Scientists Say a Now-Dominant Strain of the Coronavirus Appears To Be More Contagious Than Original (latimes.com) 200
Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From a report: The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote. In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease, the report warned. The 33-page report was posted Thursday on BioRxiv, a website that researchers use to share their work before it is peer reviewed, an effort to speed up collaborations with scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. That research has been largely based on the genetic sequence of earlier strains and might not be effective against the new one.
The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report's authors said they felt an "urgent need for an early warning" so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain. Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain's dominance over its predecessors demonstrates that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.
The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report's authors said they felt an "urgent need for an early warning" so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain. Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain's dominance over its predecessors demonstrates that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.
Is it only more infectious.... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the main thing I"d be worried about.
Re:Is it only more infectious.... (Score:5, Informative)
A cursory read through the linked article states (fairly far down) that they don't have any evidence the new strain is more deadly.
"The Los Alamos study does not indicate that the new version of the virus is more lethal than the original. People infected with the mutated strain appear to have higher viral loads. But the study’s authors from the University of Sheffield found that among a local sample of 447 patients, hospitalization rates were about the same for people infected with either virus version."
Re:Is it only more infectious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
A cursory read through the linked article states (fairly far down) that they don't have any evidence the new strain is more deadly.
This would be consistent with typical evolutionary pressures on biological viruses. They're integral to our ecosystem, and 11% of our DNA as human beings have viral origin. Some of it is even active: https://newsroom.uw.edu/news/g... [uw.edu]
It's a simple fact of life; meiosis and mitosis have never been the only common means of gene transfer, and the less harm but more spread a virus has, the more successful it is at propagating itself. Not all of them cause illness; some are even our allies. Pandemics are usually symptoms of a disrupted environment - like destroyed wildlife habitats and the notorious wet markets - introducing harmfully imbalanced lifeforms and their genes to each other with terrible consequences, but in the long run, they settle down, they become unnoticeable, and in a few cases become beneficial or integral. But one thing for sure: some of them are vital parts of life evolving on earth.
Here's hoping that we stop the suffering of the plague, but in addition to that, I hope we get versed as a species in how to be a part of an overall healthy ecosystem, because our well-being ties into that of almost everything else alive on this planet.
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It's a simple fact of life; meiosis and mitosis have never been the only common means of gene transfer,
I think more people need to have that in their brain. Everyone gets this "darwin" concept and inheritance, but they don't get that genes introduced into a bird can end up in a plant.
Re:Is it only more infectious.... (Score:5, Funny)
I hope we get versed as a species in how to be a part of an overall healthy ecosystem
Or we could just nuke all the bats from orbit.
Re:Is it only more infectious.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Like my wife said, "We have to share the world with the virus. But we need rules." A vaccine provides clear rules.
Re:Is it only more infectious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It IS big news. The biggest risk in this pandemic is overloading healthcare systems, like what happened in Italy. Once hospitals are overloaded, they are unable to provide supportive care to as many patients, keeping their bodies alive long enough to develop antibodies to fight the virus. That goes a long way to explaining the varied mortality rates by country. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/da... [jhu.edu]
If the new strain is more contagious enough, hospitals will get overloaded and people will needlessly die for lack of space and resources and care givers. If it is more contagious, then more healthcare workers will catch the disease, reducing the number of people available to provide care. If the same antibodies that fight one strain are not able to fight the other, then people who have recovered from one strain may catch the other and put more strain on the healthcare system.
It looks like the East Coast USA and Europe are already dealing with this strain. But the West Coast and Asia, who are coping fairly well with the strain they are fighting now, had better be prepared for when this more virulent strain reaches them. The containment measures they are taking now may not be enough.
You might be right. We might get lucky and this is not big news. I'm not going to bank on that.
Why is Australia doing much better than the UK? (Score:3)
Similar countries, similar response. Both open for most work. Australia has more links to China (per population).
