Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Here is the latest updates:

Progress of COVID Inoculations

According to the coronavirus vaccine tracker, the U.S. has now administered 17.18 million vaccine doses.

Globally 54.49 million vaccinate doses have been given with the U.S., China and U.K. in the top three positions. The U.S. and China are vying for first place. In this update, many other countries are starting to show up on the scoreboard. I expect India will make its presence known shortly and will be a top contender.

Source: COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker

Biden unveils Covid-19 plan based on 'science not politics' as he signs new initiatives

Aerosol Transmission

Places like Taiwan and Hong Kong, have learned painful lessons from the SARS outbreak of 2003-2004, took precautions to prevent transmission by aerosols. Now, some countries have even put forth a full pandemic ventilation guides.

“The risk of inhalation exposure to the virus reduces the farther away one is from the virus emitter, but in enclosed spaces with low humidity, the virus can stay airborne and be carried by air currents long distances away from the source,” said Lednicky. “Many health agencies have failed to properly assess the danger posed by airborne SARS-CoV-2.”

“It is less contagious than measles but more contagious than tuberculosis, both of which are also airborne,” Jiminez added. “[Agencies] seem to fear that acknowledging it would cause fear and panic. But what really causes fear and panic is a pandemic that is out of control in many places, precisely because they are not telling people how the virus is transmitted, so that people can’t protect themselves.”

Source: Coronavirus likelier in air we breathe than surfaces touched — what scientists say we got wrong

Nursing Home Deaths

While heart disease and diabetes have been touted as among the most frequent co-morbidities, when the numbers are parsed, dementia and other mental health disorders claim more prominence as risk factors in the elderly.

Different countries report vastly different nursing home mortality rates. Deaths associated with patients in senior-care centers accounted for 40% of US COVID-19 deaths, 50% in Sweden, 62% in Ireland, and 80-85% of deaths in Canada -- compared to Singapore, where only 8% of deaths occurred in nursing homes. This intercountry variation is so large that Nature could not discount the importance of nursing home residence in their calculus of the significance of age in COVID-19-related deaths over 65.

"More than 134,200 people … died from Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia since March. That is 13,200 more U.S. deaths caused by dementia than expected, compared with previous years…People with dementia are dying not just from the virus but from the very strategy of isolation that's supposed to protect them. In recent months, doctors have reported increased falls, pulmonary infections, depression and sudden frailty in patients who had been stable for years. Social and mental stimulation are among the few tools that can slow the march of dementia . . . . Most residential care homes reported that the lack of social contact … coupled with the loss of care and stimulation provided by visitors the increased cognitive impairment and onset of depression which "caused them [the residents]… to … stop eating and drinking."

Source: COVID-19: Linking Age, Race, Nursing Homes, And Dementia

Interesting development I just found on Facebook...

Cycle Count in PCR Tests

PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing is successful in identifying organisms that cannot be grown in vitro or in situations where current culturing techniques lack sensitivity and/or require prolonged incubation periods Other testing methods, such as culture or serology, often do not match the level of sensitivity or timeliness of molecular testing. In some cases, alternative methods may increase the risk of false negatives or incorrect results in critical testing situations where fastidious pathogens may be difficult to grow or immune responses difficult to detect.

While the recent appearance of antigen tests has added to the panel of diagnostic solutions for COVID-19, RT-PCR has been the gold standard diagnostic approach since the beginning of the pandemic. Several of the COVID-19 RT-PCR solutions available on the market provide Ct (cycle threshold) values as part of their results data, and experts argue that these could be used as a semi-quantitative proxy for viral load in the absence of quantitative assays.

While PCR testing and Ct values can offer a deeper insight during the diagnostic process, they are not without limitations; perhaps the most important of which is the inherent inability to distinguish between live and dead organisms. The exquisite sensitivity of PCR allows for the detection of minute quantities of nucleic acid; however, this does not always correlate with the presence of live organisms. The assay will amplify nucleic acid from dead microbes as readily as from living. As dead organisms can be shed for weeks after recovery, a recovering patient might have the same positive test result as an actively infected patient. It is important to be able to distinguish between these two patients, as the positive test from the recovering patient may have no clinical relevance, while the actively infected patient may require treatment.

Source: The role of cycle threshold values in infectious disease diagnostics

So the way I read the article is that PCR testing can determine if a person is in an active viral state or if the person had the virus and is no longer infected. This difference can be seen in the following graph in relationship to a specified threshold value.



So a statement that "the current cycle was much too high and resulting in any particle being declared a positive case", does not seem to be valid IMHO. But maybe someone with more expertise in this area might chime in.

It is the means of separating out those who have the virus from those who had the virus.

