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[Cid]

Ok, however, I think my point still stands that labs are more likely to be studying the viruses that are most likely to be a danger in their part of the world. I would be very surprised if that were not the case - it's what they'd be most likely to get funding for.

Well yeah, but that cuts both ways. If a level 4 lab dealing with bat coronavirus is going to have a leak, that’s what it will be. It’s worth having a look at the Washington Post’s coverage... obviously still treat with extreme caution, but the arguments aren’t just coming from Trump.

 

[elbows]

Yeah thats why the theory has to remain on my radar, since it was the lab where the famous SARS & bat coronavirus team was based in recent years. The team that spent 5 years collecting samples from bats in a (not local to Wuhan) cave, where some of the coronaviruses found in these bats were similar to SARS.

I dont know what methods intelligence analysts have for attempting to discern between genuine coincidences and things that test the bounds of reasonable coincidence.

 

[Petcha]

Well yeah, but that cuts both ways. If a level 4 lab dealing with bat coronavirus is going to have a leak, that’s what it will be. It’s worth having a look at the Washington Post’s coverage... obviously still treat with extreme caution, but the arguments aren’t just coming from Trump.

Both he and Pompeo claim to have seen the intelligence suggesting it came from the lab and the intelligence community haven't publicly discounted an accidental release of it from that lab. But I guess we won't know till the dust settles. Knowing Trump he's waiting till closer to election time to reveal all. It all smells a bit fishy to me.

 

[PD58]

An interesting Twitter discussion about the graphs

 

[Yossarian]

UK Gov seemed loath to shut down air travel seeming - to my mind at least - to prefer it to peter out as the virus became established in countries. I recall wondering at the time if Gov was scared of lawsuits from UK airlines and airports. NZ closed borders and airlines very easily and they had a much smaller issue than the UK.

Border closing and a significant shutdown are key aspects to NZ's approach and reasons for their success. How much the UK could have done the same I am not sure.

Stopping flights would also have stopped infected British travelers bringing the virus to all kinds of new places, as seems to have been the case.

 

[ice-is-forming]

 

[2hats]

A human monoclonal antibody, originally identified to neutralise SARS-CoV, that also neutralises SARS-CoV-2 in cell culture and may offer a potential for both treatment and prevention of COVID-19.

Wang, C., Li, W., Drabek, D. et al. A human monoclonal antibody blocking SARS-CoV-2 infection. Nat Commun 11, 2251 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16256-y

 

[Petcha]

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I'm still a little uncomfortable with admitting Scott Morrison has been competent at something but he seems to have been here. Although I really hope letting hordes of people loose on Bondi this early doesn't prove a massive mistake. I think Ardern is taking a slightly more cautious approach to their lockdown release. Time will tell.

 

[ice-is-forming]

I'm still a little uncomfortable with admitting Scott Morrison has been competent at something but he seems to have been here. Although I really hope letting hordes of people loose on Bondi this early doesn't prove a massive mistake. I think Ardern is taking a slightly more cautious approach to their lockdown release. Time will tell.

Me too.. deeply suspicious, like where's the real ScoMo!?! And isn't it time he fucked it up..

But yer right, some people are being reckless and time will tell.

Where I live the beach is always empty which is cool, and tbh I'm doing what I think is right for me and mine.. which is probably a bit more cautious than the restrictions.

We've only had 10 cases in this town, all traced to travel and all recovered. But I'm not gonna take my eye off the ball.

 

[treelover]

Missouri governor, allowing concerts from next monday, ffs.

 

[The39thStep]

Portugal cut and paste headlines :

This Tuesday, Portugal recorded 1,074 deaths related to Covid-19, 11 more than on Monday, and 25,702 infected, that is, 178 more cases (0.7% more).

According to the Secretary of State for Health, António Lacerda Sales, this Tuesday there are 818 cases of hospitalization, of which 134 are in intensive care.

There are 1743 cases of recovery recorded, 31 more cases than yesterday. The recovered cases correspond to 6.8% of the total confirmed cases.

The overall lethality rate is 4.2% and the lethality rate over 70 years is 14.9%. About 85.9% of people undergoing treatment are being followed at home. There are 3.2% of inpatients in hospital, 0.5% of whom are in intensive care units and 2.7% in the ward.

During the pandemic, more than 2,300 health professionals were hired, including more than 700 nurses and more than a hundred doctors.

