View allAll Photos Tagged Baoding
This has probably been said before, but the armed guards and sharp fence don't make this much of a symbol of openness in the media. Or freedom of speech. Or democracy. Way to go Rem Koolhaas, great building. No I was not allowed to walk under the arch like I wanted to.
I'm told that after preparing vegetables in this manner, they are washed. But, it still strikes me as a little unsanitary, and one of the reasons I am a bit nervous to eat street food. If you feel something gritty in your vegetables, you know why!
This lady was sitting in the corner in the back of a mall in Baoding. I'm not sure if she was thinking, crying, sleeping, or what. She didn't notice me at all. Hope things turned out for her.
The Chinese countryside was very landscaped. Fields were sunken, trees planted along roads on slight berms, roads raised, everything deliberate. And lots of high voltage power lines everywhere. It seemed like people lived on the most part in very compact villages between the fields.
practiced in China? I know that legally, the answer is no. I have been here for over 3 years and have never seen a woman with this type of thing. I guess this store would have to find a woman with really small feet.
I took this photo at a shoe store on Yuhua Road in Baoding.
A couple of video reports from China's CGTN:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic0uoVWTLBI
Beijing hospital ramps up severe case treatment capacity amid COVID-19 surge
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHWay6IXtA
China's battle against COVID-19
And China Daily asks a rhetorical question here:
www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202212/22/WS63a3d06ba31057c47eba5...
China wasted three years in COVID fight?
__________
www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/packed-icus-crowded-cremat...
Packed ICUs, crowded crematoriums: COVID roils Chinese towns
Yao Ruyan paced frantically outside the fever clinic of a county hospital in China’s industrial Hebei province, 43 miles southwest of Beijing. Her mother-in-law had COVID-19 and needed urgent medical care, but all hospitals nearby were full.
“They say there’s no beds here,” she barked into her phone.
As China grapples with its first-ever national COVID-19 wave, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of Beijing are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, relatives of sick people are searching for open beds, and patients are slumped on benches in hospital corridors and lying on floors for a lack of beds.
Yao’s elderly mother-in-law had fallen ill a week ago. They went first to a local hospital, where lung scans showed signs of pneumonia. But the hospital couldn’t handle COVID-19 cases, Yao was told. She was told to go to hospitals in adjacent counties.
As Yao and her husband drove from hospital to hospital, they found all the wards were full. Zhuozhou Hospital, an hour’s drive from Yao’s hometown, was the latest disappointment.
“I’m furious,” Yao said, tearing up, as she clutched the lung scans from the local hospital. “I don’t have much hope. We’ve been out for a long time and I’m terrified because she’s having difficulty breathing.”
Over two days, Associated Press journalists visited five hospitals and two crematoriums in towns and small cities in Baoding and Langfang prefectures, in central Hebei province. The area was the epicenter of one of China’s first outbreaks after the state loosened COVID-19 controls in November and December. For weeks, the region went quiet, as people fell ill and stayed home.
Many have now recovered. Today, markets are bustling, diners pack restaurants and cars are honking in snarling traffic, even as the virus is spreading in other parts of China. In recent days, headlines in state media said the area is "starting to resume normal life.”
But life in central Hebei’s emergency wards and crematoriums is anything but normal. Even as the young go back to work and lines at fever clinics shrink, many of Hebei’s elderly are falling into critical condition. It could be a harbinger of what's to come for the rest of China.
The Chinese government has reported only seven COVID-19 deaths since restrictions were loosened dramatically on Dec. 7, bringing the country’s total toll to 5,241. On Tuesday, a Chinese health official said that China only counts deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official COVID-19 death toll.
Experts have forecast between a million and 2 million deaths in China next year, and the World Health Organization warned that Beijing’s way of counting would “underestimate the true death toll.”
At Baoding No. 2 Hospital in Zhuozhou on Wednesday, patients thronged the hallway of the emergency ward. The sick were breathing with the help of respirators. One woman wailed after doctors told her that a loved one had died.
