A small island nation in the Indian Ocean, Comoros, has given China a gift of €100 to help in the fight against the coronavirus. While Dr Ahamada Msa M'liva, who leads the delegation acknowledged that this might not be enough, he argues that every little helps.
“We know the capacities and the means of China, but by this gesture, the association wanted to show to the Chinese people how much the Comorians feel concerned,” Dr M'liva said.
He also praised the Chinese authorities for the communication and cooperation with international organizations fighting the coronavirus outbreak, which he described as a “complex and painful ordeal.”
The gift-giving ceremony took place in the country’s capital Moroni in early January but has only been reported to media in recent days.
The coronavirus death toll in China have passed the mark of 1,300, with roughly 43,000 people infected worldwide. So far, most of the deaths took place in Mainland China and no cure has been found. There are reports that many travelers are canceling their trip to Asia following the outbreak and a number of companies have pulled out of the biggest Mobile Wold Conference.
Four months after the first cases of coronavirus were recorded and three months after total quarantine was declared in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities changed the status of the city from closed to open to the public. However, the metropolis, apparently, it will take more time for the city to return to normal life - consumer activity is at zero, and there will probably be no foreign investors for several more years.
In Wuhan, a Chinese metropolis with a population of 12 million people, where coronavirus cases were first recorded in December 2019, quarantine is officially canceled on Wednesday, April 8. Trains will start to run from the city and it will be possible to fly by plane, intercity automobile communication will be restored. But this will not mean a return to normal, Bloomberg reports.
Despite the fact that now the number of new infections per day does not exceed 30 compared to several thousand in February, the shock from the epidemic still persists, and the fear of the second wave does not allow businesses to resume work at “pre-virus” levels. Fears are fueled by the fact that cases of infection in people who do not have symptoms of the disease are still being detected in the city. It is such asymptomatic cases that played a huge role in the spread of the epidemic. “Silent carriers,” up to a third of those whose tests tested positive for coronavirus, wrote the South China Morning Post in late March, citing Chinese government data. At the same time, Chinese doctors claim that an asymptomatic patient can infect a maximum of one person.
"Before and after"
Wuhan is the center of one of the most important industrial regions of China, Hubei Province. Before the outbreak, the provincial GDP was expected to grow by 7.5–7.8% in 2020. The city’s attractiveness for doing business has grown rapidly - according to the report of the Milken Institute for 2019, Wuhan ranked 9th in terms of aggregate economic indicators among all Chinese cities, rising seven lines in a year. Business in the city ranged from biomedicine and chip manufacturing to auto parts. Coronavirus delivered a painful blow to all of this.
In February alone, Hubei’s domestic regional product fell by at least 50%, and budget lost about $ 1 billion, estimates Chen Bo, an economics professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan.
New life
Shopping centers in Wuhan reopened, but they are mostly empty, most people are still too scared to go shopping for non-essential items. “I'm happy if no one comes in,” admits sales assistant at Calvin Klein's store at Wuhan International Plaza. “It's safer.” Typically, customers left 20,000 yuan (about $ 3,000) in the store over the weekend, and there were only two purchases in the week that passed since the store opened after the outbreak on March 30.
Such sentiments are ubiquitous. For example, in order to maintain a distance between sellers in shops and buyers, real walls are build in the city - 2 meters in height.
The movement of residents remains under tight control, and officials are on high alert for an outbreak. The Chinese government tracks residents through QR codes embedded in Alipay payment system and Wechat social network. Each application user automatically receives their health status at midnight - green, yellow or red - depending on their location, basic health information and travel history. Only those with a green code can leave their apartments and go to work. It is easy to lose the color of the code necessary for movement: it is enough to visit a shopping center, where later a case of infection with coronavirus will be revealed — then the green color turns yellow and implies self-isolation of the house.
Xiaomi Corp. employees who return to work are instructed not to enter the office elevator for more than five people each. At the same time, you can only stand in the elevator in accordance with special marks on the floor.
Five-star hotels are up and running again, but the buffet has been reduced to a few basic dishes, packed in individual disposable containers.
Li Jing, 33, who provides visitors with apartments, admits that Wuhan is now “clearly not the place people choose to visit first.” To lure guests, before each check-in, Lee will carry out a three-hour disinfection and expand the menu of services for guests. However, he admits that his apartments may be vacant for several weeks and even months.
Investors will not come
Officially, the plants in Wuhan can already resume work, but people are not in a hurry to return to jobs, and the supply chain must now be reorganized. One of the largest factories in Wuhan is the joint production of Peugeot cars by the PSA Group and the Chinese Dongfeng Motor Group. Machine assembly has resumed, but employees indicate that supply chains are intermittent. According to one of the plant’s managers, Mei Yunfeng, many of the company's suppliers have not yet returned to the same level as business as ussual.
“The outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic destroyed Wuhan’s plans to integrate more tightly into the global supply chain,” said Professor Chen from Huazhong University. The implications for tourism and foreign investment will continue for a long time. Chen points out that after the outbreak of SARS in 2003, foreign direct investment in Guangdong, where the epidemic began, stopped for two to three years. “The same thing will happen to Wuhan,” he is pessimistic. “Investors will be careful, fearing new outbreaks of the disease, in addition, it will seem to them that the city is poorly managed.”
A report from Wuhan cut off from the world, the story of the fight against the Ebola virus, memories of the Spanish epidemic and other educational projects.
Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak
At the beginning of the year, when coronavirus was not yet widely publicized, Pandemic appeared on Netflix - a six-part project dedicated to the global cause of the fight against viruses and, in fact, summarizing many documentaries from this collection. Its creators methodically analyze the process of the emergence of new strains; answer why it usually happens in poor countries and how some infections spread through animals.