The Secretary of State acknowledges that there is a decrease in the number of tests carried out over the weekend. The government official guarantees, however, that this is not due to lack of supply, but due to the decrease in demand for these tests. António Lacerda Sales emphasizes that more than 459 thousand tests have been carried out since the beginning of March and that more than 44 thousand tests are being carried out per million inhabitants.


The Minister of Internal Affairs said today that 560 tests were carried out on covid-19 on migrants residing in Lisbon hostels, 178 of which had positive results, advancing that the tests will continue in other units reception of these citizens.

The Minister of Home Affairs said today that 433 people were detained during the 45 days of state of emergency.

The state of emergency was in force in Portugal between March 19 and May 2, and the country entered, last Sunday, in a calamity situation to face the covid pandemic.19.It will be a period of transition until the full opening, on June 1.


Seven hundred and eighty people were prevented from traveling on public transport yesterday because they were not wearing protective masks. This was the result of the first day of surveillance and inspection in public transport in Lisbon and Porto.Under the state of disaster, the capacity for public transport is limited to two thirds of the capacity.


GNR said that at least 460 users were not complying with the obligation to wear a mask or visor. PSP had already said that it had fined three people and prevented 320 from continuing their trip.

On the first day, it was barber shops and hairdressers who apparently had the greatest demand.
Tests before daycare centers open Daycare
workers have already begun testing for Covid-19. The screening program runs at the national level. It started Monday in the Algarve and in the Lisbon and Tagus Valley region.

By May 18, 29,000 workers are expected to be tested. It is for this date that the beginning of the daycare center reopening is scheduled.

 

[spring-peeper]

Missouri governor, allowing concerts from next monday, ffs.

Despite the governor’s green light, many of the state’s biggest venues are located in the cities hit hardest by the pandemic and will remain closed in compliance with local procedures.

 

[elbows]

Here's an extract from a recent New Scientist article about the likelihood that the 1880 Russian flu was actually a coronavirus, which is still around today and is one of the various viruses that causes the common cold. (It's not just about increased immunity - viruses evolve over time to become less deadly, generally - low evolutionary fitness to kill your host.)

There is a related but opposite possibility to your last point in brackets, although I dont know very much about it and am unsure where I heard of it from.

If there are certain human genetic traits that make some people/families more susceptible to the very worst outcomes from a virus, those people may die to the extent that over time such vulnerabilities are harder to find in human populations.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

There is a related but opposite possibility to your last point in brackets, although I dont know very much about it and am unsure where I heard of it from.

If there are certain human genetic traits that make some people/families more susceptible to the very worst outcomes from a virus, those people may die to the extent that over time such vulnerabilities are harder to find in human populations.

Yeah sure, that too. We are all governed by the forces of natural selection, although humans arguably less so than others. However, a virus like covid-19, and perhaps Russian flu, too, that mostly kills the old will have only a marginal effect.

But viruses evolve in fast-forward compared to us.

 

[2hats]

Researchers at Los Alamos, Sheffield and Duke report identification of a more contagious strain (D614G) of SARS-CoV-2 across Europe and the US East coast that modifies the spike protein. "We see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominant pandemic form", wrote the lead author.

Spike mutation pipeline reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2
DOI: 10.1101/2020.04.29.069054

Slightly overly dramatic LA Times article:

Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus could be more contagious than original

A mutation in the novel coronavirus has led to a new strain viewed as more contagious than the virus that emerged from China, according to a new study.

www.latimes.com

 

[Supine]

However, a virus like covid-19, and perhaps Russian flu, too, that mostly kills the old will have only a marginal

Not disagreeing, but remember that when the Russian flu epidemic happened average life expectancy was only about 35!

A pandemic in this century has a lot more older people to infect.

 

[elbows]

Researchers at Los Alamos, Sheffield and Duke report identification of a more contagious strain (D614G) of SARS-CoV-2 across Europe and the US East coast that modifies the spike protein. "We see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominant pandemic form", wrote the lead author.

