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Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

On the plus side, things are starting to plateau out in most areas, which means that it won't get any worse than this and should start getting better soon (re: in a couple of weeks when the current asymptomatic carriers run their course). Of course, 'better' does not mean 'over', chances are pretty good it'll be months before this is over- and some places that refuse to practice proper quarantine might remain restricted for years.

As doomsday scenarios go, this one's proven rather less disastrous than it could have been.

Now let's just hope they don't do what they did with the first SARS outbreak and stop funding vaccine research the second it goes dormant. I was amongst those quite vocal about needing to complete a SARS vaccine back then, everyone just said we were being reactionary.
 
TanaNari said:
On the plus side, things are starting to plateau out in most areas, which means that it won't get any worse than this and should start getting better soon (re: in a couple of weeks when the current asymptomatic carriers run their course). Of course, 'better' does not mean 'over', chances are pretty good it'll be months before this is over- and some places that refuse to practice proper quarantine might remain restricted for years.

As doomsday scenarios go, this one's proven rather less disastrous than it could have been.
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That's basically what I've been saying since the start. This was never going to be the end of the world, not when our great grandparents survived Spanish Flu despite it being ten times worse than COVID and not even being able to make proper vaccines for it since microscopes powerful enough to see viruses and DNA strands didn't exist yet back then.

If you guys have some time to spare I recommend Extra History's video series on the subject.

 
Not too worried about the end of the world here, just looking to make sure my father gets through this alright. He's in his 70s with lung issues and I'm not wanting to bury him just yet. I've managed thus far to keep the two of us pretty well isolated and it seems to be working.
 
Governor: we extended the lock down, blah blah blah, you can still go out to the public park with your families and go on the lake! Btw, you can't buy paint or non essential items to work on things around your house. Stay home, stay safe.

...I think she got her priorities a little shifted there.
 
TanaNari said:
On the plus side, things are starting to plateau out in most areas, which means that it won't get any worse than this and should start getting better soon (re: in a couple of weeks when the current asymptomatic carriers run their course).
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Umm... no.

Smuthunter said:
That's basically what I've been saying since the start. This was never going to be the end of the world, not when our great grandparents survived Spanish Flu despite it being ten times worse than COVID and not even being able to make proper vaccines for it since microscopes powerful enough to see viruses and DNA strands didn't exist yet back then.
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The Spanish Flu was not ten times worse than COVID, and the lack of microscopes able to see viruses had little to do with why we didn't have a vaccine for it. We also still don't have microscopes powerful enough to see DNA -- not that either COVID or influenza have any -- in any meaningful sense. Very specialized techniques are needed to get the images you have likely seen; that requires specialized techniques like electron cryotomography. The original work on its structure was done using X-ray crystallography, which really, really can't be described in the terms you used.

Meanwhile, the flu vaccine vastly predates that work, with the first flu vaccinations dating to the early 1930s, and the widespread use of the flu vaccine to the 1940s. The formulation we still use today was developed in the 1950s.

The discovery of the structure of DNA is usually dated to February 1953.

In other words, ah, no.

Meanwhile, we still don't have a COVID vaccine, and won't for at least a year or two, so that side of things is utterly irrelevant.
 
Smuthunter said:
An estimated twenty million people dead in India alone says otherwise.
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It's India. A country where some religions still practice cannibalism. Their hygiene practices are... well, they regularly get Typhoid outbreaks. Typhoid. It's just salmonella, it's not hard to prevent the spread of salmonella. Cook your food, wash your hands, don't stick your tongue in an infected person's butthole. That's about all you have to do to prevent typhoid.
 
TanaNari said:
It's India. A country where some religions still practice cannibalism. Their hygiene practices are... well, they regularly get Typhoid outbreaks. Typhoid. It's just salmonella, it's not hard to prevent the spread of salmonella. Cook your food, wash your hands, don't stick your tongue in an infected person's butthole. That's about all you have to do to prevent typhoid.
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And if I see similar numbers for this outbreak then I'll start to be concerned. What I'm not going to do is panic and start ranting on forums or social media about how terrible everything is, especially because so far everything has been going pretty great for me. I'll probably never get to just sit around and play video games for days at a time again before retirement, so I'm enjoying the heck out of this shutdown. You guys keep wringing your hands over it if you want but I'm not going to join in.
 
Smuthunter said:
Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. From a medical professional, not from some guy on the internet.
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You don't have to take my word for it. You just have to look at the infection graphs. Bing has a tracker that makes it easy. Here is Johns Hopkins's version, although I can't link directly to the page for India; just click on India in the country list and click "logarithmic"; you'll see the pattern soon enough.

Of course, those numbers are probably underestimates, given the fact that they only count confirmed cases and India has even more testing issues/gaps than we do here in the US.
 
