Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Sorry to hear that, mate.
Life's a b***h.

I haven't watched the video, but I have been positing the benefits of everyone wearing masks/bandana when in a public setting.

Pepe, watch it. It is a good video. It is spearheading a movement to encourage everyone to wear face mask during this pandemic. It is like watching Greta Thurnburg advocate a good cause.

What is the Tiger King show and what does it have to do with Coronavirus?

Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine believe that they’ve found a potential vaccine for the new coronavirus.

The researchers announced their findings Thursday and believe the vaccine could be rolled out quickly enough to “significantly impact the spread of disease,” according to their study published in EBioMedicine.

The vaccine would be delivered on a fingertip-size patch. When tested on mice, the vaccine produced enough antibodies believed to successfully counteract the virus.

The scientists say they were able to act fast because they had already done research on the similar coronaviruses SARS and MERS.

“These two viruses, which are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, teach us that a particular protein, called a spike protein, is important for inducing immunity against the virus,” read a statement from co-senior author Andrea Gambotto, M.D., associate professor of surgery at the Pitt School of Medicine.

“We knew exactly where to fight this new virus.”

The vaccine follows the traditional approach of ordinary flu vaccines, using lab-made pieces of viral protein to build immunity.

While the mice have not been studied over a long period of time, the vaccine was able to deliver enough antibodies against the coronavirus within two weeks, according to the researchers.

The study’s authors are now applying for an investigational new drug approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. They hope to start human clinical trials within the next few months.

Researchers said they sided with using a patch, rather than a traditional needle, to deliver the spike protein to the skin, which elicits the strongest immune reaction.

The patch contains 400 tiny “microneedles” made of sugar and protein pieces. It would be applied like a Band-Aid with the needles dissolving into the skin.

The vaccine would be “highly scalable” for widespread use, the researchers said in a news release.

“For most vaccines, you don’t need to address scalability to begin with,” Gambotto said. “But when you try to develop a vaccine quickly against a pandemic, that’s the first requirement.”

Closing the toilet lid is highly recommended amid the coronavirus outbreak, according to a report, as a group of researchers have found that the bug can spread through fecal matter that escapes from the bowl during a flush.

The disease caused by the coronavirus, which scientists had already warned can be spread from fecal-oral transmission, can also be transmitted via “aerosolized feces,” according to Forbes, citing a study published by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.

Aerosolized feces can be propelled into the air through what’s called a toilet plume — the spread of aerosols, sometimes containing infectious fecal matter, caused by a flush.

“Close the lid and then flush,” a mechanical engineering professor from Purdue University, Dr. Qingyan Chen, told Forbes. He said it was a simple solution to help control the spread of the disease through toilet plumes.

Chen told the outlet that closing the lid can prevent 80 percent of the fecal particles from escaping into the air.

Came up in a post on this thread about Americans.Its some idiotic show.Apparently all the NTs are watching it while stuck inside.Its some big hit with them.

I wonder if sub standard ppe contributed to the situation in China.
Some protection equipment from China ‘not ideal’, HSE says

Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he will issue an executive order Friday authorizing the National Guard to seize ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE) from facilities in the state and redistribute them to hospitals most in need, as New York saw its biggest single-day increase in deaths from the virus.

The new order comes a day after the governor said he had only enough ventilators in his stockpile to last six days at the "current burn rate." And the trajectory keeps going up -- New York state has now lost 2,935 people to COVID-19, more than the number lost in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly 103,000 have been infected as of Friday, a jump of more than 10,000 in 24 hours.

"I will return it to you or pay you for it," Cuomo said to the facilities who may have ventilators taken. "I'm not going to be in a position where people are dying and we have ventilators in our state somewhere else."

Thousands have already been lost --teachers, first responders, health care workers; the virus has ripped whole chunks from families and taken many friends. Daily hospitalizations hit a new record Thursday after declining the previous two days and ICU admissions soared. New York City, impaired by the density that makes it one of the world's most vibrant places, had more than 57,000 cases as of Friday morning and 1,562 dead as of Thursday night.

New York's premier medical group says its physicians are now being faced with the cruelest of choices: Deciding who lives and who dies.

"Ventilators as lifeboats are reaching capacity. At this point, the most difficult decisions facing physicians will have to be made," the group said Thursday. "Already, some emergency physicians are reporting being told the equivalent of ‘Use your best judgment. You’re on your own.’ We will be seeing increasing depression and PTSD that will eclipse today’s physician burnout."

Emergency rooms have turned into "inescapable warzones," as one Manhattan doctor describes them. A Queens doctor says his ER is so flooded ventilators are being managed in hallways. Others say they've intubated their own colleagues; an ER doctor in New Jersey has died. Nurses have staged walk-outs to demand more personal protective equipment. The situation has become so dire that a regional EMT group has issued new guidelines telling paramedics not to take cardiac arrest patients to emergency rooms if they can't be revived in the field.

