A group of public health and national security experts who sent some of the earliest and most dire warnings to officials across the Trump administration about the gathering coronavirus crisis is now offering a searing assessment of how the federal government blundered through the critical first months of a lethal outbreak.
Members of the group, whose lengthy string of emails now read like a chilling foreshadowing of the unfolding deadly pandemic, came to be known by the chains dark-humored subject line, Red Dawn Rising, a reference to the campy 1984 cold war movie about a gritty band of Americans who fend off foreign invaders. Now several have broken their silence about the early warnings in interviews with ABC News to describe their lingering distress about the missed chances to spare lives.
We did not step up and meet the challenge that we needed to meet, said Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, Seattle-King County Public Health Officer, and a contributor to the email chain. We didn't act quickly enough to do the things that we needed to do early enough. And we still are not doing the things we need to do to get this outbreak under control.
Tune in to ABC on Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET for the "20/20" special report "American Catastrophe: How Did We Get Here?"
The chain, which was first published in April by the New York Times, has at various times looped in 25 different federal officials involved in the pandemic response, including top medical advisors in the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services. The emails gave them access to unvarnished analysis from an informal collection of scientific and medical experts, a number of whom had a first-hand role in developing a robust national pandemic response plan in the mid-2000s.
The Red Dawn emailers have tried to maintain a low profile, but six of them agreed to speak with ABC News, most for the first time publicly. The detailed accounts paint a picture of a frantic, race-against-the-clock effort to raise alarms in hopes of prodding a faster, stronger federal response to COVID-19.
Dr. David Marcozzi, who was the White House National Security Council director of medical preparedness policy in disasters during the Bush and Obama administrations, said the participants were driven by a single agenda.
We were generally concerned that this was going to be a threat to our nation, Marcozzi, now a senior official at the University of Marylands medical school, told ABC News.
Dr. David Marcozzi, a former Bush and Obama White House official, was among the "Red Dawn" emailers.
The emailers, along with other public health experts, describe how the federal government missed opportunities to mount a more muscular defense and failed to brace the nation for the tidal wave of illness that was coming.
The president began to say [in March] that nobody could imagine that something like this could actually occur, said Dr. Dan Hanfling, a biosecurity and disaster response expert from Virginia. The truth is that there was a group of us that had been trying to raise the alarm.
Hanfling said it was unclear how much of the information from the chain filtered up to top policymakers. Senior officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams, were copied into the chain at least once. Fauci told ABC News he didn't pay that much attention to the emails.
As an informal group of experts looking at this information, how much of that was penetrating to upper echelons of government? Hanfling said. It's hard to say.
Admiral Brett Giroir, an assistant health secretary who has helped run the pandemic response and who was occasionally copied on the Red Dawn email chain, said he believes the Trump administration has tried its best to be transparent, honest, and give the public the best information they know.
Because I think that's the most important thing is to have public confidence that you may not always be right, but you're always transparent, Giroir told ABC News. You're going give the American people the best information."
Admiral Brett Giroir, M.D., Asst. Secretary of Health for Department of Health and Human Services, speaks at a press conference with Vice President Mike Pence and Seema Verma, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services, in Tiger Stadium on the LSU campus, in Baton Rouge, La., July 14, 2020.
Red Dawn Rising
Email excerpt, Mar. 12:
From: Richard Hunt [Senior Medical Advisor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services]
As my 24 y/o told me, "the nation needs to go to war against this virus.
One early correspondent on the Red Dawn chain was Dr. James Lawler, a Navy veteran who served in the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barrack Obama and is now the director of clinical and biodefense research at the federally-supported National Strategic Research Institute in Nebraska.
Lawler said he still remembers the first alert he received on New Years Eve describing a pattern of "unexplained pneumonias" in China, and his initial outreach to what he called the pandemic preparedness community.
We're a small, odd bunch and these are the things that we talk about, he said.
The pace of the emails picked up quickly, Lawler said. And the list grew.
Hanfling, the biosecurity and disaster response expert, said he was added to the group in February, as the emails began tracking potential coronavirus cases as they started to appear on American soil.
I've heard our group referred to as the Wolverines, Hanfling said -- a reference to the nickname of the freedom fighters who emerged heroic in Red Dawn.
Dr. Dan Hanfling is a biosecurity and disaster response expert from Virginia.
Others in the group eventually included former White House health and security advisers like Dr. Richard Hatchett, who also served under both Republican and Democratic administrations and who now heads an global partnership formed to respond to outbreaks called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and Dr. Herbert O. Wolfe, now a Penn State professor who also serves as executive director of the Office of the Chief Medical Officer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
It was a serious group, Lawler said. Many folks who had thought for a long time about pandemics. And so, I think, a pretty good kitchen cabinet, if you want to call it that.
For those joining the Red Dawn chain, the initial hope was to offer a steady diet of thoughtful analysis for federal officials who wanted what Lawler called, unvarnished opinion.
There were no filters, he said. It was raw and straight.
Some government officials encouraged the input. In mid-February, Duane Caneva, who was appointed by Trump in 2018 to serve as the chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security, sent an email expanding the group of recipients.
Caneva wrote that the expanded "Red Dawn String" would give the participants the opportunity to provide thoughts, concerns, raise issues, share information across various colleagues responding to COVID-19."
A security guard stands outside the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market where the coronavirus was detected in Wuhan on January 24, 2020 - The death toll in China's viral outbreak has risen to 25, with the number of confirmed cases also leaping to 830, the national health commission said.
In some cases, government officials appeared to be learning about developments for first time from the Red Dawn emails. In one exchange, Eva Lee, the director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare at Georgia Tech, flagged a study showing a 20-year-old woman left Wuhan with no symptoms and had infected five family members.
Dr. Robert Kadlec, the Trump administrations Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, appeared surprised. Eva is this true?! Kadlec replied. If so, we have a huge [hole] on our screening and quarantine effort.
