Greg.D.

It helps greatly to have an animal model for the virus: something that can be infected by the virus and will respond to a test vaccine. Otherwise testing would have to be done in humans later. Has to be susceptible to the virus and we know bats aren't! I think it was mice, hamsters, and monkeys with the other SARS. Scaling up production can only be done after definitive evidence of efficacy. You wouldn't ramp up a billion dollar enterprise with no evidence of its usefulness (WeWork excluded). Going back to the freezer vaccine: it can inform the SARS2 vaccine development and/or it might even be cross-reactive (they each bind our ACE receptor). But, you need to show it works first. It worked in mice and the Baylor team has the sars2 virus to test the old vaccine against the new virus - again in mice. This freezer vaccine ne was never tested in humans. U. S. has a low death rate when there are 500 confirmed case, what happens at 50,000? I haven't heard anything about a coronavirus manhattan project yet; not even an order to make 10,000,000 masks. What's going on?

I think there are a lot of "almost there" vaccine candidates stored away in freezers. I'll trust that the person interviewed knows how truly close this SARS1 vaccine was ... and has no financial interest. But, short of a vaccine, we can make use of the recovered people - if their recovery conveys permanent resistance. We can call them "Wuhan Angels": people who go back out in the community and keep the grocery stores, hospitals and critical government and business functions limping along. The corona gig economy. You read it here first.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/war-south-china-sea-would-reshape-asia-and-world-127557 A War In The South China Sea Would Reshape Asia (And The World)

Too bad there is not some kind of international court that could interpret the laws of the seas and settle these disputes! https://www.ibtimes.com/south-china-sea-dispute-vietnams-fishing-trawlers-entering-chinese-waters-claims-2927864 South China Sea Dispute: Vietnam’s Fishing Trawlers Entering Chinese Waters, Claims Beijing https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/chinas-aggressive-new-move-in-the-south-china-sea-brings-region-closer-to-brink-of-war/news-story/11e3943389f73d7fd2e7baf8d2594cba China’s aggressive new move in the South China Sea brings region closer to brink of war While the eyes of the world are distracted by the coronavirus, something very dangerous is going down in the South China Sea.

Every time I come to this site I am thinking of your progress. Hoping for the best.

I hope they do crow -- and open a conversation about their system versus that of the free world's! Bring it on!

Not sure why this is so hard for us. You can't know how you can do better if you don't know how you are doing. Weird that the CDC couldn't make a functional test in great enough numbers but that can happen ... but don't know why it is not fixed by now. Then, why has the CDC, the venerable producer of the The Morbidity and Mortality Report, decided to quit being the source of epidemiological data? We'll find out someday, I guess. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-have-been-tested-coronavirus/607597/[/size] Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing “I don’t know what went wrong,” a former CDC chief told The Atlantic. "The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.” Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises. ............. To arrive at our estimate, we contacted the public-health departments of all 50 states and .... _____________________ The figures we gathered suggest that the American response to the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has been shockingly sluggish, especially compared with that of other developed countries. The CDC confirmed eight days ago that the virus was in community transmission in the United States—that it was infecting Americans who had neither traveled abroad nor were in contact with others who had. In South Korea, more than 66,650 people were tested within a week of its first case of community transmission, and it quickly became able to test 10,000 people a day. The United Kingdom, which has only 115 positive cases, has so far tested 18,083 people for the virus. Normally, the job of gathering these types of data in the U.S. would be left to epidemiologists at the CDC. The agency regularly collects and publishes positive and negative test results for several pathogens, including multiple types of the seasonal flu. But earlier this week, the agency announced that it would stop publishing negative results for the coronavirus, an extraordinary step that essentially keeps Americans from knowing how many people have been tested overall. ............... The federal tally of positive cases is now also badly out of date: While the CDC is reporting 99 positive cases of the coronavirus in the United States, our data, and separate data from Johns Hopkins University, show that the true number is well above 200, including those on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. ............... Oregon, situated between the California and Washington hot spots, can test only about 40 people a day. Texas has 16 positive cases, according to media reports, but the health department’s website still lists only three cases. TheTexas Tribune has reported that the state can test approximately 30 people a day. Other states can test even fewer. Hawaii can test fewer than 20 people a day, though it could double that number in an emergency, an official told us. Iowa has supplies to test about 500 patients a day. Arkansas, though not near a current known outbreak, is able to test only four or five patients a day. On the East Coast, testing capacity varies significantly. New York State has 22 positive cases, including several cases of community transmission in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It can test 100 to 200 people a day. Neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut have not shared any information about how many tests they have run, or about their daily testing capacity. Pennsylvania can test only about a dozen people a day, and Delaware can test about 50 people, our survey found. An official in Massachusetts, where two of 20 tests have come back positive, said that she did not know the Bay State’s daily capacity, but that its health department “currently [has] an adequate supply of test kits.”