Cuomo says the surge of COVID-19 patients has overwhelmed hospitals, so much so that he announced Thursday that the Javits Center field hospital, intended to be a 2,500-bed facility for non-virus patients to ease the burden, will now exclusively treat coronavirus patients. The U.S. Army will run it.

The next battlefront, the apex, could be catastrophic. All of the current plans and efforts currently in place are designed with that in mind, Cuomo says. State consultants say New York will need 75,000-110,000 COVID-only beds when the apex hits. Estimates vary as to when that will happen. On Thursday, Cuomo said his team pegs it hitting at the shorter end of a seven-to-30-day range.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said on MSNBC Friday he expects an initial surge of coronavirus patients in New York City next week -- a flood of easily 5,000 or more people who need to be intubated or on ventilators in ICUs. Right now, he says, "We have enough ventilators just to get to Sunday/Monday."

"I'm guaranteeing you that next week is going to be a lot tougher. Next week in New York City is going to be very tough," de Blasio said. "We have days to set up a structure to truly mobilize the medical community of this nation ... If that is not done in the coming days, you're going to see people die who did not need to die."

New York City is the national epicenter of the crisis, but the alarming curve it is seeing will trend to other parts of the state -- and other parts of the country, Cuomo has said. The governor said Friday he was worried about emerging clusters on Long Island, in Westchester. He has a Central Coordinating Team that is constantly working to best allocate resources, from staff to equipment and supplies, and shift them to where they are most needed.

Ultimately, New York needs three things -- beds, equipment and staff, Cuomo says. Beds are the easiest to acquire. Nearly 100,000 retirees have returned to work to shore up medical staffing; some colleges are graduating medical students early. De Blasio called for a national medical personnel enlistment program Friday, saying the country needs a wartime footing for a wartime threat.

No state is equipped to handle this situation. States don't do public health emergencies," Cuomo said on MSNBC. "There is no capacity in my state health system that runs 50,000 beds to create and maintain an additional 50,000 beds, just in case once every 20 years there's a pandemic. It doesn't work that way."

Cuomo says hospitals have essentially turned into ICU units for COVID-19 patients. About 21 percent of all NYC cases have required hospitalization, slightly higher than the rolling statewide average (14 percent). Half of those patients are 75 and older, but 10 percent are children, according to the city's latest data. The vast majority of fatalities, though, are people older than 65; nearly 99 percent of all victims had prior conditions or conditions under investigation.

One projection from the Gates Foundation-funded IHME suggests New York could lose a total 16,000 people through the second week of May.

New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio asked New Yorkers to wear a face covering when they go outside and will be near other people.

He cited research showing asymptomatic people could be spreading the virus without realizing it.

"When you put on that face covering, you're protecting everyone else," he said.

The mayor said it could be a scarf or a bandanna or anything homemade, but it should not be a surgical mask needed by first responders and healthcare workers.

A recent study by researchers in Singapore became the latest to estimate that somewhere around 10% of new infections may be sparked by people who carry the virus but have not yet suffered symptoms.

New York state officials said Friday there is no data to support the effectiveness of face masks.

"There is no clear evidence to suggest that face masks, whether made out of cloth or even the general public using face masks. but we are continuing ot look at the data all the time that is coming in and we are examining that right now," Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said.

A bandanna might not prevent someone from coming into contact with the virus, but it could help a person who has it not give it to others when the sneeze, cough or breathe.

"It's fair to say the masks couldn't hurt unless they gave you a false sense of security," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

The mayor of Los Angeles also told everyone in the city to start wearing masks on Wednesday.

The Trump administration is also formalizing new guidance to recommend that many Americans wear face coverings when leaving home, in an effort to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, according to White House sources.

I'm very much hoping that mask wearing in public in the U.S. catches on and is culturally accepted to the point that no one cares if they see someone in a mask as it has been in parts of Asia for a long time. If it does catch on, I actually hope it would "stick" even after the pandemic in the U.S. like it is in Asia in non-pandemic times. I would feel more comfortable being able to wear a mask going around in public if I felt the need, especially the older I get. People can be germ farms.

This is the abstract of a paper out of China:

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) causes the infectious disease COVID-19, which was first reported in Wuhan, China in December, 2019. Despite the tremendous efforts to control the disease, COVID-19 has now spread to over 100 countries and caused a global pandemic. SARS-CoV- 2 is thought to have originated in bats; however, the intermediate animal sources of the virus are completely unknown. Here, we investigated the susceptibility of ferrets and animals in close contact with humans to SARS-CoV-2. We found that SARS-CoV-2 replicates poorly in dogs, pigs, chickens, and ducks, but efficiently in ferrets and cats. We found that the virus transmits in cats via respiratory droplets. Our study provides important insights into the animal reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2 and animal management for COVID-19 control.

Source: Susceptibility of ferrets, cats, dogs, and different domestic animals to SARS-coronavirus-2