Bring Out Your Dead!!!
Coronavirus-19 is becoming a problem. Chinatown didn’t hold their annual New Year’s festival this time, because of this virus, and merchants and restaurants lost cash inflow. I do get the issues involved, but some of the stuff is getting silly. This is not, after all, the Plague that swept Europe three times running, nor is it the smallpox and typhus epidemics that were rampant And there was that poor soul known as Typhoid Mary, whose employers’ families came down with typhoid fever wherever she worked, but she herself was perfectly healthy. She spent her life in isolation after word got around.
However, there now seems to be a 5th possible Covid-19 patient in the Chicago area. Just turn the sound down a bit on the video below.
The best way to avoid getting sick is to wash your cotton pickin’ hands, isn’t it?
Yeah, and let’s not panic. Measles will kill unvaccinated adults who catch that bug, but it’s usually just a rash for kids. Part of growing up, isn’t it?
I am not saying don’t take it seriously, but I do know that SARS research is now being applied to this bug, and some good results may just come out of that alone. These virus hunters are looking at the genetic “machinery” of the RNA samples scattered through this bug. Fascinating to listen to them talk about it, and how they understand what it’s doing. If they can solve this problem through prior research that they have returned to, they will. Might even prevent the next Plague from getting started.
Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", "Your Tax Dollars At Work"
“Bring out your dead…”
I just knew that was coming
Why am I not surprised?
Something else that is not surprising. The print media following the lessons of Randolph Hearst with the whole fear mongering/yellow journalism thing. And the broadcast media taking a page from CBS Radio Broadcast of War of the Worlds. Told them then that the public could be made to believe anything they said. It hasn’t happened since 1992, but the FCC can impose fines of up to $25K “…for any broadcast hoax that alarms the public and causes civil or federal authorities to respond to imaginary crisis…”
Next blast from the past may be the age old trick that started in the 1840s, keep voters drunk or drugged and transport them from place to place by political hacks and have them vote multiple times.
You don’t have to have a potential virus to make sure you WASH YOUR HANDS!
I’m not dead yet!
RNA? And that’s an anagram for NRA? I knew the gun nutz (tip of that hat to Hardin) was behind this! Ever since my local material supply ran short of tin foil, I drool sputter spew mutter rant …
Headlines today say 100 confirmed cases… and 6 dead just in Washington state. Makes you wonder about that 1.7-2% published mortality rate.
What that likely says is that cases are being underreported…
but be prepared for the mortality rate to be underreported too….
The former (under-reporting of cases) is almost certain to be a much larger issue than the latter (under-reporting of mortality rate).
Why? Some cases of a new disease might not even be recognized, particularly if they’re mild and don’t require medical care. In contrast, deaths from illness during the outbreak of a new disease are going to get some extra scrutiny.
See my reply to Berliner below, David. One should expect an outbreak in a nursing home to have a far higher mortality rate than that of the general population. Covid-19 is exceptionally dangerous on the elderly and those with chronic poor health; the fatality rates for those groups are far higher than that for the population in general.
That should read “my reply to George V below”. Mea culpa, and my apologies.
Sorry, but decoding the initials is easy.
RNA = ribonucleic acid – inactive but sits waiting for something to activate it. Ribonucleic acid, a nucleic acid is present in all living cells. Its principal role is to act as a messenger carrying instructions from DNA for controlling the synthesis of proteins, although in some viruses RNA rather than DNA carries the genetic information.
DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid – active and easily taken over by RNA to create activity, reproduce and move on (causing trouble in this case). DNA is the chemical name for the molecule that carries genetic instructions in all living things. The DNA molecule consists of two strands that wind around one another to form a shape known as a double helix. Each strand has a backbone made of alternating sugar (deoxyribose) and phosphate groups.
No secret codes, nothing like that, just the difference between the Message (DNA) and the Messenger (RNA), if you want an analogy.
Methinks David was making a joke that you missed, Ex-PH2. (smile)
I know, Hondo, but it’s kind of fun to explain the mysteries of stuff learned in biology class. 🙂
And I’m sure I had forgotten some of that since my last biology course circa 1972. Hell, they’ve apparently discovered 67 new sexes since then! Science is marvelous.
Advice that I gave the HM’s in 2/7 BAS ’95-’97
No matter how bad things get in life… WASH YO ASS!
there is no limit to the suffering, debasement, and exploitation of Americans that Democrats are willing to create to further their own ends.
which is a fancy way of saying that nothing has changed since 1861
It looks like the lamestream media are rooting for the virus to spread in the US so as to blame Trump and try to sway the 2020 election to joe or bloomie.
