Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Questions and speculations prove nothing.

Here are the benefits of asking questions.

1. We learn about life through questions.
It is scientifically proven that we learn about life by asking questions. Children naturally start learning about the world by observing, testing and asking “why.” Through questions, children learn the cause-and-effect relationship and, most important, the meaning of words.

2. The more we question, the better answers we get.
Unfortunately, with age and responsibilities, the questioning stops and we settle for the few options that we have learned. The minute those options don’t work, we get stuck. Whenever we experience an obstacle, our brain goes to the fastest pattern it can find from our experiences similar to the current situation. This is why we sometimes have illogical reactions: We do not give time for the brain to find a better solution. The more information and experiences we have, the more options we have to solve our problems.

3. The quality of our lives depends on questions we ask.
The quality of our lives is directly related to the quality of our thinking. “The quality of our thinking, in turn, is determined by the quality of our questions, for questions are the engine, the driving force behind thinking.”

4. Questioning makes you open.
Questioning forms new patterns in the brain. The more patterns it forms, the more flexible it becomes. With flexibility, it can access more information already stored in your brain instead of reverting to the old patterns.

5. Questioning makes you wiser.
When you become more open because of a flexible brain, you become perceptive of many different perspectives and less biased in your decisions.

6. Asking the right questions creates happiness.
We all know how peace and harmony feels, but not many of us take a minute to understand what causes these feelings. When we entertain this deep question, we start understanding how to feel at peace more often. We realize we are the creators of our feelings; they don’t just happen to us.

Source: 6 Underlying Benefits of Asking Questions

AND I AM BIG ON HAPPINESS! (because I am a happy boy!)

The purpose of a discussion forum is to discuss...posing questions generate discussion

The science that is being used to tackle the Wuhan coronavirus is impressive. The viral genome was solved in days and released to the world. Companies and academic institutes are working like mad to come up with a vaccine. But it may not matter. Here's why.

In the world of infectious diseases, it is always better to prevent an infection than to treat it. Almost without exception, this means vaccination is the way to go. But it's not so easy. Far from it. Here's a look at how science has performed so far in response to the Wuhan coronavirus. And why even the best efforts might not make a difference.

1. The Speed. Wow.

The genome of the virus was determined with lightning speed and published immediately (January 11th) by Professor Yong-Zhen Zhang of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center & School of Public Health at Fudan University in Shanghai. But the credit does not belong solely to Zhang. Far from it. In this case, we saw the power of collaborative science among different groups in multiple countries.

The timeline of the period between the discovery of 2019-nCoV/Wuhan virus and where we stand now sounds like it comes from a science fiction script, but it's real:

* December 2019 – An outbreak of viral pneumonia hits Wuhan. No one has any idea what was the causative pathogen.
* January 9, 2020 – Chinese scientists and the WHO announced the discovery of 2019-nCoV (aka Wuhan Virus) and confirmed that it was responsible for the cases of pneumonia.
* January 11 – China releases the genomic sequence. The genome was determined from samples isolated from the first patients. It is freely available.
* January 24 – Scientists at The Pasteur Institute in Paris begin sequencing the viral genome from samples taken from three French patients. They begin on Friday and have the sequence solved by Monday.
* January 30 – The Pasteur Institute scientists release the viral genome, which confirms that it's the same virus that infected Chinese patients. Here's what the genome looks like.
* January 29 – An Australian announced that it was able to grow the virus in cultured cells. This is enormously important for the development of diagnostic tests, vaccines, and antiviral drugs. I'll get to that in a moment.

2. Now Comes the Hard Part

There has been talk about having a vaccine against the coronavirus in months. I hope I'm wrong, but this sounds delusional. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in Norway is funding Moderna Therapeutics and Inovio Pharmaceuticals, two biotechs. CEPI says they hope to have a vaccine candidate ready for human testing in 16 weeks. But even if they succeed there is a big difference in having a Phase I candidate and an approved, working vaccine.

The previous record for the fastest vaccine development goes to Inovio. But the company also gets an award for the fastest dose of hard luck. In response to the Zika threat in 2015, the company had an experimental vaccine ready to be tested in humans in seven months. Except it didn't matter. Zika largely dissipated and the vaccine was left on the shelf. It made no sense to run clinical expensive trials for an infection that "went away." Just one of the many things that can go wrong in the world of drug and vaccine development. You can succeed and still fail.

3. All this can go wrong too...

The ability to grow viruses in vitro (outside the body) is critical to vaccine and drug discovery. If Compound X stops influenza from growing in a dish of cultured cells it has a chance to do so in animals and humans. Here's how it works: biologists seed a monolayer of cultured host cells with a virus and measure whether X prevents viral replication in cells and at what concentration.

Ironically, norovirus (stomach virus), the evil little SOB, which is one of the most contagious pathogens in the world, absolutely refused to grow in cultured cells, and this is almost surely a reason why we have neither a vaccine or antiviral drug for the infection. It took 50 years to overcome this problem. Hepatitis C, which infects the livers of 3% of the people in the world, would not grow in liver cells (seriously?). A stripped-down, artificial version of the virus called the HCV replicon was synthesized and this discovery led to drugs that cured the infection. But the discovery of the HCV replicon took about 10 years.

Human papillomavirus (HPV), the most common STD in the US is highly contagious, but there still isn't a good way to grow the virus outside the body. On the other hand, some viruses grow like gangbusters in cultures of host cells. So do influenza, measles, herpes, and varicella-zoster (chickenpox/shingles).

