Wuhan, China Corona Virus 2020

[WiseOne]

I've been getting regular updates from my medical center. I'll pass on anything interesting...so far it's just kind of "this is what to do if you see a patient who might have the virus" stuff.

No time today to plow through an 18 minute video, but...all depended on whether the virus can be transmitted person to person, and how easily it transmits. Measles and the flu are super-transmitters, so they're the paragons of epidemic-prone bugs. It looked to me, based on the reported cases, that if this virus is transmitted person to person, it doesn't do so all that readily. But, the incubation period is still in question....figured we'd have to wait a week or two to know for certain.

There has now been a confirmed case of human to human transmission, but this tells me two things. First, yes it can be transmitted to people in close contact (husband of a person who carried the disease back from China). But second, it is looking like it takes more than casual contact for transmission to occur. The person who returned from China was sitting on a plane with other passengers for hours, using the restroom, touching common areas like overhead bins, and then walking through airports etc. None of that has (so far) caused any new cases in the U.S.

So, we are not looking at a 1918-like pandemic, where all it took was walking down a street near a person incubating the virus to get you sick. Still don't know enough to judge severity other than that, though.

[dualstow]

Financial news headlines over the past few days:

Stock market drops: "Markets plummet on coronavirus fears"
Stock market rises: "Markets rally on hopes that coronavirus spread will subside"

I prefer Markets shrug off coronavirus worries.

[Maddy]

Does anyone have any good, credible information about the origin of this virus? I haven't had time to delve into this much at all, but I have seen a number of reports to the effect that (1) this is a mutated version of a virus that has been under study for some time, (2) that the Wuhan province where this virus first took hold is the home of two P4 laboratories dedicated to the study of biological weapons, (3) that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation owns the patent on a recombinant form of the virus and has been actively involved in research aimed at producing a related vaccine, and (4) that only a few months before this viral outbreak, a number of entities here in the U.S. were involved in staging a simulated pandemic in which this coronavirus was the responsible pathogen.

If this virus has, in fact, been under study, it would seem to be a simple thing to determine whether the form that is moving throughout China is a mutated variant. If it is, it should be simple enough to determine as a matter of statistical probability whether the specific alterations to the viral genome are random or engineered. Finally, it should be easy enough to determine whether the genetic sequence of this virus matches the one on which there is a patent. Strangely, I've seen no answers to these questions.

[Cortopassi]

I love meat, but yikes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tJndwiKuoQ

[Maddy]

https://www.activistpost.com/2020/01/ba ... break.html

[dualstow]

Horseshoe bats?

[Maddy]

Regardless of the natural or engineered nature of this virus, am I the only one thinking that this would be a really good time for the powers-that-be to let some air out of the market? Not sure whether I want to try to frontrun a downturn by going all-cash for a while, but it's hard to ignore the fact that, this being an election year and all, a big fat scapegoat will be a hard thing for the puppet masters to pass up. I'll probably just sit tight, as the lessons learned in 2008 were painful ones and I'm sorely lacking in talent when it comes to this kind of thing.

[Maddy]

Any genetics wonks out there that could help translate? WiseOne?

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1 ... -bioweapon

This is just one excerpt out of a rather lengthy thread full of genetics-speak:

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding
@DrEricDing
22. The authors dunked this final conclusion: “This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous”. Wow, they sure just went straight there!

[Cortopassi]

Everything in the world has its conspiracy theorists.

Viruses: Secretly created, accidentally or deliberately released, companies with vaccines already ready for the virus, etc is near the top of the list of conspiracies, book and movie plots, etc.

Maybe deliberate, maybe accidental, maybe just because of terribly unsanitary conditions.

Why does everything always start in China? Why not India, with nearly just as many people?

[dualstow]

Why does everything always start in China? Why not India, with nearly just as many people?

Sometimes it does.

Indonesia was also mentioned on the radio early this morning. As I remember, farmers cleared forest by slash and burn to plant mango trees. The smoke irritated bats, and the uprooted bats were attracted to the trees. The bats carried a virus and excreted it below, where it contaminated the farmers’ pigs. From there, it could spread to humans. I don’t know if this particular virus did. They didn’t name it.