Lawler said initially, that sort of reaction took him aback.
Too often, we were finding that our group [was] providing information to leaders who were hearing it for the first time from these informal channels, he said. And that was surprising and disappointing, to be honest.
Kadlec did not respond to a request for an interview through his office.
An early, queasy feeling in 2020
Email excerpt, Jan. 28:
From: Carter Mecher [Department of Veterans Affairs physician]
Anyway you cut it, this is going to be bad.
Among the first Americans to get a bad feeling about the news out of China in early January was Helen Branswell, the infectious disease reporter for the Boston-based health news website Stat News.
Branswell, who was not among the Red Dawn emailers, said it was just hours into the new year that she started to feel a queasiness in her stomach. On Jan. 2, she tweeted: Not liking the look of this.
She described seeing images on social media of Chinese authorities in hazmat suits spraying down the wet market in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the outbreak, and hearing early reports of widespread shutdowns in the city.
It rapidly grabbed my attention and held it, Branswell told ABC News.
Medical staff members wearing protective clothing walk next to patients waiting for medical attention at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan, China, Jan. 25, 2020.
Lawler said after he started seeing alerts about the mystery illness in China the Red Dawn members began to "look at these things [and] were giving each other the play by play on what we were hearing and what we were seeing, he recalled. And it was obvious very early on, in January, that this had the potential to be a serious global event.
At the time, the administration was still struggling to interpret the signs from China, said Tom Bossert, an ABC News contributor who was on the Red Dawn email chain and who served as a top Homeland Security Advisor to President Trump.
Bossert, who left the Trump administration in 2018, said government officials were so focused on containing the virus keeping it from crossing the ocean they were missing signs that people with no symptoms were capable of circulating it. Trump would announce a ban on most travel from China at the end of January.
To contain this in China or in Wuhan, that's a really noble objective, Bossert said. But that strategy, he said, didn't seem to recognize or understand the notion that you can have a lot of sick people, infectious people walking around in any community.
In those initial weeks, Lawler said the group was just starting their efforts to persuade leaders to look beyond efforts to block the virus from entering the U.S., and in the direction of bracing the public for potentially dramatic lifestyle changes that could slow down the spread.
These signs were out there pretty early -- good indications that asymptomatic infections were occurring and that those people were then able to transmit to others, Lawler said.
Hundreds of thousands could die. People were stunned."
Email excerpt, Jan. 28:
From: James Lawler [Former Bush and Obama White House official]
Great Understatements in History:
Napoleon' s retreat from Moscow - just a little stroll gone bad"
Pompeii - "a bit of a dust storm"
Hiroshima - "summer heat wave"
AND
Wuhan - "just a bad flu season"
By February, members of the Red Dawn chain were solidifying their view that what started as a mystery illness in China was poised to become an epidemic of historic proportions.
Lawler shared his early projections during a speaking engagement at a reception for the American Hospital Association. When he began to rattle off the numbers, he recalled, the room grew uncomfortably silent. Without a clear and aggressive response, he said he expected 96 million Americans to contract COVID-19, and as many as 480,000 would die.
People were stunned, he said.
Not only were the health care executives taken aback, he said. When he shared the figures with members of Congress and officials within the executive branch, he said he saw a similar reaction.
They had not heard these types of projections before, Lawler said. The fact that folks were hearing these numbers for the first time from me was concerning.
Dr. James Lawler, a former Bush and Obama White House official, was among the "Red Dawn" emailers.
Currently, approximately six months into the outbreak, more than 4 million positive cases of coronavirus have been reported in the U.S. and more than 140,000 Americans have died, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University, despite many parts of the country taking on drastic lockdown measures.
Around the time of Lawlers presentation, Fauci was appearing in Washington at an Aspen Institute panel discussing the outbreak.
Branswell, the Stat News reporter, was moderating. At one point, Fauci was asked to explain why the U.S. government was still so focused on keeping the virus from entering the population, instead of turning more attention to preparing for it to spread.
Thats the message that is very fine-line sensitive, Fauci responded. To let the American people know that, at present, given everything that is going on the risk is really relatively low.
Branswell told ABC News she remembered being puzzled. And it showed. Explain to me why the risk is low, somebody? she responded. I cant see why theres no force field around China.
Fauci said his caution stemmed from the fact that, by this point in mid-February, the U.S. had only 13 confirmed cases of coronavirus. But he acknowledged this view could be wrong.
Is there a risk that this is going to turn into a global pandemic. Absolutely yes, he said. There is. There is.
In an interview with ABC News, Fauci said that, even looking back now, he believes it was reasonable to make the assumption that the risk of spread was low, because, at that moment, so few cases had made it across the ocean.
As a scientist, the thing you must always do is to be humble enough to know that when you get additional information, even information that might conflict what was felt earlier on, you then change your viewpoint and you change your recommendations based on the data that you have at that time, he said.
Science is a learning process, he said. To think that we knew everything right at the first day that we knew that there was a new virus, I think is just unrealistic.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Many of those interacting with federal officials through the Red Dawn chain said they understood that none of the decisions in the midst of a crisis are easy.
We recognized the incredible challenges and really fraught decisions, Hanfling said.
A slowness in revving up a response
Email excerpt, Feb. 29:
From: Eva Lee [Medical research expert, Georgia Tech]
We need actions, actions, actions and more actions. We are going to have pockets of epicenters across this country, West coast, East coast and the South. Our policy leaders must act now. Please make it happen!
Inside the Trump Administration, officials have had mixed views about the early steps taken to respond to those waving red flags about the burgeoning crisis.
Giroir, the four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, said he believes the administration took early, aggressive action. Beginning January 9, he said, the health service began a deployment of officers to nursing homes, field hospitals and Native American reservations that would eventually number more than 5,000.
On February 3, I issued an order that everybody in the corps was on alert, Giroir said. For the first time in our history everybody needed to be ready to go.
