OT: a good friend is STUCK IN CHINA
- Thread starter AreYouNUTS
- Start date
Wanna add casinos to your list too lol. This is what I was mentioning about norovirus incidents happening on cruise ships. This one happened in casino. I read norovirus can live on surfaces for months if you don't disinfect, unlike most others which won't survive more than a few hours to 24 hours.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/norovirus-outbreak-louisiana-casino-200-sick-investigation
https://www.bestuscasinos.org/news/200-individuals-affected-virus-outbreak-at-louisiana-casino/
Unfortunately, casinos aren’t safe from viruses. This week, reports surfaced that show more than 200 individuals have been infected with a new virus outbreak at a Louisiana casino. This has prompted health officials in the state to conduct a new investigation.
The casino where this virus spread is the L’Auberge Casino in Lake Charles. Due to recent events here, thousands of individuals have recently visited the gambling venue. More than 200 individuals who visited this gambling establishment claim to suffer from symptoms associated with this virus.
This new virus is said to cause a variety of serious health effects. Dr. Lacey Cavanaugh, a regional medical director in the area, commented on the virus outbreak at a Louisiana casino to the media this week.
I use to travel to St Charles to gamble at the casino from Houston,
Two week quarantine over and 195 people free to go from the air force base in California.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article240202217.html
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article240202217.html
One person has been reported to have an incubation period of 24 days. One. And that doesn't mean they "know" it was 24 days as these reports are based on interviews with the patient and it's always possible the patient came in contact with the virus in some way after the contact deemed primary by the interviews. Much more importantly, the median incubation period, which is a rock solid piece of data based on thousands of cases, is still just 3 days, so a 14-day quarantine should be fine for the vast, vast majority of cases (and a 7 day period good for 95% or more of cases).
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/12/WS5e43097da310128217276c8d.html
Tom Cotton is just another loudmouth with a Twitter account. The Lancet article didn't say that the virus didn't originate in the Wuhan market, because there's simply not enough data to know, for sure, that it originated there (or anywhere for that matter). Unfortunately, the Chinese didn't take the thread seriously enough early on and much of the useful "evidence" (remains of animals, especially) was not preserved, making it very hard to find the true source.
The virus was found in people associated with the market, and in the market environment — on surfaces, for instance, or in cages. However, some of the early cases, including what might have been the first reported case, were in people who were not associated with the market. Jon Epstein, vice president for science and outreach at EcoHealth Alliance in New York, said this means the first jump from animals to humans may not have occurred in the marketplace. People may have contracted the disease from animals at another location or earlier, as yet unknown cases may have contracted the disease at the market and passed it on to other people.
Further complicating matters, animals at the Wuhan market seem to have been quickly disposed of, although reports from China were that samples from those animals tested negative for the virus.
Also, while the Chinese have been far from perfect in handling this epidemic in their country, no serious scientists think the virus was bioengineered by them, especially given the latest data indicating that there's a very good genetic match with virusus seen in pangolins (mammalian anteaters), the most highly trafficked wild animal in China. It's looking likely that bats were the original hosts for nCoV, like they were for SARS and MERS, but that pangolins were an intermediate host that could have led to the jump of the virus to humans, whereas for SARS, the intermediate host was civets and for MERS it was camels (MERS originated in the Middle East).
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/science/pangolin-coronavirus.html
And by the way, the WHO has officially given the new coronavirus a name: COVID-19 (for coronavirus disease in 2019).
Sort of.
The virus has a name, "SARS-CoV-2" and the illness it causes is called COVID-19. Kind of like how HIV (virus name) causes AIDS (disease).
Unfortunately the "official" name indicates the high degree of similarity to the original SARS virus. Seems much more easily transmitted between people. Death rate TBD.
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/02/deaths-newly-named-coronavirus-disease-top-1000
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.937862v1
The extremely troubling and interesting nature of this particular pathogen is that it has the ability to adapt to its host in some way. So a healthy teenager may be extremely infectious and shedding the virus and they are totally asymptomatic. So you have a hosts and vectors that are asymptomatic or have high shedding rates before they become overtly or minimally symptomatic. So this makes this particular organism worrisome and particularly hard to contain. we physicians who deal with this are now paying close attention to seeing our patients within a 24 to 48-hour follow-up should they present with respiratory symptoms and travel history or exposure. It's troubling to see somebody discharge from a hospital or emergency room and improve condition and bounce back a few days later intubated.
Shout out to # numbers due to his complete and very accurate information much like his weather forecast...lol.
Shout out to # numbers due to his complete and very accurate information much like his weather forecast...lol.
