COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US) (6 Viewers)

[superchuck500]

It has to be due to the long incubation period. Many infected that weren't known.

However, this seems to be more like a cold that has a high chance of turning into bronchitis/pneumonia. Immune deficient and the elderly are the risk populations.

Wash your hands (~20 seconds), consider having a medical mask on you if you travel on a plane. Bring a small bottle of sanitizer for when you can't use soap and water.

I think we have to temper China's containment to how the US would contain a serious disease. This isn't Ebola.

I agree that the fact that infected people can go 9 days or longer being asymptomatic is a huge challenge for containment. We don't yet the transmission pathway(s) - one of the Chinese team doctors thinks it's eyeball related (yeah, weird).

No, it's not ebola but MERS kills 1 in 3 . . . and the Wuhan virus is a very close cousin to MERS, and mutates easily because it is an RNA virus - which replicates on a single-strand and is prone to "errors" or even series of errors in replication. Those errors become mutated strains. (See links below).

An RNA virus with a highly lethal cousin is a very dangerous thing if you consider the scale of the outbreak. We're in full outbreak mode right now - I can just about assure you that by the end of the day Sunday, we're going to have the virus in possibly twice as many countries as we have right now - or more.

I don't think we should be too cavalier about presuming that the US would be handling this differently. We now know that the case in Washington state had come into close contact with at least 16 people before being diagnosed - and that authorities are tracking those people down now. How many people did those 16 interact with? It's been days now. If this virus is spreading while the patients are asymptomatic and it's transmitting fairly easily, it's almost impossible to contain no matter what country you're living in.

Hopefully that's not quite the case. Hopefully it doesn't become more lethal. But it's a novel virus in an outbreak that is becoming global. It's a very precarious situation - no need to freak out or be irrational right now, just one to pay attention to and not discount.

How Mutant Viral Swarms Spread Disease

Viruses exist as “mutant clouds” of closely related individuals, an insight that is helping researchers predict where disease is likely to spread

www.scientificamerican.com

Why are RNA virus mutation rates so damn high?

The high mutation rate of RNA viruses is credited with their evolvability and virulence. This Primer, however, discusses recent evidence that this is, in part, a byproduct of selection for faster genomic replication.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[efil4stnias]

I think we have to temper China's containment to how the US would contain a serious disease. This isn't Ebola.

No its not Ebola.

But what it is and what it is doing is showing the world just how precarious dealing with infectious disease is.

 

[bclemms]

Mutating Zombies that don't have to die first with 9 day incubation period.

Hopefully most of them are Homers and we get very few Hawkings or T3's.

 

[superchuck500]

Hopefully most of them are Homers and we get very few Hawkings or T3's.

objection

 

[bclemms]

4 people in Scotland that just returned from Wuhan are showing symptoms have just been tested.

China coronavirus: Incident team to deal with Scottish threat

The patients are being tested as a precaution in Scotland after returning from China with respiratory problems.

www.bbc.com

I'm calling BS on even the high end of the model numbers if they all test positive too. Just doesn't seem logical to have that many cases traveling internationally in such a short period of time.

 

[superchuck500]

Now confirming cases with no travel connection to Wuhan.

 

[superchuck500]

4 people in Scotland that just returned from Wuhan are showing symptoms have just been tested.

China coronavirus: Incident team to deal with Scottish threat

The patients are being tested as a precaution in Scotland after returning from China with respiratory problems.

www.bbc.com

I'm calling BS on even the high end of the model numbers if they all test positive too. Just doesn't seem logical to have that many cases traveling internationally in such a short period of time.

There are suspected cases now in Scotland, Australia, Brazil, and Mexico . . . but until they're confirmed it's hard to take too much from it.

 

[bclemms]

Now confirming cases with no travel connection to Wuhan.