Yet in Australia the virus was pretty much gone within a couple of weeks, yet in the UK the new cases per day is stubbornly flat.
Maybe the UK virus is a different strain?
Re:Why is Australia doing much better than the UK? (Score:5, Informative)
Australia closed it's borders when local community spread made up only 10% of the load. This gave Australian contact tracers enough breathing space to knock out the infection chains. That plus social distancing reduced the R0 to below 0.5. As a consequence Australia has 300 times less deaths than the UK and almost 1000 times less death than the USA.
Given this news, I'm sure the borders will be closed for a quite bit longer.
Re: Why is Australia doing much better than the UK (Score:3)
Latitude has an effect : https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/... [cebm.net]
One other study that I saw earlier but can't find a link to right now found that latitude affects the spread, even when controlled for temperature and humidity.
Australia had summers during the initial days of the spread of Covid-19 : especially they had longer sunshine durations. Initial days are most dangerous in any country as the government, people, businesses are not yet prepared.
While I can also appreciate the response of Australia and New Zeala
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Re: Is it only more infectious.... (Score:2)
Go check if you're still immune. You might not be, as other patients suggest.
Re:Is it only more infectious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
...or also more deadly?
That's the main thing I"d be worried about.
Well...
(1) Just more deadly will affect individuals.
(2) Just more infectious will infect more people, which will also cause more deaths.
(3) More infectious and more deadly will be the worst with both.
So they all sound bad, in that order.
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...or also more deadly?
That's the main thing I"d be worried about.
Well...
(1) Just more deadly will affect individuals.
(2) Just more infectious will infect more people, which will also cause more deaths.
(3) More infectious and more deadly will be the worst with both.
So they all sound bad, in that order.
Or
(0) It's exactly the same and more widespread for other reasons.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, is even more skeptical of the team’s conclusions than Hanage.
“They didn’t do a single experiment, and this is all conjecture,” she told Gizmodo. “There’s no indication that this mutation makes the virus more transmissible, and they’ve done nothing to show that this mutation is functionally significant.”
It could be more widespread because Europe just had way more cases.
It’s generally agreed the outbreaks of covid-19 that have swept across the world largely originated from strains of the virus that emerged from Europe, following the introduction of the virus from China last year. But that doesn’t necessarily indicate the virus meaningfully changed there to accomplish this feat.
“The great majority of sequenced isolates now descend from the European outbreak, which has spread more extensively than the Chinese one. That could be because it is more transmissible, but it could also be because the relatively late interventions allowed it to spread more,” Hanage told Gizmodo.
Most places stopped travel from China before they stopped travel from Europe.
Hypothetically a country could get 100 cases from China and 1000 from Europe. The European version would dominate even if they were functionally identical. Just due to the fact they had a bigger headstart.
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It depends upon how long it takes to kill the host.
Already ruled out (Score:2)
It depends upon how long it takes to kill the host.
According to the article it has been dominant since mid-March. Most deaths seem to occur within ~3 weeks of initial symptoms so we would have already seen any significant change in lethality.
Re: Is it only more infectious.... (Score:2)
Well, if it takes 40 years, nobody will bother.
Hence people still acting as if large amounts of pure short acellular carbs and heated dairy weren't deadly.
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Also kind of obvious that the strain the is most infectious is the dominant one...
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Also kind of obvious that the strain the is most infectious is the dominant one...
Obvious, but not necessarily correct.
If you quarantine China and 50 cases slip through. And then 4 weeks later quarantine Europe but 7,000 already sliped through.
The European strain is going to dominate even if the 2 strains are functionally identical.
Re: Is it only more infectious.... (Score:2)
Evolution doesnâ(TM)t care what happens
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Evolution doesnâ(TM)t care what happens
This is only true for meanings of "care" that are not applicable to the context of evolution as an emergent process.
Re:Is it only more infectious.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Evolution favours increasing infectiousness but decreasing lethality:.
