear her, and within the Great Firewall the nationalists smear her,” joked one Weibo commenter.

Some former detractors gave her credit, however, for openly saying on her promotional tour that she hails from Wuhan, the city at the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic where the disease originated.

“She’s the only one who dares to say in front of the world media that she’s a Wuhan native, so I’m a fan of her. Domestically right now, how many from Wuhan would dare openly admit that’s where they’re from?” read one post. People from Wuhan have been subject to extreme stigma since the start of the virus. Particularly in the early, panic-striken days of the epidemic, many ended up outcasts shunned by their peers and neighbors, kept out of hotels and even specially tracked and registered by the authorities — even in other parts of the country.

Beyond “Mulan,” a growing list of other films have recently canceled their scheduled debuts due to coronavirus concerns, including Disney’s “New Mutants” and “Antlers,” Paramount’s “A Quiet Place 2” and “The Love Birds,” and Universal Studios’ “Fast & Furious 9.”

“Mulan” marks the third film starring Chinese superstar Gong Li to be pulled in almost as many months, after Lou Ye’s “Saturday Fiction” — which debuted at Venice — was pulled from its expected Chinese theatrical release in December, presumably for censorship reasons, and Peter Chan’s highly anticipated volleyball film “Leap” cancelled its Chinese new year sortie just as the coronavirus situation was heating up.

But many Chinese fans say that neither the virus nor the delay will dampen their enthusiasm for Mulan. “A good meal won’t spoil just because it’s served a bit late. A good film will always catch the world’s attention, whenever it comes out,” one wrote online.

THREADS
Mulan (2020) (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

...and I don't quite agree with it, but it's relevant to our forum here.


Culture China 22:32, 20-Feb-2020
Tai Chi, Baduanjin, Chinese-style exercises help you fight coronavirus (https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-02-20/Tai-Chi-Baduanjin-Chinese-style-exercises-help-you-fight-coronavirus-Of4VQCNbtS/index.html)
By Wu Yan

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3049544e356b7a4e776b544f7845444d7949444f31457a6333 566d54/img/8519713db998487ea04c61965d562d7f/8519713db998487ea04c61965d562d7f.jpg

Chinese-style exercises such as Tai Chi and Baduanjin have become popular among patients during the novel coronavirus outbreak, and have been recommended by medical experts to ordinary people to improve physical strength.

Photos and videos of doctors leading patients with mild symptoms to practice Tai Chi and Baduanjin in makeshift hospitals in Wuhan have gone viral on social media recently. Experts say the exercises are good for patients' recovery and reducing their anxiety.

What's so good about Tai Chi and Baduanjin?

Developed from ancient Chinese philosophies and breathing techniques, Tai Chi is a system of meditative physical exercise. Tai Chi is best known as a martial art which has developed into many genres over the centuries.

In 1956, the then-national sports authority introduced 24-Form Tai Chi. Adapted from traditional Yang-style Tai Chi but simplified and standardized, 24-Form Tai Chi is widely adopted by many nowadays for relaxation and health.

"In China, a great way (to strengthen the body) is Tai Chi," renowned Chinese respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan said during an interview, "When doing Tai Chi, the practitioner is in a half-squatting posture. Although the static movement does not have significant effect on tachypnea (rapid breathing), it is good for training muscles."

He said that he had a dozen patients whose lung function level was only 20 to 30 percent of that of a normal person. But by continuing to take medicine, walking and practicing Tai Chi, the patients' movement was greatly enhanced and some were even able to climb a mountain.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3049544e356b7a4e776b544f7845444d7949444f31457a6333 566d54/img/5e39ff9ef6134a289661f2e0f81d9d32/5e39ff9ef6134a289661f2e0f81d9d32.png
A doctor leads patients of mild symptoms in a Tai Chi practice in a makeshift hospital in Wuhan, Hubei Province. /People's Daily

Similar to Tai Chi in that it emphasizes breathing, Baduanjin, or Eight-Section Brocade, refers to eight sections of movements performed repetitively and nonstop, reminiscent of brocade weaving.

Originating from the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), Baduanjin traditionally contains both a standing and seated set of eight sections of movements each, but has also been expanded to twelve-section movements and sixteen-section movements.

In 2003, the General Administration of Sport of China re-choreographed the standing version of the aerobic exercise, and promoted it as one of eight health qigongs nationwide. Featuring slow movement and low intensity, Bajuanjin is suitable for all ages.

For epidemic prevention and control, people are currently being advised to stay at home.

To help people strengthen the body and develop a healthy lifestyle, the General Administration of Sport of China recently recommended a list of indoor exercises. Tai Chi, Baduanjin and other traditional Chinese-style exercises are on the list.

"The key is perseverance. It's better to practice every day," Zhang Boli, general counsel to Wuhan's Dahuashan makeshift hospital and president of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, told China Sports Daily.

He also suggested ordinary people practice according to one's abilities and advance gradually in due order.

(Cover image: A man practices Tai Chi. /VCG)


THREADS
Tai Chi as medicine (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?50553-Tai-Chi-as-medicine)
Baduanjin] (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56712-Baduanjin-(8-section-brocade))
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

We are shutting down. :(


Bay Area authorities place strictest order in country: ‘Shelter in place,’ only essential businesses open in 6 counties (https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Bay-Area-must-shelter-in-place-Only-15135014.php)
Photo of Erin Allday
Erin Allday March 16, 2020 Updated: March 16, 2020 1:19 p.m.

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/11/10/41/19171434/9/gallery_xlarge.jpg

The San Francisco Chronicle has lifted the paywall on our coverage of this developing story to provide critical information to our community. To support our journalists' work, consider a digital subscription.

Six Bay Area counties announced a “shelter in place” order for all residents on Monday — the strictest measure of its kind in the country — directing everyone to stay inside their homes and away from others as much as possible for the next three weeks as public health officials desperately try to curb the rapid spread of coronavirus across the region.

The directive begins at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday and involves San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda counties — a combined population of more than 6.7 million. It is to stay in place until at least April 7. Three other Bay Area counties — Sonoma, Solano and Napa — were not immediately included.

The order falls just short of a full lockdown, which would forbid people from leaving their homes without explicit permission, and it wasn’t immediately clear how, or to what degree, it would be enforced. The order calls for the sheriff or chief of police to “ensure compliance.” In Italy and other places that have instituted lockdowns, travel outside the home has been restricted without permission and police have been ordering people back home if they don’t have a reason to be in public.

“The scientific evidence shows that at this stage of the (coronavirus) emergency, it is essential to slow virus transmission as much as possible to protect the most vulnerable and to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed,” the order states. “One proven way to slow the transmission is to limit interactions among people to the greatest extent practicable.”

The Bay Area orders are the most restrictive yet in the U.S. The region is the first to direct people to stay at home as much as possible and avoid even small social interactions.

In Washington state — where a Seattle-area outbreak has infected more than 400 and killed 37 — public health officials on Monday announced that bars, restaurants, clubs, gyms and other indoor social or recreational venues be closed until March 31. The state also banned all gatherings of 50 or more people. But the restrictions stopped short of advising people to shelter in place and did not ban non-essential travel.

In the six Bay Area counties, non-essential gatherings of any size are now banned, along with non-essential travel “on foot, bicycle, scooter, automobile or public transit.” People may travel for shopping for necessary supplies, accessing health care, and providing aid to family and friends who need assistance, and for non-residents, returning to their home outside the Bay Area. Airports, taxis, and public transit — including BART — will remain operational, but only for essential travel and people are expected to keep six feet apart when possible.

People in the six counties will still be able to go shopping for items such as food and household supplies, and seek medical care. They will be able to go outside for walks or exercise as long as they keep six feet away from anyone they don’t already live with. People who are homeless are exempt from the order but encouraged to find shelter.

People who are older or have underlying health problems are being told to stay inside at all times except for health care under the new directive. They should ask someone to shop for them if they are able.

The order calls for all “routine medical appointments” and elective procedures to be canceled or rescheduled. “To the extent possible, all health care visits that are not canceled or rescheduled should be done remotely,” the order states.

Everyone is to work from home, or stop working, unless they provide an essential service, which includes health care workers; police, fire and other emergency responders; and utility providers such as electricians, plumbers, and sanitation workers.

Grocery stores and pharmacies will remain open, and restaurants may stay open to provide takeout food only. Also staying open: veterinary services, gas stations and auto repair shops, hardware and other home supply stores, banks and laundry services. Businesses that remain open are encouraged to keep both employees and customers six feet apart, including while standing in line. But there are no specific limitations on the number of people allowed inside.

As Bay Area deals with the Coronavirus there are fewer people out in the city and in the streets making the Bay Area look and sound different as the population practices social distancing.
Video: San Francisco Chronicle
Daycare centers may stay open, but children must be kept in groups no larger than 12, and they must stay with the same group of children every day.

The Bay Area restrictions came as the White House on Monday urged all older Americans to stay home and everyone to avoid crowds and eating out at restaurants.

Among the new recommendations from President Donald Trump and his coronavirus task force: Over the next 15 days, Americans should not gather in groups of more than 10 people, schooling should be at home and discretionary travel and social visits should be avoided. If anyone in a household tests positive for the virus, everyone who lives there should stay home.

The orders come as cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, climb rapidly around the region. The Bay Area has reported 251 cases since the outbreak began — but more than half of those cases were in the past four days alone. And national testing shortfalls means that there are certainly many more hundreds and possibly thousands of cases in the region that have not been diagnosed, infectious disease experts say.

Increasingly aggressive responses — such as limiting large gatherings and closing schools — have not yet slowed down the spread of disease, and public health officials agreed over the weekend that much more restrictive tactics were needed to force people apart. Authorities fear that regional hospitals could be overwhelmed by a crush of seriously ill patients if the virus is allowed to keep spreading as it has been.

The Bay Area announcement comes just a day after Gov. Gavin Newsom advised that all bars in the state be closed, and that restaurants reduce capacity. Several states have announced closures of bars, restaurants and entertainment venues, and instituted curfews. Also on Sunday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged that all gatherings of 50 or people or more be stopped nationwide — the agency’s strongest advisory so far. As of Monday morning, U.S. cases had topped 4,000, but the actual number of infected people is far higher.

Staff writers J.K. Dineen and Joaquin Palomino contributed to this report. The Associated Press also contributed.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday

Photo of Erin Allday
Erin Allday
Follow Erin on:
https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/
erinallday
Erin Allday is a health reporter who writes about infectious diseases, stem cells, neuroscience and consumer health topics like fitness and nutrition. She’s been on the health beat since 2006 (minus a nine-month stint covering Mayor Gavin Newsom). Before joining The Chronicle, Erin worked at newspapers all over the Bay Area and covered a little of everything, including business and technology, city government, and education. She was part of a reporting team that won a Polk Award for regional reporting in 2005, for a series of stories on outsourcing jobs from Santa Rosa to Penang, Malaysia. Erin started her journalism career at the Daily Californian student newspaper and many years later still calls Berkeley her home.

[GeneChing]

As of Tuesday March 17, the San Francisco Bay Area has issued a ‘Shelter in Place’ order closing all non-essential businesses until April 7. This affects the Kung Fu Tai Chi Headquarters in Tiger Claw’s California branch. We will still be telecommuting however response will be limited. Kung Fu Tai Chi subscriptions are fulfilled through MartialArtSmart.com so please direct any subscription questions there.

We appreciate your continued support and understanding during this global crisis. Please stay healthy everyone.

Gene Ching
Publisher, Kung Fu Tai Chi & KungFuMagazine.com

[GeneChing]

'The Matrix' Reboot Shuts Down Production Due to Coronavirus Crisis (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/matrix-reboot-shuts-down-production-due-coronavirus-crisis-1284857)
MARCH 16, 2020 10:58AM by Borys Kit

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/768x433/2019/08/the_matrix_still_0.jpg
'The Matrix' (1999) | Courtesy of Photofest

The movie was shooting in San Francisco but moved to Berlin in early March for the completion of its shoot.
Warner Bros. Pictures’ reboot of The Matrix has been shut down until further notice, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.

The movie, currently titled The Matrix 4, was shooting in San Francisco but moved to Berlin in early March for the completion of its shoot.

No shooting was underway but the production was in prep mode.

The move follows the studio’s decision earlier Monday to postpone the start of production on the latest chapter of J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts. That shoot was set to begin Monday in London.

Warner Bros. also paused production on The Batman, also shooting in London. That movie had been seven weeks into its shoot.

The major studios began pausing their major productions late last week as a response to the growing pandemic. On Friday, Disney suspended all live-action productions, including The Little Mermaid and Marvel Studios' Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Sony paused preproduction on the action comedy The Man From Toronto on Saturday, while Netflix has put Red Notice on hiatus and Blumhouse has hit the brakes on its thriller, Vengeance, which is being directed by B.J. Novak.

Lana Wachowski is directing The Matrix 4, which reunites Keanu Reeves and Carrie Anne-Moss and also has Yahya Abdul-Mateen II on its roll call. The pic is scheduled for release on May 21, 2021, but it is unclear whether the shutdown will change that.

THREADS
Matrix 4 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70161-Matrix-4)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

BOX OFFICE MARCH 17, 2020 10:07AM PT
‘Black Widow’ Release Pulled Amid Coronavirus Pandemic (https://variety.com/2020/film/box-office/black-widow-release-coronavirus-1203532996/)
By REBECCA RUBIN
News Editor, Online
@https://twitter.com/rebeccaarubin

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/black-widow-scarjo.jpg?w=937&h=527&crop=1
CREDIT: COURTESY OF MARVEL

Disney’s “Black Widow” is the latest tentpole to shift its release date because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Marvel superhero adventure, starring Scarlett Johansson, was slated to hit theaters May 1. The studio also pulled “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” the Dev Patel-led drama from its Searchlight banner, and Amy Adams’ “The Woman in the Window,” a 20th Century title, which were supposed to debut May 8 and April 15, respectively. It’s unclear when any of the films will be released.

Disney has already delayed “Mulan,” “The New Mutunts” and “Antlers,” but held off on postponing “Black Widow” in hopes that it wouldn’t have to scrap another big film. But the move was inevitable since movie theaters in multiple states, including New York, New Jersey Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington, have been ordered to close. Only AMC Theatres has given a timeline on how long its locations might be closed, estimating six to 12 weeks for venues nationwide.

Multiple studios have pulled movies in wake of coronavirus, including Universal’s “Fast & Furious “entry “F9,” MGM’s James Bond installment “No Time to Die” and Paramount’s “A Quiet Place 2.”

Theaters across North America aren’t entirely shuttered yet, but exhibitors expect that could happen soon. Multiplexes in China, Japan, Italy and other areas greatly impacted by the novel virus have seen mass closures, resulting in billions of dollars in lost revenues. On Sunday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that public gatherings involving more than 50 people be called off for the next eight weeks.

While an exact budget for “Black Widow” has not been revealed, Marvel movies typically cost somewhere in between $150 million and $200 million. In addition to Johansson, “Black Widow” also stars Florence Pugh, David Harbour, O-T ***benle, William Hurt, Ray Winstone, and Rachel Weisz. It was directed by Cate Shortland, and follows Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff in the events after “Captain America: Civil War.”

THREADS
Black Widow (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70643-Black-Widow)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

MAR. 16, 2020
Professional Wrestling Without an Audience Is Avant-garde Theater (https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/wwe-match-john-cena-wyatt-without-audience.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s1&utm_campaign=vulture&fbclid=IwAR2H0_E0XXM15-lrHZ_homXNzfVBo0--A51smXWUF3tEwzF8S9sOlvGjyB0)
By Jackson McHenry@McHenryJD

https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2020/03/16/16-wwe-smackdown-new.w330.h330.2x.jpg
If a wrestler falls with no one watching, do they still make a sound? Photo: WWE/YouTube

As anyone who is into the WWE or has watched at least five episodes of Netflix’s GLOW knows, professional wrestling is mostly about playing your character to the audience. So, in this time of coronavirus-induced social distancing, what happens when there’s no audience? Enjoy this WWE clip below, in which Bray Wyatt talks smack to John Cena with extreme intensity in front of rows and rows of empty chairs. You may think that this is one of those viral video edits where people add in forced silences, or perhaps a Samuel Beckett drama of the absurd, forcing all the artificiality of the format to the fore. This is about stripping everything down to its barest essentials, revealing what is primal and true, and also (like a lot of edgy theater) there are two chairs behind them on the set just sitting around.



WWE
✔
@WWE
"At #WrestleMania, it's going to be a slaughter. You just don't know it yet."#SmackDown @WWEBrayWyatt @JohnCena

Embedded video (https://twitter.com/WWE/status/1238646082080509953?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5 Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1238646082080509953&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vulture.com%2F2020%2F03% 2Fwwe-match-john-cena-wyatt-without-audience.html)
5,743
7:00 PM - Mar 13, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,215 people are talking about this
Watch the way Cena maintains his hard stare even as you can clearly hear Wyatt’s inhales and exhales. Observe the absolute seriousness of the camerawork, the way the segment ends with a hyper high-energy series of cuts to a laughing clown(?). Bring these performances to Broadway, once it reopens. Let John Cena do Waiting for Godot!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj2Bvp3He1M&feature=emb_logo

If that sole clip isn’t enough for you, there’s so much more where it came from in the footage from March 13’s WWE SmackDown. All the pomp and circumstance and ceremony go on, but there’s something missing, in an ineffable but central way. It’s the TV equivalent of eating an elaborate meal that’s been prepared without salt. Anyway, everyone involved deserves (heavily sanitized) acting trophies for their dedication to the bit.

THREADS
Professional Wrestling (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?49901-Professional-Wrestling)
covid-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Oh man, srsly? :mad:



A White House official called coronavirus the 'Kung-Flu' to an Asian-American reporter's face (https://www.businessinsider.com/reporter-says-trump-official-called-coronavirus-the-kung-flu-2020-3?utm_campaign=sf-bi-main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&fbclid=IwAR2TpYDoh2FO-LhzBlaqyWq67qGOKchQCatqs0Jv-LlTPMkqy5LYsVqrnLs&fbclid=IwAR00_ajZ7RqIFZVADQfKH4GUj6Qi_zsJjv5MWBNdg YeBd9ENNZSALtKihdw)
John Haltiwanger 3 hours ago

https://i.insider.com/5e70fa4ac4854061c61ea974?width=2400&format=jpeg&auto=webp
Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, March 12, 2020, in Washington. AP Photo/Evan Vucci
An Asian-American reporter, Weijia Jiang, on Tuesday said that a White House official called the novel coronavirus "Kung-Flu" to her face.

President Donald Trump has faced criticism for referring to coronavirus as a "Chinese Virus" and "foreign virus."

The director of the CDC earlier this month said it is "absolutely wrong and inappropriate" to call COVID-19 the "Chinese coronavirus."

A White House official called the novel coronavirus the "Kung-Flu" to CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang's face, the journalist tweeted on Tuesday.

"This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the "Kung-Flu" to my face. Makes me wonder what they're calling it behind my back," Jiang said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.



Weijia Jiang
✔
@weijia (https://twitter.com/weijia/status/1239923246801334283)
This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the “Kung-Flu” to my face. Makes me wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.

164K
7:35 AM - Mar 17, 2020 · Washington, DC
Twitter Ads info and privacy
59K people are talking about this
The novel coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, and causes the disease COVID-19, is a pandemic that has spread to 145 countries.

Some Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have sought to portray coronavirus as a foreign illness that is China's fault. On Thursday, Trump called coronavirus a "Chinese Virus" in a tweet. In an Oval Office address last Wednesday announcing travel restrictions on Europe, Trump referred to coronavirus as a "foreign virus."

Chinese officials condemned Trump's Thursday-night tweet. "The US should first take care of its own matters," said Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry, NBC News reported.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged against using such phrasing or discriminating against Chinese people. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, earlier this month said it is "absolutely wrong and inappropriate" to call COVID-19 the "Chinese coronavirus."

Moreover, the CDC's website states: "People in the U.S. may be worried or anxious about friends and relatives who are living in or visiting areas where COVID-19 is spreading. Some people are worried about the disease. Fear and anxiety can lead to social stigma, for example, towards Chinese or other Asian Americans or people who were in quarantine...Stigma hurts everyone by creating more fear or anger towards ordinary people instead of the disease that is causing the problem."

China has faced criticism over efforts to suppress information over the scale out the coronavirus outbreak within its borders, but it's also taken aggressive measures that appear to have slowed the rate of new infections in the country.