So many worst case scenarios happening here. Mutated virus, long incubation period in a major metro with a busy international airport, with a government that suppresses information that is highly contagious that quickly spread to 4 of the 10 most populated cities on Earth. It's literally one mutation away from being a catastrophic global event at this point.

 

[superchuck500]

So many worst case scenarios happening here. Mutated virus, long incubation period in a major metro with a busy international airport, with a government that suppresses information that is highly contagious that quickly spread to 4 of the 10 most populated cities on Earth. It's literally one mutation away from being a catastrophic global event at this point.

Yes, I think that's 100% correct. If it doesn't get more deadly, it's probably going to be okay. But it's literally a game of chance at this point.

 

[bclemms]

There are suspected cases now in Scotland, Australia, Brazil, and Mexico . . . but until they're confirmed it's hard to take too much from it.

If those come back positive then it's only missing Africa and Antartica. With as much travel that comes and goes from the US and China, Hong Kong and China and Hong Kong and USA it's a matter of time before it goes nuts here.

 

[bclemms]

The financial markets are really taking note as well. Asian markets took a big hit overnight, US market is being dragged down, particularly travel stocks. Pharma stocks are doing quite well which is limiting the downside. Gold is trying to make a run. Outside of Impeachment, the news cycle is really slow right now so it's already been a media frenzy but will continually get worse.

I'll admit, I'm fascinated by the whole thing. History says we are so overdue for a major destructive virus. I don't think this is it but it sure shows how vulnerable we really are.

 

[bclemms]

Clinic in Wuhan from people waiting to get tested with Wuhan symptoms. If they didn't have it before they will certainly have it after.


So what happens after most of these people showing symptoms test negative then get the virus after waiting to be tested in packed hallways with people infected? You would think they would figure a better way to keep people from being packed together like that.

 

[efil4stnias]

So many worst case scenarios happening here. Mutated virus, long incubation period in a major metro with a busy international airport, with a government that suppresses information that is highly contagious that quickly spread to 4 of the 10 most populated cities on Earth. It's literally one mutation away from being a catastrophic global event at this point.

one mutation away in an organism that lives to mutate and RNA viruses are found to mutate more frequently than most other viruses.

 

[superchuck500]

Clinic in Wuhan from people waiting to get tested with Wuhan symptoms. If they didn't have it before they will certainly have it after.


So what happens after most of these people showing symptoms test negative then get the virus after waiting to be tested in packed hallways with people infected? You would think they would figure a better way to keep people from being packed together like that.

I'm also seeing video of people in Wuhan just falling to the ground and laying there . . . some just in the street.

But it's hard to say what that really is, I have read that many in Wuhan think that only the worst cases get treatment, so they might be feigning symptoms to get better treatment.

 

[superchuck500]

Here is an explanation on why the 'snake paper' made an error in the analysis - this stuff is fascinating.

On the ‘snake paper’ they’ve correctly detected there’s recombination in the data set but then get the breakpoint wrong. If you look in our diversity plot across the Spike region (21717 to 25693) although it’s harder to call which virus is closest due to the increase in diversity, it’s still clear that there’s been a switch back to the bat-coronavirus CoVZXC21 being the closest. However, in their figure they’ve concluded from this that it’s the Spike that’s part of the recombination region, i.e., the breakpoint being to the right, which is not the case and not where the breakpoint is detected by the more sophisticated maximum likelihood method GARD (or other methods in RDP). The bootstrapping method they mention but don’t show is notorious for not detecting breakpoints reliably. Worse they’ve concluded it’s the Wuhan lineage that’s recombinant when in fact it’s the bat viruses that are changing their phylogenetic position and no longer clustering with Wuhan over ORF1b. On their linking the virus codon usage to snakes if you look at their figure 3A, it shows that nCoV and bat virus cluster together but not with snakes so their own analysis doesn’t support this conclusion. There is thus no evidences that snake are involved.

http://virological.org/t/ncovs-relationship-to-bat-coronaviruses-recombination-signals-no-snakes/331/3e