I don't think the Chinese strategy is the blueprint for the world. More testing is better, yes, but censoring and doctoring information is not. I wonder what happened in those prisons where it was spreading and we have heard no more. The prison scenario is the opposite of self isolation at home. All countries should massively ramp up the number of ventilator-equipped, isolation-capable beds they have on hand and, learning from China, have more personal protection available to (and used properly by) health care workers. That should be do-able. Of course, there will be push back from the health care industry who doesn't want their privileged secret revealed: shit doesn't have to be that expensive!

I've always thought the U.S. (and any country) should secure - through government intervention - energy or materials sources critical to their security. There is decoupling in a wide range of areas between US and China and lately I am hearing the word "reciprocity" when explaining a U.S. move (like throwing out a portion of Communist Party media). Some companies and whole industries have been looking outside of China for a few years now to find cheaper and maybe more stable manufacturing situations. That should probably be left to them. Clearly, items necessary to fight a pandemic will be unavailable if the pandemic starts in China. Shouldn't any country have both a strategic stockpile and available manufacturing capacity for things like health care products (including medicines)? Interestingly, there is money to be made in Africa and India where we would compete with China and we (U.S. businesses) should probably decouple our sourcing from China - or we won't stand a chance. The overhead in China seems so high, I expect more investment and business activity to move out of China.

Hey! Great news! There's no place like home! You probably don't like being a burden to those around you, but you'll turn this around. I've had ideas what I would do in your situation but I won't bother you with it unless you reach some point where you're looking for advice. Greg

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-really-have-coronavirus/607348/ Interesting point at the end is that the fatality rate is probably much lower than 3 or 2%, because China probably has far more cases than the 100,000 they'll end up claiming - but they were not all sick enough to test and never were confirmed. This could end end up being flu-like, only there is no vaccine to protect health care workers or older people, who have a higher fatality rate. The Official Coronavirus Numbers Are Wrong, and Everyone Knows It Because the U.S. data on coronavirus infections are so deeply flawed, the quantification of the outbreak obscures more than it illuminates. We know, irrefutably, one thing about the coronavirus in the United States: The number of cases reported in every chart and table is far too low. The data are untrustworthy because the processes we used to get them were flawed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s testing procedures missed the bulk of the cases. They focused exclusively on travelers, rather than testing more broadly, because that seemed like the best way to catch cases entering the country. Just days ago, it was not clear that the virus had spread solely from domestic contact at all. But then cases began popping up with no known international connection. What public-health experts call “community spread” had arrived in the United States. The virus would not be stopped by tight borders, because it was already propagating domestically. Trevor Bedford’s lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which studies viral evolution, concluded there is “firm evidence” that, at least in Washington State, the coronavirus had been spreading undetected for weeks. Now different projections estimate that 20 to 1,500 people have already been infected in the greater Seattle area. In California, too, the disease appears to be spreading, although the limited testing means that no one is quite sure how far. .......... In total, fewer than 500 people have been tested across the country (although the CDC has stopped reporting that number in its summary of the outbreak). As a result, the current “official” case count inside the United States stood at 43 as of this morning (excluding cruise-ship cases). This number is wrong, yet it’s still constantly printed and quoted. In other contexts, we’d call this what it is: a subtle form of misinformation. This artificially low number means that for the past few weeks, we’ve seen massive state action abroad and only simmering unease domestically. While Chinese officials were enacting a world-historic containment effort—putting more than 700 million people under some kind of movement restriction, quarantining tens of millions of people, and placing others under new kinds of surveillance—and American public-health officials were staring at the writing on the wall that the disease was extremely likely to spread in the U.S., the public-health response was stuck in neutral. The case count in the U.S. was not increasing at all. Preparing for a sizable outbreak seemed absurd when there were fewer than 20 cases on American soil. Now we know that the disease was already spreading and that it was the U.S. response that was stalled. Meanwhile, South Korean officials have been testing more than 10,000 people a day, driving up the country’s reported-case count. Same goes for Italy: high test rate, high number of cases. (Now some Italian politicians want to restrict testing.) In China, the official data say the country has more than 80,000 cases, but the real number might be far, far higher because of all the people who had mild(er) cases and were turned away from medical care, or never sought it in the first place. That may be cause for reassurance (though not everyone agrees), because the total number of cases is the denominator in the simple equation that yields a fatality rate: deaths divided by cases. More cases with the same number of deaths means that the disease is likely less deadly than the data show.

