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Ha ha this is very funny.
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So unsure and uncertain. Many people asking him to step down as the head of WHO. Hmm....
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This picture is so funny.
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https://hnewswire.com/whos-tedros-adhanom-should-be-put-on-trial-for-crimes-against-humanity/ There are lots of news about the WHO Dr. Tedros Adhanom. https://www.change.org/p/www-who-say-no-to-dr-tedros-adhanom-as-next-who-director-general https://www.change.org/p/who-call-for-resignation-of-tedros-adhanom-ghebreyesus-who-director-general/c
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Thank you so much for your updates.
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Hope everything will be fine over there for you. It is tough and not easy.
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Top best recovery rate (These countries have recorded more than 60% recovery rate) Country, Other Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active Cases Percentage recovered from total cases 1. Greenland 11 +0 0 +0 11 0 100.00 % 2. Iceland 1,778 +5 10 +0 1,417 351 79.70 % 3. South Korea 10,683 +9 237 +1 8,213 2,233 76.88 % 4. Thailand 2,811 +19 48 +1 2,108 655 74.99 % 5. Austria 14,873 +78 491 +21 10,971 3,411 73.76 % 6. Iran 84,802 +1,297 5,297 +88 60,965 18,540 71.89 % 7. New Zealand 1,440 +9 12 +0 974 454 67.64 % 8. Switzerland 28,063 +119 1,436 +7 18,600 8,027 66.30 % 9. Germany 147,593 +528 4,869 +7 95,200 47,524 64.50 % 10. Australia 6,619 +7 71 +0 4,258 2,290 64.32 % 11. Hong Kong 1,030 +4 4 +0 650 376 63.11 % 12. Malaysia 5,482 +57 92 +3 3,349 2,041 61.09 % 13. Denmark 7,695 +180 370 +6 4,700 2,625 61.08 %
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2 interesting articles as listed below. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/curse-of-the-bat-woman-what-went-on-in-wuhan-lab-pxmws0pzthttps://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/curse-of-the-bat-woman-what-went-on-in-wuhan-lab-pxmws0pzt https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3bbgQIUmjY&list=PLCk54fsbGh6Wb6BOIClI90V3jF-ce6QeS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLNRnk9TUtc&list=PLCk54fsbGh6Wb6BOIClI90V3jF-ce6QeS&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OzBzfbHBBo&list=PLCk54fsbGh6Wb6BOIClI90V3jF-ce6QeS&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDzfb_KyllA&list=PLCk54fsbGh6Wb6BOIClI90V3jF-ce6QeS&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfSxne11Yjk&list=PLCk54fsbGh6Wb6BOIClI90V3jF-ce6QeS&index=5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wcdm-55Xg4&list=PLCk54fsbGh6Wb6BOIClI90V3jF-ce6QeS&index=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdfSJabF2NI&list=PLCk54fsbGh6Wb6BOIClI90V3jF-ce6QeS&index=7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yrVoxNB9gQ&list=PLCk54fsbGh6Wb6BOIClI90V3jF-ce6QeS&index=8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba8of3mHVFU&list=PLCk54fsbGh6Wb6BOIClI90V3jF-ce6QeS&index=9 Pretty interesting video above.