Some folks just let their brains run amok. In my local paper this morning in a story about people stockpiling face masks, TP, and hand wipes was mention of a woman who was stocking up on canned goods and staples. She was quoted as saying since the Corona virus started in a Chinese market she worried about the food supply here. Seriously, this alarm is getting out of hand.
In other news, the infection rate is China appears to be slowing. I wonder if this virus is mutating as it propagates from host to host, and is becoming less symptomatic. That is, over time it will have less serious symptoms.
About that spike in deaths in Washington state – wasn’t the first death a nursing home resident? I heard that 50 people in that nursing home were showing symptoms. I’d expect nursing home residents to be among the most likely to have life-threatening symptoms.
It may be running into natural resistance to the virus, too. Corvid-19 creates a respiratory infection. Not everyone is vulnerable to that.
I was scolded for not getting the flu shot last fall and got it while at FHCC, because the flu is returning and will probably return until late Spring.
If the current US cases are indeed clustered in a nursing home for the elderly and infirm, that means the US fatality rate will be skewed WAY higher than that for the population in general. Early data from China definitively showed that the disease has a hugely higher fatality rate among those 70 and older, and is also much higher for those with chronic poor health.
There are already two known strains that are spreading, so mutations are already in the wild, yes.
As for the mortality rate, the UK government estimates 2% or lower[1] – the 3.4% is true with what fuzzy data we have globally, but the error bars are huge due to the fact that so few people are tested, and many people have mild symptoms. There are also at least two strains out there, each with different factors.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51674743
The 9th Washington patient has died. He too came from that same nursing home and had underlying medical conditions. Meanwhile…
“So far, 16,000 people have died and 280,000 people have been hospitalized during the 2019-2020 flu season, according to preliminary estimates from the CDC on Feb 21, 2020”
Flew back from a month vacation near Dumaguete, Philippines last week via a 8 hour layover in Incheon airport. Incheon was normal/busy and 95% of us were wearing paper face masks. We had Purell for the hands and Lysol wipes for surfaces. Temperatures taken on arrival there via a thermal camera in a narrow hallway and on departure by Asiana gate agents with the thermal ones held close to the forehead.
While there I only saw one person in a hazmat suit and wearing a paper face mask… she was shopping in the Prada duty-free store.
We brought the Purell, Lysol and face masks from home.
Too late to sell my Corona beer stocks, so I’ll just sit here and grin and Beer it.
Be careful, Jeff. Did you know the lime in your Corona can cause Lyme disease?
If anyone asks about the Corona, you’re still celebrating Chinese New Year
Have we all forgot about SARs already
In 2009-2010 over 1000 plus deaths
80,000 plus cases in the United States along
The media barely talked about that because
The chosen one was POTUS
The DEMs the and media is all in to blame trump
On this. Is anyone paying attention to the stock market right now it’s telling because of the buying and selling the last two weeks or so
To bad the SEC doesn’t go after crooked shit
In the markers anymore
I think you’re confusing a few things – SARS was 2002-2003, and the US only had 27 cases. The 2009-2010 outbreak was the H1N1 (‘swine flu’), and a public health emergency was declared with the WHO giving it the highest level on its pandemic alert scale.
One important thing to note is that the CDC said that nearly 59 million Americans contracted the virus, with 12K deaths. That’s a mortality rate of just 0.02%, which compared with the still-fuzzy numbers around the novel coronavirus is miniscule.
And there was plenty of news coverage – in fact, you can still google for many of the old articles in that time-frame. But in terms of concern, this virus seems to be considerably worse, both in the mortality rate among the elderly, and the fact that it has a long incubation time and high transmission factor. Which contributes to why it’s even more of a news story.
Take this one seriously. This virus is likely going to mean negative or close to negative population growth in the US in 2021.
This is going to take out a million Americans over the next 24 months.
And that is a low end estimate.
Forgive me for having zero faith in your prediction. Your track record is less than stellar.
On what? Trump finishing his first term? He barely might.
And it will have more to do with the craven cowardice and fecklessness of the republicans.
I predicted Trump might win the election because Hillary was a weak candidate.
I predicted Trump would get impeached,
I am doing above average,
I’ve been massaging my “empiric data” again over the thought of a Bernie presidency!!!
