Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Per WP, a second case of unknown origin was confirmed in California today:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/a ... story.html

https://outline.com/xmxF3F

I’ve been very scared about this. I don’t want to burn my best friends which are my stuffed animals


I have over 100 stuffed animal friends and can’t lose them.

I do not see any reason why you would need to destroy your stuffed animals. You might need to put them under quarantine for several weeks, keeping them in isolation. But that would be the extent of it.

My daughter's stuffed animals are in more danger of being put in the washing machine

I'm watching this live:

https://www.kgw.com/video/news/local/kg ... 83-1393698

And Oregon has announced a presumptive case of unknown origin in the state. The state lab's test came back positive, but it's still presumptive because it is awaiting CDC confirmation.

And now Washington State will hold a conference on coronavirus:

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1233581853854064640

I am more concerned about things getting weird over this. But it will probably be the same as things were for Y2K and after 9/11 etc.

It is already getting weird.

1. People have mistakenly associated the coronavirus with the popular Mexican pale lager Corona beer. The company has reported millions of dollars in lost sales as a result of the confusion. The company reported Thursday a loss of $285 million during the first two months of 2020.
2. The Iranian government is arresting Internet users and accusing them of spreading false rumors about the coronavirus in Iran. 24 people arrested and 188 given warnings.
3. The virus has sparked racist attacks and stereotypes against Asians.
4. In Russian, 2 women escaped quarantine. One jumped out the hospital room window. And the other short-circuited the electronic lock to her room.
5. In Wisconsin the police department set up a sting operation by offering to test methamphetamine to insure they were not infected with the coronavirus.

I like that last one. We just want to make sure your meth is safe to use.

pfft. modelo is better anyway.

1. People have mistakenly associated the coronavirus with the popular Mexican pale lager Corona beer. The company has reported millions of dollars in lost sales as a result of the confusion. The company reported Thursday a loss of $285 million during the first two months of 2020.

I do feel sorry for those folks. They now belong to a small and select club:

Better than meth?

better than corona.

meth? i wouldn't be able to tell you

Another strange headline in the news was:

Over China, coronavirus coincides with plummet in nitrogen dioxide



And they had satellite photos to prove it.

My mind went into cause/effect mode. Then it became obvious. Nitrogen dioxide is a major component of smog. If people don't drive and stay sheltered in their home, they will produce very little smog.

But nowhere in the article do they use the word "smog".

There were a few articles on the coronavirus yesterday and today of interest. One of the problems currently happening is there is a shortage of N95 face mask in the U.S. They are sold out. This is quite obvious. I tried to buy some face mask a few weeks ago and they were sold out at that time.

Why are they sold out, this early? The panic hasn't really set in within the U.S. Sure some preppers are stocking up. But not the general population. One of the primary reasons is that many of these face masks are manufactured overseas. Many of the manufacturers are located in China. Shipment to the U.S. has ground to a halt.

Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, said the U.S. needs approximately 300 million N95 respirator masks for medical personnel working with the virus but he admitted the country only has a fraction of that number.

So what can be done about this? The Trump administration is considering using special executive powers to ramp up U.S. production of protective face masks and clothing to combat the domestic spread of coronavirus. The administration may invoke the 1950 Defense Production Act, which was passed by Congress before the Korean War and gives the president the power to increase the production of materials for national security purposes. If you bypass a lot of the red tape in the procurement process, you can retool this problem away rather quickly.

I have been reading some more about this, and although I don't believe that it is/was a bioweapon/deliberately bioengineered for military use, I'm beginning to wonder a little about where it came from.

Apparently there is no significant local population of bats in Wuhan, for instance ( contrary to what I had thought and the impression that is usually given/tends to be reported ), the animal which the virus genome indicates it almost certainly came from.

But lots of research on infectious diseases is done by travelling to rural areas with large local bat populations, because they tend to provide sizeable reservoirs of viruses to study, and bringing samples and animals back with them.

So I am now wondering whether the research lab in Wuhan, alone in the whole of China in having the premises and the license to carry out experiments on higher level/most dangerous or infectious diseases, and using relatively rare and/or wild animals for testing purposes, may have accidentally released this virus, via human error ( natural/inevitable ) or human cupidity ( eg the selling of dead laboratory animals/flesh/body parts on to the nearby "wet market" for the large sums of money that certain rare body parts fetch in China ).

*But* a named member of staff/worker at the Wuhan lab has sworn on their life that the lab is not responsible for the virus entering the general population. And the Chinese government has always stated that it came from the wet market.

On the other hand apparently the Chinese government recently, since the outbreak began, issued new directions and regulations to high level disease research labs, ( unnamed but there is only one in China which handles very dangerous ones, Wuhan ), to upgrade and tighten lab security protocols etc.

In the film Jurassic Park the owner and higher level officers could have sworn on their life that the escaped dinosaurs were not their responsibility, but it only took one dishonest disgruntled employee hoping to make money on the side to completely compromise the security systems.

https://www.thestreet.com/latest-news/w ... b-accident So, I am currently less certain that this virus came *directly* from "the wild".

Perhaps it was given a lift, an unnaturally rapid/almost instant transfer from relatively distant isolated rural/forest areas with low density populations to the inner city, via lab testing conditions/situations which, like the camp-hospitals during the Spanish flu in the last half of World War 1, may have inadvertently selected for the most active/adapted to survival in cities.

If this turned out to be true, that perfectly ordinary human error or cupidity caused the outbreak, then in theory, as you and ... commented above, the Chinese government might be held responsible for a a very big bill for costs worldwide arising from the outbreak, and would explain why it made such extraordinarily gigantic efforts to contain it.

But as far as I can see it wouldn't make any difference to how world governments approach it. Only perhaps aggravate the already horribly widespread racial hostility being shown to Asian people.

Last edited by ouinon2 on 29 Feb 2020, 11:51 am, edited 2 times in total.