All things Chinese CoronaVirus

[CU88]

Anyone else remember when America was a World Leader?

May 4, 2020 at 2:53 p.m. EDT
LONDON — World leaders came together in a virtual summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate...

The online conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus, which has killed more than 250,000 people worldwide.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

[cradleandshoot]

Anyone else remember when America was a World Leader?

May 4, 2020 at 2:53 p.m. EDT
LONDON — World leaders came together in a virtual summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate...

The online conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus, which has killed more than 250,000 people worldwide.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

Is there a difference between promising billions of dollars and wanting a ROI? What America does best is tinkle away billions of dollars hunting down unicorns.

[kramerica.inc]

I also remember thinking they would bring something better to the meetings since they were hosting 2 a month...

Certainly sounds like the wrong folks to be doing it, at least with the emphasis you described.

That said, I do see that they have a group involved in this arena.

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/demil/default.htm

Yes, they were a part of all the ACWA foreign treaty-related chem-demil stuff.

[RedFromMI]

A mutant coronavirus has emerged, even more contagious than the original, study says

https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... n-original

Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote.

In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease, the report warned.

The 33-page report was posted Thursday on BioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 9.069054v1), a website that researchers use to share their work before it is peer reviewed, an effort to speed up collaborations with scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. That research has been largely based on the genetic sequence of earlier strains and might not be effective against the new one.

The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report’s authors said they felt an “urgent need for an early warning” so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain.

Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain’s dominance over its predecessors demonstrates that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.

The coronavirus, known to scientists as SARS-CoV-2, has infected more than 3.5 million people around the world and caused more than 250,000 COVID-19 deaths since its discovery late last year.

The report was based on a computational analysis of more than 6,000 coronavirus sequences from around the world, collected by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data, a public-private organization in Germany. Time and again, the analysis found the new version was transitioning to become dominant.

The Los Alamos team, assisted by scientists at Duke University and the University of Sheffield in England, identified 14 mutations. Those mutations occurred among the nearly 30,000 base pairs of RNA that other scientists say make up the coronavirus’s genome. The report authors focused on a mutation called D614G, which is responsible for the change in the virus’ spikes.

“The story is worrying, as we see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominant pandemic form,” study leader Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos, wrote on her Facebook page. “When viruses with this mutation enter a population, they rapidly begin to take over the local epidemic, thus they are more transmissible.”

Scientists at major organizations working on a vaccine or drugs have told The Times that they are pinning their hopes on initial evidence that the virus is stable and not likely to mutate the way influenza virus does, requiring a new vaccine every year. The Los Alamos report could upend that assumption.

If the pandemic fails to wane seasonally as the weather warms, the study warns, the virus could undergo further mutations even as research organizations prepare the first medical treatments and vaccines. Without getting on top of the risk now, the effectiveness of vaccines could be limited. Some of the compounds in development are supposed to latch onto the spike or interrupt its action. If they were designed based on the original version of the spike, they might not be effective against the new coronavirus strain, the study’s authors warned.

“We cannot afford to be blindsided as we move vaccines and antibodies into clinical testing,” Korber wrote on Facebook. “Please be encouraged by knowing the global scientific community is on this, and we are cooperating with each other in ways I have never seen … in my 30 years as a scientist.”

[tech37]

A mutant coronavirus has emerged, even more contagious than the original, study says

https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... n-original

Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote.

In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease, the report warned.

The 33-page report was posted Thursday on BioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 9.069054v1), a website that researchers use to share their work before it is peer reviewed, an effort to speed up collaborations with scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. That research has been largely based on the genetic sequence of earlier strains and might not be effective against the new one.

The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report’s authors said they felt an “urgent need for an early warning” so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain.

Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain’s dominance over its predecessors demonstrates that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.

The coronavirus, known to scientists as SARS-CoV-2, has infected more than 3.5 million people around the world and caused more than 250,000 COVID-19 deaths since its discovery late last year.

The report was based on a computational analysis of more than 6,000 coronavirus sequences from around the world, collected by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data, a public-private organization in Germany. Time and again, the analysis found the new version was transitioning to become dominant.

