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I’m trying to decide whether to book a trip to Amsterdam in mid Feb, but with the way this thing is developing I wonder if it might be wiser not to travel through intl airports, foreign hotels, etc if I don’t have to.

How long till they get a working vaccine distributed out and widely available I wonder? Not much chance of that before mid Feb.
 
Retroviruses use both RNA and DNA in replication.

I feel duly chided. :D
Interestingly, I read something about using an anti-HIV drug in combating this one.

Now you say something that rhymes with "Gaultier's".
 
Rail travel from HK to the mainland has been suspended so that’s the end of my Guangdong trip :(

I mean, I guess you can still walk across the border? They haven't specifically said it's totally closed. Personally, I wouldn't come into China right now anyway. :(

Got a friend who was visiting Changsha with his Chinese wife and kid who's just managed to get some of the last seats on a train back to HK tomorrow. So glad they're going to make it.

We're down to our last new mask now. Can't get them in the shops. Got flights to Seoul on Thursday morning and we'll need to wear them on the journey. Fortunately (!) the pollution is so bad all winter that I reckon I've got a few discarded in my office. Going to go in tomorrow morning and check. :hmm: :facepalm:
 
I’m trying to decide whether to book a trip to Amsterdam in mid Feb, but with the way this thing is developing I wonder if it might be wiser not to travel through intl airports, foreign hotels, etc if I don’t have to.

How long till they get a working vaccine distributed out and widely available I wonder? Not much chance of that before mid Feb.
I wouldn't worry. It'll probably come to you before you get to it; it seems that there are increasing numbers of asymptomatic cases and quite possibly will just end up circulating in the general population like flu, the common cold, etc.
 
They haven't stopped flights or buses to Guangdong.

I’ll keep an eye on it. My trip isn’t until 15th February. If I can get into Hong Kong but not PRC then I’ll do a side trip to Tokyo instead.
 
I wouldn't worry. It'll probably come to you before you get to it; it seems that there are increasing numbers of asymptomatic cases and quite possibly will just end up circulating in the general population like flu, the common cold, etc.

I’m sure you’re right. The way it’s going at the moment, I can’t see how it can be contained within one area. That ship has sailed.

Doesn’t mean I want to do anything which might increase my chances of encountering it sooner than I might otherwise do so. I’m hoping I might be able to get vaccinated before it makes it to my door, vain though that hope might be.
 
elbows I think you should take over as team leader globally for this, with 2hats as consultant. Shit be sorted in a week.

lol cheers but I think the only thing we could improve would be the spread of certain information. I certainly dont have anything in mind that would halt the spread, apart from waiting for several months and seeing how much the seasonal aspect affects transmission! (quite probably the seasons will make a big difference).
 
I’m trying to decide whether to book a trip to Amsterdam in mid Feb, but with the way this thing is developing I wonder if it might be wiser not to travel through intl airports, foreign hotels, etc if I don’t have to.
If you fly from the UK, the arrivals area at Schiphol is pretty distant from the gates used by 'proper' international travellers like the US and China. (Also worth bearing in mind there's a huge conference in Amsterdam the week of the 10th, so you might have trouble finding a reasonably priced hotel mid-week.)
 
Sounds like the German human-human transmission case is going to further stoke fears of infection during incubation/asymptomatic phase:

the German cases had attended a work-based training event also attended by a woman who only became ill two days later during her return to China two days later. The German case is most worrying because if the Chinese woman was indeed asymptomatic at the time of the training session it would confirm reports of spread before symptoms develop making standard control strategies less effective.

(from an entry a few hours ago on the Guardian live updates page Coronavirus: Germany confirms first human transmission in Europe – live updates )
 


And, so the graph is a little less confusing:

"Time line for each case with travel history from Wuhan, with patient identifiers with
detection location, gender (M or F) and age. Distinct periods are shown as unexposed (gray),
exposed (white), infected but asymptomatic (pink), and symptomatic (purple). The analysis
yields the probability of being infected (violet), i.e. the cumulative density function of the
estimated infection moments (using the
Weibull distribution)."

You can read the paper here...
 
Some dont think it has changed hardly at all since it first appeared in humans. This gets all mixed in with stuff I've mentioned before about the media stories of mutation-related risks having taken on something of a life of their own. Quite reasonable concepts from the past, with simple tales of 'more deadly and less spreadable' evolving into 'less deadly but more spreadable' probably do a disservice to the realities, or at least its not so straightforward in every disease outbreak and evolution.

Dunno really though, we need people to analyse a lot more samples genetic sequences to see if there are still hardly any changes happening.

Personally, in the meantime, I tend to imagine the virus already had its current characteristics at an early stae of the outbreak, ie it may have had this spread potential since the very first case (or close to it). I cant tell though, but certainly I dont take language from authorities about the virus changing and becomign more likely to infecct the young at face value. It might be that the virus has not changed recently, and its just our understanding of its thats evolving.

