pinkelsteinsmom
Veteran Member
"Let them eat cake"
CORONA Main Coronavirus thread
- Thread starter Heliobas Disciple
- Start date
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- coronavirus
SusieSunshine
Veteran Member
‘We have community transmission now.’ Bexar County changes tactics from containment to mitigation
On Thursday, Bexar County health officials confirmed the inevitable -- that the new <a href="https://www.ksat.com/topic/coronavirus" target=_blank>coronavirus </a>that causes the respiratory illness COVID-19, is now being transmitted within the community.
www.ksat.com
San Antonio – On Thursday, Bexar County health officials confirmed the inevitable -- that the new coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness COVID-19, is now being transmitted within the community.
Until late this week, the cases in Bexar County could be traced to travel outside of Texas or to contact with someone who had traveled outside the state and tested positive.
“Our focus is shifting from containment to community mitigation,” said Michelle Vigil, public relations manager for the Metropolitan Health District.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes community mitigation as “a set of actions that persons and communities can take to help slow the spread of respiratory virus infections. Community mitigation is especially important before a vaccine or drug becomes widely available.”
Texas, Bexar County and San Antonio have all issued emergency declarations to implement social distancing and other measures in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19.
The shift from containment to community mitigation means that Metro Health officials will no longer spend great effort tracing the steps of people with COVID-19 to notify others who may have had contact with them.
“We will not be doing any intense contact tracing,” Vigil said.
Buckle up.
MGT
Senior Member
I agree with you, Texican. The repercussions will be severe.
Indiana's numbers are out:
126 Cases, 3 deaths and 833 tested.
Here are some of the counties with the most cases, current totals = the new cases today:
Marion: 46 = 21 new
Hamilton: 10 = 5 new
Johnson: 7 = 3 new
Lake: 7 = 1 new
Hendricks: 6 = 2 New
New counties today, each has 1 case: Delaware, Elkhart, Greene, Hancock, Harrison, Miami and Scott. Yesterday these came on board with 1 case each: Allen (3 new), Grant, Shelby, Vanderburgh and Vigo (1 new).
The Hancock Co case is a Greenfield-Central Community Schools teacher. The last time the patient had contact with others at school was on March 9.
The health department wants any Greenfield Intermediate School students, teachers, or staff who have COVID-19-related symptoms to contact their healthcare provider first and then also contact the Hancock County Health Department at (317) 477-1125.
fox59.com
126 Cases, 3 deaths and 833 tested.
Here are some of the counties with the most cases, current totals = the new cases today:
Marion: 46 = 21 new
Hamilton: 10 = 5 new
Johnson: 7 = 3 new
Lake: 7 = 1 new
Hendricks: 6 = 2 New
New counties today, each has 1 case: Delaware, Elkhart, Greene, Hancock, Harrison, Miami and Scott. Yesterday these came on board with 1 case each: Allen (3 new), Grant, Shelby, Vanderburgh and Vigo (1 new).
The Hancock Co case is a Greenfield-Central Community Schools teacher. The last time the patient had contact with others at school was on March 9.
The health department wants any Greenfield Intermediate School students, teachers, or staff who have COVID-19-related symptoms to contact their healthcare provider first and then also contact the Hancock County Health Department at (317) 477-1125.
Greenfield-Central Community Schools teacher tests positive for coronavirus
HANCOCK COUNTY, Ind. – A Greenfield-Central Community Schools teacher tested positive for the coronavirus. The Hancock County Health Department made the announcement Thursday afternoon. The teache…
fox59.com
MGT
Senior Member
Friday, March 20, 2020
Trending: Out-of-control teenagers coughing on grocery store produce
Idle teenagers are participating in a “disturbing trend” of coughing on grocery store produce and posting their pranks online as the nation fights the coronavirus, which is known to spread from human “droplets” spraying from mouths.www.washingtonexaminer.com
Trending: Out-of-control teenagers coughing on grocery store produce
by Paul Bedard
March 20, 2020
"Idle teenagers are participating in a “disturbing trend” of coughing on grocery store produce and posting their pranks online as the nation fights the coronavirus, which is known to spread from human “droplets” spraying from mouths.
The latest incident occurred in the Washington exurb of Purcellville, Virginia, some 55 miles from the White House.
According to a Purcellville Police Department report, “An incident occurred at a local grocery store involving juveniles reportedly coughing on produce, while filming themselves and posting it on social media.”
The report said that the store, identified on social media as Harris Teeter, immediately removed the items and cleaned up the area. The police said, "The grocery store immediately removed the items in question, and has taken appropriate measures to ensure the health of store patrons."
On a community Facebook page, one woman who said she witnessed the event wrote, “Punk teenagers are hitting the grocery stores, coughing all over the produce and the grocery items — filming it and posting it to YouTube. It scared the hell out of one elderly woman who was just trying to grocery shop. Why the hell aren’t these people keeping their teens home??? This is not summer vacay!”
The police investigating the case said that there is a national trend by teenagers to cough on food and film it.
“We are asking for parental assistance in monitoring your teenagers’ activities, as well as their social media posts to avoid the increase of any further such incidents. We have learned that this appears to be a disturbing trend on social media across the country, and we ask for help from parents to discourage this behavior immediately,” said the police.
In the past two weeks, schools around the nation have closed as authorities deal with the virus."
No doubt they are the same idiots who were eating Tide Pods.
Go to this URL; Guidance on Executive Order 202.6 | Empire State Development I was pleasantly surprised by what NYS lists as essential.
jward
passin' thru
Novel Coronavirus - Covid19
@PandemicCovid20
·
3h
A coronavirus expert from KU predicted this pandemic—here's what he says will happen next http://dlvr.it/RSJ3vb #coronavirus #covid19 #pandemic
View: https://twitter.com/PandemicCovid20/status/1241335386665676800?s=20
@PandemicCovid20
·
3h
A coronavirus expert from KU predicted this pandemic—here's what he says will happen next http://dlvr.it/RSJ3vb #coronavirus #covid19 #pandemic
View: https://twitter.com/PandemicCovid20/status/1241335386665676800?s=20
The Hammer
Has No Life - Lives on TB
View: https://twitter.com/lookner/status/1241385531902242817?s=19
NY Governor Cuomo: "You have to expect at the end of the day, 40% to 80% of the population is going to be infected. So the only question is how fast is the rate...and can you slow that rate so your hospital system can deal with it."
NY Governor Cuomo: "You have to expect at the end of the day, 40% to 80% of the population is going to be infected. So the only question is how fast is the rate...and can you slow that rate so your hospital system can deal with it."
Tom McDowell
BAMN
New York governor: "Everything that can be done is being done"
CNN
Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke today on what New York state is doing to respond to the growing coronavirus epidemic.
At the top of Cuomo's list is increasing hospital capacity, building beds and seeking out locations to help treat a growing number of infected.
www.cnn.com
===
.
CNN
Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke today on what New York state is doing to respond to the growing coronavirus epidemic.
At the top of Cuomo's list is increasing hospital capacity, building beds and seeking out locations to help treat a growing number of infected.
Cuomo said he will be looking at the Javits Center, SUNY Stony Brook and the Westchester County Center, among other places, as possible treatment locations.
New York governor: "Everything that can be done is being done"
Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke today on what New York state is doing to respond to the growing coronavirus epidemic.
===
.
pinkelsteinsmom
Veteran Member
There will be no lock down. Trump is paralyzed by the so called patriots screaming "you can't take our freedoms" and the "it's only the flu" bunch. In other words he is 5 weeks late to be able to contain this , we will go the same route as China and Italy! You, your family, economy and country are GONE!
jward
passin' thru
A coronavirus expert from KU predicted this pandemic—here’s what he says will happen next
Until recently, KU professor Anthony Fehr was one of about 100 people studying coronavirus full-time
March 20, 2020
Martin Cizmar
Scientist in a clean room
If you’d been a molecular biosciences student at the University of Kansas last semester, you might have known this was coming. In class, the concept of a deadly new coronavirus outbreak originating in China—such as the one currently bringing the world to its knees—was discussed. That class was taught by Dr. Anthony R. Fehr, Assistant Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of Kansas. Until very recently, Fehr was one of about a hundred people in the country studying the coronavirus full-time.
