Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Mar 03, 2020 9:16 am

1. I get this question a lot. Please just consider the fact that in late December nCoV only existed in one city in China. If you can't figure it out from there, I have learned from experience that I likely cannot explain it to you.

2. WHO is a PR bureaucracy. The renaming stands as their great achievement so far. If the name needs to be changed again, they'll be ready.

3. SARS was closer to 10%, nCoV will almost definitely shake out to around 1%. The problem, for the 10,000th time, is the virulence, not how deadly it is.

4. Because you're listening to motherfucking idiots.
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Mar 03, 2020 2:09 pm

Further:

8bitagent » Tue Mar 03, 2020 5:05 am wrote:Why wasnt there apocalyptic end time paranoia and worst-case-pandemic insanity in the media in 2009?


Isn't that just ... you being you ... more than an assessment of the real world? Is there actual paranoia and insanity in the media about nCoV? David Muir wiping away his tears on ABC and telling America to make peace with Christ? That would be breaking news to me, and I've been paying attention to little else.

There's a 57 page thread in our archives. Obama declared it a national emergency. There were military checkpoints and inspections from people in tybek suits in airports around the world, and hundreds of schools got closed in the US alone. There were US citizens locked in Chinese hotel rooms, and even cruise ships being kept at sea. If you don't remember that, it's likely you just weren't paying any attention. There were a lot of good movies and TV shows that year.

Media coverage in 2009 followed the same playbook as media coverage in 2020. I have offered a link before that outlines the staged/phased model of pandemic communications. Remember, "Risk = Hazard + Outrage"

Nobody is selling paranoia and panic except the usual assholes, who are always selling paranoia and panic, and never seem to run out of stock.
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby semper occultus » Tue Mar 03, 2020 3:10 pm

to compare & contrast Covid 2020 to the effect of the SARS outbreak in 2003 look at the relative size of Chinese manufacturing sector


Image
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Mar 03, 2020 7:22 pm

WHO says coronavirus death rate is 3.4% globally, higher than previously thought
PUBLISHED TUE, MAR 3 20204:28 PM ESTUPDATED 2 HOURS AGO
Berkeley Lovelace Jr.
]
World health officials said Tuesday the case fatality rate for COVID-19 is 3.4% globally, higher than previous estimates of about 2%.

“Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. In comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected, he said.

The World Health Organization had said last week that the mortality rate of COVID-19 can differ, ranging from 0.7% to up to 4%, depending on the quality of the health-care system where it’s treated. Early in the outbreak, scientists had concluded the death rate was around 2.3%.

During a press briefing Monday, WHO officials said they don’t know how COVID-19 behaves, saying it’s not like influenza. They added that while much is known about the seasonal flu, such as how it’s transmitted and what treatments work to suppress the disease, that same information is still in question when it comes to the coronavirus.

“This is a unique virus, with unique features. This virus is not influenza,” Tedros said Monday. “We are in uncharted territory.”

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said Monday that the coronavirus isn’t transmitting the same exact way as the flu and health officials have been given a “glimmer, a chink of light” that the virus could be contained.

“Here we have a disease for which we have no vaccine, no treatment, we don’t fully understand transmission, we don’t fully understand case mortality, but what we have been genuinely heartened by is that unlike influenza, where countries have fought back, where they’ve put in place strong measures, we’ve remarkably seen that the virus is suppressed,” Ryan said.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/03/who-say ... ought.html
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
User avatar
liminalOyster
 
Posts: 1873
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 10:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby DrEvil » Tue Mar 03, 2020 8:57 pm

^^That's pretty fucking terrifying if you combine it with Marc Lipsitch's estimate of 40-70% of the world infected. Some quick math yields at total death toll of ‭183 million people in the worst case (3.4% mortality rate / 70% infected), so about three WW2's worth of dead people, or seven 9/11's each hour for a year. The US alone would be 8 million dead with those numbers, or the entire population of New York.

On the bright side, Trump voters will be dropping like flies as the mortality rate goes up with age.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
User avatar
DrEvil
 
Posts: 3971
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Mar 03, 2020 9:06 pm

.

