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philip964 wrote: ↑Wed Feb 05, 2020 7:12 pm Man from Beaumont suspected of having Coronavirus.
No link, sorry just announced on TV.

Person from Wisconsin has it. Just came back from Beijing. Didn’t visit Wuhan. 12th case in US.

https://nypost.com/2020/02/05/wisconsin ... -us-to-12/

...great.

I can’t speak to the actual numbers of infected or killed, if this is true it would be a very bad sign.

These next few weeks will be quite telling about the direction this will go. Once a large enough population is infected in China I have to believe that there will be MANY more infected showing up outside China. The fact that there are still relatively cases outside of China gives me a bit of hope that the numbers of infected are not too high yet.

All it really takes is a nightmare scenario of a carrier who has no knowledge of their contagious nature, who is in a position that makes frequent contact with the public; like a ticket agent, bank teller or physician in a location outside of China and off it goes.

I do know a lot about single stranded RNA viruses and corona viruses, like SARS, use molecular machinery to proofread their RNA after replication to detect and delete errors. Fortunately this catches most mutations. Hopefully it is the case with this virus.

There are vaccines for other corona viruses, it will be months before one can be made ready though and that is even with skipping some testing steps.

Scary stuff.
Surfer

So let me preface that I am not an expert but I know a bit about viruses and communicable diseases (I hold degrees in biology and biochemistry).

Corona viruses are relatively common amongst humans. We have likely all been infected before as they account for about 1/3 of all “colds” in humans.

This “novel” or newish corona virus will join 5 other known commonly contracted human corona viruses. Of the five previously known; 3 cause minor cold symptoms and two (SARS and MERS) cause more severe upper respiratory complications, pneumonia is generally the worst result.

Corona viruses do not “like” heat nor humidity, these conditions rapidly deactivate them. Therefore these viruses are seasonal like the flu and largely go dormant in a population until favorable conditions are present.

A virus’s R0 quotient (reproduction factor) is used to describe how communicable it is. R0 figures suggest how many people, on average, and infected person will themselves infect. This virus is about 3.6 by recent estimates. MERS is around 4, seasonal flu is about 1.3 and measles is around 18. Our new virus is in a normal range for corona viruses. However, corona viruses are notorious for long incubation times when people seem fine but are still quite contagious; making this family of viruses difficult to contain.

This virus (2019 n-CoV) is still very “new” but all accounts point to its mortality rate of around 2%. This is difficult to ascertain at this stage; one has to remember that many people which contract it will never be counted as they are either asymptomatic, mildly affected or afraid to admit infection. Seasonal flu mortality is around 0.10%. Most corona viruses are seldom fatal however SARS is about 10% fatal and MERS kills almost 40% of those infected. So 2019 n-CoV is more severe than the flu but not astronomically so.

Thankfully, corona viruses do not mutate at an especially high rate.

I personally think we will have a couple of rough seasons with this but it will eventually “throttle down” and join the group of common seasonal ailments. I know that China is very good at controlling information when it impacts the state. I’m sure that in the near future there will be some VERY alarming figures coming out of China. This disease is not trivial and many people will become infected, like 100,000s or maybe into the millions. But, this virus is not the end of times pathogen that some are fearing.

Please feel free to fact check this info because I casually gathered it or recounted much of it from memory and as always...wash your hands and don’t touch your face!!!

Surfer