By Feb. 15 he said the health corps had seven strike teams assembled to help monitor travelers arriving in several key U.S. airports. But until his team started seeing the virus blazing through the community, he said no one was sure what to expect.
This may be fine and may go away, or it may be the big deal that we've all been training for and planning for our whole careers," Giroir said.
Perhaps the biggest challenge confronting federal leaders during a pandemic, Lawler said, is knowing when to acknowledge that it is occurring.
In one of the Red Dawn email exchanges, Lawler chided the assertions by President Trump that the spreading virus would be no worse than a bad flu.
Dr. Matthew Hepburn, a U.S. Army infectious disease expert, replied with his advice: Team, am dealing with a very similar scenario, in terms of not trying to overreact and damage credibility. My argument is that we should treat this as the next pandemic for now, and we can always scale back if the outbreak dissipates, or is not as severe.
Redfield, the CDC director, described the phenomenon as he experienced it, acknowledging he may have been lulled into a false sense of confidence that the virus would be more easily contained.
The CDC responded quickly, he said, to the first person in the U.S. was identified with coronavirus on Jan. 21. That person, Redfield said, had made 50 to 60 contacts before being isolated, and his agency worked hard to evaluate all of them.
None of them were infected, he said.
Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield, speaks during a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the Department of Education building Wednesday, July 8, 2020, in Washington.
After the CDC had identified 12 more cases involving people traveling into the U.S. from Wuhan, they traced some 850 more people who had been in contact with those travelers.
We only found two individuals that were infected, and both of them were intimate spouses, he said. So initially it didn't seem like this was infectious-infectious-infectious.
As coronavirus cases and deaths continue to surge in Florida, its easy to get lost in the numbers spit out every 24 hours by state government officials.
Coronavirus infections are rising in Florida, and so is the death toll. But understanding the metrics behind these daily reports can be complicated.
The positivity rate, or the percentage of positive tests among the tests processed, has been lifted up by national health experts as a metric key to determining when the spread of the virus is under control. The World Health Organization recommends a state or region maintain a 5 percent positivity rate for at least two weeks before lifting shelter-at-home and social distancing protocols. If an areas positivity rate is too high, that could mean testing isnt widespread enough to capture the true spread of the virus.
But doubts over this methodology were raised when dozens of small labs had reported only positive tests and no negatives, inflating their numbers to suggest a 100 percent positivity rate.
Though positivity is helpful for public health experts to track, its vital to look at all the data in context, said Dr. Nishant Anand, the chief medical officer at BayCare Health Systems, which operates 15 hospitals around the Tampa Bay area.
Instead of drilling down on specific data coming from a handful of labs, he said the more accurate picture comes from looking across an entire county or the whole state, which offers a much larger data sample.
You have to take all of these numbers in context together, Anand said. I know theres a lot of focus on the positivity rate, but I view that as one data point.
More than half of all of Floridas coronavirus tests are processed at just five commercial laboratories: Quest Diagnostics in Tampa, Laboratory Corporation of America based in North Carolina, Bio Reference Laboratories, Inc. based in New Jersey, Genetworx, and Realtox Labs LLC in Maryland.
These commercial facilities are able to process thousands of lab tests a day. Only 15 percent of the remaining 1,100 or so labs reporting to the Florida Department of Health have processed more than 1,000 tests.
Large labs say their numbers are accurate. And because such a big share of the states testing comes from just those few facilities, the numbers from smaller labs dont make a big dent in the end result.
Even when removing all the labs where no negatives were reported, Floridas percentage of positive tests remains the same - about 12 percent.
Most of the labs Ive heard about have been small labs, so the numbers theoretically would be small, Anand said. I think looking at the positivity rate across the region is more meaningful.
Anand used the analogy of students in school. He said he could look at how many children at one school got As, but looking at how many kids in a district got As would widen the data pool and make the sample size much stronger.
Floridas positivity rate is more than double than the World Health Organizations 5 percent recommendation. That means there is still disease spread in the community and likely not enough testing, Anand said.
The Florida Department of Health reports the positivity rate in two ways on its daily coronavirus report. One figure comes from the number of people who test positive for the first time divided by all the people tested that day, excluding people who have previously tested positive.
That means negative retests are counted while positive retests are not. That shifts more weight onto the negative results, dropping the overall positivity rate. The state also combines both standard coronavirus tests and antigen tests into one catch-all counter. This is troubling because antigen tests, which are used to detect viral proteins and are known for their rapid results, have been found to be inaccurate.
But its not possible to know how much the data would change if positive repeat tests were also calculated, experts say. According to the Covid Tracking Project, Florida doesnt release data related to how many people tested positive for the first time and how many tested positive consecutive times, making it impossible to independently verify.
Anand said like any data point, the positivity rate needs to be looked at in context. He said he likes to consider the actual number of new people tested compared with new positive tests.
Just like with any fraction, the numbers could be higher or lower depending on what you include in the numerator or denominator, he said.
In the states daily report, dozens of the same facilities have their testing results spread across multiple line items because of typos, varying names of the lab, or a missing period. The Florida Department of Health said it is working with hospitals and laboratories to standardize the names.
For example, there are five varying monikers for the Orlando VA Healthcare System. Its listed as Orlando VAMC, Orlando Veteran Affairs Medical Center, Orlando VA Medical Center, and VAMC Orlando, in health department reports.
Some facilities enter positive and negative results into the database at the same time, but positive results take priority. In some cases, lab samples are run every hour. The process is semi-automatic, with some manual entry.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said its not uncommon for negative results to lag and be reported later than positive tests because the latter is more urgent. In April and May he said some labs unloaded a huge dump of negative results after routinely submitting positive tests.
In a July 15 press conference, DeSantis said its the law that labs have to report a positive infection for any illness. He said an executive order mandates the labs report negative results as well for tracking purposes.
DeSantis has blamed the reporting issue on the labs repeatedly, saying its not the health departments fault.