Smuthunter said:
That's basically what I've been saying since the start. This was never going to be the end of the world, not when our great grandparents survived Spanish Flu despite it being ten times worse than COVID and not even being able to make proper vaccines for it since microscopes powerful enough to see viruses and DNA strands didn't exist yet back then.
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Smuthunter said:
An estimated twenty million people dead in India alone says otherwise.
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Please don't be one of those who looks at the absolute numbers to make comparisons. That won't tell you anything. Look at the mortality rates instead. The numbers typically thrown around for Spanish flu are somewhere in the range of 4-10% dead. I've seen official estimates for COVID-19 at around 3.5% and 6%, which are probably underestimates if we judge by how SARS estimates went. So really, Spanish flu and COVID-19 are in the same ballpark. Although what age groups are most affected is definitely a significant difference.
 
Rule 1. You should jsut not have said that kind of shit to start with, because that's frankly disgusting. No matter what, stop that shit of celebrating the misery of those you hate.
I actually like the death and violence and religous madness so nakedly gripping everyone in my shithole of a country called India. Looking at the heartbroken faces of families who've lost such bright children, babies, parents and friends is quite heartwarming for me.

Did you also know that the city of Indore here tried to stone and mob some doctors coming there to inspect soem supected carrier cases to death and the doctors only barely got out alive after running for their lives while heavily injured? It's on video.

I have much to say about the religious fanatics the country is plagued and I don't even know where to start about those trash bags. So i will keep my mouth shut about it.
 
Here is what I found in pics.
PRI_148862411.jpg

PRI_148862279.jpg
 
LordZeddthedrunk said:
So it looks like the virus has mutated into three strains
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TotalAbsolutism said:
Do these pictures have sources to back them up? Because, as we have learned from Train Dodger, it's very easy to just say things.
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At this point, with as much spread as it's had... there should be far more than three "strains" by now. Most viruses mutate at absurd rates, and differentiating strains is... I'd say 'more art than science', but the process doesn't even meet the standards of 'art'. More like a game of darts* after a couple bottles of the other corona.

That said, I *sincerely* doubt there's any validity to the 'three strains' listed here. To start with, it takes longer than this outbreak's been active to properly sequence viral DNA, let alone sequence enough samples from enough separate cases then put them into the shared databases and run full analysis of the mutations and only then can the experts make up some arbitrary criteria for when enough mutations have occurred to consider it a new strain.

And all of that is especially true of the Coronavirus family- RNA viruses mutate faster and are harder to sequence than DNA viruses, and Coronaviruses have one of the largest genetic strings of all retroviruses.

It also doesn't really matter... diversified Wuhan Flu strains doesn't create any more or less legitimate risk in humans. If anything, we'd be better off if there are more strains... it means one will eventually mutate to be nearly harmless, and we can intentionally infect everyone with that "benign" strain, should all other attempts at developing a vaccine fail (same way we used cowpox to fight smallpox). Because the same antibodies will work on all of them.

So, ultimately, this ranges from an irrelevant to positive event... assuming it's true at all...

*
Trying to determine where one 'strain' ends and another begins is tricky enough in higher sexual organisms like plants or animals- depending on how you ask the question, there's anything between One and Fifty races of humans on Earth (and we're an unusually inbred species to begin with)... and then there is the taxonomical nightmare which we have turned dogs into... I promise you, if we didn't know better, our scientists wouldn't consider pugs and great danes to be the same genus, let alone species.

And sexual organisms are the *easiest* groups to differentiate with, since we can use 'reproductive viability' as a criteria. Things get exponentially worse when we start discussing asexual species. Even higher order asexual species like certain plants.

Once we start discussing the highly mutative unicellular organisms like bacteria... it borders on impossible to differentiate strains, since the only scientific absolutes are current gene sequences. And while DNA is indisputable, our ability to understand what it means is exceedingly limited. Like hieroglyphics before the Rosetta Stone... the characters are clearly etched, but that don't mean we can read them.

And at least bacteria are alive by the standard definition. Viruses are in a class of their own where all lessons one might derive from (other) lifeforms break down into utter nonsense. As such, virus classifications are more guesswork than anything, and often less about their genes, and more about their behaviors (not that this works all that well, either) and strains are rarely useful for anything other than tracking vectors.
 
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alethiophile said:
this stuff.
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Yeah... that looks like a pretty typical viral mutation pattern. At least, for the fast ones like influenza and coronavirus. If it's not accurate, then the accurate one will still look an awful lot like it.

alethiophile said:
Not going to bother figuring out how well it fits with that A/B/C division.
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Nor should you. Any possible differentiation one could invent at our current technological level is arbitrary at best and misleading at worst. It's a useful tool for tracking the "ancestry" of vectors, and thus other at-risk locations, and that's all it can be trusted to do.
 
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