Merged 2019-nCoV / Corona virus

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kellyb said:
We'd be up to at least 100 confirmed cases in the US if this were nearly as contagious as flu or RSV, I'm 99.9% sure. I want to say in the 2009 zoonosis/pandemic, once it was detected in the US, it went up by about 30-40 cases per day for a few days in the early days. We're at 7 confirmed cases total in the US now.

This technically IS a pandemic right now by all definitions, but it looks like a pandemic that can (thankfully, probably) be controlled ("controlled" in an "eradicated" sense) with quarantine, like SARS was.

I'm sure it is capable of sustained human to human transmission under the right conditions, but that's a very different things from it being as contagious as flu (where you're liable to infect 10 or 20 people before you have so much as a slightly stopped up nose) so I think the public health authorities are doing the right thing to be going at quarantine measures with serious force.
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I'd have to agree with all that!
 
Should have read the news before posting - the suspected case in NZ isn't coronavirus, and since we have ~1500-odd Chinese arriving every day of the week, you'd think there would be one by now if it were as bad as the 'flu for contagion.

Still, early days and could change overnight, but the signs right now are pretty positive.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Could the virus come to US households via the millions of Amazon packages with Chinese products ordered all the time?
I just remembered the Osaka Flu from The Simpsons....
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Here is my post from yesterday which answers your question.
rjh01 said:
Here is a more reliable source
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html

Q: Am I at risk for novel coronavirus from a package or products shipping from China?
There is still a lot that is unknown about the newly emerged 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) and how it spreads. Two other coronaviruses have emerged previously to cause severe illness in people (MERS and SARS). 2019-nCoV is more genetically related to SARS than MERS, but both are betacoronaviruses with their origins in bats. While we don’t know for sure that this virus will behave the same way as SARS and MERS, we can use the information from both of these earlier coronaviruses to guide us. In general, because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from products or packaging that are shipped over a period of days or weeks at ambient temperatures. Coronaviruses are generally thought to be spread most often by respiratory droplets. Currently there is no evidence to support transmission of 2019-nCoV associated with imported goods and there have not been any cases of 2019-nCoV in the United States associated with imported goods.
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Does not answer the question can I get it from touching something that another person, who is infected, has recently touched? And how long is recently?
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The Atheist said:
I'm beginning to wonder if the virus isn't capable of sustained human to human transmission, or is just quite difficult to catch.

The first Japanese case was a tour bus driver who had been driving a tour of people from Wuhan and was diagnosed one week ago today. If he came down with it and it's easily spread, other people the tour came in contact with would be showing up by infected by now. All the hotel, shop, restaurant and tourism operators they came in contact with and it seems they didn't pass it on to them.

Time will tell, but the numbers aren't growing outside China as fast as they would be in a pandemic. The explosion of cases seen in Mexican 'flu hasn't happened.

Yet...
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As you say it all depends on how many people each infected individual on average gives the virus to. If it is only 2 or 3 over a week or two then it will take a long time to spread, but it will spread. Then if these people get it but show no symptoms, but each pass it on to 2 or 3 other people it might take some time before it is obvious that it is spreading in other countries.

It might be more infectious in China because they smoke more there. This has been mentioned before.
 
I want it to reach more countries in higher numbers, a more sustained epidemic before I call it a pandemic.

Just looks like an outbreak, mostly primary exposure led to people getting sick as they boarded their flight and diagnosed when they arrived home. It hasn't been acting up too much in the countries seeded by the new virus.
 
dudalb said:
I just got a boardgame from a US company who has it printing done in Japan (Very common nowdays) and I admit that thought crossed my mind?

Though so far as we know, it has to be transmitted from living organism to living organism.
I think it is important we don't add to the hysteria by spreading BS rumors and peddling theories as facts.
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Japan is not the same as China.
 
This might be interesting!

https://jameslyonsweiler.com/2020/01/30/on-the-origins-of-the-2019-ncov-virus-wuhan-china/

He indicates that the virus might be coming from a laboratory. But not because of CT, but by accident.

The Link is quite technical, so I can't judge any of his claims.
But the bottom line is this:

RECOMBINATION technology has been in use in molecular virology since the 1980’s. The structure of the 2019-NCoV virus genome provides a very strong clue on the likely origin of the virus.

Unlike other related coronaviruses, the 2019-nCoV virus has a unique sequence about 1,378 bp (nucleotide base pairs) long that is not found in related coronaviruses.

Looking at the phylogenetic tree recently published derived using all the full genome sequence, we see the 2019-nCoV virus does not have clear monophyletic support given the bootstrap value of 75 (Fig 1).

...

The disease progression in of 2019-nCoV is consistent with those seen in animals and humans vaccinated against SARS and then challenged with re-infection. Thus, the hypothesis that 2019-nCoV is an experimental vaccine type must be seriously considered.

Evidence for: Sequence homology between INS1378 to pShuttle Coronavirus vaccine; presence of a SARS-like Spike protein in bat coronavirus, otherwise most similar to bat coronaviruses; low bootstrap value.

Evidence against: Low sequence homology (but highly signifiant). NB these viruses are RNA viruses and they can evolve quickly, even under laboratory conditions.