Thanks, mostly just trying to correct a ton of misinformation that some love to post around here. This is a very dangerous pathogen, as you noted, and it could become a pandemic, as many are warning. Good luck being on the front lines of this one, especially if it starts to take hold in the US and especially given the fairly high rates of infection among health care professionals in China, to date.
My hope is, at least outside of China and in countries like the US with very good health care systems, that really good prevention behaviors and monitoring/tracking/quarantining (and improvements in treatments with some antiviral combos showing promise) can keep transmission rates low enough to prevent a major epidemic here.
And maybe this time, China and some other countries will really start to crack down on these "wet markets" and the black market in illegal wildlife trade, which would greatly reduce the likelihood of getting some future virus with the high transmission rate of COVID-19 and the high mortality rate of MERS (30-40%). That would be close to an Armageddon scenario.
Well, unfortunately, things have deteriorated around the world over the last couple of weeks. Cases are up to 600 in South Korea, 130 in Italy and could be hundreds or even thousands in the new epicenter for the disease, Iran, where 12 have died, the most outside of China, which is not surprising, as Iran does not have the medical infrastructure to prevent a more serious epidemic.. Markets are roiled, with the S&P down nearly 4% today and there's now more serious fears of a global pandemic.
Much of the concern is because COVID-19 is significantly more deadly than the flu (2% or so vs. 0.1% for flu) and transmission rates look to be higher than for SARS (which was 8-10% deadly) and the fact that it's now spreading to other countries, as per above. The most important thing all along was keeping it localized to China and if that doesn't happen, we could have a world wide pandemic (the 1918 flu pandemic killed close to 2% of people infected, so it's possible it could be like that).
On the plus side, today we have antivirals and antibiotics (for secondary infections) we didn't have back then, plus we have test kits that can identify infected people quickly and we can utilize public health approaches like quarantines and even more simple things like better hand-washing (which appear to have finally slowed the spread in China). On the down side, the world is far more interconnected globally with travel and trade than it ever was before, so transmission vectors are greater than back in 1918. At this point, it's going to be really difficult to keep it from spreading, significantly to other countries, including the US. Here's what the WHO had to say about a potential pandemic:
The infection has been fatal in 2 to 4 percent of cases within Wuhan, but in less than 1 percent elsewhere, the W.H.O. said.
The organization has declared the epidemic a public health emergency, but Dr. Tedros said it has not reached the level of a pandemic — yet.
“For the moment, we are not witnessing the uncontained global spread of this virus and we are not witnessing large-scale severe disease or deaths,” he said. “Does this virus have pandemic potential? Absolutely it has.”
@AreYouNUTS - didn't want to start a new thread on this as there's lots of really good info in this one, including from some actual doctors on the front lines of this, so any chance you could add something to the thread title noting this is also about the coronavirus? Thanks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/world/asia/china-coronavirus.html#link-55bd821f
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-pers...community-covid-19-spread-could-take-place-us
It'll stop when the weather gets warmer. These things always stop when the weather gets warmer.
So sayeth The Trump.
Good point. It should slow down significantly, by March/April, like all other virus transmissions, but it won't stop - but it could be just enough to prevent it from becoming a pandemic in the northern hemisphere, since we're already almost in March - my guess is it's going to be a very close call, especially with the Middle East now looking to be in play as a source for Europe. Just said all this in an IM on the board to @DJ Spanky and another poster.
It seems to me that an outbreak in Iran would suggest that warm weather isn't really an inhibitor.
Come on, it's a pandemic right now. Did you see how the WHO is redefining the term? They're doing everything possible to not call it what it is.
US is doing almost no testing (something like 400-500 total so far). Starting to see reports on social media that people are sick with pneumonia, high fever, but not being tested. Maybe they're just flu cases, we can hope. But it's hard for me to believe there aren't clusters of coronavirus cases in the US given all the international travel we've had.
Warmer weather might help, it might not. Maybe it will delay the real impact until next fall/winter.
Things went from "all fine" to panic/quarantining/armed guards in parts of Italy in a 4-5 day period. It can happen here. Hopefully it won't.
It's still pretty cool and dry in Iran in February and the research shows that it's more about humidity than temperature. The reason viruses are transmitted much more readily in the winter in the northern and southern hemispheres is a combination of cool, dry conditions, which lead to drier mucus, leading to more easily airborne virus particles; in addition, viruses will survive a bit longer outside the host in cool dry conditions. Furthermore, more recent research has shown that immune responses in laboratory animals are less effective in low humidity conditions (perhaps due to less "trapping" of virus particles in mucus).