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Interesting facts about the virus. https://ccnationalsecurity.org/made-in-china/ “Made in China” Special Report There’s little doubt anymore that COVID-19 originated in China. It’s very possible – likely even – that the Wuhan coronavirus was not released into the world on purpose. But it’s also a fact that the Chinese Communist regime runs a sophisticated offensive biological weapons program. Chinese researchers at Beijing’s only declared BSL-4 (Bio Safety Level 4) lab, the Wuhan Virology Institute, have been publishing papers in the scientific literature for years now, explaining exactly how they were manipulating the genetic material of various coronavirus strains. They were not just looking for prophylactic drugs or vaccines to counter existing virus pathogens either. No, in the lab, they deliberately created new viruses by combining genetic material from pre-existing viruses in ways that are extremely unlikely to happen naturally—even by way of the typically active mutations that occur with RNA (ribonucleic acid) viruses like coronaviruses. Then, whether on purpose or not, that Frankenstein virus got loose. To put things in context, we should begin with a 1999 book written by two Chinese Communist Colonels in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It’s called “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America.” Stephen Coughlin has written a comprehensive analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic (“Formation of a COVID19 Red Team”) that begins with a close look at this Chinese warfare handbook. He warns that the U.S. is ill-prepared to defend itself “against hostilities waged at the political warfare level.” “Unrestricted Warfare” is an amazingly candid battle plan for waging war across a span of methods of operations that explicitly includes “Bio-chemical warfare, among other things like diplomatic warfare, economic warfare, electronic warfare, and space warfare. The point of the two Colonels’ thesis is that warfare should not be confined merely to military means but that by combining such other methods, “the other army is subdued without fighting.” Michael Pillsbury, Director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute is a brilliant China scholar with decades of service in presidential administrations since the 1970s. In 2016, he published a book that draws on his deep understanding of Chinese culture, history, and thinking. “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower” is a fascinating read that puts “Unrestricted Warfare” into an historical context spanning millennia. One of his most important themes is that while the current Communist Chinese regime of Xi Jinping is steeped in the knowledge of how its historical predecessors (especially from the so-called “Warring States” period that spanned hundreds of years) used cunning, deceit, ruthlessness, and immense patience to defeat warlord rivals, the West—and especially the U.S.—neither knows nor appreciates much that happened before what we’d call the modern era. Our other fatal mistake is to think of warfare merely in military terms. Which brings us back to the current COVID-19 pandemic and the “Made in China” Wuhan coronavirus. A terrific young journalist at The Epoch Times named Joshua Philipp has produced a documentary film called “Tracking Down the Origin of Wuhan Coronavirus.” Philipp researched a vast amount of openly available information and put it together in a way easily accessible to the average viewer. He reports on the names, the labs, the timeline, and the medical science behind it all without overwhelming us with complicated technical jargon. Bottom line up front: this Wuhan coronavirus did not come from bats at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. It came from a Chinese laboratory where researchers deliberately experimented with ways to make both pre-existing and recombinant viruses more communicable and more effective at getting inside human cells. As Philipp demonstrates, Chinese researchers have been working on coronaviruses for years. Earlier pandemics, including SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), and H1N1 (swine flu), all came out of China, too. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was established in 2003 with help from the French government in the wake of the SARS outbreak. Due to myriad security concerns, it didn’t become operational as a P-4 (Pathogen/Protection level) laboratory until 2017. Its Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety is of particular concern. Long before 2017, though, senior and internationally well-known researchers like Shi Zhengli, who worked in the Special Pathogens Lab, were experimenting on how to enhance the capacity of the coronavirus for transmission across species and specifically from animal reservoirs to humans. Shi Zhengli, widely known as the “bat lady” for her work on the bat coronavirus, has now disappeared but earlier published a number of papers in respected peer-reviewed journals like Nature Medicine. During the Obama administration, the Communist Chinese regime even paid the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to include Shi in a “gain of function” study on the potential for combining existing SARS-CoV genetic material together with the spike protein on the surface of the Chinese horseshoe bat virus in ways that would more readily transmit to and emerge in humans. Such a synthetic laboratory-created hybrid virus is called a “chimera” and was shown to be capable of “robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo.” The in vivo reference is to mice, which were used to demonstrate the chimera’s deadly capabilities in mammals. What this means is that these researchers created something artificially in the lab that had never existed before and likely never would exist purely in nature. The University of North Carolina study prior to 2014 had been conducted with funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci). The objective of the study ostensibly was to prepare for possible future virus pandemics. In October 2014, however, HHS advised the University that U.S. Government funding for such “gain of function” research was being “paused.” The damage was done, though. Shi obviously continued the work back home at the Wuhan Institute of Virology because results of that “gain of function” chimera study were published in the December 2015 issue of Nature Medicine. Shi’s name is among the authors. American researchers, including Ralph S. Baric Ph.D., the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, also were named as co-authors of the study. And then it got out. The Frankenstein synthetic lab-created virus got loose. We don’t really know how or whether it was deliberately released in some kind of “Unrestricted Warfare” scenario but get out it did. So, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cover-up began in earnest. Conscientious and concerned doctors like Dr. Li Wenliang (who later died of the disease) began trying to sound the alarm about a new virus causing symptoms of unknown cause but were silenced and effectively “disappeared.” Labs were ordered to destroy coronavirus samples. On 2 January 2020, the Director General of the Wuhan Institute of Virology issued a strict prohibition against any dissemination of information about the Wuhan coronavirus. International and U.S. Centers