Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

Post Reply New Topic

Nice. My wife is also volunteering in making masks. It feels like going back to the days of American Revolution. But it feels good.

Do your masks come with nose bridge?

Last edited by eikonabridge on 24 Mar 2020, 11:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

Beautiful work, jimmy's wife!

So be it. We recovered from the Great Recession, multiple wars, 2008 recession, we’ll recover again just as the other nations doing lock downs will.

How about you stop panicking over the economy.

My Facebook is full of people who say “don’t panic over this virus” then panic over the economy

It sounds like Dr. Oz has become a believer:

The work by researchers at IHU-Méditerranée Infection in Marseille has garnered global attention, notably from President Trump. Researchers prescribed the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin to patients earlier this month, according to the research, which is published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.

In the abstract of their research study, researchers noted that patients “showed a significant reduction of the viral carriage,” six days after treatment with the two drugs began, and “much lower average carrying duration,” compared to untreated patients.

Oz said that he worked with a research team at Columbia University to craft a study that would “replicate” France's research.

“We’re going to test whether these two drugs -- a malaria drug and Z-Pack [Zithromax] -- can reduce the chance of you having a virus that lasts in your body more than five days as we’re showing in the study and also will it reduce the amount of virus the whole time.”

Oz said that the process is a “game-changer” because it takes the combination of two already existing pills and "repurposes them to shorten the amount of time of infection while potentially reducing complications."

Source: Dr. Oz delivers message to Trump, coronavirus task force: 'Get us these pills'

One of the researchers in the French Team is Prof. Dr. Didier Raoult.



This is a link to the study including the graph:
Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open- label non-randomized clinical trial

Yeah they have this frivolous need for a job to be able to pay for food and shelter. I know, ridiculous.

I take it you have no such need so meh on them?

We also recovered from the Spanish Flu people are so worried about covid-19 eventually someday possibly being like. That game plays both ways.

Last edited by EzraS on 24 Mar 2020, 12:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oh! Noooo! They are shutting down the production of marshmallow Peeps because of the Coronavirus.
This is horrible news! I love Peeps.



Not a Peep will be made beginning March 25. [That's TOMORROW]

Just Born, the candy manufacturer that makes Peeps among other candies, announced that it is temporarily suspending production in Philadelphia and Bethlehem, Pa., due to the “rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation.”

Source: Peeps manufacturer shutting down production amid coronavirus outbreak

I guess this will call for direct action. I must plan a raid to the stores and capture a pirates chest of these before the store shelves are empty.

I wonder how many are out of work now because of that.

Oh yeah, I'm not supposed to care about that because it doesn't really matter. They'll bounce back, no biggy.

No work, no food and other necessities on the shelves, no problem.

No. But the design that Jo Ann Fabrics is using might. We will see tomorrow. Tell your wife thanks, the nation depends on you.

That'll be great until Jo Ann Fabrics shuts down.

Maybe/maybe not! Indiana is scheduled for total lockdown beginning tomorrow. But Jo Ann Fabrics told my wife to show up at 10AM tomorrow to pick up supplies.

I will let you know tomorrow how things go.

What is the percentage of 396,249 and 17,353 out of 7,930,000,000?

Last edited by EzraS on 24 Mar 2020, 12:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hope she gets enough to last a few months.

People stocking up on toilet paper is starting to not be so silly anymore.

Another Conspiracy Theory BIT THE DUST!

As the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 spreads across the globe, with cases surpassing 284,000 worldwide today (March 20), misinformation is spreading almost as fast.

One persistent myth is that this virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was made by scientists and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began.

A new analysis of SARS-CoV-2 may finally put that latter idea to bed. A group of researchers compared the genome of this novel coronavirus with the seven other coronaviruses known to infect humans: SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2, which can cause severe disease; along with HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E, which typically cause just mild symptoms, the researchers wrote March 17 in the journal Nature Medicine.

"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," they write in the journal article.

Kristian Andersen, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, and his colleagues looked at the genetic template for the spike proteins that protrude from the surface of the virus. The coronavirus uses these spikes to grab the outer walls of its host's cells and then enter those cells. They specifically looked at the gene sequences responsible for two key features of these spike proteins: the grabber, called the receptor-binding domain, that hooks onto host cells; and the so-called cleavage site that allows the virus to open and enter those cells.

That analysis showed that the "hook" part of the spike had evolved to target a receptor on the outside of human cells called ACE2, which is involved in blood pressure regulation. It is so effective at attaching to human cells that the researchers said the spike proteins were the result of natural selection and not genetic engineering.

