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[Coronavirus] Thread - SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19
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The national health minister has also stated cases have risen to more than 2700 and deaths to 80, with the virus showing an increased ability to spread despite containment efforts.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-spread-getting-stronger-as-number-of-deaths-rise-to-80-11918934
The claim was never that the virus was overwhelmingly infecting the elderly and immunocompromized. The claim was that the majority of deaths were among that group. Just like flu, its infectious to many people, but younger people or those in good health (espescially respiratory health) tend to have minor symptoms, if any.
But yeah, the fact that it infects everyone is not new. It's either disingenuous of the article to play it like this is a surprise, or maybe we were more tuned in to the facts than others?
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Stephen McDonell BBC News in his most recent article.
The number of infections is increasing, and, because of the way viruses work (more exposures mean more infections) that means the rate is increasing, but, remember there is also a 2-14 day incubation period and more and more people will come into hospitals with any symptoms at all at this point. There's not really any evidence that the virus is becoming more infectious, just, that its level of infectivity is (or was, remember the incubation period means that cases coming in now could likely have been infected back on the 19th) still ahead of the countermeasures being deployed.
Because people are less likely to go to the hospital if their symptoms aren't too severe, and younger people have stronger systems that would handle the disease better.
Except I'm not really sure that first part is true. The more severe and deadly cases were among the elderly with pre-existing conditions, but I don't recall reading that the infected cases were overall.
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This is going to hit the detention camps, and when it mixes with both strains of the flu running rampant there, it is going to be an epic shitstorm. We ought to behave like it's already here and running through the populace, but well, given this "administration", I fully expect them to just ignore it and try to pray it away, or to just ignore it, or to hold out until the drug companies find a new way to milk us all for the pill to solve it.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2020/01/26/coronavirus-whistleblower-nurse-says-china-has-90000-sick/amp/
I'm on mobile and have to take care of a few errands before I can watch the video. That's a pretty horrifying headline and introduction paragraph, I think I'm going to watch the video before I read all of the article. I don't really trust NY Post that implicitly.
Edit: I don't really trust random videos on YouTube either. Hmmm.
The containment efforts were closing the barn door after the horse was already raising hybrid foals with he neighbor's donkey. China's taken some harsh actions in Wuhan and at internal borders, but cases had already been reported in every part of China except Tibet and Taiwan, plus several other Asian countries and abroad, it was too late to contain it at the point of origin.
:-/
The New York Post is known for sensationalism. An unsourced video from a random person making unverified claims doesn't mean anything.
Not that everyone cooks properly and it only takes one fuck up to ruin things for everyone, I’m just curious.
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Doesn't matter how well-cooked something is if you slap it down on the same cutting board afterwards.
I don't know enough about Chinese culture to speculate on why city dwellers would eat bat when they probably don't have to, but whatever the reason it's probably not worth risking epidemics.
It's probably more the case that bushmeat like this IS illegal to sell in China, but, the government hasn't been enforcing the law. So, the stalls are even less clean than they would be because they are effectively operating in a grey market environment.
It's generally less uncooked food and more cross exposure from the live animals (as these are wet markets, where you're buying live animals rather than processed meat) or transferring blood borne diseases whilst preparing the meat (i.e you cut yourself).
My understanding is that it's more or less a lay term for harvesting atypical wild animals, normally ones not associated with food, and eating them. The equivalent in America would be folks who eat squirrel or opossum, I'd guess. It's a helpful term not for its specificity, because it really has none, but because these animals are typically totally unregulated by any sort of hunting management body and there's normally a good reason the animals aren't considered food animals. You often hear the term in association with threatened species, for example.
In the case of bats, their populations are often pretty fragile and can't sustain the weight of human consumption. They also just don't have much meat, are really important for the ecosystem, and are world-famous for brewing up horrible diseases.
My guess would be that fish are so many branches further evolutionarily from us that their infections don't transfer as easily.
I think the huge difference is the piscine/mammal divide. Maybe I'm missing stuff but most virii/bacteria don't really cross that line. Just too much difference between us and fish instead of something like pigs or bats. Normal body temps that the virus would thrive in for one.
Lots of different ways. Saltwater and freshwater meat can have some different hazards, but the ultimate difference is that basically everything we eat from the water is very very different from us, biologically speaking. Most things that can infect a fish and a human are actually parasites and the like, not bacteria/viruses, and such parasites can easily be dealt with during cooking or processing. Waterborne food animals also live in a completely different environment than bush meat, adding a further barrier to anything trying to jump species. Something adapted to cold salt water has a really really hard time surviving in the relatively hot, arid environments humans favor.
Bush meat, however, can carry, and be exposed to, a limitless number of exposure sources. While a bat itself may not be as nasty dirty as a sewer rat, it's still a high-temperature communal creature constantly exposed to a wide variety of contaminating sources. On top of that, there's no telling how that creature has been prepared or cleaned prior to reaching a market. And because bush meat is inherently not a domesticated food source, any immunities in the human population to potential pathogens are going to be entirely local; somebody in Nebraska is just not going to have an immunity that a small river village in China has where people have been eating bats for hundreds or thousands of years.