There were a number of labs that were simply doing what the default is, he said. I dont think they were trying to be underhanded, I think thats sort of what they were doing before this started.
Positive test results are also reported to each county health department to start contact tracing process, said Lisa Razler, a spokeswoman with BayCare.
Mike Palmer, the CEO of Nona Scientific laboratory in Ocala, wrote in an email to the Tampa Bay Times that all of their data, including negative results, was reported to the Florida Department of Health. However, there were communication errors.
Nona Scientific is one of the smaller labs in the state that has reported a 100 percent positivity rate on the daily health department report.
Lori-Ann Martell, the practice administrator for Advance Medical of Naples, also wrote in an email to the Times that they had reported total tests for each day and positive results. Still, on the state report, the lab has a 100 percent positivity rate.
She said it seemed like the error was on the end of the state, but that in the meantime theyll post their data on their Facebook page for transparency.
I think everyone is doing their very best in a very busy and stressful time caring for and testing COVID-19 patients, she said. Transparency from the testing source is the only way to assure we all understand what is going on in our community/state/country.
Positivity is an important metric, because it shows how common the virus may be in the community and if theres enough testing to make sure asymptomatic cases are also under control. A high number means testing needs to be expanded.
But its not a perfect metric. It only looks at the people who get tested, which includes people who get tested because they think they have symptoms.
Still, health experts rely on it and believe its a helpful guidepost for understanding disease in a community - in conjunction with other important data, like looking at new cases, hospitalizations and death.
The findings raise fresh questions about the success of U.S vaccination efforts if an effective vaccine emerges which could translate into how quickly the country could return to some level of normalcy. It is not clear how much public attitudes about a vaccine could change if a shot becomes available.
Vaccines from the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna began the final stage of clinical trials in the U.S. this week. Results that reveal whether those vaccines work are expected before the end of the year, the companies said. Two Chinese-made vaccines are also in end-stage trials overseas.
Poll respondents said they would be less likely to take a coronavirus vaccine that was made in China than one made in the U.S. Twenty-three percent said they would not take a China-made vaccine, compared to 17 percent who would turn down an American shot.
The largest group declining a China-made vaccine were those who viewed Trump very favorably, with 40 percent saying they would not take a vaccine made in China.
The poll did not find any major differences across ethnicities in respondents' willingness to take a coronavirus vaccine, regardless of its origin.
Seventeen percent of white respondents, 16 percent of Hispanic respondents and 20 percent of Black respondents said they would not take a U.S. vaccine. Twenty-two percent of whites respondents, 17 percent of Hispanic respondents, and 27 percent of Black respondents said they would be unwilling to take a China-made shot.
The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll was conducted online from July 24 to 26 among a national sample of 1,997 registered voters. Results from the full survey have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Morning Consult is a global data intelligence company, delivering insights on what people think in real time by surveying tens of thousands across the globe every single day.
More details on the poll and its methodology can be found in these two documents: Toplines | Crosstabs
SEOUL, South Korea Three years ago, out of work and hungry, Kim Geum-hyok climbed Mount White Horse near his North Korean hometown, Kaesong, brooding on the meaninglessness of life.
Not far to the south, across a river, the 21-year-old could see high-rise buildings in South Korea, dazzlingly lit up. The sight beckoned him.
After two nights on the mountain, Mr. Kim crossed the worlds most heavily armed border to get to it. He climbed down, crawled under and over layers of barbed-wire fences and made his way through minefields. At the rivers edge, he hid among reeds, improvising a life jacket from washed-up plastic trash. When night fell, he began to swim.
I kept swimming toward the light, Mr. Kim said of his seven and a half hours in the water, in an interview that a fellow North Korean defector posted on YouTube. When I finally landed on the South Korean side and walked through reeds and saw South Korean soldiers approaching, I was so exhausted I collapsed.
This month, after three years of life in the South, Mr. Kim went back swimming across the same river hed crossed in 2017, South Korean officials said. On Sunday, North Korea said he may have brought the coronavirus into the country for the first time, and it put Kaesong, Mr. Kims hometown, under lockdown.
On Monday, a police department in South Korea said that before Mr. Kim left, a warrant had been issued for his arrest on a rape accusation.
North Korea did not identify Mr. Kim in its statement. But South Korea said he was the only defector in the South who had gone back to the North this month. The South did not disclose his full name, but it released enough information for reporters to establish his identity.
And other defectors who knew him including the YouTube interviewer, Kim Jin-ah, a woman from Kaesong confirmed that it was him, uploading photos of Mr. Kim to social media.
Weeks before his departure, Mr. Kim, now 24, gave several interviews for Kim Jin-ahs YouTube channel, Lady From Kaesong, talking about his lives in the two Koreas. He used an alias and wore sunglasses, and in some clips his face had been digitally altered. Much of what he said could not be independently verified.
I once visited his apartment in late June and I was surprised that it was so bare of furniture, Ms. Kim said in a video posted after Mr. Kims return to the North. Looking back, I think he was already preparing to leave South Korea.
Even before Mr. Kim went back, his story was an unusual one. Most of the 33,000 North Korean defectors now living in South Korea got there by way of China and Southeast Asia. But some, like Mr. Kim, made the dangerous decision to cross the inter-Korean border.
For a defector to return, however to a desolate economy and a dictatorship that calls defectors human scum is rare. Eleven have done so in the last five years, according to the Souths Unification Ministry. Like many defectors, those who go back have often had trouble adjusting to the Souths freewheeling capitalist society.
In one of the YouTube interviews, Mr. Kim said he had lost most of his hearing at an early age. Because of that, I had difficulty communicating with people, he said. I was beaten because I was told to bring one thing and brought something else.
When he was still a child, Kaesong, a city of 300,000, was chosen as the site of an industrial park run jointly by the two Koreas. It opened in 2004, and Kaesong became a boomtown, awash with cash. Mr. Kims cousins worked at the park, he said, and he himself sold eggs and vegetables.
