Re Stopping flights from China.
The US appears, unlike the UK, to be testing arrivals. So far out of 30,000 travellers, they haven't had a single positive test.
www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronavirus-china-live-updates/2020/02/12/c60c3606-4d21-11ea-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html
Washington Post Live Updates.
7:30 p.m.
CDC has found no coronavirus cases since airport screening began a month ago
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has screened over 30,000 travelers from China since mid-January, and no confirmed coronavirus cases have been identified, a top official said Wednesday.
U.S. airport screening began Jan. 17 and expanded more than two weeks ago to all travelers from China to 11 U.S. airports.
“We have not detected any cases from returning travelers from China,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. The number of confirmed cases in the United States remains at 13, most of them travelers returning from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak.
In a briefing with reporters, Messonnier also said test kits that CDC sent to state and local public health labs last week were producing “inconclusive results” during practice runs. “Some states were getting inconclusive results — not as false positives or false negatives — and not on actual clinical specimens,” she said.
Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, said about 25 states had flagged the problem and notified CDC immediately. CDC determined that one component of the kit was not performing “as it should,” Messonnier said. The agency is remaking that component and will send the new ones back to the labs. In the meantime, testing for covid-19 will continue at CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
As soon as CDC realized there was a problem with a component in the test kit, it did not send any of the kits to international labs, officials said.
Once the labs perform their quality control and verification procedures, states will be able to start testing patients, Becker said, a delay that may be a few days to a week.
This DOES suggest the risk from flights into the UK remains very low, despite the news today.
I think the case today has two scenarios:
- She knew she might have the disease before travelling, but was so scared of being treated in China, she took the risk (to her health and to fellow passengers) to travel anyway. Now that possibly says a lot about human rights in China and how afraid people are of being forceably quarantined there.
That might lead to the disease spreading in its own right as people conceal their symptons and either hide from the state or try to flee the country.
- She geninuely wasn't taken ill until she travelled, and upon arrival in the UK she did absoluetely everything right and went completely by the advice being given out. This is very encouraging, to know that she behaved as responsibly as possible under the circumstances.
I note here that China is testing the body temperature of its citizens at various check points including at airports, so this might suggest she wasn't displaying symptoms before she left China, rather than her travelling to the UK and deliberately exposing other passengers.
My point being, that I think that calls to shut down all flights from China appear, on the face of it, to possibly be more political and out of fear than based on a high level of risk. And that I tend to lean towards this woman being genuine rather than fitting the Daily Mail Narrative of being a potential health tourist which I'm sure she will be painted as.
I hope that does, at least, offer a little more reassurance to people worried about flights coming into the uk or flying themselves (particularly if they are not going to an Asian destination). It does NOT, at present, appear to fall into the high risk catergory.
This is perhaps the reason that the flights haven't been stopped altogether to the UK...