It strongly favors increasing infectiousness, decreasing lethality - very little (or none). Few diseases are lethal so quickly that they actually interfere with transmission, and if death comes after their infectious period there is no selective pressure at all. The highly lethal disease plague has never shown selection for being less lethal in humans, Humans however have shown to be selected to be more resistant to plague (selection for a Toll-like receptor groups) due to it high lethality. In fact I cannot think of a single major human pathogen for which selection for decreasing lethality has actually been shown.
Re:Is it only more infectious.... (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact I cannot think of a single major human pathogen for which selection for decreasing lethality has actually been shown.
What happened to the Spanish flu? Hmm, according to Wiki, it first mutated to a more deadly version, the second wave, then may have mutated to a more harmless version. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Probably about the same.
It's been obvious from the beginning that there are more than one of these fuckers out there. My guess is, you get one, it's a "mild" case. Catch two or more at once, you're in trouble.
This explains nicely how a whole cruise ship full of geezers can get infected with only a handful of fatalities -- or a whole church full of them, as we saw in Washington -- while a nursing home somewhere else gets completely wiped out.
The multiple-infection phenomenon may scale up to cities (NYC) an
Re: Is it only more infectious.... (Score:2)
Why is that the only thing? If it's very infectious but not very lethal, there is an increased risk of further mutations resulting in a new strain that could be very lethal, because more people will be infected,and it's coming in contact with more varied immune systems. COVID-19 is an RNA virus, and they are notoriously better at adapting and mutating than DNA viruses.
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That's a silly and pedantic definition of "deadly". With that outlook, Ebola and SARS are not deadly.
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"...or also more deadly?"
Sorry, I wanted to post a few witty (IMHO) death quotes from discworld but not even death can get past the CAPS filter.
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A virus that kills its host also kills itself and eventually goes extinct. Therefore as viruses mutate, even if they become more contagious, they tend to be less deadly over time.
Re:Is it only more infectious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're being serious about starting gods-be-damned World War 3 then you're a fucking lunatic and need to be locked up and medicated, it would end our civilization.
In either case: shut up, you're not helping.
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How would diverting resources to a war and away from the economy stimulate the economy? And if anything it would make the debt grow, not abolish it. After dumping several trillions into the economy and it being flat on its back, the evidence isn't backing you on this.
Re: Is it only more infectious.... (Score:2)
Broken window fallacy.
Broken widow fallacy too.
Re: Is it only more infectious.... (Score:2)
Who can SERIOUSLY think that the existence of Uber or Amazon makes the world richer?
Probably Bezos, assuming he's a fan of Michael Jackson and believes that he is the world.
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Oh no, it's not sarcasm. I really am that deluded.
And not only deluded, but just functionally unable to understand the amount of good such visionary titans like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, have brought and will continue to bring over the world.
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> ...or also more deadly?
> That's the main thing I"d be worried about.
When are we going to start a war with China to stimulate the economy and abolish the debt? After the election?
This Plandemic reads like a David Benioff / D.B. Weiss hack script.
Were you going for the funny mod? That could also explain the "Plandemic" thing.
Alternatively, if you were serious, then the most likely answer is after losing the election decisively "because Xi interfered in MY election". Who first said "This means war!" There is a citation for "Of course, you know, this means war!" from Duck Soup in 1933, but Groucho is much more dignified than Trump. I think it must go back before that, and I suspect the Marx Brothers "borrowed" a lot of their jokes.
On the larger topic,
I needed some good news. (Score:2)
I believe this is also the more deadly variant.
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So long as you're the first into the suicide booth, I'll happily consider your position. Being cavalier and dismissive of other people's lives is character flaw, not a positive trait. That's tens of thousands of families robbed of loved ones, who in many cases, they couldn't even see before they died. I don't know nihilistic and apathetic you have to become to decide that millions of lives are expendable. Perhaps you can enlighten as to your technique of shuttering your moral center.