“I had a lecture on coronaviruses last semester, in the fall, before this all happened,” he says. “I knew that there’s a lot of SARS-like viruses in China that this could happen. So I actually had a slide in my lecture that was like, ‘there are lots of SARS-like coronaviruses, we could have another outbreak within our lifetime.'”
“So I basically, you know, predicted something,” he says. “I guess I was conservative on the timeframe. But I posted that to my Facebook and everybody’s like, ‘pretty crazy!'”
Right now, Fehr is working to research conserved proteins within coronaviruses and trying to develop compounds that could inhibit them.
“We’re several years away from having anything that can be used to humans, though,” he says. “So I’m pushing my research for the next outbreak.”
And to hear Fehr tell it, there likely will be another outbreak of a coronavirus like the one currently roiling the world.
Will there be a vaccine for the novel coronavirus? Will we one day get coronavirus shots like we get flu shots? What is China’s connection to this outbreak and previous ones? Why is the disease called COVID-19 instead of SARS?
Fehr was generous enough to give us a half-hour of his time to answer these and many other questions. Some of the information is a little dense, as you might expect from one of a handful of the most knowledgable people in the world on this subject. But Fehr’s perspective is something you’ll want to hear.
Here’s a transcript of our interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Kansas City magazine: Can you just kind of give me a little bit of background on how you came to study the coronavirus and the typical career path of a virologist?
Dr. Anthony Fehr: I started working on coronaviruses back in 2012. Just to give you a sense of normally how academic researchers progress: We do our graduate work at one university, and when I was in graduate school, I worked on cytomegalovirus, which is a whole other virus. When you finish grad school, you go on to what’s kind of a kind of an internship where you find a lab that you want to work in for a period of several years. And then, hopefully, you do well enough there that you ultimately get some other place to like you enough that you get your own laboratory. So I went to Dr. Stanley Perlman’s lab at the University of Iowa, mostly just because I’m a trained virologist and his lab seemed very interesting. They had actually been working on coronavirus since the ’80s. It just seemed like a good lab and a good fit for me, so that’s where I did my post-doctoral work.
At the time, it was kind of iffy in terms of funding because the original SARS outbreak occurred in 2002. The money from that was starting to wane. And so there was definitely a little bit of, ‘This could be a tough career road to go down if there are no other coronavirus outbreaks in the near future.’ Well that year, actually, MERS coronavirus came out. Now with this one, the funding situation seems like it will be a lot better going forward.
I would imagine you will never worry about funding again for the rest of your career. I know that coronavirus mostly comes from animals, specifically bats. Do you mostly study animals?
I more or less study the virus. A lot of our studies are, you know, geared toward viruses in human cells. So what we do is we take these little, you could say, petri dishes. We put in human cells, and then we study how the virus replicates and that kind of thing.
But we also do quite a few mouse experiments as well. So we kind of do a combination of those. A lot of human viruses we actually have mouse models for.
From doing a little bit of reading about this, one thing that really struck me is that the ‘non-alarmist’ take was ‘It’s the flu, bro.’ You heard people saying early, and it’s, of course, not true. But from what I understand coronavirus can be the common cold—which we’ve had no ability to tackle throughout history.
So, I’ll explain that. There are a lot of different viruses that cause the common cold. Coronaviruses account for about ten to twenty percent of the common cold cases each year. And there are four different coronaviruses that can cause the common cold. So you’ve likely been infected with a coronavirus before—that is true.
And so the difference between our cold viruses and then viruses like the flu and then this SARS coronavirus 2— and SARS originally—is that the cold viruses generally get into our upper respiratory tract and that’s about as far as they go. They don’t really go any further, they kind of get in there, and cause you to cough a little bit, to sneeze, maybe give you a headache or those kinds of things. But what’s different about these viruses, they can go into the lower respiratory tract, and when they get in there and start replicating really aggressively, that can really affect your ability to breathe. And it can actually cause a lot of other damage.
So this virus is definitely not just a cold virus.
A lot of people are going to be asymptomatic, or have mild symptoms. And for those people what’s probably happening is that they’re basically controlling the virus before it gets into the lower respiratory tract.
And that’s because of antibodies they have from battling colds over the years?
No, that’s, that’s actually incorrect. The antibodies directed against the cold viruses will not be able to do anything against this virus. Probably what it is: Most healthy individuals have what’s called an innate immune response, which is where you don’t necessarily need to have previously seen this.
We all have pretty strong defenses—our cells have a lot of you know, just regular defenses that they can have all viruses. And in younger, healthy people, those defenses oftentimes are good enough to stop the virus before it gets going. Or at least delay it long enough before we can develop our own antibodies against this virus.
Oh! And so one reason that children are doing so much better with this might be that while they don’t have as many antibodies, they do have better innate defenses, because that’s kind of a way that their bodies are set up since they don’t have all those antibodies yet, but they have a more aggressive innate response?
Yeah, I mean, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. But I think, in general, you can say that the immune system between young and middle-aged people that are doing fine here is different from elderly people. Elderly people have a diminished immune response and it’s often dysregulated.
On my Twitter page, there’s a recent article quoting a lot of work from my old boss, Dr. Stanley Perlman, who had a lot of comments about what the differences could be in children.
Until I read about this, I didn’t really understand the progression of SARS. I’ve always seen this referred to as COVID-19. But now technically it’s called SARS-CoV-2, right?
Well, let me explain the naming, which is very confusing, and I kind of hate it. So, on the same day, we named two things. There’s the disease, which is COVID-19. And then there’s the virus, which is SARS-Coronavirus-2. They are distinct.
If you had the disease, and you say, ‘I had COVID-19’ that means you got a disease and you have a poor respiratory function or something like that. If you got the virus, SARS-CoV-2, that could mean a range of things. You could have no disease, you could have COVID-19. So COVID-19 is a disease whereas the virus is SARS Coronavirus-2.
It is odd. Going back 20 years to the SARS outbreak: SARS coronavirus was the original one, but the disease was named just ‘SARS.’ So, they named the virus, basically SARS coronavirus. And the disease was again Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome—that’s what SARS stands for. And that’s the disease.
The disease caused by this virus is almost identical to SARS, so why we need to name it a different disease, I’m not quite sure. It could have easily just been called SARS as well. Because that’s what it is: It’s a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Is the similarity to SARS something that we only learned later, or from the moment they were working on this were they saying, ‘Well, this is basically SARS?’ It seems like the major difference is that this spreads even more quickly?
In terms of the transmissibility of the virus, it is seemingly a lot more transmissible than the original SARS. But, yeah, as soon as we had the sequence of this virus, we knew that it was fairly closely related to SARS.
Getting into the sequencing. I know nothing, but from what I’ve read a lot of this stuff does tend to start in China because of the way humans and animals interact there and that’s where the genetics come from, so China is where a lot of the sequencing stuff actually happens. I was reading a Malcolm Gladwell story from the New Yorker story published in 1997 about the Spanish Flu and it mentioned Wuhan, and I’m like, “whaaaat?” I guess the current thinking is that the Spanish Flu of 1918, they think, actually originated in China. Not to politicize it or get into the racist, imperialistic ideas but as I understand it most of this work in virology involves China because of how humans and animals come into contact there. Does your work involve things that are happening in China a lot?
We don’t know exactly how this virus got into the human population, right? It’s clearly descended from a bat population—and what we do know is that there are a lot of coronaviruses in bats and a lot of SARS-like coronaviruses similar to this one and the original SARS. There’s a lot of viruses in bats in China. China has a lot of really amazing caves that are very important dwelling places for bats. Having said that, there are clearly coronaviruses in African bats—I think I saw a report where there was an Australian one. So it’s not totally just China, but there are a lot of bats with coronaviruses there.
Now, yes, the virus likely transmitted into some sort of wild animal and, yes, the fact that they do eat and sell wild animals—it could have contributed to this. But that’s also not clear, either. If we had bats with coronaviruses here, that could easily happen in the United States because we have close contact with animals. The virus might transmit in their feces or whatever. Who knows—your cat or some other animal that you interact with could certainly become infected with a virus if we had the same situation here.