for Disease Control scientists were prevented from traveling to China. On 7 February 2020, a top PLA Biological Warfare (BW) expert, Chen Wei, assumed control of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A Wuhan Institute graduate student researcher named Huang Yanling is believed by some to have been “patient zero.” On 16 February 2020, the Institute issued an explicit denial that Huang Yanling had ever been one of its employees—but her photo, biography, and links to published research previously there were all removed from the official website. Things go back even further, however. On 13 March 2020, the South China Morning Post reported that “patient zero” in fact may have been a 55-year old from Hubei province—and dated the contraction of the COVID-19 to 17 November 2019. That is a most interesting date, because just one day later, on 18 November 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted a job opening “asking for scientists to come research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats.” This job posting added that the prospective hire would “answer the molecular mechanism that can coexist with Ebola and SARS-associated coronavirus…” Ebola and SARS?! That’s not all. On 24 December 2019, the Institute posted a second job opening that sought candidates to research a situation in which “the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS…” Clearly, by mid-November 2019 and no later than early-to-mid-December 2019, CCP authorities knew they had a very serious situation on their hands but chose not to warn the World Health Organization (WHO) until 31 December 2019. Not until 9 January 2020 did Chinese authorities finally announce that a novel coronavirus was behind the Wuhan outbreak; the city was not placed on lockdown until 22 January. Thus, many thousands of Wuhan residents were permitted to leave Wuhan and travel throughout China and abroad to spread the deadly virus for many weeks to unsuspecting populations the world over. Beijing’s CCP regime already knew that the Wuhan coronavirus was spreading human-to-human long before January 2020, because according to a February 15, 2020 article in the respected journal The Lancet, they’d traced early victims who’d had no connection with the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Given the early December 2019 date of those victims’ illness, the patients must have been infected sometime in November 2019. The CCP also knew, as we now do too, that the horseshoe bats it tries so hard to blame for the outbreak are not even found in Hubei Province (of which Wuhan is the capital city) but rather at least 900 kms. away in either Yunnan or Zhejiang Province. Nor are horseshoe bats sold at the Wuhan “wet market.” This means that for the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the P-2 Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention to have been experimenting with the coronaviruses of such bats, someone would have had to collect those bats and bring them to Wuhan. Although hard to corroborate, there are reports that the Chinese Institute of Military Medicine, Nanjing Command uploaded the bat SARS-like coronavirus genomic sequence, obtained from bats in Zhejiang Province, to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), U.S. National Library of Medicine sometime in 2018. A June 2014 paper published at the NCBI website entitled “Identification of diverse alphacoronaviruses and genomic characterization of a novel severe acute respiratory syndrome-like coronavirus from bats in China” reported four years earlier that the genomic sequencing of a novel coronavirus collected from bats in Yunnan Province, China showed it to be a “recombinant from certain bat SARS-like CoVs circulating in Yunnan Province.” China not only did not inform the rest of the world that the virus was spreading human-to-human, but instead used the all-too-willing WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to propagate the lie via Twitter on 14 January 2020 that “the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.” The resulting delay proved deadly to hundreds of thousands, perhaps eventually even millions, of people who would contract and die of this novel coronavirus. The final chapter in this 2019-nCoV saga is yet to be written. Full knowledge of exactly where and how this coronavirus came to be awaits further research but, given the CCP’s deliberate concealment and disinformation operations, may never be completely explained. Still, we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that 2019-nCoV came out of China. We know that had Chinese authorities responded to what it knew was a dangerous outbreak of a novel coronavirus weeks or even months sooner, the heavy toll of illness and death worldwide could have been far less. It was the Communist Party cover-up that created conditions for a pandemic. The delay also allowed Beijing to buy up supplies of medical protective gear around the world, even as it was still denying the reality of the virus. As Giulio Meotti noted in a hard-hitting 28 March 2020 piece at the Gatestone Institute, China’s ruling elite “seemed obsessed only with the sustainability of their totalitarian regime.” He writes also that “The Chinese government’s complicity in the pandemic is now an opportunity for the West to reevaluate its ties to Beijing.” Exactly so. To bring us back to Steve Coughlin’s paper cited at the beginning of this report, we must understand that China is at war with the United States and fully intends to take advantage of our failure to recognize or respond appropriately to the CCP’s “hostilities waged at the political warfare level.” Because whether or not Beijing deliberately released the bioweapon coronavirus it created, its malign behavior once the pandemic was unleashed should leave us in no doubt about its true intentions. Coughlin recommends formation of a COVID-19 Red Team to consider America’s strategic vulnerability to the full span of China’s “Unrestricted Warfare.” In a way, and especially if the virus did get out by accident, we have been given an unanticipated warning about the true hegemonic ambitions of this Chinese regime. Michael Pillsbury wrote about the uniquely Chinese concept of shi in his brilliant book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon.” Although impossible to translate exactly, as Pillsbury explains it, shi has to with properly understanding and seizing strategic advantage from the flow of events, especially in warfare. Key to achieving success in shaping outcomes to one’s own advantage in the almost mystical world of shi is recognizing the enemy’s vulnerability without letting him know that his weakness has been found out. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, the West now has the opportunity to see exactly how the Chinese Communist leadership thinks and behaves—perhaps before Beijing was ready for that to happen. That revelation must not go to waste. A Red Team of top China experts like Steve Bannon, Gordon Chang, Bill Gertz, Michael Pillsbury, and Robert Spalding plus strategic thinkers like Steve Coughlin, Newt Gingrich, Rich Higgins and others should be assembled by the Trump administration immediately. It should not wait for the pandemic to abate but assemble on an urgent basis and begin to take stock of where we are and where we need to be to confront the number one threat to U.S. national security: Red China.
