Treyfish
Moderator
Korea says all of China a coronavirus watch zone
:tiphat:http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=282451
:tiphat:http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=282451
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Nurse treating coronavirus sufferers in China claims 90,000 people have already been infected Daily Mail
It would be consistent with the hospital videos we've seen, showing wall to wall patients. Just doing the paperwork for each patient is going to be seen as a useless distraction, so the records are bad.
That said, I'm hard put to think of any additional measures that the Chinese could take beyond what they have already done, so the exact number is immaterial. The quarantined areas will suffer through the epidemic unless a cure is quickly found.
Whether the travel restrictions will be enough to keep the epidemic confined is the main uncertainty. If they fail, I'd expect truly draconian steps in immediate consequence.
the problem with these lab-escape theories is -as before- the virology, the mutation count.
They would not discuss this, as it usually didn't support the claim.
Why should the lab use a virus that is currently circulating in bats ? Just so they have an argument
of natural release if it escapes ? But then, if it occurs in Nature why should the risk from a lab-escape
be greater ? Unless it hadn't been manipulated .. but they would see that by comparing it to the
wild strains.
As I understood they did not find a good match of this virus yet in bats, hopefully they will find some.
The best match is from bats in 2018 with 3500 mutations, then the SARS virus from 2003 with 5900 mutations
The Twitter hashtags #SARS and #Wuhan are blowing up with people suggesting the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, the only one in China, as the origin of this virus, either through intentional or accidental release. There are several news articles out this morning, including one in the Washington Times to that effect, accusing China of working on this virus in a bioweapons program.
This is still really an animal virus, even if we haven't determined which animal and where it jumped to humans. I can't imagine someone is smart enough to engineer a SARS-like virus to spread this efficiently H2H and then accidentally release it in the lab. I just don't think we know that much about coronaviruses in general to pull that off. Also, if the lab had engineered the virus, we would have gotten these draconian measures to fight it three weeks ago when the virus was discovered as they would have known the potential of the virus.
To see if it can infect humans.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
"While public health measures silenced the SARS-CoV outbreak2, recent metagenomics studies have identified sequences of closely related SARS-like viruses circulating in Chinese bat populations that may pose a future threat4,5. However, sequence data alone provides minimal insights to identify and prepare for future pre-pandemic viruses. Therefore, to examine emergence potential of circulating CoVs, we built a chimeric virus that encodes a novel, zoonotic spike protein in the context of a viable CoV backbone"