[Maddy]

Everything in the world has its conspiracy theorists.

No need to talk about conspiracies. DNA recombinant technologies have been a fact of life since at least the mid-70s. That particular era comes to mind because it places me in my first or second year of college at a large university where highly-credentialed professors still lectured to auditoriums full of undergraduates. One particular day stands out for me. I was taking a survey-level biology course from a research professor who was all over the topic of DNA recombinance. He expressed quite emphatically his view that it was all but inevitable that at some point this technology would get out of control inasmuch as the techniques were so simple as to allow it to be done in a garage. I remember his exact words: "The cat's out of the bag." Scared the wits out of me as an 18- or 19-year-old. That was over 40 years ago.

Remember all that money that got pumped into "cancer research" during the '80s? They never did find a cure for cancer, but they got a whole boatload of advances in DNA recombinance while trying. DNA recombinance is now the focus of some of the most promising clinical research, it's the source of a renewed controversy over "designer babies" and eugenics, and major military funding is being directed toward laboratory-engineered bioweapons. Point is, this is anything but the stuff of science fiction.

[WiseOne]

Except that not a lot of that was probably happening in Wuhan.

Sometimes these things happen. It's a virus that mutated just enough to jump from animals to people. That's how HIV got started - and again, the jungles of East Africa in the 1960s/1970s were not exactly a hotbed of DNA recombinant research.

[Maddy]

WiseOne, all this is way above my pay grade, but wouldn't it be a simple thing to determine, as a matter of statistical probability, whether the gene sequence is the result of random mutations or whether it is engineered? I'm not advancing any particular theory, but I am wondering why we don't have a definitive answer to this question.

[dualstow]

The guy who created it couldn’t resist embedding “Boris was here” in the code.

[WiseOne]

WiseOne, all this is way above my pay grade, but wouldn't it be a simple thing to determine, as a matter of statistical probability, whether the gene sequence is the result of random mutations or whether it is engineered? I'm not advancing any particular theory, but I am wondering why we don't have a definitive answer to this question.

Out of my area too, except that I know people are working on sequencing this virus as we speak.

[Cortopassi]

Virus must be cured. Gold smashed and stocks on a tear. Or maybe Tesla is driving the whole market up.

[dualstow]

Virus must be cured.

About as accurate as “everything starts in China” on the previous page.
The market is resilient.

[dualstow]

David Quammen was on the radio talking about viruses including SARS.

He explained that cave-dwelling horseshoe bats were brought to "wet markets" in China, where the hygiene is not so good, and eating wild animals is still a fad. One example of the bad hygiene: animals are butchered on plywood sheets.

The bats infected palm civets, which are cute little mammals in the same suborder as the mongoose. Subsequently, the SARS virus jumped from civets to humans.

Ebola is from Africa.
Hantavirus originated, I think, on Indian reservations in North America (but South Korea before that).
But, bats, which can carry viruses without dying + poor hygiene in bushmeat markets may explain why there is a second epidemic coming out of China.

[Cortopassi]

https://coronaoutbreakmap.com/irrefutab ... t/#new_tab

man made???

"But the WHO and CDC are covering up this inconvenient fact in order to protect communist China"

Dammit, does everything in this world have to be a potential conspiracy with two sides. Can't we just all settle on one truth when something this bad is happening?

Meanwhile stock futures are green again. Like 90% of supply chains and goods aren't going to be severely impacted. Hell, we already can't get parts to build our PCBs where I work and we have small volumes compared to consumer electronics.

[dualstow]

China won't let the WHO* or CDC help, because admitting that they need outside help would make the Party look weak.
It's disgusting.

*I failed to come up with a Roger Daltrey joke, but not for lack of trying

[Kriegsspiel]

HIDE YA KIDS, HIDE YA WIFE..AND HIDE YA HUSBAND CUS THEY INFECTIN EVERYBODY OUT HERE.

[dualstow]

HIDE YA KIDS, HIDE YA WIFE..AND HIDE YA HUSBAND CUS THEY INFECTIN EVERYBODY OUT HERE.

Proud to say I get this one! I can hear his (autotuned) voice in my head now.