Here is the latest updates:

Progress of COVID Inoculations

According to the coronavirus vaccine tracker, the U.S. has now administered 18.45 million vaccine doses.

Globally 56.74 million vaccinate doses have been given with the U.S., China and U.K. in the top three positions. The U.S. and China are vying for first place. In this update, many other countries are starting to show up on the scoreboard. I expect India will make its presence known shortly and will be a top contender. In the last week India went from a vaccination rate of 0.01 to 0.06 per hundred people. This is a minuscule percentage but in terms of actual people it amounts to 806,484 people. As a result they just passed Russia on the scoreboard.

Source: COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker

I was watching a South Korean television station called ARANG a few minutes ago. It is interesting to get a different perspective on COVID response. In the program they highlighted an inflatable field hospital [inflatable isolation ward]. It was the size of a basketball court [450 square meters or 4,800 square feet] and had negative pressure rooms for each patient room. It is highly portable and can be placed into commission in less than one day. The mobile facility is developed by CHO Min-su of the Korean Institute of Radiological and Medical Sciences.



According to one article:

* The rooms use a ventilation system that creates negative pressure to allow air to flow into the isolation room and be channelled out safely, helping prevent the spread of airborne pathogens.

* The mobile clinic modules are large greenhouse-like inflatable tents, which the institute said cost a fifth of the price of building a conventional hospital ward.

Source: S.Korea unveils inflatable isolation ward for COVID-19 patients

Covid variant found in UK may be more deadly than others, says Boris Johnson

The pace of the vaccinations is really picking up. I check the numbers at 1:21 today and now 7 hours later almost 4 million more people have been vaccinated.

Progress of COVID Inoculations

According to the coronavirus vaccine tracker, the U.S. has now administered 19.84 million vaccine doses.

Globally 60.31 million vaccinate doses have been given with the U.S., China and U.K. in the top three positions. The U.S. and China are vying for first place. In this update, many other countries are starting to show up on the scoreboard. I expect India will make its presence known shortly and will be a top contender. India has now vaccinated over a million people.

Source: COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker

Globally over 2.1 million people have died from the Corona Virus.
America leads the death totals with 424,000 deaths and on track to reach 500,000 deaths in February.
Brazil has 200,000+ deaths. Mexico and India both have 150,000+ deaths.
The global cases of Corona Virus will pass 100 million cases within 2 or 3 days.
The deadly UK strain is spreading the virus at a much faster rate and more cases ultimately leads to more deaths as hospitals fail to cope with increased caseload.

I am noticing a a weird pattern among the acquaintances I know who got infected:
- Both parents and grandmother of an old classmate’s husband, all the 3 died within the same week.
- Parents of a acquaintances I know, both died within same week.
- There’s news of siblings dying with the same infection, few days apart.

I am starting to wonder why it is so mild on most yet very deadly on some; killing more than one member of the same family. They say maybe it is a matter of genetics or blood type; yet those old couples often weren’t blood related tho.

Officially there’s only 3 strains detected, I read the initial viral load (number of viruses) makes a difference too; if it is too high in the first day your body gets overwhelmed quickly.

It is scary how it gets so deadly to some and still little known why.

There are several variants of COVID. These include the U.K. variant, the South African variant and the Brazil variant.

There was a report published the other day that said that the U.K. variant was more deadly. What the report said was:

Patrick Vallance told a news conference that "there is evidence that there is an increased risk for those who have the new variant." He said that for a man in his 60s with the original version of the virus, "the average risk is that for 1,000 people who got infected, roughly 10 would be expected to unfortunately die." "With the new (U.K.) variant, for 1,000 people infected, roughly 13 or 14 people might be expected to die," he said. But Vallance stressed that "the evidence is not yet strong."

So essentially the trend data is fairly weak and the increase in lethality is not great.

But the article then went on to say:

But Vallance said scientists are concerned that variants identified in Brazil and South Africa could be more resistant to vaccines.

If the vaccines that are coming online prove ineffective or less effective at preventing transmission for those two variants then the world is in big trouble. If the natural immunity that individuals receive after being infected and surviving the original virus disappears for these two variants, then the world is in big trouble. This is the current threat and cause for concern.

UK chief scientist says new virus variant may be more deadly

China is Expanding Current Lockdown to Parts of Hong Kong

Officials placed 10,000 residents under COVID-19 lockdown Saturday in a crowded district in Hong Kong. Secretary for Home Affairs Tsui Ying-wai said 3,000 civil servants were deployed in the Jordan area of the Yau Tsim Mong district of Hong Kong to test the 10,000 residents amid the lockdown. Officials sealed off about 200 buildings in the district from 4 a.m., the South China Morning Post reported.


Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

Source: COVID-19: Government declares lockdown in Hong Kong