Meanwhile, the US government is lagging behind much of the world in terms of testing for the novel coronavirus, and therefore does not have a full picture of the extent of the outbreak across the country.

[GeneChing]

Sheltering in place. READ 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com Championship – Corona-Postponed (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/ezine/article.php?article=1543) by Gene Ching

http://www.kungfumagazine.com/admin/site_images/KungfuMagazine/upload/1250_handshake.gif

THREADS
TCEC2020 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71553-2020-Tiger-Claw-Elite-Championships-amp-KUNG-FU-TAI-CHI-DAY-May-16-17-San-Jose-CA)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[robertdreeben]

I caught a weird illness just prior to the holidays and many people I know - all across the U.S. - caught similar bugs. I don't think it was related to this, but plague is one of the horsemen of the apocalypse...

Upon reflection, in the first week of February, myself and many of my co-workers [LEO's] also came down with the same respiratory illness with all the classic symptoms of covid 19, and it was bad. Worse than anything I had in years. Now, normally I never get sick, Always get the flu shot and never come down with the flu. On a typical day as an emergency responder- occupational hazards have me exposed to numerous pathogens on a regular. This includes: stepping into apartments that have not been cleaned in 20 plus years where the resident has passed away and is in different states of decomposition. Putting my hands on emotionally disturbed individuals who declare they're "Not going", may be bloody, spitting while they're screaming..all without gloves or masks, because there is just no time to put them on. And then being sequestered in the local hospitals and "Buses" [ambulances] with perps, victims, aided's and EDP's. That being said, I'm not afraid of cooties. I also have severe OCD when it comes to germs, dust, and people talking over my food and chewing with their mouths open. So all my life I have always been disinfecting with wipes and hand washing. I routinely wipe items down that come from the supermarket and go into the fridge. That includes disinfecting my handcuffs whenever they have been affixed to a client's wrists. My sneaking suspicion is that I had the virus and got over it along with a whole bunch of us out here. So far, 4 co-workers at the precinct have tested positive in the last week and I was exposed to all of them. Time will tell if I'm right. Our work directive is to show up, even if you have been exposed and don't go sick unless you get symptoms. Anyway here are my thoughts and some personal hacks for this world war 3 and the new great depression that we now face:

-Sold out of toilet paper, really? Go to Amazon and get a bidet attachment for your toilet and you'll hardly use any paper. Have had one for years, its life-changing like finding Jesus. I always preach the gospel of the Bidet. And it will cure your external hemorrhoids

-My go-to immune boosters: Medicinal mushrooms from "Host Defence" [Paul Stamets company. Look him up if you don't know who he is], Monolauaurin from Natural Cure labs and finally, a teaspoon of medical-grade Manuka Honey. I take these every day along with a bunch of other stuff for different things.

-Use a tongue scraper after brushing your teeth. Your tongue holds bacteria and you can't brush it off sufficiently. The more you purify the less you'll have to detoxify. By an air purifier for your home along with a water filter.

-Soak your feet every time you shower. Plug the drain and fill the tub with Epsom salts while you are showering. The therapeutic effects are far-reaching.

-Tape your mouth shut with surgical tape when you go to sleep to prevent mouth breathing. Look up the benefits of nose breathing and mouth taping.

-Benefiber combined with Metamucil. Drink it down every day before dinner.

-When you get up in the morning immediately drink 24 oz's of water before you eat or drink anything else. You'll go numero dose 3 or 4 times before you leave the house.

So yeah we all still have our kung fu but dam, I like to go to the gym and do my resistance training. When these restrictions locked in here in NY I went shopping on the internet looking for adjustable dumbells to replicate my routine. All sold out. I think I found one of the last stock from Xmark 50 lb adjustable dumbells. They do the trick along with some rubber fitness bands. Social distancing sucks! Yeah, yeah "Stop the spread", I get it. However, it goes against the social nature of human beings who want to hug, kiss and be stroked. This communal prayer and fasting is not forever. It serves to remind all people to count their blessings, fortify and reinforce their mind, body, and spirit. Along with speeding the up the FDA, drug companies and all these goddam alarmists who dick around taking too long to bring cures and vaccines to market. As a cop having faced death several times in my career this is my mantra: I live in faith, not in fear. I live in peace, not in panic. God speed to the world in winning this war!

[GeneChing]

Due to the pandemic (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia), TC Media Intl was furloughed and for the first time in the history of our department, we were unable to meet the submission deadline for this issue. This is a novel situation so I do not know how this will impact production until we reopen however the SUMMER 2020 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71773-Summmer-2020) issue will be delayed.

Stay Strong & Healthy everyone. Be Well.

[GeneChing]

May 6, 2020 2:31am PT
‘Better Days’ Dominant at Closed Door Edition of Hong Kong Film Awards (https://variety.com/2020/film/asia/better-days-hong-kong-film-awards-coronavirus-1234599252/)
By Vivienne Chow

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/better-days-201914137_1-res-cr.jpg?w=600
Goodfellas Pictures, Fat Kids Production

Chinese romantic crime drama “Better Days” directed by Hong Kong’s Derek Tsang, scooped eight awards at this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards, including best film, best director, best screenplay and best actress. Critically acclaimed elderly gay drama “Suk Suk” took the best actor and best supporting actress awards, organizers announced on Wednesday afternoon.

Winners, however, were unable to give acceptance speeches on stage as the awards ceremony was cancelled due to the coronavirus epidemic. The results were announced instead via a 25-minute live streaming event hosted by awards chairman Derek Yee.

Dressed in black tie, Yee appeared to be sitting in a dimly lit VIP cinema among the awards statuettes, yet to be presented to the recipients. He said despite the cancellation of the star-studded awards ceremony, organizers kept the polling going and received 1,675 votes from industry practitioners, about 57% of registered voters.

“Better Days” was yanked by mainland authorities from the Berlinale last year, but later became a box office sensation. It also earned awards for acting star Zhou Dongyu and China pop sensation Jackson Yee, and for best original film song for “Fly,” written by Ellen Joyce Loo, the Hong Kong singer-songwriter who died of suicide in 2018, age 32.

Action drama “Ip Man 4: The Finale” emerged as the biggest winner of craft awards, with prizes for film editing, sound design and Yuen Wo-ping’s action choreography.

2020 Hong Kong Film Awards Winners
Best Film
“Better Days” Produced by: Jojo Yuet-chun Hui

Best Director
Derek Kwok-cheung Tsang (“Better Days”)

Best Actor
Tai Bo (“Suk Suk”)

Best Actress
Zhou Dongyu (“Better Days”)

Best Screenplay
Lam Wing Sum, Li Yuan, Xu Yimeng (“Better Days”)

Best New Performer
Jackson Yee (“Better Days”)

Best New Director
Norris Wong Yee Lam (“My Prince Edward”)

Best Costume & Makeup Design
Dora Ng (“Better Days”)

Best Art Direction
Cheung Siu Hong (“***ara”)

Best Film Editing
Cheung Ka Fai (“Ip Man 4: The Finale”)

Best Cinematography
Yu Jing Pin (“Better Days”)

Best Supporting Actor
Cheung Tat Ming (“i’m livin’ it”)

Best Supporting Actress
Patra Au Ga Man (“Suk Suk”)

Best Action Choreography
Yuen Wo Ping (“Ip Man 4: The Finale”)

Best Visual Effects
Yee Kwok Leung, Ma Siu Fu, Leung Wai Man, Ho Man Lok (“The White Storm 2: Drug Lords”)

Best Sound Design
Lee Yiu Keung George, Yiu Chun Hin (“Ip Man 4: The Finale”)

Best Original Film Song
“Fly” (from “Better Days”). Composer: Ellen Joyce Loo. Lyrics: Ellen Joyce Loo, Wu Qing Feng. Vocal artist: Yoyo Sham.

Best Original Film Score
Eman Lam (“My Prince Edward”)

Best Asian Chinese-Language Film
“An Elephant Sitting Still”

THREADS
HKFA (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65254-Hong-Kong-Film-Awards)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Ip Man 4 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69747-Ip-Man-4-The-Finale)

[GeneChing]

Outdoor recreation (https://covid19.ca.gov/stay-home-except-for-essential-needs/#top)

Can I still exercise? Take my kids to the park for fresh air? Take a walk around the block?
It’s okay to go outside to go for a walk, to exercise, and participate in healthy activities as long as you maintain a safe physical distance of six feet and gather only with members of your household. Below is a list of some outdoor recreational activities.

*Parks may be closed to help slow the spread of the virus. Check with local officials about park closures in your area. Californians should not travel significant distances and should stay close to home.

...

Soft Martial Arts – Tai Chi, Chi Kung (not in groups)

THREADS
Soft power (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?39376-Soft-power)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYEMrPGU4AARbD8?format=jpg&name=medium

THREADS
2020 Tiger Claw Elite Championships & KUNG FU TAI CHI DAY, May 16-17, San Jose CA (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71553-2020-Tiger-Claw-Elite-Championships-amp-KUNG-FU-TAI-CHI-DAY-May-16-17-San-Jose-CA)
COVID-19 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
WildAid Tiger Claw Champion (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57416-WildAid-Tiger-Claw-Champion)
The Ku Yu-Cheung Bak Sil Lum Championship (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70634-The-Ku-Yu-Cheung-Bak-Sil-Lum-Championship)
Songshan Shaolin Champion (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?60021-Songshan-Shaolin-Champion)
IWSD Grand Champions (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71741-IWSD-Grand-Champions)
Tiger Claw Heavy Guandao Championship (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71742-The-Tiger-Claw-Heavy-Guandao-Championship)

[mickey]

Greetings,

I know it has been a while.

I am here to share the finding that many who were taken down as a result of this virus had very low potassium levels. This was discovered in China.

This past September, I came down with something that may have been from the corona family. I had vertigo, vomiting, diarrhea and nasal/bronchial congestion. The only thing that pulled me together was pineapple, which has potassium. I spoke with another coworker and found out that he and six others were sick with the identical symptoms. He managed to pull himself together with a banana, another potassium containing fruit.

Do your research on this.

mickey

[GeneChing]

Chinese Martial Arts in the News: May 22, 2020 – Epidemic, Closure and The Loss of Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine (https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2020/05/21/chinese-martial-arts-in-the-news-may-22-2020-epidemic-closure-and-the-loss-of-kung-fu-tai-chi-magazine/)

Introduction
It has been way too long since our last news update. We are fortunate to have had such a rich series of guest posts exploring the ways that COVID-19 has impacted both our personal training and the field of Martial Arts Studies. That series has not yet concluded, but I thought that it might be a nice change of page to get caught up with the news. For new readers, this is a semi-regular feature here at Kung Fu Tea in which we review media stories that mention the traditional fighting arts. In addition to discussing important events, this column also considers how the Asian hand combat systems are portrayed in the mainstream media. As one might expect, many of the martial arts stories published over the last month centered on the global disruption of the novel coronavirus. Still, it is fascinating to note the wide variety of ways that it is being discussed with reference to the martial arts.
While we try to summarize the major stories over the last month, there is always a chance that we may have missed something. If you are aware of an important news event relating to the TCMA, drop a link in the comments section below. If you know of a developing story that should be covered in the future feel free to send me an email.

https://chinesemartialstudies.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/5010_kfm201703-junecover.jpg

The Impact of COVID-19 on the Chinese Martial Arts
Calculating the cost of a catastrophe is never easy. In the case of the TCMA these losses can be seen in the slow attrition of the schools, institutions and infrastructure that support our community. Perhaps the greatest of these institutional losses has been the closure of Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine. The entire magazine industry has been in decline for decades, but in this case the current epidemic was the final straw. Gene Ching, the magazine’s former publisher (and before that editor), has been an important friends to the growing field of Martial Arts Studies and I have had the pleasure to work with him on several small projects over the years. This must have been a devastating blow for him and the entire production team. At the same time, Kung Fu Tai Chi served as an important unifying voice in an area so diverse and riven with factionalism that simply keeping up with current developments is a real challenge.
Newsstand martial arts magazine had a profound impact on me as I grew up in a small, relatively isolated, town. They created an image of martial practice that was almost intoxicating to my young and impressionable mind. The loss of KFTC Magazine feels like losing another slice of my younger self. All created things must end, and it has been a good 28 year run.

COVID-19 is not only impacting the martial arts in North America. While Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Peoples Republic of China seem to have come out on the other side of their respective curves, the effects of the pandemic on their economies, and martial arts communities, continues to be dire. Particularly interesting was an article in Bloomberg titled “Hong Kong’s Economic Crisis Just Keeps Getting Worse,” which opens and closes with the struggles of one of the city’s many Wing Chun schools. Of course, the ongoing civil unrest in Hong Kong adds an extra hurdle for that city’s economy.
“Passing on this cultural touchstone to the next generation is proving to be Lam [Shu-shing]’s biggest challenge yet as the number of students has dwindled to a handful. “This is the toughest moment in the past 40 years that I am teaching Kung Fu,” said Lam, who at almost 70 had to give up his gym when he couldn’t afford the rent. “I don’t see any improvement in Hong Kong any time soon.”

As in North America, some Chinese schools have found new opportunities as they continue to negotiate long-term shutdowns. I found a fun photo essay in the China Daily titled “Martial arts master turns to online classes for global students.” The physical and highly personal nature of instruction has made the martial arts sector resistant to any sort of consolidation (something that we have seen in other areas of the fitness industry). One wonders how resilient the new networks of students and teachers being formed now will prove to be, and whether they might be a harbinger of change in the future.

“Martial arts master Yu Danqiu is teaching apprentices around the world online after his club was closed by the COVID-19 outbreak. On May 9, Yu, chairman of the Ming He Quan, or the Calling Crane Fist Research Association of the Fujian Martial Arts association in Jianxindongling village of Cangshan district, in Fuzhou, East China’s Fujian province, taught fist forms remotely to apprentices from five countries, including Russia, Australia, and the United Kingdom.”
continued next post

[GeneChing]

Of particular interest to me has been the differences and similarities in how universities, on the one hand, and martial arts schools, on the other, have handled the migration to an online format. To be entirely honest, I am not sure how successful this experiment has been on he academic side. Chronic absenteeism and levels of rock-bottom morale suggesting actual depression have left many high-school and college instructors struggling to connect with their students. I have seen some great on-line teaching happen in traditional martial arts venues, but this is also a crowd that generally self-selects. Still, it is always fascinating to see these two world coming together as happened recently when the Taijiquan classes sponsored by Miami University’s Confucius Institute were forced to turn to on-line grading for their students’ Duanwei advancement.

“WA martial arts business owner willing to go to jail to stay open.” While most news stories featured discussions of the move to on-line teaching, the previous headline reminds us that a not insignfigant number of schools have refused to take this rout. In the last month there have been several stories of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu schools that have refused to close their doors in defiance of state and local regulations. One of these is the Battleground Martial Arts Academy in Battleground Washington.
“Rodeman says he disinfects the space on a daily basis, and does everything to maintain a clean environment. But he also noted that his business doesn’t really fit into the phased reopening plan, which left him with few options.
“A law enforcement officer came to my door, handed me a paper that says I can’t even reopen until phase four. I said, ‘Even at phase four, I’m still not legally able to practice jujitsu in here.’”
“So I decided to say, I can’t agree to that, I can’t follow,” he said. “I could be looking at a $5,000 fine and one year in jail. … I’m willing to make a stand because I believe what I’m doing is right.”
Prolonged closures is a threat to all sorts of martial arts schools and gyms. Still, BJJ schools seem to face additional challenges as their style has grounded its legitimacy not in solo-drills with grappling dummies, or Zoom conditioning classes, but rather in constant practice with a non-cooperative opponent. Not all instructors are enthusiastic about the possibilities of remote instruction as a way to stay connected with their students. Additionally, given the popularity of the style many schools are located in large locations which command relatively high rents. Similar stories of defiance are playing out in other states as well, such as the case of Rice Brothers BJJ in California.

“(My group) thinks the virus is on the downscale and there are studies that came out that show most of us have had coronavirus anyway,” Rice said. “We need to operate and we need to pay rent. It’s either we go broke and file bankruptcy or we operate business.”… Rice isn’t going to conduct online classes and remains adamant about allowing his grapplers to train at his gym. Rice says he is making his students follow proper sanitation guidelines by having them wear only freshly-cleaned gis and his staff is washing down the mats before and after each training session.”

Of course the vast majority of BJJ schools have opted to place the safety of their students and local community first by following state and local regulations. Still, the economic costs of being a good citizen are high as the following article reminds us. There is some relief on the horizon for gyms and martial arts studios in states like Georgia and Florida which are currently encouraging reopening. Yet once again, the intimate nature of BJJ training seems to ensure that returning to the mats will not necessarily be a return to normal training.

Gracie Barra Martial Arts School in Kissimmee is implementing several safety measures, including having each person practice in their own square, 6 feet apart from others.
“We are allowing people who live in the same household to train together, such as siblings, spouses, roommates,” Owner of Gracie Barra, Igor Andrade, said.
The school is also requiring temperature checks and sanitizing at the door. Members must also come dressed and ready to avoid crowded use of locker rooms.


While COVID-19 is having a profound impact on small businesses around the globe, its effects are also playing themselves out in the realm of public diplomacy. One Chinese, English language, tabloid ran a story titled “Chinese Martial Arts Help Cubans Deal with COVID-19 Lockdown.” The traditional arts seem to be almost custom made for this sort of event. And given the profound ways in which the COVID-19 outbreak has damaged China’s global image, it is not surprising to see stepped up public diplomacy efforts. At least some of that has come in form of increased support for martial arts communities overseas, as this article reminds us. Facing profound economic dislocation, the Chinese embassy in Rwanda has donated a large amount of food to help support the country’s Kung Fu community in the hopes that they can continue their training.
The National Review (which has a very specific editorial direction) addressed these sorts of efforts in an article titled “Traditional Chinese Medicine as Soft-Power Play.” While it directly addresses TCM’s interplay with COVID crisis, one suspects that similar arguments could be made about certain martial arts programs.
“As scientists and biotechnology companies around the world are racing to develop therapeutic drugs and a vaccine for COVID-19, China has been busy promoting traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) abroad as an effective treatment for the disease. The Chinese government reported that 87 percent of COVID-19 patients in China received TCM as part of their treatment and that 92 percent of them had shown improvement as a result. This claim hasn’t been independently or scientifically verified. So why is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advocating TCM with such vigor? Ultimately, this push is part of a soft-power play.”


THREADS
Kung Fu Tai Chi is ceasing publication (www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71782-Kung-Fu-Tai-Chi-is-ceasing-publication)
Covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

http://dragonfest.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2020a_dragonfest_martial_arts_museum.jpg

Event Canceled
Dragonfest Canceled for 2020

Welcome to the 16th Annual Dragonfest!!! (http://dragonfest.com/)

16th ANNUAL DRAGONFEST!
Dragonfest canceled for 2020.

We had hoped to postpone Dragonfest to later in the year, however, with the uncertainty of the governor of California on the re-opening of the state, and the large gathering of people, we have chosen to cancel Dragonfest for 2020. We are making this announcement now so that you can cancel and hotel reservations or airline tickets. We will be back for 2021. For vendors, we will contact you the last week of May to determine if you want a refund to hold the booth rental for next year.

THREADS
Is-anyone-going-to-DragonFest-this-year (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?16642-Is-anyone-going-to-DragonFest-this-year)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman’s George Floyd tweet sees Reebok and Rogue drop sponsorship (https://www.scmp.com/sport/outdoor/crossfit/article/3087957/crossfit-ceo-greg-glassmans-george-floyd-tweet-sees-reebok)
Greg Glassman’s ‘FLOYD-19’ Tweet has caused Rogue and Reebok to drop CrossFit but both will fulfil their 2020 obligations
By Mark Agnew
8 Jun 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/landscape/public/d8/images/methode/2020/06/08/a0a283a2-a929-11ea-bf1b-7541df8028ff_image_hires_123146.jpg?itok=PwhopX9D&v=1591590712
Greg Glassman’s latest Tweet has seen mass condemnation from the CrossFit community. Photo: Ruby Wolff

CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman has come under fire after publishing a tweet appearing to compare the death of George Floyd to the coronavirus, with sponsors pulling their support for the sport.
Reebok, one of the sport’s two main sponsors, has dropped its affiliation with CrossFit. The sportswear brand were in discussions over a new agreement, but said: “in light of recent events, we have made the decision to end our partnership with CrossFit HQ,” in a statement, adding that they remain passionate about the CrossFit community.
CrossFit CEO sorry for ‘Floyd-19’ tweet – ‘a mistake, not racist’
The sport’s other main sponsor, Rogue, has removed the CrossFit logo from The Rogue Invitationals and threatened to cease association completely, depending on how CrossFit moves forward.
Froning condemns George Floyd tweet, athletes boycott CrossFit Games
Replying to a Tweet by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that called racism and discrimination “public health issues”, Glassman wrote “It’s FLOYD-19”, referring to George Floyd, the black man killed by a white police officer in the US, and the global pandemic Covid-19.

