New Coronavirus Outbreak in China Could Upend Progress Rest of the World Has Made Against Virus | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: This informational nugget was sent to me by Ben Shapiro, who represents the Daily Wire, and since this is one of the most topical news events, it should be published on BCN.

The author of this post is Ryan Saavedra.

    A new coronavirus outbreak in China, where the disease originated, threatens to upend the progress that the rest of the world has made in the fight against the disease as it might be changing in a way that makes it more difficult to detect.

    Bloomberg News reported Thursday that the new strain of the coronavirus in northern China showed "a different gene sequence from the outbreak in Hubei" and that "changes in the virus's genetic sequence could make it harder for officials to detect" and create "hurdles for vaccine research and development for pharmaceutical companies that are racing to stop the spread" of the coronavirus.

    "One of China's top doctors said patients in Jilin appeared to be asymptomatic for a longer period than was usual in Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged last year, but didn't elaborate on what those findings were based on," Bloomberg News added. "He told state television the cases in the first two weeks seem to show damage mostly in the lungs, with only 10% developing into critical cases."

    The news comes after Bloomberg News reported earlier this week that "108 million people in China's northeast region are being plunged back under lockdown conditions as a new and growing cluster of infections causes a backslide in the nation's return to normal." Thousands of people had reportedly already been quarantined in the new lockdown in the area.

    Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that scientists were pushing back on claims that the coronavirus had mutated to a point that there was a "turbocharged strain hopscotching around the world." The Times reported:

• [E]xperts in viral evolution are far from convinced. For one thing, there is no new strain: Unlike the flu, the coronavirus so far has not split into clearly distinct forms.
• It does mutate, but that's what viruses do. Just because a mutation becomes more common isn't proof that it is altering how the virus functions.

    All of this comes as the world has suffered trillions of dollars in economic damage from the pandemic; tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs; and hundreds of thousands of people around the world have died from the coronavirus.

    As The Daily Wire has highlighted, instead of acting to stop the spread of the coronavirus, Chinese Communist Party officials silenced doctors and journalists who tried to warn the world; censored internet search terms in China that were related to the outbreak; destroyed samples of the coronavirus that it had in its labs; refused to allow CDC officials into China to investigate the outbreak and to help contain it; repeatedly lied about the extent of the outbreak in their country so they could reportedly hoard medical supplies from around the world that they needed to combat the outbreak; falsely blamed the U.S. military of bringing the coronavirus to Wuhan; and threatened other countries for supporting an international investigation into the origins of the coronavirus inside China.