Good link. Great resources to use against fools that think china is fine and under control.
So today we get reports (unconfirmed and not peer reviewed) that Wuhu Flu hits men much more frequently than women and seems to have parts of the HIV virus built into it (couldn’t have happened naturally). If those two claims turn out to verified, I don’t need any more evidence: it IS a bio-weapon. I’ve always referred to that kind of thing as “self-punishing behavior.” It’s only a shame it doesn’t exclusively affect members of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Happy Hunger Games. And may the odds be ever in your favor.”
Latest from Zero Hedge. In my mind, there’s a growing list of variables that says this bug is man-made. The extremely high R0 is awfully convenient - something you’d want in a weapon.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/coronavirus-contains-hiv-insertions-stoking-fears-over-artificially-created-bioweapon
Well, the good news is no international deaths so far. On that front, nCoV is not nearly as lethal as SARS.
As well the reported confirmed and serious/critical cases are now tracking well south of the recent exponential trend.
So today was the first break in that trend since the beginning. Row 3 called for 13,100 cases and 2,620 serious cases (which we’d need to include back in some of the dead and the released as both would have been part of that serious count at one point, but still is lower than expected as the entire lot would only get is to ~2,300 vs 2,620):
So it was 11.9 k cases vs 13.1 k
That’s a pretty hefty departure.
One of several explanations could apply.
- The Chinese government is just winging it and making up sorta reasonable sounding numbers.
- We’re actually tracking the rate of increase in China’s ability to manufacture and distribute test kits.
- The quarantines are working and the trend has been broken.
Possibly some combination of all three?
Regardless, I really don’t trust the CCP here to provide accurate info. So I’m not staking much on these numbers…a little bit, but not a lot.
I sure wish we could get some non-state info out of China.
Funny enough all of these infection rates look like the Fibonacci Number series. Just a thought. Keep up the good work.
Early research found that this coronavirus targets the ACE2 receptor, which is found in Asians at roughly five-times the rate of other global populations.
https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/
4th … they only have so many test kits per day. This would explain the leveling off of the increase of confirmed cases.
Your reason (2) could cause what we are seeing as the result of three fundamentally different reasons.
The first, pessimsitic, reason is that infections are spiralling out of control and the manufacturing rate of test kits is not keeping pace.
The second, optimistic, reason would be that initially test kits were unavailable and the case count fell behind reality. However as test kit production ramped up, sufficient test kits were available to test all patients. This caused a temporary spike in case counts for 2-3 days as doctors caught up, with a subsequent taper as they are now ony testing new cases.
The third possible reason is that there are far, far more cases than have been reported - and the doctors can’t possibly keep up no matter how many tests they run and the number of new daily confirmed cases is so small compared to the number of existing infections that it basically doesn’t tell us much at all - good or bad - about R0 or anything else.
I think the point here is that there are just to many unknowns to feel confident of any conclusion. More data and accurate data is essential to increase confidence.
Wuhan is probably too much of a mess to ever feel confident about the accuracy of what’s coming out. But looking at the data series separately from Zhejiang, Guangdong, Henan, Hunan etc. might prove more instructive as the case load is not yet high enough to be overwhelming the health system.
No a mount of orders from above are going keep people in there homes if they get hungry enough, now they are going to have feed the 50 million people china in lock down! This will have to go on for an unknown amount of time.May the food always be in your favor.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-wuhan-infected-coronavirus.html
I don’t know if this has been discussed here yet, but I thought I would post. 75,000 cases estimated by at least one medical journal.
If one assumes an R0 of 3.5 to 4.1, is there anyway to “guess” how long until this is making us want to stay inside? Perhaps a range estimate of 3-6 months? I’m thinking if we had an estimate, it would allow us to better plan and prepare.
Also, is the 6-9 month period for a typical pandemic reasonable? Lately, I’ve read about pandemics that lasted 18-months. This virus seems like something very new. Should we be thinking about trying to isolate for a longer time frame?
OK, does the progression of this disease have any similarities whatsoever with HIV? That idea just seems preposterous on it’s face.Nope. I'm tracking the story from the 'bioengineered' paper carefully. I actually read the whole thing this morning, but decided I needed to let some other qualified people in the field react to it before I made too much of it. The issue is that the researchers from India discovered that there are four relatively short, but significant, amino acid inserts in the corona spike proteins that seem to (based on modeled folding, not experimental crystallography) converge on the receptor binding area. That would be super unusual. That's the one area that's usually most highly 'conserved' because any changes there tend to make binding worse, not better. Even a single, solitary amino acid change at that position can wreck the whole thing. To have 4? And that are really quite large? As I understand it, that's odd. This is a map of the amino acid sequence of the spike protein. The top row is nCoV. The second row is SARS, and everything in red is where there is 'consensus' between the two coronaviruses. I want you to pay attention to insert 1 in particular. It's not just that it's a swap or substitution of one amino acid for another (aka a mutation) it's a complete insert of a whopping 7 amino acids.
This is a bit tricky to explain, but what confers the functionality to a protein is its overall 3D shape. It has to have exactly the right shape to work. Inserting a whole chunk of new material into a long, complex string that then has to fold into an intricate origami of alpha helixes and beta sheets, with all the various charges lining up into a stable configuration is usually a recipe for disaster.