But four years ago, the South shut down the complex in a dispute over the Norths nuclear weapons program. The economy crashed, and Mr. Kim, like many others, was soon out of work. (Last month, with inter-Korean relations at another low, the North blew up an office in Kaesong that it had jointly operated with the South.)
By the time he climbed Mount White Horse in June of 2017, Mr. Kim told Ms. Kim, he saw no hope for the future, no meaning in life, wondering whether I should continue to live or die. Seeing the South Korean buildings at night compelled him to go there and check it out even if that meant my death, he said.
Mr. Kim said he could not take his eyes off South Korean television during his debriefing by officials, which all defectors undergo after arriving in the South. In the North, all TV sets are preset to government propaganda channels.
Updated July 27, 2020
Mr. Kim settled in Gimpo, a city across the Han River from Kaesong. A doctor corrected the hearing problem that he had lived with since childhood. He gave Ms. Kim no details about his condition or the treatment, but he told her that he cried that day.
He also told her that he missed his parents deeply. He had enrolled in a vocational school, as part of the resettlement program that the South offers to defectors. But he said he quit and found work, hoping to send money to his family, as defectors often do through middlemen in China.
Off camera, according to Ms. Kim, Mr. Kim confided something else.
He told her that he was being investigated by the police because another defector had accused him of raping her. He told Ms. Kim that he had been so drunk on the night in question that he couldnt remember anything.
With Mr. Kim now in the North, it is impossible to contact him for comment. But the police in Gimpo confirmed that a warrant had been issued for his arrest.
On July 17, officials say, Mr. Kim arrived on Ganghwa Island, which may have been where he first set foot on South Korean soil. At 2:20 a.m. on the 18th, he got out of a taxi on the islands northern shore. Around that time, he sent his last text message to Ms. Kim.
I really didnt want to lose you because you were like a big sister to me, he wrote, according to Ms. Kim, who read the message on YouTube. I will repay my debt to you no matter where I live, as long as I live.
Ms. Kim, who was working at a 24-hour convenience store when the message arrived, rushed to Mr. Kims apartment as soon as her shift ended, she told her viewers.
She learned that he had given up the apartment days earlier, reclaiming his deposit. She said he had also sold a used car he had borrowed from her, apparently to raise as much money as he could before going home.
South Korean officials concluded that Mr. Kim had crossed by crawling through a drain, three feet in diameter, that runs underneath barbed-wire fences on Ganghwas north shore. That led him to the Han River, which they believe he swam back across.
In a bag near the drain, officials found bank receipts indicating that Mr. Kim had withdrawn 5 million South Korean won from his account, then converted most of that to $4,000.
What happened to Mr. Kim after he crossed is unknown. North Korea said Sunday that he was in quarantine, accusing him of creating the dangerous situation in Kaesong City that may lead to a deadly and destructive disaster.
TheWest Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) reports as of 5:00 p.m., on July 28,2020, there have been 269,704 totalconfirmatory laboratory results received for COVID-19, with 6,173 totalcases and 111 deaths.
DHHR has confirmed the deaths of a 77-yearold female from Mercer County, an 87-year old female from Mercer County, and a 60-yearold female from Preston County. We are deeplysaddened by this news, a loss to both the families and our state, said Bill J.Crouch, DHHR Cabinet Secretary.
In alignment with updated definitions fromthe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the dashboard includes probablecases which are individuals that have symptoms and either serologic (antibody)or epidemiologic (e.g., a link to a confirmed case) evidence of disease, but noconfirmatory test.
CASESPER COUNTY (Case confirmed by lab test/Probable case):Barbour (29/0), Berkeley (605/22), Boone (68/0), Braxton (8/0), Brooke(51/1), Cabell (281/9), Calhoun (6/0), Clay (17/0), Doddridge (2/0), Fayette(122/0), Gilmer (14/0), Grant (46/1), Greenbrier (83/0), Hampshire (67/0),Hancock (87/5), Hardy (50/1), Harrison (168/1), Jackson (155/0), Jefferson(280/5), Kanawha (699/13), Lewis (24/1), Lincoln (52/2), Logan (98/0), Marion(155/4), Marshall (111/2), Mason (41/0), McDowell (18/1), Mercer (111/0),Mineral (99/2), Mingo (106/2), Monongalia (829/16), Monroe (18/1), Morgan(24/1), Nicholas (26/1), Ohio (241/0), Pendleton (30/1), Pleasants (6/1),Pocahontas (40/1), Preston (97/22), Putnam (152/1), Raleigh (138/4), Randolph(203/3), Ritchie (3/0), Roane (14/0), Summers (5/0), Taylor (39/1), Tucker(8/0), Tyler (11/0), Upshur (36/2), Wayne (176/2), Webster (3/0), Wetzel(40/0), Wirt (6/0), Wood (218/11), Wyoming (17/0).
As case surveillance continues at thelocal health department level, it may reveal that those tested in a certaincounty may not be a resident of that county, or even the state as an individualin question may have crossed the state border to be tested.Such is the case of Preston County in this report.
Pleasenote that delays may be experienced with the reporting of information from thelocal health department to DHHR.
Please visit thedashboard at www.coronavirus.wv.gov for more detailed information.
There were nearly 500 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Massachusetts over the weekend and the percentage of tests that come back positive for the coronavirus is rising.
The Department of Public Health confirmed 210 new cases of COVID-19 onSaturdayand 273 more cases onSunday, along with the announcement of 31 recent COVID-19 deaths between the two days. The number of daily new cases, which had generally settled at fewer than 200 a day earlier in the month, has been above 200 each of the last four days.
"Last four days in #Massachusetts had #COVID19 new positive tests over 200. Last time that happened? Mid-June - on the way down," Dr. David Rosman, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society,tweeted Sundaynight.
