I have a bad feeling again—China is reinstating measures & has fired the mayors of 2 key cities. Thus far, China has shut down an industrial city, urged residents not to leave Beijing and closed down schools in Shanghai due to increase of #COVID19. 👀 thehill.com/policy/healthc…
2) If mainland China 🇨🇳 follows the way of Hong Kong 🇭🇰 — then China will be royally screwed. And the world’s supply chain might completely melt down for a period. HK deaths are surging so high it is approaching NYC in spring 2020–and HK hasn’t peaked yet.
3) Worse, “Mainland 🇨🇳 has already started to divert flights away from Shanghai & began lockdown this week with closures in some of its largest provinces. Vessels have stopped departing from Shanghai as a port.” —DAMN that is serious. This is Shanghai! 👀 bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
4) Most of the China and HK surges are #BA2. Meanwhile in England… both cases and hospitalizations surging. And #BA2 is now over 50%. Not good.
5) Assume China knows more than it reveals. They’ve built extra surge hospitals recently too. China has also recently approved rapid antigen testing. They had resisted for over 26 months. Something is very different now. reuters.com/world/china/ch…
6) In the first two months of 2022, the megacity, with a population of nearly 25 million, has logged 1,243 confirmed COVID-19 cases arriving from outside the Chinese mainland. The number is also roughly ~80% of Shanghai's total imported cases last year. xinhuanet.com/english/202203…
7) Regarding Shanghai’s shutdown — its a city of 25,000,000 people! (And likely more, not including illegal migrants without “huko” residency permits). One person describes it this way— he no longer had communication with anyone at his Shanghai office as of Friday.
8) Hong Kong was once as strict on #COVID19 as mainland China was. Yet somehow it partly gave up and lost control. Here is how HK now compares to 44 other *high income* counties. If this hits Shanghai & other major Chinese industrial cities… supply chains worldwide will suffer.
9) UPDATE—the 13-million population city of Shenzhen has locked down! With all non-essential enterprises stop operating, or required to work from home. Buses and subways all suspended. Govt services shut down except for epidemic essential staff. Holy shit. ishare.ifeng.com/c/s/v006LBcjcB…
10) ⚠️ Shenzhen health official Lin Hancheng warns Sunday that this #BA2 strain is "highly contagious, spreads quickly and has a high degree of concealment", leading to widespread community transmission if control measures were not strengthened soon. 👀 xw.qq.com/cmsid/20220313…
11) Update—Jilin (city of 1.3 mil pop where China central govt just fired mayor yesterday) is now building a new 6000-bed isolation 🏥 clinic— in less than a week! Remind you of somewhere in Jan 2020?
12) Outbreak is still early in China 🇨🇳, but look at that near-vertical surge. The fact that it’s simultaneously happening in with lockdowns in multiple cities at once shows urgency that we haven’t seen before. And keep in mind Shenzhen & Shanghai are critical industrial cities!
13) China isn’t alone in this mess. South Korea 🇰🇷 is also see an epic surge— now surpassing all time pandemic highs.
14) If HK is a country, its #COVID19 death rate per capita would be 5x higher than the next highest country (which also has near complete #BA2). If Shenzhen is surging because it is the immediate neighbor of HK. If Shenzhen, the industrial core of 🇨🇳, is disrupted, it’ll be hell.
15) For Western European countries who think they are immune from #BA2 after their recent #Omicron wave… well there is some sobering news for you — your govt leaders who claim ‘COVID is over’ are delusional and lying to you. Learn from what’s happening elsewhere #CovidIsNotOver
17) UPDATE— Apple supplier Foxconn shuts all its Shenzhen factories as #COVID19 outbreak in China grows - ft.com/content/d59c76…
18) Hong Kong health experts say they do not expect local #COVID19 infections to decline any time soon, with one warning residents not to let their guard down, as cases could rebound at any time. HK seems to be in trouble for a while—likely Shenzhen too.
19) with scenes like this in China prior to the lockdown, you can see why Shenzhen region is having to resort to lockdowns to keep things from getting out of hand. In China, population density is by far one of the riskiest thing with a contagious virus.
20) UPDATE— Dongguan, with population over 7 million, has also suddenly gone into lockdown. Dongguan is another major industrial city adjacent to Shenzhen and near Hong Kong.
21) As you can see, cases are rising everywhere in China. It’s not just in northeast Jilin or south near Shenzhen. 23 of the 31 mainland provinces reported confirmed, symptomatic cases over the past week. Including asymptomatic cases, there were almost 10,000 new cases.
22) I’m now confident that #BA2 definitely deserves its own distinct Greek letter, separate or Omicron family. BA1 and BA2 are more different than Delta is from original Wuhan 1.0 strain. And the infectiousness and attack rates don’t lie —BA2 is worse by leaps and bounds! 👇
23) Catch up on what is #BA2–This is a good quick video of BA2 to date, which is much more dangerous and which honestly deserves its own Greek letter. C’mon @WHO. #CovidIsNotOver
24) Bottomline: I believe China is now teetering at the edge between barely containing BA2 wave of COVID-19 and completely losing control like it has in Hong Kong—
25) …which we know could spell horrible conditions outcomes and huge economic difficulties and disruption to the most critical manufacturing and export centers of the world. Thus, this bodes extremely poorly for the rest of the global supply chain crisis and economic stability.