My wife says, though it’s probably being used more and in more places now, that sidewalk pickup system was common when she was living and working in Beijing.

FDA cuts through the tape (their tape) to open up state and hospital labs to create and use their own tests. In bid to rapidly expand coronavirus testing, U.S. agency abruptly changes rulesWhat went wrong: The United States badly bungled coronavirus testing—but things may soon improveThe key problem with the kits is what’s known as a negative control, says Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious diseases at the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL). CDC’s test uses the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay to find tiny amounts of the SARS-CoV-2 genome in, say, a nose swab. To make sure a test is working properly, kits also include DNA unrelated to SARS-CoV-2. The assay should not react to this negative control, but the CDC reagents did at many, but not all, state labs. The labs where the negative control failed were not allowed to use the test; they have to continue to send their samples to Atlanta.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/03/cdc-says-us-coronavirus-cases-climb-to-at-least-108-with-six-deaths.html It's just their job, apparently optional if they feel like it: medical professionals

I think the Wuhan coronavirus has a firm toehold in the U. S. now and will spread and be managed in a North American way (a Chinese viral epidemic with American characteristics). For better or worse. I expect a surge in cases soon. But that will just be testing catching up with infections. That will be a good thing. Other than that, it’s sit and wait for me (now that we’ve stocked up on hand sanitizer). https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/3m-ramps-up-n95-respirator-production-amid-global-coronavirus-outbreak.html ”3M ramps up N95 respirator production as demand surges from global coronavirus outbreak” “To fill the surge in demand for the devices, particularly the N95 respirator, 3M is ramping up production In Aberdeen, South Dakota, more than 650 employees at one of 3M’s largest manufacturing facilities are working overtime to increase face mask production.” Good pic’s at this link: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/total-fing-anarchy-costco-shoppers-share-funnyscary-tales-of-preppers-getting-ready-for-a-coronavirus-outbreak-2020-03-02 ‘Total f***ing anarchy!’ Costco shoppers share funny/scary tales of preppers getting ready for a coronavirus outbreak The comments sections gave some color from the front lines: “Signs were up that they were out of toilet paper, paper towels and bottles of water. Even with that, inside people were stocking up on food, drinks... darn near everything it seems. Going up and down the aisles, seeing pallets empty and people loading up their carts... it was just surreal all the panic buying that is going on.” “It was total f**king anarchy.” “We sold out of toilet paper yesterday, which hasn’t happened at our Costco in 30 years. It was a horrible day to work and I am dreading work today.” An ongoing topic - click here for Most Recent Post

Seems reasonable!

