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The Coronavirus – No Need To Panic
Bring Out Your Dead by beq
bigger – uncropped
I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918
The picture and the rhyme are from a fifteen year old Moon of Alabama post headlined Bring Out Your Dead. Beq's title for her picture is from a medieval Mounty Pyton sketch (vid) around the 'black death'. We no longer have to fear the plague but every once a while a new virus catches up with humanity.
China is stepping up efforts to stop the spread of a the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV:
Chinese President Xi Jinping has held a special government meeting on the Lunar New Year public holiday to warn that the spread of a deadly new virus is "accelerating".
The country is facing a "grave situation" Mr Xi told senior officials, according to state television.
The coronavirus has killed at least 41 people and infected almost 1,300 since its discovery in the city of Wuhan.
Travel restrictions have already hit several affected cities.
And from Sunday, private vehicles will be banned from the central districts of Wuhan, the source of the outbreak.
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Across mainland China, travellers are having their temperatures checked for signs of fever, and train stations have been shut in several cities.
An infected person transmits the virus to X healthy persons. In an epidemic the factor X is greater than 1. For the novel coronavirus the initial factor, also known as R0 or R naught, is 1.4-2.5 which is not especially high.
Ferris Jabr @ferrisjabr – 6:58 UTC · Jan 25, 2020
The basic reproduction number (R0) is the average number of secondary infections generated by one infected person in a totally susceptible population #2019nCoV
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The claim that "we are now faced with the most virulent virus epidemic the world has ever seen" and that the new coronavirus is 8x as infectious as SARS is completely untrue. Even if the R0 were 3.8 that would be nowhere near a record.
Here is some context w/ a range of R0s:
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As long as the R0 is over 1 the infection will spread further as each infected person will infect multiple healthy ones who again will infect others. To stop an epidemic R0 has to be brought to under 1. Key is to lower the number of healthy persons an infected person comes into contact with. In 2002-2003 the SARS epidemic started out with an R0 of about 3 and ended with an R0 of 0.4. This was achieved by isolating the sick and, as not all infected persons are immediately recognized, also by lowering the number of contacts people have in their daily life.
China is now rapidly doing both.
The fatality rate of the novel coronavirus is also no reason to panic.
Dr. Melvin Sanicas @Vaccinologist – 22:11 UTC · Jan 23, 2020
Preliminary R0 (number showing how contagious / transmissible a pathogen is) for #Wuhan #nCoV2019 novel #coronavirus: 1.4-2.5. Here are the figures for other diseases #SARSvirus #MERS & their case-fatality rates to put things in perspective
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The current 4% case-fatality rate of the coronavirus (which still may increase) is also not especially high. The Spanish Flu pandemic, which began in the U.S., had a fatality rate of about 10%. It was unusual in that it killed mostly young adults. The novel coronavirus seems to be quite usual in that it mostly kills people who are already weakened by other circumstances. The infection is then often the 'last drop in the bucket' that kills a person who already had a medical condition.
People fond of conspiracy theories will speculate that the coronoavirus was spread intentionally or escaped from some laboratory. The neo-conservatives in the U.S. have played with that idea.
Advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.
"Rebuilding America's Defenses" – The September 2000 PNAC Report
But from a scientific perspective that makes little sense. There is no 'race gene' that could be used to safely discriminate between people of a certain heritage and others.
The novel coronavirus is likely a variant of some animal virus that crossed over to a human host. This probably happens way more often than we recognize.
From away in the past…
Opinion
BUSH’S NOMINEE FOR U.N. ENVOY HAS ALREADY IRRITATED THE WORLD
By Robert James Parsons
San Francisco Chronicle
March 13, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/13/ING8CBNC1N1.DTL
GENEVA – John Bolton, whom President Bush nominated last week as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is remembered here as the man President Bush sent, in the first year of his first administration, to kill the biological weapons treaty – a man who accomplished the task with a truculence that made a lasting, and very negative, impression.
It explains why so many observers of the international scene respond to his appointment with a shudder.
In 1995, there was a review conference for all the signatory countries of the 1975 biological weapons convention, which the United States had ratified. Its purpose was to assess the state of the matters dealt with in the treaty and discuss amendments to it in view of advances in biological research and in the world’s political situation.
The conclusion of the conference was that the treaty needed an enforcement mechanism, for advances in research were reaching a point at which it would soon be possible to circumvent many of the text’s provisions.
A drafting committee was set up to produce an additional protocol to give the text teeth. It was to meet several times each year and to have a final text ready for the review conference in November 2001.
By April 2001, the text was almost ready. The drafting committee was to hold one more three-week session, in July, to finalize the text, after which it would be available to the signatory country governments to study until the review conference.
The U.S. delegation to the April session gave little indication that anything had changed with the new administration. Work proceeded satisfactorily.
In July, the new Bush administration sent a new delegation, headed by Bolton. He declared the United States was withdrawing support for the enforcement protocol.
The United States already had the biggest bio weapons program in history, all in the name of defensive research.
However, this is an area where there is only a fine line between defensive and offensive, and most observers and scientists were convinced that if the United States had not yet crossed that line, it was about to do so.
As long as the United States refused to guarantee its compliance with the treaty, no other country could be expected to guarantee compliance either.
At the opening of the review conference, Bolton proposed that the protocol be, simply, dumped. In its place, he proposed bilateral treaties between the United States and every other country in the world, treaties that the United States would have the power to enforce, including the right to extradite and try in U.S. courts those suspected of engaging in bioweapons research.
In short, nothing would disturb the United States when it crossed the line into research for offensive bio weapons, but the United States was seeking for itself a system answerable to nobody that would empower it to bring its full force (including military, of course) to bear on any country attempting to compete with it in bio arms research.
The academic experts and nongovernmental organizations monitoring the drafting process and bioweapons research throughout the world were horrified and predicted that this would give rise to a frenzied arms race in biological weapons, probably with China in the lead.
A year later, China discovered SARS and tried to hide it. Three months later, terrified of the possibilities of its spreading throughout China and the world, it notified the World Health Organization, which immediately organized an emergency response on a scale unprecedented for any new illness. The WHO, too, was obviously terrified.
SARS was brought under control, but within the WHO, suppressed by pressure from a certain superpower, was an analysis of the SARS virus showing it to be an artificial creation designed to kill fast and furiously.
The conclusion was that it had somehow escaped from a military lab, which explained why, for three months, the Chinese authorities had hoped to counter the threat, ultimately in vain.
In the end, the Chinese were only too happy to have the analysis suppressed, and the superpower in question averted a major worldwide debate on the need for a bioweapons treaty with an enforcement mechanism.
Now, the bioweapons treaty is essentially a dead letter, the bio arms race is on, and many are quietly asking what the real origin of the bird flu might be.
The world is the poorer for the loss of the bio arms treaty and much less secure, but John Bolton did his work well. Now he can focus on the United Nations.
— Robert James Parsons, a journalist based in Geneva, writes for the Geneva daily Le Courrier.
Posted by: RJPJR | Jan 25 2020 22:36 utc | 54
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