Trump is still in office, and is likely to be re-elected. Yes, he was impeached. Again, he’s still in the oval office. You scored on the election prediction, so based on the empirical data provided above, your average is 33.33%. Even under common core math rules, that’s a failure.
I, and most rationally thinking people, don’t place much faith in the rants of chicken-little we’re-all-doomed-if-you-don’t-listen-to-me parrots. Just go stand over there in the corner, Al Gore and Greta are there to keep you company.
Not only is the president going to finish his first term – quite comfortably, I might add – he is more than likely to win a second term, which he will also finish (natural causes excepted). You blew that prediction, dude.
And yes, Trump was impeached. He’s still the president. Impeachment means nothing without removal from office, and you may have noticed that the removal did not happen, and everybody involved knew going in that it wouldn’t. Not because of party loyalty, but because the Democrats put forward the weakest possible case.
The only thing above average about you, Lars, is your opinion of yourself.
Illegal aliens living in the US are not Americans Zika Poodle.. I’m gonna predict your numbers are off by at least a factor of 10, and possibly 100… But hey, keep trying, even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while…
I’m inclined to disagree with his numbers, too, but if you condition them on the numbers we have, and that we’ve failed to contain the outbreak, it doesn’t look far off from what’s plausible:
The 2018 estimate for the number of Americans 70 and older is 35.3M. If we use the 3.4% global mortality rate (which includes people below 70, but most deaths have been older), and assume everyone gets exposed -not likely, but let’s roll with it- then we have 1.2M deaths.
You can scale that down, considerably, by exposure rate – the H1N1 in 2009 hit an estimated 60M Americans, but that’s only 20% of the population, so reduce that number by 1/5th. But we don’t know enough yet about natural resistance and how it’s spreading to better constrain the estimates of how many people it’ll reach.
And, like I said, we’re using the 3.4% number – if you use the UK’s 2% number, it drops a fair bit, too. But that number likely includes a skew by the younger, less-affected population. In the US, those 70+ people are only 10% of the population.
What’s the over-70 mortality rate? Hard to tell so far, but certainly higher than the base.
I’m also not including any other segments of the population for now, but just looking at the 70+, and using the too-low 2% number from the UK, and using the 20% spread number from H1N1 (which is a big unknown), we still get:
35.3M * 20% spread * 2% mortality
Or, roughly, 141K fatalities. That makes your off-by-a-factor-of-10 number in the running, and hopefully you’re right about the off-by-a-factor-of-100 guess, but I think it all comes down to how contained we get this. And again, this is just the 70+ demographic.
As for Lar’s zero population growth prediction, I wonder how many of those in that 70+ cohort he thinks would have been reproducing?
Or wouldn’t have died from other causes?
Both of those are good point Poe, and LC, there’s no question that there is the potential for this to be very bad, just as it was there for the other diseases mentioned. My guess, based on experience with the previous ones is that our population is less susceptible than that in other countries with poorer overall health, poorer nutrition, and poorer healthcare.. (yeah China and other centrally controlled governments).. As I pointed out above, these comments exclude the illegal alien population, as the tend to have few or no imuniations, practice terrible hygiene, etc. The same can be said for the homeless / drug addict populations, especially in places like Washington, Oregon, and California, where you have needles, feces, etc in the street, along with vermin that in addition to spreading the plague will likely spread this as well. In those areas / populations, I expect that the infection and mortality numbers will be much higher, for the same reasons it is in other countries.
If it helps, since I’m literally on the front lines with this, I’ll be happy to keep you all posted on what kind of impact I’m seeing in EMS
Not sure what Poodle thinks, PT, but as we both know the answer is “very few”.
The US population growth rate is currently just under 2/3 of one percent annually. The current estimate of US population is 331+M.
Doing the math, for the US to have a negative population growth means that more than ( 0.0065 x 331,000,000) = 2.15+M would have to die from Covid-19 alone for the US to have a negative population growth rate.
My guess is that we’ll see far fewer death than that. As of today, South Korea has reported 5766 Covid-19 cases and 35 fatalities; Japan has reported 317 cases and 6 fatalities. Those work out to fatality rates of around 0.6% and 1.9%, respectively.
I once owned a Toyota Corona.
It was stolen and never recovered.
At least that’s what they told me.
Now I’m not so sure……….
Hmm…now that you mention it, chop-shop does sound kinda Chinese, doesn’t it?
I’ve also heard it said that the corona virus won’t last long.. after all, it was made in China…
If it doesn’t kill ya, return it to Walmart for a full refund…