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Good start for Denmark. Testing those with the sympthoms is the key for high recovery rate. Early detections also help in recovery rate. Good job done by Denmark and I am so happy for them.
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Mass gathering for demonstration will make the spread of the virus even faster. Oh no.
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Latest data as of 20th April, 2020. Top best recovery rate (These countries have recorded more than 50% recovery rate) Country, Other Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active Cases Percentage recovered from total cases 1. Greenland 11 +0 0 +0 11 0 100.00 % 2. South Korea 10,674 +13 236 +2 8,114 2,324 76.01 % 3. Iceland 1,771 +11 9 +0 1,291 471 72.90 % 4. Austria 14,795 +46 470 +18 10,631 3,694 71.86 % 5. Thailand 2,792 +27 47 +0 1,999 746 71.60 % 6. Iran 83,505 +1,294 5,209 +91 59,273 19,023 70.98 % 7. New Zealand 1,440 +9 12 +0 974 454 67.64 % 8. Australia 6,619 +7 71 +0 4,258 2,290 64.32 % 9. Switzerland 27,944 +204 1,406 +13 17,800 8,738 63.70 % 10. Germany 145,743 +1 4,642 +0 91,500 49,601 62.78 % 11. Hong Kong 1,026 +0 4 +0 630 392 61.40 % 12. Malaysia 5,425 +36 89 +0 3,295 2,041 60.74 % 13. Denmark 7,515 +131 364 +9 4,312 2,839 57.38 %
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Dr Anthony Fauci became famous after he has been named as one of the top 3 best doctors who have done a good job throughout the whole pandemic. This award is given to 3 doctors from 3 different countries and Dr. Anthony Fauci is one of them. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/dr-anthony-fauci-trusted-voice-coronavirus-200330124431910.html Excerpts from the article. The original article is very long and it is about 10 pages. I just put down the important points below. Who is Dr Anthony Fauci, the US's trusted voice on coronavirus? Dr Fauci is seen as a trustworthy voice, often correcting US President Donald Trump on the coronavirus crisis. If Dr Anthony Fauci says it, Americans would be smart to listen. As the coronavirus has upended daily life across the globe, Fauci, the US director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has become the trusted voice in the United States in separating fact and fiction. The fear and confusion of outbreaks are not new to Fauci, who, in more than 30 years has handled HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola and even the nation's 2001 experience with bioterrorism - the anthrax attacks. Fauci's political bosses - from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump - have let him do the explaining because he is frank and understandable, translating complex medical information into everyday language while neither exaggerating nor downplaying. At 79, the government's top infectious disease expert is by age in the demographic group at high-risk for contracting COVID-19. But he is working round the clock and getting only a few hours of sleep. He is a little hoarse from all the talking about coronavirus, and he is spending hours speaking to news and entertainment personalities on television and the internet. Yet, his vigour belies his age, and he credits it to exercise, including running. Fauci became the Trump administration's go-to representative because US citizens trust him, according to polls. The top scientist has bluntly said that the coronavirus pandemic will get worse in the US and criticised the federal government on certain aspects of its response. Early life Fauci was born in Brooklyn, New York, on Christmas Eve, 1940, into an Italian-American family. President George W Bush, who, in 2008, awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom, noted that even as a boy he showed an independent streak: In a neighbourhood full of Brooklyn Dodgers fans, Fauci rooted for the Yankees. Fauci became head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984, when the nation was in the throes of the AIDS crisis. He has recalled the huge frustration of caring for dying patients in the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) hospital with nothing to offer. After hours, he would chat with then-Surgeon General C Everett Koop about what scientists were learning about AIDS, influencing Koop's famous 1986 report educating Americans about the disease. In 1990, when AIDS activists swarmed the NIH to protest what they saw as government indifference, Fauci brought them to the table. Fast forward, and he helped to shape Trump's initiative to end HIV in the US. Although he's spent his career in government, Fauci does not seem to have lost the human touch - and that may be part of the key to his success as a communicator. