Coronavirus

[sukumvit boy]

NIH stopping critical study that may have told us from where and how Covid -19 came to be.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020...es-critics-say

This article also discusses the the 'conspiracy theories' surrounding the questions as to weather the virus was engineered and than released accidentally or on purpose by the Wuhan biosecurity lab which had been cited for biosecurity deficiencies earlier .

[KnightHawk 2.0]

The President has now made a statement, which is reported here-
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/coro...ry?id=70925268

The Clueless Buffoon statement is hollow and insincere,because soon after he made that statement he was right back it again with his childish attacks on masks and stroking fear and divisiveness, and coming up a with a weak ass executive order againist social media platforms such as twitter and facebook, all because twitter flagged two of his tweets about mail in voting. and him creating conspiracy theories and pushing propaganda is nothing but a distraction from him and his administration's poor mishandling of the CO-VID 19 Pandemic. And the only thing he cares about is getting re elected no matter the cost.

[Stavros]

This article also discusses the the 'conspiracy theories' surrounding the questions as to weather the virus was engineered and than released accidentally or on purpose by the Wuhan biosecurity lab which had been cited for biosecurity deficiencies earlier .

Thank you for this important artice, with this critical paragraph-
"There is no scientific evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated in Shi’s collection of bat viruses at WIV, though researchers concede that such an escape can’t be unequivocally ruled out. The known bat virus closest to SARS-CoV-2, although 96.2% similar, is at least 20 years removed from the pandemic virus in evolutionary time—meaning that if it escaped from a laboratory, it would have taken decades for it to evolve into the virus that has now killed more than 230,000 people to date. One Nature Medicine paper further indicated that the pandemic virus shows no signs of having been engineered by scientists, another contention of conspiracy theorists. For one thing, although the researchers note that though the virus binds to a human cellular receptor to initiate an infection, that interaction is not optimal, “strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation,” they write."

We have so many more things to worry about and work on than some conspiracy theory that this has been engineered by Bill Gates to create a global database, or by chemical firms seeking to cash in on trillions of profit from a vaccine. And so on. If we spent more time re-thinking our relationship to the wilderness, its animals and pathogens, and on standards of public hygiene, we will be spending it to the betterment of all. And we can do these things without causing much pain, incurriing little substantial, long-term cost.

[sukumvit boy]

Thank you for distilling and elucidating those critical facts from the article ,Stavros. Which I should have done myself in my original post . My primary problem is that I never learned to type properly and still use the 'hunt and peck' method so my posts are too abbreviated.
The other key point of the article was that the cancelled NIH study might have told us how the Covid-19 virus 'jumped ' to humans . The speculation is that it may have come from bats first and than jumped to some other mammal (pangolins?) before jumping to humans. But I'm sure some future studies will answer those questions.
On another related issue , there is fear that the virus may infect apes and wreak havoc in the captive and wild ape population.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart...arn-180974512/

[Stavros]

One of the hardest things to describe with many zoonoses is the original source of transmission, first between animals and then from animals to humans. Malaria existed for thousands of years before Ronald Ross identified how the anopheles mosquito transmitted malaria's plasmodium into the human body; Edward Jenner's first inoculation against Smallpox (origin unknown) took place in May 1796 but it was not until the 8th May 1980 that the disease was declared officially eradicated -and following a campaign launched in 1959, should we not thank the WHO for co-ordinating it, rather than attempt to ostracise the orgaization because one ignorant little man doesn't understand how it operates (and evidently doesn't care)?
https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html

The greater worry is the proportion of people who are asymptomatic, and have aready been the cause of infection in other people, in the article linked, the husband of a woman in Boston-

“My husband ended up very sick,” she says. “He was in intensive care for a day, and in hospital for 10 days. But while I was also infected, I had no symptoms at all. I have no idea why we responded so differently.”

And where he acquired antibodies to Covid 19, she has none, which raises questions about the effectiveness of any vaccine that is developed.

But the broader question must be, if there are more people than is known who are asymptomatic, does this mean that an unregulated relaxation of isolation might create a second wave, not next winter, but next month? Caution, as-

"While scientists still don’t know whether asymptomatic people are as contagious as those who display symptoms, there are still many ways in which they can pass on Covid-19. “We know that you don’t need to be coughing to transmit a respiratory infection like Sars-CoV-2,” says Houben. “Talking, singing, even blowing instruments like a vuvuzela – in the past all of those have been shown to transmit respiratory viruses in some way.”

"...when Covid-19 was identified at the start of the year, many public health officials both in the UK and around the world failed to account for the threat posed by asymptomatic transmission. This is largely because they were working on models based on influenza, where some estimates suggest that only 5% of people infected are asymptomatic. As a result, the large scale diagnostic testing regimes required to pick up asymptomatic Covid-19 cases were not in place until too late."

Only one way to find out if asymptomatic carriers cause the disease -unlock!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...y-are-infected

[Del06]

Just FYI: this is a vuvuzela. It's South African, I gather.

[sukumvit boy]

Here's a good article on the rapid repurposing of drugs for Covid-19.
Quite usefull also because it explaines the lifecycle of viral organisms and how various drugs work, with great diagrams .

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6493/829

[Stavros]

Thanks for this fascinating article -I offer two in return -the first on the seasonality of Covid 19 which ends with a hypothesis-

" Urgent for effective policy is to determine if children are important transmitters, in which case school closures may help slow transmission, or not, in which case resources would be wasted in such closures. Previously it was thought children were not easily infected with SARS-CoV-2. Recent evidence from Shenzhen suggests that children may be infected and shed detectable virus at about the same rate as adults — so now the only question is whether they transmit as readily. It seems likely the answer is yes, but no data as of this writing to my knowledge."
https://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/will-c...armer-weather/

This is a review of the Uk policy, and not a favourable one-

"Last week, Britain became only the second country in the world whose official death toll from coronavirus exceeded 40,000. The scale of the human tragedy is incomprehensible: at the pandemic’s peak, almost 1,000 people were losing their lives a day. They have left behind more than 40,000 families who are mourning at a time when they cannot come together to share their grief.
This is a pandemic that has tested the public health response of governments in every corner of the world. But the UK has performed poorly on any measure: the death toll is now more than double what the government’s scientific advisers said would be a “good outcome”, and, at this point, it has one of the worst excess deaths rates in the world."
More bad news in the full article-
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ovid-19-crisis

[PEPE3Z]

[Rover177]

Flu, pneumonia and other respiratory diseases kill 77,000 in UK and 370,000 in US each year. We expect it, therefore we don't have annual shutdowns.