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He's a Prime Candidate for Logan's Run
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Hell, if one billion die, life could still go on as if nothing happened, and they would be replaced in a few years. People vastly over-value human life. At some point, it stops being a good thing and becomes a bad thing. We passed that point.
The eco-fascist final solution to the human being question. You're the folks who undervalue human life.
I needed some good diseases. (Score:2)
The belief it couldn't happen to them.
Re: I needed some good news. (Score:2)
Ignorance.
We are already a decade after 'peak child'. The biggest problem of humanity is solved. Partially by chance; we did not know what we needed to achieve for people to decrease their family sizes voluntarily. Now we know.
It seems most people don't update their knowledge of the world after high school.
Perhaps this explain the early EU cases (Score:2)
If the virus initially was less contagious, perhaps a few odd cases did indeed appear in the US and EU (e.g. in France, as is in the news today), but failed to take hold). Then a second strain came and caused (alongside political delay) the current havoc.
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If you read the paper you can see that the original Wuhan lineage did already take hold before this new one came along. But it is possible that some other variant was spreading and was poorly contagious before the Wuhan lineage took off. This is actually likely if this virus jumped to humans recently. It takes time for these bugs to adapt to new hosts.
Re: Perhaps this explain the early EU cases (Score:3)
As previoisly reported, according to researchers, in the region where covid-19 started, seven million people are found woth anti-bodies against that family of viruses each year.
There are many, *many* strains out there. Probably many new ones each month.
If the new strain is dominant (Score:2, Troll)
'The report's authors said they felt an "urgent need for an early warning" so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain.'
If the new strain is dominant, then it would seem to me that clinical trials of drugs and vaccines would be happening mostly with people infected with this new strain - which is what you would want.
I don't mean to be glib... but I suspect at least some of the "urgency" is that of the authors wanting to get their names recognize
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Except even if shown effective, they may be sub-optimal.
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Yes, but "sub-optimal" is better than "ineffective". If a sub-optimal but widely spread vaccine is not 100% effective, but it is able to reduce Covid-19's R value below 1 (as in, one infected person spreads the virus to less than one new host, on average), then we can squash this. If Remdesivir can only shorten recovery times by 15%, that is 15% more beds and ventilators available for the next patient.
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Re: If the new strain is dominant (Score:2)
Worse - it might make us think entire valid approaches to a vaccine donâ(TM)t work when in fact they do... just against the wrong virus.
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It's important, because the work being done now to develop drugs and vaccines maybe based on lab samples and analysis done with the older strain that is no longer dominant.
So yes, clinical trials will likely end up being done with people infected wit the new strain... using drugs developed for the old strain.
That may or may not matter in the end, but it's important to be aware of so those working on the treatments can factor that into the development *before* they spend more time and resources on a drug tha
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Depends on where the clinical trials etc are done. For now the virus has mostly been stopped from inter-region spread, so the new strain is perhaps only on the east coast of N. America with the weaker strain on the west coast (only 9 new cases here in BC today) so if they do the trials on only the west coast, it would likely be the weak strain their testing against.
Still lots to learn
Not over (Score:2)
Covid 19 is over. The fat lady just could not sing due to the breathing tube down her throat.
If the fat lady still has a breathing tube down her throat then clearly Covid-19 is not over. That's the concern: there is a lot of understandable pressure to lift the lockdown but the vast majority of the population is still vulnerable. Covid-19 will not be over until we establish herd immunity either by vaccination or by enough of us surviving it. At that point the fat lady - and all the rest of us - will be singing!
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There are very few jurisdictions reporting no new cases, so no, it isn't over.
Darwin at work again ... (Score:4, Interesting)
the more infectious strain will get into more people faster and so out compete the others. Survival of the fittest.
