re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

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An 83-year-old American is diagnosed with coronavirus a day after disembarking the cruise ship Westerdam along with more than 2,200 passengers and crew

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African preparedness:
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Two labs (one in Senegal the other in South Africa) are the testing labs for the whole continent. Four countries in the Ebola area have just announced they can run tests.

There are 10,000 Chinese companies in Africa and 80,000 african students in Chinese universities.

According to Chinese state media, more than one million Chinese nationals live in African countries.

There are also more than 80,000 African students in China, often attracted by government scholarships, reports the Guardian. A 21-year-old student from Cameroon was reported to have contracted the virus after a trip to Wuhan and is being treated in hospital.

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Like weather forecasters, researchers who use mathematical equations to project how bad a disease outbreak might become are used to uncertainties and incomplete data, and Covid-19, the disease caused by the new-to-humans coronavirus that began circulating in Wuhan, China, late last year, has those everywhere you look.

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The key variables of most models are mostly the same ones epidemiologists have used for decades to predict the course of outbreaks. But with greater computer power now at their disposal, modelers are incorporating more fine-grained data to better reflect the reality of how people live their lives and interact in the modern world — from commuting to work to jetting around the world.

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The clearest sign of the progress in modeling comes from flu forecasts in the U.S. Every year, about two dozen labs try to model the flu season, and have been coming ever closer to accurately forecasting its timing, peak, and short-term intensity. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determines which model did the best; for 2018-2019, it was one from Los Alamos.

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But while important, worshipping at the shrine of R0 “belies the complexity that two different pathogens can exhibit, even when they have the same R0,” the Canadian-U.S. team argues in a paper posted to the preprint site medRxiv. Said senior author Antoine Allard of Laval University in Quebec, “the relation between R0, the risk of an epidemic, and its potential size becomes less straightforward, and sometimes counterintuitive in more realistic models.”

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Using an R0 of 2.3 and serial interval of seven days, they project 300,000 cases by next week. If the serial interval is even one day less, the number of cases blasts past 1.5 million by then. But if the countermeasures that China introduced in January, including isolating patients, encouraging people to wear face masks, and of course quarantining Wuhan, reduce the effective reproduction number, as has almost certainly happened, those astronomical numbers would plummet: to 100,000 and 350,000 cases, respectively.

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The impact of COVID-19 on healthcare workers became a little clearer today, with a Chinese health official reporting 1,716 cases, 6 of them fatal, as Egypt reported its first infection and Singapore and Japan continue to report a steady stream of local cases.

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Zeng Yixin, the National Health Commission (NHC) vice minister, said the number of infected healthcare workers is rising and that they are facing heavy and tiring workloads. He said 87% of the infected medical staff are from Hubei province, the outbreak's epicenter.

The number reported today is more than triple the 500 case number reported earlier this week by the South China Morning Post, based in information shared by Chinese hospital sources. They told the paper that at least 500 cases had been reported as of the middle of January.

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Local cases climb in Singapore, Japan
Singapore's health ministry today reported 9 more COVID-19 infections, all of them apparently local cases, raising the country's total to 67, the most outside of China, excluding the cluster on the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

Six of the new cases are part of a known church cluster, and one is a contact of an earlier confirmed case. Investigations are under way into how the other two patients were exposed to the virus.

In related developments, Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong warned today that the COVID-19 outbreak could push the country into an economic recession and that the country was bracing for a "significant hit" in the quarters ahead, Reuters reported, based on comments Loong made in a Facebook video.

Elsewhere, Japan's health ministry today reported 6 more cases in five different cities, raising its total to 37. Investigations are under way into the source of exposure, though one patient had a close conversation with a tourist from Wuhan. Two have links to the Diamond Princess cruise ship, including a taxi driver who drove passengers from the boat after they disembarked, the Straits Times reported today. One is the patient who was at the same facility where an infected surgeon worked

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BREAKING: Epicenter of coronavirus outbreak reports 1,843 new cases and 139 new deaths.

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UPDATE: China's National Health Commission reports 166 new cases and 3 new deaths outside Hubei province since yesterday

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People have been saying that for the past 2 weeks, me included... Nothing has really changed.

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