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Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful
We’ve known about SARS-CoV-2 for only three months, but scientists can make some educated guesses about where it came from and why it’s behaving in such an extreme way.
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B.C. announces 77 new coronavirus cases, bringing total to 348, as restaurants close province-wide
All restaurants in B.C. now being ordered to move to take-out and delivery models only.
B.C. is ordering all restaurants to stop providing dine-in services, as provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry announced 77 new cases of coronavirus Friday, bringing the total in the province up to 348.
Of that number, 200 are in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, 95 are in Fraser Health, 30 in Island Health, 19 in Interior Health and four in the Northern Health region.
Twenty-two people are now in hospital, with 10 in intensive care. Six people have fully recovered.
"We're now at the point where it's irrelevant what community you're in ... We need to take measures across the province," Henry said, while emphasizing the importance of taking extreme care before entering a long-term care home.
Friday's announcement also confirmed a new health-care worker associated with the Dufferin Care Centre, a long-term seniors' facility in Coquitlam, has been diagnosed with the virus. That case is now being managed as an outbreak.
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Air pollution drops as countries shut down amid spread of COVID-19
Large drops of nitrogen dioxide seen over Italy and China
It's a surreal sight: Webcams from across Italy show normally packed tourist destinations, streets and beaches empty, scenes that seem more aligned with a movie than real life.
In the battle against COVID-19, countries around the world are restricting gatherings, encouraging people to work from home and closing public venues. Italy is under lockdown.
All of these actions are having quantifiable consequences, particularly in our environment, scientists believe.
The change was first noticed over Wuhan, China, the city that first reported incidents of the new coronavirus that leads to the COVID-19 disease.
Satellite observations found that nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels had dropped by 10 to 30 per cent between Jan. 1 and Feb. 25. NO2 emissions are produced by cars, trucks and power plants, among other human-related activities. While NO2 is also produced naturally, it accounts for just one per cent of total emissions.
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Sobeys to install plexiglass barriers at checkouts as grocers work to stay open amid coronavirus outbreak
Sobeys parent company Empire Co. Ltd. has ordered thousands of plexiglass screens to be installed at store checkouts in an effort to provide some separation between staff and customers.
The new screens will be accompanied by stickers on the floor with footprints on them leading to the checkouts and instructing customers to stay two metres apart while lining up.
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Trump's 'Chinese' Virus Is Part of a Long History of Blaming Other Countries for Disease
Even as his Administration’s response to COVID-19 has evolved, one part of President Donald Trump’s reaction to coronavirus has remained consistent. More than a week after he prompted outcry by retweeting a supporter who called the novel coronavirus the “China virus,” photos from Trump’s Thursday press briefing about the virus showed that “corona” had been crossed out and replaced with “Chinese.” The President and his team have defended the use of that language—despite the World Health Organization making a point of not naming the disease after the place where the outbreak began, and despite advocates arguing that such terminology fuels the risk of hate crimes against people of Asian descent, who have already reported a surge in discrimination.
Take the so-called “Spanish flu,” a pandemic in 1918 and 1919 that killed up to 50 million people worldwide. Many Americans, including Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, seem to believe—as the name implies—that this influenza outbreak began in Spain. However, the first recorded case was in Kansas. (Meanwhile in Spain, it was known as the “French flu.”)
Just a couple of years before the 1918 flu outbreak, Italian immigrants on the East Coast were blamed for a polio outbreak, though in fact there was no evidence of an outbreak either in Italy or at Ellis Island. And for decades, white Americans associated Chinese immigration with a host of diseases, and used public health as an excuse to discriminate against them.
“America has a long history of immigrant exclusion on the basis of disease,” says Kim Yi Dionne, a professor of political science at the University of California-Riverside who has written about how politicizing disease can shape public attitudes about immigration. “Chinese immigrants to California were treated as medical scapegoats for years, and their exclusion based on disease threat was actually codified in the 1882 Exclusion Act.”
Cholera was sometimes called “Asiatic cholera” because it was first detected in India, even though it also flourished in European countries like Britain. As for smallpox, it had originally come to the Americas through European invasion. Together with other new infectious diseases, smallpox killed millions of Native people.
This biased way of associating immigrants with disease continued throughout the 20th century. A 1957-58 flu pandemic that was first identified in China became known as the “Asian flu,” and a 1968-1969 flu pandemic first identified in Hong Kong became known as the “Hong Kong flu.” Yet the 2009-2010 H1N1 flu that the CDC says was first recorded in the U.S. didn’t become the “American flu.” Instead, it gained the misleading name “swine flu” because scientists at first thought it was similar to viruses that occur in North American pigs, although further testing has complicated this theory. Much of the media coverage around this flu emphasized that it may have come from Mexico, which had by then become the focus of American immigration anxiety.
In fact, many Americans still seem to think of H1N1 as a foreign virus. On Wednesday, Republican Senator John Cornyn falsely claimed China was the source of “swine flu.”
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