Spike mutation pipeline reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2
DOI: 10.1101/2020.04.29.069054
Slightly overly dramatic LA Times article:

Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus could be more contagious than original

A mutation in the novel coronavirus has led to a new strain viewed as more contagious than the virus that emerged from China, according to a new study.

www.latimes.com

Thanks for that one, I am currently part way through reading the research paper, I cannot face the media versions of the story right now, I will look at that tomorrow. Because media pandemic mutation cliches and associated drama have long been on my list of things to moan about. And I was very much not a fan of the '2 strains' stuff that came out in a paper quite early on. Although I will now have to go back and see whether it turns out that the early, flawed paper has any connection with the detail of this new study.

This paper is much more like it, plenty of detail, lots of focus on specific mutations at sites of interest, and the rather large genome dataset to work with. There are still some areas where the authors and everyone else have to rely on speculation, eg many mutations whose effects we do not fully understand, but finally I feel like with this pandemic we actually have enough data on this side of things to begin to do the subject of mutations some justice. I mean this level of detail is not brand new, I recall concerns about specific mutations in specific samples of H5N1 bird flu back in the years where most of the future pandemic risk concerns were directed towards that type of flu. But when it comes to public and media perceptions about virus mutations, famous and dramatic historical examples are often partly conjecture, based mostly on the observation of certain waves being worse than others. I'm not suggesting they were false, but I usually find there is quite important stuff in the detail, and when we dont have the detail I am likely to be quite skeptical.

Anyway I better try and finish reading the paper before I comment on it properly. But my initial thought from a purely personal point of view given what has come out of my big gob on the subject in the past is along the lines of doh! I really though I would get away with being quite flippant and dismissive about mutation aspects for much longer than this, but now it seems my focus on moaning about the tired mutation cliches was unwise. I'm not sure if I can really take much solace in the fact that the authors were also taken by surprise, but here is that bit anyway:

When we embarked on our SARS-CoV-2 analysis pipeline, our motivation was to identify mutations that might be of potential concern in the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein as an early warning system for consideration as vaccine studies progress; we did not anticipate such dramatic results so early in the pandemic.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Not disagreeing, but remember that when the Russian flu epidemic happened average life expectancy was only about 35!

A pandemic in this century has a lot more older people to infect.

True. Although life expectancy once you got through childhood was a fair bit higher. But if you're mostly only killing old people (and in the case of Covid-19, it is mostly the very old - in Ireland both the mean and median ages of death are over 80; in the UK 70 per cent of deaths have been over 75s), you're not exerting a huge selection pressure.

 

[Marty1]

UK Gov seemed loath to shut down air travel seeming - to my mind at least - to prefer it to peter out as the virus became established in countries. I recall wondering at the time if Gov was scared of lawsuits from UK airlines and airports. NZ closed borders and airlines very easily and they had a much smaller issue than the UK.

Border closing and a significant shutdown are key aspects to NZ's approach and reasons for their success. How much the UK could have done the same I am not sure.

Britain’s open borders make it a global outlier in coronavirus fight
UK is not testing or quarantining travellers from overseas even as other world powers impose strict controls

Maybe Boris was weary of being called a racist as Trump was when he restricted air travel from China?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Researchers at Los Alamos, Sheffield and Duke report identification of a more contagious strain (D614G) of SARS-CoV-2 across Europe and the US East coast that modifies the spike protein. "We see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominant pandemic form", wrote the lead author.

Spike mutation pipeline reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2
DOI: 10.1101/2020.04.29.069054
Slightly overly dramatic LA Times article:

Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus could be more contagious than original

A mutation in the novel coronavirus has led to a new strain viewed as more contagious than the virus that emerged from China, according to a new study.

www.latimes.com

Suggestive perhaps of an explanation for the earlier suspicions that many/most of us may have some level of resistance that have since been contradicted by the very high infection levels recorded in US prisons (80 per cent in one).

 

[two sheds]

And yet another reason letting the virus rip through the population to give herd immunity amounts to criminal negligence.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

An interesting Twitter discussion about the graphs

Those conclusions don't follow from the graphs, though. They've cherry-picked, essentially, countries that acted early and effectively before an explosion of infection. Italy, Spain, Belgium and France also imposed strict and long lockdowns, but too late. That's the real story there. And many of the countries in those graphs have now begun easing, or in the case of South Korea, were organised enough never to impose a lockdown.

Really, the story of those graphs is that if you act too late at the start, then you'll be fucked. They say next to nothing about when to ease lockdown.

 

[elbows]

Suggestive perhaps of an explanation for the earlier suspicions that many/most of us may have some level of resistance that have since been contradicted by the very high infection levels recorded in US prisons (80 per cent in one).