He added in another Tweet: “Your failed model quarantined us and now you're going to model a solution to racism? George Floyd's brutal murder sparked riots nationally. Quarantine alone is “accompanied in every age and under all political regimes by an undercurrent of suspicion, distrust, and riots.” Thanks!”
Glassman plays a very visible role in the sport. He has rarely shied away from controversy, weighing in on topics such as supporting trans-athletes and their right to compete under their chosen gender.

But his recent tweet has brought swift condemnation.
The Rogue Invitationals, one of the biggest events of the year, will no longer carry the CrossFit logo, the company stated on Instagram.
“Rogue will work with the CrossFit Games leadership to determine the best path forward. We will fulfil the 2020 season for the athletes and the community. The future is dependent on the direction and leadership within CrossFit HQ,” the post read.

Mat Fraser, four-time winner of the CrossFit Games, published a post thanking Rogue for their decision. He added support for his former gym, NCFIT, which said they were no longer a CrossFit affiliate.
Katrin Davidsdottir, the 2015 and 2016 CrossFit Games champion, posted on Instagram that she was “ashamed, disappointed and angry”, before suggesting she could withdraw from the sport.

“I haven’t had much time to process this, organise my thoughts or speak to those involved so for the time being I am going to keep it at this. I don’t know what this means for myself or the sport. But for now: I know this is NOT RIGHT and that needs to be said,” she added.

THREADS
CrossFit (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?60302-Crossfit)
Covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

Do we need a BLM thread?

[GeneChing]

CORONAVIRUS
China’s Darkened Movie Theaters Pose a Danger to Hollywood (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/06/china-theaters-box-office-hollywood-movies)
Billions are at stake as the world’s second-biggest box office market keeps cinemas closed during its halting recovery from COVID-19.
BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN
JUNE 19, 2020

https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5eebdcd19d368940b137b343/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/movies-theater-closed-china.jpg
FROM STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.

Even as China gradually gets back on its feet from the devastation of its COVID-19 outbreak and quarantine earlier this year, its roughly 70,000 movie theaters remain dark, one aspect of everyday life that remains locked down by the government.

President Xi Jinping has indicated no rush to reopen the nation’s cinemas, cutting off the world’s second-largest market, which was close to usurping the United States as number one. China’s strict cultural ministry only allows a limited number of international films into the country, and Hollywood has often tried to break through by tailoring scripts to remove elements undesirable to censors or adding scenes with popular Chinese stars.

The enduring lockdown on Chinese theaters was chronicled by the New York Times in a recent article, which stated that it was one factor “holding back the Chinese economy when the world needs it most.” The article noted that even though theaters for plays and concerts had reopened, Xi had continued to keep cinemas shuttered. “If anyone wants to watch a movie, just watch it online,” Xi said during a public appearance on March 31.

But what are the actual losses for both Hollywood and other filmmakers around the globe? The answer, in a word: massive.

China’s total contribution to the global box office in 2019 was $9.2 billion. The North American tally was $11.4 billion. Together they made up nearly half of the world’s total movie ticket sales of $42.5 billion.

“China can often save a movie,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a box office analyst with the media-metrics tracker Comscore. He cited Terminator Genisys and the two Pacific Rim movies as titles that benefited from being Chinese hits. “Some of those films that didn’t do well in North America did do well internationally, particularly in China.”

He called China “the savior of many a would-be blockbuster that, had they relied merely on their North American box office, would have remained really in the red.”

If the country’s theaters remain closed indefinitely, the lost revenue could be catastrophic. That’s more than Hollywood studios can reckon with at the moment, as the effort continues to both restart production of new films and get North American theaters operational again. Studio executives don’t know when that will happen, even as they barrel toward the late-July releases of would-be blockbusters like Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.

This adds another layer to the already-complicated relationship between studios and China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, which typically allows fewer than 40 international films to screen per year. In addition, China enforces periodic “blackouts” when no new international films can screen publicly.

If China’s leadership wants to hold back the reopening of movie theaters, pressuring them to do otherwise could backfire, making a bad situation worse.

Comscore’s total $9.2 billion number for China’s 2019 box office only tells part of the story. Of that number, about $2.9 billion went to Hollywood films. In 2018, the country’s total box office was about $8.8 billion, and $3.2 billion was for Hollywood films. In 2017, the total was $8.3 billion, while approximately $3.4 billion went to American studios.

That means that even as China’s box office prowess has increased, the share of money going to Hollywood has slightly diminished. Will the prolonged shutdown of theaters accelerate that decline, or will Chinese moviegoers be so hungry for cinematic escape that the box office comes roaring back?

As per usual in Hollywood, the answer is the old maxim: Nobody knows anything. Except that there’s a lot of money to be found in China, for those who can collect it.

At first, I thought Covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia) would put a damper of Chollywood Rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising). Now I'm beginning to wonder if they will emerge the victor.

[GeneChing]

JUNE 18, 2020 / 8:53 PM / 4 DAYS AGO
China says one-fifth of Belt and Road projects 'seriously affected' by pandemic (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-silkroad-idUSKBN23Q0I1)
2 MIN READ

BEIJING (Reuters) - About 20% of projects under China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to link Asia, Europe and beyond have been “seriously affected” by the coronavirus pandemic, an official from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday.

According to a survey by the ministry, about 40% of projects have seen little adverse impact, and another 30-40% have been somewhat affected, said Wang Xiaolong, director-general of the ministry’s International Economic Affairs Department, at a news briefing in Beijing.

“About 20% percent of the projects have been seriously affected,” he said. Wang did not give any details.

The results from the survey were better than expected and although some projects had been put on hold, China had not heard of any major projects being cancelled, he added.

Over 100 countries have signed agreements with China to cooperate in BRI projects like railways, ports, highways and other infrastructure. According to a Refinitiv database, over 2,600 projects at a cost of $3.7 trillion are linked to the initiative.

Restrictions on travel and the flow of goods across borders, as well as local measures to combat COVID-19, were the main reasons for the impacts on projects, said Wang.

“As the situation improves we have confidence that the projects will come back and the execution of them will speed up,” he said.

The challenge of the pandemic to BRI projects follows a pushback in 2018, when officials in Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere criticized projects there as costly and unnecessary.

China scaled back some plans after several countries sought to review, cancel or scale down commitments, citing concerns over costs, erosion of sovereignty, and corruption.

(This story adds dropped words in lead paragraph)

Threads
The-Silk-Road (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68861-The-Silk-Road)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

China
Wuhan residents told to stay indoors again after record rainfall (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/06/wuhan-residents-stay-indoors-record-rain-china-coronavirus?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1)
City at centre of coronavirus outbreak faces new crisis as China suffers weeks of flooding
Lillian Yang and Lily Kuo in Beijing
Mon 6 Jul 2020 08.06 EDTLast modified on Mon 6 Jul 2020 08.41 EDT

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/492e4be72724b9493f29617f096d1a6075a11d62/0_0_4000_2399/master/4000.jpg
A flooded road in Wuhan, Hubei province, on Monday. Authorities raised the emergency warning to the second-highest level, forecasting more rain. Photograph: China News Service/Getty Images

People living in Wuhan, the central Chinese city that bore the brunt of the country’s coronavirus outbreak, have been told stay indoors once more after record rainfall prompted authorities to raise the city’s emergency response to the second highest-level.

A prolonged period of heavy rain is the latest disaster to strike China, where people are only just recovering from the coronavirus outbreak.

State media have been accused of downplaying the severity of the floods, emphasising the heroic efforts of emergency workers by publishing prominent images of soldiers rescuing trapped residents.

Residents waded waist-deep along waterlogged streets in Wuhan, filled after a record 426mm (16.8 inches) fell between Sunday and Monday morning. Authorities raised the four-tier emergency warning to level two on Monday, predicting more severe weather in the coming days.

The country is braced for more flooding, after weeks of what has been for some regions the heaviest rainfall in decades triggered severe flooding and mudslides in almost every province, affecting more than 20 million people and resulting in direct economic losses of at least £4.7bn.

China’s national weather service has issued rainstorm warnings for more than 31 consecutive days. “This has rarely been seen in recent years,” the state-run People’s Daily wrote on Weibo. At least 121 people have died or gone missing and more than 875,000 people have been forced to relocate, according to China’s ministry of emergency management. But internet users have questioned why the rains have received so little attention.

“Why does our official media say nothing about the severe floods in the south of our country,” one user wrote on Weibo. Another said: “The topic of flooding is like a tattoo – covered up.”

Mingbai Zhishi, an independent social media account or “self media”, wrote: “The floods raging in the south will not be quiet, but unlike in the past, the media are not rushing to report it. It really is quiet.”

Several areas of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, have already flooded. Torrential rain in Jingmen flooded shops and supermarkets. Helen Hai, 25, in Changyang county east of Wuhan in Hubei province, described driving and passing landslides and rocks falling along the mountain roads. The windscreen wipers were useless against the fast and constant downpour.

“It was like driving blind, like driving in the water,” Hai said. The rains, which flooded areas like hers last weekend, were unceasing. “The rain poured non-stop from morning until night. It was very frightening and I feel it is very unusual.”

Elsewhere, in the city of Tongren in Guizhou province in the mountainous south-west, the floods formed a giant waterfall in the city centre. In Chongqing, in Sichuan province, more than 100,000 people were evacuated as dozens of homes were destroyed.

On 29 June, after weeks of heavy rains and floods, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, gave his first public statement on the crisis, calling on the country to “put people first and value people’s lives most in the fight against the floods”, according to the official news agency Xinhua.

Experts say officials are also obscuring the danger of the dams in rivers across southern and south-western China where the floods have been the worst. “This is their tradition. They never disclose how the disaster is made or why it has happened,” said Wang Weiluo, a Chinese hydrologist and outspoken critic of the giant Three Gorges hydroelectricity plant.

“Most people think floods are caused by extreme weather but it is mainly caused by the discharge of reservoirs and the result of flood control works,” he said.

Wang believes the actual losses may be greater than official reports. The recent example of the coronavirus outbreak, where authorities at first did not disclose the risk of contagion and punished whistleblowers such as Li Wenliang, a doctor, is instructive, according to Wang.

“Blocking information is the beginning of a disaster. Any flood starts when the information is blocked. Just like Li Wenliang said: ‘A healthy society should not only have one voice.’ “In China, there is only one voice of the central meteorological station and when that one is wrong, everyone gets the wrong information.”

Hai is not surprised that the authorities would want to downplay the crisis. “It is very common. They have been doing this for a long time, not just with flooding but also other problems,” she said. “It is hard for me to judge the government data but I tend to expect the real situation is worse than they claim.”

Threads
China-floods (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71793-China-floods)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Kung fu shrine Shaolin Temple reopens to public (https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2006220695/)
Xinhua
20:15 UTC+8, 2020-06-22

China's kung fu shrine Shaolin Temple reopened to the public on Monday, ending a months-long closure amid the COVID-19 epidemic.

The 1,500-year-old temple, in central China's Henan Province, opened its gates at 9 a.m., ushering in its first tourists in five months.

The temple declared it had enhanced epidemic control measures, including thorough disinfection of the temple and nucleic acid testing among its monks.

The Shaolin Temple, like many other scenic spots and cultural sites in China, closed in late January as the country moved to curb the COVID-19 outbreak.

Source: Xinhua Editor: Zhang Long

THREADS
Shaolin-Temple (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?38366-Shaolin-Temple)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

China has just contained the coronavirus. Now it's battling some of the worst floods in decades (https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/14/asia/china-flood-coronavirus-intl-hnk/index.html)
By Nectar Gan, CNN
Updated 5:18 AM ET, Tue July 14, 2020
Parts of China wrecked by raging flood waters

(CNN)Weeks of torrential rains have caused the worst flooding in China in recent decades, destroying the homes and livelihoods of millions of people as the country struggles to revive an economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic.

Since June, devastating floods have impacted 38 million people -- more than the entire population of Canada. Some 2.24 million residents have been displaced, with 141 people dead or missing, the Ministry of Emergency Management said Monday.
On Sunday, Chinese authorities raised the country's flood alert to the second highest level in a four-tier emergency response system. Chinese President Xi Jinping described the flood control situation as "very grim" and called for "stronger and more effective measures" to protect lives and assets.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200714090730-06-china-floods-0708-exlarge-169.jpg
Rescuers evacuate residents on a raft through flood waters in Jiujiang in central China's Jiangxi province on July 8.

The unfolding disaster comes as China is still reeling from the aftermath of the coronavirus.
The pandemic and a weeks-long shutdown throughout much of China dealt a historic blow to the country's economy. GDP shrank 6.8% in the first quarter, the first contraction that Beijing has reported since 1976. The country promised in May to throw 3.6 trillion yuan ($500 billion) at its economy this year in tax cuts, infrastructure projects and other stimulus measures as part of a bid to create 9 million jobs and blunt the fallout from the pandemic.
The flooding is likely to complicate those recovery efforts. Some of the worst affected areas include many of the regions hardest hit by the coronavirus, just months after they emerged from strict lockdown measures.
While summer flooding is a common reoccurrence in China due to the seasonal rains, this year's deluge is particularly bad. It has hit 27 out of the 31 provincial regions in mainland China, and in some places, water levels have reached perilous heights not seen since 1998, when massive floods killed more than 3,000 people.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200714090553-04-china-floods-0703-exlarge-169.jpg
Floodwaters flow past a residential building in Chongqing in southwest China on July 1.

A total of 443 rivers nationwide have been flooded, with 33 of them swelling to the highest levels ever recorded, the Ministry of Water Resources said Monday.
The majority of these rivers are in the vast basin of the Yangtze River, which flows from west to east through the densely populated provinces of central China. The river is the longest and most important waterway in the country, irrigating large swathes of farmland and linking a string of inland industrial metropolises with the commercial hub of Shanghai on the eastern coast.
This year, the summer rains arrived early and poured with unusual intensity. Over the past weeks, the average precipitation in the Yangtze River basin reached a record high since 1961, authorities said.
"Compared with before, this year's rainfall was more intense and repeatedly poured down on the same region, which brought significant pressure on flood control," Chen Tao, the chief weather forecaster at the National Meteorological Center, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200714090934-09-china-floods-0713-exlarge-169.jpg
This aerial view shows a bridge leading to the inundated Tianxingzhou island in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on July 13.

Sweeping floodwaters left a trail of devastation, ravaging 8.72 million acres of farmland, destroying 28,000 homes and in some cases submerging entire towns.
According to state news agency Xinhua, by Sunday, the floods had caused 82.23 billion yuan ($11.75 billion) of economic losses nationwide.
In central China's Hubei province, which accounted for more than 80% all of China coronavirus cases, historic levels of rainfall were recorded in several cities, causing widespread floods and landslides. As of Thursday, more than 9 million residents have been affected in the province of 60 million people, causing 11.12 billion yuan ($1.59 billion) of economic losses, Xinhua reported.
Last week, authorities in the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan, the original epicenter of the coronavirus, raised the city's flood alert level to the second highest, after days of heavy downpours submerged many of its roads and a waterfront park.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200714090628-05-china-floods-0708-exlarge-169.jpg
Residents swim past a riverside pavilion submerged by the flooded Yangtze River in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province on July 8.

Further downstream on the Yangtze River, in eastern Jiangxi province, the water levels in China's biggest freshwater lake, the Poyang Lake, rose to a historic high of 22.52 meters (74 feet), well above the alert level of 19.50 meters (64 feet), according to Xinhua.
As of Sunday afternoon, floods had disrupted the lives of over 5.5 million people in the province, with nearly half a million evacuated from their homes, China's state-broadcaster CCTV reported.
The flooding is unlikely to subside as more heavy rains are forecast for the coming days. On Tuesday, the China Meteorological Administration issued a blue alert for heavy rain from Tuesday to Saturday in multiple provinces in the country, including Sichuan, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

Threads
China-floods (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71793-China-floods)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

BUSINESS
China's Wanda Film Warns of $226M Loss After 6 Months of Cinema Shutdowns (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/wanda-film-warns-226m-loss-6-months-cinema-shutdowns-1303265)
6:51 PM PDT 7/14/2020 by Patrick Brzeski

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape_928x523/2016/06/wanda.jpg
Getty Images
A Wanda cinema in China

China's largest cinema operator, which also controls North America's largest chain AMC Theatres, has seen all of its Asian theaters idle since Jan. 25, months before movie theater shutdowns hit the U.S.

China's largest cinema chain operator Wanda Film said it expects to lose $214 to $228 million (RMB 1.5 to 1.6 billion) in the first half of 2020 thanks to over five months on continual cinema shutdowns in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The decline represents a stark reversal of fortunes from the $75 million profit the Chinese exhibition giant reported during the same period in 2019. "Operating income dropped by a big margin compared with the same period last year," the company said in a statement, noting its ongoing rent and salary obligations.

Movie theaters across China shut down en masse on Jan. 23, shortly before the weeklong Lunar Near Year holiday, always the country's biggest box office stretch of the year. Wanda's production and distribution business also are hurting amid the pandemic. The studio's latest tentpole Detective Chinatown 3, the latest installment in a series that has grossed nearly $700 million, was set to be released over the holiday but remains on the shelf. Production of other projects has been indefinitely delayed.

Total box office in China for the first half of 2020 was $311 million (RMB 2.2 billion), down 93 percent from $4.4 billion (RMB 31.2 billion) during the same period last year, according to data from Artisan Gateway.

Although China has made great strides in controlling the coronavirus, cinema operators have suffered repeated setbacks in their attempts to resume business over the past several months.

In mid-March, Beijing regulators appeared to have settled on a province-by-province phased reopening strategy, giving approximately 600 cinemas in the least COVID-19-affected regions of the country the green light to reopen. Within days, however, they were ordered reshuttered, reportedly at the direction of senior central government authorities who were concerned about the prospect of a second outbreak. The industry went back into waiting.

In early May, reopening again appeared imminent. China’s top administrative body, the State Council, publicly stated on May 8 that indoor entertainment facilities, including cinemas and live music venues, could resume business nationwide. Yet no instructions for precisely when and how the reopening should be undertaken were ever provided, keeping theater operators in limbo, awaiting further guidance from officialdom. Then, on June 11, Beijing discovered a fresh cluster of locally transmitted COVID-19 infections at a food processing facility, prompting the city's health authorities to again order cinemas to remain shut.

Rumors circulated through Beijing industry circles earlier this month that the reboot was finally coming in late July, but an official plan, or confirmation, has been unforthcoming.

Wanda also is the largest shareholder in North American cinema chain AMC Theatres — the Chinese company owns 49.85 percent of AMC's outstanding common stock, but holds 74.89 percent of the combined voting power — but Tuesday's earnings warning made no mention of the group's North American holdings. AMC is held by a division of the Dalian Wanda Group parent company, not the Wanda Film subsidiary, which is listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange.

Threads
Chollywood-rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

MOVIES
Shanghai Film Festival Set to Open July 25 Without Foreign Guests (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shanghai-film-festival-set-open-july-25-foreign-guests-1303404)
10:15 PM PDT 7/15/2020 by Patrick Brzeski

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape_928x523/2018/06/shanghai_skyline_night_h_2018.jpg
studioEAST/Getty Images
Shanghai

The 2020 edition of the festival, now scheduled to begin in just over one week, will take a condensed form and be mostly a Chinese affair, staffers for the festival told The Hollywood Reporter Thursday.

The Shanghai International Film Festival, China's longest-running major cinema event, will take place in-person beginning July 25.

The 2020 edition of the festival, now scheduled to kick off in just over one week, will take a condensed form and be mostly a Chinese affair, staffers for the event told The Hollywood Reporter Thursday. The festival will go without its usual international jury and main competition, instead screening an abridged selection of gala films for the public and local industry. The event's screening lineup is expected to be released in the days ahead.