Re:Darwin at work again ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but there is no real competition between strains. Viruses more closely match the preditor-prey model. The faster spreading strain may sweep through the population faster, build herd immunity, effectively consuming all of it's prey, and starve itself. A slower spreading strain may continue to find new hosts, finding an equilibrium where it can mutate to reinfect or find new hosts as people travel and children are borne.
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Yeah, well that will be news to the evangelicals.
If you explain it to them carefully, you can usually get evangelicals to accept survival of the fittest and natural selection.
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That implies they are able to think logically.
Usually the problem isn't logic, it's incorrect data.
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Re: Darwin at work again ... (Score:2)
I found it funny.
Triggered much? Rustled your jimmies?
You're definitey an expert on loserdom though, I give you that.
Glycoprotein modifications are important (Score:2, Informative)
I've opined at length about the danger of glycoprotein mutation. This is what makes a virus resistant to a known vaccine.
When I pointed out a month ago that the virus that was passing around the USA had a different glycoprotein structure than the virus that was originally in Wuhan, I was shouted down and silenced. I tried to raise this exact alarm over a month ago because the vaccine work was and is still being done on an irrelevant strain of the virus.
I am sure I will be shouted down once again. Whatever.
Re:Glycoprotein modifications are important (Score:4, Funny)
And to think no one listened to an anonymous coward....what IS the world coming to...
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I've opined at length about the danger of glycoprotein mutation.
You have? Really??
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That's really too bad. If he did have a point and a real life he could have given a shit about talking to people who might have made a difference. But chances are they were already looking into the possibility anyways.
Re:Glycoprotein modifications are important (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Who didn't know that mutations in the virus glycoproteins enable viruses to evade vaccines and immunity? That has been known for decades. Try to find out something that hasn't been known since the 1960s. Can you tell us some 1980s stuff?
2. You pointed out there were strains circulating with glycoprotein mutations last month? Did you realize that was published on routinely and tracked since at least February and March, possibly even January.
The most worrysome part... (Score:2)
The paper continues a fairly long line of existing evidence that the accumulating mutations are not more deadly than the original. More contagious but not more deadly. That's maybe the good news.
The bad news is that they see evidence of mutations "migrating" between different viral lineages. If that holds up then the most likely way this could happen is if two or more lineages can infect the same person at the same time so their genetic material can intermingle. That's where you could start to see potential
The cause is pretty obvious.. (Score:5, Funny)
This is no doubt thanks to 5G. The Deep State is sending out signals, telling the virus how to do more damage. It's all in Hillary's emails.
We need Trump to finish his Covfefe serum stat, to save the planet from this! Please send more bleach and light bulbs to the White House!!
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Here's the opposite of your post.
"New virus strain. God damned Trump!"
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"God damned Trump!"
I'm not religious, is this true? It seems plausible, but why are the rest of us being punished.
Could this be why people got re-infected? (Score:2)
Or does a natural immunity against one, from having been sick, protect against the other?
Also: Time to break out the big guns?: Gene therapy via gene drive.
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It hasn't been proven that folks have gotten reinfected, the CoVid tests don't accurately measure living viruses in the host. Thus you can wind up with false positives, since the test will count dead virus detritus and virus fragments that haven't cleared out of the host, as well as a current active infection.
We're fucked (Score:3)
Re:We're fucked (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that Trump was just a more belligerent version of how a number of leaders responded. The Chinese government's first response was to have some police show up at the doctor that outed the existence of clusters of infected people and ordered him to shut up. The Brazilian president is behaving like any even dumber version of Trump, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom didn't bother showing up to COBRA meetings and publicly bragged that he was shaking lots of hands.
The few countries, like Taiwan, that responded quickly and decisively, were the ones that hadn't basically abandoned any preparations built during the SARS and MERS outbreaks. In other words, their governments are populated by individuals smart enough to realize that pandemics are a part of being a living organism, and knew that at any time, a new novel pathogen could show up at their doorstep.
