Russia warns Turkey, blocks UN bid to end Syria bloodshed

Fulya Ozerkan and Philippe Rater | Agence France-Presse | Istanbul, Turkey/United Nations,
United States
Jakarta   /  Thu, February 20, 2020  /  08:15 am

An image grab taken from a video by Syrian news website SY24 on July 24, 2019 shows a
Syrian man reacting as two dust-covered Syrian girls, trapped in rubble, grab their baby sister
from her shirt as she dangles from a bombed-out building in the Syrian town of Ariha in the
northwestern province of Idlib. - Of the three girls shown in the photo, one is dead and two are
fighting to stay alive, after regime airstrikes hit their home, said Dr Ismail, who treated the
victims in a nearby hospital. Riham, 5, who appears in the photo gripping her sister's green shirt,
died on Wednesday, the doctor said. Touka, the seven-months-old girl who is shown dangling in
the air, is currently in intensive care, after suffering a trauma to the head, he added. Dalia, who
also appears in the photograph, is stable after undergoing chest surgery, according to Mohamed,
another doctor at the same facility. The girls are part of a family of eight, consisting of two
parents and six sisters. (AFP/SY24/ Bashar al-Sheikh)

Russia on Wednesday warned Turkey against intervening in Syria as it blocked a UN bid to end
the Damascus regime's brutal assault on the last rebel enclave.
Syrian aid workers called urgently for a ceasefire and international help for nearly a million
people fleeing the regime onslaught in the country's northwestern Idlib province -- the biggest
wave of displaced civilians in the nine-year conflict.
Turkey, supporter of some rebel groups in Idlib, has been pushing for a renewed ceasefire in
talks with Russia, which backs the Syrian regime. Ankara is eager to prevent another flood of
refugees into its territory adding to the 3.7 million Syrians it already hosts.
The Syrian NGO Alliance said displaced people are "escaping in search of safety only to die
from extreme weather conditions and lack of available resources".
"We have hundreds and thousands of people who are fleeing... not just from bombardments but
from lack of insulation, from the weather, a lack of heating. It feels like doomsday," Razan
Saffour, of the Syrian Expatriate Medical Association, told AFP in Istanbul.
The group said a total of $336 million was needed for basic food, water and shelter. Education
resources were also needed for 280 million displaced school-age children.
Talks fail between Turkey, Russia 
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said talks with Moscow over the past fortnight had so
far failed to achieve "the desired result" and warned that Turkey would launch an offensive into
Syria unless Damascus pulled its forces back by the end of the month. 
"An operation in Idlib is imminent.... We are counting down, we are making our final warnings,"
Erdogan said in a televised speech. 
He called for Syrian forces to retreat by the end of this month behind Turkey's military posts in
Idlib, which were set up under a 2018 deal with Russia designed to hold off a regime advance.
The Kremlin quickly responded to Erdogan's threat, saying that Turkey should instead act
against "terrorist groups" in Idlib.
"If we are talking about an operation against the legitimate authorities of the Syrian republic and
armed forces of the Syrian republic this would of course be the worst scenario," Kremlin
spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow.
With Turkey moving large numbers of reinforcements into Idlib in recent weeks, Defence
Minister Hulusi Akar emphasised that it was "out of the question for us to withdraw from our
observation posts".
"If there is any sort of attack against them, we will retaliate in kind," he told reporters in Ankara. 

