Merged 2019-nCoV / Corona virus

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catsmate said:
Yes.
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There were several ingredients that became prohibited from use in over the counter hand sanitizers a few years ago though. The FDA did a data review and found a lack of evidence that they were safe and/or effective.

Antibacterial hand and body wash manufacturers did not provide the necessary data to establish safety and effectiveness for the 19 active ingredients addressed in this final rulemaking.
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These are the non-alcohol products. 60% alcohol or more is still good.
 
Are we still downplaying this or is it OK to be concerned now?

I can tell you in hawaii we are ******** twinkies

The dumbest state in the union, with an extreme anti-science, anti-vax and massive fake alterna scam "traditional" 'medicine" and we are having piles of Chinese rerouted here.

What could go wrong?

Hey its ok, we have a quarantine center here for the 2 or 3 of them dumb enough not to reroute their flights
 
I posted this in the Conspiracy Theory thread, but it's worth repeating here.

There was a paper uploaded to bioRxiv prior to peer review, which claimed that the novel coronavirus had genetic sequences from HIV and implied that it had been deliberately created as a bioweapon. It's since been withdrawn, but Forbes has an article about it.

The work, by a group based in India, was entitled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag.”

“Based on analysis of multiple, very short regions of proteins in the novel coronavirus, the bioRxiv paper claimed that the new coronavirus may have acquired these regions from HIV,” said Arinjay Banerjee, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in virology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada who has extensively studied coronaviruses.

However, the authors then speculated that this might not be a coincidence and perhaps the bits of genetic code were put there intentionally. The conspiracy theory was addressed today by a scientist from the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who rubbished the claims.

Essentially, the scientists found that yes, there are some additions in the nCoV coronavirus originating in Wuhan that other coronaviruses don’t have, which are similar to pieces of sequence found in HIV. But, the kicker here is that these pieces of genetic code are also found in countless other viruses and there’s no reason to believe they specifically came from HIV, at all.
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Armitage72 said:
I posted this in the Conspiracy Theory thread, but it's worth repeating here.

There was a paper uploaded to bioRxiv prior to peer review, which claimed that the novel coronavirus had genetic sequences from HIV and implied that it had been deliberately created as a bioweapon. It's since been withdrawn, but Forbes has an article about it.
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Dreadful nonsense. The coronavirus is a picornavirus. This type of virus is extremely small in size (hence the word, 'pico':

Picornavirus is an icosahedral, nonenveloped, small (22 to 30 nm) particle 1). The term picornavirus is derived from pico, which means small (typically, 18-30 nm), and RNA, referring to the single-stranded positive-sense RNA common to all members of the picornaviruses family 2).
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https://healthjade.net/picornavirus/

The HIV virus is a retrovirus (imagine a DNA helix back to front, hence 'retro') it acts as a mirror to bodily cells and replicates that way.

Any of a group of RNA viruses whose RNA is used as a template inside a host cell for the formation of DNA by means of the enzyme reverse transcriptase. The DNA thus formed is inserted into the host cell's genome. Most retroviruses can cause cancer. Retroviruses also include HIV.
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https://www.yourdictionary.com/retrovirus

There is no way a picornavirus can interact with a retrovirus or originate or mutate from one.
 

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pipelineaudio said:
Are we still downplaying this or is it OK to be concerned now?
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Jury is firmly out on that question.

There are several things to think about, because either maths stopped working, or there's are pieces of the puzzle we don't yet know.

Things we don't know:

How many people are really infected.
Is secondary/tertiary virulence reduced?
What happens when the Hubei quarantine is lifted?
Why have we seen so few cases outside China, and more particularly, the contained regions, despite the unrestricted travel early in the outbreak?

One other point I'm wondering is if, given the evidence that the foecal/oral route is a viable method of transmission, whether contaminated water may be behind the huge number of infections in somewhat confined regions.
 
Vixen said:
There is no way a picornavirus can interact with a retrovirus or originate or mutate from one.
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That's the entire point of the conspiracy: that to get a DNA sequence from HIV into 2019-ncov, you'd have to artificially engineer it. The reason it's wrong isn't because picornaviruses can't interact with retroviruses, but because the similarities are likely coincidental. Of the 4 "matched" sequences, 2 are found in other coronaviruses, one of the other matches is so short it's meaningless, and one of the matches isn't even that close a match.
 
casebro said:
7-8% fatality of hospitalized patients- how does that compare to flu? or other viral pneumonias?

I've got an idea-Want to avoid diseases that are the bane of all man kind? Stay out of China.
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That's a meaningless number.
 
Armitage72 said:
There were several ingredients that became prohibited from use in over the counter hand sanitizers a few years ago though. The FDA did a data review and found a lack of evidence that they were safe and/or effective.

These are the non-alcohol products. 60% alcohol or more is still good.
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That article is about antibacterial soap, not waterless hand sanitizers.
 
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Matthew Best said:
I had a plumber round my house today, and he insisted that the truth is being covered up and in reality thousands of people have already died in China. He told me people were dropping dead in the streets and there are videos of this on social media.

I didn't believe a word of it, but it is a sign of how panic spreads.
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Exactly.
I doubt even the Chinese Government...who I don't have much trust in....could cover something like that in an age when every smart phone has a camera built in...
 
casebro said:
7-8% fatality of hospitalized patients- how does that compare to flu? or other viral pneumonias?

