Corona Virus – The African connection.

Like every issue of consequence, in our Age of Incomprehension, opinion about the truth concerning the  Corona virus outbreak is divided.  Either China is taking all prudent steps, the virus, while transmissible, has a low mortality rate and the West, with its travel bans, is over-reacting in a vaguely racist manner, or China has the virus far from contained, we don’t know just how transmissible it is nor its mortality rate because the figures from China can’t be trusted and therefore travel bans are a wise precaution.

If travel bans to and from the infected parts of China turn out to have been justified then one country in particular may be worth watching, Ethiopia.  Ethiopia’s Bole International airport is the main African gateway to and from China. On average 1500 passengers per day arrive from China every day.  Ethiopia scans them all for symptoms which essentially means taking their temperature.

Many of those passengers then fly on to other parts of Africa where Chinese companies are doing business. These are 2018 figures courtesy of Brookings.

The three main areas of Chinese business in Africa are transport, which generally means building airports and railways, energy which means building power stations and grids and metals which means mines.

One of the airports the Chinese funded and built is Bole International Airport in Ethiopia.

The flights from China arriving at Bole International come from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Hong Kong.  Just yesterday the Chinese government added China’s 5th largest city Guangzhou to its list of locked down quarantined cities.  Which strikes me as news.  For Guangzhou to have been quarantined means it must already have a large number of cases.  Guangzhou is not near to Wuhan, the source of the Corona virus outbreak. It is near to Hong Kong.

It is linked to both by high speed rail and internal air travel. Guangzhou airport is in fact the  third busiest in China and the 13th busiest in the world handling over 65 million passengers per year.

So… the spread of the  Corona virus in Guangzhou has got so serious that the Chinese government has quarantined it. Yet till now flights from there to Ethiopia were running. Of course I have no idea how many passengers were actually on those flights nor where they might have originated from.  But the rail and air links from Wuhan and other cities to Guangzhou and the fact that Guangzhou is therefore the hub to which any workers going to Africa would have passed through, does raise a few questions. Remember, 1500 per day on average (meaning in ‘normal times’ which these are not) through Bole international from China alone.

The Ethiopian authorities have been scanning arrivals. But we know that one of the things which has made this virus difficult to contain is that people can carry it and spread it for up to 14 days before they show symptoms. This is one of the reasons the Chinese authorities, despite draconian measures, have failed to contain it. If the Chinese authorities have failed, how confident should we be the Ethiopian authorities and those in the other countries Chinese workers have travelled on to, will succeed?

I have no idea and frankly neither does any one else. Which is surely the relevant point.

Western Counties have so far contained the virus and I think it likely they will continue to do so, simply because if you catch a virus outbreak early, you can . Viruses multiply and spread roughly according to a sigmoid curve. This plots the number of infections. At the start of an outbreak the curve is shallow simply because the numbers involved are small.

Double from 2 to 4 or 4 to 8 and its not that many new cases. That’s the shallow part of the curve, the beginning of the outbreak. As the curve steepens its not that the virus is increasing its infection rate. The rate will not have changed at all. But the numbers involved grows. Still only doubling, but doubling from 8 to 16 to 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384…you see the problem. Its nothing more than the consequence of big numbers. That is what we are seeing in China in the quarantined cities.  The question is IF and it still is, thankfully, an IF, some of the Chinese workers have carried the virus to Ethiopia or the African countries they work in, will those countries be able to contain it while they can, while the numbers are small?

I hope so.

23 thoughts on “Corona Virus – The African connection.”

  1. “Its nothing more than the law of big numbers.”

    As an engineer who works with people with a non-technical background it’s always amusing when one of them tries to use concepts they don’t really understand to sound like they do understand something.

    But when it’s a matter of consequence it quickly stops being amusing.

    Look up “Law of Large Numbers,” which is what I’m pretty sure you were actually referring to.

    And then fix your article because I stopped taking anything you had to say seriously.

    Otherwise, interesting points regarding Africa.

    1. Hello Don,

      I have looked it up as you requested. I see the confusion. Actually I was unaware of the use of the term in statistics. I can see how it doesn’t help clarify things. I will change it to ‘consequence’ and see if that helps you.

      You know you could also try being a little less snotty in your comment.

      1. Hello Gollem,

        I appreciated your commentary and feel it deserves to be taken seriously.

