Attention to the Unseen

Laurie Garrett wrote last month: When Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared the Wuhan coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern on Thursday, he praised China for taking “unprecedented” steps to control the deadly virus. “I have never seen for myself this kind of mobilization,” he noted. “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.” The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting…

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Peter Nicholas writes: When a senior White House aide would brief President Donald Trump in 2018 about an Ebola-virus outbreak in central Africa, it was plainly evident that hardships roiling a far-flung part of the world didn’t command his attention. He was zoning out. “It was like talking to a wall,” a person familiar with the matter told me. Now a new coronavirus that originated in China is confronting him with a potential pandemic, a problem that Trump seems ill-prepared…

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump has lavished praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping for his handling of the growing coronavirus outbreak — a posture some in his administration are growing increasingly uncomfortable with as his advisers remain concerned about China’s lack of transparency and handling of the epidemic. Worries about rattled financial markets and their effect on the economy as well as the delicate negotiations with China over a trade deal — a key to Trump’s reelection — have…

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Ars Technica reports: Amid an explosive outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China that has killed over 1,000 and sickened over 43,000 worldwide, US President Donald Trump proposed a nearly 19 percent budget cut to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the agency primarily tasked with preparing for and responding to such outbreaks and other serious health threats. In the president’s proposed 2021 federal budget released Monday, the administration says that the changes to the CDC’s funding are intended to…

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The New York Times reports: When an outbreak of the Ebola virus touched the United States’ shores in mid-2014, Donald J. Trump was still a private citizen. But he had strong opinions about how America should act. Mr. Trump, who has spoken openly about his phobia of germs, closely followed the epidemic, and offered angry commentary about what he said was the Obama administration’s dangerous response. He demanded draconian measures like canceling flights, forcing quarantines and even denying the return…

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Asia Times reports: Deserted streets, eerily quiet shopping malls and empty buses. For most people, this evokes images of quarantined Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. But, in fact, this is Beijing, home to the ruling Communist Party elite, the Great Hall of the People and the iconic yet infamous Tiananmen Square. “It is a ghost city, hardly any people out and very few vehicles. Six buses passed me today and, with the exception of the drivers, they were…

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Disturbing from Communist China. Chinese government are only suspecting these people have been exposed & therefore are going to quarantine them w/ people who have #coronavirus. They are fighting because they don’t want to be quarantined w/ the infected. pic.twitter.com/6Lvnr2Cj7o — Nat Shupe (@NatShupe) February 7, 2020 Richard McGregor writes: Soon after Li Wenliang succumbed to the coronavirus in Wuhan early on Friday morning, a drawing of the Chinese doctor appeared on the internet, sleeping and being hoisted gently into…

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The Washington Post reports: China’s streets were quiet and its neighborhoods sealed, but grief and rage against the government poured onto social media on Friday as the country confronted the death of the “whistleblower doctor” whose story was seen as a parable for the Communist Party’s failings. Within hours of Li Wenliang’s death, millions of Chinese, homebound in the coronavirus crisis, tried to bypass censors to post the hashtag “We demand freedom of speech” in a remarkable but short-lived digital…

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Colorized scanning electron micrograph of filamentous Ebola virus particles (blue) budding from an infected cell (yellow-green). NIAID, CC BY By Linda J. Bilmes, Harvard Kennedy School As coronavirus continues to spread, the Trump administration has declared a public health emergency and imposed quarantines and travel restrictions. However, over the past three years the administration has weakened the offices in charge of preparing for and preventing this kind of outbreak. Two years ago, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates warned that…

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Nicholas Kristof writes: China’s leaders sometimes seem 10 feet tall, presiding over a political and economic juggernaut that has founded universities at a rate of one a week and that recently used more cement in three years than the United States did in the entire 20th century. President Trump has hailed China’s president, Xi Jinping, as a “brilliant leader,” and Michael Bloomberg says Xi is “not a dictator.” But we’re now seeing the dangers of Xi’s authoritarian model, for China…

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