26) What happens in China over the coming weeks will affect the world. COVID is not over — with the world acting slowly only further endangering the world. God help us. medriva.com/china-at-a-cov…
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It’s a trap: CATCH 22—if you register, ICE will deport you. If you don’t register, you’ve now committed a crime for the first time, and ICE will deport you. Trump doesn’t care if you’ve paid all taxes and followed all laws—ICE will deport you.
2) The Department of Homeland Security announced that it was mandating that all people in the United States illegally register with the federal government, and said those who didn’t self-report could face fines or prosecution. ***Failure to register is considered a crime***
3) Registration will be mandatory for everyone 14 and older without legal status. People registering have to provide their fingerprints and address, and parents and guardians of anyone under age 14 must ensure they registered. The registration process also applies to Canadians who are in the U.S. for more than 30 days, such as so-called snowbirds who spend winter months in places like Florida.
3) “Kennedy is set to announce Thursday the planned changes, which include axing 10,000 full-time employees spread across departments tasked with responding to disease outbreaks, approving new drugs, providing insurance for the poorest Americans and more”.
SICKENING—Trump’s DHS just deported a surgeon from Brown University Medical School—who is here legally on an H1B visa that doesn’t expire until 2027, and has committed no crimes. Trained in the U.S. at Ohio State, University of Washington, and Yale as a **transplant surgeon** (one of the most difficult surgical fields in all of medicine!!!), she is a highly trained doctor on kidney transplants, which cannot be easily replaced. Her phone was seized at the border. A federal judge handed down an injunction against her deportation—but she was already deported on a plane en route to Paris. Brown’s kidney transplant clinic is now strained by her deportation.
2) Full text:
PROVIDENCE — A Rhode Island doctor who had traveled to Lebanon to see her parents was prevented from re-entering the United States at Boston’s Logan International Airport on Thursday evening, her lawyer and a colleague said.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, who lives in Providence, has been working at Brown Medicine’s Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension since last July, and she [has] been part of the transplant service at Rhode Island Hospital, according to Dr. George Bayliss, the organ transplant division’s medical director. She has been studying and working in the United States for about six years, he said Friday.
The US consulate in Lebanon had issued her an H-1B visa, which is given to people in specialty occupations requiring expertise. The visa was valid through mid-2027, said Thomas S. Brown, an attorney representing her and Brown Medicine.
Alawieh was detained when she returned to Logan airport, and family members are afraid that she is about to be deported to Lebanon, he said.
“We are at a loss as to why this happened,” Brown said. “I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of the Trump crackdown on immigration. I don’t know if it’s a travel ban or some other issue.”
He said her phone has been seized and he has not been able to contact Alawieh.
Bayliss said a lawyer filed a petition with the US District Court in Massachusetts, and Judge Leo T. Sorokin issued an order saying Alawieh should not be moved outside of Massachusetts without 48 hours notice. But he said that message apparently did not reach immigration officials in time, and a plane carrying Alawieh left for Paris.
“This is outrageous,” Bayliss said in an interview. “This is a person who is legally entitled to be in the U.S., who is stopped from re-entering the country for reasons no one knows. It’s depriving her patients of a good physician.”
A US Customs and Border Patrol spokesperson, Ryan Brissette, was not able to immediately answer questions about Alawieh on Friday evening.
Bayliss said Alawieh graduated from the American University of Beirut medical school and came to the United States for a nephrology fellowship at Ohio State University. She then landed a transplant fellowship at University of Washington and had a residency in the Yale hospital system before starting at Brown Medicine last July, he said.
“She’s really a very humble and able person,” Bayliss said. “She takes care of her patients. She is talented and thoughtful and a great addition to our division.”
Bayliss said Alawieh went to Lebanon to visit parents and planned to be gone for two weeks. He said she texted a colleague at 6:30 p.m. Thursday saying she was back in Boston, but then her family heard from immigration officials.
Dr. Paul Morrissey, surgical director of the organ transplant division at Brown University Health, said Alawieh works on getting people in Rhode Island on the list for a kidney transplants, and that’s a crucial job at a time when there has been a lot of focus on the need for kidneys and their equitable distribution.
He said Alawieh should not have had any problem traveling out of the country with an H-1B visa.
“It’s an unfortunate set of circumstances,” Morrissey said. “It’s putting a strain on our office. Her work has been exceptional.”
3) There is a new Trump ban against many countries, including tourist visa bans against all countries in the red and orange lists. This list is still tentative. And it shouldn’t have affected people with existing visas, such and the Brown kidney transplant surgeon
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… once upon a time, liberals did have our own “Leftist Joe Rogan”… his name was Joe Rogan…
Here he is advocating for socialized medicine, healthcare for all, and supporting labor unions to protect workers.
2) Recall, Rogan was once pro Obama and pro Bernie Sanders, and pro Yang Gang, and anti Trump. It’s sad he has since failed to the dark side. But like Vader… maybe he can be redeemed someday and come back to the light.
Joe Rogan was also pro gay rights and pro DACA and pro helping inner city communities that suffer economic and social injustices. It’s sad what he has become. I feel we should try to pull & welcome him back someday. Everyone can be redeemed.