It is also possible that a strain of virus weaponised by the biological weapons research lab escaped and they injected it afterwards into bats to have a fall-species that doesn’t look like biological weapons researchers
The coronavirus would make a really bad biological weapon. Most of the deaths have been older men. Children and young people rarely have serious problems.
Years ago there was a vicious rumor that McDonalds was putting earthworms in their burgers. McDonalds ended the rumors when they pointed out that earthworms cost several times as much a beef on a per pound basis. Why would they use $5/lb worms instead of $1/lb beef?
The coronavirus has done a good job of killing older Chinese men. How could that make a good biological weapon?
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Very James Bondish…but not likely.
Using confirmed cases to calculate mortality rate is inaccurate. To determine mortality rate, you need to know how many people were infected in total, not how many confirmed cases there have been. I have not seen any consensus calculations of total infected with 2019-nCoV.
For instance, the CDC’s flu surveillance system only covers 8.5% of the US population. As of last week, there have been about 180,000 confirmed cases of influenza in the United States. However, the CDC calculates there have been at least 26 million total Americans infected. They have also calculated at least 14,000 deaths from influenza. That number is much more accurate because it is much easier to test those who have died from a flu-like illness.
If you simply divide total deaths by total confirmed case, this years seasonal flu death rate is 7.6% which is nowhere near the typical 0.05% in the US. Using the calculated infected, you get 0.05%.
We do not know the total infected with 2019-nCoV. However, we know that it is more than what the confirmed cases are.
Even using worst case scenario confirmed cases (which I used in previous posts), both mortality rate and reproductive number have remained steady. There is no data to suggest this is some runaway train picking up steam. It continues to chug along as expected. If people want to be precautious, great. People thinking this is some Hollywood armageddon movie come to pass are mistaken.
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Precisely.
I had a mild case of the flu last week (well AFAIK that’s what it was).
But I was in Boston the week a confirmed case was found there.
For all I know I had coronavirus and didn’t even know it.
(Unlikely because absolutely no one else in my household has gotten sick).
There have been accounts of people diagnosed with the coronavirus having symptoms just as mild as the ones I had. So there are a lot of cases going unreported.
The figures for cases and deaths outside of China are arguably more accurate since China appears to have problems with testing all the likely cases.
There have been 600 reported cases outside of mainland China and there has been one death each in France, Japan, and the Philippines. That gives a death rate of 3/600 = .5% of reported cases outside of China.
The real question is whether the spread of the virus can be controlled. Estimates are that 28% of the US population got the Spanish flu after World War I. If a similar number got the coronavirus, the number of US deaths could exceed 400,000 based on the death rate outside of China.
Where are you getting the demographic data re deaths from? I can’t find any
Just as a follow up, I tried to find some estimates of total infected. Best I could do was for the end of January.
The total confirmed cases on 1/27/2010 was 4,515
The Lancet estimated cases as of 1/25/2020 was 75,815.
They used some pretty aggressive numbers to come up with that (a higher R0 than what appears to be the case), but it does give some perspective. The true amount of people infected could be 17 times higher than confirmed cases given their numbers. Even if it was 10 times times higher, the mortality rate would drop by a factor of 10 (as compared to those using confirmed cases to calculate mortality rate).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30260-9/fulltext
The data is in the fox news link. Here is a link to the original source from Johns Hopkins:
The newest figures show 67178 cases of which 66497 are from mainland China.
There is also one additional death from Hong Kong, which is not included in the mainland China numbers. That gives 4 deaths out of 681 cases outside of mainland China. The death rate is .59% of reported cases.
Given the concerns from foreign governments I doubt there are a significant number of cases that are not reported. International travelers are arguably healthier than the general population since people with severe medical conditions are unlikely to travel.
So far, mostly elderly and mostly Asian according to everything I’ve read.
That stands to reason as it’s the very young and very old that are generally at highest risk in epidemics and of course about 95% of more of the affected are in China.
If you aren’t an elderly or sickly Chinese living in Wuhan you have almost nothing to worry about. You are thousands of times more likely to die from the seasonal flu at this time than from the coronavirus.
Yeah, with a death rate of 2% (of known cases) it’s not a very effective weapon. Although it could be used to extend the solvency of Social Security.
Tom Cotton is dangerous.
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A paper from a Chinese University is pointing to the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WHCDC) as a possible source of the coronavirus:
The report says: ‘Genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis (intermediate horseshoe bat).’
It describes how the only native bats are found around 600 miles away from the Wuhan seafood market and that the probability of bats flying from Yunnan and Zhejiang provinces was minimal.
In addition there is little to suggest the local populace eat the bats as evidenced by testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors.
Instead the authors point to research being carried out within a few hundred yards at the WHCDC.
One of the researchers at the WHCDC described quarantining himself for two weeks after a bat’s blood got on his skin, according to the report. That same man also quarantined himself after a bat urinated on him.
Fox News is dangerous.
https://mobile.twitter.com/broderick/status/1229078741873197058
Why? Because he’s questioning the required narrative? Can’t have people questioning the official narrative. No, that won’t do at all.
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Here is the Lancet paper that the Chinese “paper” was based off of. The Chinese paper quoted in these articles appears to have been retracted. I was able to find a copy and read it. It’s not a scientific paper. It’s a few paragraphs that boil down to “the genome is similar to endemic bats, it’s not likely these Chinese bats would be in Wuhan, so it must be from a laboratory.”
If you read the Lancet article, it goes into the similarities with the bat virus, and then goes on to explain that while it is similar to the bat virus, a yet unknown animal intermediate reservoir (maybe one of the many animals found at a market?) must also be present. These conspiracy theories are silly without any science to back it. Let me guess, the conspiracy is Chinese scientists altered a bat virus to infect another animal to then infect humans. Yeesh.
Just for fun, can you guess the most likely primary animal reservoir for both SARS and MERS? BATS!!! You got it. Crazy to think yet another coronavirus has a bat reservoir, isn’t it!
Because he is a congressman pushing conspiracy theories.
There are real, unanswered questions about the origin of the coronavirus.
For example, the earliest known human patient with the virus has not been publicly identified. If the first patient worked at a university lab that handles bats or other animals that carry similar viruses, then it is likely that the lab was the ultimate source of the infection. The intent of the researchers may have been to study the virus to prevent possible future infections, but sloppy procedures could have resulted in the accidental release of a highly contagious virus into the middle of a city of over 10 million people.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity . . .
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It was a cluster outbreak. 41 individuals hospitalized for pneumonia tested positive for the virus. Any of them could be the index case. Maybe none of them are. We don’t always get a nice, neat patient zero, especially when the majority of those infected do not require hospital care. It can take time to firmly establish who patient zero was as testing of old samples (if available), is performed.
For instance, patient zero for MERS was an individual hospitalized in Saudi Arabia in June of 2012. That patient wasn’t identified for 5 months. It took 4 months to identify the index case of SARS (a Chinese farmer), but it was a “super-spreader” (a Chinese fish seller) 2 months after patient zero who led to the outbreak (he infected 30 people while hospitalized).
It’s exciting to think of all the crazy and even clandestine ways this virus could have started. As of now, it fits perfectly well with prior coronavirus and other disease outbreaks.