The Shanghai International TV Festival, typically held in tandem with the film festival, will take place in abridged form from Aug. 3 to 7.

Chinese immigration authorities continue to maintain strict bars on entry for foreign travelers from most of the world, and lengthy quarantine requirements are in place for all returning Chinese citizens. Festival organizers say offshore guests won't be formally invited to the festival, but staff from international film companies stationed within China will be welcome to attend.

The festival, considered China's most prestigious international cinema event, typically is held in mid-June, but it was postponed this year in response to the pandemic.

News of the festival's renewed plans for a physical edition follow an announcement from China's Film Bureau earlier in the day permitting Chinese cinemas in regions deemed "low-risk" for coronavirus infection to resume business on July 20.

threads
Shanghai-International-Film-Festival (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71333-Shanghai-International-Film-Festival)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Jul 15, 2020 10:18pm PT
China to Begin Reopening Cinemas
By Rebecca Davis

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/china-cinema-spirited-away-shutterstock_editorial_10322704e-res.jpg?w=600
ROMAN PILIPEY/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

China will begin reopening cinemas in “low-risk regions” from July 20, the China Film Administration (CFA) announced Thursday, ending nearly six months of closures that left thousands of theaters bankrupt.

“Cinemas in low-risk regions can resume business in an orderly manner on July 20, with the effective implementation of prevention and control measures. Mid- and high-risk regions must temporarily remain closed,” the administration said in a statement posted to its official website.

“Once low-risk regions become designated as mid- or high-risk regions, they must strictly implement epidemic prevention and control measures…[and] cinemas must close again in a timely fashion in accordance with requirements.”

The long-awaited green light comes, however, with caveats that may mean that profits continue to prove elusive for the hard-hit Chinese exhibition sector.

Attendance of each screening will be capped at 30%, the CFA said in a four-page document of specific guidelines and safety measures, and the overall number of screenings per venue must be reduced to “half their number in a normal period.” Furthermore, each film screening may not exceed two hours in length, it said — without providing further detail as to what this might mean for longer films.

Meanwhile, concessions — cinemas’ biggest profit driver — will be banned.

“Film screening venues will not sell snacks and beverages, and eating and drinking in the screening rooms is prohibited,” it said.

Other indoor businesses such as restaurants or transportation resumed operations months ago in China, and currently do not face policy restrictions on their operating capacity.

The CFA said that cinemas will be required to follow the “precise and scientific implementation of prevention and control measures.”

All tickets must now be sold virtually through real-name registered online reservations, and procured via contactless methods, it said. Different parties unknown to each other should be sold seats more than a meter apart.

Public areas like lobbies, corridors and bathrooms should be disinfected no less than twice a day, while commonly touched areas like ticket vending machines, sales counters and public seats should be wiped down no less than five times a day. Armrests, 3D classes and other such frequently touched items should be disinfected after each use. Ventilation in screening halls must be improved.

Masks will be mandatory for both employees and customers, with temperatures taken for anyone entering the venue.

Employees returning to work from mid- and high-risk regions will be asked to quarantine, and to “reduce unnecessary going out and avoid frequenting crowded places.”

The CFA also described the precise bureaucratic mechanism by which reopenings will be monitored.

“Once each region’s local film department has received the local party committee and government’s approval for their plan to reopen cinemas, they should discuss with the local CDC how to reopen in accordance with the rules,” it explained. Ultimately, different regions’ plans for re-opening must be reported back up to the national-level CFA.

Unverified leaked documents and statements from insiders indicate that cinemas in Guangzhou, one of China’s top movie-going regions, may be among the first batch to reopen.

The problem now facing cinemas is what they will have to show viewers, when.

When a small portion of cinemas reopened briefly in March, business was dismal. Venues were unable to attract much of a crowd by offering stale local titles that most people had already seen. Fresh content will now be crucial to getting people through the door.

The first film to confirm its intentions to release theatrically in China was “The First Farewell,” a Xinjiang-set about three Uighur children which Variety called “an outstanding debut feature” from writer-director Wang Lina. Even before authorities had mentioned any timeline for reopening cinemas, the movie said earlier this month that it was “scheduled to screen the first day cinemas reopen.” It issued a new tagline aligned with its tale of sorrowful partings: “Let’s meet again after a long period of separation.”

Previously, a number of Hollywood films were set to hit Chinese cinemas to reel in post-COVID crowds. They included a 3D, 4K restoration of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” as well as “1917” and “Little Women,” which both began putting out new promotional material in May, apparently in anticipation of a theatrical run. All four films of the “Avengers” series, “Coco,” “Call of the Wild,” Oscar winner “Jojo Rabbit,” “Inception,” “Avatar” and “Interstellar” are other Western movies whose names have appeared as potential kickstarters for the Chinese box office.

Others like “Ford v. Ferrari,” “Sonic the Hedgehog,” and “Bad Boys for Life” are also already sitting in the holding tank, having been approved for earlier, cancelled Chinese theatrical releases.

Yet just because the doors are open doesn’t mean that the profits will flow. Confidence in a quick rebound at the box office appears in some quarters, at least, to be low.

On Wednesday, the $43 million-budgeted, effects-laden Chinese fantasy actioner “Double World” announced that it would forgo a theatrical debut in favor of premiering online on iQiyi and Netflix, where it will debut next weekend. The decision at least “provides us with a way to reach users and recoup our investment,” its producer Zhang Amu said.

threads
Chollywood Rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Jul 17, 2020 9:45am PT
‘Pursuit of Happyness,’ ‘Dolittle,’ ‘Bloodshot,’ And ‘Coco’ Set to Open China Cinemas (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/pursuit-of-happyness-dolittle-bloodshot-china-cinemas-reopening-1234709488/)

By Rebecca Davis

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/bloodshot-movie-vin-diesel.jpg?w=600
Bloodshot Movie Vin Diesel
Courtesy of Sony

Chinese cinemas will open next week in regions at low risk for COVID-19 with a boost from a slew of Hollywood titles, including “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “Dolittle,” “Bloodshot,” and “Coco.”

China’s theaters have been closed for longer than any other country’s, having stayed dark — despite a brief attempt to reopen in March — since the lunar new year holiday in late January.

As of early Saturday morning in China, 22 films are set to hit theaters on Monday, the first day of reopenings, including U.S. films “Pursuit of Happyness,” “Coco,” and “A Dog’s Purpose.”

The others are all Chinese re-run titles, except for one new one: “A First Farewell,” a well-received arthouse title set in China’s Xinjiang region that screened as part of last year’s Generation Kplus selection at Berlin.

The opening day offerings include: blockbusters “Wolf Warrior 2,” “Monster Hunt,” “Wolf Totem,” “American Dreams in China,” and Jackie Chan’s “CZ12”; comedies “The Mermaid” and “Goodbye Mr. Loser”; thrillers “Sheep Without A Shepherd” and Huayi Brothers’ 2009 “The Message”; rom-coms “How Long Will I Love You” and “Beijing Love Story”; propaganda film “The Moment of the Sunrise”; and animations “Big Fish and Begonia,” “White Snake,” “Nezha,” “The Adventure of Afanti,” and the classic 1960s version of the “Journey to the West” tale, “The Monkey King (Uproar in Heaven),” a nostalgic audience favorite.

“Happyness,” the 2006 biographical drama starring Will Smith, appears to have had a short run in China back in 2008, grossing just $848,000. Chinese audiences typically gravitate towards emotional but ultimately feel-good titles, so distributors are likely hoping it will tap into viewers who recently enjoyed Oscar-winning “Green Book” enough to shoot it to a gross $71 million in China last year — just a few million shy of its $85 million U.S. run.

“Coco” did extremely well in China, despite featuring ghosts, which the country’s censorship regime technically bans. It grossed $189 million in 2017.

Meanwhile, four foreign films are set to debut July 24, kicking off cinemas’ first opening weekend back in business. They are: “Dolittle,” “Bloodshot,” “Capernaum,” and “A Dog’s Journey,” the Dennis Quaid-starring sequel to “A Dog’s Purpose.”

Universal’s “Dolittle” was supposed to screen Feb. 21 in China, but was indefinitely pushed back due to COVID-19 as cinemas shut. Its star Robert Downey Jr. is beloved to Chinese fans for playing Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Superhero film “Bloodshot” was released March 13 stateside. Its China release could give it a shot at profitability, given that headliner Vin Diesel has a large fan base there thanks to his “Fast & Furious” franchise appearances. Made on a reported $45 million budget, the title grossed just $29 million globally, $10 million of which was earned in the U.S.

“Capernaum” already became a surprise theatrical hit last year in China, grossing $54 million last April, a sum greater than its haul anywhere else in the world.

Variety has seen a leaked list of titles that state-run distributor China Film Group has sent out to cinemas but was unable to verify its origins. It said that in addition to the films listed above that have already confirmed, the first two “Avengers” series films (2012’s “The Avengers” and 2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron”), James Cameron’s classic “Titanic,” and local sci-fi mega-hit “The Wandering Earth” will be re-released but have yet to set dates.

The document indicated that nearly all the Chinese re-releases would screen via a “charity” model in which distributors and producers will forgo their cut of box office returns in favor of handing it over to help struggling exhibitors. “Capernaum,” whose China rights are held by Road Pictures, will also be released under this model, but not the other foreign films .

Meanwhile, the well-anticipated local animated film “Mr. Miao” has confirmed it will release on July 31.

What an odd selection of films. Man, I miss going out to the movies...:(

threads
Chollywood Rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Kung Fu Buffet closing due to COVID-19 (https://www.wane.com/news/kung-fu-buffet-closing-due-to-covid-19/)
NEWS
Posted: Jul 18, 2020 / 04:28 PM EDT / Updated: Jul 19, 2020 / 11:33 AM EDT

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) – A local restaurant is closing due to decreased business from COVID-19.

Kung Fu Buffet located off of Stellhorn Rd. announced Saturday on Facebook of their closing. The post states:

“We’ve got some bad news… Due to COVID business has been very bad so we are deciding to close on July 31st for good. Thanks to all the customers who has been supporting us ever since the beginning!”

WANE 15 spoke with an employee who also confirmed the closure.

Until the closure, takeout orders are still available.

Kung Fu Buffet is also selling equipment from the restaurant at this time. If interested, contact information can be found on the website.


threads
Kung-Fu-Restaurants-amp-Bars (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?51971-Kung-Fu-Restaurants-amp-Bars)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia&p=1318805#post1318805)

[GeneChing]

ENTERTAINMENT MOVIES
FAREWELL FOR NOW, TENET. HERE’S WHAT WE LEARNED FROM THE SUMMER MOVIE SEASON THAT NEVER WAS (https://time.com/5869038/tenet-movie-theaters-reopening/)
Farewell for Now, Tenet. Here’s What We Learned From the Summer Movie Season That Never Was
BY ELIANA DOCKTERMAN
JULY 20, 2020 11:08 PM EDT

Summer movie season is canceled for the first time since Jaws became the first warm-weather blockbuster in 1975.

On Monday, after months of delays and uncertainty, Warner Bros. officially postponed Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated spy movie starring John David Washington, indefinitely. Since the coronavirus pandemic first caused movie theaters to shutter in March, the film industry, theater owners and fans had all looked to Tenet as the must-see-on-the-big-screen popcorn movie that might save the summer of 2020. If anything could lure audiences back to theaters after months of lockdown, it would be a spectacle from the filmmaker behind The Dark Knight, Inception and Dunkirk, a longtime champion of the value of the theatrical experience.

But as COVID-19 case numbers continued to rise across the U.S., it became abundantly clear that reopening movie theaters would not be safe. Tenet’s release date shifted from mid-July to late July and then to mid-August. As recently as last week, Nolan himself staunchly insisted that Tenet would release this summer. Now, those who had held out hope are facing the reality that one movie could never have borne that much responsibility, much less in the face of a public health crisis far beyond its control.

It remains to be seen whether other movies currently slated for theatrical release this summer, like Disney’s live-action Mulan, will follow in Tenet’s footsteps. Either way, it will take a lot of time, some box office gambles and perhaps even a vaccine before enough fans are comfortable sitting in a darkened room alongside hundreds of strangers to laugh and gasp in unison—or even just breathe the same air.


In the meantime, as fans continue to get their movie fix largely on the small screen, here’s what the blockbuster season that never was has taught us about what the future of movies may have in store.

There was never going to be one film that saved the moviegoing experience

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/tenet-john-david-washington-robert-pattinson.jpg?w=800&quality=85
John David Washington and Robert Pattinson in Tenet Warner Bros.

The narrative that played out around Tenet, and Nolan’s insistence that it be released in theaters this summer, felt like a Hollywood fantasy itself. The trades positioned Nolan as if he were the hero in one of his own films, the man who would swoop in and save the day.

The obsession with a Nolan movie, specifically, was not arbitrary: Nolan is one of the few—if not the only—directors left in Hollywood who can conjure superhero-level box office numbers with a totally original film that’s not tied to a franchise, comic book or cinematic universe. His movies are big, expensive, immersive experiences best seen in IMAX the weekend of release, lest someone spoil the big plot twist in your social media feed.

Even before the pandemic, Tenet represented the last hopes of a Hollywood largely lost to the franchise era, a remnant of the days when original dramas could vie for Oscars and break the box office at once. If, against all odds, Tenet succeeded during the pandemic, Hollywood could declare victory over the existential threat the virus poses, over the streaming services competing for audience attention, over the notion that screenwriters had run out of new ideas.

If all this sounds rather farfetched, let’s cut ourselves a break. It is tempting in these dreary times to pin our hopes on a single solution to an intractable problem: one leader who might save us; one vaccine that might inoculate us; one day when suddenly everything will be back to normal. In reality, the return to normalcy will be slow and halting. Even once a vaccine becomes available, not everyone will receive it at once; we will return to our offices, our friends’ homes and, yes, movie theaters in small groups, then larger ones. Appealing as it was to cling to a symbol of resilience and the shared, communal experiences we yearn for, it was never that simple.

Movie theaters need ongoing systemic support, not a miracle

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/alamo-drafthouse.jpg?w=800&quality=85
The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema on June 26, 2018 in Denver, Colorado Amy Brothers—The Denver Post via Getty Images

Movie theaters are in dire straits. Even the biggest chains may possibly go bankrupt. They were struggling even before the pandemic: Why spend money on movie tickets, snacks and parking when you can just fire up Netflix from the comfort of your couch for around the cost of a single movie ticket?

It’s going to take more than a movie like Tenet to help the industry survive and thrive. Movie theaters, like many other types of businesses, are in a desperate situation. The major chains have laid off tens of thousands of employees. Groups of theaters have sued the New Jersey Governor and the Michigan Governor for the right to reopen. Meanwhile, it is looking unlikely that theaters will be able to reopen in two of America’s biggest markets, New York and Los Angeles, in August, as originally planned. Movie theaters will continue to need government aid and local support during the pandemic—they have benefitted from the $2 trillion stimulus package passed in March. And indie theaters will need even more to make it through this unprecedented time.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

Nobody wins in the standoff between studios and Netflix

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/charlize-theron-old-guard.jpg?w=800&quality=85
Charlize Theron in The Old Guard Aimee Spinks—NETFLIX

If you feel like the content released during the pandemic has been subpar, you’re not imagining things.

The pandemic has only accelerated the ascendance of streamers in Hollywood. Studios are worried that even after the pandemic ends, audiences will have gotten so used to having decent, new content served up to them at home that they won’t bother heading to the movie theater. As a result, studios have been hoarding their biggest films rather than releasing them on Hulu, Netflix or video-on-demand services. Why would they charge a family of four $20 to rent a movie on Apple now when they can charge that family of four $20 per person to see that same movie in IMAX at a later date?

We as consumers are left with a mixed bag of streaming content and too few of the kinds of water-cooler movies that kickstart shared cultural conversations. Netflix has invested heavily in action movies like The Old Guard (released in July) and Spenser Confidential (released back in March), but they spend less money making those movies than Warner Bros and Disney do on the biggest blockbusters of the year, and it often shows. That is not to say that spending more money on a movie guarantees quality—just look at box office bombs like Dark Phoenix or Dolittle—but many critics have observed that the most-watched Netflix movies feel thin, and not quite like replacements for the big summer blockbusters. Fans agree: A 2018 study from Barclays found that audiences reported the quality of Netflix movies “meaningfully worse” than most studio releases.

Of course, these studios’ strategy is contingent upon the idea that Hollywood will be able to release the movies they’re holding back in theaters sometime this year or early next year. And the truth is, we have no idea when we’ll be able to return to public spaces like theaters. Polls conducted in the spring suggested that many consumers won’t be willing to risk leaving theaters for awhile, even if it means waiting a long time to see splashy releases like Mulan.

Hollywood may be too dependent on big blockbuster movies

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/black-widow-2-captain-america-civil-war.jpg?w=800&quality=85
Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff in Captain America: Civil War Zade Rosenthal—Marvel Studios

While I would never suggest that Tenet be released straight to streaming—that is a film intended to be enjoyed with a large audience—maybe this is the moment for Hollywood to reconsider its priorities.

Right now, studios tend to focus onn big-budget superhero films or horror films with tiny budgets that can turn a nice profit. Comparatively few mid-budget comedies or dramas even get greenlit. But those are exactly the types of films suited to streaming. Even if streaming movies on the whole still don’t measure up to theatrical releases, services like Netflix and Hulu have found niches in specific genres that big, older Hollywood studios have abandoned, like rom-coms and serious, mid-budget dramas.

Maybe if traditional studios had invested in more movies like Hulu’s Palm Springs or Netflix’s Da 5 Bloods, they could be competing with Netflix by releasing them to the streaming market instead of sitting on the Black Widows and Top Gun 2s until the world changes.

The moviegoing experience is not going to become obsolete

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/tom-cruise-mission-impossible-fallout.jpg?w=800&quality=85
Death-defying: Cruise in Mission: Impossible—Fallout Paramount

There is some good news buried in this rather depressing update. The hype around Tenet suggests that people do desperately miss the summer blockbuster experience, and it will not disappear.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about some of the best memories I have in movie theaters—the moment when an IMAX audience lost its collective minds when a certain character in Mission Impossible: Fallout got struck by lightning; or the guy who just kept repeatedly screaming “hell yes” as Vin Diesel and his crew dragged a massive safe through the streets of Rio de Janeiro in Fast Five; or how the audience I saw Get Out with were on their feet cheering during the finale of that film.

We will have that experience again—even if Tom Cruise has to personally build an isolated town for an entire film crew to do so. It may be when Daniel Craig’s final James Bond movie No Time to Die drops in November. It may be when Fast & Furious 9 premieres next spring. It may be even later than that. Theaters will be implementing a lot of changes to try to stay afloat in the interim, like reducing capacity or not allowing moviegoers to order food during a film. But—assuming enough is done to keep them afloat before that time—pent-up demand for a fun night at the movies will buoy struggling theaters when things finally do begin to change for the better.

THREADS
Tenet (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71638-Tenet)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
The Old Guard (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71790-The-Old-Guard)

[GeneChing]

Fencing, with built-in social distancing, proves ideal sport for coronavirus pandemic (https://www.dispatch.com/news/20200720/fencing-with-built-in-social-distancing-proves-ideal-sport-for-coronavirus-pandemic)
By Allison Ward
The Columbus Dispatch
Posted Jul 20, 2020 at 11:48 AM
Fencers say that the sport might be the ideal activity to do right now as it promotes social distancing.

Like many kids, summer looks a lot different this year for siblings Eleanor and Gavin McClung, who are not allowed to visit public pools, attend large gatherings of friends or go on vacation far from home.

Fortunately, the Upper Arlington sister and brother, 8 and 14 respectively, still have at least one extracurricular activity their parents find safe: fencing.

Masks and gloves are already standard equipment for the sport and some competitors now double up on masks, wearing a cotton one underneath the mesh fencing one, which does not have the same protective effect against COVID-19.

And social distancing? That’s less of a problem for athletes carrying nearly 4-foot-long sabers, epees and foils with the goal of stabbing anyone who comes near them.

“Innately, it’s a little safer,” said the kids’ mother, Becky McClung. “You’re not in each others’ faces all the time and there are those natural barriers.”

In fact, fencing might be one of the safest sports right now, a perk that many clubs across central Ohio and nationwide have touted on social media in recent weeks as they’ve welcomed students back since reopening.