Also, people tend to congregate in groups, inside, much more in cold weather (especially around the holidays). And viruses don't go "dormant" in warm weather - it's simply that transmission rates are much lower, so incidence is much lower."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190513155635.htm
Conspiracy , Witchhunts , Lies all part of the Chinese directive... does anyone in today’s day and age have doubts that governments are capable and perhaps culpable for the spread of highly contagious diseases... has the Government of Mainland China allowed outside medical teams to interact and possible come up with a better way to protect it’s citizens to stop the spread around the globe....naaaah why would they do that it would expose too much of what really could be going on...easy to lose 500 million and still have billion people... less mouths to feed... less waste and garbage ... less energy used... a lot less of things for a new generation...no more limits placed upon number of children a family can have...still it sounds crazy but that is the way of planet earth 2020... no worry our brothers and sisters in the DC political arena will have everything under control... “ we are prepared says the CDC.”... better hope somebody with have a brain does ...
Disagree. It's absolutely not a pandemic now, but I agree it could become one in fairly short order. And this has been a very tough flu season, with near record deaths, especially in children, so it's hard to tell what's going on here.
I completely agree the US absolutely needs to step up testing (the kits are out there now) and needs to be more restrictive with travel and to be more prepared to move quickly to quarantines, if needed, as it's likely to at least become more serious in pockets of the US.
Warmer and more humid weather has always helped with every other virus, so no reason to think it won't here. And maybe by next winter, we'll see a vaccine.
Snippets from various articles. BBC chart shows mortality rate is below 1% for people up to 50 and way below in younger groups. They don't publish details of every death outside China but every one I've read about was always a person 60+ and a good handful in their 80s. I don't know that I've read about one below 60 outside of China yet.
EDIT: tried to post the BBC link but somehow whenever I post from the BBC it's always a video that shows up rather than the text
EDIT2: since I can't get the link with the bar chart to show up it's around ~15% for 80+, ~8% for those 70-79, ~3.5% for those 60-69, ~1.25% for those 50-59, and below 1% or way below 1% for groups younger. These numbers were from a Chinese study.
EDIT3: found another link with the info graphic.
- Older individuals fare more poorly: Of the 1,408 cases of COVID-19 in patients over age 80, there have been 208 deaths, for a case fatality rate (number of deaths per number of cases) of almost 15%. By contrast, there have been no deaths in the 416 cases in children ages 0-9 years, and one death among the 549 cases of children and adolescents ages 10-19 years.
- Those with other chronic illnesses do worse: There have been approximately 5,000 cases where individuals have reported a known co-morbid medical condition, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, or cancer. The average mortality rate in these groups is in the 5-10% range, whereas of the 15,000 individuals who reported no other medical conditions, the mortality rate to date has been less than 1%.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninash...er-when-it-comes-to-coronavirus/#5ba995ffa436
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/18/cor...l-in-men-than-women-major-study-suggests.html
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I believe the number of reported cases worldwide is way lower than the actual number. The incubation period for this virus is up to 14 days and some reports of it being even longer. That means there are people with no fever or other symptoms traveling around the world right now not even knowing they have this. Also, with cold and flu season right now, many cases are mild and these people may not have gone for testing or treatment thinking it was cold or flu. I would bet the number of current cases is double if not more of whats currently reported.
That’s the assumption that we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg so we don’t really know the true number of cases. Good in one sense because it brings the mortality rate down bad because people are possibly spreading it further while they have minimal symptoms.
The median incubation period from infection to onset of symptoms looks to be about 4 days and presumably the vast majority are under 7 days, which is still on the long side and still is a major risk, but certainly not 14 days.
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-pers...19-virus-likely-has-multiple-infection-routes
I don't think there's been anywhere near a record number of flu deaths this year. It has been tougher than usual on children for sure.
The kits are NOT out there. There were problems with reagents in most of the test kits sent out by the CDC. I believe right now there are only 3 or 4 states that are able to do their own (limited) testing. Everything else still needs to be sent to CDC which is a several day turnaround. Yet South Korea has managed to run what, 10,000 tests? 20,000? Can't recall the exact number.
Maybe, but if you've done any reading about the issues that were encountered with SARS and MERS vaccine development you would see that this is not going to be a straightforward process. I'd be very surprised if there was something available for general use by next winter.
Maybe we get lucky and the warmer weather knocks this down and it can be eliminated like SARS was, but this virus is so widely distributed (much more than SARS) and more easily transmissible that I don't see how that happens. It's also still a couple of months from really warmer weather in much of the US, plenty of time for things to get pretty bad. Hopefully not.
