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%.
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.”
(1)Five hundred million people, in other words the third part of the entire world's population, were infected and fell ill.
The "Spanish" influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, which caused approximately 50 million deaths worldwide, remains an ominous warning to public health. The disease was exceptionally severe.
(2) The president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson that time, caught the flu— and so did future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Wilson felt bad during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he was negotiating the future path for the world after World War I. If he'd died during this times, it would have dramatically changed the future of many states. Wilson's daughter Margaret and much of his staff also got sick. Roosevelt — then the assistant secretary of the Navy — was infected while on a voyage to France aboard the USS Leviathan. Roosevelt survived the flu after being returned home to the States.
(3) The pandemic came to be known as the "Spanish flu," but it didn't actually start in Spain.
When the flu first hit Europe in early 1918, it spread throughout military camps on both sides of World War I. Even if it was going fast, governments involved in the war kept it a secret because they feared that acknowledging their troops were sick could help the enemy.
That's where Spain highlighted. Since it was a neutral country, it had no need to keep secrets when its people got sick, so the Spanish government and media reported what was happening.
(4)No one actually knows where the virus started. For decades, scientists have debated where in the world the pandemic started, variously pinpointing its origins in France, China, the American Midwest, and beyond. The Spanish flu reached its height in autumn 1918 but raged until 1920.
(5)People who catched the flu felt severe fatigue, fever, and headaches. Many also suffered from a cough so severe they would turn blue, tear abdominal muscles from coughing, and bleed from the mouth, nose, and sometimes ears.
The disease, which came to be known as the Spanish flu, hit the young and healthy, with many victims dying within hours or a couple days after the symptoms began.
Arriving on April 27 in Novosibirsk with a flight from Vietnam, a duck named Borislav was detained at the Tolmachevo airport - taken from the owners and quarantined because the duck did not have veterinary permission to enter Russia, Siberia newspaper reported.
Borislav is registered as a pet: she has an international passport, a special chip, the necessary vaccinations and a certificate of export - in Vietnamese and English. The duck did not have only an import permit from the Rosselkhoznadzor. According to Litvinova, back in Vietnam, she tried to contact the agency by phone and email, but no one answered her.
History of Borislav:
Litvinova and her husband bought a duckling in Vietnam seven months ago. “We saw enough horror in Vietnam, how they sell live ducks for food and wanted to save at least one duckling,” Litvinova said.
At first, the duck was called Borei, because they thought it was a male. Later it turned out that the duck is a female, so she became Borislav. The bird has its own instagram, it lives with the owners in the apartment, it is perceived as a child.
When the mistress and Borislav flew to Novosibirsk, the bird was taken. “Leaving the duck at the airport was scary: when the employee of the veterinary control called her boss, he told her over the speakerphone:“ Write out the act, we’ll kill tomorrow, ”said Litvinova.
What else is known:
On April 30, the Rosselkhoznadzor announced that they would return Borislav to the owners when they received the results of the survey. The duck is still in isolation in Tolmachevo.
“The bird responds adequately to feeding, feels satisfactory and daily takes water procedures,” the department said.
Litvinova and her husband lives in Yalta, while in Novosibirsk they were sent to quarantine for two weeks in an observatory.
Similar cases:
Earlier, a Spitz named Mila flew from Thailand to quarantine “without the right to walk”. The owner of the dog was threatened with a fine if this requirement is violated. Mila was placed in the observatory with him.
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.