“Fencers try to keep away from each other,” said Stan Prilutsky, head coach at Columbus Fencing & Fitness in Dublin, where the McClungs take lessons. “If you get too close, you’re in trouble.”

Even though the sport boasts built-in barriers to deter the spread of COVID-19 — including that it only involves two athletes — Isabel Alvarez has reopened Profencing in Lewis Center cautiously, following protocols recommended by USA Fencing, the sport’s governing body.

“I have an immune deficiency problem,” she said. “Staying in business, staying well and not getting sick, has been a big effort.”

Finances became extremely tight after nonessential businesses were shut down in the spring, and a slow rebound since it reopened for private lessons has put the academy in jeopardy of shutting its doors for good, Alvarez said. A small Paycheck Protection Program loan and some generous parents who continued paying their children’s fees even when the business was closed have helped her weather the storm so far, she said.

Anyone entering Alvarez’s building is asked to wear a cotton mask, even while fencing, and students aren’t allowed to store their equipment at the facility. She’s taught students how to sanitize their suits — something they should do anyway — and they’ve done away with ceremonial handshakes, following USA Fencing rule changes.

So far, Alvarez said she is only seeing about half her regular students, and many of her summer camps with community centers have been canceled. However, she is still doing a few small camps, starting this month. She hopes to begin offering introductory classes for new students and small-group sessions soon.

“It’s safe to do fencing, and it’s good because the kids need an activity,” Alvarez said. “It challenges the mind and body.”

One of her students, Elise Lemasters of Delaware, who generally prefers bouts with friends and at tournaments, couldn’t wait for her first private class with Alvarez upon returning to the club.

“In the car, I told my dad how excited I was, and I typically don’t like having lessons, but I was looking forward to it,” said the 12-year-old, who is the No. 1 female fencer in Ohio under 13.

Parents at Profencing shared that excitement. Heather Besselman, a mom of four, said she and her two sons who fence, especially 10-year-old Noah, were thrilled when Profencing opened again.

“Noah needed activity,” said Besselman, of Delaware. “It was time, and they’re taking precautions all across the board.”

Her children still haven’t been many places, but she feels they’re safe fencing.

“They’re fully geared up and the chance of saliva going through their mask then through another mask and onto their opponent is slim,” she said.

While wearing two masks is “weird,” Noah said, it’s now “normal.”

Normal is what many of Prilutsky’s students have craved these past few months. About 75% of his 150 or so students are back taking regular private lessons.

While he acknowledged he and other instructors saw some benefits to teaching virtual lessons on Zoom — which focused on technique and footwork — he’s glad to have students back in his 8,000 square-foot facility that boasts 19 fencing strips.

“One student was crying after her first bout because she was so excited to be back,” Prilutsky said. “There’s been an emotional response to getting back to the sport we love.”

Gavin McClung admits he was a bit nervous to come back as he felt out of shape after two months away from the club. But it didn’t take long to fall into a rhythm with familiar faces around him.

“I’ve been excited, too,” the teen said. “There are a lot of people here I haven’t seen in a while.”

award@dispatch.com

@AllisonAWard



threads
Fencing (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?9851-Fencing)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Wonder what the U.S. IMAX loss might be...



Jul 22, 2020 6:57pm PT
Imax China Warns of $36 Million Half Year Loss (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/imax-china-losses-wanda-film-coronavirus-1234714006/)
By Rebecca Davis

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/imax-logo.jpg?w=600
Courtesy of IMAX

Imax China, the Hong Kong-listed subsidiary of Imax, has warned that it expects a net loss between $34 and $36 million for the first half of the year, as cinema closures in the country due to COVID-19 have slammed exhibition firms.

The 2020 figures stand in contrast to a net profit of $24 million in the same period last year.

There are around 700 Imax cinemas in mainland China, nearly all of which have been shut since late January because of the coronavirus.

A notice posted Tuesday to the Hong Kong stock exchange said the 2020 decrease was primarily attributable to the shutdown and coronavirus slowing the installation of new theater systems. A non-recurring deferred income tax charge and provisions of around $9 million made for trade and financing receivables were also other factors.

The news comes after China’s largest cinema chain operator Wanda Film said last week that it anticipates net losses of between $214 and $228 million in the first half of the year, down from net profits of $75 million (RMB524 million) during the same period last year. Its 600 complexes have also been shut for nearly that entire time, and its blockbuster “Detective Chinatown 3” indefinitely postponed its late January premiere.

Despite the downturn, Wanda and Imax struck a 20-theater agreement earlier this month, in which Wanda will upgrade ten of its existing theaters to the latest “Imax with Laser” technology and install Imax systems at ten others. With these upcoming systems, there will be 378 Imax screens across China at Wanda venues.

Wanda Film’s executive president said that Imax “will be critical in welcoming back to theaters and offering the best possible cinematic experience well into the future.”

Last year, Imax saw a record-breaking year in China with a box office of $366 million. It may be quite some time before the company sees such highs again.

Although cinemas began reopening from Monday, the Chinese box office has so far been slow, with theaters earning just $500,000 nationwide their first day back in business. The strong $20.8 million opening weekend of South Korean zombie film “Peninsula” elsewhere in Asia, however, provides some hope of a faster recovery once desirable new blockbusters start hitting screens with regularity again.


threads
Chollywood Rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

...but I suspect bots are among said toys. Love the denial that these are mostly for 'export' as well as the use of 'spurts' in the title.


Economy / China Economy
China’s sex toy makers in growth spurt, as coronavirus lockdowns fuel global appetite (https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3094355/chinas-sex-toy-makers-growth-spurt-coronavirus-lockdowns-fuel)
China’s sex toy exports have increased by 50 per cent this year, according to the Shanghai-based The Paper, with sex doll exports doubling
Lockdown measures in the US, Britain, Europe, New Zealand and Australia have led to increased demand
Cissy Zhou
Published: 7:30pm, 23 Jul, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/07/23/8217404e-cca1-11ea-9c1b-809cdd34beb3_image_hires_203515.jpg?itok=uObZHVD_&v=1595507726
China’s overall economy has staged a mild recovery since the outbreak of coronavirus, and the sex toy industry seems to have been able to enjoy a more rapid recovery since the enforced closures and lockdowns. Photo: Reuters

Sex toy manufacturers in China have seen a surge in orders since the start of the coronavirus, marking one of a few bright spots in an economy battered by the pandemic, according to industry insiders.
China’s economy, including its manufacturing outlook and exports, crashed at the start of the year at the height of the outbreak with the official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index plunging to an all-time low in February, while exports shrank by 17.2 per cent in January and February combined.
The overall economy has staged a mild recovery since, and the sex toy industry seems to have been able to enjoy a more rapid recovery since the enforced closures and lockdowns, with one Shandong-based manufacturer reporting a 30 per cent increase in exports and domestic sales.
Overseas sales manager Violet Du said Shandong-based Libo Technology had increased its production line staff by around 25 per cent to close to 400 since they returned to work at the end of February.

Our production lines are running around the clock, and our workers are working in two shifts to meet the surging demand
Violet Du
France, the United States and Italy have been the most active export markets over the last four months, according to Du, although domestic sales slowed as China began to bring the coronavirus under control.
“Our production lines are running around the clock, and our workers are working in two shifts to meet the surging demand,” Du said.
The surge in demand is largely due to lockdown measures, added Du, with exports to the US and some European countries expected to continue to rise as virus containment measures remain in place.
Dongguan-based manufacturer Aibei Sex Doll Company has also increased staffing levels but has been still forced to turn away orders, according to general manager Lou, who only provided his surname.

This is a niche market in China, because the Chinese culture is relatively conservative, so all our products are export-oriented, with the US and Europe being the largest market
General manager Lou
Aibei produces around 1,500 sex dolls per month, with prices ranging from 2,200 yuan to 3,600 yuan, although Lou insists with a larger capacity, sales could have surged by more than 50 per cent.
“This is a niche market in China, because the Chinese culture is relatively conservative, so all our products are export-oriented, with the US and Europe being the largest market,” Lou said.
Large factories in Dongguan can produce around 2,000 dolls per month, with smaller factories producing around 300 to 500, although this is far below the current demand from the US and Europe, added Lou.
China’s sex toy exports have increased by 50 per cent so far this year, according to the Shanghai-based The Paper, with exports of sex doll doubling. Sex doll exports to Italy have increased fivefold since March, when confirmed coronavirus cases began to emerge.
Various reports also suggest demand from the US, Britain, Denmark, New Zealand, and Australia increased when lockdown measures were introduced.
In March and April as coronavirus cases surged, Adam and Eve, a popular sex toy brand in North America, reported that their online sales had increased by around 30 per cent compared to the same period last year.
Berlin-based sex toy maker Wow Tech Group reported in April that online sales for their We-Vibe and Womanizer brands had increased by more than 200 per cent.

This totally redefines what 'essential worker' means...

threads
Sex-Bots (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70518-Sex-Bots)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Newsflare
Shaolin monks disinfect stage and audience area to prepare for performance (https://www.msn.com/en-gb/video/viral/shaolin-monks-disinfect-stage-and-audience-area-to-prepare-for-performance/vi-BB15BFkS)
Duration: 01:10 17/06/2020
Shaolin monks disinfected the stage and the audience area to prepare for the Shaolin Zen Music Ritual outdoor performance in central China's Dengfeng city on June 13. In the video, monks carry pressure sprayers to disinfect the audience area, the stage and the building's roof. According to reports, the Shaolin Zen Music Ritual reopened recently after months' coronavirus lockdown. Only one-third of the seats are available to visitors and social distance are requested.

THREADS
Shaolin-Temple (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?38366-Shaolin-Temple)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Variety
Jul 23, 2020 10:39pm PT
Hong Kong Film Festival is Canceled as Coronavirus Continues to Take Toll
By Patrick Frater

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/hkiff44-key-art_we-are-back-cr2.png?w=600
Courtesy of HKIFF

The Hong Kong International Film Festival, set to have taken place in the second half of August, has been canceled.

The festival had previously rescheduled its 44th edition from its usual slot in March, due to the first wave of the coronavirus outbreak. It had set Aug 18-31 Aug. instead.

But, with the city now facing a third wave of the virus, organizers on Friday bowed to the inevitable and announced the cancellation of HKIFF44 and the smaller Cine Fan activities in September and October.

They said that the Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF), one of Asia’s longest running film project markets, will go ahead as planned in virtual form. It will run Aug. 26-28.

“While it is tremendously deflating, given all the hard work that we have put in, the well-being of our colleagues and the public is of utmost importance to us. Calling of HKIFF44 is heartbreaking, but we believe we have a duty to behave with social responsibility,” said Albert Lee, executive director. “We will start working in the next edition of the festival straight away. We are determined to make up for the ‘lost’ HKIFF44.”

Last month it was announced that Hong Kong FilMart, the largest film rights market in Asia, had given up on plans to be held in physical form this year. Instead, FilMart will migrate to a virtual platform, FILMART Online, running Aug. 26-29, 2020. The problem at the time was not specific to Hong Kong, but more reflected other cities being put on lockdown, and travel difficulties among Asian territories.

Hong Kong had seemed to manage the disease well through testing, contact tracing and quarantines that stifled a first dose of coronavirus in February, and a second wave in March-April brought on by residents returning from abroad. But the city is now suffering a third wave that is more serious than either of the two earlier outbreaks.

Cinemas have been closed for nearly two weeks, restaurants and bars must close at 6pm, and mask-wearing has become compulsory on public transport and at all indoor public spaces, such as shopping malls.

The territory’s government has rejected claims that it created too many quarantine exception categories and allowed new imported cases to restart local infections. But epidemiologists Friday said that is exactly what happened and point to the genetics of the recent COVID-19 cases that consist of strains that were not previously present in the city.

To date Hong Kong has recorded 2,132 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. It has caused 16 deaths.

threads
Asian-Film-Festivals-and-Awards (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?48392-Asian-Film-Festivals-and-Awards)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

ENTERTAINMENT
Disney delays ‘Mulan’ indefinitely, Star Wars and Avatar movies pushed back a year (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/23/disney-delays-mulan-indefinitely-star-wars-and-avatar-movies-pushed-back-a-year.html)
PUBLISHED THU, JUL 23 20205:00 PM EDTUPDATED THU, JUL 23 20206:42 PM EDT
Sarah Whitten
@SARAHWHIT10
KEY POINTS
“Mulan” is no longer being released on Aug. 21 and is now “unset” on Disney’s calendar.
All dated Star Wars films and Avatar sequels have been pushed back one year on the calendar.
The company said that theater closures and production shutdowns during the global coronavirus pandemic caused it to make a number of adjustments to its slate.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106312455-1577373035892mulancropped.jpg?v=1577372796&w=630&h=354
Liu Yifei stars a Fa Mulan in Disney’s live-action adaptation of “Mulan.”
Disney

Disney is making some major changes to its release calendar that include delaying “Mulan” from its Aug. 21 release indefinitely and pushing back the debuts of future Star Wars and Avatar movies by a year.

On Thursday, the company said that theater closures and production shutdowns during the global coronavirus pandemic caused it to make a number of adjustments to its slate.

“Over the last few months, it’s become clear that nothing can be set in stone when it comes to how we release films during this global health crisis, and today that means pausing our release plans for ‘Mulan’ as we assess how we can most effectively bring this film to audiences around the world,” a Walt Disney Studios spokesperson said in a statement Thursday.

Disney shares fell slightly in after-hours trading and were down nearly 1%.

“Mulan” is currently listed as unset, meaning its release is delayed indefinitely. This is the fourth time that the live-action film has been delayed since March.

With “Mulan” vacating its August release date, there are now no Hollywood blockbuster releases set for the month. “Tenet” moved out from its August debut on Monday and has yet to announce a new release date. AT&T CEO John Stankey has promised movie theater owners that Christopher Nolan’s spy thriller will have a theatrical release.

“New Mutants” a 20th Century Fox feature in the X-Men franchise that has been delayed for the last three years, appears to still be on the calendar for Aug. 28, but depending on if movie theaters reopen next month, the film could be pushed again or be delegated to a video on-demand release.

A number of smaller, independent features are set for release in theaters. However, major theater chains like AMC may not be open to show them. Earlier Thursday, AMC announced that it has pushed back its reopening plans to mid-August after “Tenet” left the calendar. It is unclear how it will react to “Mulan” leaving as well.

AMC, like other major movie theater chains, has been closed since mid-March, awaiting a slowdown in coronavirus cases and new content from Hollywood. AMC, in particular, had been very vocal about how the pandemic could push it into bankruptcy.

Earlier this month, the exhibitor was able to reach a debt agreement that should help it remain solvent through 2021.

“Theaters will again be forced to reassess their target opening dates,” Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Boxoffice.com, said. “Archival titles can only get the market so far while the summer weather is conducive to the current drive-in boom. Studios need theaters to be open, and theaters need studios to release new product. Anytime one side of that equation budges, the other has little choice but to follow suit in this current world of uncertainty.”

Additional slate changes include:

“The Personal History of David Copperfield” moving to Aug. 28
“Death on the Nile” is now debuting on Oct. 23
“The Empty Man” will arrive on Dec. 4
“The French Dispatch” is unset
“Antlers” is now dated Feb. 19, 2021
“The Last Duel” will arrive Oct. 15, 2021
An untitled Disney Live Action film will take the place of “Avatar 2” on Dec. 16, 2021.
“Avatar 2” pushed to Dec. 16, 2022
Untitled Star Wars moved to Dec. 22, 2023
“Avatar 3” now dated Dec. 20, 2024
Untitled Star Wars redated to Dec. 19, 2025
“Avatar 4” will arrive Dec. 18, 2026
Untitled Star Wars moved to Dec. 17, 2027
“Avatar 5” now slated for Dec. 22, 2028

threads
Mulan-(2020) (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins Moves to 2021 (https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/snake-eyes-gi-joe-origins-release-date-2021/)
Paramount and Hasbro’s G.I. Joe film franchise relaunch, Snake Eyes, will be pushed from its October release date.
By Joseph Baxter
|
July 27, 2020

https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/snake-eyes-gi-joe-retaliation-ray-park-paramount.jpg?resize=768%2C432
Ray Park as Snake Eyes in G.I. Joe: Retaliation
Photo: Paramount Pictures

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins will silently and stealthily shift its way out of a 2020 film industry schedule that’s been snakebit by the COVID cobra.

Studio Paramount, which is partnering with property owners Hasbro Toys to produce, plans to move the release of the Snake Eyes film—a prequel intended to relaunch the G.I. Joe film franchise—to an unspecified date in 2021, as revealed by Hasbro (via THR,) in a call about the company’s quarterly earnings report. While the film had been set to hit theaters on October 23, 2020, the companies seem to have concluded that its long-set fall premiere is no longer insulated from the destructive reach of the pandemic, which continues to leave theaters shuttered nationwide.

Indeed, Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s chairman and CEO, after citing significant COVID-era losses (seemingly due to a variety of reasons, be it the lockdowns to supply chain delays), stated that, “We’re working out the specifics with Paramount,” with regard to a new release date for Snake Eyes. Yet, if we were to take Paramount’s most recent pandemic-pushed release dates—specifically the lengthy 2021 shifts dealt to Top Gun: Maverick and A Quiet Place II—then it’s very possible that Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins could be given a similar quarantine lasting as long as a full year to October 2021. Of course, nothing has been confirmed as of yet, and the release schedule landscape is constantly shifting strategic variables against the health crisis, leaving open every possibility.

Snake Eyes will manifest as a solo outing focused on the iconic silent black-clad commando and ninja of Hasbro’s G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero 3 ¾” toy line relaunch of the 1980s and ’90s. The character, a heroic member of the G.I. Joe team, is arguably the most famous of the franchise, last seen on the big screen as a dark, silent whirlwind of martial arts mastery in 2009’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and 2013’s G.I Joe: Retaliation, played by Star Wars Darth Maul actor Ray Park (pictured above). This film, however, will see the title character played by Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding, this time mask-less and set to depict the eventually-disfigured and muted character’s tragic backstory, along with his complex relationship with eventual fellow Joe member Scarlett (Samara Weaving) and—another franchise A-lister—white-clad ninja frenemy Storm Shadow (Andrew Koji).

Make no mistake, Snake Eyes is a major priority for Hasbro and Paramount, which—in a similar approach to 2018’s Bumblebee for the Transformers property—will use the film to launch a new iteration of G.I. Joe films after the general failure of the aforementioned previous entries left the franchise dormant for the past seven years. Indeed, news came as recently as this past May that the company coalition was planning to push ahead with new G.I. Joe films, which would be built upon the prospective success of this character-centric prequel, likely set to retain cast members like Golding, Weaving and Koji, whose characters are integral to the franchise. That last tidbit came after news from last fall revealed that another G.I. Joe solo film was in the works, this one centered on (curiously enough,) Chuckles, a loud-Hawaiian-shirt-clad undercover member of the Joe team.

For now, the date on which Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins will fight for freedom wherever there’s trouble remains a mystery.

threads
Snake Eyes (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70780-Snake-Eyes)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Jul 29, 2020 8:26pm PT
‘Tenet’ Approved for Theatrical Release in China (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/tenet-china-release-1234720583/)
By Rebecca Davis

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/tenet-nolan.jpg?w=600
Melinda Sue Gordon

“Tenet” announced Wednesday that it has passed government approvals for a theatrical release in China, an indication that an official release date is now on the horizon.

The film has released a poster in Chinese, swapping the English tagline “time runs out” for a clarion call to return to cinemas that roughly translates to “make every second count; invade the theaters.”

Chinese cinemas reopened in regions at low risk for COVID-19 on July 20, taking in $12.6 million in their opening weekend. Currently, around 44% of its cinemas are back in business, but have been required to operate at just 30% capacity to allow for social distancing, as well as reduce their total number of screenings to half their usual tally.

Additionally, guidelines for reopening released by the National Film Bureau request that cinemas not screen films that are over two hours long — which could potentially pose problems for “Tenet,” which runs at two hours and 31 minutes.

This directive was soon contradicted, however, by Chinese authorities’ subsequent approval of numerous films longer than two hours for nationwide theatrical release. These include “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and Nolan’s own “Interstellar” — currently scheduled for a theatrical re-run starting Aug. 2 — as well as local blockbusters already in play like “Operation Red Sea.”