At the Zhuozhou crematorium, furnaces are burning overtime as workers struggle to cope with a spike in deaths in the last week, according to one employee. A funeral shop worker estimated it is burning 20 to 30 bodies a day, up from three to four before COVID-19 measures were loosened.
“There’s been so many people dying,” said Zhao Yongsheng, a worker at a funeral goods shop near a local hospital. “They work day and night, but they can’t burn them all.”
Over two hours at the Gaobeidian crematorium on Thursday, AP journalists observed three ambulances and two vans unload bodies.
“There’s been a lot!” a worker said when asked about the number of COVID-19 deaths, before funeral director Ma Xiaowei stepped in and brought the journalists to meet a local government official.
As the official listened in, Ma confirmed there were more cremations, but said he didn’t know if COVID-19 was involved. He blamed the extra deaths on the arrival of winter.
But even as anecdotal evidence and modeling suggest large numbers of people are getting infected and dying, some Hebei officials deny the virus has had much impact.
“There’s no so-called explosion in cases, it’s all under control,” said Wang Ping, the administrative manager of Gaobeidian Hospital, speaking by the hospital’s main gate.
Wang said only a sixth of the hospital’s 600 beds were occupied, but refused to allow AP journalists to enter. Two ambulances came to the hospital during the half hour AP journalists were present, and a patient’s relative told the AP they were turned away from Gaobeidian’s emergency ward because it was full.
In Bazhou, a city 60 miles east of Gaobeidian, a hundred or more people packed the emergency ward of Langfang No. 4 People’s Hospital on Thursday night.
Guards worked to corral the crowds as people jostled for positions. With no space in the ward, patients spilled into corridors and hallways. Sick people sprawled on blankets on the floor as staff frantically wheeled gurneys and ventilators. In a hallway, half a dozen patients wheezed on metal benches as oxygen tanks pumped air into their noses.
Over two hours, AP journalists witnessed half a dozen or more ambulances pull up to the hospital’s ICU and load critical patients to sprint to other hospitals, even as cars pulled up with dozens of new patients.
A beige van pulled up to the ICU and honked frantically at a waiting ambulance. “Move!” the driver shouted.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” a panicked voice cried. Five people hoisted a man bundled in blankets out of the back of the van and rushed him into the hospital.
The guard asked a patient to move, but backed off when a relative snarled at him. The bundled man was laid on the floor instead, amid doctors running back and forth.
Medical workers rushed over a ventilator. “Can you open his mouth?” someone shouted.
As white plastic tubes were fitted onto his face, the man began to breathe more easily.
Others were not so lucky. Relatives surrounding another bed began tearing up as an elderly woman’s vitals flatlined. A man tugged a cloth over the woman’s face, and they stood, silently, before her body was wheeled away. Within minutes, another patient had taken her place.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
A small concrete road in HeBei province, just across the border from Beijing and my first ride in BaoDing Prefecture.
“I like to make works where I use my body to connect with the materials.”
Born Baoding City, Hebei, 1977
Song Hongquan grew up as the son of a noted stone carver in the most celebrated stone-carving district of China, Quyang County, famed for 2000 years for its marble, granite and jade. The artist has never had formal instruction in carving; he says he learned just by watching his father and other carvers. In After the Stone Age (2011), he blurs the lines between carver and carving, past and present by using the tools of a stone carver to carve, out of stone, the tools of a stone carver. He got the granite for this work straight from the quarry, and spent three years transforming it into perfect facsimiles of 75 traditional tools—including crowbars, hammers, bores, chisels, maces and pincers—and the box in which they are kept. That process was a prolonged meditation on the relationships between human beings, civilisation and nature, he says: “It was after the Stone Age, when man invented metal tools, that we started moving away from nature.” While that was regrettable in some ways, it also brought blessings and wonders, including those of art itself: carvings were among the first artworks ever made, and the birth of the Iron Age, with its metal tools, opened up vast new possibilities for creation.