Sunday's report from DPH also showed that the seven-day average of the positive test rate as of July 25 had climbed to 1.9% from 1.8% after holding steady at 1.7% for more than a week. One month ago, the positive test rate was 2%.
Data reported Sunday would suggest the average will continue to climb the 273 new cases reported Sunday were the results of 9,780 tests, meaning that 2.79% of all tests came back positive for the virus.
Last week, the governor pointed out that the state's average positive test rate has dropped in the months since many aspects of the state's economy began to reopen. When the earliest steps of the administration's reopening plan began May 18, the seven-day average positive test rate was 9.6%.
"We actually had a higher positive test rate two and a half months ago than we have today, which speaks not only to the strategic decision-making that went into developing and implementing that plan, but it also speaks in a very big way to the work that's continued to be done by the people in Massachusetts to do the things that we know are most successful in containing the virus and reducing the spread," Gov. Charlie Baker said last week.
In Somerville, Mayor Joe Curtatone has taken a slower approach to allow business and social activity to resume. While most of the rest of the state has advanced to phase three of the administration's plan to open movie theater, gyms and more, Somerville is waiting until at least early August to permit most of those phase three businesses.
In aninterview Sundaywith WBZ-TV's Jon Keller, Curtatone defended his approach and said he has two goals: "to ensure the public health, safety and wellbeing of everyone in our community and also to make sure that in any reopening, that it sustainable."
"As we move forward and as we have been moving forward, we have to commend the governor, his administration, the commonwealth and everyone out there who has done their part to flatten the curve," he said. "But there are lessons to be learned and there's data that we should be fully looking at."
At the end of a press conference Friday at which he announced new mandatory quarantine or testing requirements, Gov. Charlie Baker said the data he's seen do not suggest that young people are driving coronavirus activity in Massachusetts.
"We do not have that," Baker said. "Our under-30 crowd is a higher percentage than it was two months ago, but that's not because their positive test rate overall has gone up. It hasn't, it's collapsed the same way the 30 to 60 crowd did and the over-60 crowd did."
TheWest Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) reports as of 10:00 a.m., on July 26,2020, there have been 259,669 total confirmatory laboratory results receivedfor COVID-19, with 5,887 total cases and 103 deaths.
In alignment with updated definitions fromthe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the dashboard includes probablecases which are individuals that have symptoms and either serologic (antibody)or epidemiologic (e.g., a link to a confirmed case) evidence of disease, but noconfirmatory test.
CASESPER COUNTY (Case confirmed by lab test/Probable case):Barbour (28/0), Berkeley (589/19), Boone (70/0), Braxton (8/0), Brooke(47/1), Cabell (272/9), Calhoun (5/0), Clay (17/0), Doddridge (2/0), Fayette(114/0), Gilmer (14/0), Grant (40/1), Greenbrier (81/0), Hampshire (56/0),Hancock (81/4), Hardy (50/1), Harrison (159/1), Jackson (153/0), Jefferson(275/5), Kanawha (671/12), Lewis (24/1), Lincoln (46/2), Logan (86/0), Marion(154/4), Marshall (97/1), Mason (41/0), McDowell (14/1), Mercer (84/0), Mineral(94/2), Mingo (91/2), Monongalia (801/16), Monroe (18/1), Morgan (24/1),Nicholas (22/1), Ohio (230/0), Pendleton (27/1), Pleasants (6/1), Pocahontas(39/1), Preston (97/22), Putnam (139/1), Raleigh (126/4), Randolph (201/4),Ritchie (3/0), Roane (14/0), Summers (4/0), Taylor (38/1), Tucker (8/0), Tyler(11/0), Upshur (33/2), Wayne (173/2), Webster (3/0), Wetzel (40/0), Wirt (6/0),Wood (212/10), Wyoming (15/0).
As case surveillance continues at thelocal health department level, it may reveal that those tested in a certaincounty may not be a resident of that county, or even the state as an individualin question may have crossed the state border to be tested.
Pleasenote that delays may be experienced with the reporting of information from thelocal health department to DHHR.
Please visit thedashboard at www.coronavirus.wv.gov for more detailed information.
The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the supply of blood and blood components in many countries through reduction in blood donations and disruption of routine practices in blood establishments. Blood services throughout the world must move quickly in response to the pandemic to maintain blood sufficiency for critical patient needs, ideally through development, implementation and activation of emergency response plans in cooperation with hospitals. Meanwhile, COVID-19 convalescent plasma can be made available on an experimental basis through local production provided that ethical and safety criteria are met for its preparation and use. Blood systems that provide COVID-19 convalescent plasma must ensure that blood establishments have sufficient capability to safely collect, process and store these special products in a quality-assured manner in compliance with WHO and other internationally recognized standards for plasma for transfusion.
WHO provided interim guidance on Maintaining a safe and adequate blood supply during the pandemic outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on 20 March 2020. More recently, on 10 July 2020, WHO published updated interim guidance entitled Guidance on maintaining a safe and adequate blood supply during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and on the collection of COVID-19 convalescent plasma. Compared with the earlier version, the updated interim guidance provides greater details on management of the blood supply and expanded recommendations on collection of COVID-19 convalescent plasma. The BTT organized webinar on 28 July 2020 will include a presentation on the Scientific rationale and clinical experience with experimental treatment with COVID-19 convalescent plasma and a summary of the 10 July 2020 WHO interim guidance.
Shi Zhengli, one of the worlds leading bat coronavirus researchers, trainsstaff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on how to safely work in their new biosafety level 4 laboratory in 2017.
By Jon CohenJul. 24, 2020 , 3:45 PM
Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
The coronavirus pandemic has thrust virologist Shi Zhengli into a fierce spotlight. Shi, whos been nicknamed Bat Woman, heads a group that studies bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in the city in China where the pandemic began, and many have speculated that the virus that causes COVID-19 accidentally escaped from her laba theory promoted by U.S. President Donald Trump. Some have even suggested it could have been engineered there.