Status: Most likely.

Test: Determine the nucleotide sequence all laboratory types of coronavirus being studied in China (a match will confirm). Find an isolate that matches 2019-nCoV in the wild and reproducibly independently isolate the virus from a wild animal (a match will falsify).

The available evidence most strongly supports that the 2019-NCoV virus is a vaccine strain of coronavirus either accidentally released from a laboratory accident, perhaps a laboratory researcher becoming infected with the virus while conducting animal experiments, or the Chinese were performing clinical studies of a Coronavirus vaccine in humans.

...

If the Chinese government has been conducting human trials against SARS. MERS, or other coronviruses using recombined viruses, they may have made their citizens far more susceptible to acute respiratory distress syndrome upon infection with 2019-nCoV coronavirus.

The implications are clear: if China sensitized their population via a SARS vaccine, and this escaped from a lab, the rest of world has a serious humanitarian urgency to help China, but may not expect as serious an epidemic as might otherwise be expected.

In the worst-case scenario, if the vaccination strain is more highly contagious and lethal, 2019-nCoV could become the worst example of vaccine-derived contagious disease in human history. With an uncharacteristic aysmptomatic prodromal period of 5-7 days, individuals returning from China to other countries must be forthright and cooperative in their now-prescribed 2-week quarantine.
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Skeptic Ginger said:
My thought was to look at how many people in China are still smokers. It's very high.

With influenza, smoking puts you at higher risk of pneumonia. Smoking affects the cilia in the trachea. Influenza tends to infect cells in the middle airway (trachea). That's a double whammy on the defenses against bacteria getting into the lung.

I wonder how much smoking is going to be a factor for severe illness.
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That's an interesting point.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Should we hide under the bed now? :)
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No. That's cat territory and he's far scarier than 2019-nCoV.

Skeptic Ginger said:
Speaking of avoiding the virus, when the 2009 flu variant was spreading, before the vaccine was available, I saw all the ways one could not avoid exposure. For example, try buying groceries if the clerk or the bagger are sniffing and coughing.

They both touch every one of your items. So do you wear gloves to put your food away? Leave the bags in the car for a sufficient amount of time for any surface contaminants to die?

But then what about the people you didn't see? At the produce area someone touches everything they put in the bins. Same with the meat in the meat area, someone touched each package of meat. And the plastic wrap in a refrigerated area is perfect for preserving surface contamination. At Whole Foods store employees are constantly spiffing up the shelves pulling all the products to the front.

So what do you do to avoid contaminated surfaces? It's one thing to wash your hands when you come in the house. But what if half the items in your kitchen are contaminated?


Try it: throughout the day see all the things that could have contaminated surfaces you cannot avoid touching.
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Spray bleach everywhere? Carry a high powered UV lamp? Avoid human contact?
 
New cases per day in China might have peaked. It didn't increase for 3 days. Of course, too soon to be sure. That would mean 'the light on the end of the tunnel'. Usually it happens at around 50% of total cases.
 
carlosy said:
This might be interesting!

https://jameslyonsweiler.com/2020/01/30/on-the-origins-of-the-2019-ncov-virus-wuhan-china/

He indicates that the virus might be coming from a laboratory. But not because of CT, but by accident.

The Link is quite technical, so I can't judge any of his claims.
But the bottom line is this:
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He is an antivaxxer who claims vaccines cause autism.

But I am not sufficiently educated enough to judge his work. I can only say that the claim that a vaccine for SARS has made the Chinese susceptible to the new 2019-nCoV seems to fit within most conspiracy theories made by antivaxxers....

So although I personally can't judge this article, I would urge extreme caution in believing or spreading information like this until someone with the expertise who can be trusted confirms its merits.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Wow, Trump's going crazy. No surprise with his ignorance. So now Chinese nationals coming from China are banned from the US.

But what's he going to do when the virus spreads in multiple countries? Ban half the world from entering the US?

He's probably just trying to save himself.
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BBC reports that Australia has banned flights from China. So your fury can be applied to that country and its crazy top person as well.
 
carlosy said:
This might be interesting!

https://jameslyonsweiler.com/2020/01/30/on-the-origins-of-the-2019-ncov-virus-wuhan-china/

He indicates that the virus might be coming from a laboratory. But not because of CT, but by accident.

The Link is quite technical, so I can't judge any of his claims.
But the bottom line is this:
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This does really belongs in Conspiracy theory:. Technically because it implies a (1) secret development of a vaccine that (2) escaped and (3) the facts are being hidden by a group of insiders. But even more so because it ignores many of the known facts and it is made up instead of implausible or impossible conjectures that rely on melodramatic imaginations rather than logical ones. The sequence is absolutely consistent with the proposal that the 2019-ncov virus is a bat-like virus that acquired a "spike" protein from another coronavirus that allows it to more efficiently infect humans; it is the opposite of what one might expect of a virus engineered for a vaccine.

Some of the proposal may change as more details are revealed. The virus may be bat-like but may have infected the first humans from another species. Etc. But the chances it was human-engineered as described by some are virtually zero or below.
 
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