Despite our status as a burgeoning (or well-established, depending on perspective) banana republic, i expect the U.S. mortality rate to hang within/under 1-2% . Taking into account numerous factors and soon-to-be inadequate domestic measures, i believe we remain better equipped to handle this than some of the other regions hit so far, with better access to care. Or perhaps better at proactive shut-down measures (relative to others).

We shall see, however. If senior living establishments continue to be the hot zones we may surpass 3 - 4%. /sarcasm, perhaps.

Any children afflicted yet? By my count it's been zero so far, which is interesting.
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Mar 03, 2020 9:12 pm

In fairness, that's a scare stat - those under 50 are something like .8 with very high numbers if you're over 80. Plus, "under 50" contains some very unusual class breaks anyways.
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
User avatar
liminalOyster
 
Posts: 1873
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 10:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Mar 03, 2020 9:12 pm

Belligerent Savant » Tue Mar 03, 2020 8:06 pm wrote:
Any children afflicted yet? By my count it's been zero so far, which is interesting.


Infected but not afflicted; some school closures in EU.
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Mar 03, 2020 9:22 pm

^^^^

good distinction. School closures in Westchester County NY, as well, reportedly due in part because the son of an infected attorney (who traveled regularly to NYC) attended one of the schools.


Coronavirus News: 4 NY schools closed after Westchester Co. man tests positive

WESTCHESTER COUNTY, New York (WABC) -- Four schools in New York have closed after word that a man from Westchester County has tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

The man's positive test result for COVID-19 prompted the closure of Westchester Day School in Mamaroneck, Westchester Torah Academy in White Plains, the Salanter Akiba Riverdale (SAR) Academy and SAR High School in Riverdale, the Bronx.

One of the man's sons attends SAR Academy on 254th Street. SAR High School a few blocks north on West 259th Street is also temporarily closed because the child may have had contact with other students.

The closures are being done as a precaution.

Both of these facilities are private Orthodox Jewish schools.





liminalOyster » Tue Mar 03, 2020 8:12 pm wrote:In fairness, that's a scare stat - those under 50 are something like .8 with very high numbers if you're over 80. Plus, "under 50" contains some very unusual class breaks anyways.



Noteworthy clarifications, Liminal.
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby Grizzly » Tue Mar 03, 2020 9:28 pm

Tangentially related?

I remembered instantly about this, especially the hazmat suits (hazardous materials suits)...once someone posted about it on reddit conspiracy :
Let's not forget that one time last year when special forces conducted an "operation" in downtown LA with full on Hazmat suit wearing individuals, loading sensitive cargo into black helicopters
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/fd2saz/lets_not_forget_that_one_time_last_year_when/

Does anyone here remember roughly 1 year ago in February the U.S. military conducting a "training exercise" where they loaded up black helicopters with what looked like sensitive cargo, while some of the trainees wore Hazmat suits. I've been thinking about this weird exercise and the Getty mansion gun trove nearly every day this past year while both incidents become memoryholed


I’m sure we have a thread here on it ...I think it turned out to be a South American Art/cultural house or perhaps an embassy or next door to an S.A. embassy? They blew a hole in the wall of the building. And I remember watching three or four teams 6,8, perhaps 12 men in whole but in different sets loading a blk hawk, then taking off... no sign of that vid, it's been scrubbed.

The coronavirus death toll in Washington state has risen to nine.

The nation's first death may have happened earlier than previously thought.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-deaths-washington-rise-9-state-ups-outbreak-response-n1148321
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
User avatar
Grizzly
 
Posts: 4722
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:15 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby Grizzly » Wed Mar 04, 2020 2:39 am

Wrex

Really, our best bet is banking on seasonal variability, and that's currently a total unknown. Cheers!


How does this explain that novel coronavirus continues to rise in Singapore? Where it's Now
91 °F and has been steaming hot 37 °C (Celsius) on average which has not slowed the spread at all...???


2 new coronavirus cases confirmed in Singapore

https://www.wsbtv.com/news/trending/coronavirus-live-updates-singapore-has-98-cases-mexico-has-first-cases/P2G5NZWVNVHPPONFRFVLSVRZ2Y/
(Half way down the page)

Update 10 a.m. EST March 3: Officials with Singapore’s Ministry of Health confirmed two new cases of the 2019 novel coronavirus Tuesday, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 110.