This is certainly one of the subjects where it will be easy for me to make a mistake or become out of date.

The following document is too technical for me to absorb in full. But its been updated and their descriptive stuff that relates to my point 'we need people to analyse a lot more samples genetic sequences to see if there are still hardly any changes happening' is just now starting to show signs of shifting:

This shows that there is limited genetic variation in the currently sampled viruses but more recent ones are showing more divergence as is expected for fast evolving RNA viruses. But the lack of diversity is indicative of a relatively recent common ancestor for all these viruses.

 
Did anyone else get this strange question when the authorities were saying that the disease had passed the species boundary, well there was the sort of implied question what exactly were they doing with those animals?

Read somewhere that it was people eating bat soup that caused this virus 🦇
 
I’m trying to decide whether to book a trip to Amsterdam in mid Feb, but with the way this thing is developing I wonder if it might be wiser not to travel through intl airports, foreign hotels, etc if I don’t have to.

How long till they get a working vaccine distributed out and widely available I wonder? Not much chance of that before mid Feb.
I work installing IT systems in Airports at the moment but if this things carries on , I'l be seriously looking for another job ( Although I'm just about to hear about a job I've gone for which may make my decision simpler )
 
If you fly from the UK, the arrivals area at Schiphol is pretty distant from the gates used by 'proper' international travellers like the US and China. (Also worth bearing in mind there's a huge conference in Amsterdam the week of the 10th, so you might have trouble finding a reasonably priced hotel mid-week.)

Thanks, but I’m working on the assumption that by mid-Feb, the people who might be carrying this disease won’t just be the ones arriving from China and other far off places. Anywhere with a lot of people is going to be potentially risky.

That huge conference would be my reason for going there, so not much hope of cheap hotel prices. I’d probably look for an Airbnb in a cheaper suburb.
 
Read somewhere that it was people eating bat soup that caused this virus 🦇

You hang out in all the best places don't you?


"As news of the Wuhan virus spread online, one video became emblematic of its claimed origin: It showed a young Chinese woman, supposedly in Wuhan, biting into a virtually whole bat as she held the creature up with chopsticks. Media outlets from the Daily Mail to RT promoted the video, as did a number of prominent extremist bloggers such as Paul Joseph Watson. Thousands of Twitter users blamed supposedly “dirty” Chinese eating habits—in particular the consumption of wildlife—for the outbreak, said to have begun at a so-called wet market that sold animals in Wuhan, China."
 
An example of shit going round (not within China, this one):



But when people have no trust in official sources it's a bit inevitable.
 
You hang out in all the best places don't you?


"As news of the Wuhan virus spread online, one video became emblematic of its claimed origin: It showed a young Chinese woman, supposedly in Wuhan, biting into a virtually whole bat as she held the creature up with chopsticks. Media outlets from the Daily Mail to RT promoted the video, as did a number of prominent extremist bloggers such as Paul Joseph Watson. Thousands of Twitter users blamed supposedly “dirty” Chinese eating habits—in particular the consumption of wildlife—for the outbreak, said to have begun at a so-called wet market that sold animals in Wuhan, China."

Sure I saw it on the BBC, maybe I misread the headline.
 
This may already be out of date, but there is some similarity between this virus and a bat virus. There is also some suspicion that if it originated in bats, it got to humans by more than one inter-species jump.
 
Current state of accepted wisdom regarding bats etc to the best of my knowledge (which is limited):

Bats are currently considered to be the primary known animal host for coronaviruses.

However, as mentioned in that BBC article, they are not considered the best candidates for the spread to humans. It is assumed that such events, when they happen via markets, are caused by a different sort of animal that is more likely to be found in such markets.

In the past, with SARS it was civit cats that were in the frame for being the intermediate host, and with MERS it is dromedary camels. I believe that before the bat natural hosts thing was discovered, civit cats were thought to possibly be the natural host, rather than just an intermediary, but I havent double-checked this.

Its also important to note that the actual eating of the animals is not necessary part of the jump from the intermediate animal to humans - ie rather than a soup made from the animal concerned, its often though that animal faeces contaminating the market environment with the virus is a more likely vector. Epecially since the intestines are where these sorts of viruses tend to do their thing in animals, the respiratory side is often more a feature of human manifestations of the infections.

Returning to the bats and the routine state of things in terms of the coronavirus hanging out inside them, I believe I read a study of relevance recently. Serological testing of villagers near bat caves suggested some signs of past coronavirus infection of local people, in fairly low numbers. These things mostly go unnoticed unless we go looking for them specifically, because they havent caused a big deal or turned into any sort of wider outbreak.
 
The poo stuff does apply to humans too, just in varying degrees. eg if I remember properly, there were some cases with diarrhoea within the first group of infected people that came to medical attention, but not that many, and less than was seen with SARS. But there have been so many cases since then that we dont have any clinical info about, that I should not really be clinging to the initial set of descriptions, but have nothing broader to replace them with yet.
 
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