So the wet animal markets are not the issue?
I think they might have possibly have contributed here. But I was talking to people that, you know, go to China a lot and that’s a pretty rare thing in China. Actually, they don’t have a lot of these wet animal markets, the vast majority of people there just go to the store, they don’t actually go to these markets. But it could have been one or two people that did it and, you know, started this outbreak.
So, compared to the original SARS, what are we doing right this time? And what did we do wrong? How is it different in the original SARS outbreak?
With the original SARS outbreak, China was less than forthcoming about telling the world that there was an outbreak. The technology also was dramatically slower back then, so we didn’t know what the virus was in that case—and I would have to say, “we” with quotation marks because I was barely in college at that time. But you can imagine the sequencing technology and the speed at which these things can get done or just is somewhat greater today than it was in 2000.
So, the great thing that happened here is that we got the sequence immediately, we could develop diagnostic tests very quickly. And considering the speed at which the virus transmits through the human population, had we not had that, China might have had quadruple or ten times more cases than they actually had—if not more that. That was a great thing. They were able to basically stop this outbreak.
What we’re not doing? It’s hard to say because, you know, there are a lot of hard decisions that have to be made when you talk about forcing quarantine and forcing people to stay in their houses and canceling lots of events, and I don’t know if I would have made the right decisions at the end of the day. But you look back at it probably the moment this virus got out of China and into some of these other countries and it was more than just a couple of cases in these other countries, we should have probably shut down our borders to any international travel. I don’t know if that would have solved it, because this virus is extremely tricky to stop from spreading. We don’t really have a clue how many people are actually infected in this country right now. I look at the numbers every day, and it’s like, there’s 10,000 now, but it could easily be five times that many—or more.
posted for fair use
www.kansascitymag.com
Until recently, KU professor Anthony Fehr was one of about 100 people studying coronavirus full-time
March 20, 2020
Martin Cizmar
If you’d been a molecular biosciences student at the University of Kansas last semester, you might have known this was coming. In class, the concept of a deadly new coronavirus outbreak originating in China—such as the one currently bringing the world to its knees—was discussed. That class was taught by Dr. Anthony R. Fehr, Assistant Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of Kansas. Until very recently, Fehr was one of about a hundred people in the country studying the coronavirus full-time.
“I had a lecture on coronaviruses last semester, in the fall, before this all happened,” he says. “I knew that there’s a lot of SARS-like viruses in China that this could happen. So I actually had a slide in my lecture that was like, ‘there are lots of SARS-like coronaviruses, we could have another outbreak within our lifetime.'”
“So I basically, you know, predicted something,” he says. “I guess I was conservative on the timeframe. But I posted that to my Facebook and everybody’s like, ‘pretty crazy!'”
Right now, Fehr is working to research conserved proteins within coronaviruses and trying to develop compounds that could inhibit them.
“We’re several years away from having anything that can be used to humans, though,” he says. “So I’m pushing my research for the next outbreak.”
And to hear Fehr tell it, there likely will be another outbreak of a coronavirus like the one currently roiling the world.
Will there be a vaccine for the novel coronavirus? Will we one day get coronavirus shots like we get flu shots? What is China’s connection to this outbreak and previous ones? Why is the disease called COVID-19 instead of SARS?
Fehr was generous enough to give us a half-hour of his time to answer these and many other questions. Some of the information is a little dense, as you might expect from one of a handful of the most knowledgable people in the world on this subject. But Fehr’s perspective is something you’ll want to hear.
Here’s a transcript of our interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Kansas City magazine: Can you just kind of give me a little bit of background on how you came to study the coronavirus and the typical career path of a virologist?
Dr. Anthony Fehr: I started working on coronaviruses back in 2012. Just to give you a sense of normally how academic researchers progress: We do our graduate work at one university, and when I was in graduate school, I worked on cytomegalovirus, which is a whole other virus. When you finish grad school, you go on to what’s kind of a kind of an internship where you find a lab that you want to work in for a period of several years. And then, hopefully, you do well enough there that you ultimately get some other place to like you enough that you get your own laboratory. So I went to Dr. Stanley Perlman’s lab at the University of Iowa, mostly just because I’m a trained virologist and his lab seemed very interesting. They had actually been working on coronavirus since the ’80s. It just seemed like a good lab and a good fit for me, so that’s where I did my post-doctoral work.
At the time, it was kind of iffy in terms of funding because the original SARS outbreak occurred in 2002. The money from that was starting to wane. And so there was definitely a little bit of, ‘This could be a tough career road to go down if there are no other coronavirus outbreaks in the near future.’ Well that year, actually, MERS coronavirus came out. Now with this one, the funding situation seems like it will be a lot better going forward.
I would imagine you will never worry about funding again for the rest of your career. I know that coronavirus mostly comes from animals, specifically bats. Do you mostly study animals?
I more or less study the virus. A lot of our studies are, you know, geared toward viruses in human cells. So what we do is we take these little, you could say, petri dishes. We put in human cells, and then we study how the virus replicates and that kind of thing.
But we also do quite a few mouse experiments as well. So we kind of do a combination of those. A lot of human viruses we actually have mouse models for.
From doing a little bit of reading about this, one thing that really struck me is that the ‘non-alarmist’ take was ‘It’s the flu, bro.’ You heard people saying early, and it’s, of course, not true. But from what I understand coronavirus can be the common cold—which we’ve had no ability to tackle throughout history.
So, I’ll explain that. There are a lot of different viruses that cause the common cold. Coronaviruses account for about ten to twenty percent of the common cold cases each year. And there are four different coronaviruses that can cause the common cold. So you’ve likely been infected with a coronavirus before—that is true.
And so the difference between our cold viruses and then viruses like the flu and then this SARS coronavirus 2— and SARS originally—is that the cold viruses generally get into our upper respiratory tract and that’s about as far as they go. They don’t really go any further, they kind of get in there, and cause you to cough a little bit, to sneeze, maybe give you a headache or those kinds of things. But what’s different about these viruses, they can go into the lower respiratory tract, and when they get in there and start replicating really aggressively, that can really affect your ability to breathe. And it can actually cause a lot of other damage.
So this virus is definitely not just a cold virus.
A lot of people are going to be asymptomatic, or have mild symptoms. And for those people what’s probably happening is that they’re basically controlling the virus before it gets into the lower respiratory tract.
And that’s because of antibodies they have from battling colds over the years?
No, that’s, that’s actually incorrect. The antibodies directed against the cold viruses will not be able to do anything against this virus. Probably what it is: Most healthy individuals have what’s called an innate immune response, which is where you don’t necessarily need to have previously seen this.
We all have pretty strong defenses—our cells have a lot of you know, just regular defenses that they can have all viruses. And in younger, healthy people, those defenses oftentimes are good enough to stop the virus before it gets going. Or at least delay it long enough before we can develop our own antibodies against this virus.
Oh! And so one reason that children are doing so much better with this might be that while they don’t have as many antibodies, they do have better innate defenses, because that’s kind of a way that their bodies are set up since they don’t have all those antibodies yet, but they have a more aggressive innate response?
Yeah, I mean, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. But I think, in general, you can say that the immune system between young and middle-aged people that are doing fine here is different from elderly people. Elderly people have a diminished immune response and it’s often dysregulated.
On my Twitter page, there’s a recent article quoting a lot of work from my old boss, Dr. Stanley Perlman, who had a lot of comments about what the differences could be in children.
Until I read about this, I didn’t really understand the progression of SARS. I’ve always seen this referred to as COVID-19. But now technically it’s called SARS-CoV-2, right?
Well, let me explain the naming, which is very confusing, and I kind of hate it. So, on the same day, we named two things. There’s the disease, which is COVID-19. And then there’s the virus, which is SARS-Coronavirus-2. They are distinct.
If you had the disease, and you say, ‘I had COVID-19’ that means you got a disease and you have a poor respiratory function or something like that. If you got the virus, SARS-CoV-2, that could mean a range of things. You could have no disease, you could have COVID-19. So COVID-19 is a disease whereas the virus is SARS Coronavirus-2.
