A very disturbing article in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) today — https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3162088/coronavirus-hong-kong-reports-first-untraceable?module=storypackage&pgtype=homepage.
First: some background. There has been an outbreak of COVID19 traced to the Moon Palace restaurant in Kowloon recently. It began with an aircrew member from Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd., who was subsequently found to be infected with omicron. He ate lunch there 27 December with his family. . Five other customers later tested positive. Yesterday’s paper said that transmission occurred between the first known case and others not sitting close to each other. I can’t find that particular article, so this is from memory.
Today’s news is particularly bad, because the current case was acquired within the community (with no obvious contact to an infected person, or time at the restaurant), His virus has two of the mutations typical of omicron (further testing is in progress).
Given how infectious omicron is and the population density of Hong Kong (mask or no mask) omicron is likely to spread widely in Hong Kong (and likely China itself).
You won’t find any schadenfreude here. I have a son, daughter-in-law and two grandkids living there. This is why I was able to see that a pandemic was in store 2 years ago –https://luysii.wordpress.com/2020/01/27/what-to-do-about-the-wuhan-flu/
It seems quaint now, but I the reason I was reading the SCMP regularly in 2019 – 2020 was the Hong Kong riots in the summer of 2019 their possible effects on my family.
So why am I concerned presently? Due to the Chinese attempts at tight control, the majority of the Chinese population have had no infectious experience with the pandemic virus (aside from Wuhan of course). This is unlike Western populations which have been exposed and symptomatically/asymptomatically infected with various strains of the pandemic virus for nearly two years. So the Chinese are immunologic virgins as far as omicron is concerned. We are about to see how protective the vaccines they’ve received (Sinopharm, Coronavac) are against omicron.
Hopefully, the Chinese are better protected than we have been by the Pfizer, Moderna, etc. etc vaccines. As of yesterday, 37% of the 2000 or so COVID19 patients in Massachusetts hospitals are said to be ‘fully vaccinated’ (I’m not sure if this means 3 shots or the original 2).
Addendum 5 Jan ’22 — If you want to see how tenaciously the Chinese are tracing cases in the outbreak in Hong Kong — look at today’s SCMP — https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3162190/coronavirus-hong-kongs-fifth-wave-has-already?module=lead_hero_story&pgtype=homepage.
Particularly fascinating is a diagram of the diners and seating arrangements in the Moon Palace restaurant in Kowloon, the source of one outbreak — they have each confirmed case — the table they were sitting at, the times they were there. Particularly scary is the 20 meter distance between the index case (an airline stewardess) and one of the infected.
Even scarier is the pronouncement of Gabriel Leung — he’s the MD who said the pandemic was in 31 Chinese cities in 27 Jan ’21, so anything he says must be taken seriously. See the link to my post — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2020/01/27/what-to-do-about-the-wuhan-flu/
“Fellow government adviser Professor Gabriel Leung, dean of the University of Hong Kong’s faculty of medicine, told a radio programme there were “probably five to 10 invisible transmission chains in the community. It’s a very alarming situation”.
Stay tuned. The article said that there 38 COVID19 cases in Hong Kong — it isn’t clear how many are the omicron variant.
So here’s a repeat of a post written 12 December ’21
Is China following a Smokey the Bear policy on the pandemic?
China is following a prevent pandemic virus infection policy, just as Smokey the Bear followed a prevent forrest fires policy. The latter didn’t work out well, as although fires were prevented for a while. However, when fires did occur, they were much much worse than the smaller ones Smokey prevented. There was much more tinder and stuff to burn.
Actually Smokey has changed his tune slightly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Bear SmokeyBear.com’s current site has a section on “Benefits of Fire” that includes this information: “Fire managers can reintroduce fire into fire-dependent ecosystems with prescribed fire. Under specific, controlled conditions, the beneficial effects of natural fire can be recreated, fuel buildup can be reduced, and we can prevent the catastrophic losses of uncontrolled, unwanted wildfire.”
Revision 14 December 2021 — China’s policy of prevention has resulted in a Chinese population which has been vaccinated using two killed virus vaccines (Sinopharm, Coronavac). They have not had any natural infections with the virus (aside from the original cases) as far as we know given what China has allowed out.
Infection with the virus itself exposes you to all its proteins, with your immune system responding to all of them. Western vaccines are just to the spike protein.
It tends to be forgotten that moist cases of pandemic viral infection are asymptomatic.
Given 800K deaths from COVID19 in the USA, how can I possibly say this is good. Here’s how :>
If you had an infection with the virus, you develop antibodies. Nowadays, everyone who is vaccinated has antibodies so there is no point in testing for them, but what were things like in the days before vaccines?
The following is from a post July/2020.
New York State randomly tested 3,000 people at grocery stores and shopping locations across 19 counties in 40 localities to see if they had the antibodies to fight the coronavirus, indicating they have had the virus and recovered from it. With more than 19.4 million people residents, according to U.S. Census data, the preliminary results imply that at least 2.7 million New Yorkers have been infected with Covid-19.They weren’t all hospitalized.
Here’s some work the same month from Queens — https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-antibodies.html
At a clinic in Corona, a working-class neighborhood in Queens, more than 68 percent of people tested positive for antibodies to the new coronavirus. At another clinic in Jackson Heights, Queens, that number was 56 percent. But at a clinic in Cobble Hill, a mostly white and wealthy neighborhood in Brooklyn, only 13 percent of people tested positive for antibodies.
So the disease has already to spread to half the population in some neighborhoods in Queens. If even 10% of them were sick that would have been 140,000 hospitalizations. They didn’t happen.
OK, so a lot more people were infected than got sick. Why is this good?
Enter the omicron variant of the pandemic virus. It can evade the antibodies produced by all the current vaccines (in the West — protection against the Chinese killed viral vaccines CoronaVac and Sinopharm isn’t known yet). Yet omicron doesn’t appear to produce severe disease. Thus far…
The CDC in the past week said of the 40+ omicron cases it knows about (there certainly are more out there, and more to come), there was one hospitalization (for two days) and no deaths.
Here is Dr. Fauci 12 December 2021 — “We’re getting anecdotal information … not necessarily confirmed yet, that the level of severity appears to be maybe a bit less than in the Delta. But there are a lot of confounding issues that it may be due to the underlying protection in the community due to prior infections,”
Source — https://nypost.com/2021/12/12/omicron-appears-to-evade-some-protection-from-covid-vaccines/
So the Chinese population may be sitting ducks for omicron having been given vaccines (Sinopharm, Coronavac) of unknown potency against omicron. If their statistics are true there has been little or no natural infection with the pandemic virus in the Chinese population (which Fauci has just implicated is protective),. Given that I have a son, daughter in law and two grandkids living in Hong Kong, I find this extremely disconcerting.
Chemiotics II 