Coronavirus claims new victim: 'DEF CON cancelled' joke cancelled after DEF CON China actually cancelled DEF CON is cancelled. For real this time. DEF CON China, that is. The Middle Kingdom edition of the computer hacking conference has been called off due to the nation's latest coronavirus outbreak. The cancellation – or postponement, depending on how optimistic you want to be – was announced by the DEF CON team on Monday, a …
News has emerged (today) that Chinese health authorities are refusing to share the sample of the virus to anyone.
Not sure you're right about that, ie
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/2019-ncov-seqs/
And given infected patients outside China, other nations would be able to isolate samples from those and sequence it.
Lifted from Australian ABC News which states:
The Doherty Institute is the second lab in the world to recreate the disease. A lab in China was the first, but did not share its discovery with the WHO.
No one can verify if China is really able to test for the virus.
No one can verify if China can find a cure.
If everyone has the confidence that China can do what they claim to do, then why is the US, France and Australia independently working for the same thing (but all reporting to WHO)?
We are all looking for the same thing because China is not forthcoming with the information.
'then why is the US, France and Australia independently working for the same thing (but all reporting to WHO)?'
That's a good question which appears to skewer your point.
Why are they working independently when they are all reporting to the WHO? Presumably because many hands make light work.
The director of the UK lab for infectious diseases was on Breakfast Time over the weekend and was clear that the Chinese cooperation with other countries was more than acceptable. There wasn't the slightest suggestion of any issues.
So who are we to believe?
Lifted from Australian ABC News which states:The Doherty Institute is the second lab in the world to recreate the disease. A lab in China was the first, but did not share its discovery with the WHO.
Ah, the BBC also ran the same story, which presumably was from a wire service that doesn't have biologists/virologists on staff. It's not 'recreating' the virus, but isolating it. Then again, the sequence already published is kinda fun because it's in.. v-code? So semi-human readable. Like the AATCGetc bit at the end.
If everyone has the confidence that China can do what they claim to do, then why is the US, France and Australia independently working for the same thing (but all reporting to WHO)?
That's how science works, and arguably a good thing. So Australia isolated the virus from infected patients, then can sequence it and compare to results from China. So labs outside China can independently reproduce and verify results from inside China. And I guess is also better than relying on live virus samples shipped by China as it'll also allow comparisons to see if it's mutating.
It's a bit vague but I take at their word that the Aussie lab is making more of the stuff from their own blueprints.
You can't legally import a cheese and tomato sandwich into Australia so I don't think that the People's Pestilence will be freely exchanged between pharmacies worldwide willy-nilly. I could be horrifically mistaken. But, as you say, they got around that by importing a person who luckily had it about their person, in the same way that rubber was first introduced to Ireland.
Remember as well that laboratory in Surrey in 2007 that was a bit casual washing out the foot-and-mouth disease test tubes and set off a mini-outbreak downwind, you don't want that happening everywhere. Although in Australia it would take their minds off the fire.
It's a bit vague but I take at their word that the Aussie lab is making more of the stuff from their own blueprints.You can't legally import a cheese and tomato sandwich into Australia so I don't think that the People's Pestilence will be freely exchanged between pharmacies worldwide willy-nilly. I could be horrifically mistaken.
I'm thinking the ability to paste that v-code into a vi-writer could be a more horrific mistake. AFAIK, it's ever more possible to slice & splice fragments into an unsuspecting incubator cell whilst humming 'Express Yourself'. Otherwise it's possible to order from labs online. Like my friend did. Your mouse pox is here! Ermm.. Yey? Thankfully 'here' meant 'at the lab'.
Russia and China Are Working on Virus Vaccine: Consulate
Just as suspected.
China is witholding the sample of the virus is because they don't have the technical know-how and the Russians would.
Maybe the news of the discovery by Australian scientists may have forced China's hand.
It's possible to have sympathy for the victims of the virus while also addressing the business risks that arise from an interruption to the supply chain.
Millions of people that won't ever catch the virus could lose their jobs; that has a major impact on others around them and I think it would be negligent to disregard those for fear of looking callous.
It's ok folks, they've found a cure! You simply need to mix up the adrenal glands of baby fresh water dolphins, the spleens of infant sea turtles, the lower intestines of pangolins and pour in the blood of a hundred endangerred baby cave salamanders and swill it all down with a glass of embryonic fluid from an unborn piglet. Oh! and don't worry if you make a bit of a mess, you can just wash the left overs down the drain. Also, the good news is that this cure will make you lucky in games of chance and also extra sexually attractive.
That's not to say that we in the West aren't immune from having our very own bio-security problems as well, the Blood Products scandal that impacted parts of Europe (and America?) is a case in point. Let's face it, if dear old mother earth wasn't just one big Petri dish of a thing, then no organic life would be here today. We all have a responsibility towards each other everyday of our lives to maintain all species in the best of health.
Shutting down public transport to limit the spread of the virus is a ridiculous overreaction. Latest figures I can find (I didn't look beyond the BBC website) show 5,974 confirmed cases and 9,239 suspected cases in 16 countries with 134 deaths. This is 134 family tragedies but this epidemic is nowhere near as bad as 'flu.
Influenza spreads around the world in yearly outbreaks, resulting in about three to five million cases of severe illness and about 290,000 to 650,000 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza
OK, this thing is new so it needs monitoring. its 'kill rate' appears to be higher than 'flu (134/9239=1.5%) - but we have literally no idea how many people caught this and experienced common cold symptoms and got better in the usual week or so. We probably never will know as publishing that news won't sell page views to advertisers.
