Coronavirus

If we ever face a flu strain that is predicted to kill half a million people in the US in a single season, I'll make a point of staying inside for that too.

Covid-19 spreads more quickly than the usual flu virus. Is apparently easier to adhere to other people. Can be quite unfriendly...As in lead to death.

So far there's still plenty of unknowns about this thing.

LOL so up to a 100,000 flu deaths on average a year is not a worry but a prediction of 500,000 US deaths when China deaths from Coronvirus is less then a hundreds of that number is a worry to you??????

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Louisiana and Georgia have postponed the primary election.
This is possibly stupidity at it's best. Off the Covid-19 is still going strong at the new date, then what?
According to the medical experts it is supposed to get worse.

Probably best to vote absentee. But not sending people out to vote right now is a good idea.

I early-voted for the first time ever so as to avoid the pandemic.

Yes, the prediction of half a million deaths in the US has me quite worried.

The flu is usually much less than 100,000 US deaths every year. And I get a quadrivalent flu shot every year.

I even finagled a PPSV23 pneumonia shot for myself when I was younger (paid for it myself). I've been trying to get a booster (still willing to pay for it myself) for the past few years, but haven't yet found someone willing to give me one.

That's what many French are also saying. The question today is how many are going to vote. If few people do, the election looses its meaning and could get cancelled. The second round of voting is still scheduled for 22 March, when the epidemic is expected to reach its maximum in the country. It would be irresponsible to maintain it. There's no urgency in changing municipal councils and mayors that are at the forefront of the fight right now.

Here's a cheery report for a sunny Sunday morning (and a cold one here):

Asia's garment industry sees lay-offs, factories closing due to COVID-19.



That means much fewer cheap garments, even at places like Walmart. More importantly, it means financial disaster for men and women all across south Asia and southeast Asia. This will be bad for folks in India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Indonesia and Thailand. It will be catastrophic in Bangladesh for the garment industry, where the Bengali labor force--about 90% of them women--produces ready-to-wear garments in volume second only to China. Ready-to-wear garments from Bangladesh provide 80% of the country's foreign exchange, and is by far the repository of most of Bangladesh's domestic investment capital. Garment exports account for almost one eighth of Bangladesh's gross domestic product. (Sea level rise further threatens Bengalis' future. With a mere 10 inches of sea level rise, more than 10% of the country's land mass will be inundated, and almost 10% of its population displaced.



The CIA Factbook reports a Bengali population of more than 162.5 million people. Where will they go? Personally, I think the recent pace of global warming is such that ten inches of sea level rise in the next 30 years is a foolishly optimist projection.)

Bangladesh's tragedy is, in my opinion, despite its genuinely tragic nature, also symptomatic of how this pandemic is going to affect the entire world and its economic sector. The social impact of that pandemic will very likely cause profound social disasters, engendering a harsh response from authoritarian regimes, and creating more refugees fleeing oppression and economic disaster. As I said, a cheery good Sunday morning to you all.

[Sources at CIA Factbook, Wikipedia and various news agencies. The quoted material above is from CNA (Channel New Asia), a Singapore-based corporate subsidiary. Their English is excellent (which should be no surprise coming from Singapore) and in my experience, their news reporting is well balanced.]

45% voted in French municipal elections today, a record low.

Yes, plenty rumors and fake cures out there.

https://nypost.com/2020/02/27/putting-potatoes-up-your-butt-wont-cure-hemorrhoids-doctors-warn/

The Shengen space is closing down. This follows the practice of many states, who had already closed down as of this weekend.

Federal personnel chief quits abruptly amid coronavirus planning for the workforce of 2.1 million

JetBlue passenger receives lifetime ban for flying with COVID-19

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jetblue-bans-passenger-flew-positive-coronavirus-nyc-jfk-palm-beach-flight/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/jetblue-plane-passenger-diagnosed-coronavirus-landing-florida/story?id=69553619

Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand

Neil M Ferguson et al.

Summary
… we assess the potential role of a number of public health measures – so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) – aimed at reducing contact rates in the population and thereby reducing transmission of the virus. In the results presented here, we apply a previously published microsimulation model to two countries: the UK (Great Britain specifically) and the US. We conclude that the effectiveness of any one intervention in isolation is likely to be limited, requiring multiple interventions to be combined to have a substantial impact on transmission.