And there are some pathogens for which no vaccine exists, no matter how much research was thrown at them. While vaccines can protect us from dozens of infections, there are some bugs that just won't cooperate, for example, herpes simplex, HIV/AIDS, norovirus, Lassa fever, malaria, and hepatitis C.

4. What happens if no vaccine can be found?

Now, the options become limited (and worse):

* Containment has been used to prevent epidemics but Wuhan has already escaped. Too late.
* Like Zika, some pathogens just do not have "what it takes" to infect enough people to cause a pandemic. Viruses can mutate in a way that makes them either more or less infective to humans. If they become less likely to infect humans the pathogen can't efficiently spread and there will be no pandemic. But there's a big difference between Zika and Wuhan – Zika is transmitted by mosquitos while Wuhan is readily passed from person to person, and rather easily at that.
* New drug discovery – a feasible, but lengthy option – has certainly been successful in providing game-changing antiviral drugs. For example, while there is no vaccine for herpes, HIV/AIDS, or hepatitis C (HCV) herpes can usually be controlled with acyclovir, HIV/AIDS drugs have been developed that are so potent that they shut down HIV replication and restore the immune systems of people who are infected, and hepatitis C can now be cured about 95% of the time. But it is time that is the problem.

Hepatitis C was discovered in 1989, but it took 22 years for the first two direct-acting antiviral drugs to hit the pharmacy and neither was any good. The first member of a series of drugs called polymerase inhibitors cures, Solvadi, wasn't approved until 2013 – 24 years after the virus was discovered, and this with almost every pharmaceutical company conducting HCV research projects. I led one of them at Wyeth. The campaign against HCV, like HIV, was a phenomenal success story, yet it still took a quarter of a century from the lab to the pharmacy

The timeline for HIV/AIDS was a bit better, but it still not great. It was 14 years from the discovery of the virus and the approval of Saquinivir – the first HIV protease inhibitor, despite an enormous global effort. Saquinivir would become the first drug to make up "HIV cocktails," and it is no coincidence that 1995 was the first year that AIDS deaths began to drop.

Bottom line: Antiviral discovery led to unparalleled success for HIV and HCV, but it not going to help with a rapidly spreading new pathogen.

Conclusion/Prediction

The best cutting edge research, such as we are seeing with Wuhan and saw previously with HIV and HCV, can still fail or it can succeed. But even if everything goes right it will take far too long to have an immediate impact on a newly emerged pathogen that spreads easily.

Drug and vaccine development is slow going and there is only so much that can be done to speed it up. Even if Inovio really does have a vaccine ready to test in 16 weeks, the clinical trials required to determine if it works, and, if so, at what dose, will probably take a year, maybe more. Then figuring out how to grow enough of the vaccine to protect the world will probably take years.

There is no quick fix here. We need the best science, a lot of luck, and maybe a little cooperation from the virus. In the absence of a pleasant surprise, is unlikely that Wuhan will be under control anytime soon. But on a positive note, the prospects for a vaccine.

Source: Wuhan Virus Science Is Amazing. And It Might Not Matter.

Are we all dead yet?

No?

Or worse yet, undead -- has the nCoV-induced Zombie Apocalypse destroyed human civilization?

No?

Then let's leave the scare-tactics to the conspiracy theorists and start behaving like rational human beings instead.

Wuhan is having a health crisis because of this virus.

China has taken steps to prevent the spread of this virus.

So have many other places around the world.

New York, with a huge Chinese population, hasn't had ONE confirmed case of the coronavirus yet.

Indeed: in all this we should remember than China, despite recent welcome development, is still, per capita, a very poor country with much less of the infrastructure we in the west get to take for granted.
It is not a foregone conclusion that speed of the virus’ spread in Wuhan will be replicated in Doncaster, or Düsseldorf, or Des Moines.

Just remembered that the last big Ebola outbreak did transfer to Britain: if memory serves me rightly we had three infected, and no deaths.

Even the Philippines -- often considered a third-world country -- has had only one nCoV-related death so far, and only about three-dozen suspected cases.

The ebola was transferred through touching an infected person's feces or urine without washing your hands, but this China virus is airbourne, which is much more difficult to avoid unless you go around with a mask on all the time or don't breathe.

Aye, that would be true: one could also point out that the infrastructure gap between us and China is less severe than between us and the primary Ebola risk zones of Africa, and that would also be true.

I still think that we live in a relatively safe bubble with regards to major disease outbreaks stands though.

Makes perfect sense if you go by the numbers in Wuhan area the death rate seems to be about 3.1 percent so yeah with the lot smaller number of people infected outside of China I am not surprised there is only one death out side of China.

Kind of odd they just call it the coronavirus.
When coronavirus is just a type of virus.

The common cold is caused by a coronavirus thus you end with the guys saying the coronavirus has been around for years a bottle of Lysol says it kills the coronavirus.

SARS and MERS are also both a Coronavirus

I just got over a coronavirus a cold that is

The construction crews of Wuhan have built multiple hospitals in about ten days devoted solely to the coronavirus. These are actual buildings, not MASH-type units.

It seems to me that many people have got the impression from sensationalised media reports that Coronavirus is something completely new. The reports are omitting to mention - as far as I can see - that this latest version is a new strain - not a new disease per se. There are many coronavirus strains and people have been exposed to them and infected for decades, perhaps centuries.

While prudence is sensible, the hysteria seems to be extreme at the moment. I think some of this may be politically driven. The flu is a coronavirus, so are many respiratory illnesses.

The above is true.

The complication and mortality rate seem a little higher than most influenzas (the mortality rate in China, so far, is about 2%)-----but most people who contract this virus get a relatively mild, flu-like illness.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 04 Feb 2020, 6:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.