        Perhaps, as someone offering social criticism, you might consider trying to be a little less of a snowflake in response to a helpful comment.

        I suppose the commenter had no obligation to try to make your commenntary look less amateurish and irrelevant, but perhaps he thought your message was important enough that it should be improved to look like it is plausible and conveys the impression of good judgement.

        Perhaps you could have been more effective by simply thanking him for pointing out the needed edit and left off the childish offendedness if you wanted to be considered more seriously.

        1. I take the author quite seriously,
          and thought his response to the arrogant prick was overly compassionate.

          Perhaps – in between dispensng your helpful but unsought advice to the guy – on how to behave on his own website, you might consider the virtues of silence as a path to real wisdom.

          1. The reported restriction of this virus to ethnic Chinese is quite astounding and points to a trial run of a targeted bioweapon. Several US labs are specialised in this area and, no doubt keen to test their experiments.

            Together with the swine and chicken attacks, this smacks of a biological war.

  2. Hello All,

    No need for us all to fall out. Thank you, all of you. First, I am grateful, to Don and anyone who points out where I have got things wrong. The whole point of writing here is to offer thoughts and be clear. If I get things wrong I am happy to alter them.

    As for being a snowflake, that made me laugh. Maybe I was overly sensitive. It can happen. My main point was that I value politeness.

  3. You can’t be a snowflake and be on this story? I am wondering if the virus is having trouble spreading in flight because of the increased radiation gained being airborne? Thanks for your patience and I love to see fresh woke people? Heart warming !

  4. Hi Golem

    These are thursdays official (AP) figures.
    Mainland China: 2,118 deaths among 74,576 cases, mostly in the central province of Hubei
    Hong Kong: 65 cases, 2 deaths
    Macao: 10
    Japan: 727 cases, including 634 from a cruise ship docked in Yokohama, 3 deaths
    Singapore: 84
    South Korea: 51, 1 death
    Thailand: 35
    Taiwan: 24 cases, 1 death
    Malaysia: 22
    Vietnam: 16
    Germany: 16
    United States: 15 cases; separately, 1 U.S. citizen died in China
    Australia: 14
    France: 12 cases, 1 death
    United Kingdom: 9
    United Arab Emirates: 9
    Canada: 8
    Iran: 5 cases, 2 deaths
    Philippines: 3 cases, 1 death
    India: 3
    Italy: 3
    Russia: 2
    Spain: 2
    Belgium: 1
    Nepal: 1
    Sri Lanka: 1
    Sweden: 1
    Cambodia: 1
    Finland: 1
    Egypt: 1

    There seem to be two attitudes, play it down so as not to spark a panic, or play it up to gain different sorts of advantages. The “ups” include Senator Cotton in the US (blame China, regime change?), and the WHO and Bill Gates (billions of cases, with the possible “aim” of getting more money to “fight it”). The “Downs” are the Chinese themselves (and their 1’600 internet trolls to “correct” bad impressions) or reasonable bloggers (Moon of Alabama, who has written some very clear posts deflating the panic mode.) The latter is sensible in the present situation.

    I should add that Qom in Iran is now on military lockdown with a reported 9 cases, (from 2 Chinese tourists) which doesn’t help calm the nerves.

    Your post on Ethiopia as another possible source of infection, is a problem in that one person can infect many others (One person is thought to have infected 57 others when admitting himself to hospital for a stomach problem. The infected include the surgical operating team, the others in the ward, nurses etc.).
    The incubation is between 3 to 24 days.
    —-
    Long time since I posted here. In those days I was “British” but have since changed to “Irish”, so I’m looking forward to you saying something about the EU(-xit?), and now that there is €60 billion less in the kitty, who is going to pay the difference?

    Nice to see you again

  5. In fact, although 14 day incubation looks like the average, there is growing evidence from the source area that in some cases it is 26 days. So when it comes to quarantine, authorities should err on the side of caution.
    I am not, btw, a Domesayer about COVID19. But further to David’s opening point about the lack of trust in information, I do continue to wonder why the media obsession with this virus is so much greater than it was with SARS or MERS:
    https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2020/02/22/crash-2-covid19-viral-media-neurosis-are-they-connected/

  6. I wonder what, if any impact this will have on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Of course the investment dollars (yuan) may be so significant that governments are simply willing to overlook whatever health impacts may arise.

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