71–80 of 105 posts
Spain seems to be an exception to this theory.
Madrid has cold weather up until Tuesday - https://www.accuweather.com/en/es/madrid/308526/march-weathe... It’d be interesting to see if the warmer weather since Tuesday will reduce the number of new cases. If we assume a week between exposure to getting diagnosed, we would start seeing lowering rate of new infection starting from mid next week.
Maybe that's why Singapore hasn't been badly impacted?
Singapore is included in how they determined this result, therefore you shouldn't use this result to explain why singapore is doing better.
But not by enough. This epidemic has a growth rate (R) of at least 2. The article claims "One degree Celsius increase in temperature and one percent increase in relative humidity lower R by 0.0383 and 0.0224, respectively." The March to July difference for New York City is only 19C. San Francisco, 9C. For both cities, humidity is relatively uniform year round. Even assuming this result is meaningful, it still leaves…
> Here, we examine province-level variability of the basic reproductive numbers of COVID-19 across China and find that changes in weather alone (i.e., increase of temperature and humidity as spring and summer months arrive in the North Hemisphere) will not necessarily lead to declines in COVID-19 case counts without the implementation of extensive public health interventions.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyK9PSsnCI8
[2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022467v...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still no vaccine for SARS 18 years later, what makes you think we'll have a vaccine for this?
SARS hasn't been seen in 15 years. Exactly whom did you expect would spend the time and money to develop a vaccine for it?
Given how close SARS and SARS-CoV-2 is, maybe the SARS vaccine could be applied to the current case.
Sure, but what about when it gets cold again? It may come back even worse
By then, we should have enough testing kits, and authorities should be better prepared to handle it.
Testing kit shortages, lack of information, no vaccine, etc. are all a function of how little time we've had to respond. If we can buy 3 months, that's a lot of bonus time to prepare.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they didn't just study it. They engineered a variant of a SARS-like coronavirus specifically to be able to infect humans. The paper's abstract says they did this by "combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat."
Yes, that's how one studies these things. The models we have in simulation are far too crude, so scientists are forced to make the real versions. I have a friend who does this with tuberculosis to study how it develops resistance to drugs. Part of it was trying to enhance or block certain genetic pathways, and yes, sometimes it results in tuberculosis strains with much higher adaptivity than normal. This is how we le…
For what it's worth, one of the names on that paper is Shi Zhengli, one of the lab’s top researchers who is now defending the lab to the media:
[Shi Zhengli] said on her social media account that she “guaranteed with her own life” that the outbreak had nothing to do with the lab but was a “nemesis for the barbaric habits and lifestyle of some people – like eating wild game including bats.”
https://asiatimes.com/2020/02/coronavirus-lab-leakage-rumors...
EDIT:
As I noted in my other comment, these researchers didn't actually create a new coronavirus, but rather a much simpler and safer virus purpose-built to test some receptor-binding structures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure that the Olympics will be cancelled. It's unlikely that we'll have a vaccine before then and Covid19 is well beyond containment at this point.
Abe is dead set on hosting the Olympics one way or another, so he might try to reschedule it... to a time of year when R is higher. :(
But not by enough. This epidemic has a growth rate (R) of at least 2. The article claims "One degree Celsius increase in temperature and one percent increase in relative humidity lower R by 0.0383 and 0.0224, respectively." The March to July difference for New York City is only 19C. San Francisco, 9C. For both cities, humidity is relatively uniform year round. Even assuming this result is meaningful, it still leaves…
There is no way humidity is relatively uniform year round in NYC. It gets very humid during the summer and very dry during the winter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SARS hasn't been seen in 15 years. Exactly whom did you expect would spend the time and money to develop a vaccine for it?
Maybe we should develop responses to pathogens that have the ability to wipe humanity off the galaxy. Given how close SARS and SARS-CoV-2 is, maybe the SARS vaccine could be applied to the current case.