Like every issue of consequence, in our Age of Incomprehension, opinion about the truth concerning the Corona virus outbreak is divided. Either China is taking all prudent steps, the virus, while transmissible, has a low mortality rate and the West, with its travel bans, is over-reacting in a vaguely racist manner, or China has the virus far from contained, we don’t know just how transmissible it is nor its mortality rate because the figures from China can’t be trusted and therefore travel bans are a wise precaution.
If travel bans to and from the infected parts of China turn out to have been justified then one country in particular may be worth watching, Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s Bole International airport is the main African gateway to and from China. On average 1500 passengers per day arrive from China every day. Ethiopia scans them all for symptoms which essentially means taking their temperature.
Many of those passengers then fly on to other parts of Africa where Chinese companies are doing business. These are 2018 figures courtesy of Brookings.
The three main areas of Chinese business in Africa are transport, which generally means building airports and railways; energy which means building power stations; and grids and metals which means mines.
One of the airports the Chinese funded and built is Bole International Airport in Ethiopia.
The flights from China arriving at Bole International come from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Hong Kong. Just yesterday the Chinese government added China’s 5th largest city Guangzhou to its list of locked down quarantined cities. Which strikes me as news. For Guangzhou to have been quarantined means it must already have a large number of cases. Guangzhou is not near to Wuhan, the source of the Corona virus outbreak. It is near to Hong Kong.
It is linked to both by high speed rail and internal air travel. Guangzhou airport is in fact the third busiest in China and the 13th busiest in the world handling over 65 million passengers per year.
So… the spread of the Corona virus in Guangzhou has got so serious that the Chinese government has quarantined it. Yet till now flights from there to Ethiopia were running. Of course I have no idea how many passengers were actually on those flights nor where they might have originated from. But the rail and air links from Wuhan and other cities to Guangzhou and the fact that Guangzhou is therefore the hub to which any workers going to Africa would have passed through, does raise a few questions. Remember, 1500 per day on average (meaning in ‘normal times’ which these are not) through Bole international from China alone.
The Ethiopian authorities have been scanning arrivals. But we know that one of the things which has made this virus difficult to contain is that people can carry it and spread it for up to 14 days before they show symptoms. This is one of the reasons the Chinese authorities, despite draconian measures, have failed to contain it. If the Chinese authorities have failed, how confident should we be the Ethiopian authorities and those in the other countries Chinese workers have travelled on to, will succeed?
I have no idea and frankly neither does any one else. Which is surely the relevant point.
Jim Bianco also makes an interesting point…
To date no infections on the continent of Africa have been reported. Why?
Only today, February 7, did anyone on the continent actually get a testing kits to look for infected people.
What will this number be in two weeks? https://t.co/4yoWJmNRlc
— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) February 7, 2020
Western Counties have so far contained the virus and I think it likely they will continue to do so, simply because if you catch a virus outbreak early, you can . Viruses multiply and spread roughly according to a sigmoid curve. This plots the number of infections. At the start of an outbreak the curve is shallow simply because the numbers involved are small.
Double from 2 to 4 or 4 to 8 and its not that many new cases. That’s the shallow part of the curve, the beginning of the outbreak. As the curve steepens its not that the virus is increasing its infection rate. The rate will not have changed at all. But the numbers involved grows. Still only doubling, but doubling from 8 to 16 to 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384…you see the problem. Its nothing more than the law of big numbers. That law is what we are seeing in China in the quarantined cities. The question is IF and it still is, thankfully, an IF, some of the Chinese workers have carried the virus to Ethiopia or the African countries they work in, will those countries be able to contain it while they can, while the numbers are small?
I hope so.
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And how many flights leave Africa for Europe, North America, and elsewhere every day? That there are still only a couple of dozen confirmed cases in North America is either reason for hope that this virus is nowhere near as contagious or serious as feared or that hundreds/thousands of new cases will turn up in the next week or two.
Not a single non-Asian killed so far? Sort of makes the official figures more believable.
Wait two weeks.
As of a few days ago, 88% of the nCOV deaths were 60 year+ old men with severe existing health issues like diabetes.
And given the Africa demographic profile – is nCOV necessarily an issue even if it breaks out there? The median age in Africa is supposedly 18 (vs. 35 in the US, 31 in Asia, 42 in Europe).
TBP readership might be doomed though.
You do know that the 800 dead numbers are pure made up bullshit, right? You do know that what passes for news of the virus coming out of China is pure bullshit, don’t you? You do know that to quarantine 400 million would also include young and old alike along with both males and females, don’t you? You do know that what is know of the virus at this point is rather sketchy, don’t you? You do know that talking out of your ass makes you look like a brainwashed idiot, don’t you?
I understand that the virus can remain on everyday items for up to 9 days ready to infect. We are using surgical gloves when out and about, especially on supermarket trolleys and handling goods. Hygienic wipes also help on surfaces. I was rudely reminded of the filth on my PC keyboard and mouse the other day when I used wipes for the first time! Uhggg…not pleasant at all – I can now see the letters and numbers!
So to cheer everybody up, perhaps we should all go home and stay there:
A more “disturbing” version for our times!
good article but i must admit that when i saw the title i thought that it was going to be something different–
on one of yesterday’s threads someone had posted a link about the director of the canadian lab that the virus was allegedly stolen from by the chinese scientist–
the director of the lab collapsed at a conference in africa & died on the spot —
i was hoping that someone had written a standalone article about the circumstances around his death–
Seems the good doctor was an alcoholic who had had a liver transplant and had undergone ‘deep brain treatment’for his alcoholism that helped him cut back on his consumption of booze. His death is still a tad untimely under the circumstances….
https://nationalpost.com/news/helped-develop-response-to-sars-h1n1-renowned-scientist-francis-plummer-dead
3 items that were or were not in the article stood out–
it did not say that he collapsed & died in africa–
it did not mention his family other than a friend saying what a good husband/father he was–
theresa tam,chief scientific officer,wtf?
canada,you’re as bad as us–
“… Dr. Larry Gelmon, who helped set up that meeting, said Plummer collapsed and was taken to hospital in Nairobi, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
No confirmed cause of death has yet been released.”