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New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#341
post #292
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Asia people eat a lot of really weird stuff for us Westerners. I live in Thailand with my Thai girlfriend. I don't understand why my girlfriend likes to eat various kinds of insects and larva and why people in my village like to eat a pigs' brains. Yesterday my girlfriend showed me a YouTube movie of a Chinese girl eating a live octopus. I also know some people like to eat snakes around here. Different strokes for…

You live in a Thai village? How do the costs compare to living in a larger city?

Thai food and drinks like coffee can be a bit cheaper for sure. Most dishes can be bought on the local markets or in local "restaurants" for 40 Baht or so. Smaller coffeeshops also offer drinks for around 40 Baht. I believe in bigger cities prices might be 50% higher or so.

Clothes and such can be had very cheap as well (maybe 200 Baht for jeans), but no brands of course.

For reference: 1 USD is around 30 Baht right now.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#342
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it might have been first identified there because there was a lab equipped to isolate it, but I don't really know. I mean, China has had a problem with things like fake eggs, so who knows? Its DNA seems to have been sequenced and made available online. If it's anything that has obviously been tampered with by a lab, I expect someone to point that out sooner or later. That said, I have no idea what sort of…

Fake eggs are known to cost more than real eggs. Much like fake meat today. Where do you get that information?

I saw it long ago so I'm not sure, but it was probably from this:

https://www.chinasmack.com/shanghainese-netizen-finds-fake-c...

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#343
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is taken care of by face marks and hand washing, because what would be happening is you touch your eyes. If you're using a face mask, you should be washing your hands anyway, because if you think it's working, the moment you touch it you've come in contact with virus.

how long can a virus live on a face mask?

For an enveloped virus like this? "Awhile". I'm sure there's estimates for SARS or Influenza somewhere that are probably pretty correct for this too.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#344

President Xi has warned that the virus is spreading. His intervention seems to be unprecedented. Is it worse than what it seems to be? They have quarantined whole cities and are building a hospital at war scale especially for this. Maybe the Chinese know something that the world doesn't know yet.

Anecdotal (not official) reports suggest as many as 100,000 infections in Wuhan area. There are claims the virus may be spread through eyes as well as inhalation. Additional unsubstantiated claims suggest low to no fever during incubation period, making detection difficult. The most sensationalist claim making the rounds is that a known Wuhan area PLA biolab may have failed to contain this pathogen. In the end none o…

Is it possible that Coronavirus will be economically beneficial if the primary terminal cases are within the elderly population? There would be a big reduction in pension and healthcare expenses if the elderly population (80+) was reduced by 20% worldwide, and a lot of resources (particularly housing) freed up for younger generations. This would entail a worldwide toll of 28million.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#345
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General consensus so far seems to be about twice as fatal as the annual flu. (Which says nothing about transmissibility rate / R0, which they are still figuring out.) Really rough numbers, annual flu is around 0.1% , while the spanish flu was more like 2.5% So, not a pandemic in terms of fatality. General sense so far seems to be it's more of a big deal than the (run-of-the-mill) flu, less of a big deal than SARS. (K…

Care to quote a source for "twice as fatal as the flu"? Everything indicates it's way worse. 6 of the first 41 identified patients have died. That's a mortality rate of 15%. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Caveat: 41 is a very small sample, and the first patients are likely to have been the most severe cases (pre-existing conditions, weak immune systems, etc). And when you take publicl…

Mortality rate is compared against recoveries, not confirmed cases. Your figure is wrong.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#346
post #341
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live in a Thai village? How do the costs compare to living in a larger city?

Thai food and drinks like coffee can be a bit cheaper for sure. Most dishes can be bought on the local markets or in local "restaurants" for 40 Baht or so. Smaller coffeeshops also offer drinks for around 40 Baht. I believe in bigger cities prices might be 50% higher or so. Clothes and such can be had very cheap as well (maybe 200 Baht for jeans), but no brands of course. For reference: 1 USD is around 30 Baht right…

Can confirm. Many dishes around Bangkok have been raised to around 50฿ now and I'd say your average 'indie' coffee shop with AC, wifi, and power outlets, drinks will be about 60-80฿.

Rent for a studio outside the city centers of Bangkok with AC and a hot shower (rare since locals don't like hot showers) is like 4000-8000฿ / mo.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#347
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In places like Singapore (Chinese dominant culture, but different government), wet markets exist, but they don't sell unregulated wild meat. I gather the one in Wuhan wasn't supposed to either, but either enforcement was lacking or they were paid to look the other way.

How much unregulated wild meat is there in the city-state of Singapore to begin with?

Close to none.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#348
post #146
post #21

From what I've read it came from bats. Most probably bats being eaten.[1] Bats have been the source of at least 4 pandemics. It's interesting to note that current coronavirus spreading in China and the SARS outbreak of 2003 have two things in common: Both are from the coronavirus family, and both were passed from animals to humans in a wet market.[2] I tried to put together a page for coronavirus in China here where…

It was reported in the BBC today that while SARS originated in bats, the vector for humans were a species of cats that got the disease from the bats. For coronavirus what we know so far is that it originated in a seafood market, but as to what species was eaten that is speculation at this point.

I've seen at least one report that says the first known patient (who is not necessarily the one who caught the disease from an animal) never visited the Wuhan market.

Despite all the media stating it as fact, it's not certain where it came from yet, just likely.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#349
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to quote a source for "twice as fatal as the flu"? Everything indicates it's way worse. 6 of the first 41 identified patients have died. That's a mortality rate of 15%. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Caveat: 41 is a very small sample, and the first patients are likely to have been the most severe cases (pre-existing conditions, weak immune systems, etc). And when you take publicl…

Because the 1441 confirmed cases are likely to be far lower than the number of people who actually have it. Carriers, latency, people recovering on their own. This ratio is the number that will get much more accurate over the next couple of weeks.

There are far more confirmed cases now, by the way. That number has almost doubled in the last two days.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#350

Can someone explain https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?RID=2PUA1EJK114&CMD... to me? This is a comparison between 'bat SARS-like coronavirus' and 'Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus'. Under Alignments, it looks like the envelope proteins are identical. Wouldn't that be unlikely for a natural mutation? Would this not lead credence to this being a leak from their BSL-4 lab about twenty miles away from the Wuhan…

Yes. There’s a biology from Harvard who has noticed this. I think people are catching on it’s from the lab. I’ve seen PhD level biologists on twitter making the same observations Here it is: Wuhan virus is essentially SARs http://virological.org/t/missed-orfs-in-ncov/345 "Anyone notice two ‘accessory’ ORFs not annotated in nCoV? Orf13 (aka 9b) (28284:28577) and Orf14 (28734:28955) . One is ~ 70% ID and other ~ 90% to…

>This was a lab break.

Or, the lab happened to be studying a similar virus that existed in local bats?

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