Until the guideline is more formally lifted, it appears that cinemas in different regions under different levels of COVID-19 threat have been given varied amounts of leeway, or at least have been variously willing to stick their neck out and program longer films.

All eight of the “Harry Potter” films run over two hours, but they are all currently screening as part of the Shanghai International Film Festival.

Yet at least two cinemas in Beijing said Wednesday in private chats posted to social media that due to the confusion, they currently didn’t dare program approved, available titles over 120 minutes long — even the patriotic blockbuster “Wolf Warrior 2,” which runs 123 minutes.

Elsewhere in China, however, that film’s re-run has already made $1.1 million since cinemas reopened Monday.

“Tenet” had to reschedule its release numerous times due to COVID-19 before Warner Brothers this week settled on the unconventional plan of debuting it internationally before it hits North America.

It is now prepared to open in around 70 countries abroad starting on Aug. 26, including the U.K., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea and Russia. It will then premiere in select U.S. cities over Labor Day weekend from Sept. 3.

China is far and away the most important foreign market for “Tenet” director Christopher Nolan’s films.

The Chinese box office for almost every film he’s made as either director or executive producer has blown away earnings from other territories by a large margin. The only exceptions are “Dunkirk” and “The Dark Knight Rises,” for which China was the second largest market globally behind the U.K., and “Batman Begins,” which hit the Middle Kingdom all the way back in 2005, when its box office was still comparatively nascent.

Of the Nolan-directed films, “Dunkirk” made $51 million in China in 2017, while “Interstellar” grossed $122 million there in 2014. The “Dark Knight Rises” grossed $52.8 million in 2012 and “Inception” $68.4 million in 2010.

Films executive produced by Nolan have also seen strong showings in the country. They include “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” with $96 million, “Justice League” with $106 million, “Transcendence” with $20 million, and “Man of Steel” with $63 million.

threads
Tenet (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71638-Tenet)
Chollywood-rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Patriotic Activities Mandated to Reopen Religious Venues (https://bitterwinter.org/patriotic-activities-mandated-to-reopen-religious-venues/)
07/24/2020 HAN SHENG

Places of worship must prove loyalty to the CCP before opening their doors after the coronavirus lockdown. Flag-raising ceremonies are obligatory.
by Han Sheng

All religious venues in China were closed for more than five months to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The Shaolin Temple on Mount Song in the central province of Henan, the Buddhist holy site reputed as “Number One Temple under Heaven” and renowned around the world for its martial arts school, was no exception.

As lockdown restrictions were eased, it was allowed to reopen on June 22, but only on the condition that a grand national flag-raising ceremony promoting patriotism and pledging loyalty to the CCP was organized that day. A requirement each place of worship in China must accept if they want to resume their activities in the post-lockdown era.

https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Shaolin-Temple-monks-stand-in-lines-for-a-flag-raising-ceremony.webp
Shaolin Temple monks stand in lines for a flag-raising ceremony.

At 9 a.m. that day, Shi Yongxin, the abbot of the Shaolin Temple, accompanied by about 100 disciples, led the flag-raising ceremony in the rain. After 1,500 years of promoting Buddhism in China, the temple has succumbed to the CCP’s “sinicization” policy, gradually losing its original values and responsibilities.

“It is so unnatural for monks in traditional robes to take part in a flag-raising ceremony like soldiers,” commented a temple visitor who witnessed the reopening on June 22.

“Strictly controlled by the state, people of faith must follow the Party’s commands,” another visitor added. “The government thinks that there are too many believers, which it sees as a threat to its regime.”

Shaolin Temple monks carry a national flag in a marching drill, reminiscent of a military ceremony.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYwyCtNcyYM&feature=emb_logo

Proof of “patriotism” has become a prerequisite for religious activity venues to reopen after the lockdown. Even after they are open again, religious activities are still banned or strictly restricted in the name of “epidemic prevention.” Patriotic events, however, are not spreading the virus, according to the CCP.

The famous Nantai Rock Temple in Quanzhou, a prefecture-level city in the southeastern province of Fujian, was allowed to open its doors on June 21, but only if a flag-raising ceremony was organized. A staff member at the temple said that since the government controls religions and demands to prove loyalty to the state, the venue must now hold flag-raising ceremonies weekly and ahead of each monks’ assembly or other religious activity. The temple has no other choice but to obey. Before a small assembly on July 2, the temple abbot led a flag-raising ceremony for a group of about 30 Buddhists.

The flag-raising ceremony at the Nantai Rock Temple on July 2.

The Religious Affairs Bureau of Quanzhou also demands local religious venues to have the national flag on display throughout the week, regardless of the weather: raise it on Monday and lower it on Friday. The flag must be kept in pristine condition—unfaded and undamaged.

https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Following-a-flag-raising-ceremony.webp
Following a flag-raising ceremony, the Nantai Rock Temple abbot gives a speech, praising President Xi Jinping for his achievements in fighting the coronavirus outbreak.

On June 30, the eve of the 99th anniversary of the founding of the CCP, the United Front Work Department (UFWD) of Qingdao city in the eastern province of Shandong gathered monks in the Zhanshan Temple to watch The Founding of A Party, a film about the history of the CCP. “Promotion of Buddhism and most religious activities in the temple are still banned,” one of the temple’s monks explained, adding that they are not even allowed to gather for traditional morning and evening chants.

In late June, imams of some state-run mosques in Shandong’s Liaocheng city were demanded by the city’s UFWD to “commemorate the Party’s birthday” and organize believers to hold a flag-raising ceremony on July 1 even though religious gatherings continue to be banned.

“All mosques, churches, and temples in Liaocheng-administered Linqing city had to hold flag-raising ceremonies; some had over 100 attendees. Is this not a gathering?” a local Muslim questioned the reasoning behind the government’s regulations.

Buddhism & Communism (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70795-Buddhism-amp-Communism)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Another covid heartbreaker...



Aug 4, 2020 2:00pm PT
With ‘Mulan,’ Disney Tests Out Entirely New Early VOD Model (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/mulan-disney-plus-premiere-1234711185/)
By Adam B. Vary, Rebecca Rubin
Mulan
Courtesy of Disney

In another major blow to movie theaters, Disney announced “Mulan” will forgo its planned theatrical release. Instead, the live-action remake is premiering on Disney Plus on Sept. 4 for a premium rental price.

The company believes that the release of the action epic will help drive subscribers while serving as a valuable test case to determine how much of their hard-earned cash customers are willing to part with in order to watch a movie that was originally intended to debut exclusively in cinemas.

Unlike the rest of the content available on Disney Plus, “Mulan” won’t be available directly to subscribers. Consumers in the U.S. and other territories will have to pay $29.99 to rent the movie on top of the streaming service’s monthly subscription fee of $6.99. In markets where Disney Plus isn’t available, “Mulan” will play in cinemas.

For now, Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek says “Mulan’s” big move isn’t reflective of a new business model for the company — even though it kind of is.

“We’re looking at ‘Mulan’ as a one-off as opposed to saying there’s some new business windowing model that we’re looking at,” Chapek said Tuesday on the company’s earnings call.

Disney may be signaling to exhibitors that it’s not turning its back on cinemas and that it will respect their ability to have exclusive access to the studio’s content, but Chapek wouldn’t be so interested in testing the waters if the possibility didn’t exist that the studio would dive back into streaming with some other oft-delayed theatrical release. There’s plenty to pick from on that score. Disney has shelved a number of buzzy titles since the pandemic shuttered theaters. Tellingly, Chapek said that Disney wants to “learn from it and see the actual number of transactions.” If those numbers are good, will “Mulan” still be a one-off?

It’s also notable that the form of premium VOD that Disney is testing is very different and potentially more lucrative than others deployed by studios. “Mulan” will cost roughly $10 more than Universal charged for “Trolls World Tour” and it’s sticking the price of a subscription on top of that bill. It remains to be seen if that will be too rich for consumers at a time when unemployment is reaching Great Depression-era levels and benefits may be cut. It certainly makes “Mulan” the priciest VOD release since the failed attempt to offer 2011’s “Tower Heist” to cable subscribers for $60 three weeks after it opened. Universal, the studio behind the Ben Stiller-Eddie Murphy comedy, abandoned those plans in the wake of exhibitor upheaval.

Disney’s decision to mix things up with “Mulan” comes just days after AMC Theatres and Universal stunned investors when they announced that they had reached an agreement that would enable some movies to debut their film on home entertainment platforms within 17 days of their theatrical debut. The two companies hailed the move as an important evolution in film distribution, but other chains such as Regal and Cinemark were cool to the new model. Disney, among all of its major studio brethren, has historically been one of the staunchest allies of the theatrical experience. The announcement may have goosed its stock, but it was a drag on the shares of the major exhibitors.

The decision to put “Mulan” on premium video-on-demand further emphasizes the studio’s increased reliance on Disney Plus at a time when most of their business — from theme parks and cruises to movie theaters and retail stores — have been crippled by the pandemic. Research, Chapek says, suggests that bringing a high-profile release like “Mulan” to homes “will act as a fairly large stimulus to sign up for Disney Plus.”

Chapek added that it gives them a chance to recapture “some of our original investment” on “Mulan.” The movie cost $200 million to produce and many millions more to market and promote on a global scale. That means it will rely on ticket sales — and lots of ’em — if it hopes to turn a profit. Unlike Universal’s “Trolls World Tour,” Warner Bros.’ “Scoob” and other movies that were put on premium video-on-demand platforms in lieu of a traditional release, Disney won’t have to split in the riches from digital rentals since they own the streaming platform.

Originally scheduled to open on March 27, “Mulan” was meant to be one of Disney’s major theatrical releases for the year. The studio mounted a lavish red carpet premiere at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles on March 9. But just three days later, the cascade of industry closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic forced Disney to postpone “Mulan’s” release. It was delayed multiple times before Disney indefinitely removed it from the release calendar last week.

It’s yet another stark indication of studios’ dwindling faith that movie theaters will be able to safely reopen in the near future, especially at the scale necessary to support mega-budgeted tentpole movies. Just before “Mulan” was pulled from Disney’s schedule, Warner Bros. removed “Tenet” from its release calendar. The sci-fi epic from Christopher Nolan is now expected to launch internationally starting on Aug. 26 before making its way to select U.S. cities on Sept. 3.

The lack of a theatrical release for “Mulan” is another setback for exhibitors, who had hoped patrons of all ages would turned out to watch the fearless Chinese warrior back on the big screen. “Tenet,” another title that movie theater owners are counting on to revive moviegoing after prolonged shutdowns, is geared toward slightly older crowds.

With sweeping battle scenes and lavishly appointed sets and costumes, Disney shelled out millions upon millions to make “Mulan” a must-see in theaters. In fact, when Disney delayed “Mulan” for the third time in June, co-chairman and chief creative officer Alan Horn and co-chairman Alan Bergman highlighted the necessity to see the film on the silver screen.

“Director Niki Caro and our cast and crew have created a beautiful, epic, and moving film that is everything the cinematic experience should be, and that’s where we believe it belongs — on the world stage and the big screen for audiences around the globe to enjoy together,” said Horn and Bergman in a statement at the time.

Based on the legend of the female Chinese warrior who disguises herself as a man to spare her infirm father from conscription into a war, “Mulan” features a breakout performance in the title role from Chinese actor Liu Yifei, and awards worthy performances from Tzi Ma (as Mulan’s father) and Gong Li (as a mysterious and complex villain). Along with “Crazy Rich Asians,” it is one of the only large-scale releases from a major Hollywood studio to feature an entirely Asian cast.

“Mulan” was always meant to be a global theatrical player, especially in China. But even though Chinese theaters have started to reopen, box office sales have been sluggish without any new content to feature.

threads
Mulan-(2020) (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
Disney+ (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71104-Disney)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

MOVIES
U.K. Exhibitors "Bewildered" by Disney Decision Not to Bring 'Mulan' to Cinemas (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/uk-exhibitors-bewildered-by-disney-not-bringing-mulan-cinemas-1306032)
4:20 AM PDT 8/5/2020 by Alex Ritman

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape_928x523/2020/03/pho-14030_r2-h_2020_0.jpg
Courtesy of Disney
'Mulan'

Disney's shock move to scrap the theatrical release in certain markets, including the U.S. and U.K., has gone down badly with the U.K.'s already-beleaguered exhibition industry.

Exhibitors in the U.K. have reacted badly to Disney's shock decision to scrap Mulan's several-times-postponed theatrical release and take it straight to its Disney+ platform in certain markets.

The controversial new release strategy was revealed on Tuesday, with the live-action family adventure — expected to be one of the first major blockbusters to be come out as exhibitors emerge from the COVID-19 lockdown — now set to be offered to Disney+ customers in the U.S., U.K. and other select markets for the premium price of $29.99 beginning Sept. 4, forgoing cinemas in many territories altogether.

In a letter sent to British cinemas on Wednesday and seen by The Hollywood Reporter, Disney apologized for the decision, which it said was one that was "not taken lightly."

"Given that COVID-19 has disrupted large parts of the content pipeline and markets are in vastly different situations right now, and after delaying the global theatrical debut multiple times, we are subsequently taking a tailored approach to this release," it said.

However, the move to bypass cinemas altogether and not even give Mulan a day-and-date release has rattled the U.K.'s already beleaguered exhibitor industry, which had been counting on both Disney's blockbuster and Warner Bros.' Tenet — now due to launch overseas Aug. 26 — to draw back customers.

"The decision not to give cinemas a chance to play the film (even if day and date with Disney +) is frankly bewildering and something we’ve of course gone back to them on," said Phil Clapp, chief executive of the U.K. Cinema Association, in a letter set to its members and seen by THR.

In a later statement, Clapp said the move would seem a "step backwards rather than forwards" by much of the industry.

"With cinemas across the U.K. now continuing to re-open and welcome back their customers, the decision by Walt Disney Studios yesterday to put Mulan on their Disney+ service and not into cinemas will be seen by many as hugely disappointing and mistimed," he added.

"A trip to the cinema to see one of the event family films of the year would have been hugely popular, successful and a welcome escape for many after months of restrictions on out of home entertainment. It would also have provided a much needed boost for both audiences and cinemas who need a supply of new films after Christopher Nolan’s Tenet hits cinemas at the end of August."

Kevin Markwick, who owns the independent Picture House cinema in Uckfield, was more descriptive in his response, joking that he'd be homeless by the time Disney decided to return to exhibitors.

"Thanks Disney chums, we'll be here warm & waiting for you when you plan to return, having existed on thin air and love & cuddles and happy thoughts. Just give us a buzz when you are ready. I'll be sleeping in a doorway outside the bank soaked in my own wee," he tweeted. He later added: "One other thing special Disney cuddle bums, if sectors of the industry are so sure that VOD and cinemas can live together, why not let us have a bash at showing Mulan at the same time?"

Another U.K. exhibition executive said the decision was perhaps taken because Disney didn’t want to "risk cinemas refusing to play the film" if it were to be released day-and-date on Disney+. "If Disney think they don’t need cinemas anymore that’s pretty much game over for us all."


ALEX RITMAN
alex.ritman@thr.com
@alexritman

threads
Mulan-(2020) (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
Disney+ (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71104-Disney)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

His chef made the most amazing veggie prawns complete with antennae.



China embraces plant-based protein as consumers look for alternatives to meat amid Covid-19 (https://www.scmp.com/tech/start-ups/article/3096300/china-embraces-plant-based-protein-consumers-look-alternatives-meat)
Beyond Meat, the US plant-based meat company that launched a successful IPO on Nasdaq in May last year, made its retail debut in China last month
China’s vegan food market is forecast to be worth nearly US$12 billion by 2023, up from just under US$10 billion in 2018
Yujie Xue in Shenzhen
Published: 6:15pm, 6 Aug, 2020

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/08/06/0bd28858-d7b9-11ea-a9df-dfa023813e67_image_hires_193955.jpg?itok=9TwG-As1&v=1596714009
Plant-based crayfish from Chinese start-up Zhenmeat. Photo: Handout

With wet markets in China under the spotlight as potential hotspots for fresh coronavirus outbreaks, consumers are looking for alternative sources of protein in their diets. That shift is providing start-ups and their investors with an opportunity to profit from China’s fledgling food tech sector.
Beyond Meat, the US plant-based meat company that launched a successful initial public offering on Nasdaq in May last year, made its retail debut in China last month with its Beyond Burger available in Alibaba Group Holding’s 50 Freshippo stores in Shanghai. The company also pledged to bring its products to 48 more Freshippo stores across China by the end of the year.
The partnership with Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, is the latest move in China’s increasingly crowded food tech sector. In June, Yum China – owner of China’s KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell outlets – also joined with Beyond Meat to offer several plant-based beef dishes.
Hong Kong plant-based meat brand Omnipork announced a partnership with Starbucks in April to offer plant-based pork dishes that cater to an Asian palate. Nestle, the Swiss-based multinational food and drink giant, also announced plans to build a plant-based food plant in China.
“It's a great opportunity to start educating and introducing this new option to the masses for the first time,” said Matilda Ho, founder and managing director of Shanghai-based food tech venture capital firm Bits x Bites. “There’s been growing interest among Chinese consumers about plant-based meat since last summer.”
Demand has already been growing in the world’s second largest economy. China’s vegan food market is forecast to be worth nearly US$12 billion by 2023, up from just under US$10 billion in 2018, according to a report issued last year by Euromonitor International. Sales of plant-based meat in China increased from US$7.2 billion in 2014 to US$9.7 billion in 2018, according to the same report.
“We believe that plant-based meat, as a new food technology, will transform the traditional food industry like the internet transformed traditional industries,” said Zhou Qiyu, marketing manager of Whole Perfect Food, a Shenzhen-based vegan food company founded in 1993.
A number of factors are driving China’s shift to plant-based food tech. Before Covid-19, an outbreak of African swine fever led to massive culling of pigs, causing a surge in pork prices and rising concerns about food safety in the meat supply chain.
Separately, the government wants to halve the country’s meat consumption by 2030 to cut carbon emissions and control obesity. Surveys have also found that Chinese consumers are becoming more open to a “flexitarian”, or mainly vegetarian, diet.
Separate outbreaks of the coronavirus pandemic in two separate wholesale food markets – the original one in Wuhan in January and a second wave in Beijing in June – have also sparked consumer concern when it comes to meat consumption.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=ZiBCZ0uQG3I&feature=emb_logo
3D printouts of plant-based meat could become alternative food for world’s population

“Although people are now returning back to the normal routine after Covid-19, consumers are concerned about the potential link between meat products and the virus,” Bits x Bites’ Ho said. “Some are reducing their meat intake as a result. Many are preparing for the worst to come again.”
While the pace of food tech deals in the capital market has slowed due to the pandemic, Ho said fundamental demand for meat alternatives and consumer preference for plant-based protein technologies are on the increase. Bits x Bites has invested in four alternative protein start-ups, and one company in its portfolio – Israeli chickpea protein specialist InnovoPro – raised US$15 million in its series B funding in April.
Domestic food-tech players are also raising funds off the back of their innovative plant-based protein products. Shenzhen-based Starfield, founded last year, closed its latest funding round in March, attracting investment from Dao Foods and New Corp Capital, an early backer of Beyond Meat.
Whole Perfect Food collaborated with Alibaba’s Tmall marketplace in June to launch low-fat, plant-based chicken sausages targeting fitness freaks. Zhenmeat, another Chinese start-up, is experimenting with 3D printed bones to insert into its plant-based meat products to make them seem more like real meat.
Owing to its Buddhist culture, China has a long history of developing vegetarian dishes that mimic the taste of meat. Whole Perfect Food, one of the country’s biggest vegetarian food producers, generates almost 300 million yuan (US$43.2 million) annually from sales of products such as vegan shrimp and plant-based abalone sauce.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/08/06/d3afc0e4-d7b8-11ea-a9df-dfa023813e67_1320x770_193955.jpg
Products from Beyond Meat are shown for sale at a market in Encinitas, California. Photo: Reuters

However, compared to Western competitors, Chinese players still have a long way to go. California-based Impossible Foods uses genetic engineering to harvest soy leghemoglobin, or heme, in large volumes from yeast to make its products taste more like meat. Most of the Chinese-developed plant-based meat still has a strong bean taste, according to Zhou.
Meanwhile, US companies have yet to develop technologies to mimic muscle fibre, which means current plant-based meat is limited to the forms of ground or minced meat, rather than beef steak or chicken breast. Western food tech companies also have not developed a convincing plant-based alternative to higher fat meat like pork, which accounts for more than 60 per cent of China’s total meat consumption.
Chinese consumers also tend to care more about the texture of the meat, said Xue Yan, secretary general of the China Plant-Based Foods Alliance, one of the first organisations to represent the alternative protein sector in China. He expects to see more local start-ups developing technologies to improve the meat’s texture and coming out with products that cater to Chinese consumers.
A bigger question for suppliers is whether Chinese consumer interest and curiosity will translate into repeat buying or brand loyalty, rather than one-off purchases.
“There aren’t enough qualitative breakthroughs in global plant-based meat technology. Domestic consumers’ pursuit of taste and flavour is endless. That’s the greatest challenge for us,” said Zhou.

threads
Shaolin-diet-vegetarianism-and-stuff (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?61187-Shaolin-diet-vegetarianism-and-stuff)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

The latest update from Pan Mountain - READ Rebuilding the Northern Shaolin Temple: Part 16: Expansion Plans (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/ezine/article.php?article=1552) by Greg Brundage

http://www.kungfumagazine.com//admin/site_images/KungfuMagazine/images/ezine/8895_Image1.jpg

THREADS
Bei Shaolin Temple 北少林寺 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?52748)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Tai Chi for coronavirus disease 2019 in recovery period: A protocol for systematic review and meta analysis (https://www.docwirenews.com/abstracts/tai-chi-for-coronavirus-disease-2019-in-recovery-period-a-protocol-for-systematic-review-and-meta-analysis-2/)
August 9, 2020

This article was originally published here
Medicine (Baltimore). 2020 Aug 7;99(32):e21459. doi: 10.1097/MD.0000000000021459.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Assessing the effectiveness and safety of Tai Chi for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in recovery period is the main purpose of this systematic review protocol.