China has forcefully rejected such claims, but Shi (pronounced SHIH) herself has said very little publicly.
Now, Shi has broken her silence about the details of her work. On 15 July, she emailedScienceanswers to a series of written questions about the virus origin and the research at her institute. In them, Shi hit back at speculation that the virus leaked from WIV. She and her colleagues discovered the virus in late 2019, she says, in samples from patients who had a pneumonia of unknown origin. Before that, we had never been in contact with or studied this virus, nor did we know of its existence, Shi wrote.
U.S. President Trumps claim that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts, she added. It jeopardizes and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology.
Shi stressed that over the past 15 years, her lab has isolated and grown in culture only three bat coronaviruses related to one that infected humans: the agent that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which erupted in 2003. The more than 2000 other bat coronaviruses the lab has detected, including one that is 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2which means they shared a common ancestor decades agoare simply genetic sequences that her team has extracted from fecal samples and oral and anal swabs of the animals. She also noted that all of the staff and students in her lab were recently tested for SARS-CoV-2 and everyone was negative, challenging the notion that an infected person in her group triggered the pandemic.
Shi was particularly chagrined about the 24 April decision by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), made at the White Houses behest,to ax a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance in New York Citythat included bat virus research at WIV. We dont understand [it] and feel it is absolutely absurd, she said.
Scienceshared Shis responsesavailable here in full(PDF)with several leading researchers in other countries. Its a big contribution, says Daniel Lucey of Georgetown University, an outbreak specialist whoblogsabout SARS-CoV-2 origin issues. There are a lot of new facts that I wasnt aware of. Its very exciting to hear this directly from her.
Shis answers were coordinated with public information staffers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, of which WIV is part, and it took her 2 months to prepare them. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research says he suspects Shis answers were carefully vetted by the Chinese government. But theyre all logical, genuine, and stick to the science as one would have expected from a world-class scientist and one of the leading experts on coronaviruses, Andersen says.
However, Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, who from the early days of the pandemic has urged that an investigation look into the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through a laboratory accident, was decidedly unimpressed. Most of these answers are formulaic, almost robotic, reiterations of statements previously made by Chinese authorities and state media, Ebright says.
Shis responses come at a time when questions about how the pandemic began are increasingly causing international tensions. Trump frequently calls SARS-CoV-2 the China virus and has said China could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks. China, for its part, has addedan extra layer of reviewfor any researchers who want to publish papers on the pandemics origins andhas assertedwithout evidence that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in the United States.Calls for anindependent, international probeinto the origin questions are mounting, and China hasinvited two researchersfrom the World Health Organization to visit the country to discuss the scope and scale of a future mission. They are now in China working through those details. Lucey says Shis answers toSciences questions could help guide the investigation team. (Here are related questionsSciencehas suggested the mission should address.)
Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance has worked with Shi for more than 15 years. He describes her as social, open, and something of a goodwill ambassador for China at international meetings, where she converses in both French and English. (Shes also a renowned singer of Mandarin folk songs.) What I really like about Zhengli is that she is frank and honest and that just makes it easier to solve problems, he says.
After taking a blood sample, Shi Zhengli releases a fruit bat outside a cave in Guangxi province in 2004. The work resulted in a Science paper that would become a turning point in her career.
Born in Henan province in central China, Shi studied at Wuhan University and WIV, then earned a Ph.D. in France at the University of Montpellier II. She returned to WIV in 2000. Initially, the vast majority of her research focused on viruses in shrimp and crabs, and her papers all appeared in specialty publications such as Virologica Sinica and the Journal of Fish Diseases.
But in 2005, a study she published in Science with Daszak and other researchers from China, Australia, and the United States became a turning point in her career. The paper reported the first evidence that bats harbored coronaviruses closely related to the lethal virus that jumped from civets to humans and caused the worldwide outbreak of SARS in 2003.
With NIH funding, Daszak has continued to work with Shi and her WIV team to trap wild animals and take samples to hunt for more coronaviruses. They have published 18 more papers together about viruses discovered in bats and rodents. Shi is is extremely driven to produce high-quality work, Daszak says. She will go out in the field, and gets involved in the work, but her real skills are in the lab, and shes one of the best Ive worked with in China, probably globally.
Shi told Science her lab was thrust into the pandemic on 30 December 2019, the day her team first received patient samples. Subsequently, we rapidly conducted research in parallel with other domestic institutions, and quickly identified the pathogen, she wrote.
It didnt long take for suspicions and rumors to arise. They spread on Chinas social media sites and then in the United Kingdoms Daily Mail and The Washington Times in the United States. On 2 February, Shi posted a note on her own social media site that said SARS-CoV-2 was nature punishing the uncivilized habits and customs of humans, and she was willing to bet my life that [the outbreak] has nothing to do with the lab. Partly as a show of support for Shi, Daszak and 26 other scientists from eight countries outside of China published a statement of solidarity with Chinese scientists and health professionals in The Lancet in February. In a 17 March Nature Medicinepaper that analyzed SARS-CoV-2s genetic makeup, Andersen and other evolutionary biologists argued against it being engineered in a lab.
Yet the possibility that her lab had played a role worried Shi, she revealed in a March Scientific American profile that briefly touched on origin questions. She frantically went through her own laboratorys records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal, the story said. None of the sequences of bat viruses her lab had found closely matched SARS-CoV-2, the article noted. That really took a load off my mind, she told Scientific American. I had not slept a wink for days.
In her written answers to Science, Shi explained in great detail why she thinks her lab is blameless. WIV has identified hundreds of bat viruses over the years, but never anything close to SARS-CoV-2, she says. Although much speculation has centered on RaTG13, the bat virus that most closely resembles SARS-CoV-2, differences in the sequences of the two viruses suggest they diverged from a common ancestor somewhere between 20 and 70 years ago. Shi notes that her lab never cultured the bat virus, making an accident far less likely.