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, many Americans panicked when a US nurse was infected by a patient she was caring for, a traveller from West Africa. Ebola can cause deadly bleeding. Fauci confronted those fears by setting a personal example. When the NIH hospital released that nurse, not only did he say she was not contagious, he gave her a hug before TV cameras to prove he was not worried. Correcting Trump Fast-forward six years, and Fauci is again at the forefront of scientists' efforts to dispel misinformation and explain the coronavirus pandemic, even when it means being at odds with the president. Fauci uses a metaphor from one of the fastest-moving sports to describe his strategy on the outbreak. "You skate not to where the puck is, but to where the puck is going to be," he told a House committee. He has simultaneously advocated containment to try to keep the virus from spreading, mitigation to check its damage once it gets loose in a community, immediate efforts to increase testing, and short-term and long-term science to develop treatments and vaccines. He is hoping a dynamic response will put the nation where the puck ends up going. "It's unpredictable," he said. "Testing now is not going to tell you how many cases you're going to have. What will tell you ... will be how you respond to it with containment and mitigation." Fauci told CNN that the pandemic could ultimately kill between 100,000 and 200,000 people in the US should mitigation be unsuccessful. Those projections have since been lowered to under 100,000.
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Here is the picture of the famous doctor name Dr Anthony Fauci.
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Just found out how famous Dr Anthony Fauci is. He is indeed a very good doctor. Congratulations. In the Spotlight – The doctors at the top: Truth-tellers and heartthrobs As world leaders grapple with COVID-19 and people demand facts and reassurance, unlikely new stars emerged from the epidemic: public health officials. From Anthony Fauci in the U.S. to New Zealand's Ashley Bloomfield and Noor Hisham Abdullah in Malaysia, these medical professionals have been calm and clear in doling out health advice devoid of politics for weeks, and gained a loyal following in the process. A reassuring presence China Global TV Network (CGTN) named three leading doctors in the fight to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus worldwide. They are Malaysia’s Health director-general Dr. Noor Hisham, the US government’s infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci and New Zealand’s director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield. Two months ago, hardly anybody knew who they were. Today, they have become household names and have been called heartthrobs, rockstars and national heroes on social media, print and TV – not what you'd expect for three men in suits who can be seen most days speaking from behind a lectern about facts and data. Fauci, 79, is the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD) while Bloomfield, 54, and Hisham, 56, are respectively directors-general of health in New Zealand's and Malaysia's health ministries. None of them are cabinet ministers but all three have emerged as the face of their country's response to COVID-19. In daily press briefings that have become must-watch TV, they have updated the public on new cases, calmly explained why lockdown measures are needed and patiently answered questions on how the virus can spread and when a vaccine might be ready. Amid an unprecedented global pandemic and as governments worldwide have sometimes been slow to react, introducing confusing measures and sending contradictory messages, Fauci, Bloomfield and Hisham have become voices of reason and sources of calm and reassurance. Fauci is "the one guy you can trust," notes a Facebook fan page that has already garnered 75,000 members.
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Thank you for your information.