It is odd. Going back 20 years to the SARS outbreak: SARS coronavirus was the original one, but the disease was named just ‘SARS.’ So, they named the virus, basically SARS coronavirus. And the disease was again Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome—that’s what SARS stands for. And that’s the disease.
The disease caused by this virus is almost identical to SARS, so why we need to name it a different disease, I’m not quite sure. It could have easily just been called SARS as well. Because that’s what it is: It’s a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Is the similarity to SARS something that we only learned later, or from the moment they were working on this were they saying, ‘Well, this is basically SARS?’ It seems like the major difference is that this spreads even more quickly?
In terms of the transmissibility of the virus, it is seemingly a lot more transmissible than the original SARS. But, yeah, as soon as we had the sequence of this virus, we knew that it was fairly closely related to SARS.
Getting into the sequencing. I know nothing, but from what I’ve read a lot of this stuff does tend to start in China because of the way humans and animals interact there and that’s where the genetics come from, so China is where a lot of the sequencing stuff actually happens. I was reading a Malcolm Gladwell story from the New Yorker story published in 1997 about the Spanish Flu and it mentioned Wuhan, and I’m like, “whaaaat?” I guess the current thinking is that the Spanish Flu of 1918, they think, actually originated in China. Not to politicize it or get into the racist, imperialistic ideas but as I understand it most of this work in virology involves China because of how humans and animals come into contact there. Does your work involve things that are happening in China a lot?
We don’t know exactly how this virus got into the human population, right? It’s clearly descended from a bat population—and what we do know is that there are a lot of coronaviruses in bats and a lot of SARS-like coronaviruses similar to this one and the original SARS. There’s a lot of viruses in bats in China. China has a lot of really amazing caves that are very important dwelling places for bats. Having said that, there are clearly coronaviruses in African bats—I think I saw a report where there was an Australian one. So it’s not totally just China, but there are a lot of bats with coronaviruses there.
Now, yes, the virus likely transmitted into some sort of wild animal and, yes, the fact that they do eat and sell wild animals—it could have contributed to this. But that’s also not clear, either. If we had bats with coronaviruses here, that could easily happen in the United States because we have close contact with animals. The virus might transmit in their feces or whatever. Who knows—your cat or some other animal that you interact with could certainly become infected with a virus if we had the same situation here.
So the wet animal markets are not the issue?
I think they might have possibly have contributed here. But I was talking to people that, you know, go to China a lot and that’s a pretty rare thing in China. Actually, they don’t have a lot of these wet animal markets, the vast majority of people there just go to the store, they don’t actually go to these markets. But it could have been one or two people that did it and, you know, started this outbreak.
So, compared to the original SARS, what are we doing right this time? And what did we do wrong? How is it different in the original SARS outbreak?
With the original SARS outbreak, China was less than forthcoming about telling the world that there was an outbreak. The technology also was dramatically slower back then, so we didn’t know what the virus was in that case—and I would have to say, “we” with quotation marks because I was barely in college at that time. But you can imagine the sequencing technology and the speed at which these things can get done or just is somewhat greater today than it was in 2000.
So, the great thing that happened here is that we got the sequence immediately, we could develop diagnostic tests very quickly. And considering the speed at which the virus transmits through the human population, had we not had that, China might have had quadruple or ten times more cases than they actually had—if not more that. That was a great thing. They were able to basically stop this outbreak.
What we’re not doing? It’s hard to say because, you know, there are a lot of hard decisions that have to be made when you talk about forcing quarantine and forcing people to stay in their houses and canceling lots of events, and I don’t know if I would have made the right decisions at the end of the day. But you look back at it probably the moment this virus got out of China and into some of these other countries and it was more than just a couple of cases in these other countries, we should have probably shut down our borders to any international travel. I don’t know if that would have solved it, because this virus is extremely tricky to stop from spreading. We don’t really have a clue how many people are actually infected in this country right now. I look at the numbers every day, and it’s like, there’s 10,000 now, but it could easily be five times that many—or more.
posted for fair use
A coronavirus expert from KU predicted this pandemic—here's what he says will happen next
Scientist in a clean roomIf you’d been a molecular biosciences student at the University of Kansas last semester, you might have known this was coming. In class, the concept of a deadly new coronavirus outbreak originating in China—such as the one currently bringing the world to its knees—was...
www.kansascitymag.com
The Hammer
Has No Life - Lives on TB
View: https://twitter.com/BGrueskin/status/1241172932463923207?s=19
3 different NYC doctors: “I’ve been in ICU care for 15 years, and this is the worst I have ever seen" “We’ve never seen anything like this." “I’ve seen more cases in the last 10 days of severe respiratory illness than we’ve seen in years" Coronavirus Cases Strain New York City Hospitals: ‘We’re Getting Pounded’
3 different NYC doctors: “I’ve been in ICU care for 15 years, and this is the worst I have ever seen" “We’ve never seen anything like this." “I’ve seen more cases in the last 10 days of severe respiratory illness than we’ve seen in years" Coronavirus Cases Strain New York City Hospitals: ‘We’re Getting Pounded’
jward
passin' thru
Continued
A coronavirus expert from KU predicted this pandemic—here’s what he says will happen next
Until recently, KU professor Anthony Fehr was one of about 100 people studying coronavirus full-time
March 20, 2020
Martin Cizmar
Yeah, I mean, that I find those numbers to be a little bit funny. I remember someone in Ohio said, ‘Well, actually, we probably have 100,000 cases,’ but every case is being reported by the media as ‘There’s a new case in Jackson County!‘ I obviously have no idea, but it seems possible that there are several thousand cases in Jackson County right now. Because you know all of these things that other people don’t know, what do you do that most people don’t do in your daily life? Do you wash your hands for 40 seconds?
I probably do the same thing as everybody else does. I mean, I guess I’m concerned about it. But at the same time, you know, these things are really hard. You spend your whole life like doing all these cleaning things, and it’s still not a guarantee.
Do you think you’re going to get it? I mean, are we all going to get it?
That’s a great question. And—I don’t think we will. Even if you multiply the number of cases in China, by ten, that’s still less than one percent of their whole population. So even if they underestimated their numbers by ten, that’s still probably like, maybe like a percent of the whole population. So, that indicates that the large majority of us may or may not get it, you know, depending on how effectively we can stop it through the current measures. And so, we’ll see.
And I’m hopeful that perhaps this will kind of diminish with the season as the other coronaviruses do. I would not guarantee that—that’s certainly not something that’s guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m hopeful that will be the case and that we’ll have time to maybe get a vaccine out by the time we hit cold season next year.
The common cold, unlike the flu, is basically impossible to develop a vaccine for because it changes so quickly. Isn’t that something that we have to worry about with this?
So, as I said, coronavirus counts for about twenty percent of common colds but the vast majority of the other cases are what are called rhinoviruses. Rhinoviruses mutate very rapidly and you can’t really make a vaccine against those things.
Coronaviruses don’t mutate quite as rapidly. They still mutate rapidly, but they don’t move quite as rapidly as other RNA viruses, because they have what’s called “proofreading.” So they can actually “proofread” their genome when they make new copies, for errors.
Now, that’s not a foolproof system. They’re still going to make mutations. It’s not clear how long a vaccine would work—it could be like a flu where you have to kind of take the current strain and take your best guess at it. But at the same point, I don’t think it’s going to be an every year type of thing. It might be that it’s every five years or something like that, that you’ll see that your immunity might wane to this virus.
At the very least, it might have some partial immunity that can mitigate and take the lethality rate down from three or four percent to a more manageable number.
So do you think that getting a coronavirus shot is going to become like getting a flu shot after this?
Probably not. You know, these highly lethal coronaviruses are zoonotic events. We don’t have one like the flu that goes around every year. Maybe this one will become that—we really don’t know. This SARS Coronavirus-2 could be one of those that mutates enough that it reoccurs every year, or maybe every two or three years, and because it transmits so well we can’t really ever get rid of it. That’s certainly a possibility. The other possibility is we get a vaccine, it sort of goes away, and then we’re waiting for the next one.
And that is something that will happen again because there’s just so much genetic material out there in all of these bat populations around the world, if I understand correctly.