Some suspicions have focused on a naming inconsistency. In 2016, Shi described a partial sequence of a bat coronavirus that she dubbed 4991. That small part of the genome exactly matches RaTG13, leading some to speculate that Shi never revealed the full sequence of 4991 because it actually is SARS-CoV-2. In her replies, Shi explained that 4991 and RaTG13 are one and the same. The original name, she says, was for the bat itself, and her team switched to RaTG13 when they sequenced the entire virus. We changed the name as we wanted it to reflect the time and location for the sample collection, she said, adding that TG stands for Tongguan (the town in Yunnan province where they trapped that bat) and 13 is short for the year, 2013.
Thats a very logical explanation, says Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney who co-authored the Nature Medicine paper with Andersen. Shis reply also clarified to him why 4991 held such little interest to her team that they didnt even bother to sequence it fully until recently: That short genetic sequence was very different from SARS-CoV, the virus that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak. In reading this the penny dropped: Of course, they would have been mainly interested in bat viruses closely related to SARS-CoV, because this virus emerged and caused a human epidemic not some random bat virus that is more distant, Holmes says.
With help from Frances Mrieux Institute, the Wuhan Institute of Virology built a biosafety level 4 laboratory, which is used to study highly dangerous pathogensand isnt needed for most coronavirus experiments.
Shi mentioned several other factors that she says exonerate her lab. Their research meets strict biosafety rules, she said, and the lab is subject to periodic inspections by a third-party institution authorized by the government. Antibody tests have shown there is zero infection among institute staff or students with SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses. Shi said WIV has never been ordered to destroy any samples after the pandemic erupted and she was sure the virus didnt come from the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Preventionor another lab in the cityeither: Based on daily academic exchanges and discussion, I can rule out such a possibility.
Labs that presumably had strict biosafety rules have had accidents: The SARS virus escaped from several labs after the global outbreak was contained in 2003. And even if everyone in the institute tested negative for the virus today, an infected person could have left WIV months ago. Still, Holmes says, the answers are a clear, comprehensive, and believable account of what occurred at WIV.
But then where did the virus come from? Shi is unsure but concurs with the scientific consensus that it originated in bats and jumped to humans either directly or, more likely, via an intermediate host.
When the outbreak surfaced, Wuhan health officials believed the jump occurred at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market because many of the first known COVID-19 patients had links to it. Shis lab tested samples from the market and found RNA fragments from the virus in door handles, the ground and sewage, she wrotebut not in frozen animal samples.
However, two papers published in late January revealed that up to 45% of the first confirmed patientsincluding four of the five earliest casesdid not have any ties to the market, casting doubt on the theory that it was the origin. Shi agrees: The Huanan seafood market may just be a crowded location where a cluster of early novel coronavirus patients were found.
Researchers from WIV and Huazhong Agricultural University didnt find the virus in samples from farmed animals and livestock taken around Wuhan and in other places in Hubei province, she wrote. Shi added that many years of surveillance in Hubei have never turned up bat coronaviruses close to SARS-CoV-2, which leads her to believe the jump from animals to humans happened elsewhere.
Shi Zhenglis team takes samples from bats trapped in the wild. The team never found SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic virus, in bats, Shi says.
Andersen would like more specifics. Limiting the search at the market to frozen animal samples is an obvious gap, he says: What were these? Did they look at any live animals? Im still a bit puzzled by the statement that the only role of the market was that it was a crowded location, yet so many of the environmental samples were positive so early on.
Shi provided few details on Chinas efforts to pin down the origin. Many groups in China are carrying out such studies, she wrote. We are publishing papers and data, including those about the viruss origins. We are tracing the origin of the virus in different directions and through multiple approaches.
Daszak supports the push for an international research effortwhich he cautions could take yearsand says Shis group should play a prominent role in it. I hope and believe that she will be able to help WIV and China show the world that there is nothing to these lab escape theories, and help us all to find the true origins of this viral strain, he says.
Shi ended her answers to Science on a similar note. Over the past 20 years, coronaviruses have been disrupting and impacting human lives and economies, she said. Here, I would like to make an appeal to the international community to strengthen international cooperation on research into the origins of emerging viruses. I hope scientists around the world can stand together and work together.
ReadShi Zhengli's answers toScience's questions in full here.
HUNTING & FISHING LICENSE SALES UP 40 PERCENTGov. Justice took time out of his briefing Monday to report that June 2020hunting and fishing license sales were up by nearly 40 percent compared to thesame month last year.
In June 2020, the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources sold 43,091licenses, compared to 31,148 licenses for the same month in 2019.
In an effort to encourage outdoor activity among West Virginia residents at asafe distance during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Justicegreatly expandedthe state's annual Free Fishing Days promotion, holding dates for free fishingin March, extending the promotion through nearly all of Apriland May,and holding an additional free fishing weekend in June.
As a result,this June, more than 10,000 total fishing licenses were sold,shortlyafter the series of free fishing promotions came to an end.
Over 50 percent of all fishing license sales this year have been from new,first-time license holders, Gov. Justice said. Now, what does that tell you?It tells you that when we did the program to let people go fishing for free, alot of people went and they had a great time and now theyre buying licenses.
Last week, the Governor also announcedthat West Virginia State Parks had seen a 227 percent increase in onlinereservations from West Virginia residents in June 2020 compared to the previousyear as a result of the states ongoing WVSTRONG Discount.
Im just tickled to death that people are getting out and enjoying the greatoutdoors of this state because it is absolutely magnificent, Gov. Justicesaid. Go fishing, go hunting, go walking, go hiking, go biking. This stateabounds in beauty like you cant fathom.
Gov. Justice encourages all West Virginians to practice proper socialdistancing and maintain at least six feet of space between themselves andothers as they continue to explore Almost Heaven through the rest of thesummer.