The first case confirmed Tuesday involved a 70-year-old Singaporean man who tested positive for the virus Monday afternoon. Officials said he was being treated Tuesday in an isolation room at Singapore General Hospital.

The second case involved a 33-year-old Singaporean man whose infection appeared to be related to a cluster identified at Wizlearn Technologies Pte Ltd. He was being treated in an isolation room Tuesday at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases, officials said.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
User avatar
Grizzly
 
Posts: 4722
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:15 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Mar 04, 2020 8:11 am

Nobody is explaining much at this point due to the data limitations, but here's the optimistic case.

I am not familiar with the mechanics of seasonal variation but I'd assume it has more to do with UV radiation cooking surfaces and people being outside instead of indoors than just the overall temperatures.

Edit: ...so why not blow a lunch break fixing that?

Influenza is a permanent fixture of human life on Earth. It's always there, but the "flu season" variations are an order of magnitude or greater, so the effects are obvious. As you might expect, the seasonal component is a matter of perspective -- peak influenza conditions are a roving band of ideal circumstances that tear ass around the planet in slow motion all year long. It only appears to come and go because we stay in the same place.

The actual microscopic motherfuckers that infect us have a lipid (fatty) coating that thrives in cold and dry conditions -- the "dry" part being the most important, apparently. It survives a lot longer on surfaces when it's cold out.

The tropics also have a flu season of sorts: their rainy season always sees an escalation of cases. There are two mitigating factors involved there, both of which are universal. First and more abundantly proven, it's just a matter of people being cramped into confined spaces indoors, which facilitates aerosol transmission. Second and more speculative, that rainy season, like the changing solar cycles of winter, lowers human exposure to sweet, sweet Vitamin D and weakens our immune systems.

The other mitigating factors are social: high-volume holiday air travel overlaps neatly with peak flu transmission most years, and public school fucks us in all kinds of ways, and amplifying flu season is one of them.

None of which adequately explains what is going on in Singapore. WHO held a press conference saying yesterday that nCoV spreads "less efficiently" than dollar store brand Influenza; I suspect that will wash out to be wishful thinking in another two weeks as clinical data sets improve exponentially.
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Mar 04, 2020 4:45 pm

Not familiar with Judd Legum, but it does seem to be correct that the CDC is no longer updating their website to include the total number of Americans tested for COVID-19.

BREAKING: The CDC has stopped disclosing the number of Americans tested for coronavirus.

On the left is how the website looked last night. On the right is what it looks like now, with the testing info removed.

The lack of testing is a scandal.

This is the coverup.


https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/12 ... 9270688768
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
User avatar
stillrobertpaulsen
 
Posts: 2414
Joined: Wed Jan 14, 2009 2:43 pm
Location: California
Blog: View Blog (37)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Mar 04, 2020 6:23 pm

Via: New Yorker

Despite its severity, however, there is almost nothing surprising about this pandemic. It has been utterly predictable in nearly every way: from the nature of its emergence, to its rapid international dissemination, to its clear potential to sicken people and kill them. What is surprising is the fact that we are not better prepared for this kind of assault. As the late Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg put it, in what is perhaps both his most famous and his most ignored warning, viruses pose “the single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on this planet.” As the world learned in 1918, when influenza killed at least fifty million people, there is no weapon as lethal that is also as widespread.

Moreover, these viral invasions often move in obvious, specific patterns. No one who has ever glanced at a textbook on emerging infectious diseases or, for that matter, read the science section of a newspaper, could have been surprised to learn that bats were the original host of this virus, or that humans almost certainly acquired it from an intermediary species—in this case, probably pangolins, which are thought to be the most heavily trafficked animals on Earth. Pangolins are prized for the supposed medicinal properties of their scales, and they appear to have been sold at the seafood market in Wuhan where the epidemic appears to have started.