The Los Alamos team, assisted by scientists at Duke University and the University of Sheffield in England, identified 14 mutations. Those mutations occurred among the nearly 30,000 base pairs of RNA that other scientists say make up the coronavirus’s genome. The report authors focused on a mutation called D614G, which is responsible for the change in the virus’ spikes.

“The story is worrying, as we see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominant pandemic form,” study leader Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos, wrote on her Facebook page. “When viruses with this mutation enter a population, they rapidly begin to take over the local epidemic, thus they are more transmissible.”

Scientists at major organizations working on a vaccine or drugs have told The Times that they are pinning their hopes on initial evidence that the virus is stable and not likely to mutate the way influenza virus does, requiring a new vaccine every year. The Los Alamos report could upend that assumption.

If the pandemic fails to wane seasonally as the weather warms, the study warns, the virus could undergo further mutations even as research organizations prepare the first medical treatments and vaccines. Without getting on top of the risk now, the effectiveness of vaccines could be limited. Some of the compounds in development are supposed to latch onto the spike or interrupt its action. If they were designed based on the original version of the spike, they might not be effective against the new coronavirus strain, the study’s authors warned.

“We cannot afford to be blindsided as we move vaccines and antibodies into clinical testing,” Korber wrote on Facebook. “Please be encouraged by knowing the global scientific community is on this, and we are cooperating with each other in ways I have never seen … in my 30 years as a scientist.”

Okay so this is the strain we've been mostly dealing with. The scary headline and graphic makes it sound like it has just emerged.

[Kismet]

Okay so this is the strain we've been mostly dealing with. The scary headline and graphic makes it sound like it has just emerged.

IMHO that is a distinction without a difference. The virus that's here is what it is and everyone deserves to know that.

[RedFromMI]

(omitted)

Okay so this is the strain we've been mostly dealing with. The scary headline and graphic makes it sound like it has just emerged.

Yes, but the scientists publishing this are emphasizing the differences to make sure that the vaccine developers don't miss the changes (a lot of the work has been done using the original published sequences from the Chinese/WHO and the early French sequencing.

If the changes were big enough the other vaccine may not be effective - but they would discover that pretty quickly in human trials of efficacy. And lose time.

[6ftstick]

Okay so this is the strain we've been mostly dealing with. The scary headline and graphic makes it sound like it has just emerged.

IMHO that is a distinction without a difference. The virus is what it is and everyone deserves to know that.

Interesting how they continue to ad layers of scariness.

Cats get it now

Dogs get it now

Kids get it now.

It mutates

The tests are unreliable with many false positives.

Lets just stay in our corners and let the mediocre bureaucrats take over everything.

[tech37]

Okay so this is the strain we've been mostly dealing with. The scary headline and graphic makes it sound like it has just emerged.

IMHO that is a distinction without a difference. The virus is what it is and everyone deserves to know that.

Agreed kismet. Being skeptical re all news vehicles at this point, any doubt on my part is with the medium not the message.

[wgdsr]

A mutant coronavirus has emerged, even more contagious than the original, study says

https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... n-original

Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote.

In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease, the report warned.

The 33-page report was posted Thursday on BioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 9.069054v1), a website that researchers use to share their work before it is peer reviewed, an effort to speed up collaborations with scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. That research has been largely based on the genetic sequence of earlier strains and might not be effective against the new one.

The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report’s authors said they felt an “urgent need for an early warning” so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain.

Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain’s dominance over its predecessors demonstrates that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.

The coronavirus, known to scientists as SARS-CoV-2, has infected more than 3.5 million people around the world and caused more than 250,000 COVID-19 deaths since its discovery late last year.

The report was based on a computational analysis of more than 6,000 coronavirus sequences from around the world, collected by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data, a public-private organization in Germany. Time and again, the analysis found the new version was transitioning to become dominant.

The Los Alamos team, assisted by scientists at Duke University and the University of Sheffield in England, identified 14 mutations. Those mutations occurred among the nearly 30,000 base pairs of RNA that other scientists say make up the coronavirus’s genome. The report authors focused on a mutation called D614G, which is responsible for the change in the virus’ spikes.

