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Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

straitstimes.com

51–60 of 316 posts

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#51
post #47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's the expert, and I'm not. But I can do math. Influenza this year in the US: 19M infected and 10K fatalities. If you posit 1% mortality rate for coronavirus like he argues, that's 20 times more deadly. And it's twice that in China, it's unclear if that's a statistical anomaly or a structural feature of some difference in how things are tested/reported in China. So I'm not going to just shrug and say it's no big de…

You can only do the math right if you get counter and denominator right. The number of unreported cases is probably very high. I found this in the article posted above: ”So the 20,000 cases in China is probably only the severe cases; the folks that actually went to the hospital and got tested. The Chinese healthcare system is very overwhelmed with all the tests going through. So my thinking is this is actually not as…

I'm using his mortality rate of 1%. That's 20x the mortality rate of influenza in the US. If it's 2% like the media reports then it's 40x. It doesn't really matter to me, either way is too deadly for my liking.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#52

Honestly if there is truth to this article it is reassuring. I've been scouring the darker corners of the internet obsessively for every seemingly reputable bit of data under the assumption that virtually anything official out of China could not be trusted. This doctor is working on the absolute worst of cases and even they, it seems, have a high overall probability of survival. Also good to see some figures on the p…

Isn’t Caixin Global a Chinese news source, almost certainly filtered? Do you have a reason to believe them more than the dark corners?

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that, it was interesting and quite anti-panic.

Now it seems healthcare workers are readily getting infected. "A study has found that 40 health-care workers were infected with the novel coronavirus by patients at a single Wuhan hospital in January, underscoring the risks to those at the frontlines of the growing epidemic." https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/coronavirus-chin...

yeah, in the early days, before mid of January, health care workers did not know what it was so a significant number got infected. And in the early days the local hospitals were overwhelmed with patients and the supplies were running short, some got infected. Now there are a lot of medical staff coming from other regions, and staff is pretty well protected. Hopefully we do not hear anymore medical staff infected.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#54
> That was why ICU medical staff were almost all sickened.

This is a brilliant strategy for spreading the virus to any patients who might've come in with regular cold or flu and hadn't been infected with coronavirus yet.

This is like a commercial for why we need to build medical telepresence robots.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#55
post #30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a something like 20% hospitalisation rate. That seems kind of scary compared to the flu which is "you have a sniffle, get over it."

"the flu", i.e. influenza, is definitely not "you have a sniffle, get over it" more like feeling like you've been hit by a truck for 2 weeks while you shiver in bed with a fever, coughing your lungs out, unable to function

And you may not 'feel better again' for a month, or two, or more.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#56
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want detailed virological and epidemiological research and discussion, please see: http://virological.org/ There are other virology / epidemiology forums which may be of use, but I don't have these links at-hand. For instance, the following link is a highly descriptive, accessible analysis of nCoV-2019: http://virological.org/t/analysis-of-wuhan-coronavirus-deja-... OPs article does have merit, as far as givin…

Ok and what does this mean? “ nCoV2019 has a furin-sensitive motif at the traditional S1/S2 border fo the spike protein, i.e. RRAR, that was lacking in SARS (which depends on cathepsin cleavage a few amino acids downstream). nCoV2019 lacks the secondary minimal furin cleavage site, i.e. RNTR, that is found in SARS. Therefore, the endoproteolytic cleavage pattern is expected to be different between nCoV2019 and SARS.…

Furin --> A protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furin

Spike protein --> the proteins on the surface of a virus used to attach onto or enter a host cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peplomer

RRAR --> This is a group of amino acids: Arginine Arginine Alanine Arginine. Here is the list of abbreviations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Class/MLACourse/Modules/MolBioR...

For a discussion of cleavage --> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/endoproteolytic

For a discussion of it relevant to another virus --> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC103966/

Mucin --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucin

O-Glycosylation --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-linked_glycosylation

So this is a discussion of the differences in how these viruses uses their respective spike proteins to trigger endoproteolytic cleavage in the host cell. Specifically, what the impact of different positionings of their amino acids is.

For example, the idea "Furin-sensitive motif" means that there is a section of the spike protein which contains the amino acids described (RRAR), which is sensitive to the protein Furin in host cells.

See here as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6756975_Proteolysis...

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#57
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been telling everyone to relax, these mass media panics about some virus happen every few years like clockwork. We are primed as a society to fear China right now so a panic like this is right on schedule.

Do you think it is a mass media panic within China? Because if you look at what is going on, it doesn’t look like the response to a yearly flu. It looks like a gravely serious event.

The big difference between this and flu is that there is no effective drug and vaccine. Some people react mildly to the virus, some people's immune system seems to compromised by the virus quickly. It also seems to have long incubation periods and high infection rate. In a city as dense as China, it would spread quick from person to person. So the only effective way to reduce infection is to quarantine people. Not allow them to gather around. Flu is actually affects a lot of people too. It just not a "massive event" because we dont try to contain it. It would take a similar measure to try to contain flu if there is no flu vaccine

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#59
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yes, that's why capitalists drive on private roads only, and go to private courts when they get in trouble with private police forces. They also honk to honor their private armies and thank them for their service. The private fire service is of course a pillar of most capitalist communities as well.

...And we're writing about this on an internet that was developed by privately funded defense researchers and private universities. You can use this internet to get driving directions via privately funded geolocation satellites.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#60

Did you see Eric Raymond having a completely normal one about novel Coronavirus? http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8587

An excellent example of how expertise and reasoning ability in one domain does not necessarily transfer to another.

That humility is hard for engineers is something I try to remind myself daily.

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