This article was updated on February 23, 2020, at 11:55 p.m. local time in South Korea. SEOUL—A South Korean church whose founder says, rather mysteriously, that he represents the second coming of Christ on Earth and has unique insights into God’s revelations is getting much of the blame for a major surge in the spread of the deadly coronavirus here. Fear of the disease now known as COVID-19 actually had been on the decline in South Korea until a fresh outbreak was traced to a 61-year-old woman who belonged to the Shincheonji Church in Daegu, a city of 2.4 million about 170 miles southeast of Seoul. Soon it was clear that more than half the known cases were connected to Shincheonji parishioners. As the number of infections started climbing with disconcerting speed on Sunday, the government here put the country on the highest possible alert , opening the way for it to lock down whole cities if deemed necessary. All told, as of this writing late Sunday night local … [Read more...]

HONG KONG—Entire economies are stalling in distant parts of the world because of what’s going on in China. In a matter of weeks, the novel coronavirus first sighted in the central Chinese city of Wuhan less than two months ago, when it is believed to have made the leap from animal hosts to humans, has traveled to many continents. And the outbreak has changed the world in ways nobody had foreseen. The vast, fast-spreading contagion is a classic example of what Nassim Taleb years ago dubbed a “black swan”: an event that is highly improbable and unpredicted, a surprise that reshapes history, and is then subject to “retrospective distortion,” when everyone says they should have seen it coming. If there is a difference, it’s that the initial reaction of the Chinese Communist Party was to deny in real time that anything very important was happening at all until the evidence was quite literally overwhelming. So the question has become, to put it colorfully, whether the black swan … [Read more...]

Authorities in China’s eastern city of Nanjing locked down at least 30,000 people on Tuesday to contain an outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus, China’s state-run Global Times reported on Thursday. Roughly 29 communities and 30,000 residents within Nanjing’s Jiangning district “have been put under enclosed management since Tuesday,” according to the newspaper. “There are enough living materials in the sealed area and social order is well maintained,” Fu Jinjin, the deputy director of Nanjing’s Jiangning district, assured reporters during a press conference on July 20. Jiangning district is home to Nanjing’s Lukou International Airport. Nine staff members of the airport tested positive for the Chinese coronavirus on July 20. Lukou International Airport has since updated its tally of infected workers to 17. After learning of the airport’s coronavirus cluster infection on Tuesday, Nanjing municipal authorities, together with officials from the greater Jiangsu province, of … [Read more...]

On May 20, during a joint press conference with Vice President Mike Pence , Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched a truculent defense of his management of the coronavirus pandemic in his state. DeSantis groused about having been the target of a “typical partisan narrative” forecasting a surge in disease cases tied to a purportedly premature reopening of Florida by commercial businesses and recreation areas. He complained that the media had “waxed poetic for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York.” It’s spreading like wildfire. Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., about his state’s surge in COVID-19 cases Advertisement Instead, he said, Florida’s death rate was better than that of the Northeast, Midwest and other Southern states. “We’ve succeeded, and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative.” Not so fast, governor. At 14 deaths per 100,000 residents, Florida ranks 26th in its death rate … [Read more...]

Call it the retraction that shook the coronavirus world. On June 4, the Lancet, the British medical journal that is one of the most prestigious scientific publications in the world, withdrew a paper that had been one of the most consequential in the novel field of coronavirus studies. The peer-reviewed paper, which the Lancet had published on May 22, said that treating COVID-19 with the antimalarial drugs chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine raised the heart-related death risk for COVID-19 patients in the hospital without showing any benefit. Yes, this is a wake-up call. But we’ve had the wake-up call for years. Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch Advertisement The lead author of the paper, which employed a worldwide database of 96,000 patients from nearly 700 hospitals on six continents, was a highly regarded Harvard cardiac surgeon. The findings were so striking that they prompted researchers in the U.S. and abroad, including the World Health Organization, to … [Read more...]

Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., factory was up and running at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, despite the “shelter in place” lockdown issued by Alameda County and several other Bay Area counties the day before. Workers leaving the plant after the night shift said the automobile plant was churning out cars as usual — the Model 3, the Model X, the Model S and the newest Model Y. The parking lot was packed to capacity with about 3,000 cars, as dozens of morning-shift workers searched for overlooked spaces. Workers even parked in fire lanes. Dozens of shuttles and full-size buses ferried morning workers to the factory and took night-shift workers away. Departing workers packed shoulder to shoulder at the door of each bus, waiting to get on. The buses take workers to offsite lots and as far away as Tracy and Stockton. Business 18% of U.S. workers have lost jobs or hours since coronavirus hit, poll finds As the coronavirus pandemic hits the economy, 18% of U.S. adults surveyed … [Read more...]