That bat virus researcher was just a dedicated scientist who collaborated with non-Chinese researchers, so was likely legitimate. With respect to "having to publish in non-Chinese journals" - well, that would be a first for a Chinese journal to reject a manuscript! Anyway, yes, you have to bring the samples back to the lab rather than set up sequencing equipment in bat caves. Even though the workers wear protective equipment (as do bat guano harvesters), the virus really needs to pass through an intermediate host before it can become human-infectable - still a rare event. That's where the live animal, bush meat markets come in. Cages stacked on top of each other, poop spreading around and into other cages. Took 16 years for it to happen again after SARS 1. Now, we have SARS-CoV-2. Neither the live market (2 blocks from the train station) nor that lab should be situated where they are, too. Germany had a Marburg virus outbreak in a similar situation.

When a virus emerges from its host cell, it buds out through the membrane, taking pieces of the membrane with it, which becomes its coat. The coat can be studded with proteins ("spike" proteins) that are coded for by the virus genome (in this case the single stranded RNA) and made during virus replication. In the case of this coronavirus, it codes for a spike protein that is a nice fit for binding with a protein we all have on the outside of our cells called angiotensin converting enzyme 2 ("ACE") and, once bound, can facilitate a cascade of events that allows for its transduction into the cell. The single strand, + orientation means it's ready to serve as a template for more virus proteins including those that will make copies of its RNA to reemerge from the cell, packaging itself in a new coat in the process, only now it is many copies of itself. Our tissue's response to the infection of our lung cilia can plug up our alveoli (visible by X-ray) and even leave lasting damage if we survive. Some viruses like HIV have a very short life span outside host tissue (why you can't catch it from a toilet seat) whereas this Covid-19 needs a moist environment but apparently can survive longer - like in the taxi last used by an infected person and you just got in it. Just want to say here that the personal protection equipment they use like the gowns, gloves and masks are considered contaminated from first use in the clinical setting and should be removed in a precise sequence and location ("degowning") when transitoining from the contaminated area (place where a sick, coughing patient is) to the next location. Remove when taking a break or eating, too! To me, the avoidable tragedy in Hebei is not the lack of 50,000 spare, equipped hospital beds (the U. S. would be in a similar bind)) but the infection of 3000 health care workers. Allon would have been familiar with these safety protocols as second nature from his clinical experience and, given China being factory to the world, the well-trained caregivers shouldn't have had such an uphill struggle for protecting themselves.