The shape is all wrong, and 'poof!' the whole thing is a mess for its intended purpose.
Remember, the entire purpose of a spike protein is to dock the virus with the ACE2 receptor to gain entry into the cell so it can take it over.
It is the exact configuration of the spike protein that confers the species 'preference' of the virus. Change it slightly and it no longer works on bats, but will work in snakes. With a different substitution it will work in giraffes but not monkeys.
So the changes in the spike proteins were being examined because that gives the clues as to how it managed to jump to humans.
Well, when the researchers starting digging around in their massive genetic databases hunting for similar sequences as these inserts, they got these hits from the HIV virus (which is totally not related to nCoV in any way).
All four inserts had varying degrees of matching. Inserts 1 and 2 were perfect matches to the gp120 spike protein on HIV which, it should be noted, is the name of the docking protein that binds to human cells and allows HIV to gain entry.
Insert 3 lines up pretty well with HIV, but is missing three amino acids (in red) compared to HIV. Insert 4 is missing 11 amino acids and has a much larger gap.
The authors rather gently concluded that the uncanny similarity of the inserts to those found in HIV was "unlikely to be fortuitous."
This study needs to be replicated, and I'll need other qualified virologists to weigh in and confirm this before I make anything of it. I remain interested but I'm very far from coming to any particular conclusion.
In conclusion, let me also put a stop to the "HIV drugs work against, nCoV, therefore that proves something" conjecture. The drugs mainly work by inhibiting the replication inside the cell after infection. HIV is a retrovirus (negative sense RNA) while nCoV is a positive sense RNA. They replicate by entirely different machinery.
Many HIV drugs target the reverse transcriptase enzyme that HIV needs to converts it's core RNA message into DNA. These would be completely useless against nCoV because it doesn't have that enzyme.
The only drug that would be effective in both HIV and for nCoV based on the paper being discussed is one that specifically targeted the region of the spike protein that had been modified. There might be one that does that, but I couldn't find it by Googling.
Otherwise, the drugs such as protease inhibitors would be expected to work against a wide variety of viruses but not because of the spike protein changes discussed above.
There. That's perhaps more than you wanted to know, but there's a lot of attention on this and I wanted to be sure we're having a fact-based discussion.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.27.20018952v1
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.27.20018952
Abstract
We estimate the effective reproduction number for 2019-nCoV based on the daily reported cases from China CDC. The results indicate that 2019-nCoV has a higher effective reproduction number than SARS with a comparable fatality rate.
And here is the way that this high infectivity builds. Wow. At some point everyone "gets it" and the chain of transmission is slowed by quarantines and social distancing. --But as an intellectual exercise, this builds fast.
R0 is a very important number. But it does not directly say anything about the rate of infections and the period of time required for the epidemic to burn itself out.
R0 depends both on the likelihood of transmission in any given time period and on the period for which a carrier remains infectious.
Once we accept an R0 high enough to cause a pandemic, then the first of those factors is probably more important than R0 itself in terms of answering your questions.
A large number of scientists have responded indicating, amongst other criticisms, that the highlighted genomes are sometimes found in corona viruses, and are therfore definitely not unique to HIV.
CNN has a report on the progression of nCov in one American victim. Interesting progression of symptoms.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/31/health/washington-coronavirus-study-nejm/index.html
Seems like a fever and coughs are typical, and fatigue but that’s to be expected with both. Less typical are nausea, runny nose, vomiting and diarrhea. That would indicate that medicinals which treat fever and cough would be a priority for home treatment.
Something you buy at the supermarket could be covered in virus and continue to be infectious for up to 5 days
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4659470/
So be paranoid about using hand sanitizer and consider “quarantining” purchases for 5 days
A large number of scientists have responded indicating, amongst other criticisms, that the highlighted genomes are sometimes found in corona viruses, and are therfore definitely not unique to HIV.I said in a post on another thread, we are in for a period of maximun disinformation for the next week or two. The more that public forums are talking up the "its a bioweapon targeting AIDs people", or the new one "your pets can get it so toss them off a tall building" get attention, the less people will take prudent and practical advice and make real preparation. If you are scared and freaked out, people who do not have your best interests at heart can use this crisis to manipulate us all. Imagine if nCov does go global pandemic and the peak season is the Summer. A few thousand deaths and local self quarantine is all the excuse the Elite needs to argue we should delay the US elections, isn't it. Be informed, but don't let really off the wall theories take control of you. And really, even if it were suddenly proved that China did steal and then weaponize nCov, how would that change your preparations to make yourself safe?
Whitney Webb wrote an great article, describing the weaponization of these viruses.
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/top-news/bats-gene-editing-bioweapons-recent-darpa-experiments-raise-concerns-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/
I would have expected more cases going exponential in the US, but maybe it’s just early yet.
Although one paragraph in Whitneys reporting may explain this.
“In addition, one preliminary study on the coronavirus responsible for the current outbreak found that the receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), is not only the same as that used by the SARS coronavirus, but that East Asians present a much higher ratio of lung cells that express that receptor than the other ethnicities (Caucasian and African-American) included in the study. However, such findings are preliminary and the sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions from that preliminary data.”
Any thoughts?