Ma XueLu Chief Strategy Officer, Yingli Green Energy Holding Company with Philip McMaster (Da Long) founder of the "Peace Plus One" World Sustainability Project
Photos Courtesy of:
McMaster Institute for Sustainable Development in Commerce.
Baodingshan Cliff Carvings, Mount Baoding (Precious Summit), Chongqing, China, 26 April 2009. Created in 1174-1252 under the supervision of Zhao Zhi-feng, an extensive series of Dazu rock carvings (over 6,000) and cave temples reflect a variety of Buddhist doctrines, Confucian ethical and Taoist theories in the Song Dynasty. The remoteness and inaccessibility of this site meant it was unknown to the outside world until the 1980’s and luckily it escaped the destruction of the Cultural Revolution when so many religious and cultural sites were destroyed.
I actually have four chairs, but currently, one is being used in my computer room. When I find a decent office chair, I will return that chair to the dining room.
17Sep10 update- I have since bought an office chair, so now there are four chairs at this table.
www.statnews.com/2022/12/21/screening-asymptomatic-patien...
Infectious disease board recommends hospitals stop screening asymptomatic patients for Covid-19
www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/italy-says-covid-cases-on-...
Italy Says Covid Cases on China Arrivals Are Omicron
(Bloomberg) -- Italy didn’t find any new concerning Covid-19 mutations among recent arrivals from China who tested positive for the virus, a relief for officials worried about fresh health threats.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Italy already sequenced half of the samples tested in Milan and they all show the omicron strain of the coronavirus.
“This is quite reassuring,” she said at a press conference Thursday. “The situation in Italy is under control, and there are no immediate concerns.”
Italy sequenced the viral samples of passengers on two recent flights from China. About half of those on the planes had tested positive, though most weren’t showing symptoms.
In Germany, the health ministry said it’s seen no evidence of a variant of concern emerging in China compared to what’s already circulating in Germany.
www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/china-s-covid-outbreak-driv...
China’s Covid Outbreak Driven by Existing Strains, Global Consortium Finds
(Bloomberg) -- The Covid-19 outbreak that’s hitting China is being caused by strains of the virus that have already circled the world, with no signs yet of significant new mutations emerging, according to officials at a global consortium that’s tracking the pandemic.
Chinese authorities submitted 25 new genetic samples from Beijing, Inner Mongolia and Guangzhou taken in the past month to GISAID, a database where scientists from around the world share coronavirus sequences as a way to monitor mutations. Tiny changes, which occur naturally as the virus passes from one person to another, have allowed scientists to track how the pathogen has moved in China and provide reassurance about its direction thus far.
“There is no evidence at this point to suggest there is any new variant of any significance,” Peter Bogner, chief executive officer of GISAID, said in a telephone interview.
The details gathered from the genetic samples are a snapshot of the current situation in China, said Sebastian Maurer-Stroh, chief scientist at GISAID’s global data science center in Singapore. It hasn’t been brewing its own independent variant, but instead imported strains are circulating, he said.
Variant Worries
Some global health authorities and governments have expressed concern the outbreak in China, which may be experiencing as many as 37 million new infections a day, could spur the development of dangerous new variants that would once again sweep across the world. It’s unclear how the virus will act next in China, given that its earlier no-tolerance approach and reliance on inactivated vaccines have created a very different immunity landscape.
The samples submitted by the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention closely resemble existing strains found among GISAID’s 14.4 million Covid genomes, the officials said. The closest related genomes, to subvariants of omicron known as BF.7 and BA.5.2, were collected in the US and Russia this summer.
There were several independent imports of infection among the cases in Guangzhou, made up of the earlier BA.5.2 omicron subvariant, Maurer-Stroh said. The Inner Mongolia outbreak stemmed from the more recent BF.7 variant, and spread from there to Beijing, the data show.
China has been working closely with GISAID as the outbreak flared up. That relationship should help inform the world if any worrisome mutations do emerge, the officials said.
“We have no idea where this virus may go,” said Maurer-Stroh, who is also executive director of the Bioinformatics Institute at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research. “Right now the snapshot doesn’t give away anything. The rest is speculation.”
www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/china-s-covid-19-surge-rai...
