New Coronavirus - COVID-19

[JSH]

There is a half-way decent chance my wife and I have had it. We spent the last two weeks of 2019 in Vietnam. The first day in Hanoi we were seated the row in front of a Chinese family that looked really sick and spent hours of the bus ride coughing on us (feel the spray on the back of your neck coughing). My wife got sick 3 days later with the worse flu she has every had. That turned into pneumonia that knocked her out of commission for the first 2 weeks of 2020. It then took until mid February to get back to almost normal.

She went to the doctor 4 times in January but they didn't do any tests to determine the virus. Just some x-rays and a CT scan to watch the pneumonia

This is for an athletic woman in her 40's that commutes by bicycle every day and runs a 3-4 times per week. She does have asthma - AKA an underlying condition.

I felt mildly bad for about 3 days.

We stopped in Tokyo and San Francisco on the way back before returning home to the Portland Metro.

[freebeard]

I had a bad experience in Vietnam but I survived it as well.

I described my episode in Permalink #5. My concern at this point is the theorizing that it is a bacteria, not a virus. Examples of reinfection are unlikely if it is a virus. They don't work that way; or rather, if they did vaccines wouldn't work.

[wild speculation]I've heard it said that Covid-19 and the 1918 Spanish Flu might be variants of tuberculosis.[/wild speculation]

[redpoint5]

What are the odds we'll need a whole 'nother vaccine that everyone has to take, like polio?

[JSH]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

What are the odds we'll need a whole 'nother vaccine that everyone has to take, like polio?

Very low. A much more likely scenario is the H1N1 model where a vaccine is developed but only given to high risk people. The pneumonia vaccine is similar.

[redpoint5]

Just a thought I had, but it amazes me that we're still reliant on nature to build vaccines, and even to engineer genes. We understand a great deal about the processes, but can't accomplish the actual building of the vaccines through our own mechanical/chemical processes. If we could, producing vaccines for everything would be extremely cheap, and I'd see no reason why we couldn't be vaccinated against a much larger number of viruses. I wonder if there's some limit of immunization variety where the body is less effective at building immunity to new stuff?

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

What are the odds we'll need a whole 'nother vaccine that everyone has to take, like polio?

We don't know yet, if it is even possible to have a vaccine for COVID-19.

There are apparently 2 strains of the virus:

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scient...ry?id=69391954

WHO report PDF:

https://www.who.int/docs/default-sou...nal-report.pdf

Combine this with a fairly high rate of reoccurance (about 14%?), and this may well become endemic.

[Xist]

Romney wasn't welcome at the CPAC conference, where someone was kind enough to bring Covid.

One friend on Facebook complained about a politician politicizing the virus. I do not know what criteria they use for that claim, but if one side is guilty of it, both are.

She said to just wash your hands and avoid people with the symptoms. I do not know how easily they can spread the virus before they show symptoms, but I am naturally going to take precautions around people showing symptoms.

I am worried about the contagious ones that are not showing symptoms yet.

Other friends are joking about this, saying that this is the perfect time to go to Disneyland.

Lock yourself in a tin can for hours with travelers from all over.
Spend long days in one of the world's most popular tourist attractions, particularly with wealthy Asians.
Come back and tell your friends that you had the time of your life.
Sneeze on everyone.

What could possibly go wrong?!

In unrelated news, my supervisor had me install Grammarly because I had some typos, although I believe that I have better grammar than my supervisor. It doesn't catch some that I find while proofreading, but it flags many things that are perfectly fine.

Apparently the creators are at war with the Oxford Comma. It seems like most sources say the Oxford Comma is correct (possibly calling it something else), so why isn't there at least a checkbox for this?

Anyway, all of a sudden emojos have appeared while I was writing. I thought that I had the option of harassing my readers with pictographs, but it turns out that there is a new feature (that they did not ask if I wanted) that checks the tone of what you are writing.

The problem is that I wrote the following and it still showed a hugging emojo:

Die in a fire you freaking idiot!
I hate you your mother should have smothered you with a pillow!

For the record, I was testing Grammarly, and if anything, talking to it.

You guys are okay.

On a good day.

[oil pan 4]

No vaccine was made for SARS and it's a Corona virus.
But this Corona virus is making good copies of it's self.

[freebeard]

The current threat is accelerating the rate of medical science:

Scientists figure out how new coronavirus breaks into human cells

Scientists have revealed the first picture of how the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 binds with human respiratory cells in order to hijack them to produce more viruses.
Researchers led by Qiang Zhou, a research fellow at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China, have revealed how the new virus attaches to a receptor on respiratory cells called angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, or ACE2.
"They have pictures all the way down at the level of the atoms that interact at the binding interface," Thomas Gallagher, a virologist at Loyola University Chicago who was not involved in the new research but studies coronavirus structure, told Live Science. That level of information is unusual at this stage of a new virus outbreak, he said.

[redpoint5]

First thing I'd do if studying a new virus is take a look. How long does it normally take to schedule some time on a scanning tunneling electron microscope? Maybe it isn't that easy?