What earlier suspicions that many/most of us have some level of resistance?

 

[krtek a houby]

Britain’s open borders make it a global outlier in coronavirus fight
UK is not testing or quarantining travellers from overseas even as other world powers impose strict controls

Maybe Boris was weary of being called a racist as Trump was when he restricted air travel from China?

Both men have a long and well documented history of racism and stirring it up against "minorities".

And it's working for them. Trumps insistence on calling this the "Chinese" virus, is resulting in attacks on people of East Asian heritage in several countries, not just the US.

I doubt if Johnson gives a toss whether he's seen as a racist or not.

Expect more of this shit in the US as November approaches.

 

[weltweit]

Stopping flights would also have stopped infected British travelers bringing the virus to all kinds of new places, as seems to have been the case.

Yes, I agree, they should have stopped incoming flights early and urgently especially from hot spots!

 

[elbows]

Researchers at Los Alamos, Sheffield and Duke report identification of a more contagious strain (D614G) of SARS-CoV-2 across Europe and the US East coast that modifies the spike protein. "We see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominant pandemic form", wrote the lead author.

Spike mutation pipeline reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2
DOI: 10.1101/2020.04.29.069054
Slightly overly dramatic LA Times article:

Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus could be more contagious than original

A mutation in the novel coronavirus has led to a new strain viewed as more contagious than the virus that emerged from China, according to a new study.

www.latimes.com

BBC version of the story, which includes other studies:

Coronavirus mutations: Scientists puzzle over impact

A study has identified a mutation that its authors say could make the coronavirus more infectious.

www.bbc.co.uk

Another study from University College London (UCL) identified 198 recurring mutations to the virus.

One of its authors, Professor Francois Balloux, said: "Mutations in themselves are not a bad thing and there is nothing to suggest SARS-CoV-2 is mutating faster or slower than expected.

"So far, we cannot say whether SARS-CoV-2 is becoming more or less lethal and contagious."

I like this next quote because I do not like talk about 2 strains when the reality is more complicated, eg where the same mutations can appear in multiple different branches of the virus tree. I'd rather talk about the specific mutations than try to divide the whole picture up into 2 strains, one with the mutation in question and one without. But even trying to talk about it on this level I find myself quite out of my depth with this subject, I doubt I know all the relevant concepts or even the right terminology to use.

A study from the University of Glasgow, which also analysed mutations, said these changes did not amount to different strains of the virus. They concluded that only one type of the virus is currently circulating.

 

[wayward bob]

By the way there are some fun little videos about the Salisbury Common Cold Unit where some human coronaviruses were first discovered in the 1960's here (although these videos dont say anything about coronaviruses). People used to volunteer to go there for a nice holiday while having cold viruses (or a placebo) dripped into their nose!

we did this in cardiff the 90s was only a day iirc but it paid

 

[elbows]

I already posted this story in an oil thread, but there is a quote in it which somewhat reflects my thoughts on lockdown etc as that stuff continues to sink into my brain, so I will post it here too.

Climate change and coronavirus: Five charts about the biggest carbon crash

How the global pandemic is limiting carbon emissions and what this will mean for climate change.

www.bbc.co.uk

According to Prof Gail Whiteman from Lancaster University, UK, it was almost impossible to believe that governments around the world, when faced with a health emergency, would put humanity ahead of the economy. But they did.

"We can recover from an existential, complex threat and emerge much stronger and more resilient," she says.

"Which strengthens the idea that we can do things differently on climate, that we can tackle this one.

"I think it gives us huge energy."

 

[two sheds]

Only it seems very likely to go back to business as usual once the initial rush of infections are done - tory government with huge majority isn't likely to cede ground to anyone outside their own bubble.

 

[elbows]

Suggestive perhaps of an explanation for the earlier suspicions that many/most of us may have some level of resistance that have since been contradicted by the very high infection levels recorded in US prisons (80 per cent in one).

I will ask again, what earlier suspicions that many/most of us have some level of resistance?

You know I am very interested in asymptomatic cases, levels of population infection, assumptions about how many people would get it if the pandemic was left unmitigated, and even the idea of some kind of ceiling that we dont understand.

But none of that translates in my mind to the idea that many/most of us have some level of resistance. But it depends what resistance means. So I'm asking again, what are you on about?