Trump is a symptom of a disease. To see other symptoms, see the right wing and libertarian idiots on this very forum who either deny there is a pandemic, or want to sacrifice tens of thousands of people, when we don't even fully understand the pathogen causing it all. Want to see the definition of delicate snowflakes, see the weekend warriors showing up at the Michigan state legislature with their guns, like somehow they can bluster the virus out of existence. That is my operating definition of a fucking idiot.
Re:We're fucked (Score:5, Insightful)
She would have not screwed up the pandemic response team set up by Obama. She would have listened to her scientific advisors in January and got testing out in vast numbers in February. She would have expanded the scope of government-supported contact tracers to break infection chains. All sorts of useful, big government stuff.
She would have clearly explained the danger to the American public right from the start.
She would not have sent out SMS messages like these:
'The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant. Surgeon General, “The risk is low to the average American.”'
10:20 PM - Mar 9, 2020
'So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!'
1:47 AM - Mar 10, 2020
Re:We're fucked (Score:5, Insightful)
Trump acted immediately when his scientific advisors told him to.
Really? His scientific advisors were telling him it would all go away by April. Just 5 cases soon to be zero. Anyone who want's a test can get one. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear?
In that case, another major difference is Hillary would have had competent advisors.
Back in the real world.
I seem to remember Trump's scientific advisors 'clarifying' what Trump said quite frequently.
And Trump contradicting his advisors even more regularly.
It's laughable to think that a Democrat would have done better.
It's laughable to think that anyone would have done worse.
Well (Score:2)
Isn't that just tickety-boo.
keeps on spreading (Score:3)
Maryland acted very early in declaring a state of emergency, stay at home orders, we are wearing masks in stores now.
I've been wondering why nothing we do seems to slow down the spread of this virus.. a newer, more contagious strain would explain that.
Its scary how fast this thing has mutated... if it keeps mutating like this we will never have a vaccine for every version. it mutates faster than we can make new vaccines. here is the maryland curve
https://coronavirus.maryland.g... [maryland.gov]
Some considerations (Score:2, Insightful)
The Y axis of 'flattening the curve' means an extended X axis. This allows more time for the virus to mutate into something more deadly before the populace develops a herd immunity. Then there are the doctors and nurses exposed to the danger and their risk of PTSD from an extended exposure to a mutating virus. Wouldn't discussions of exit strategies to the lockdown be appropriate considering the introduction of surveillance technology?
By exit strategy (as a criteria for a progressive ending to this loc
polybasic furin cleavage site PRRA (Score:2)
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Re:Can't we please be honest and stop the FEAR ? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Just 52, years, ago, however, another flu, (H3N2), known as the Hong Kong flu, killed roughly 100,000 Americans and over 1,000,000 people worldwide. What makes this flu particularly notable is the fact that most media outlets are not reporting on it and the fact that absolutely nothing was shut down. In fact, Woodstock — that was attended by an estimated 500,000 people — took place smack dab in the middle of the H3N2 flu pandemic."
So, 50 years ago -- Did we have refrigerator trucks parked out side of hospitals to house bodies? Hospitals straining at their seams from too many patients all at once? Did we have mass graves? We do now.
h3n2 killed over 100k americans over what? 2 years? We broke 70k in about 5 weeks with covid. 8-9 weeks if you want to count from shutdown.
They are not the same thing.
Re:Can't we please be honest and stop the FEAR ? (Score:5, Informative)
This is getting to be laughable. From the beginning of the pandemic people were saying this is no worse than the flu, now that it is far worse than seasonal flu it is no worse than a major pandemic of the last century.
Well, it is already far worse. The number of confirmed deaths from Hong Kong flu was about 33,800.
https://www.sinobiological.com... [sinobiological.com]
The number you are quoting (100,000 deaths) is an adjusted estimate by the CDC.
Right now we are at above 70,000 confirmed deaths and using the same adjustment multiplier we would be at about 200,000 deaths (both confirmed and not explicitly accounted for).