I think it’s likely. I think based on what happened this year they’re going to start really regulating markets in China. Again, a lot of this is just chance. And you know, maybe it’ll be five years from now, maybe it’ll be 50 years from now.
Something a lot of people don’t know that there was a big outbreak of a coronavirus just two years ago in China, in pigs. There was a pig virus that emerged from bats. Bats actually infected pigs and that moved into the pig population in China. Just two years ago.
So, again, that just re-emphasizes that this happens somewhat frequently.
I know from reading about past pandemics like the Spanish Flu that the second wave—when it comes back either slightly mutated or when people have their guard down—has been one of the tougher times.
I’ve never heard of that—the second wave being worse. It’ll be interesting to see how this happens. Will it come back? If it does go away during the summer—and that’s a big ‘if’—when does it come back, does it come back with basically the same sequence, so if you already had it you’re gonna be completely immune? Or will you only be partially immune? How many people will not get it because they had it asymptomatically that we just don’t know about? So there’s a lot of questions that come about from that.
Are they getting plasma with antibodies in it from people who have recovered to give to our top officials?
I’ve heard a bit about that. You know, if you recover from this, you’ll likely have antibodies that could be neutralizing or could inhibit the virus. And that’s a common way to treat patients—basically, give them these antibodies from another person. Now, you have to be careful because you have to have a blood match. So it’s not necessarily ideal, but I think it has the potential to work.
I know that there are many other infections where we do that and it can be helpful. All of these things that we’re throwing out there have not been tested. So I’m just saying it has worked in other viruses but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work here.
I have to ask about the reaction from your friends and family who probably thought ‘he’s doing this weird nerdy work on this virus, SARS, from 20 years ago.’ Have people that are close to you suddenly been like, ‘So tell me everything you know about coronavirus’?
Yeah, I’ve definitely had a few more friends come out of the woodwork that normally don’t talk to you that want to talk. But I take it all in stride. I feel like it’s our obligation as scientists to inform the public as best as we can, whenever people ask. They definitely seem to take more of an interest in my work now.
Categories: News
Tags: Anthony Fehr, antibodies, bat caves, bro, Coronavirus, coronavirus shot, COVID-19, Fehr Labs, Infectious Disease, It’s the flu, KU, plasma, SARS, SARS-CoV-2, spanish flu, virology, wet animal markets, wuhan
posted for fair use
www.kansascitymag.com
A coronavirus expert from KU predicted this pandemic—here’s what he says will happen next
Until recently, KU professor Anthony Fehr was one of about 100 people studying coronavirus full-time
March 20, 2020
Martin Cizmar
Yeah, I mean, that I find those numbers to be a little bit funny. I remember someone in Ohio said, ‘Well, actually, we probably have 100,000 cases,’ but every case is being reported by the media as ‘There’s a new case in Jackson County!‘ I obviously have no idea, but it seems possible that there are several thousand cases in Jackson County right now. Because you know all of these things that other people don’t know, what do you do that most people don’t do in your daily life? Do you wash your hands for 40 seconds?
I probably do the same thing as everybody else does. I mean, I guess I’m concerned about it. But at the same time, you know, these things are really hard. You spend your whole life like doing all these cleaning things, and it’s still not a guarantee.
Do you think you’re going to get it? I mean, are we all going to get it?
That’s a great question. And—I don’t think we will. Even if you multiply the number of cases in China, by ten, that’s still less than one percent of their whole population. So even if they underestimated their numbers by ten, that’s still probably like, maybe like a percent of the whole population. So, that indicates that the large majority of us may or may not get it, you know, depending on how effectively we can stop it through the current measures. And so, we’ll see.
And I’m hopeful that perhaps this will kind of diminish with the season as the other coronaviruses do. I would not guarantee that—that’s certainly not something that’s guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m hopeful that will be the case and that we’ll have time to maybe get a vaccine out by the time we hit cold season next year.
The common cold, unlike the flu, is basically impossible to develop a vaccine for because it changes so quickly. Isn’t that something that we have to worry about with this?
So, as I said, coronavirus counts for about twenty percent of common colds but the vast majority of the other cases are what are called rhinoviruses. Rhinoviruses mutate very rapidly and you can’t really make a vaccine against those things.
Coronaviruses don’t mutate quite as rapidly. They still mutate rapidly, but they don’t move quite as rapidly as other RNA viruses, because they have what’s called “proofreading.” So they can actually “proofread” their genome when they make new copies, for errors.
Now, that’s not a foolproof system. They’re still going to make mutations. It’s not clear how long a vaccine would work—it could be like a flu where you have to kind of take the current strain and take your best guess at it. But at the same point, I don’t think it’s going to be an every year type of thing. It might be that it’s every five years or something like that, that you’ll see that your immunity might wane to this virus.
At the very least, it might have some partial immunity that can mitigate and take the lethality rate down from three or four percent to a more manageable number.
So do you think that getting a coronavirus shot is going to become like getting a flu shot after this?
Probably not. You know, these highly lethal coronaviruses are zoonotic events. We don’t have one like the flu that goes around every year. Maybe this one will become that—we really don’t know. This SARS Coronavirus-2 could be one of those that mutates enough that it reoccurs every year, or maybe every two or three years, and because it transmits so well we can’t really ever get rid of it. That’s certainly a possibility. The other possibility is we get a vaccine, it sort of goes away, and then we’re waiting for the next one.
And that is something that will happen again because there’s just so much genetic material out there in all of these bat populations around the world, if I understand correctly.
I think it’s likely. I think based on what happened this year they’re going to start really regulating markets in China. Again, a lot of this is just chance. And you know, maybe it’ll be five years from now, maybe it’ll be 50 years from now.
Something a lot of people don’t know that there was a big outbreak of a coronavirus just two years ago in China, in pigs. There was a pig virus that emerged from bats. Bats actually infected pigs and that moved into the pig population in China. Just two years ago.
So, again, that just re-emphasizes that this happens somewhat frequently.
I know from reading about past pandemics like the Spanish Flu that the second wave—when it comes back either slightly mutated or when people have their guard down—has been one of the tougher times.
I’ve never heard of that—the second wave being worse. It’ll be interesting to see how this happens. Will it come back? If it does go away during the summer—and that’s a big ‘if’—when does it come back, does it come back with basically the same sequence, so if you already had it you’re gonna be completely immune? Or will you only be partially immune? How many people will not get it because they had it asymptomatically that we just don’t know about? So there’s a lot of questions that come about from that.
Are they getting plasma with antibodies in it from people who have recovered to give to our top officials?
I’ve heard a bit about that. You know, if you recover from this, you’ll likely have antibodies that could be neutralizing or could inhibit the virus. And that’s a common way to treat patients—basically, give them these antibodies from another person. Now, you have to be careful because you have to have a blood match. So it’s not necessarily ideal, but I think it has the potential to work.
I know that there are many other infections where we do that and it can be helpful. All of these things that we’re throwing out there have not been tested. So I’m just saying it has worked in other viruses but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work here.
I have to ask about the reaction from your friends and family who probably thought ‘he’s doing this weird nerdy work on this virus, SARS, from 20 years ago.’ Have people that are close to you suddenly been like, ‘So tell me everything you know about coronavirus’?
Yeah, I’ve definitely had a few more friends come out of the woodwork that normally don’t talk to you that want to talk. But I take it all in stride. I feel like it’s our obligation as scientists to inform the public as best as we can, whenever people ask. They definitely seem to take more of an interest in my work now.
Categories: News
Tags: Anthony Fehr, antibodies, bat caves, bro, Coronavirus, coronavirus shot, COVID-19, Fehr Labs, Infectious Disease, It’s the flu, KU, plasma, SARS, SARS-CoV-2, spanish flu, virology, wet animal markets, wuhan
posted for fair use
A coronavirus expert from KU predicted this pandemic—here’s what he says will happen next
Until recently, KU professor Anthony Fehr was one of about 100 people studying coronavirus full-time. He predicted a pandemic last year.
www.kansascitymag.com
bsharp
Veteran Member
Sounds like a good opportunity for many of those that have filed for unemployment. Unfortunately too many American citizens are too proud to do that type of manual labor. Or too lazy. When I lost a job and chose to go back to school when I was about 40, I spent a couple of summers detasseling. You do what you gotta do.
