COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US) (28 Viewers)

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bclemms said:
Numerous experts dismissed it but numerous experts have also said it's quite possible. It's unproven that it came from the lab just like it's unproven it came from the market. Personally, I think the US should certainly be looking at the possibility but not publicly.
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"Possible" isn't good enough for the general public, so I can tepidly get behind your last sentence more or less.

Otherwise, responders need to deal in the known, not in the "what could be". IMHO, anyway. Reason being that resources are necessarily limited, and every contingency cannot be guarded against.
 
Eeyore said:
Even if the truth is known/discovered, it'll never be public knowledge. It's too damaging.
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If that's true, than anyone's free to believe anything they want and act on those "anything I want" beliefs. The creation of "truth" on an individual level.
 
Eeyore said:
I was thinking scarred kidneys and lungs but, you're right, the heart too.
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To me, it beggars belief that this thing could affect the heart, lungs, and kidneys without symptoms. Even if just listlessness and a fever.
 
I'm pretty confident from what I have read in the virology analysis that the virus doesn't show any indication of being engineered - it has been fully sequenced that the genome fully analyzed. There was some talk early on of an unnatural protein spike but I think that has been debunked.

But even if the virus is naturally occurring, that still doesn't rule out the possibility that it had been isolated in the Wuhan lab for further study - and it then escaped from there, most likely by accident. I don't think we know enough to rule that out at this point. This is the question that Tom Cotton is trying to ask - and I really don't think he's helping his case with his tone being so accusatory. But the question is, nonetheless, a legitimate one.

This new paper from the university in south China that is being touted as "concluding" that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab isn't terribly persuasive from what I have read. It doesn't appear to go in the virology at all, and relies on suspect premises. For example, it argues that the bats believed to be the viral reservoir don't live anywhere near Wuhan, and weren't sold in the Wuhan market - so it's unlikely they would have been there. This isn't persuasive to me because the epidemiologists believe that these viruses originate in bats but are carried in an intermediate host of a more domestic nature - and that's when they jump to humans. That's what happened with SARS (civet cats) and MERS (camels). The fact that the paper doesn't seem to consider an intermediate host in the form of an animal traded in Chinese markets is suspect.

I also disagree with Tom Cotton that we can say for sure that the origination in the Wuhan market theory is "bogus." I think the evidence for this is the Lancet-published paper on the first batch of patients in China, which noted that about a 1/3 of them had no connection to the market. I think this only suggests possibilities, that include: (1) the virus may have jumped to humans via an intermediate host before it got to the market (e.g. en route) and then went P2P - but given how long symptoms take in some cases, it's hard to know when this happened, and (2) perhaps the patients did have a connection to the market that was unexplored or not realized. But the strong correlation to the market in so many of the other early cases cannot be dismissed, IMO. I also don't like the presumption that if there are questions about the official storyline, it must mean there is a cover-up.

But Cotton is right that China's unwillingness to be open, transparent, and sharing of information only brings on more suspicion. They can't have it both ways.
 
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Doug B said:
A large, indeterminate number of asymptomatic carriers has been postulated from early on. I am curious how many of these 70% will eventually get any symptoms.

I consider a large number of asymptomatic carriers good news from a few perspectives -- it greatly lowers the percentage of infected suffering severe symptoms, and it also lowers the mortality rate.
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I read about a case this morning where a woman in her twenties didn't become symptomatic for 19 days. If we presume she didn't have a later exposure than was being counted, that certainly suggests that some that are asymptomatic at the time of testing may later develop symptoms.

But this just shows how little we know about this thing. It's silly to try to draw firm conclusions now about pathology, mortality, transmission, etc.
 
superchuck500 said:
I read about a case this morning where a woman in her twenties didn't become symptomatic for 19 days.
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Was she in quarantine anywhere? I ask because quarantine conditions seem to make it difficult to pinpoint date of transmission.
 
Doug B said:
A large, indeterminate number of asymptomatic carriers has been postulated from early on. I am curious how many of these 70% will eventually get any symptoms.

I consider a large number of asymptomatic carriers good news from a few perspectives -- it greatly lowers the percentage of infected suffering severe symptoms, and it also lowers the mortality rate.
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This can go both ways. It also could mean that the virus has already spread well beyond containment levels and we don't even know it yet. So it could mean it's a lot less deadly but a lot more likely to be realized as a global pandemic.
 
It’s entirely possible to be asymptomatic and never catch the disease so to speak. It’s well known that some people can range from carrier only and show no symptoms to mild cases, all the way up to death in a few days. There is a wide variance in people’s immune system, and science isn’t completely sure of how it all works. This is actually the part I’m finding interesting. We have only heard the stories of the major illnesses and death. But like in any outbreak, where are the rest of the cases and what are the numbers.
 
Goatman Saint said:
It’s entirely possible to be asymptomatic and never catch the disease so to speak. It’s well known that some people can range from carrier only and show no symptoms to mild cases, all the way up to death in a few days. There is a wide variance in people’s immune system, and science isn’t completely sure of how it all works. This is actually the part I’m finding interesting. We have only heard the stories of the major illnesses and death. But like in any outbreak, where are the rest of the cases and what are the numbers.
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Yeah, I wonder if those who are asymptomatic, but carrying the virus will have long term effects on any given individual. I'm guessing there are a ton of people out there unwittingly getting other people infected.

Just seems like there are still so many unknowns at this point. I guess we can only wait and see to what extent this thing will impact globally.

I tend to think it's just getting started.
 
Goatman Saint said:
It’s entirely possible to be asymptomatic and never catch the disease so to speak. It’s well known that some people can range from carrier only and show no symptoms to mild cases, all the way up to death in a few days. There is a wide variance in people’s immune system, and science isn’t completely sure of how it all works. This is actually the part I’m finding interesting. We have only heard the stories of the major illnesses and death. But like in any outbreak, where are the rest of the cases and what are the numbers.
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So basically, what these numbers from the sardine can petri dish cruise ship are telling us is that there are probably quite a few people out there walking among us who are carrying this thing, likely spreading it around, but we have no way of knowing about them or that we're infected. Good to know.
 
Thing that needs to be known is just how infectious are the asymptomatic ones? Corona virus typically only transit through sneezing and body fluid to body fluid contact (snot to surface to hand to face). If someone is asymptomatic then it should be pretty dang difficult to spread from them even if they are carriers. Fortunately it is also an enveloped virus which is way easier to kill, keep off surfaces and while exists on surfaces generally will become unable to infect someone rather quickly. While I know they said it can survive for 9 days outside the body, that’s a test to see in optimal conditions, and it’s survival, not ability to infect. HIV may live for up to 6 days in dried blood. However, it’s ability to infect someone is a whole lot less than that. As in minutes unless in a syringe, and even that pretty much requires immediate reuse to be infected. I’m thinking this being an enveloped virus is much the same.
 
Goatman Saint said:
Thing that needs to be known is just how infectious are the asymptomatic ones? Corona virus typically only transit through sneezing and body fluid to body fluid contact (snot to surface to hand to face). If someone is asymptomatic then it should be pretty dang difficult to spread from them even if they are carriers.
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This is an outstanding point.
 
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