Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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O M G the truth of the issue now comes out......... all because of sci Fi and comic book illustrators .

A couple bits of interesting news.

First, California, the entire state, is now under lockdown. California Governor Gavin Newson has issued a "stay-at-home order to everyone in the state. There are some exceptions to essential workers and operations. This order takes effect tonight.

Second, the President announced that the FDA will make available hydroxychloroquine or also referred to as chloroquine as a treatment option to infected individual against the coronavirus. This drug is an existing anti-malaria drug that shows promising results in treating the viral infection both in France and China. The manufacturer Bayer is donating 3 million of the pills to the Trump administration.

What's a "Cow Orker", btw?

I discussed earlier in this thread that as I slept last night I saw a little shiny bangle that attracted my attention. So I will try and describe this, put it in words. I visualized Wuhan as a Petri Dish of the Planet.

A Petri dish is a shallow cylindrical glass lidded dish that is typically used to culture microorganisms. A growth medium (agar) is placed in the plate. A biological sample is added to the agar and the contamination spreads throughout the medium and a culture is grown.

In this case humans are the agar. Why does Wuhan make a good candidate for a Petri dish? For one thing, the growth medium! Influenza viruses need people to grow. People are the growth medium and Wuhan has 11 million of them. But it also needs an environment conducive for the creation of the first cell (Virus 0) to form, the biological genetic mutation. For that, one needs geographical elevation. So it is not just Wuhan but the province that contains it, Hubei that is critical. Wuhan is not particularly elevated. But the province Hubei on the western parts, their highlands rise above 6,000 feet. Hubei province has 58.5 million people.

Now I am not implying that Hubei is the only Petri dish on this planet. But it is one of them because of its high population density and its elevation.

Why is elevation important? It is because there are fewer air molecules at higher elevations between the surface of the planet and outer space than at sea level.

So let us first look at recent major pandemics that produced a large loss of life. These are:

Asian Flu Pandemic (H2N2 Influenza) - 1956
Death Toll: ~2 million worldwide
Asian Flu originated in China in 1956 and lasted until 1958. In its two-year spree, Asian Flu traveled from the Chinese province of Guizhou to Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States. Estimates for the death toll of the Asian Flu vary depending on the source, but the World Health Organization places the final tally at approximately 2 million deaths, 69,800 of those in the US alone.

Hong Kong Flu Pandemic (H3N2 Influenza) - 1968
Death Toll: ~1 million worldwide
The Hong Kong Flu was first reported on July 13, 1968 in Hong Kong, it took only 17 days before outbreaks of the virus were reported in Singapore and Vietnam, and within three months had spread to The Philippines, India, Australia, Europe, and the United States. While the 1968 pandemic had a comparatively low mortality rate (.5%) it still resulted in the deaths of more than a million people, including 500,000 residents of Hong Kong, approximately 15% of its population at the time.

Swine Flu Pandemic (H1N1 Influenza) - 2009
Death Toll: 151,700-575,400 people worldwide
Swine flu is the name for the influenza type A virus that affects pigs (swine). It was first detected in April 2009 in a 10-year-old girl in California. From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated that there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (8,868-18,306) in the United States. CDC estimated there were 151,700-575,400 deaths worldwide.

Both the influenza virus and the coronavirus are infectious respiratory illnesses. In general, coronavirus outbreaks did not produce high fatality numbers. SARS (2002) killed 774 individuals while MERS (2112) killed 858 individuals worldwide. So the concept that the Wuhan Coronavirus (2019) producing a high number of fatalities is a bit of an anomaly.

So I will lump the Wuhan Coronavirus in within the other three major pandemic viruses, and focus on the four following years: 1956, 1968, 2009 and 2019. What do these four years have in common? Those are all years when the Earth received strong doses of highly energetic radiation from deep space.

Our galaxy is awash with radiation. Within our galaxy massive stars die in massive explosions called supernovas. These explosions are so great that they split atoms apart. The charged particles are spun up to near light speed and released into the galaxy. These particles (protons and ions, which are pieces of atoms) are called GCRs (Galactic Cosmic Rays). These highly energetic particles are constantly bombarding our solar system.

But just like in the Star Trek series, we on Earth have shields. Three to be exact! These are the strong magnetic field of the sun, the magnetic field of the Earth and Earth’s atmosphere. These shields protect us from the harsh realities of outer space. They protect the existence of life on our planet.

Most galactic cosmic rays have energies between 100 MeV and 10 GeV. If those cosmic rays are protons, which they are most of the time, they are traveling at speeds between 45% and 99.6% of the speed of light.

Why is elevation important? As the GCRs strike the top of the atmosphere it creates a cascade of particle that drill down deeper and deeper into the atmosphere. If the heavier particles in the cascade reach the Earth they can produce genetic mutation in viruses, taking one form of a common virus and fabricating a novel variant that is deadly to its human host. It only takes one of these to start the chain reaction towards producing a major pandemic. So regions that have significant geological elevation are at greater risk for virus 0 than regions at sea level. This is because there are less air molecules between deep space and high elevations than those at low elevations.


An image of a single proton (1 TeV) striking the atmosphere at 20 km above the Earth producing a cascade of particles.

This is our third shield. But let us also consider the first shield – the strong magnetic field exerted by our sun.

The strong magnetic field of the sun deflects most of these GCRs from the inner solar system. But the magnetic field is not constant. The sun goes through a cycle of approximately 11 years when the magnetic field weakens and strengthens. This is called a solar cycle and is visually evident by the number of sunspots on the surface of the sun.

During the solar maximum, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays and this threat is held at bay. But during solar minimums the number (flux rate) of these GCRs striking Earth’s atmosphere increases significantly.



The following graph shows the Sunspot Number plotted by years and also the corresponding cosmic ray flux. The four arrows at the top of the graph are the Asian Flu Pandemic that began in 1956, the Hong Kong Flu Pandemic of 1968, the Swine Flu Pandemic of 2009 and the Wuhan Coronavirus Pandemic of 2019. We are currently in a solar minimum, one of the deepest solar minimums in the last hundred years. (As a result the cosmic ray flux rates at the moment should be at its peak.) So all four of these pandemics line up very close with strong peak periods of high-energy deep space radiation.