Two fundamental strategies are possible: (a) mitigation, which focuses on slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread – reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection, and (b) suppression, which aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels and maintaining that situation indefinitely. Each policy has major challenges. We find that that optimal mitigation policies (combining home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease) might reduce peak healthcare demand by 2/3 and deaths by half. However, the resulting mitigated epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over. For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option.

We show that in the UK and US context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures, though it should be recognised that such closures may have negative impacts on health systems due to increased absenteeism. The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed. We show that intermittent social distancing – triggered by trends in disease surveillance – may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound. Last, while experience in China and now South Korea show that suppression is possible in the short term, it remains to be seen whether it is possible long-term, and whether the social and economic costs of the interventions adopted thus far can be reduced. ...

Results
In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months (Figure 1A). In such scenarios, given an estimated R0 of 2.4, we predict 81% of the GB and US populations would be infected over the course of the epidemic. ... In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality. ...

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

Source

The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming

I don't know if this has been posted on a2k, but it is a sobering statement indeed.

The following information is from the Shelby County Health Department .

WHAT YOU MAY NOT KNOW OR DON'T UNDERSTAND ABOUT VIRAL PATHOGENESIS:

Feeling confused as to why Coronavirus is a bigger deal than Seasonal flu? Here it is in a nutshell. I hope this helps. Feel free to share this to others who don’t understand...

It has to do with RNA sequencing.... I.e. genetics.

Seasonal flu is an “all human virus”. The DNA/RNA chains that make up the virus are recognized by the human immune system. This means that your body has some immunity to it before it comes around each year... you get immunity two ways...through exposure to a virus, or by getting a flu shot.

Novel viruses, come from animals.... the WHO tracks novel viruses in animals, (sometimes for years watching for mutations). Usually these viruses only transfer from animal to animal (pigs in the case of H1N1) (birds in the case of the Spanish flu). But once, one of these animal viruses mutates, and starts to transfer from animals to humans... then it’s a problem, Why? Because we have no natural or acquired immunity.. the RNA sequencing of the genes inside the virus isn’t human, and the human immune system doesn’t recognize it so, we can’t fight it off.

Now.... sometimes, the mutation only allows transfer from animal to human, for years it’s only transmission is from an infected animal to a human before it finally mutates so that it can now transfer human to human... once that happens..we have a new contagion phase. And depending on the fashion of this new mutation, thats what decides how contagious, or how deadly it’s gonna be..

H1N1 was deadly....but it did not mutate in a way that was as deadly as the Spanish flu. It’s RNA was slower to mutate and it attacked its host differently, too.

Fast forward.

Now, here comes this Coronavirus... it existed in animals only, for nobody knows how long...but one day, at an animal market, in Wuhan China, in December 2019, it mutated and made the jump from animal to people. At first, only animals could give it to a person... But here is the scary part.... in just TWO WEEKS it mutated again and gained the ability to jump from human to human. Scientists call this quick ability, “slippery”

This Coronavirus, not being in any form a “human” virus (whereas we would all have some natural or acquired immunity). Took off like a rocket. And this was because, Humans have no known immunity...doctors have no known medicines for it.

And it just so happens that this particular mutated animal virus, changed itself in such a way the way that it causes great damage to human lungs..

That’s why Coronavirus is different from seasonal flu, or H1N1 or any other type of influenza.... this one is slippery. And it’s a lung eater...And, it’s already mutated AGAIN, so that we now have two strains to deal with, strain s, and strain L....which makes it twice as hard to develop a vaccine.

We really have no tools in our shed, with this. History has shown that fast and immediate closings of public places has helped in the past pandemics. Philadelphia and Baltimore were reluctant to close events in 1918 and they were the hardest hit in the US during the Spanish Flu.

Factoid: Henry VIII stayed in his room and allowed no one near him, till the Black Plague passed...(honestly...I understand him so much better now). Just like us, he had no tools in his shed, except social isolation...

And let me end by saying....right now it’s hitting older folks harder... but this genome is so slippery...if it mutates again (and it will). Who is to say, what it will do.