Reason one:
Well, there's a flu vaccine that's used in many countries to protect people most at risk from influenza. There's no vaccine at present for this one.
Reason two:
It's only in the past couple of days that they've been able to properly understand incubation timescales and the transmission vectors so precautions to prevent spreading were very reasonable. Even now precautions are reasonable.
Reason three:
When somewhere approaching 10% of the world's population catch influenza each year even 650k deaths is somewhere in the region of a 0.1% mortality rate. The mortality rate before global attention was turned on it for the Coronavirus was around 6%, which is exceedingly high.
Reason four: More people died from Spanish Flu in 1918 than due to the whole of World War 1, and that was before air travel made it much easier to carry an undetected virus to a new population. This shit is serious.
Reason five:
It's new and some people find it scary. While they may be overreacting a failure to listen and address their concerns would cause issues in itself. Shutting down the public transport may be better than seeing Government buildings burned down in riots.
1) Vaccination to protect those most at risk: We don't know who is most at risk. It might turn out to be like the 1918 'flu that you mentioned which unusually may have affected fundamentally more robust people worse than the young or elderly. Research is called for to find out and to see if a vaccine is even possible (unlike for that other well known human coronavirus, the common cold) - not panic measures. We know that 'flu can be a killer but we don't shut down our economies to fight it.
2) Incubation period and sustained person-to-person transmission: The research that has so far been done suggests that this virus may reach sustained person-to-person transmission levels - like 'flu or the common cold. This research is not complete but the isolation measures are already in place. It's an overreaction.
3) Kill rates: Most cases of 'flu are self-reported and not formally diagnosed. If we were to take the world-wide deaths figure and express it as a percentage of formally diagnosed cases of 'flu then the kill rate would be a hell of a lot higher than 0.1%. As far as I can tell the only people being diagnosed with 2019-CoV are those presenting with pneumonia symptoms - there is almost certainly a large number of people who got infected and recovered without medical intervention or testing.
4) 1918 'flu: 50m deaths. 3-5% of the world's population killed. H1N1 virus - not a coronavirus. Yep, that was incredibly bad. Recent analysis suggests that many of those deaths may have actually been due to a bacterial superinfection - possibly related to the methods used to isolate those infected with the virus. That may be revisionism, of course.
5) It's new and scary, people expect us to do something: Well that's something we can agree on. Unfortunately, what most people don't realise is that something is being done even if it's 'just' data gathering. Worse than that, most people don't even know the difference between a bacterial and a viral infection. Until proper research is done the medical adage 'don't just do something, stand there!' is probably good advice. In terms of keeping people calm and maintaining law and order in society, wrecking a city's economy with travel restrictions is unlikely to be effective.
You'd be happy to ride in a passenger jet with coronavirus patients then? I think volunteers will be needed to establish how easily it's transmitted.
There's an argument that especially since smoking on planes was banned, the air quality is economically adjusted so that you breathe more of the contents of other people's lungs in an aeroplane than in nearly any other situation. Not to mention mysterious grot from the engines.
You'd be happy to ride in a passenger jet with coronavirus patients then?
Formally diagnosed coronavirus patients? Yes, probably. They'd likely have masks on - quite possibly oxygen masks.
Would I be happy to get on a plane from Wuhan with a bunch of the locals? Yes. I did 24years commuting on the London tube - anything that bites me dies horribly. More seriously: Wuhan is a city of 11m people, there's a low chance that an infectious person is on the plane.
If you had been in Wuhan for a business trip and needed to catch a plane to get back - or if you lived in Wuhan and needed to go somewhere else for a business trip do you mean to tell us that you wouldn't get on the plane?
If the alternative to flying out of Wuhan inside a small tin tube full of people is to stay in Wuhan, each has pluses and minuses. I favour waiting it out while minimizing human contact, or else driving elsewhere inside an individual hygienic capsule. I bet their taxis are getting carefully cleaned and it's worth paying for. The problem with waiting is what are you waiting for?
As for a business trip from Wuhan, I expect that a lot of my meetings would be no-shows if they knew where I'd just come from.
I think we want to be careful with saying that significant bodies of people or large numbers of public health organizations are overreacting. Wuhan coronavirus has been around for maybe a month-and-a-half now, and tomorrow it will almost certainly pass up the total number of diagnosed SARS cases, which was about 8,000 people. However, SARS was active for about 6 or 8 months to reach that number.
Also, right now it is hard to say what the actual mortality rate for Wuhan Coronavirus is. You can't just look at the current number of fatalities divided by the current cases, because those fatalities represent cases that were diagnosed some days ago and reached the end of the disease state, but the half or more of the current case numbers were diagnosed within the last few days. I have no idea what the mean length of time is from when a coronavirus patient exhibits symptoms until they recover or pass away, but I imagine that it is something like a week or 10 days. So we need to see what the outcome is for the people who have become symptomatic in the last few days.
And of course, right now there isn't a treatment protocol for Wuhan coronavirus. Some cases are getting bed rest at home, plus a raft of over-the-counter medications, while at the other end of the spectrum, serious cases are in an ICU being pumped full of antibiotics, other prescription anti-viral medications and various nutritional drips and food in the hopes that works. Eventually, doctors will figure out what the optimal treatment protocol is for coronavirus, and even seriously ill patients will have a much greater chance of surviving.
So there are a lot of pieces in motion right now. I will say that Wuhan coronavirus is not something you want to shrug off if you catch it, especially if you are middle-aged or older or have other significant pre-existing conditions.
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