again
I didn’t do the math this time, I got it here:
But then I did the math on the CDC link provided above by Hokie and it came out to 0.09 percent using the high range for infections and the high range for deaths.
Nope, and the only reason I got it wrong before is I just forgot a couple of zeros.
Yeah sign me up for team no-freaking-way that the basic flu kills 7% of people. that’s one of the most unbelievable stats ever. FAKE NEWS!
Talked to a couple of people (former students of mine) from Wuhan who don’t have it. One joked that the boredom of staying home is more deadly than the virus.
Guess it’s two stories. Either you (or someone you know) has it and you’re pretty damn scared or you don’t and are bored waiting for the quarantine to end.
That 7% mortality article has been updated. The actual stat was 7% of US deaths the first two weeks of the year were due to the flu. Lol journalists.
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All right, according to that dope map linked above there have been 19 cases in Thailand and it’s killed five there? That sounds bad. One of the infected is a taxi driver? That…also sounds bad. I’m not seeing anything in the news about deaths in Thailand though, but I’m developing a NYT needle amount of trust in that map.
And there have been 4 cases in New South Whales and 2 deaths? It will be interesting to see what the mortality rate outside of China is.
edit: they removed the deaths from Thailand and NSW, now showing 19 infections and zero deaths in Thailand and 4 and zero in NSW. Good.
It’s probably like 7% of deaths the first two weeks of the year excluding heart issues, cancer, and gunplay.
If this twitter thread turns out true then things are about to get wild geopolitically.
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1223305946723704832
The figure caption says “SARS?”
Revisiting what we know.
- death rate still 2%
- definitely spreading by human to human contact
- no cases reported in many countries with significant Chinese community and travel
- fewer cases reported in countries with high Chinese contact but less developed medical systems than in countries with well developed medical systems (see Philippines vs Australia)
- cases still growing exponentially
The only conclusion I can draw is over the next month s or so, we will see the pandemic move from Wuhan to include major uncontrolled outbreaks in a number of poorer countries, and increasingly via those countries to the developed world.
Predicting that everyone gives up on contact tracing by April because it will be that widespread, and people will be focusing on general prevention and management.
The political response to this is gonna be wild.
And we are gonna lose another year of not doing anything about climate change.
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I think that the important parts for the purpose of both the study and twitter thread are the sites of difference. The authors appear to be claiming that where nCoV differs from SARS it bears uncanny resemblence to HIV. The implication being that somebody intentionally modified SARS through the insertion of “short segments of HIV proteins”.
From the as yet non peer reviewed study:
We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are present in all Wuhan 2019-nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose, we used the 2019-nCoV local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and considered hits with 100% sequence coverage. Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins. The amino acid positions of the inserts in 2019-nCoV and the corresponding residues in HIV-1 gp120 and HIV-1 Gag are shown in Table 1. The first 3 inserts (insert 1,2 and 3) aligned to short segments of amino acid residues in HIV-1 gp120. The insert 4 aligned to HIV-1 Gag. The insert 1 (6 amino acid residues) and insert 2 (6 amino acid residues) in the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV are 100% identical to the residues mapped to HIV-1 gp120. The insert 3 (12 amino acid residues) in 2019-nCoV maps to HIV-1 gp120 with gaps [see Table 1]. The insert 4 (8 amino acid residues) maps to HIV-1 Gag with gaps.
Direct link to paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf
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Preparing my tin foil hat, I have to point out that a local Wuhan television report from 2015 showed China’s most advanced virus research laboratory known as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.
And that laboratory is located next door to the wet market.
OK I made that up but maybe?
Does the HIV insertion mean that infected people may survive the SARS-like symptoms but be HIV+?
Maybe, maybe not. (NOT TO THE HIV QUESTION) Most (if not all) respiratory viruses seem to display pretty marked seasonality characteristics, and it’s possible that something as simple as an ambient increase in temperature may change the virus behavior. Sometimes this stuff just takes off like crazy, and disappears just as fast (and, AFAIK, with no one having a verifiable reason as to who it happens - SARS-CoV which would seem to be the most reasonable example of this sort of virus, blew up in Nov 2002 with a total (about) of 8100 cases with around 8% mortality - and by 2004 the virus vanished, with no (AFAIK) new cases since 2004.
Could things get a lot worse - sure. Could this burn out like 2004 - sure. Anyone saying otherwise is guessing - and it’s not educated guessing, either. I’m not signing up for a tour group to Wuhan any time soon, but it’s still anyone’s guess as to where this is all going.
MM MD
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I feel like this makes for awesome Twitter fodder but is unlikely to be true, just based on nothing but my gut and my experience living in the era of fake news.
However, even if it is true that the differences between SARS and nCoV are genetically identical to HIV, could that result from a human being infected with both SARS and HIV and somehow their genetic material combined in some way? I’m pretty dumb. Maybe @hobbes9324 knows?
Edit: lol what perfect timing
@MrWookie @beetlejuice could this be viral transduction from some slob with both HIV and a corona virus? Or is this a for real lab experiment gone wrong?
Or gone right in terms of its efficacy, wrong in terms of its release date.