Funny...my wife just showed me our bottle of colloidal silver. We know that silver kills bacteria. I'd assume it could be hard on the virus. But, I haven't studied it. We go through a lot of thieves oil at our place as a prevention measure.

Honestly, we can't say enough about a healthy diet, exercise and sufficient rest. I'm not getting nearly enough rest lately and that's not good...

How many tests must a person take to be sure of the correct outcome of the test.? All test have a certain probability of giving a false positive or a false negative. It is not just the false positives to be concerned about, but the false negatives which allow the disease to continue to be transmitted with only the disease becoming semptomatic to indicate the negative was a false negative. False positives are usually weeded out by giving the test over a couple of times, but is the test repeated for a negative result?

"Every carrier infects X number of other people (and we do not know what X is yet or what all of the means of transmission are)"

So far the data and calculations are showing 1.3 to a max report of 3.3 (that was later revised to 2.2 IIRC).

"H.sapiens is actually making a surprisingly good showing of rationality in terms of low-granularity decisions to self-isolate and to close public events."

Indeed, and this may be a major contributor to reducing the spread. I'm also curious as to the longer term effects of this. By way of example, many companies are doing full-time work from home now - and not just tech people. This will, in my experience, open people up to that notion more and show the company that yes, they can actually do that and be fine. So I wonder how much of a boost remote-work will get out of this. One tech conference I know went virtual this year as well.

Thanks for sharing your expertise, Jan.

I'm not going to parse through your message bit-by-bit. But, at first glance your R0 doesn't match the numbers I received. But, I haven't listened for R0 numbers lately. In short, I read every study I can get my hands on. That's why I get a headache every Friday. My initial, and early, conclusion that this was airborne was based on CDC recommendations on how to deal with this virus. Since then, I have heard a few reports supporting the conclusion. Your chances of getting a normal flu after sitting three feet from an infected person for eight hours is very low. Not so with this.

But, I just read and think. Everybody takes in different information. I'm not going to shovel out my sources. And, everybody can think whatever they want to think. It's somewhat possible this thing may fade away in a month or so, then show up again in the next "cold and flu season", based on a collection of conditions. We'll see. I appreciate your commentary.

Want to hear the funniest part? (at least with my sense of humor) The mainstream media will tell you over and over (including some guest doctors) that Vitamin D doesn't matter. That's because they can't write a prescription for it, IMO...

My nutritionist has recommended 10,000 IU of Vit D for me for years. (Plus 25,000 Vit A)

I've taken it every day for years.

This short video discusses the D3 benefits in detail.
https://youtu.be/W5yVGmfivAk

I also take vit. D3 every winter

I contracted an apparent cold three-and-a-half weeks ago. It began in the middle of the night with a mild sore throat. I took a certain brand of echinacea for a few days, and on day 5 was feeling much better. I doubt that this bug was COVID-19 because I healed so rapidly, had a very drippy nose, my temp never exceeded 99.3, had no aches or pains, and no difficulty breathing. BTW, has the Thieves study been replicated? I've always been skeptical. Thanks for any input you may have.

"As you said, being airborne makes it very dangerous and that is why it's exponentially difficult to contain."

It isn't airborne in the sense that matters, it is airborne droplet - just like H1N1. Containment is fundamentally no different from a process/procedure perspective.

"Some victims were frequent travelers: did they consider what the consequences will be?"

So, story time. Back in the 80s I was part of an agency that prepared/planned for stuff like this. The primary thing we talked about regarding broad transmission was what we called "super carriers" - people who travelled frequently and to high traffic/population areas. The modeling showed that if we, when faced with an outbreak the most important thing you could do to stop it was to lock down most of the "super carriers". Absent them more than 90% of outbreaks would be contained/eliminated.

Had we had the data/tech we do today, I have no doubt we'd have used it in our planning. Even then we knew the names of the vast majority of the American "super carriers".

That said, essentially we're talking Pareto Principle in regards to the "super carriers". But the effect is/was to drop that r0 value below 1. If you can do that, you've got it beat. However, realizing this the question of curtailing movement switches.

It is one thing to shut down travel broadly - such as all flights in/out of a hot zone - and another to stop that tiny minority from travel. Now here I kinda need to clarify just a bit about the work I was involved in in the 80s. While the basic principles and processes are the same, bioweapons are a bit different than natural viruses. However, IMO if you want to know the best way to stop something, consult the people who figure out the best way to spread it.

An alternative is mandatory quarantine/isolation. From a "freedom" perspective it can be thorny to consider travel limitations and/or physical quarantine. The sticky wicket is the post-operational period. Don't do enough or target the wrong population and you decrease confidence and justification for it. Go too far and you build resentment. The catch there is in the beginning you don't know how hard to go, and if you go hard enough it will look like you overreacted.

