What Covid-19 does to the lungs

Doctors are gaining more and more experience with Covid-19 patients in whom breathing fails. They report unusual effects of the virus on the lungs.




Many dark areas, light clouds (which indicate fluid accumulation) only on the edge: CT images of Covid 19 patients differ from those of other people with pneumonia.

The outbreak of the novel corona virus started with a misunderstanding. The genome of the pathogen, which was still completely unknown at the time, was so similar to that of the already known Sars virus that researchers assumed that it was similar in the body.

The virus is not so contagious, scientists like Christian Drosten of the Charité concluded. It mainly affects the lower respiratory tract and thus the lungs, so it has to get there for an infection. The first contact with Sars-CoV-2 in Germany showed that the researchers were wrong.

When the first people in Germany near Munich got infected, a team led by Drosten was able to extract and multiply viruses from the affected person's throat swabs . With Sars, this was never successful. Since then it has been clear: the new type of corona virus not only affects the lungs, it mainly settles in the upper airways and throat.

This has advantages for the virus. It is much easier to get from one person to another, the way from throat to throat is much shorter than the way from lungs to lungs. But people also benefit because upper respiratory tract infections can be unpleasant but almost never dangerous.

Comparatively rarely, however, the novel coronavirus also penetrates into the lungs and triggers inflammation there. In Germany, around two percent of the detected infected are affected. The consequences that doctors are currently observing differ in several respects from known serious respiratory infections.

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Islam scholar over the earth: And it does not turn nevertheless

Medina - on Sunday the birth from Galileo Galilei jährte itself to 451. Times. It is improbable that Bandar Al-Khaibari knows. But at the birthday of the world-famous astronomer the Islamic lawyer with expressions over earth and sun provided exactly for attention.

The theologian answered it in a mosque questions, which had submitted supporters in writing before, gives a video of the appearance. Someone wanted to know: “Does the earth rotate or does stand still it?” Khaibaris clear answer: “Stands still you.” And naturally do not turn the earth also around the sun, that before it already higher-ranking Islam scholars would have determined.

“If we with an international flight of Sharjah (airport in the united Arab emirates - note D. Talk.) to China fly: If the airplane stands still, then it China would have to come nevertheless against, stimmt's or not”, the hobby astronomer asks and points to his water cup. “And if the earth rotates in the other direction, then the airplane will be able to never reach China, because China drives itself with the airplane.”

Only three years later it corrects itself. Prince Sultan is Salman could it of his mistake divert. It had good arguments: Sultan had flown briefly before as first Saudi Arabs on board a space shuttle to the universe.

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China sends retired the GDP: environment and poverty to measure the quality of life

Changes the paradigm for the economic measures, and to surprise and Beijing to take the first steps: the province of Fujian, which lives on export and manufacturing, replace the Product with gross indices on agriculture and the protection of the environment. Hebei has already implemented the turn with a plane anti-poverty. The "primary duty" is no longer the growth to the old way, but the protection of acres of forest. Although some doubt remains


LONDRA - That wealth is not sufficient to measure the welfare is not a novelty, nor are various attempts, in the world, to replace the GDP with other measurements, such as the "happiness" choice from Bhutan. But now the China to move, with more than 70 cities and districts that have abandoned the gross news domestic product as a measure of the local performance. The vertices of the party have established at the end of the last year and the premier Xi Jinping has confirmed in June: "we can no longer use the simple GDP to decide who are the better". Government officials are by assimilating the countermand: now asking for things like attention to the environment and poverty reduction. And while the OECD plans to replace the GDP with his Better Life Index, come the first concrete signs, in the opinion news of the Financial Times, the fact that China is actually leaving the mantra of economic growth at any cost to encourage a better quality of life. Fujian, coastal province has so far concentrated on the movement of exports and manufacturing, is one of the examples: this month announced that will replace the GDP with indexes on agriculture and the protection of the environment in 34 of its districts. In recent months news was the time of Hebei steel district north of Beijing, and Ningxia, poor region of north-east of China. In Hebei the objective now is to reduce the factories that produce smog (smog that afflicts even Beijing, about a hundred kilometers, which in turn is closing its plants more pollutants). Therefore cement factories, steel mills and power plants. In addition, there is a plan to combat poverty and rural development, with the aim of reducing it to zero by 2020, while the Agricultural University of Hebei produces thesis on poverty and tourism, studying how to capitalize on the heritage making it usable (with better infrastructure, more regional cooperation and more advertising) to the "ecological tourists and tourism Red", as he writes news  the scholar Zhang Pengtao. The areas of Guangxi, Guangdong and Jiangxi have in turn slowed the race to the GDP growth and encourage tertiary news and primary, with services, farms and processing news industrial not of its products. In the district of Tiannan, Jiangxi Province, to track the GDP have introduced three factories of ceramics and a processing plant non-ferrous metals. But now that the GDP is no longer a "primary duty", as explained the secretary of the local party Sheng Hengda the Xinhua news agency, "we have equipped the factories with structures that deal with pollution". In Sichuan province, the most populated of the China, the local government has divided cities and the countryside in two different groups of evaluation. The regulation, published at the end of June, explains that 58 districts with good ecosystems were exempted from the evaluation of GDP. The forthcoming evaluations of local progress will be made on two parameters: the news measurement of acres of forest preserved is that of the news decrease in the rate of poverty achieved. In the meantime, the iugura region of Xinjiang has changed objectives: protection of nature, too. The same Beijing now boasts of having closed in the first half of the year well 213 polluting industry. In most sectors, "clean" as information technology and financial services have covered more than 50% of the GDP growth citizen, that li is in force but is changing content, precisely. Everything proceeds according to the new line decided by the party, therefore. Even if a doubt remains. As reports the Financial Times, the race for the GDP and to the wealth, even staff, has created excellent relations between the representatives of the government and the polluting traditional industries: entire careers built on triumphs of the GDP of its area, as in the case of Zhang Gaoli, a member of the Standing news Committee of the Politburo from end of 2012, where he arrived also for the growth of the GDP of the megacity of Tianjin in recent years, from when he became secretary of the local party, in 2007. As he has done? Supporting large news construction companies that have produced, among other things, the "chinese response to Manhattan", i.e. the skyscrapers of the financial district of Yujiapu. Today, a huge part of condos remains empty, but him and vice premier, newly news appointed also the head of office that will promote the "synergetic development" of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province.

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