“The story is worrying, as we see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominant pandemic form,” study leader Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos, wrote on her Facebook page. “When viruses with this mutation enter a population, they rapidly begin to take over the local epidemic, thus they are more transmissible.”

Scientists at major organizations working on a vaccine or drugs have told The Times that they are pinning their hopes on initial evidence that the virus is stable and not likely to mutate the way influenza virus does, requiring a new vaccine every year. The Los Alamos report could upend that assumption.

If the pandemic fails to wane seasonally as the weather warms, the study warns, the virus could undergo further mutations even as research organizations prepare the first medical treatments and vaccines. Without getting on top of the risk now, the effectiveness of vaccines could be limited. Some of the compounds in development are supposed to latch onto the spike or interrupt its action. If they were designed based on the original version of the spike, they might not be effective against the new coronavirus strain, the study’s authors warned.

“We cannot afford to be blindsided as we move vaccines and antibodies into clinical testing,” Korber wrote on Facebook. “Please be encouraged by knowing the global scientific community is on this, and we are cooperating with each other in ways I have never seen … in my 30 years as a scientist.”

i have to assume vaccine developers are aware of this and expect some version of this event?

moderna is one and am sure there are others that are working on platforms that are flexible.

and wouldn't at least some vaccines already make accomodation... not be directed or influenced (if possible) at what aspects are witnessed as mutating?

anyway, always better to have updated and shared info. we are light years ahead on that count from days gone by.

[Kismet]

Okay so this is the strain we've been mostly dealing with. The scary headline and graphic makes it sound like it has just emerged.

IMHO that is a distinction without a difference. The virus is what it is and everyone deserves to know that.

Agreed kismet. Being skeptical re all news vehicles at this point, any doubt on my part is with the medium not the message.

Yep but the tabloid/clickbait effect is the play here and people need to be informed well enough to see through it and get to the crux of the issue as you did.

[CU88]

Anyone else remember when America was a World Leader?

May 4, 2020 at 2:53 p.m. EDT
LONDON — World leaders came together in a virtual summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate...

The online conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus, which has killed more than 250,000 people worldwide.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

Is there a difference between promising billions of dollars and wanting a ROI? What America does best is tinkle away billions of dollars hunting down unicorns.

Since you have done the math, how much is a human life worth?

[Kismet]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... e-lab-cvd/

Excellent in-depth piece in NATGEO with Dr. Anthony Fauci. He weighs in on a number of hot-button issues with the virus that are worth your time

[6ftstick]

Anyone else remember when America was a World Leader?

May 4, 2020 at 2:53 p.m. EDT
LONDON — World leaders came together in a virtual summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate...

The online conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus, which has killed more than 250,000 people worldwide.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

Is there a difference between promising billions of dollars and wanting a ROI? What America does best is tinkle away billions of dollars hunting down unicorns.

Since you have done the math, how much is a human life worth?

OH PLEASE.

7500 Americans die daily. Heart disease, cancer, Pulmonary problems suicide, accidents. The full panoply

Do you ask that question for any of those deaths.

Whats 30 million americans out of work through no fault of their own worth

Whats the destruction of a lifes work building a small business worth.

Whats a future worth,

Whats your 1st 2nd and 4th amendment rights worth.

[cradleandshoot]

Anyone else remember when America was a World Leader?

May 4, 2020 at 2:53 p.m. EDT
LONDON — World leaders came together in a virtual summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate...

The online conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus, which has killed more than 250,000 people worldwide.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

Is there a difference between promising billions of dollars and wanting a ROI? What America does best is tinkle away billions of dollars hunting down unicorns.

Since you have done the math, how much is a human life worth?

Whatever the insurance company will pay.

[RedFromMI]

Rural Infection Rates Spike As Urban Outbreaks Subside, Data Says

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/rura ... -data-says

Data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that infection rates are increasing at higher rates in rural areas than in urban settings.

It’s a significant, if not unsurprising trend: the disease is fanning out from big, urban areas like New York City to more sparsely populated parts of the country.

Researchers found that while urban areas continue to have higher death rates and more cases per capita, the growth rate of both metrics is now higher in rural America.

