sethnintendo said:
Are they athletes, military or both? Is it like US where they have Army and Navy colleges that play college sports? I thought military games was like military fake skirmishes with laser tag weapons. |
Olympic games for the military apparently. Now the accusations of the US bringing in the virus make sense (not in the way that that happened, but how this conspiracy theory started)
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-official-says-us-army-maybe-brought-coronavirus-to-wuhan-2020-3
A Chinese government spokesman said on Thursday that the US Army may have "brought the epidemic to Wuhan," fueling a coronavirus conspiracy theory.
Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called attention to a comment on Wednesday from Robert Redfield, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acknowledging that some Americans who were said to have died from influenza may have actually died from COVID-19.
"When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected?" Zhao wrote on Twitter. "What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!"
Rumors aside, for the games, for example this article
https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/corona-scare-india-part-wuhan-games
New Delhi: A total of 9,308 military personnel from 103 countries had participated in the 10-day military world games, also called the Olympics of the military, that was held in Wuhan, Hubei, from 18-27 October 2019.
On 17 November 2019, less than 20 days after the event had ended, China identified the first Covid-19 patient, a 55-year-old man from Wuhan, which has now emerged as the ground-zero of the pandemic. India, too, had sent a delegation of about 100 personnel from which 10 won medals. Other major participants were the US, which had sent a team of 300 men, France, Italy, Germany and Brazil.
These games are held every four years. However, this time, the games were special as it was for the first time that the games were not confined to the military bases like in the past, but a separate athletes’ village was built in Wuhan. The athletes’ village was built in an area of 5,65,000 square meters, comprising about 35 blocks and is located on the bank of Huangjia Lake, Jiangxia district, Wuhan. The village is less than 20 km (as the crow flies) from Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market which is regarded as the place from where the pandemic started spreading and 13 km from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a state owned state-of-the-art laboratory that works extensively in the field of virus study.
First covid19 death identified in the US so far was on Februari 6th in California. It was an infection from community spread, but it still seems unlikely that it took 3 months to detect a suspicious death in the states if in fact the virus was already brought back at the end of October.
Not outside the realm of possibility though, it would tie in to the strange pneumonia cases seen at the end of November in Italy.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-timing/italian-scientists-investigate-possible-earlier-emergence-of-coronavirus-idUSKBN21D2IG
No follow up on that afaik.
California also saw a spike of flu deaths early this year, perhaps not all were from the flu...
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article240532841.html
Researchers have run models of the evolution of this virus, and they say it’s more likely that it first emerged in early to mid-November, said Catherine Troisi, a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. That means the virus was floating around the Wuhan area for as many as 11 weeks before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first U.S. case on Jan. 21.
Put that together with the fact that thousands of people travel through Wuhan’s airport daily, heading to foreign destinations, Troisi said, and it’s likely that the highly transmissible COVID-19 pathogen caught a flight to the United States before the outbreak caught the world’s attention.
In January, when officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally began their testing, they limited it:
▪ To travelers who had returned from traveling in China within a 14-day period and showed respiratory distress.
▪ Or to people who had close contact with such a traveler and showed symptoms.
The policy meant that no one could say whether the new coronavirus had already surfaced in individuals who were hospitalized with pneumonia.
The virus being around much earlier would eliminate all the stuff about it being more contagious at first then slowing down, and actually some what supports the anti body test findings. No need for wild swings in R0 to make it fit, but some missed undetected covid19 deaths that might have simply been attributed to the flu.
This is good news for social distancing. Covid19 being a little less contagious (longer but slower spread) means we've been confirming more and more milder cases, keeping the counts high, but explaining the lower than expected need for hospital beds and ICU. Not that the virus isn't still plenty dangerous (especially since it's doing a great job spreading unseen) but the mortality rate could indeed be less than 1%.
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