American Experience: Influenza 1918
The history of the spread of coronavirus is often compared with the events of a hundred years ago. Then, in a world not yet recovering from World War I, an epidemic of Spanish flu was raging. The episode of the cult documentary series American Adventure is dedicated to her.
We Heard the Bells: the Influenza of 1918
This movie is also dedicated to the well known 1918 epidemic. But this is not an attempt to recreate the events of a century ago, but rather the desire to reflect them. The main characters are old people from different parts of the USA who, as children, became eyewitnesses of the spread of the disease. They recall how they did not believe that the Spaniard would touch them, how they had faced the death of relatives and friends, how they were ill themselves - and after that they had a long biased attitude, because other people were afraid that they would infect them too. According to many heroes of the movie, the events of those years became the most terrible memories in life.
The Lockdown: One Month in Wuhan
A documentary project about life in the famous city of Wuhan during its complete isolation. At the beginning of 2020, 11 million people remained on their own at the epicenter of the spread of coronavirus. The main characters are doctors, officials and ordinary citizens, who were able to organize themselves in the face of the disease.
How to Survive a Plague
Contrary to the name, this movies is not a training manual on what to do in the event of a “black death” pandemic. We are talking about HIV and AIDS - diseases that they preferred to remain silent about until a certain time - but somewhere they are still silent today.
Fire in the Blood
If treating HIV-infected people in America is a difficult but solvable problem, then in Africa it is almost impossible. The fact is that many pharmaceutical giants refuse to voluntarily supply medicines necessary for antiretroviral therapy to poor countries. Because of this, dozens of people who are unable to receive treatment die every day.
Why Do Viruses Kill?
Of all the projects on the list, this is perhaps the least optimistic. The movie was released 10 years ago after the swine flu pandemic, which killed some 18,000 people. Then it became obvious that we are still powerless in front of some of the creatures of nature and that modern science is not fully aware of the mechanisms of the emergence of new strains. "Why are viruses killing?" introduces us to the device of viruses and answers the question why, even today, scientists cannot stop their spread in time.
Hero with a Thousand Faces
From 2014 to 2016, a disease was raging in West Africa, killing more than 11,000 people. But this movie is not about how quickly Ebola destroys a person from the inside, but about people who are fighting an epidemic. The focus of the crew going to Sierra Leone is doctors and volunteers risking their lives.
Mosquito
Speaking of Ebola and other viral diseases, one can not help but talk about other human enemies. We have long been accustomed to them and often do not even take them seriously, but they very often carry deadly infectious diseases. That's right, we are talking about mosquitoes. The movie contains a fascinating and consistent story about how they reproduce, what they feed on and for what global epidemics these seemingly harmless insects are responsible.
Coronavirus: Explained
The most relevant project on the list. This is the new season of the Explained documentary series, whose authors in half-hourly videos answer simple questions about health, sex, politics and economics in simple language. One of the episodes of last season was devoted to epidemics - in it, Bill Gates and a team of visiting doctors discussed the likelihood that a new pandemic will happen in the next decade. Alas, their predictions came true even faster.
At a restaurant located in Hanoi, Vietnam, visitors were offered a "coronaburger." This is an ordinary burger in which the top bun is made in the form of a virus that is causing a pandemic around the world. Thus, Hanoi fast food Pizza Home decided to urge the population not to panic.
“We decided to start making crown burgers against all the negative news about coronavirus so that people could feel happier [...] In Vietnam there is such a thing - if you are afraid of something, then you should eat it,” German Gref said, Baker Pizza Home.
Despite the fact that most cafes and restaurants in Vietnam have closed due to a pandemic, Pizza Home continues to work in a takeaway format. Every day, about 50 people buy new burgers, which increased restaurant sales by 5%.
China seems to be hit by a new wave of coronavirus. People in the northeast of the country can only leave the house for strictly necessary shopping. This time it would be a form of the virus that has mutated. The symptoms of the infection appear later and the disease is more difficult to cure. Authorities imposed containment measures on the affected area.
Chinese officials have imposed quarantine restrictions on two cities in northeast China's Jilin province. Jilin is part of a larger province in the Dongbei region - home to more than 100 million people. Health authorities have raised the alert in the area, writes express.co.uk.
About 40,000 residents of Jilin and Shulan were tested for coronavirus after officials were alerted to a possible new outbreak.
In Jilin, authorities stopped all major transport links to and from neighboring cities until further notice. In Shulan, all villages and residential complexes were closed after a similar outbreak of COVID-19 cases last week.
Residents are allowed to leave their homes only for essential reasons, but not more than two hours, once every two days. However, delivery services have been largely shut down, and anti-fever drugs are banned from pharmacies to prevent people from hiding their symptoms.
Schools, public places and public transport have been closed. Children can only play outside if they wear masks, and health care workers have returned to protective equipment, writes Bloomberg.
Strict measures have raised concerns, as people believed the nation's worst epidemic was over. The fear spread to nearby areas, although no cases have been officially reported in those places.
The virus in the new outbreak has mutated
The new virus that hit northeast China is behaving differently from the one in Wuhan, and researchers say it has undergone mutations. Patients in China's new outbreaks appear to be carrying the virus for a longer period of time and need a longer recovery time. In addition, the symptoms of the disease are felt more than two weeks after infection, say Chinese specialists, which makes it difficult to detect new cases.
However, it seems that patients rarely have a fever, and the virus affects only the lungs, not the other organs as is the case with the form discovered in Wuhan. Moreover, it is believed that the new form of coronavirus is actually exported from abroad, the analysis of the strain of the new form of the virus resembling that of Russia.