 Russia objects to UN bid 

Russia, which along with Iran backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has repeatedly vetoed UN
resolutions on the conflict as it hopes for the triumph of the regime.
At the United Nations, diplomats said they were unable to produce a statement on ending the
fighting due to Russian objections.
"We tried very hard to have a press statement calling for cessation of hostilities and humanitarian
access to Idlib," said Nicolas de Riviere, the French ambassador to the United Nations.
"Basically Russia said 'no', which is very painful," he told reporters.
The UN envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, confirmed that no progress had been made either in
several rounds of talks between Turkey and Russia held in Ankara and Moscow.   
"To the contrary, public statements from different quarters, Syrian and international, suggest an
imminent danger of further escalation," he told the UN Security Council.
Earlier this week the United Nations said the displaced were mainly women and children. It
warned that babies were dying of cold because aid camps are full. 
The Syrian NGOs called for the warring parties to allow safe access for humanitarian groups and
for a "complete ceasefire and end to human rights violations".
According to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the regime offensive has
killed more than 400 civilians since it began in December, adding to the toll of more than
380,000 who have died in the years of unrest.
"The violence in northwest Syria is indiscriminate. Health facilities, schools, residential areas,
mosques and markets have been hit," the UN head of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief,
Mark Lowcock, said earlier this week. 
The head of the World Health Organization said Tuesday that out of nearly 550 health facilities
in northwest Syria, only about half were operational.
"We repeat: health facilities and health workers are not a legitimate target," Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus told journalists in Geneva.
Syrian troops have reconquered swathes of Idlib and retaken the key M5 highway connecting the
country's four largest cities as well as the entire surroundings of Aleppo city for the first time
since 2012.
Oxfam said that two of the British aid group's local workers died in an attack on Wednesday
elsewhere in Syria in the southern Daraa area.
Coronavirus may spread faster than WHO
estimate
New research reviews the basic reproduction number (R0) of the new coronavirus, that is, the
number that indicates how transmissible a virus is, and finds that it is much higher than current
estimates.

People in many settings are now wearing medical masks as they try to prevent infection.

Since its breakout in December 2019, scientists have grappled with the highly contagious new
coronavirus that they dubbed 2019-nCoV, and now known as SARS-CoV-2.

“Where did the virus originate?,” ”How did it spread to humans?,” and “How long does the virus
survive on surfaces?” are just a few of the questions that researchers have been scrambling to
answer.

Now, a review of existing studies tries to answer another question that is crucial to controlling
the epidemic: How quickly does it spread?

The question is of utmost importance, especially in the light of the most recent toll: 42,708
confirmed cases and 1,017 deaths have occurred in China as of February 11, 2020.

To find the answer, a team of researchers set out to examine several scientific studies of the new
virus and published the results in the Journal of Travel Medicine.

Joacim Rocklöv, who is a professor of sustainable health at Umeå University in Sweden, is the
last and corresponding author of the new analysis.

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Higher estimates than WHO predict

As Rocklöv and team explain in their paper, basic R0 describes the average number of new
infections that an infectious person can generate in a population that was not previously exposed
to the virus.
An R0 greater than one suggests that the number of people infected is likely to grow, whereas an
R0 of less than one suggests that the viral transmission “is likely to die out.”

“The basic reproduction number is a central concept in infectious disease epidemiology,

indicating the risk of an infectious agent with respect to epidemic spread,” write the authors of
the paper.

So, the researchers accessed several eligible studies that dealt with the basic RO from the
PubMed, bioRxiv, and Google Scholar databases.

The studies appeared between January 1, 2020, and February 7, 2020, and Rocklöv and team
settled on a final number of 12 studies whose quality was high enough to include in the analysis.

The studies they selected estimated basic R0 for the virus in China and overseas. These
estimates ranged from 1.4 to 6.49 and had an average of 3.28 and a median of 2.79.

Both of these numbers are significantly higher than the numbers that the WHO suggested —
which were 1.4–2.5.

The authors explain that the initial studies reported lower R0 values, then spiked, then returned
to the initial estimates. The estimation methods the studies used played a role in these
differences, note the researchers.

“The studies using stochastic and statistical methods for deriving R0 provide estimates that are
reasonably comparable. However, the studies using mathematical methods produce estimates
that are, on average, higher.”

Coronavirus spreads faster than SARS

“Our review shows that the coronavirus is at least as transmissible as the SARS virus. And that
says a great deal about the seriousness of the situation,” comments Rocklöv.

“When looking at the development of the corona epidemic, reality seems to correspond well to or
even exceed the highest epidemic growth in our calculations. Despite all intervention and control
activities, the coronavirus has already spread to a significantly higher extent than SARS did.”
– Joacim Rocklöv

In their paper, the scientists acknowledge, however, that due to the short onset of the virus and
insufficient data, the current estimates for the basic RO could be biased.

“However, as more data is accumulated, estimation error can be expected to decrease, and a
clearer picture should form,” write the authors, who conclude, “Based on these considerations,
R0 for 2019-nCoV is expected to be around 2–3, which is broadly consistent with the WHO
estimate.