I've got an idea-Want to avoid diseases that are the bane of all man kind? Stay out of China.
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Really a difficult number to extract any useful information from. The severity of a disease that will buy you admission into a hospital varies greatly with the individual hospital, insurance/wealth/influence of the infected, traditions of the community with regardto caring for the ill, size of the epidemic. etc. From what I read today the hospitals in China are so overwhelmed that many seriously infected individuals are being sent home, even knowing some will die, because there are not enough beds and equipment. A very severe form of triage. Quarantines have also made it harder for some people to reach hospitals.
 
Honestly I am ever more convinced that social media and the internet has made people stupider. Much stupider. Any rumor, no matter how clearly untrue, rapidly circulates among millions of uninformed and nervous people, turning them into mis-informed and deeply frightened people. And there are evil selfish people who provoke these rumors intentionally either for "fun" or profit (political or economic).

Pre-print web sites such as bioRxiv are considered by many scientists as valuable ways of sharing their results prior to more formal methods of publishing research results. But here too is a means of incredibly rapidly disseminating incorrect, and potentially dangerous information. These pre-prints are not peer reviewed or screened for accuracy, but are only quickly scanned to ensure they are on a biological topic, not libelous, etc. Unfortunate in this case.

"What a wonderful world..."


FYI: I once was a virologist and I know the level of stupid in many of these rumors.
 
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Vixen said:
Dreadful nonsense. The coronavirus is a picornavirus. This type of virus is extremely small in size (hence the word, 'pico':

https://healthjade.net/picornavirus/

The HIV virus is a retrovirus (imagine a DNA helix back to front, hence 'retro') it acts as a mirror to bodily cells and replicates that way.

https://www.yourdictionary.com/retrovirus

There is no way a picornavirus can interact with a retrovirus or originate or mutate from one.
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Vixen, your grasp of genetics is poor, you should avoid commenting on technical issues.

Coronaviruses are NOT Picornaviruses. Corona viruses are so called because of the crown like appearance of their capsule. They are large RNA viruses (positive single stranded RNA genome). Picornaviruses have capsules with an icosahedral structure, and are small RNA single stranded viruses. Retroviruses are a third group of RNA containing viruses. Retroviruses are defined by possessing a reverse transcriptase. Whilst most RNA viruses directly replicate RNA to RNA, and translate RNA to protein, retroviruses transcribe their RNA into DNA which can integrate into the host genome then hijack cellular processes to synthesise proteins and replicate themselves. (Aproximately 10% of DNA in our chromosomes originates from genes left behind by retroviruses, although much is nonsense some viruses have left genes that are now essential to life, in reality we are chimeras part animal (eukaryote), part virus, part bacteria.)

If there are simultaneous infections by two different viruses within one cell it is possible for viruses to integrate RNA from different viruses. In fact DNA viruses can even pick up bacterial and eukaryotic DNA and carry genes between species.
 
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Giordano said:
Honestly I am ever more convinced that social media and the internet has made people stupider. Much stupider. Any rumor, no matter how clearly untrue, rapidly circulates among millions of uninformed and nervous people, turning them into mis-informed and deeply frightened people. And there are evil selfish people who provoke these rumors intentionally either for "fun" or profit (political or economic).

Pre-print web sites such as bioRxiv are considered by many scientists as valuable ways of sharing their results prior to more formal methods of publishing research results. But here too is a means of incredibly rapidly disseminating incorrect, and potentially dangerous information. These pre-prints are not peer reviewed or screened for accuracy, but are only quickly scanned to ensure they are on a biological topic, not libelous, etc. Unfortunate in this case.

"What a wonderful world..."


FYI: I once was a virologist and I know the level of stupid in many of these rumors.
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Sad to say, the Jude Law character in "Contagion" has a lot of real world counterparts.
 
Vixen said:
Dreadful nonsense. The coronavirus is a picornavirus. This type of virus is extremely small in size (hence the word, 'pico':

https://healthjade.net/picornavirus/

The HIV virus is a retrovirus (imagine a DNA helix back to front, hence 'retro') it acts as a mirror to bodily cells and replicates that way.

https://www.yourdictionary.com/retrovirus

There is no way a picornavirus can interact with a retrovirus or originate or mutate from one.
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You can make pseudotyped virus in the lab using HIV core with the envelope of choice, in this case the Spike protein of nCOV 2019.


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Matthew Best said:
I had a plumber round my house today, and he insisted that the truth is being covered up and in reality thousands of people have already died in China. He told me people were dropping dead in the streets and there are videos of this on social media.

I didn't believe a word of it, but it is a sign of how panic spreads.
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Video of people falling over in the streets has been making the rounds. I've seen it. The video in question only shows a few people, it's not even clear when or where the different clips were taken, and there's no indication that they're dead rather than passed out.

It's an almost certainty that the number of deaths are being understated, and there are multiple stories of people saying that their relative died of coronavirus but the death certificate just says pneumonia. But it's not at all clear how understated the numbers are. I wouldn't bet it's in the thousands, but I wouldn't guarantee it's not either. That's the problem with China: you just don't know.
 
Capsid said:
You can make pseudotyped virus in the lab using HIV core with the envelope of choice, in this case the Spike protein of nCOV 2019.


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One can do absolutely amazing things in a lab now. But just to reassure the non-virologists on the Forum, the sequence of nCOV 2019 is not at all what one would see if it was pseudotyped HIV with an nCOV-2019 envelope spike protein. Also pseudotyped viruses can only replicate as pseudotypes once, in the very next host cell to which they are exposed. Pseudotype virus are made in cells that separately produce the different viral components, which then come together as the virus is assembled. Pseudotyped virus cannot continue an infection and create an epidemic as a pseudotype. One needs recombinants (viruses with mixed genomes) to do that.
 
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