I could have worded my post above better. This flu season is record-breaking for deaths of children (outside of the 2009 epidemic), as per the link below. It's not even above average for deaths, in general, though (although there are 16,000 US flu deaths so far this season out of 29 million infections).
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/health/child-flu-deaths-105/index.html
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
The kits are out there, but there have been some problems verifying that they're all working properly, as one of the reagents appears to be substandard, as you noted. That happens sometimes with rushing a test out into the field and needs to be fixed quickly, but all positive field tests still go back to CDC anyway for confirmation. Since the protocol only calls for testing people with symptoms who were high risk travelers, this probably isn't a major issue, yet. Yet being the key word - I think everyone agrees the FDA/CDC need to fix this problem ASAP (and they need the proper govt. funding to do so, which has been an issue with the current Administration).
With regard to vaccine development, I agree it's very challenging. The attached article says the WHO says it may take up to 18 months, but the article notes it could also be faster, given the lessons learned with trying to develop SARS/MERS vaccines, which ended up not really being needed as the spread of these viruses petered out before the next flu season.
Having seen, first hand, what can be accomplished with public-private partnerships in the case of the Canadian Health Authority and Merck (and J&J) on developing and manufacturing an approved and effective Ebola vaccine, I'm guardedly optimistic we could have such a vaccine in <18 months, if the public and private sector are equally all-in here (and I'm sure they would be if this becomes a pandemic); 12 months would be pretty astonishing, though. it took several years in the Ebola case to get the private sector involved - but once involved, development of the vaccine for use in large clinical trials was done quite quickly.
COVID-19 petering out certainly might not be the case here, though, given what appear to be significantly greater transmission rates (albeit with much lower death rates), so having a vaccine ASAP could end up being critical for the planet. I'm sure one of the biggest questions will be whether COVID-19 dies down with warmer weather (like all other viruses, including coronaviruses have always done) and whether, if it does, the virus returns next winter (or if we see it take off in the southern hemisphere's winter, like we do with the flu) - and then whether it mutates like influenza does, such that even if we develop a vaccine, mutations might make it moderately effective, like the flu vaccine (unlike most other vaccines for viruses which are much closer to 100% effective).
https://www.sciencealert.com/who-says-a-coronavirus-vaccine-is-18-months-away
https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/07/inside-story-scientists-produced-world-first-ebola-vaccine/
Nice response. A few points of clarification though regarding pediatric flu deaths. The current total of 105 is not the highest ever recorded at this point in the season, but it is the second highest. There were 265 child deaths at this point in the 2009-2010 season. Total for that year was 288. The last 2 years the total number of child deaths have been 188 and 144 so this year could easily top those if things keep going at the current rate.
As for death rates, I think we still have to be really careful about making assumptions from the "data" provided by China. I don't think anyone has a good handle on how many deaths or infections have actually occurred there, and since the infection often has a long course (2-4 weeks or more in severe cases), there is a significant lag between case identification and final outcome. If you use only "resolved" cases and accept the Chinese data, the death rate is 8.8% (2664 deaths / (2664 deaths + 27635 recovered). That doesn't account for "minor" cases but also doesn't account for the potentially thousands of deaths that have not been officially attributed to the disease. I'll feel a lot more confident if the rates of death and serious illness in the Italy and South Korea outbreaks are low. I've said elsewhere that Wuhan/Hubei might be the model for a worst-case scenario where the early outbreaks are ignored/denied and the medical system is completely overwhelmed. We'll see.
Regarding vaccines - I have seen several papers that describe complications associated with attempts at SARS vaccines. I assume these were in animal tests, but if I recall correctly, the vaccines were effective in preventing actual infection with the SARS virus. However, when animals were exposed to the virus they still developed some kind of serious inflammatory response in their lungs. Since SARS1 and SARS2 are very similar, there might be similar problems. On the other hand, technology has advance a lot since 2003 so perhaps new techniques will lead to safe/effective vaccine development on a quicker time scale.
Informative information is the best kind.
No one that was in China from December should have been allowed here
Was the sickness common knowledge in China BEFORE the rest of the world knew of it ? How many of the approx. 11,000,000 population of Wuhon escaped outside the first Wuhon quarantee zone ? I read an estimated 5,000,000 ? Who many of those escaped the second quarantee zone of approx., 56,000,000 ? (which is approx. Calif, Oregon, Wash combined.)
Yea they estimate 5 million left Wuhon before they shut the city down. How many of those were infected and where did they all end up? Even if only 1% of that group was infected thats 50K that now traveled to other cities/countries.