Infectious diseases that leap from animals to humans are called zoonoses. They do it all the time. Most people remember the worldwide panic caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, which, in 2002, led to the first pandemic of the millennium—although its global death toll was seven hundred and seventy-four people, fewer than the number of people who die in an average week at the height of an annual flu season in the United States. The SARS virus, which also originated in China, passed to humans through a protein—ACE-2, or angiotensinconverting enzyme—that is found on respiratory cells, which also serve as an entry point for the COVID-19 virus. They are both coronaviruses—named for the halo you see around them under a microscope—are genetically similar, and were isolated in bats. The same was true for MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a coronavirus that began in 2012 and spread through Saudi Arabia. MERS was transmitted to humans via camels, but it originated in bats, as did the Ebola virus. Marburg, a deadly hemorrhagic virus that was first described in 1967, originated in Old World fruit bats.

The reason that bats play such a significant role in the transmission of these viruses is not difficult to understand. Bats make up roughly twenty per cent of all mammal species, and many of them have unusually robust immune systems that seem easily able to defend them against powerful viruses. That makes them the perfect viral host; the viruses train themselves on the bats’ immune system, and, in the process, become increasingly able to defend themselves. Yet bats are hardly the only host of viruses that infect humans. In 2004, a highly pathogenic form of avian influenza, H5N1, which occurs naturally in wild waterfowl but can spread easily to domestic poultry, leaped from chickens to humans, setting off a frightening epidemic. In 2009, the new strain of influenza was a form of H1N1, also called swine flu, because it passed to humans through pigs; they serve as a common mixing vessel for viruses, because porcine respiratory cells are similar to ours.

...

These viruses all pose special threats because they are new, which means that humans have no antibodies to defend against them. The 2009 H1N1 epidemic infected at least 1.4 billion people, most of them before vaccines or treatments for the virus were available. And that was in a year when, by most accounts, the W.H.O. moved as expeditiously as it ever has. That strain of influenza killed as many as two hundred thousand people in the world—but it could have been many times worse. In 1957, for example, the Asian flu pandemic killed more than a million people. In 1968, the Hong Kong flu pandemic killed between one and four million. Maybe we will also be lucky this year. (It ought to be remembered that, even now, the seasonal flu poses a much greater threat to the health of the average American.) Unless COVID-19 proves to be uniquely virulent, it will likely subside within a few months, and the danger it poses will be substantially forgotten, like that of SARS, MERS, avian influenza, and other zoonotic diseases. But it is too soon to know for certain.

....

At some point, not many years from now, we will have the capacity to instantly sequence viruses and to make and operate diagnostic tests anywhere, not just in a lab. Biology is becoming digital information, and it needn’t be stored only in Cambridge, or Palo Alto, or Paris. It is already possible to transmit and print a DNA sequence using the molecular equivalent of 3-D printers—a process that could enable scientists almost anywhere to construct vaccines. Making this technique readily available should be a national and, in fact, an international priority. There are other possible solutions, such as editing the genes of pigs (and bats) to repulse the viruses that can transfer to humans. This kind of ecological intervention would be scientifically difficult, and ethically questionable. But it will inevitably be discussed, so let’s do it rationally.

Even if this pandemic passes quickly, there will be another one, possibly far more catastrophic, next year, or in ten years’ time, or twenty. All we can know for sure is that if we have any hope of containing it, the time to prepare is now.


Naturally "a process that could enable scientists almost anywhere to construct vaccines" would also enable hostile actors almost anywhere to construct bioweapons.

We are living in the sweet spot where the threat of human technology needs to be measured against the threat of human nature -- not because of the potential for millions, or billions, of deaths, but because of a total existential threat to our species. But of course, who truly has the power to intervene here?

Threat mitigation and security through obscurity are our best bets in the meantime, and it's only a matter of time: when, not if.
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Manufactured 'Contagion' - Coronavirus Edition

Postby DrEvil » Wed Mar 04, 2020 7:32 pm

^^That is one of the few things that keeps me up at night. What happens when anyone can assemble a full bio-weapons lab with the ability to custom-make any virus in their basement for a few thousand bucks or less, and specifically, what happens when some deep green, Gaia worshiping lunatic who genuinely believes that Earth would be better off without humans, or a doomsday cult, gets that basement lab? The lunatics already exist, it's just a matter of technology catching up. Imagine if Aum Shinrikyo had access to that technology (they're still around).
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
User avatar
DrEvil
 
Posts: 3971
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 46 guests