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During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, DoD refused to deliver supplies to treatment centers, airlift CDC staff back from the field, or transport sealed/packaged lab samples - all for fear of the remotest chance of exposing troops to the virus.

So this 👇 doesn’t surprise me.
DoD provided a lot of help with that response, but any chance of proximity to the virus was a red-line dealbreaker for them (which was not the case for CDC or AID teams). Strong, strong institutional aversion to infectious risks.
I agree with the plan of using the hospital ships for non-COVID. That’s not the issue. The parallel to Ebola is the extreme, excessive lengths DoD would go to to avoid even minute chances of exposing troops. See echoes of that in the conditions for admission here.
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More from @JeremyKonyndyk see all

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Jeremy INVEST IN PUBLIC HEALTH Konyndyk
@JeremyKonyndyk
As things keep getting worse, we'll be hearing a lot of folks saying “look forward not backward” and “don’t politicize this disaster”.

Lemme tell you - from a disaster management perspective - why that’s bunk. This weekend's blockbuster WaPo piece is a good place to start.
I read this piece Sunday morning over breakfast with a red pencil in hand, circling every missed opportunity, every point where better leadership and competent governance could have put us on a better course.

There was a lot of red.
What is so striking, reading through the piece, is that despite what @realDonaldTrump has repeatedly claimed, the current crisis was not unforeseen.

Numerous officials cited in the piece saw the potential risk. "The Richter scale hit 8" after the Wuhan lockdown began.
Read 18 tweets
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Jeremy INVEST IN PUBLIC HEALTH Konyndyk
@JeremyKonyndyk
This says so, so much about why the federal response is struggling.

Trump is explicit that he takes a reactive approach to a crisis that exponentially punishes delay.

The only way to win is to get ahead of the virus. Reaction = failure.
Calibrating action based on case numbers or ER admissions *today* means you are actually reacting to what the virus was doing *2+ weeks ago*.

From time of exposure, most people start begin experiencing symptoms within 11 days, and it often takes another week to become severe.
And testing delays can add further time before a case gets officially counted. So taking action only once things get bad, as Trump is suggesting, means constantly running 2-3 weeks behind the virus.

What does this mean in terms of response timing?
Read 7 tweets
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Jeremy INVEST IN PUBLIC HEALTH Konyndyk
@JeremyKonyndyk
This is absurd. The Minister of China's National Health Commission reported they were seeing this in late January. Wasn't airtight evidence at that stage, but credible enough to be concerning.
Link:
Slight nuance - more accurate to say it's been well established for quite a while that people can transmit the virus while pre-symptomatic. But functionally it's a similar risk - people transmitting before they (or anyone around them) realize they are sick. That's not new.
Read 3 tweets

Related threads

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Kai Kupferschmidt
@kakape
Many people now pointing to old articles (incl. one from me) saying: It’s all there. And others saying: No-one could have predicted #covid19. So I just want to be very clear about what I personally as a journalist covering this beat for years expected and didn‘t expect. A thread
I expected a virus to go global, probably respiratory, probably from bats. Because experts told me. @PeterDaszak in my 2013 article: „right now in China, there are bats carrying a virus that can directly infect people, and cause another SARS pandemic“ sciencemag.org/news/2013/10/b…
The scenario I thought about the most was a virus that is very deadly (something like 10 percent mortality say) but not super transmissible. The most likely alternative seemed a mild virus that spread rapidly. We probably wouldn’t be able to do much about that.
Read 10 tweets
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SambhavāmiYugeYuge
@WindsOfChange72
⚠️🚧⚠️

#ChineseWuhanVirus BIOWEAPON

Explosive investigative thread piecing together the various shadowy incidents that occurred prior to the #COVID pandemic.

Proof, articles, citations included.

Not a lame ass conspiracy theory about stock buying but fact based research.
It is impossible to find out the full conspiracy at this stage & I don't like mindless speculation.

I'm attaching below proof & I'll be raising questions.

As more facts become known we shall have more info.

I'll attach links & pics of sources in case articles are pulled off.
Firstly a prominent virologist Xiangguo Qiu, her colleague and husband Keding Cheng, and an unknown number of her students from China were removed from the Canada's National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg on July 5. 

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) said that it advised
Read 57 tweets
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Alisha H. Gupta
@Alisha__g
More than half of 8,000 probable SARS cases around the world were female.

During Ebola in 2014, more cases were recorded among women than men.

Here’s why: nytimes.com/2020/03/12/us/…
1. There is so much more to be said on this topic, much of which was left on the cutting room floor. So here are some extra bits of information and the best sources.
2. We have to be more thoughtful when diverting resources to combat the virus. During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, maternal health clinics were closed and as a result, the maternal mortality rate increased by 70% @juliaheather has more on that tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
Read 6 tweets
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Nathan Grubaugh
@NathanGrubaugh
During disease outbreaks 🦠, like #COVID19 (#SARSCoV), there is often a lot of speculation about mutations 😱.

@edwardcholmes, @MaryPetrone10, and I argue that we shouldn't worry.

Here's why👇
@NatureMicrobiol
nature.com/articles/s4156…
@edwardcholmes @MaryPetrone10 @NatureMicrobiol 2/n Mutation to many implies a significant transformation. See the X-Men or just about any outbreak movie. This pushes some to view mutations in the fictional context rather than a natural state of evolution.

@edwardcholmes @MaryPetrone10 @NatureMicrobiol 3/n With the competitive online journalism market, we get bombarded with stories about dangerous mutations and doomsday scenarios for the current #COVID19 outbreak.

For example
telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…
Read 16 tweets
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World Health Organization (WHO)
@WHO
Over 200k people have been vaccinated as part of tireless efforts to stop the current #Ebola outbreak in #DRC.

Saving lives with an experimental vaccine is one thing done differently, compared to the 2014 West Africa response.

Here the lessons learnt 👉bit.ly/2TQe40E
@WHOAFRO @OMSRDCONGO @DrTedros @MoetiTshidi The implementation of the #Ebola vaccination strategy in the #DRC has been possible thanks to the training of over 4000 Congolese staff supported by 45 researchers from #Guinea and other African nations 👉bit.ly/2TQe40E
@WHOAFRO @OMSRDCONGO @DrTedros @MoetiTshidi @MinSanteRDC The devastating 2014–2016 #Ebola epidemic in West Africa resulted in over 11000 deaths. It prompted changes in the way the 🌏🌎🌍 responds to outbreaks: putting research at the heart of the response 👉 bit.ly/2TQe40E
Read 9 tweets
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Helen Branswell
@HelenBranswell
#Ebola thread: Sorry this is so late; another disease demanded my attention. And the news here is so routinely awful I barely know where to start. This outbreak is really, really not going well.
Here's what I see:
2. @MinSanteRDC reports +14 cases today. This reporting week is 2 days old & there have already been 22 #Ebola cases. They also report 10 deaths, 7 of them community deaths. The people who looked after those dying patients will be cases themselves in the next week or 2. Fact.
3. So the outbreak totals are now 1168 cases & 741 deaths. After the West African outbreak (admitted still far, far bigger) I naively thought the world would never let an #Ebola outbreak get big again.
I was wrong.
Read 10 tweets

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