TerriHaute
Hoosier Gardener
Oh, I hope not. I live in Hendricks County too.I suspect Hendricks County will be added to the list before long. Plainfield has just put plans in place to help people get necessities without leaving home.
More than a dozen Indiana counties under travel advisories or watches as part of coronavirus pandemic response
CORONAVIRUS
by: FOX59 Web
Posted: Mar 20, 2020 / 08:18 AM EDT / Updated: Mar 20, 2020 / 08:55 AM EDT
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – More than a dozen Indiana counties have travel advisories or watches as of Friday morning.
The move is intended to discourage unnecessary travel to limit the spread of coronavirus.
Six counties are under yellow travel advisories, the lowest level. This means people should use caution when heading out.
Nine counties are under orange travel watches. This means people shouldn’t travel unless necessary. Essential travel can include to and from work, to pharmacies and grocery stores, etc.
In some cities—such as Fishers and Carmel—officials have instituted travel advisories on a local level.
Counties under a travel advisory:
Blackford
Brown
Cass
Owen
Rush
Wabash
Counties under a travel watch:
Grant
Hancock
Henry
Howard
Madison
Marion
St. Joseph
Sullivan
Wayne
The Indiana Department of Homeland Security tracks travel advisories at its website.
More than a dozen Indiana counties under travel advisories or watches as part of coronavirus pandemic response
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – More than a dozen Indiana counties have travel advisories or watches as of Friday morning. The move is intended to discourage unnecessary travel to limit the spread of coronavi…
SSTemplar
Veteran Member
If I had to be locked down at a power plant it would definitely be Millstone nuclear power in Connecticut. They have the very best cafeteria.
Power industry may ask staff to live on site as coronavirus outbreak worsens
The U.S. power industry may ask essential staff to sleep on site as the coronavirus outbreak continues to grow, Reuters reported Friday.Electric power plants are considered “critical infrastructure…thehill.com
Power industry may ask staff to live on site as coronavirus outbreak worsens
BY J. EDWARD MORENO - 03/20/20 10:27 AM EDT 110
The U.S. power industry may ask essential staff to sleep on site as the coronavirus outbreak continues to grow, Reuters reported Friday.
Electric power plants are considered “critical infrastructure” by the federal government, meaning as local and state governments impose shutdowns, they will still have to go to work.
Industry trade groups and electric cooperatives told the wire service that companies are stockpiling beds, blankets and food for those employees.
“The focus needs to be on things that keep the lights on and the gas flowing,” Scott Aaronson, vice president of security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), told Reuters, adding that some “companies are already either sequestering a healthy group of their essential employees or are considering doing that and are identifying appropriate protocols to do that.”
Public health officials have urged the public to practice social distancing as a preventative measure to slow the spread of the virus. If workers who are deemed essential still leave, go to work and return to their homes, it puts the people they live with at risk of exposure.
On Thursday night, California imposed a statewide shutdown, asking all citizens who do not work in those critical infrastructure industries not to leave their homes. Similar actions have been put in place in cities across America.
Countrymouse
Country exile in the city
This is a nice little video. Lucknow is the capitol of Uttar Pradesh in northern India; around 3 million population:
View attachment 187895
Here, scroll down some before it scrolls down too far:
Newstrack (@newstrackmedia) | Twitter
The latest Tweets from Newstrack (@newstrackmedia). https://t.co/PoDA3FUc9D is a web NEWS service, providing comprehensive coverage on Current Affairs, Politics, Sports more. Indiatwitter.com
I admire their spirit, but at the same time---
making noise with hand-clapping, bells, tambourines, and pot-banging reminds me just a little bit of reading in my history books how ancient cultures tried to drive away "the dragon eating the sun" during an eclipse by making a lot of noise...
CaryC
Has No Life - Lives on TB
For my fellow Mississippians:
jward have been doing a good job of keeping the US track, however, lot's more folks are coming here, and I've been putting up updates here, so will continue.
MS has gone hot, overnight from 80 cases to 140. Data below. Just want to mention a couple of things.
The North Miss. Medical Center as of last night are treating 4 cases, however there are now this AM 5 residents in Lee Co. with the virus. I'm sure they along with those in surrounding counties will end up there.
Also my son had a co-worker go to the ER yesterday from work with suspected Covid-19. The only person allowed inside was the patient, they would not let his wife in. So I take that to mean the hospital is on lockdown, meaning no visitors. My son is on a 14 day quarantine until further notice, (until the test comes back in 3-5 days).
Mississippi COVID-19 Cases
New cases as of 6 p.m. March 20, 2020
Our date for case reporting now better reflects the cutoff time for inclusion in this table.
All Mississippi cases to date
jward have been doing a good job of keeping the US track, however, lot's more folks are coming here, and I've been putting up updates here, so will continue.
MS has gone hot, overnight from 80 cases to 140. Data below. Just want to mention a couple of things.
The North Miss. Medical Center as of last night are treating 4 cases, however there are now this AM 5 residents in Lee Co. with the virus. I'm sure they along with those in surrounding counties will end up there.
Also my son had a co-worker go to the ER yesterday from work with suspected Covid-19. The only person allowed inside was the patient, they would not let his wife in. So I take that to mean the hospital is on lockdown, meaning no visitors. My son is on a 14 day quarantine until further notice, (until the test comes back in 3-5 days).
Mississippi COVID-19 Cases
New cases as of 6 p.m. March 20, 2020
Our date for case reporting now better reflects the cutoff time for inclusion in this table.
| County | Cases | Deaths |
| Attala | 1 | 0 |
| Clay | 1 | 0 |
| Coahoma | 2 | 0 |
| De Soto | 9 | 0 |
| Forrest | 1 | 0 |
| Franklin | 1 | 0 |
| George | 1 | 0 |
| Grenada | 1 | 0 |
| Hancock | 1 | 0 |
| Harrison | 2 | 0 |
| Hinds | 7 | 0 |
| Itawamba | 3 | 0 |
| Jackson | 2 | 0 |
| Lafayette | 1 | 0 |
| Leake | 1 | 0 |
| Lee | 4 | 0 |
| Lincoln | 1 | 0 |
| Lowndes | 4 | 0 |
| Madison | 4 | 0 |
| Marshall | 1 | 0 |
| Panola | 1 | 0 |
| Pearl River | 2 | 0 |
| Pike | 1 | 0 |
| Rankin | 4 | 0 |
| Simpson | 1 | 0 |
| Tunica | 1 | 0 |
| Union | 1 | 0 |
| Washington | 1 | 0 |
| Total | 60 | 0 |
| County | Cases | Deaths |
| Adams | 1 | 0 |
| Attala | 1 | 0 |
| Bolivar | 2 | 0 |
| Clay | 1 | 0 |
| Coahoma | 5 | 0 |
| Copiah | 2 | 0 |
| DeSoto | 13 | 0 |
| Forrest | 5 | 0 |
| Franklin | 2 | 0 |
| George | 1 | 0 |
| Grenada | 1 | 0 |
| Hancock | 4 | 1 |
| Harrison | 10 | 0 |
| Hinds | 14 | 0 |
| Holmes | 3 | 0 |
| Humphreys | 1 | 0 |
| Itawamba | 3 | 0 |
| Jackson | 5 | 0 |
| Jones | 1 | 0 |
| Lafayette | 2 | 0 |
| Lawrence | 1 | 0 |
| Leake | 1 | 0 |
| Lee | 5 | 0 |
| Leflore | 7 | 0 |
| Lincoln | 1 | 0 |
| Lowndes | 4 | 0 |
| Madison | 7 | 0 |
| Marshall | 2 | 0 |
| Monroe | 2 | 0 |
| Panola | 1 | 0 |
| Pearl River | 9 | 0 |
| Perry | 1 | 0 |
| Pike | 2 | 0 |
| Rankin | 7 | 0 |
| Simpson | 1 | 0 |
| Smith | 1 | 0 |
| Tippah | 3 | 0 |
| Tunica | 1 | 0 |
| Union | 1 | 0 |
| Walthall | 1 | 0 |
| Washington | 1 | 0 |
| Webster | 1 | 0 |
| Wilkinson | 1 | 0 |
| Winston | 1 | 0 |
| Yazoo | 1 | 0 |
| Total | 140 | 1 |
bw
Fringe Ranger
Your faith is charming.