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Countries who have achieved more than 50% recovery rate for today based on the latest data on 19th April, 2020. Top best recovery rate (These countries have recorded more than 50% recovery rate) Country, Other Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active Cases Percentage recovered from total cases 1. Greenland 11 +0 0 +0 11 0 100.00 % 2. South Korea 10,661 +8 234 +2 8,042 2,385 75.43 % 3. Iceland 1,760 +0 9 +0 1,291 460 73.35 % 4. Austria 14,696 +25 443 +0 10,501 3,752 71.45 % 5. Thailand 2,765 +32 47 +0 1,928 790 69.72 % 6. Iran 82,211 +1,343 5,118 +87 57,023 20,070 69.36 % 7. Australia 6,606 +20 70 +0 4,230 2,306 64.03 % 8. New Zealand 1,431 +9 12 +1 912 507 63.73% 9. Switzerland 27,740 +336 1,381 +13 17,100 9,259 61.64 % 10. Germany 144,348 +624 4,547 +9 88,000 51,801 60.96 % 11. Malaysia 5,389 +84 89 +1 3,197 2,103 59.32 % 12. Hong Kong 1,026 +2 4 +0 602 420 58.67 % 13. Denmark 7,384 +142 355 +9 4,141 2,888 56.08 %
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https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/explained/article/3080466/how-did-migrant-worker-dormitories-become-singapores-biggest Excerpts from the long article above. How did this happen when Singapore seemed to be successfully flattening the curve? Singapore reported its first Covid-19 infection on January 23, but seemed to be successfully containing the disease, with just 102 cases as of February 29. That quickly ballooned to 1,000 by April 1 as soaring infection rates worldwide prompted overseas-based residents of the city state to return home – some of whom were carrying the disease, sparking a second wave of infections through imported cases. As the country focused on this rise in imported cases, it missed the infections happening among migrant workers. National development minister Lawrence Wong said many of the workers had continued working as their symptoms were mild. “We did drop the ball on foreign workers,” wrote former Singapore diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, an active commentator on social media. The fundamental issue is the poor living conditions faced by these men. They sleep on bunk beds, 12 to 20 people packed into a room ventilated by small fans attached to the ceiling or walls. Hundreds of men on each floor share communal toilets and showering facilities. As early as March 23, non-profit Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) had written to local media that these conditions were ripe for a Covid-19 cluster. On top of this, workers are transported squeezed into the back of a truck, and not showing up for work leads to a fine – so many of them work despite being ill. “We at TWC2 knew it was only a matter of time before Covid-19 would begin to spread in worker dormitories, where conditions are nearly ideal for transmission of infection,” the organisation said on April 3. “It gives us no pleasure to be proven right so soon after.” Authorities have since set up medical outposts at dormitories and reassured workers that their salaries would be paid while they were locked down. In a video address, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke directly to the families of those affected, saying Singapore appreciates the workers’ contributions. “We feel responsible for their well-being. We will do our best to take care of their health, livelihood and welfare here, and to let them go home, safe and sound, to you,” he said.
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https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3080492/coronavirus-cases-surge-can-singapores-health-care Excerpts from the long article above. As coronavirus cases surge, can Singapore’s health care system handle the pressure? Singapore’s Covid-19 cases have risen sixfold since the start of the month, due to outbreaks in crowded migrant worker dormitories The authorities say hospitals can cope for now but are ‘stretched’ amid concerns over availability of beds, testing facilities, ventilators and workers As Singapore experiences a drastic spike in Covid-19 cases – which grew tenfold over March to hit 1,000 on April 1, then rose almost sixfold to 5,992 as of Saturday – the authorities are on alert to ensure the health care system can withstand this growing pressure. Experts such as infectious diseases specialist Leong Hoe Nam say hospitals can cope for now, but they are concerned about admissions outpacing the number of discharged patients. As of Saturday, there were 2,563 coronavirus patients in hospitals and another 2,678 in newly converted community isolation facilities, with 740 having made a full recovery. Singapore had 11,321 acute care beds in public and private hospitals as of last year. Official data for last month shows eight public hospitals were at least three-quarters full, but at the time, there were only 802 coronavirus cases and a quarter of these patients had recovered, with some in isolation facilities and 420 in hospitals. Singapore’s public hospitals were filling up, said Professor Teo Yik Ying, dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Associate Professor Jeremy Lim, from the same school, said last week when there were almost 2,000 cases in hospitals that these represented “more than 15 per cent of all the hospital beds”. The concern now is how many more infections there are within the migrant worker community, 323,000 of whom live in 43 mega-dormitories and 1,200 smaller ones across the island and do low-wage jobs shunned by Singaporeans. About 4,162 of these workers are infected with the virus, forming close to 70 per cent of the country’s positive cases. The spread has been fuelled by the crowded dormitories these workers live in, with 12 to 20 men in each room. The government is now aggressively testing workers, having tested about 5,000 in the past few days.