China's COVID-19 surge raises odds of new coronavirus mutant
Could the COVID-19 surge in China unleash a new coronavirus mutant on the world?
Scientists don’t know but worry that might happen. It could be similar to omicron variants circulating there now. It could be a combination of strains. Or something entirely different, they say.
“China has a population that is very large and there’s limited immunity. And that seems to be the setting in which we may see an explosion of a new variant," said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.
Every new infection offers a chance for the coronavirus to mutate, and the virus is spreading rapidly in China. The country of 1.4 billion has largely abandoned its “zero COVID” policy. Though overall reported vaccination rates are high, booster levels are lower, especially among older people. Domestic vaccines have proven less effective against serious infection than Western-made messenger RNA versions. Many were given more than a year ago, meaning immunity has waned.
The result? Fertile ground for the virus to change.
“When we’ve seen big waves of infection, it’s often followed by new variants being generated,” Ray said.
About three years ago, the original version of the coronavirus spread from China to the rest of the world and was eventually replaced by the delta variant, then omicron and its descendants, which continue plaguing the world today.
Dr. Shan-Lu Liu, who studies viruses at Ohio State University, said many existing omicron variants have been detected in China, including BF.7, which is extremely adept at evading immunity and is believed to be driving the current surge.
Experts said a partially immune population like China’s puts particular pressure on the virus to change. Ray compared the virus to a boxer that “learns to evade the skills that you have and adapt to get around those.”
One big unknown is whether a new variant will cause more severe disease. Experts say there’s no inherent biological reason the virus has to become milder over time.
“Much of the mildness we’ve experienced over the past six to 12 months in many parts of the world has been due to accumulated immunity either through vaccination or infection, not because the virus has changed" in severity, Ray said.
In China, most people have never been exposed to the coronavirus. China's vaccines rely on an older technology producing fewer antibodies than messenger RNA vaccines.
Given those realities, Dr. Gagandeep Kang, who studies viruses at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, said it remains to be seen if the virus will follow the same pattern of evolution in China as it has in the rest of the world after vaccines came out. “Or," she asked, “will the pattern of evolution be completely different?”
Recently, the World Health Organization expressed concern about reports of severe disease in China. Around the cities of Baoding and Langfang outside Beijing, hospitals have run out of intensive care beds and staff as severe cases surge.
China’s plan to track the virus centers around three city hospitals in each province, where samples will be collected from walk-in patients who are very sick and all those who die every week, Xu Wenbo of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said at a briefing Tuesday.
He said 50 of the 130 omicron versions detected in China had resulted in outbreaks. The country is creating a national genetic database “to monitor in real time” how different strains were evolving and the potential implications for public health, he said.
At this point, however, there’s limited information about genetic viral sequencing coming out of China, said Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
“We don’t know all of what’s going on,” Luban said. But clearly, "the pandemic is not over.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
www.msn.com/en-in/health/healthy-lifestyle/amid-china-cov...
Amid China Covid surge, is BF.7 variant of Omicron a threat to India? Experts say ‘no need to panic’
Can BF.7 variant cause destruction in India?
The BF.7 strain, which is a sub-lineage of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, is highly transmissible and one person can infect up to 18 people, according to experts. It has similar symptoms to other Covid variants, such as cough, fever, cold, body aches and breathing issues.
While the BF.7 variant has caused major destruction in China, the experts in India believe that if proper precaution is exercised, there is “no need to panic” when it comes to the spread of this highly transmissible Omicron strain.
A clear day in Shanghai. This is from the hotel lobby bar on the 92nd floor. Why go to the observatory when you get the same view while sitting down.
I was intrigued by these bracing structures I saw in construction sites. Why so much bracing? Why not just an open hole like in US construction sites?
This is a photo of a row of urinals, unremarkable in itself. Take a look at the one on the furthest right. You will notice that the pipe underneath is disconnected. I don't think I need to explain what will happen if a person uses this. There is no warning or anything, people must find out the hard way.