Good comments until the last line. Preemptively curtailing people's movements is just about as odious a preventive measure as there can be - and for anyone with less than childlike faith in government, a reasonable concern.

The Spanish flu had about a 2.5% death rate while covid-19 seems to be in the 2 to 3 percent death rate of those infected. The Spanish flu had spread to something like 20% of the world's population and thus killed hundreds of millions. Perhaps all the control methods now available will keep it from killing less than 100,000.
H1N1 had a lesser death rate than covid-19 appears to have but infected tens of millions.

Great to hear that you are feeling fine, JRA.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... is a decent broad view.

MOST people exposed do not get it. Most people who become "Persons under Investigation" do not get it. Most people who are "presumptively/clinically confirmed" do not have it. This can also be seen by the low r0 value of 1.3 to 2.3 - meaning on average (globally) one person will infect 1.3 to 2.3 people. Removing the province where Wuhan is shows a much lower rate. Some work puts that down in the 0.4 to 1.2 range; but let us not take that as fully conclusive just yet either as we are dealing with much smaller levels once you exclude that province.

Unfortunately a lot of the data you're looking for is region specific. The sole common factors that are universal are 1) getting exposed (duh!) and 2) been over 70 years of age. On elf the reasons you want to exclude the data, to some degree, from the Wuhan area is that there is believed to be two transmission factors there: zoonotic (the fish market) and human to human and that is suspected as the reason it grew so fast.

Even within China the rates vary dramatically. For example, in the province Wuhan is in (Hubei), the overall case fatality rate is 2.9. Outside of that province, though still in China, it is 0.4%. We see this happen in the U.S. as well. As I've mentioned elsewhere here, of the 39 deaths in the U.S., 31 are from Washington, and almost all of those from King County, and over half of those from a single nursing home. This kind of thing really messes with attempts to quantify risks.

Another example is the Caribbean Princess ship, which had 2 crew members transfer from the Grand Princess. That ship had 21 cases. Out of over 2400 people aboard. The Diamond Princess (the one EVERYBODY has heard about) the r0 was 2.28. Frankly, given the circumstances, that is not as high as I'd have expected. To add to that, those were the values computed from the early days of the ship outbreak.

Regarding your item (3), again it is complicated. Mostly you have to break it out by pre-existing conditions. Even if you happen to be over 70, if you don't have chronic disease, diabetes, heart or lung problems, or already are sick, the odds are somewhat in your favor.

From the provincial data, around 95% of those who actually went (or were taken) to a facility didn't require hospitalization. Of that remaining 5% the CFR is about 49% - again in the Hubei province.

You can also look at https://www.thelancet.com/journals/la... which, while "small scale" is a rather tight study.

I've summarized the findings there elsewhere on this page, will not repeat them here. ;) Basically out of over 300 people exposed or thought to be exposed, only 1 - the spouse - got it at all.

My apologies for not laying it out as clear and simple as either of us would like, but that is basically where we are at the moment. Also, we've hit the point were more than half of total cases have hit a "recovered state" - and that doesn't include deaths. This may be a sign we're past the bulk of it, but we won't really know for another week or two as we see how things run in the more recent cases.

Are you still in Italy, JRA?

I'd take that claim with a pallet of 50lb bags of salt. The claims made in the article are explicitly countered by the paper they claim to base it on.

For example:

From the linked article:
"Further, the science paper finds that there is no known viral ancestry to the CoVid-19 coronavirus, meaning it did not evolve from nature."

From the source paper:
"Based on its genome sequence, 2019-nCoV belongs to lineage b of Betacoronavirus (Fig. 1A), which also includes the SARS-CoV and bat CoV ZXC21, the latter and CoV ZC45 being the closest to 2019-nCoV. 2019-nCoV shares ~76% amino acid sequence identity in the Spike (S)-protein sequence with SARS-CoV and 80% with CoV ZXC21 (Chan et al., 2020)."

and the full context of the cherry-picked quote from the article:
"This furin-like cleavage site, is supposed to be cleaved during virus egress (Mille and Whittaker, 2014) for S-protein “priming” and may provide a gain-of-function to the 2019-nCoV for efficient spreading in the human population compared to other lineage b betacoronaviruses. This possibly illustrates a convergent evolution pathway between unrelated CoVs. Interestingly, if this site is not processed, the S-protein is expected to be cleaved at site 2 during virus endocytosis, as observed for the SARS-CoV."

So no, the authors of the paper are not implying in any way this was bioengineered to kill humans. Indeed, reading further they indicate that this is nothing new and is possibly a route to treatment as it has been in other cases. I will also note that the implication the article's authors make is that because a new virus pops up and we don't know its ancestry, it must be a bioweapon engineered by man is absurd and unsupportable.