METHODS: The following electronic databases will be searched from inception to April 2020: MEDLINE, Ovid, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, the Allied and Complementary Medicine Database, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, VIP Database and Wanfang Database. In addition, Clinical trial registries, like the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, the Netherlands National Trial Register and ClinicalTrials.gov, will be searched for ongoing trials with unpublished data. No language restrictions will be applied. The primary outcome will be the time of disappearance of main symptoms (including fever, asthenia, cough disappearance rate, and temperature recovery time), and serum cytokine levels. The secondary outcome will be the accompanying symptoms (such as myalgia, expectoration, stuffiness, runny nose, pharyngalgia, anhelation, chest distress, dyspnea, crackles, headache, nausea, vomiting, anorexia, diarrhea) disappear rate, negative COVID-19 results rate on 2 consecutive occasions (not on the same day), CT image improvement, average hospitalization time, occurrence rate of common type to severe form, clinical cure rate, and mortality. Two independent reviewers will conduct the study selection, data extraction and assessment. Review manager software V.5.3 will be used for the assessment of risk of bias and data synthesis.

RESULTS: The results will provide a high-quality synthesis of current evidence for researchers in this subject area.

CONCLUSION: The conclusion of the study will provide an evidence to judge whether Tai Chi is effective and safe for COVID-19 in recovery period.

threads
Tai-Chi-as-medicine (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?50553-Tai-Chi-as-medicine)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Aug 11, 2020 4:56pm PT
China to Ease Limits on Movie Ticket Sales, Screening Length Starting This Weekend (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/china-coronavirus-theater-rules-eased-1234732317/)
By Rebecca Davis

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/tenent.jpg?w=600
Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros.

Cinemas in some parts of China have been told that they may now sell up to 50% of their available tickets for each screening and play films over two hours in length without restrictions starting from Aug. 14, local reports and leaked directives show.

Concessions may also now be sold — not to snack on in theaters, but, amusingly, as take-away.

The easing of theater restrictions is a big positive sign for the China box office prospects of Disney’s “Mulan,” which confirmed on Monday it would hit Chinese theaters “soon,” and Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” which is set to debut in the country on Sept. 4.

COVID-19 has dealt a blow to the global box office dreams of both films, with Disney choosing to forgo theatrical in most markets and release its live-action remake on its own streaming platform.

Chinese cinemas reopened for the first time in six months on July 20. Initial national guidelines required them to cap ticket sales at just 30% of their max capacity to allow for more extensive social distancing. They also banned the sale and consumption of concessions, and requested that screenings not go over two hours. Local authorities in some regions began asking cinemas to program a short intermission into longer films, but not others.

Now, the screening length issue appears to cleared up in time for the weekend debut of two hotly anticipated longer titles: a 3D, 4K restoration of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and the censored Chinese war epic “The Eight Hundred,” which both open Friday. “Bad Boys for Life” starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, which runs at 123 minutes, is also set to premiere alongside them.

Giving cinemas the ability to sell up to half the available seats for each showing will be a welcome boon for exhibitors. Business has been “better than expected,” analysts say, but still slow as audiences appear to await more enticing offerings.

The most successful cinema in the country, a five-hall, 565-seat venue on Hainan island, sold 1,379 tickets worth $7,000 on Tuesday.

The images below show the seating availability for two different Imax theaters in Beijing last Saturday night for the opening weekend of “1917.” The red icons indicate seats already taken, while the grey, locked seats are those left empty for social distancing purposes. For a major title on the most popular weekend evening, the 30% capacity rule left most good seats occupied, leaving only options at the very front or side.

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/taopiaopiao-tickets.png?w=600
Courtesy of Tao Piaopiao

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/taopiaopiao-tickets2.png?w=600
Recently, a few other foreign titles have announced an upcoming theatrical outing in China.
Courtesy of Tao Piaopiao

They include the 2017 U.S. historical drama “The Current War,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Thomas Edison and Nicholas Hoult as Nikola Tesla, which will arrive in China on Aug. 28. Co-produced by Harvey Weinstein and originally set for distribution by The Weinstein Company, the film’s release got caught up in Weinstein’s sexual abuse scandal and did not debut until last fall. It’s made $12 million worldwide so far, with $6 million of that from North America.

Two Japanese titles are also preparing to hit cinemas. They are the 1999 Cannes competition title “Kikujiro” — written, directed and starring Takeshi Kitano — which has yet to set a date, and “Masquerade Hotel,” a 2019 crime film directed by Masayuki Suzuki that will premiere in China on Sept. 4.

threads
Chollywood-rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Aug 12, 2020 2:35am PT
China’s ‘Eight Hundred’ Lines up August Release in North America, Australia, New Zealand (https://variety.com/2020/film/asia/eight-hundred-august-release-america-australia-new-zealand-1234732689/)
By Patrick Frater

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/the-eight-hundred-res.jpg?w=600
Courtesy of Huayi Bros.

Chinese war action film “The Eight Hundred” will open in theaters in North America, Australia and New Zealand at the end of the month, a week after it becomes the biggest local film this year to open in Chinese cinemas..

Handled by Huayi Bros., the controversial film will release in China on Aug. 28. Overseas, CMC Pictures has set Aug. 28 as the date for an outing in English-language markets.

Fixing the date was a delicate balance. It has become common practise in recent years for commercial Chinese films to aim for day-and-date releases that are coordinated with the mainland Chinese outing.

That approach not only minimizes piracy, but also allows the overseas distributor to capitalize as much as possible on the Chinese marketing efforts, and the assumption that Chinese diaspora audiences are in touch with Chinese social media. A long delay potentially risks the chance that North American-based Chinese diaspora audiences would choose to watch the film on Chinese streaming platforms instead.

CMC says it is still trying to build out its release pattern. Key cities in North America, notably New York and Los Angeles, are still closed due to coronavirus control restrictions. The same is true in Victoria State and Australia’s second most populous city Melbourne.

But in Canada, Australia and New Zealand “The Eight Hundred” has the advantage of coming after Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” which will be the first major Hollywood movie into theaters in several months and act as an ice breaker. That strategy does not hold up in the U.S., where “Tenet” is scheduled for Sept. 4.

Until Tuesday, when four new cases were uncovered in Auckland, New Zealand had gone over 100 days without a locally transmitted COVID-19 case, and most cinemas had reopened. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered a level 2 alert for most of the country, meaning that indoor gatherings must be limited to 100 people. For Auckland, the return to a level 3 alert means that cinemas re-closed from noon on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020.

Local crime drama, “This Town” topped the box office over the past weekend with over NZ$200,000 earned from 114 screen release by Madman Entertainment. The film had shot in Hawkes Bay from a screenplay by David White and Henry Feltham, directed by White and produced by Kelly Martin, Aaron Watson and White.

The $80 million “Eight Hundred” was produced by Huayi Brothers and is directed by Guan Hu (Mister Six”). It was also the first Chinese film to be entirely shot with Imax cameras.

Its story centers on the sacrifices made a ragtag group of Chinese soldiers in 1937 Shanghai as imperial Japanese troops advanced. Their operations were once praised by Mao Zedong himself as a “classic example of national revolution.” But its Shanghai Film Festival premiere last June was halted at the last minute, and its July commercial outing cancelled, after intervention by a group of Communist Party scholars and experts. They said that the film had mis-stepped in its portrayal of the rival Kuomintang Party, which ruled China until it lost the civil war against the Communists in 1949 and fled to Taiwan.

The Chinese film industry has been harder hit by the COVID-19 fallout than most other business sectors. Cinemas were closed from Jan. 23 until July 20, and some are still only now reopening their doors. To date most films released in Chinese theaters have been re-releases and a mix of small-scale local and international titles. Nationwide box office over the past weekend was flat at an aggregate $17 million.

threads
The-Eight-Hundred (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71303-The-Eight-Hundred)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

AMC Theatres to Reopen Next Week at 15 Cents Per Movie (https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/amc-theatres-reopen-next-week-15-cents-per-movie/)
AMC Theatres announced 100 theaters will reopen on Aug. 20 with the cost of 15 cents per ticket.
By David Crow
|
August 13, 2020

https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/AMC-Theatres.jpg?resize=768%2C432
AMC Theatres
Photo: Noam Galai / Getty Images

“Movies in 2020 at 1920 Prices.” That is the amusing slogan AMC Theatres trumpeted Thursday in relation to their confirmation of 100 movie theaters definitely reopening across North America. With this reopening signaling one-sixth of their U.S. locations being ready for business in a week’s time, AMC will charge only 15 cents per ticket on the first day of the rollout.

The pricing is an amusing gimmick that harkens back to when going to the movies was not only safe but also the primary form of populist entertainment in the U.S. Indeed, if one was to argue, like director Christopher Nolan has, that cinema is the most democratic form of art, it’s with those kind of prices that it became possible. Of course by Aug. 20 none of the intended studio wide releases on which theaters are resting hope will be out to reawakening audiences’ appetites.

Indeed, The New Mutants, the first major studio wide release since March, does not open until Aug. 28. And Tenet, the real tentpole that theaters are banking on to be truly must-see, does not open in “select U.S. cities” until Sept. 3. Even Solstice Pictures’ Unhinged, which stars Russell Crowe as a maniac driver, doesn’t bow until Aug. 21.

But the novel approach of returning to ‘20s era prices in a different decade is a gambit designed to get those who really miss moviegoing to try AMC locations out on the first day, likely by watching old favorites such as Nolan’s Inception, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Of course it’s trying to get audiences to try it during the heat of the coronavirus pandemic.

Despite infection rates going down in May, infection rates have increased again this summer, particularly in states like Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and California. For that reason, movie theaters remain mandatorily closed in more than 10 states, and in major moviegoing markets like New York City.

Still, AMC Theatres is pledging that the reopening will come with new safety features which include reduced capacity seating to enforce social distancing, new ventilation systems in the theaters, and an emphasis on no-contact ticket buying and concessions. Perhaps in AMC’s biggest acceptance of the current health crisis though is the theater chain agreeing to require moviegoers to wear masks… but that only came after backlash to the initial announcement that mask-wearing would merely be a guideline and AMC did not want to wade into the “politics” of hard science.

Still, on Aug. 20 you can expect to get some version of the 1920 experience. Just hope it isn’t the 1919 one when the Spanish Flu still was hanging on.

threads
Chollywood-rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Aug 17, 2020 12:00pm PT
Peter Chan’s Volleyball Drama ‘Leap’ to Hit China Over National Day (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/peter-chan-leap-national-day-1234737468/)

By Rebecca Davis

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/leap-image-cropped.jpg?w=600
"Leap"

Peter Chan’s hotly anticipated biographical sports drama “Leap” is set to hit China on Sept. 30, becoming the first of the Chinese New Year blockbusters canceled due to COVID-19 to set a theatrical outing.

Local animation “Jiang Ziya: Legend of Deification,” which was also originally scheduled to premiere over the lunar new year, will premiere the day after. They will both hit theaters over the China’s patriotic National Day holiday that begins Oct. 1, typically one of the busiest movie-going weeks of the year.

They will compete against the patriotic anthology film “My People, My Homeland,” a sequel to last National Day’s “My People, My Country,” and Chinese comedy “Coffee or Tea?,” as well as a local animated take on the classic “Mulan” legend.

The fact that major new local blockbusters are now willing to set release dates is a signal of renewed confidence in China’s box office, as cinemas slowly get back on their feet after six months of closures. Theaters are still currently only allowed to sell up to 50% of their available tickets to enable social distancing.

Seven major films were expected to release Jan. 24 over the lunar new year holiday, but all were pulled just before their premieres as COVID-19 swept the country and made mass cinema-going look less and less feasible. Theaters were officially ordered shut by authorities just afterwards.

Of those titles, “Leap” is the first to set a theatrical release date. The others include helmer Dante Lam’s “The Rescue,” Wanda’s “Detective Chinatown 3,” Stanley Tong’s Jackie Chan-starring “Vanguard” and two animations, “Jiang Ziya” and “Boonie Bears: The Wild Life.”

Xu Zheng’s “Lost in Russia,” which was thematically tied to the lunar new year holiday, stoked controversy by deciding to skip theatrical altogether and release for free via ByteDance’s video platforms, including Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), Toutiao and Watermelon video.

“Leap” tells the story of the Chinese women’s national volleyball team and their tribulations over the course of decades. It features Huang Bo (“The Island,” “Crazy Alien”) and Gong Li, who stars as the legendary coach Lang Ping.

Threads
Chollywood-rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
Mulan (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
Jiang Ziya: Legend of Deification (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71621-Legend-of-Deification-Jiang-Ziya)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Aug 23, 2020 12:22pm PT
‘The Eight Hundred’ Marches to $119 Million Total at Chinese Box Office (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/the-eight-hundred-china-box-office-2-1234745837/)
By Rebecca Davis

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/the-eight-hundred-e8819ae784a6e4b9b1e4b896e4b8ade79a84e5b08fe4babae7 89a9-copy-cr-res.jpg?w=600
Courtesy of Huayi Bros

“The Eight Hundred” has marched out ahead of all competitors at the China box office with earnings reminiscent of pre-COVID times, grossing $75.7 million over its opening weekend, according to data from industry tracker Maoyan. This brings its cume since last week’s previews up to $119 million.

Helmer Guan Hu’s retelling of a historic standoff between Chinese and Japanese soldiers in 1930s Shanghai is the first truly new blockbuster to hit the China market since coronavirus shut cinemas down in late January. In the five weeks since Chinese theaters reopened in late July, the titles available to viewers have been either re-releases of older fare, or Hollywood films that released months ago in other countries and have already circulated amongst many viewers illegally online.

“The Eight Hundred” should have released last summer, but was pulled at the last minute due to censorship concerns. The version now in theaters is 13 minutes shorter than the one that would have screened last year.

Chinese commentators have attributed its explosive success to “an upsurge of people’s patriotic enthusiasm during the pandemic period.”

On the more populist Maoyan app, where the title has a 9.2 out of 10 rating, people mostly said they liked the film because it was emotionally stirring. When selecting key phrases to describe why they enjoyed it, they chose “moving plot,” “a rousing ending,” and many “tearjerking moments” as factors far more than they selected other factors like “good script,” “good creativity,” or “good production values.”

“A blood-boiling patriotic education film, which allows us us to once again feel the bloody fighters’ feeling of connection to their home country!” wrote one of the most popular user reviews.

Another said bluntly that to complain about the film was unpatriotic and therefore unacceptable, writing: “Only people who are ****** would go about insulting [this film], people who don’t even know which country’s people they are,” using stars to denote an unfavorable descriptor.

All other titles this weekend trailed far behind “The Eight Hundred,” with only two others crossing the $1 million mark.

Its closest competitor was a 4K restored re-release of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” which grossed $4.2 million this weekend, its second in theaters. This brings its 2020 China cume up to $24 million.

Newer Hollywood films didn’t fare much better. “Onward,” which debuted in China mid-week on Wednesday, Aug. 18, grossed $1.96 million in its first weekend in theaters to come in third. Its current cume for the territory is now $2.7 million.

Meanwhile, “Trolls World Tour” premiered Friday to a weekend gross of merely $554,000.

Other Hollywood films also did only a whimper of business, including “Bad Boys for Life” ($414,000), “Interstellar” ($370,000), and fellow war film “1917” ($214,000).

A factor contributing to their poor performance is that most of the screenings were allocated to “The Eight Hundred.” That film accounted for an average of 60% of total screenings nationwide over the weekend, while “Trolls” had around around 4%, “Onward” around 6%, and “Harry Potter” around 11.5%.

The ratio of how many screenings will be given to one film over another may be subject to much backroom wheeling and dealing, but ultimately comes down to cinemas’ own belief that a particular title will make them money.

Now that “The Eight Hundred” has broken the ice, other local blockbusters will likely be encouraged by its performance to start setting release dates again. Already upcoming are two competitive Chinese new year titles that had previously been pulled due to COVID: animation “Jiang Zi Ya” and Peter Chan’s volleyball drama “Leap,” both set to debut during early October National Day holiday.

threads
The-Eight-Hundred (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71303-The-Eight-Hundred)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Goings On
Our Columnists
The Miracle of Breeding a Panda Cub During a Pandemic (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-miracle-of-breeding-a-panda-cub-in-a-pandemic)
By Robin Wright
August 22, 2020

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5f414de2840e569c23e39066/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Wright-Panda01.jpg
The National Zoo used eight hundred million frozen sperm to help its aging panda matriarch, Mei Xiang, defy the one-per-cent chance she would give birth.Photograph by Linda Davidson / The Washington Post / Getty

In a year of tortured politics, nationwide protests, and a highly contagious pandemic, our troubled republic finally has something to celebrate. Washington, D.C., has a panda cub. Mei Xiang, a mellow matriarch who weighs in at two hundred and thirty pounds, gave birth to a tiny, hairless pink cub weighing just ounces, at 6:35 p.m. Friday, at the National Zoo. The wee panda, the size of a butter stick, introduced itself with a howling squawk. The birth defied the zoological odds—Mei’s advanced age, the life-long failure of her partner panda, Tian Tian, to figure out how to mate, the zoo’s inability to extract fresh sperm from him fast, and, especially, the many complications from the covid-19 pandemic. A week after the pandemic forced the National Zoo to close, on March 14th, Mei began to ovulate. Most of the zoo’s staff were ordered to stay at home or reduce hours. In a race against time, a small team of reproduction specialists—all willing to risk the rules of social distancing—thawed eight hundred million sperm to artificially inseminate Mei, knowing that it probably wouldn’t work. “It’s overcoming the odds, and if there was ever a need for a sense of overcoming the odds, it’s now,” Brandie Smith, the zoo’s deputy director, told me. “People need this. It’s the story of hope, and the story of success, and the story of joy.”

The average lifespan of a panda—the world’s rarest and most endearing bear—is between fourteen and twenty years in the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund. (The panda is its logo.) Mei is twenty-two years old. “Given her age, she had less than one-per-cent chance of giving birth,” Smith said. Only one older panda in recorded history—anywhere in the world—has had a cub. She was twenty-three; she lived in China, the homeland of the world’s pandas.

Pandas are notoriously poor at reproduction, which is one of the many reasons they were long endangered. Today, there are less than two thousand in the wild. To encourage sex, panda handlers in China have even tried giving males Viagra and showing them “panda porn”—videos of other pandas having sex—to the breeding pairs. Females only go into estrus once a year—and only for twenty-four to seventy-two hours. Unlike with humans, and many other mammals, including leopards, gazelles, and antelope, zoologists do not know how to induce or manipulate pandas’ fertility cycles. “We have to wait for nature to take its course,” Dr. Pierre Comizzoli, one of the zoo’s veterinary specialists in species preservation, told me.