Doomer Doug
TB Fanatic
The global total is 288,000 with 12,000 Doa. That is nearly 30,000 more than when I wrote the original post. Like peak prosperity said: cluster. cluster, boom, boom KABOOM. It is too late to do anything but junker down now. Between the young fools at the beaches, and the tourists in Spain, the curve can't be flattened. New York City will suffer from deblasios folly. I give us another week max, likely 3 days till 500,000 cases. China is still lying.
SSTemplar
Veteran Member
Doom Porn at its best. This is yelling fire in a theater. Calm down take a breath and play some games with your kids at home.
Doomer Doug
TB Fanatic
If you, brown and wheeler an d kafoury call a friday press conference to say you will have another press conference on monday, you GUARANTEE WEEKEND CHAOS. The level of uncertainty is what is reckless and dangerous in my view.
Countrymouse
Country exile in the city
THIS!
And the deep staters would love NOTHING better than to DESTROY everything Trump has done!
(I heard the other day that the stock market is now back down to where it was when Trump STARTED his Presidency...)
One of the Damocrats said long ago he would WELCOME another recession if it would get rid of Trump---
well, how much more would they welcome a worldwide DEPRESSION, if it would do the trick?
20Gauge
TB Fanatic
Since I am my own employer, I will just write myself a letter attesting to my importance to the world.... all will be good..
pinkelsteinsmom
Veteran Member
Shoot to kill will reduce their exposure.ICE Reduces Arrests of Illegal Aliens amid Wuhan Fears
ICE Reduces Arrests of Illegal Aliens amid Wuhan Fears
The ICE immigration agency is reducing the arrest of illegal migrants amid fears of a coronavirus outbreak in federal detention centers.trib.al
David Ryder/Getty ImagesNEIL MUNRO18 Mar 20202893:21
The nation’s immigration enforcement agency is reducing its arrests of illegal migrants amid growing fears of a coronavirus outbreak in federal detention centers.
“ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) will focus enforcement on public safety risks and individuals subject to mandatory detention based on criminal grounds,” said a press statement issued on March 18. “For those individuals who do not fall into those categories, ERO will exercise discretion to delay enforcement actions until after the crisis or utilize alternatives to detention, as appropriate.”
“This is a return to ‘felons, not families,'” which was the policy adopted by President Barack Obama, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a pro-migration advocate at the American Immigration Council. “Though I strongly suspect ICE will not revert to the prosecutorial discretion policies of the Obama administration and that this will primarily impact who is targeted for arrest,” he added.
Up to 50,000 recent migrants and violent illegal migrants are already detained in centers around the nation. Federal courtrooms remain open while their deportation cases are being processed, according to pro-migration lawyers.
The statement was released after President Donald Trump said he would block additional visitors, migrants, and asylum seekers at the southern and northern borders. The statement, however, did not say if the United States has permission from Mexico’s government to return migrants from Mexico back into Mexico after they are caught at the border.
White-collar immigration lawyers and pro-migration groups are still demanding that Trump admit the roughly 30,000 migrants who have been sent back to Mexico before their asylum hearings in the United States.
The large population of illegal residents in the United States reduces wages for blue-collar Americans — especially amid the economic crash spurred by migrants from China.
The statement also said that ICE would not arrest migrants who are seeking medical care because of China’s disease:
A two week lockdown would pretty well do the same. And two weeks probably ain't long enough.
jward
passin' thru
Tom Winter
@Tom_Winter
Gov. Cuomo: "I don't believe it is going to be a matter of weeks, it's going to be a matter of months."
Countrymouse
Country exile in the city
A coronavirus expert from KU predicted this pandemic—here’s what he says will happen next
Until recently, KU professor Anthony Fehr was one of about 100 people studying coronavirus full-time
March 20, 2020
Martin Cizmar
Scientist in a clean room
If you’d been a molecular biosciences student at the University of Kansas last semester, you might have known this was coming. In class, the concept of a deadly new coronavirus outbreak originating in China—such as the one currently bringing the world to its knees—was discussed. That class was taught by Dr. Anthony R. Fehr, Assistant Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of Kansas. Until very recently, Fehr was one of about a hundred people in the country studying the coronavirus full-time.
“I had a lecture on coronaviruses last semester, in the fall, before this all happened,” he says. “I knew that there’s a lot of SARS-like viruses in China that this could happen. So I actually had a slide in my lecture that was like, ‘there are lots of SARS-like coronaviruses, we could have another outbreak within our lifetime.'”
“So I basically, you know, predicted something,” he says. “I guess I was conservative on the timeframe. But I posted that to my Facebook and everybody’s like, ‘pretty crazy!'”
Right now, Fehr is working to research conserved proteins within coronaviruses and trying to develop compounds that could inhibit them.
“We’re several years away from having anything that can be used to humans, though,” he says. “So I’m pushing my research for the next outbreak.”
And to hear Fehr tell it, there likely will be another outbreak of a coronavirus like the one currently roiling the world.
Will there be a vaccine for the novel coronavirus? Will we one day get coronavirus shots like we get flu shots? What is China’s connection to this outbreak and previous ones? Why is the disease called COVID-19 instead of SARS?
Fehr was generous enough to give us a half-hour of his time to answer these and many other questions. Some of the information is a little dense, as you might expect from one of a handful of the most knowledgable people in the world on this subject. But Fehr’s perspective is something you’ll want to hear.
Here’s a transcript of our interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Kansas City magazine: Can you just kind of give me a little bit of background on how you came to study the coronavirus and the typical career path of a virologist?
Dr. Anthony Fehr: I started working on coronaviruses back in 2012. Just to give you a sense of normally how academic researchers progress: We do our graduate work at one university, and when I was in graduate school, I worked on cytomegalovirus, which is a whole other virus. When you finish grad school, you go on to what’s kind of a kind of an internship where you find a lab that you want to work in for a period of several years. And then, hopefully, you do well enough there that you ultimately get some other place to like you enough that you get your own laboratory. So I went to Dr. Stanley Perlman’s lab at the University of Iowa, mostly just because I’m a trained virologist and his lab seemed very interesting. They had actually been working on coronavirus since the ’80s. It just seemed like a good lab and a good fit for me, so that’s where I did my post-doctoral work.
At the time, it was kind of iffy in terms of funding because the original SARS outbreak occurred in 2002. The money from that was starting to wane. And so there was definitely a little bit of, ‘This could be a tough career road to go down if there are no other coronavirus outbreaks in the near future.’ Well that year, actually, MERS coronavirus came out. Now with this one, the funding situation seems like it will be a lot better going forward.
I would imagine you will never worry about funding again for the rest of your career. I know that coronavirus mostly comes from animals, specifically bats. Do you mostly study animals?
I more or less study the virus. A lot of our studies are, you know, geared toward viruses in human cells. So what we do is we take these little, you could say, petri dishes. We put in human cells, and then we study how the virus replicates and that kind of thing.
But we also do quite a few mouse experiments as well. So we kind of do a combination of those. A lot of human viruses we actually have mouse models for.
From doing a little bit of reading about this, one thing that really struck me is that the ‘non-alarmist’ take was ‘It’s the flu, bro.’ You heard people saying early, and it’s, of course, not true. But from what I understand coronavirus can be the common cold—which we’ve had no ability to tackle throughout history.
So, I’ll explain that. There are a lot of different viruses that cause the common cold. Coronaviruses account for about ten to twenty percent of the common cold cases each year. And there are four different coronaviruses that can cause the common cold. So you’ve likely been infected with a coronavirus before—that is true.