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More news about the spike of cases. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/17/21213787/coronavirus-asia-waves-hong-kong-singapore-taiwan Excerpts from the long article above. Why Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore saw another coronavirus wave — and will likely see more Hong Kong’s bump in coronavirus infections, beginning in March, was relatively small, and largely attributed to people returning to the territory from places overseas where the coronavirus was then spreading rapidly, such as the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. That created tensions in the territory, as residents blamed returning expats for the spread. Authorities also identified small clusters of local transmissions, including at Lan Kwai Fong, a district in Hong Kong with a lot of bars that’s popular for its nightlife. In response to the new rise in cases, Hong Kong on March 25 fully closed its borders to non-residents for a two-week period, allowing exceptions for visitors from mainland China, Macau, and Taiwan as long as they hadn’t traveled anywhere else in the 14 days prior. Schools had already been closed in Hong Kong until at least April 20, but Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam added new measures at the end of March, including a ban on gatherings of four or more people and the closure of arcades, gyms, and movie theaters. Restaurants had to limit the number of people allowed inside, take the temperatures of everyone entering their establishments, and provide hand sanitizer to patrons. In April, all bars and pubs were also ordered to close, followed on April 10 by beauty and massage parlors. All of these orders will be in effect until at least April 23. Hong Kong’s government also extended travel restrictions indefinitely and ordered that, starting April 8, all travelers arriving to Hong Kong, symptomatic or not, would need to undergo a coronavirus test and then enter a 14-day quarantine. As of April 17, Hong Kong has just over 1,000 coronavirus cases (up from 400 when the new restrictions began in late March), with just single-digit increases by the day. At least one Hong Kong lawmaker has said it may be time to loosen some restrictions again. Taiwan, too, attributed its spike to imported cases, warning Taiwanese people to avoid traveling outside the island and risk bringing the disease back. On March 19, Taiwan barred all foreign nationals (with some exceptions, including for diplomats) from entering the island. The government also barred any travelers from transiting through Taiwan, and required any returnees to quarantine for 14 days. As of April 14, Taiwan had nearly 400 total cases, 338 of which came from outside the island. Though it recently had no new cases for the first time in more than a month, Taiwan is not letting up travel restrictions until the pandemic is under control elsewhere. “Of course, we hope it has passed,” Taiwan’s Health Minister Chen Shih-chung said at a press conference this week, according to Reuters. “But we still need to be on our guard. Of course we feel happy at no new cases today.” Singapore also dealt with a wave of imported cases. Now, though, the city-state’s latest rise in cases is being attributed to migrant workers, who are often crowded together in dormitories. Singapore has taken strict measures to sequester these workers, including by putting four facilities, containing some 50,000 people, under quarantine. The government is also housing healthy workers who work in essential services in separate facilities, so they can continue to work. Singapore also instituted in early April what it called a “circuit breaker” — basically a partial lockdown by a much nicer name. Singapore hadn’t needed to do that before, but as it saw cases surge past 1,000, it embraced more stringent measures. Now, people can only go outside for essential services, to visit the doctor, or do solo exercise, and are required to keep their distance. Restaurants are allowed to stay open for takeout or delivery only. Schools are closed. These measures will be in place until May 4. Singapore has over 5,900 total confirmed cases as of April 18; infections jumped more than 1,000 in just three days this week, a sign that the country does not yet have infections under control again. As some critics have pointed out, Singapore’s treatment of migrants, and reluctance to let them put real roots down there, likely helped create this crisis that threatens the rest of the city-state, too. “Suppression and lift” might become the new normal. That is, if the world can get there. “This is a reminder that this virus is not going to go away. You have to look at the experience of the last four months in Wuhan to realize that even the most extensive population-movement restrictions ever put in place for a public health issue in modern times has not ended virus transmission within China,” Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me. Things like antibody tests will help people and governments know who was infected, and whether they have immunity to the disease, which might also help to open up countries. But social distancing — the lifting and easing — might still need to exist. Because even if countries can successfully test and trace, these tools are much more effective if every country is doing them. As long as the pandemic is active and alive somewhere around the world, the risk of new cases emerging is everpresent. “Epidemic or pandemic control in the world very much depends on the weak links,” Jonas, the scientist at Harvard, said. “The whole system is as good as its weakest links.”
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According to the news below these 3 countries (Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan are seeing huge spike of cases which lead to their second wave of their virus to hit their country. As mentioned in the news below, the source of the virus is imported from overseas. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-cases-hong-kong-singapore-taiwan-symptoms-a9460356.html
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