Here's why: SARS-CoV-2 is very closely related to the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which fanned across the globe nearly 20 years ago. Scientists have studied how SARS-CoV differs from SARS-CoV-2 — with several key letter changes in the genetic code. Yet in computer simulations, the mutations in SARS-CoV-2 don't seem to work very well at helping the virus bind to human cells. If scientists had deliberately engineered this virus, they wouldn't have chosen mutations that computer models suggest won't work. But it turns out, nature is smarter than scientists, and the novel coronavirus found a way to mutate that was better — and completely different— from anything scientists could have created, the study found.

Another nail in the "escaped from evil lab" theory? The overall molecular structure of this virus is distinct from the known coronaviruses and instead most closely resembles viruses found in bats and pangolins that had been little studied and never known to cause humans any harm.

"If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness," according to a statement from Scripps.

Where did the virus come from? The research group came up with two possible scenarios for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. One scenario follows the origin stories for a few other recent coronaviruses that have wreaked havoc in human populations. In that scenario, we contracted the virus directly from an animal — civets in the case of SARS and camels in the case of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the researchers suggest that animal was a bat, which transmitted the virus to another intermediate animal (possibly a pangolin, some scientists have said) that brought the virus to humans.

In that possible scenario, the genetic features that make the new coronavirus so effective at infecting human cells (its pathogenic powers) would have been in place before hopping to humans.

In the other scenario, those pathogenic features would have evolved only after the virus jumped from its animal host to humans. Some coronaviruses that originated in pangolins have a "hook structure" (that receptor binding domain) similar to that of SARS-CoV-2. In that way, a pangolin either directly or indirectly passed its virus onto a human host. Then, once inside a human host, the virus could have evolved to have its other stealth feature — the cleavage site that lets it easily break into human cells. Once it developed that capacity, the researchers said, the coronavirus would be even more capable of spreading between people.

All of this technical detail could help scientists forecast the future of this pandemic. If the virus did enter human cells in a pathogenic form, that raises the probability of future outbreaks. The virus could still be circulating in the animal population and might again jump to humans, ready to cause an outbreak. But the chances of such future outbreaks are lower if the virus must first enter the human population and then evolve the pathogenic properties, the researchers said.

Source: The coronavirus did not escape from a lab: Here's how we know

Thank you for the information.

Another interesting idea in the war against the coronavirus:

New York State says that it will fight the coronavirus outbreak by using the blood plasma of recovered patients.

During a press conference on Monday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that the blood therapy trial, which is aimed at coronavirus patients who are in the most serious condition, will start this week.

“What it does, it takes the plasma from a person who has been infected with the virus, processes the plasma and injects the antibodies into a person who is sick,” Cuomo explained, during the press conference. “There have been trials that show when a person is injected with the antibodies, that then stimulates them for most of their immune system against the disease.”

“It’s only a trial, it’s a trial for people who are in serious condition, but the New York State Department of Health has been working on this with New York’s best health care agencies and we think it shows promise and we’re going to be starting that this week,” he added.

Harnessing the blood plasma of recovered patients is known as “convalescent plasma,” and was used in the fight against the SARs outbreak, according to an article published last month in the medical journal The Lancet.

“Convalescent plasma or immunoglobulins have been used as a last resort to improve the survival rate of patients with SARS whose condition continued to deteriorate despite treatment with pulsed methylprednisolone,” the article said. “Moreover, several studies showed a shorter hospital stay and lower mortality in patients treated with convalescent plasma than those who were not treated with convalescent plasma.”

Source: New York State fights coronavirus with blood plasma from recovered patients

21 MILLION cell phone accounts in China....gone. No longer active. This at a time when China is apparently requiring people to punch in "health codes" and is using cell phones as the primary method to track the movement of people.

Some theories, given that China withholds information from the rest of the world is that a portion of those 21 million cell phone accounts could have been cancelled by users to save money, but again, cell phones needed to move around.

Another theory is that the death toll in China because of the virus is magnitudes higher than what the Chinese government is reporting. I hope that's not the case. I hope the numbers they're reporting are accurate. If they're not, and we start seeing an explosion of infections, hospitalizations and deaths in the rest of the world, that would unfortunately make sense as to why China locked down whole cities rather than seemingly locking down cities for a virus that purportedly was of little consequence proportionally. As an aside, I will go on record to say that my level of respect for or trust in totalitarian regimes is zero.