This year’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Helping a panda reproduce is labor-intensive. Just determining if and when Mei goes into estrus is tricky, and even harder during a pandemic. The zoo has to collect her urine—with a syringe off whatever surface she pees on, when the two-hundred-and-thirty-pound bear isn’t looking—to test her hormone levels at the endocrinology laboratory. This year, her hormones peaked on March 22nd, during lockdown.

The zoo veterinary team had to move fast, because mating wasn’t possible. In 2004, when Mei hit puberty, the zoo tried to get her and Tian Tian to breed naturally. But Tian kept pushing Mei’s body down, rather than lifting it up to penetrate properly. The zoo got creative. It built wooden platforms and tried plastic cylinders to boost her body into the right position. But the two giant bears never did consummate. So the zoo, which has pandas, in large part, to study the reproduction and the preservation of the species, turned to artificial insemination.

In the past, trying to get Mei pregnant has required two teams employing the same equipment and catheters used for intrauterine insemination of humans—with a catch. “These are wild animals,” Comizzoli, who leads the operation, said. “You have to sedate them. They are big carnivores.” One team would sedate Tian and extract fresh semen. “Always better to get fresh semen, whatever the species,” Comizzoli, who has also successfully artificially inseminated an elephant, noted. A second team would anesthetize Mei, empty her bladder with one catheter, then deposit the semen in her uterus with another. Pandas also have notoriously small uteruses. “It goes extremely fast,” he said. “It takes a matter of minutes to inject the semen.”

The pandemic changed all that. The zoo assembled only one, smaller team. “This year, we wanted to minimize the number of procedures, so we had to go with frozen semen in our cryopreservation bank,” Comizzoli said. It had been there for five years. To help widen the genetic pool, the zoo has in the past inseminated frozen semen from pandas in China as well as Tian’s semen—double inseminations to increase the odds of a pregnancy. (Some artificial inseminations in China have used semen frozen from pandas who have since died.) But the three cubs Mei has produced since 2005 have all been from Tian’s fresh semen.

The zoo’s team risked their lives to inseminate eight hundred million sperm cells—from the billions the zoo has stored—hoping that one would reach and fertilize the one or two eggs that Mei produced. The zoo was skeptical. “The truth is that we know, in terms of biology, that after the age of twenty, it’s pretty advanced for reproduction,” he said. “Our female is at that time of life when, yes, there are less chances of carrying a healthy fetus.” Even at a younger age, Mei’s offspring had problems; only three of her six cubs have survived.

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5f414d36455009552ece4625/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/Wright-Panda02.jpg
An overhead blackandwhite view of the panda Mei Xiang sitting in an enclosure with hay on the floor after giving birth
Mei Xiang, after giving birth to her panda cub.Photograph from AP / Shutterstock

But on August 14th, Mei let zookeepers do a rare ultrasound in exchange for some of her beloved honey water; she usually balks at the latter stage of a pregnancy or pseudo-pregnancy (of which she has had several). It revealed fetal tissue. “We are totally surprised,” zoo spokeswoman Pamela Baker-Masson said, in an announcement. “Reproductively speaking, this is like a miracle.” The pregnancy was big news across Washington, too. Views on the zoo’s popular panda cam soared by twelve hundred per cent. On Friday, after news got out that she was in labor, the system repeatedly crashed.

Since China gifted the first pair of pandas to the United States, in 1972, the bears have become the city’s unofficial but beloved symbol—replacing both the donkeys and elephants that symbolize the parties that rule (at least technically) from the capital. Over the past week, the zoo set up a nursery, complete with three incubators, outside Mei’s nesting den. They prepared for the possibility of her having twins—and rejecting one. Twice, she has given birth to two cubs and one has died. Panda mothers often will nurse and pay attention to only one cub.

The contingency plan was to keep one in the incubator and try to swap it every few hours to let her nurse both. “If she has two, our plan is to swap,” Smith told me. “You have to sneak up on a giant panda and reach your hand under her belly and take one of the cubs off her. This is a bear that can crush a femur. It’s a dangerous endeavor.” If Mei refused to nurse one of the cubs, then the zoo would hand-raise it until it was viable on its own. The previous cub, the mischievous and spirited Bei Bei, had a twin, but it soon died despite the zoo’s efforts.

The future of Washington’s pandas is uncertain. The new cub—whose gender may not be known for weeks—arrived in the midst of contract negotiations with China. The pandas are technically owned by China and leased to the zoo. Mei and Tian originally cost a million dollars a year; now the zoo pays half a million annually. Each cub has to be turned over to China by its fourth birthday, under the zoo’s existing agreement with China. Bei Bei, an adventurous bear who dared fate by climbing high into trees even after he reached two hundred pounds, went back last November. The current lease on Mei and Tian expires on December 7th. The National Zoo, one of the few free animal parks in the United States, has to raise the funds to pay its panda fees to China, plus cover the costs of facilities, staff, food, and panda health care—including artificial insemination. Each panda eats some forty pounds of bamboo a day. For all the celebrating, the new cub was also bittersweet for Washington. “No matter what, this will be Mei’s last cub. It’s the end of an era,” Smith told me. “We’re a little melancholy because these pandas have meant so much to the city, to the zoo, and to us as individuals.”



Robin Wright has been a contributing writer to The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”
More

threads
pandas (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?54939-Pandas)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

Aug 26, 2020 10:58am PT
‘We’ll Do Anything to See ‘Tenet”: Meet the Fans Taking Flights for Christopher Nolan’s Latest (https://variety.com/2020/film/global/tenet-christopher-nolan-flights-flying-1234749449/)
By Manori Ravindran

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/tenet.jpg?w=600
Melinda Sue Gordon

California resident Tyler Tompkins booked a plane ride to see “Tenet” weeks before movie tickets to Christopher Nolan’s latest sci-fi epic even went on sale.

The round-trip flight from Los Angeles to Austin, a three-hour Spirit Airlines journey in time for the Sept. 1 screening, set him back $220. And that’s without accounting for the cinema stub itself, popcorn or soda. His plan? Land in the Lone Star state (where movie theaters have reopened), book it to the AMC Barton Creek Square, and see the movie — twice — before returning straight home.

“I’m seeing the movie like three hours after I land. That’s the whole purpose of this trip,” says a breathlessly excited Tompkins, who’s traveling with three others. “My friends think I’m crazy, going all the way across the country to watch it, but we want to show support for this film and we’ll do anything to see it.”

Though 65% of cinemas across the globe are now open, according to Gower Street Analytics, some international fans keen to see rare 70MM IMAX screenings of the film, and Americans in states with shuttered movie theaters, like Tompkins, are willing to cross state and country lines to be among the first to see “Tenet” on the big screen.

The 24-year-old cinephile moved from Austin to Los Angeles earlier this year with a group of friends, all hoping to break into the film industry as writers, directors and producers. Then, the global pandemic happened, and any glimmer of entry-level work dried up. Tompkins, an evangelical Nolan fan who’s been anticipating “Tenet” for months, gets by working as a server at Yard House in Marina Del Rey. As the situation grew dire for California’s cinemas, he began quietly putting money aside in case an inter-state journey was an option.

“When we were certain the film was coming out in the U.S. and I saw the theater I used to go to all the time in Austin was showing the movie on Sept. 1, I immediately bought a plane ticket,” says Tompkins.

The trip will be his first flight since the coronavirus crisis hit, and his first cinema outing, too. Tompkins, who graduated college in 2018, describes the summer anticipating “Tenet” as an “emotional rollercoaster.” “We’re just happy it’s finally happening. Nolan and Warner Bros. are taking a huge chance on this $200 million movie. We want to make sure we support it in any way possible.”

Tompkins is aware some may balk at the lengths — and perceived risks — he’s taking to see “Tenet,” but there’s little trepidation on his part. Friends who’ve flown since March have assured that face coverings are diligently worn on flights, and AMC’s socially distanced seating plans put him at ease.

“I’m not too worried,” he shrugs. “If I get sick, that’s my problem, but I want to make sure I don’t get anyone else sick, so I’ll be following the precautions.”

Another Los Angeles-based fan set to take flight for “Tenet,” who spoke to Variety on the condition of anonymity, likens the experience to “Star Wars” fans camping out for tickets, or Apple users queueing for new iPhones. “It’s stupid, yes,” says the 30-year-old university administrator who’s flying to Salt Lake City over a long weekend, “but it’s something I’m interested in.”

The film junkie, who plans to catch the film at an IMAX with Utah’s Megaplex Theatres, was able to pay for his flight with air miles, forking out a nominal $13 in taxes and fees. Thanks to free lodging with friends, he reckons he can get by on $50 over the weekend ahead of his Aug. 31 screening, for which he’s taken Monday off.

Such trips come as the U.S. exhibition sector creaks back to life, with movie theaters in Florida, Texas and Georgia now screening films such as “Unhinged,” which played 1,823 venues in North America last weekend. However, major markets like New York, California and New Jersey remain shuttered, and many are critical of all non-essential travel, let alone for an out-of-state movie.

“Travel can be a way of spreading vectors and it does give me pause,” he says. “But in general? I think people have been very selfish. People are drinking, gambling, touching cards and chips in casinos, yet there’s less shame for that than a handful of movie nerds who are doing this.”

There’s a wider principle at stake, too. “This [release] will be a referendum on whether or not theatrical for large blockbusters can happen, and I don’t want these films to go the way of ‘Mulan,’” he says. “If a film is shot for IMAX, I’m interested in seeing it on a large-format screen.”

Indeed, the lure of IMAX cinemas, especially those equipped to show crisp 70MM prints — the wide high-resolution film gauge once used to project classic films — has prompted some global fans to cross country lines. However, Europe’s resurgence of COVID-19 and knee-jerk government regulations are foiling plans across the continent.

Lukáš Meinhart, a cinema manager based in Prague, Czech Republic, says the pleasure of seeing a Nolan film in “the biggest analogue format out there” is “absolute perfection.” This year, the feat is especially challenging as London’s BFI IMAX — where Tom Cruise caught an early screening of “Tenet” on Tuesday — is the only IMAX in Europe showing “Tenet” in 70MM.

Keen to take his wife Bettina, who is based in Vienna, Austria, Meinhart booked London flights out of neighboring Slovakia for mid-September — a trip that will amount to around €300 ($350). However, the U.K. last week removed Austria from its “travel corridor” list — a roster of countries permitting safe travel without a 14-day quarantine period — meaning the couple would need to self-isolate for two weeks upon arriving in London, which they’re not prepared to do.

“Either they open the borders [again] for Austria by mid-September, or not,” the 29-year-old says warily. “I can either cancel the flights and spend time somewhere else with my wife, or take my brother.” Further complicating matters is whether a cautious BFI IMAX will even screen the film into September.

“I was pretty sad about it,” says Meinhart. “I just wanted to share it with my wife — to show her what cinema means to me.” Bettina Meinhart says she simply “can’t understand the travel regulations against Austria,” and suggest politics may be involved.

And yet, the couple regrets nothing. “We shouldn’t stop making plans to realize our dreams, to visit another country and experience something else,” Lukáš Meinhart says. “We should be aware of the regulations, but it shouldn’t limit us.”

In Paris, France, Franck Laniel similarly found himself in the coronavirus crosshairs. A devout supporter of the BFI IMAX, he booked his Sept. 5 cinema tickets as well as passes for the Eurostar train between London and Paris on Aug. 12. “But by Aug. 13, I started seeing that the British government was putting in quarantine measures [for France]. It was just unbelievable,” says the 43-year-old. “I was devastated.”

France was plucked off the travel corridor list on Aug. 15, meaning Laniel, who’s traveled to London for every BFI IMAX screening of Nolan’s films since 2012, can’t enter the U.K. without his one-day trip, costing the director of photography and his partner around €179 ($211), becoming a two-week stay in a hotel room.

“I’ll now have to book either another ride to London…which I obviously won’t need if the movie is no longer available at [the BFI IMAX],” complains Laniel.

But echoing a familiar refrain, the hassle is worth it for Nolan. “He’s taking lengths to shoot in IMAX so, as far as I’m concerned, if he’s going to do that much work, I’ll try and make the effort to see it in IMAX,” says Laniel.

“If the movie industry doesn’t realize there’s a difference between a movie made for TV, and a film made for theaters, the business is really going to feel the pain in the coming years.”


threads
Tenet (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71638-Tenet)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

When covid first struck, I thought it would hobble the rise of China's film industry. Now it looks like it was just what was needed to eclipse Hollywood.



Aug 27, 2020 7:05pm PT
China Is World’s First Market to Achieve Full Box Office Recovery, Says Analytics Firm (https://variety.com/2020/film/news/china-first-box-office-recovery-1234751777/)
By Rebecca Davis

https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/eight-hundred-a-cr-res-e5ae88e5869be88bb1e58b87e68ab5e68a97e68cafe5a58be5 85a8e59bbde5908ce8839e.jpg?w=600
The Eight Hundred
Courtesy of Huayi Bros

China this week became the first global market to make a “full box office recovery” according to targets developed by the U.K.-based film industry analytics firm Gower Street, the company said Thursday.

The firm created five targets to track and compare the paths of different territories’ exhibition sectors back to recovery. The indicators move from stage one — a point when a significant majority (80%) of cinemas are ready to resume operations — to stage five, in which business over the course of a week is equivalent to that of the top quartile of weekly earnings from the past two years.

After reaching this stage five goal, a particular market “should react as normal, with an ebb and flow dependent on the release calendar,” Gower Street explained.

To reach that target, post-COVID China needed to generate a weekly box office of $184 million (RMB1.27 billion). According to data from Comscore Movies, China hit this target just five days into the week starting Friday, Aug. 21, having taken in $189 million (RMB1.31 billion) by the end of the day Tuesday.

China’s national box office for the full week was $252 million (RMB1.74 billion), more than 18% greater than that of the equivalent week in 2019, which saw earnings of around $209 million (RMB1.44 billion).

More than 90% of Chinese cinemas by market share are now open, although they continue to operate with capacity restrictions allowing them to sell only half their available tickets.

Despite these limitations, China’s performance stands out worldwide at a time when nearly 65% of global cinemas by market share are now back in business in the wake of COVID-19 closures, up from 55% a week ago, Gower Street said.

The global box office so far in 2020 is just $6.88 billion, a fraction of the $27.2 billion three year average year to date score. Nevertheless, sales are increasing, with the $200 million collected globally this week marking a rise of 54% from the one previous. China, said Gower Street, was “undoubtedly the driver” of this growth.

This week’s success was due to massive sales for local war film “The Eight Hundred,” as well as Tuesday’s Qixi Festival, a type of Chinese Valentine’s day, which saw the release of popular local time-travel rom-com “Love You Forever,” which grossed more than $39 million on its opening day.

Giving the box office a further mid-week boost, local romantic drama “Wild Grass” and Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-winning “Little Women” also premiered Tuesday, debuting to the tune of $5.5 million and $1.5 million on day one, respectively, according to data from Maoyan.

This week’s box office tally accounts for nearly a third of all ticket sales in China to date this year, with “The Eight Hundred” alone accounting of 27% of the national 2020 box office as of Wednesday. The film has grossed $210 million (RMB1.45 billion) and Maoyan now projects a total of $459 million (RMB3.16 billion).

ADVERTISEMENTSCROLL TO CONTINUE READING
The Chinese market’s revival comes just in time for Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” which is set to further galvanize recovery once it premieres in the country on Sept. 4. A re-release of his “Inception” will compete with “The Eight Hundred” once it hits cinemas on Friday.

Disney’s “Mulan” has yet to receive an official release date in the territory, but is expected to hit theaters in the near future.


Threads
Chollywood-rising (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57225-Chollywood-rising)
Mulan (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
800 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71303-The-Eight-Hundred)
Tenet (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71638-Tenet)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

My latest feature for Den of Geek: The Many Obstacles of Mulan (https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/mulan-disney-controversy/)

https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/mulan-production-marketing-obstacles.jpg?resize=768%2C432

threads
mulan (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-(2020))
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

How is it we don't have a Hungry Ghost Festival thread here? Has it always been posted on the Taiwan-Ghost-Month-Doritos (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?51772-Taiwan-Ghost-Month-Doritos). This year's fest is interesting because of the corn moon (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?44620-Hi-Moon-we-are-back!!!&p=1319088#post1319088).



Covid-19 in the afterlife: Hong Kong shop sells joss paper face masks just in time for Hungry Ghost Festival (https://www.malaymail.com/news/life/2020/08/19/covid-19-in-the-afterlife-hong-kong-shop-sells-joss-paper-face-masks-just-i/1895232)
Wednesday, 19 Aug 2020 12:34 PM MYT
BY MELANIE CHALIL

https://media.malaymail.com/uploads/articles/2020/2020-08/20200819_HGF_paper_mask.jpg
Social media users had a field day mocking the idea of face masks for the dead. — Picture via Facebook/Chris Goh

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 19 — It’s no surprise that joss paper shops sell just about anything for those who want to ensure their deceased loved ones are comfortable in the afterlife.

But one shop in Hong Kong is taking things to the next level by selling joss paper face masks, just in case the Covid-19 pandemic finds its way into the spirit world.

An image of the colourful paper face masks was first posted on Facebook’s Complaint Singapore page by Chris Goh.

“Ghost month coming soon, anyone need mask can PM (private message) me,” he wrote, referring to the upcoming Hungry Ghost Festival.

The traditional festival which falls on September 2 this year sees living descendants honouring deceased ancestors by a myriad of rituals, including burning joss paper in the form of material items such as clothes, money, houses and cars.

According to Mothership Singapore, the Chinese words xian ren kou zhao are seen on the masks’ plastic packaging which roughly translates to ‘ancestor’s masks’.

One joss paper mask reportedly costs S$10 (RM30).

Hilarious comments soon poured in as social media users couldn’t get past the irony of selling face masks for those in the underworld.

One user pointed out that these joss paper masks for the dead might be a useful gift for those who refuse to wear a mask to remind them of their mortality in the face of a pandemic.

“Good, I need this as a present to those who refuse to wear a mask,” the comment read.

“[I] didn’t know there’s Covid-19 there,” one Facebook user said.

“Ghosts also must have social distancing,” another replied.

“Is there no lockdown or circuit breaker down there?” one person said mockingly.

threads
hungry ghost festival (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71855-Hungry-Ghost-Festival)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)

[GeneChing]

QUARANTINE LOCKDOWN
Source: Robert Pattinson Has COVID-19, Halting The Batman Production (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/09/robert-pattinson-the-batman-coronavirus)
Vanity Fair has learned from a well-placed source that the star came down with the virus just days after shooting resumed.
BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN
SEPTEMBER 3, 2020

https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5f36ca47f51ed31274cdfb60/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/batman-robert-pattinson.jpg
Robert Pattinson's first look for The Batman.
Robert Pattinson is said to have tested positive for the coronavirus, causing filming of The Batman to be halted just days after the superhero drama resumed work at studios outside of London.

Warner Bros. would not comment on any individual worker’s health, sharing only this statement: “A member of The Batman production has tested positive for Covid-19, and is isolating in accordance with established protocols. Filming is temporarily paused.” Vanity Fair confirmed through a highly placed source that Pattinson was the individual who became sick.

The production previously shut down, along with most other entertainment industry work, back in March when the quarantine lockdown first hit.

Pattinson’s representative did not immediately return a request for comment.

In the new movie, directed by Planet of the Apes filmmaker Matt Reeves, Batman is in his second year of vigilantism, and is trying to solve a series of gruesome serial killings. The case causes him to cross paths with Paul Dano’s The Riddler, Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle (before she becomes the criminal Catwoman), and the underworld figure Oswald Cobblepot, nicknamed The Penguin behind his back, played by Colin Farrell.

Jeffrey Wright co-stars as Commissioner James Gordon, Andy Serkis plays Bruce Wayne’s loyal butler Alfred, and John Turturro is the gangster Carmine Falcone.

“It’s a criminological experiment. He’s trying to figure out what he can do to finally change this place. You see that he’s charting what he’s doing, and he’s seeing he isn’t having any of the effect that he wants to have yet,” Reeves said recently at the DC Fandome event that revealed the new trailer. “The murders start to happen, and the murders start to describe a history of Gotham. It only reinforces what he knows about Gotham, but opens up a whole world of corruption that went much further.”

The movie is planned for release in 2021.

This story has been updated with new information.

threads
The-Batman (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70147-The-Batman)
covid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)