And so the difference between our cold viruses and then viruses like the flu and then this SARS coronavirus 2— and SARS originally—is that the cold viruses generally get into our upper respiratory tract and that’s about as far as they go. They don’t really go any further, they kind of get in there, and cause you to cough a little bit, to sneeze, maybe give you a headache or those kinds of things. But what’s different about these viruses, they can go into the lower respiratory tract, and when they get in there and start replicating really aggressively, that can really affect your ability to breathe. And it can actually cause a lot of other damage.
So this virus is definitely not just a cold virus.
A lot of people are going to be asymptomatic, or have mild symptoms. And for those people what’s probably happening is that they’re basically controlling the virus before it gets into the lower respiratory tract.
And that’s because of antibodies they have from battling colds over the years?
No, that’s, that’s actually incorrect. The antibodies directed against the cold viruses will not be able to do anything against this virus. Probably what it is: Most healthy individuals have what’s called an innate immune response, which is where you don’t necessarily need to have previously seen this.
We all have pretty strong defenses—our cells have a lot of you know, just regular defenses that they can have all viruses. And in younger, healthy people, those defenses oftentimes are good enough to stop the virus before it gets going. Or at least delay it long enough before we can develop our own antibodies against this virus.
Oh! And so one reason that children are doing so much better with this might be that while they don’t have as many antibodies, they do have better innate defenses, because that’s kind of a way that their bodies are set up since they don’t have all those antibodies yet, but they have a more aggressive innate response?
Yeah, I mean, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. But I think, in general, you can say that the immune system between young and middle-aged people that are doing fine here is different from elderly people. Elderly people have a diminished immune response and it’s often dysregulated.
On my Twitter page, there’s a recent article quoting a lot of work from my old boss, Dr. Stanley Perlman, who had a lot of comments about what the differences could be in children.
Until I read about this, I didn’t really understand the progression of SARS. I’ve always seen this referred to as COVID-19. But now technically it’s called SARS-CoV-2, right?
Well, let me explain the naming, which is very confusing, and I kind of hate it. So, on the same day, we named two things. There’s the disease, which is COVID-19. And then there’s the virus, which is SARS-Coronavirus-2. They are distinct.
If you had the disease, and you say, ‘I had COVID-19’ that means you got a disease and you have a poor respiratory function or something like that. If you got the virus, SARS-CoV-2, that could mean a range of things. You could have no disease, you could have COVID-19. So COVID-19 is a disease whereas the virus is SARS Coronavirus-2.
It is odd. Going back 20 years to the SARS outbreak: SARS coronavirus was the original one, but the disease was named just ‘SARS.’ So, they named the virus, basically SARS coronavirus. And the disease was again Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome—that’s what SARS stands for. And that’s the disease.
The disease caused by this virus is almost identical to SARS, so why we need to name it a different disease, I’m not quite sure. It could have easily just been called SARS as well. Because that’s what it is: It’s a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Is the similarity to SARS something that we only learned later, or from the moment they were working on this were they saying, ‘Well, this is basically SARS?’ It seems like the major difference is that this spreads even more quickly?
In terms of the transmissibility of the virus, it is seemingly a lot more transmissible than the original SARS. But, yeah, as soon as we had the sequence of this virus, we knew that it was fairly closely related to SARS.
Getting into the sequencing. I know nothing, but from what I’ve read a lot of this stuff does tend to start in China because of the way humans and animals interact there and that’s where the genetics come from, so China is where a lot of the sequencing stuff actually happens. I was reading a Malcolm Gladwell story from the New Yorker story published in 1997 about the Spanish Flu and it mentioned Wuhan, and I’m like, “whaaaat?” I guess the current thinking is that the Spanish Flu of 1918, they think, actually originated in China. Not to politicize it or get into the racist, imperialistic ideas but as I understand it most of this work in virology involves China because of how humans and animals come into contact there. Does your work involve things that are happening in China a lot?
We don’t know exactly how this virus got into the human population, right? It’s clearly descended from a bat population—and what we do know is that there are a lot of coronaviruses in bats and a lot of SARS-like coronaviruses similar to this one and the original SARS. There’s a lot of viruses in bats in China. China has a lot of really amazing caves that are very important dwelling places for bats. Having said that, there are clearly coronaviruses in African bats—I think I saw a report where there was an Australian one. So it’s not totally just China, but there are a lot of bats with coronaviruses there.
Now, yes, the virus likely transmitted into some sort of wild animal and, yes, the fact that they do eat and sell wild animals—it could have contributed to this. But that’s also not clear, either. If we had bats with coronaviruses here, that could easily happen in the United States because we have close contact with animals. The virus might transmit in their feces or whatever. Who knows—your cat or some other animal that you interact with could certainly become infected with a virus if we had the same situation here.
So the wet animal markets are not the issue?
I think they might have possibly have contributed here. But I was talking to people that, you know, go to China a lot and that’s a pretty rare thing in China. Actually, they don’t have a lot of these wet animal markets, the vast majority of people there just go to the store, they don’t actually go to these markets. But it could have been one or two people that did it and, you know, started this outbreak.
So, compared to the original SARS, what are we doing right this time? And what did we do wrong? How is it different in the original SARS outbreak?
With the original SARS outbreak, China was less than forthcoming about telling the world that there was an outbreak. The technology also was dramatically slower back then, so we didn’t know what the virus was in that case—and I would have to say, “we” with quotation marks because I was barely in college at that time. But you can imagine the sequencing technology and the speed at which these things can get done or just is somewhat greater today than it was in 2000.
So, the great thing that happened here is that we got the sequence immediately, we could develop diagnostic tests very quickly. And considering the speed at which the virus transmits through the human population, had we not had that, China might have had quadruple or ten times more cases than they actually had—if not more that. That was a great thing. They were able to basically stop this outbreak.
What we’re not doing? It’s hard to say because, you know, there are a lot of hard decisions that have to be made when you talk about forcing quarantine and forcing people to stay in their houses and canceling lots of events, and I don’t know if I would have made the right decisions at the end of the day. But you look back at it probably the moment this virus got out of China and into some of these other countries and it was more than just a couple of cases in these other countries, we should have probably shut down our borders to any international travel. I don’t know if that would have solved it, because this virus is extremely tricky to stop from spreading. We don’t really have a clue how many people are actually infected in this country right now. I look at the numbers every day, and it’s like, there’s 10,000 now, but it could easily be five times that many—or more.
posted for fair use
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" I know nothing " -- the only ACCURATE thing this IDIOT reporter said.
What a maroon.
I admire the Dr's patience in answering his / her inane questions.
Zagdid
Veteran Member
The distribution is remarkably unnatural. So many with just 1. In my mind, there should be uneven clusters. Looks like more of a product of testing protocol.
hardrock
Veteran Member
As government checks go out remember this: if you accept the check, not only is Donald Trump your President... he is your sugar daddy now.
jward
passin' thru
Apex
@Apex_WW
“The #US Army Corps of Engineers has plans to take over as many as 10,000 hotel rooms, college dormitories and other spaces in #NewYork for medical services”
View: https://twitter.com/Apex_WW/status/1241381904311554050?s=20
@Apex_WW
“The #US Army Corps of Engineers has plans to take over as many as 10,000 hotel rooms, college dormitories and other spaces in #NewYork for medical services”
View: https://twitter.com/Apex_WW/status/1241381904311554050?s=20
Countrymouse
Country exile in the city
Glad you have so few.
Georgia has gone to 485 today.
Only two days ago we had only 202.
Source: COVID-19/Coronavirus Real Time Updates With Credible Sources in US and Canada | 1Point3Acres
Tom McDowell
BAMN
Krayola
Veteran Member
This is one of my concerns. It does not matter if they keep essential businesses open (food, gas, power company, etc.) if the workers start getting sick they will not remain open.
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Weft and Warp
Senior Member
From what I understand, the sanctions never prevented meds and medical supplies.
CaryC
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Wait 'till tomorrow.
I'm not so sure that, it is that many people are catching it everyday, but rather that testing is growing so more knowledge of it's spread is increasing.
However, in the mean time, those people are still out there breathing on people.
While the count isn't as big as your state, 2 days ago we only had 50. And we were late to the party.
Weft and Warp
Senior Member
And you know what's (not so) funny, is since only essential businesses like grocery stores are open here in PA, it seems like more people than ever are shopping.