Like I said: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/business/china-coronavirus-propaganda.html Coronavirus Weakens China’s Powerful Propaganda Machine Beijing is pushing tales of perseverance, but many young people are openly questioning the Communist Party’s message. Exhausted medical workers with faces lined from hours of wearing goggles and surgical masks. Women with shaved heads, a gesture of devotion. Retirees who donate their life savings anonymously in government offices. Beijing is tapping its old propaganda playbook as it battles the relentless coronavirus outbreak, the biggest challenge to its legitimacy in decades. State media is filling smartphones and airwaves with images and tales of unity and sacrifice aimed at uniting the people behind Beijing’s rule. It even briefly offered up cartoon mascots named Jiangshan Jiao and Hongqi Man, characters meant to stir patriotic feelings among the young during the crisis. The problem for China’s leaders: This time, it isn’t working so well. Online, people are openly criticizing state media. They have harshly condemned stories of individual sacrifice when front-line medical personnel still lack basic supplies like masks. They shouted down Jiangshan Jiao and Hongqi Man. They have heaped scorn on images of the women with shaved heads, asking whether the women were pressured to do it and wondering why similar images of men weren’t appearing. One critical blog post was titled “News Coverage Should Stop Turning a Funeral Into a Wedding.” ......... The government was slow to disclose the threat of the coronavirus and worked to suppress the voices of those who tried to warn the country. In doing so, it undermined its implicit deal with its people, in which they trade away their individual rights for the promise of security. To tame public outrage, Beijing is determined to create a “good public opinion environment.” It has sent hundreds of state-sponsored journalists to Wuhan and elsewhere to churn out heart-tugging stories about the front-line doctors and nurses and the selfless support from the Chinese public. ......... China’s propaganda spinners have some tough competition. Chinese people have seen images of a young woman crying “Mom! Mom!” as her mother’s body was driven away. They’ve seen a woman banging a homemade gong from her balcony while begging for a hospital bed. They’ve seen an exhausted nurse breaking down and howling. And they have all seen the face of Li Wenliang, the doctor who tried to warn China about the very virus that killed him. ....... Beijing is doing everything it can to take back the narrative. State media is offering steady coverage of people who leave donations at government offices then dash before anyone can give them credit. One compilation of “dropped cash donations and ran away” headlines tallied 41 of them. Other stories feature medics who join the front lines after “Mom just passed away” or the person “just had a newborn.” Beat by beat, the stories sound the same. Some are blatantly unbelievable. One newspaper in the city of Xi’an apologized after it posted an article claiming that a nurse’s newborn twins asked their father where their mother was, saying it was an editing mistake. Another newspaper wrote that after a nurse went to the front line, her husband, who had been in a vegetative state since 2014, would smile whenever her name was mentioned “as if he knew that his wife was engaged in a great endeavor.” That story was later deleted. In China, admiration of the front-line medical workers is widespread and sincere. But the state media’s coverage does not show the reality that many of those workers lack protective gear. Over 3,000 of them have been infected.

Nothing seems believable about that story of the "first whistleblower", the "model worker". And, even if it was true, a lot of good it did. But, I doubt it's true. The People's Daily is trying to save the Party, not the Chinese people. Really crude timing to glorify a model worker while a hundred people per day are dying in Hubei. And on Facebook, banned in China because it's not controlled by the party, but broadcasting anybody's propaganda outside in the free world.

They had to go the ultra-pasteurized route because they didn't have a refrigerated supply chain. My in laws in western China are able to get giant crab legs so I guess they fixed that.

So, you filled out that toe tag for nothing? Was there swelling from the infection site interfering with the nerves? Keep posting so we know you're making progress.

I'm impressed. Hope everyone is back to work soon

Weird thing is I've seen other stories of whole families dying because everyone had to quarantine at home and, when one got sick and they went to the hospital, they were sent back home because there were no beds. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/18/coronavirus-kills-chinese-film-director-family-wuhan-covid-19 Chinese film director Chang Kai and family die from coronavirusA Chinese film director, his sister, mother and father have all died from the coronavirus, the latest high-profile victims of the disease in Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak. Chang Kai, 55, died on 14 February. His parents died over the previous two weeks, after the family spent days together in self-quarantine, the Chinese magazine Caixin reported. Chang’s sister died hours after he did, and his wife is in a serious condition. Death rates in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei provinces have been higher than in the rest of China and beyond. Many patients reported struggling to find a bed in hospitals filled far beyond capacity, even as the government built new hospitals and converted spaces like an exhibition centre into makeshift medical centres. ....... There are concerns that initial government advice for those with symptoms to stay at home may have exacerbated the toll from the disease, with close confinement leading to whole families being infected. Chang had nursed his father at home after he fell sick in late January. He took the older man to several hospitals, but could not find a bed, Caixin reported. On 28 January he was the family’s first victim but others had already become infected. ....... The home quarantine policy could have caused clusters of cross-household and cross-community infections by allowing serious infections to progress without treatment, Caixin reported, quoting Chen Bo, a professor at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan.

Took me a while to figure this out, but I guess you mean Chinese 6XL? Whereas you are probably an XL or something like that. Sounds like the Yulin home quarantine practice hasn't been too severe, then. You said they drained your suppuration. Any good news re progress or going home? I wouldn't want a compounding hospital infection at this point. I guess no improvement in lower pain or sensation?