dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-brown-scary-coronavirus-1.5548593

'This situation is very scary': Coronavirus is disrupting Vladimir Putin's Russia

What's the scoop with Tam?

Did she work to bring Chinese students into North American schools?

https://nypost.com/2020/04/27/russian-doctor-with-coronavirus-mysteriously-plunges-to-death/

Second Russian doctor plunges to their death amid coronavirus outbreak

A doctor who caught the coronavirus in Russia’s cosmonaut training facility was killed in an apparent suicide jump from a hospital window amid allegations she had failed to stop an outbreak of the illness, according to a report.

Dr. Natalya Lebedeva had been accused of failing to stop an outbreak of COVID-19 at Star City, site of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, the Daily Mail reported.

She had been directly involved in the treatment of the facility’s “patient zero,” one of the heads of the training center who had been in direct contact with cosmonauts, the outlet reported, citing the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.

Lebedeva, who had been treated in Moscow, fell from the sixth floor of the Federal Biomedical Agency in an apparent suicide, the UK outlet reported.

Her death comes after Dr. Yelena Nepomnyashchaya, 47, plunged from a window at her hospital in Krasnoyarsk while complaining about shortages of personal protective equipment. She is in critical condition.

Lebedeva, the chief of emergency medicine at the Medical-Sanitary Unit No. 2 in Star City, had been involved in treating the first coronavirus patient at the training site, the Daily Mail reported.

The disease is believed to have spread among health workers linked to the doctor.

Her colleagues said she had faced “accusations from her superiors that she had not taken sufficient measures to ensure the safety of her employees which resulted in the infecting of several health workers,” according to Russian media cited by the newspaper.

Among those who contracted COVID-19 was Olga Minina, head of the hospital where Lebedeva worked.

It was unclear whether the “patient zero” had any contact with cosmonauts who have since traveled to the International Space Station.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-washington.html

‘Murder Hornets’ in the U.S.: The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet

In his decades of beekeeping, Ted McFall had never seen anything like it.

As he pulled his truck up to check on a group of hives near Custer, Wash., in November, he could spot from the window a mess of bee carcasses on the ground. As he looked closer, he saw a pile of dead members of the colony in front of a hive and more carnage inside — thousands and thousands of bees with their heads torn from their bodies and no sign of a culprit.

“I couldn’t wrap my head around what could have done that,” Mr. McFall said.

Only later did he come to suspect that the killer was what some researchers simply call the “murder hornet.”

With queens that can grow to two inches long, Asian giant hornets can use mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins to wipe out a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, decapitating the bees and flying away with the thoraxes to feed their young. For larger targets, the hornet’s potent venom and stinger — long enough to puncture a beekeeping suit — make for an excruciating combination that victims have likened to hot metal driving into their skin.

In Japan, the hornets kill up to 50 people a year. Now, for the first time, they have arrived in the United States.

Mr. McFall still is not certain that Asian giant hornets were responsible for the plunder of his hive. But two of the predatory insects were discovered last fall in the northwest corner of Washington State, a few miles north of his property — the first sightings in the United States.

Scientists have since embarked on a full-scale hunt for the hornets, worried that the invaders could decimate bee populations in the United States and establish such a deep presence that all hope for eradication could be lost.