According to the study, between April 13 and April 27, the per capita rate of COVID-19 cases went from 51 cases per 100,000 people to 115 per 100,000 — a 125 percent increase.

The death rate rose commensurately, jumping 169 percent from 1.6 deaths per 100,000 people to 4.4 per 100,000.

Projections by the Centers for Disease Control leaked to the New York Times on Monday suggested that the federal government also expects COVID-19 to begin hitting rural areas harder than urban ones. Citing data from up to May 2, the document said that, over the coming months, cases in “the Great Lakes region, parts of the Southeast, Northeast, and around southern California” were expected to increase. (A White House spokesperson said that the leaked numbers were “not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed.)

Cynthia Cox, Vice President at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Director for the Program on the Affordable Care Act, told TPM that there was a chance the pandemic could worsen an already fragile health care situation in rural communities.

“Those are also the same areas that have fewer health care resources and have older populations, and even the younger population tend to be sicker,” Cox said. “So it’s possible that even if the virus continues to spread, this is a troubling sign because those areas could be harder hit.”

Rural America is uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of COVID-19. A decade-long crisis has led to scores of rural hospitals shutting down, with 126 closing since 2010. Forty-seven percent of rural hospitals in the U.S. were in the red in 2019, according to statistics from the Chartis Center for Rural Health.

The nature of the illness as well could wreak havoc on rural communities. America’s rural population is, on average, older and and has more preexisting conditions that make COVID-19 more dangerous.

Rural counties have far fewer intensive care unit beds per capita as well, limiting the amount of capacity they may have in the event of widespread outbreaks.

Michaud said that data showing how “concentrated outbreaks can be, even in rural counties,” surprised him.

“In rural areas, there’s a problem of meat processing plants and the prisons and institutional areas where we’re seeing such a rise in cases that has to do with the way their work is set up and the way conditions are and the lack of lockdown procedures that have occurred in some of these places,” he said.

Some of the same largely rural states that have had serious outbreaks — like North Dakota and Georgia — are at the forefront of the effort to open up, casting social distancing restrictions aside.

Cox noted an irony in that, saying that “some states are opening up despite the fact that the rural areas in those states have the highest rates of death and infection of coronavirus.”

[tech37]

Okay so this is the strain we've been mostly dealing with. The scary headline and graphic makes it sound like it has just emerged.

IMHO that is a distinction without a difference. The virus is what it is and everyone deserves to know that.

Agreed kismet. Being skeptical re all news vehicles at this point, any doubt on my part is with the medium not the message.

Yep but the tabloid/clickbait effect is the play here and people need to be informed well enough to see through it and get to the crux of the issue as you did.

That's the trouble, people don't get past the headline and come away with misinformation. Obviously editors for a paper like LA Times (left of center) know exactly what they're doing with misleading headlines.

[6ftstick]

Sweden

London coronavirus model predicted 40,000 dead by May 1.

100,000 dead by June 1.

2680 dead to date——no forced mitigation or forced social distancing.

Whoopsie

[Kismet]

Okay so this is the strain we've been mostly dealing with. The scary headline and graphic makes it sound like it has just emerged.

IMHO that is a distinction without a difference. The virus is what it is and everyone deserves to know that.

Agreed kismet. Being skeptical re all news vehicles at this point, any doubt on my part is with the medium not the message.

Yep but the tabloid/clickbait effect is the play here and people need to be informed well enough to see through it and get to the crux of the issue as you did.

That's the trouble, people don't get past the headline and come away with misinformation. Obviously editors for a paper like LA Times (left of center) know exactly what they're doing with misleading headlines.

Not so sure other than what I previously mentioned regarding clickbaiting/view inflation ostensibly to increase ad revenue which isn't always in accordance with informing the public clearly and directly. But, sadly, that's the way things on across the full spectrum of media - both right, left and center.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Sweden

London coronavirus model predicted 40,000 dead by May 1.

100,000 dead by June 1.

2680 dead to date——no forced mitigation or forced social distancing.

Whoopsie

USA

Trump projected about 15 dead

We are over 70,000

Whoopsie