Scaremongers and conspiracists tend to only read abstracts - to the extent they even bother. But here, even the original paper's abstract makes no such claims:

"In 2019, a new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infecting Humans has emerged in Wuhan, China. Its genome has been sequenced and the genomic information promptly released. Despite a high similarity with the genome sequence of SARS-CoV and SARS-like CoVs, we identified a peculiar furin-like cleavage site in the Spike protein of the 2019-nCoV, lacking in the other SARS-like CoVs. In this article, we discuss the possible functional consequences of this cleavage site in the viral cycle, pathogenicity and its potential implication in the development of antivirals."

Note that this paper is over a month old, and since it was published the actual virus has been named SARS-CoV-2 because it is not different enough genetically from SARS-COV (-1) to get its own classification.

The article plays slight of hand with selective quoting and letting the reader fill in the blanks with fear. The article author clearly wants you to think it is unique, but the original paper shows it isn't. For example the article reads “The spike glycoprotein of the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV contains a furin-like cleavage site absent in CoV of the same clade.”

But they fail to point out that, as the original paper clearly shows, the cleavage site is present on a bit more than half of CoV overall. Further the article adds emphasis around a claim that the virus is efficiently spread among humans, insinuates this is demonstrative of engineering. But here is the lie: if the virus was not "efficient" in spreading in humans would we be having an epidemic? Of course not.

Something important to keep in mind in all this is that corona virus is a family of viruses that exists across species. Sometimes these viruses mutate and "jump" species. This isn't new or unique. The genetic lineage of SARS-COV-2 indicates a bat origin.

For example a related paper still awaiting peer review indicates:
"At the whole genome level, the sequence identify of SARS-CoV-2 was 50% to MERS-CoV, 79% to SARS-CoV, 88% to two bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses, Bat-SL-CoVZC45 and Bat-SL-CoVZXC21 (collected in 2018 in Zhoushan, China), and 96% to Bat-SARSr-CoV RaTG13 (collected in 2013 in Yunnan, China)"

"According to random drift hypothesis (15), these nucleotide mutations among different SARS-CoV-2 strains now available are still determined by neutral evolution. In short, there has no powerful factor to force SARS-CoV-2 to evolve in a certain direction by far. However, we should take strict precautions against the strong factors that may cause directional variation of SARS-CoV-2 both in natural environment and infection treatment."

TL;DR: no, the analyses we have so far are not indicative of it being a human engineered bioweapon.

"I'm missing something here. I understand that it's airborne and contagious."

Sort of to the former, and yes to the latter. It is transmitted by droplets. This means you have to not only come into contact with the droplets but do so at a place they can ingest - it doesn't absorb via the skin. Th general public is not well educated on airborne vs airborne droplet transmission. The movies tend to go for actual airborne displays and scientists report "airborne droplet so that doesn't help.

An airborne droplet is a droplet that can cover short distances suspended in the air for short periods of time. Think of someone sneezing or coughing. By contrast an airborne virus is floating in exhaled breath.

As to contagion, the data and research we have so far puts the range of average transmission in the 1.3 to 3.3 range. Which means on average one person will infect 1.3 to 3.3 other people. So yes to contagious, but with the caveat that it isn't super contagious as some claim. It is presently less contagious than whooping cough, for example, which is also spread via droplets and airborne droplets and has an r0 of about 5.5.


You can always say we were not as prepared as we "should" have been - for something new. Those kind of claims are generally done to deflect blame - which isn't always warranted but still thrown.

The WHO delayed recognizing it as a pandemic well beyond their own published standards. It had met the criteria for stage 6 for weeks before they did. The reality is there really isn't much actual news so they all-"news"-all-the-time companies glom onto something they can scaremonger with because the human brain is wired to pay more attention to danger signs.

It makes me remember a Bill Engvall(?) bit:
"This doll looks safe enough doesn't it" like we're all at home going "uh-huh!" "But what if Barbie skated through a pool of gasoline*?!" -- https://youtu.be/rISEOKSbcko?t=195

No, wmiranda, it is not the flu - though some types of flu are due to a related species. We know this because we test for the genes of the virus...that is what the Covid-19 test kits to: they test for unique genetic sequences that this particular virus has.
Whatever other decisions you make, please do not base them on the idea that this 'may be just the flu'

Jan

Yeah, I understand. I don't think 34,000 have died from flu this year - have they? Don't know.

CDC and WHO...Uh, have your grains of salt ready.

I think they are doing a good job with these recommendations with one glaring exception. The governor has called schools "essential services" as a way to keep them open and attendance mandatory. This is a big mistake and contradicts the rest of the message and program. If what we are learning about this virus is true this will certainly result in more deaths. I hope I'm wrong. That said - at least one local school district said attendance is voluntary, which is the correct path.