Just for ecological concerns alone, I'd personally want to see bushmeat get a global ban; wild populations are often poorly counted, and this whole thing where humanity eats species to extinction is pretty fucking old and it's time to stop it. When you add in that several of the major deadly diseases from the last century or so have come from wild sources and bushmeat, it doesn't paint a pretty picture for the practice either.
Unfortunately, it would also mean a lot of people probably starving for simple lack of meat. We do have a solution to that (there is actually enough meat to go around, just not enough to make piles of cash by giving it away to impoverished areas), but nobody is going to implement it. So we're stuck with this situation where people either keep getting sick from bushmeat or people starve to death.
Ugh, I was really hoping there wasn't some stupid superstition attached to this, I'm pretty tired of superstitious food nonsense fucking up the world for the rest of us.
There has been a decent amount of criticism of the term because it including basically any animal besides like insects that are hunted for food in tropical forests. I think the term itself was first used by Africans but the way it is used now definitely has kind of racist connotations. Wikipedia says ye wei is the Chinese term for that sort of thing.
I think the UN uses the term "wild meat."
The most obvious difference is that there are huge problems with the people hunting the animals not understanding the dangers of potential diseases and how to avoid them. In the US, a lot of wild animals that could be hunted for meat are often reservoirs for various diseases. Armadillos can have leprosy, for example. Bat-borne viruses are pretty common and have a wikipedia page about them.
With the relatively few animals hunted for food in the US, a lot of care is taken to prevent them from being much of a health problem. Deer are fairly heavily managed and governments make sure to prevent tuberculosis and brucellosis from being a major problem in deer populations and information on how to avoid getting infected from handling the deer is probably at least slightly better disseminated than in a lot of less developed countries. Hunting animals for food is rare enough and usually expensive enough in the modern US that the people who do hunt for food are likely to be better informed on how to more safely butcher meat and whatnot because they aren't doing it as just a way to get food (possibly with little way to get protein elsewhere if they are in rural parts of some countries) or to sell it as food to people who don't know.
Where you lose me is a blanket ban on “Bush meat” because I don’t know what that means, and frankly neither do the people proposing it.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10745-019-0061-z
https://www.wsj.com/articles/virus-sparks-soul-searching-over-chinas-wild-animal-trade-11580055290 I kind of assumed the wild meat trade in China is as poorly regulated as much as the rest of the Chinese economy.
The pictures allegedly of bat soup very much make it look like a stupid wealth thing.
Which is why I support regulation of those things. As I said.
You folks never cease to impress. And thank you. Proceed.
The market might not have been the source - the first cases were from earlier than has been reported and had no connection to the market.
Now, this isn't the same as "it might not have come from bush meat" because the virus has been positively ID'd as a previously known bat virus. Cases being identified before the assumed jump means it actually crossed species earlier and was spreading in humans longer. Which in turn means the containment system is even worse.
In this case, it's generally not the case when people talk about it in Africa. The threats the gorillas and chimps face is more local consumption.
One thing that doesn't seem to be happening yet is the virus spread from person to person outside of China. So far every case outside of China is someone who had been in China recently and probably picked it up there. So China quarantining cities might be overkill for a low-lethality disease like this, but it might end up being the thing that prevented the virus for becoming a true pandemic.
I mean, if this thing is on the 'high side' of reasonable risk and poses a real risk of killing say 1% of people exposed to it (by causing dangerous infections in 20% of people exposed to it who are over 60 and commensurate deaths, 5% of people 40-60 with a smaller fraction of deaths) then the quarantine (if succesful) stands to save like 10 million lives in China alone. Possibly a couple of 100 million worldwide Now, China probably loses 1-2 million a year to normal flu and seasonal respiratory illness, so that number has to be considered in context, but thats still an enormous number of potential deaths to be prevented.
In cases like this its not always the current disease they're really worried about.
The more people get infected the higher the chance this mutates into something worse.
Old guy sitting on the red table/throne with the giant blade is kind of badass. There's also two guys just standing by a table with a big stick and a sign on it, and I want to believe the sign says, "Come too close and we beat you with this stick."
The article that the first cases were at least days earlier than previously thought means that at least part of the explosion is identification catch up - cases in the early stage of an outbreak will have a period where they're identified much faster than they're actually occurring, because resolved or ongoing cases will be confirmed to be coronavirus, cases from early on or before the outbreak will be identified ex post facto (such as the cases identified going back to December 1), and a spike in admissions will identify cases who were initially just staying home but who have been scared into the ER now.
That kid holding the rifle was shocking at first, but I’m pretty sure that’s just a toy based on how small it is and China’s gun laws.
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