Now, to be fair, US population in 1968 was about 200 million and it is a bit over 300 million now. So on a percentage basis we are only slightly worse now than after Hong Kong flu. But we are still near the peak of infections with maybe double the total of deaths before this first peak is over and we may be looking at more peaks in the fall/winter and beyond.
To summarize: there were three major flu pandemics in the 20th century: Spanish, Asian, and Hong Kong. Where we are now is already worse than the latter two even on a percentage basis adjusting for population. It is unlikely this will be as bad as Spanish flu unless there is a second wave, worse than the first (which is what happened with Spanish flu btw). But this is going to be not far off from Spanish flu even under optimistic scenarios.
Re:Can't we please be honest and stop the FEAR ? (Score:5, Informative)
Here is another citation:
https://www.prb.org/avian-flu-... [prb.org]
Any honest attempt to count deaths due to pandemics will lead to similar numbers. Bottom line: we are rapidly getting to the point where current pandemic is as bad as Asian flu and Hong Kong flu combined. And again, that's the sitrep right now, in the middle of our pandemic.
Now for Spanish flu. Population in 1918 was roughly a third of today. Take their number of deaths, multiple by three and you get about 2 million dead. That's the worst case scenario for COVID-19 if we have no lockdowns (or even if we have our feeble pretend lockdowns and fail to find a vaccine in a reasonable time frame). So this could yet be as bad as Spanish flu but there is hope it won't be as bad.
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Re:Can't we please be honest and stop the FEAR ? (Score:5, Interesting)
To summarize: there were three major flu pandemics in the 20th century: Spanish, Asian, and Hong Kong. Where we are now is already worse than the latter two even on a percentage basis adjusting for population. It is unlikely this will be as bad as Spanish flu unless there is a second wave, worse than the first (which is what happened with Spanish flu btw). But this is going to be not far off from Spanish flu even under optimistic scenarios.
Even the Spanish Flu, if it happened today, would not be nearly as bad as the Spanish flu as it happened in 1918. Spanish Influenza killed mostly by secondary bacterial infections. Antibiotics were not available back then, but they are now. That Covid-19 is as bad as it is, with modern medicine available, is telling.
Re:Can't we please be honest and stop the FEAR ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely. Also, Spanish flu killed as many as it did due to the WWI. If you look at the data in the link you will see that the first wave did not kill too many able bodied adults between 20 y.o. and 40 y.o. but the second one (most connected with the fierce fighting and troop movements at the end of the war) had this unusual age profile. So even if it just were to have happened in peacetime, it is likely that it would not have been as bad.
COVID-19 is happening in peacetime. Our ability to work from home is lots better than in 1918 when they tried to use phones for some distancing but that did not work well. We have antibiotics to handle secondary infections and even some antivirals (mostly HIV stuff which is being studied for possible COVID-19 use). And yet, this thing is already the defining pandemic of its era and in some parts of the USA literally everyone knows someone who has suffered badly from it or died from it.
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As I keep saying, pathogens don't just stop because of the illusion that shutting a border stops them. Before there were any serious calls to close borders, the virus was already in Europe and North America. Our goose was cooked probably in late December.
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I'd say the most closing the borders in January would have done is delayed the inevitable. Maybe, just maybe, that might have meant a slightly smaller curve because the main hit would have come a bit later, but considering countries like Italy and Spain, where large portions of the population live in a Mediterranean clime, were among the worst hit, it's pretty clear this virus isn't seasonally attuned, so I doubt the peaks arriving in May or June, as opposed to March and April, would have made that much dif
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Re: Useless post, no peer reviewed (Score:3)
Not useless!
Otherwise I hope you never left your bed, since your observation of the floor in front of it was not peer reviewed!
Hell, it wasn't even a double-blind study! Sigma how much?
But hey, I only got anecdotal evidence of you, so you don't exist. *poof*