Corona Virus, general conversation

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have developed an antibody test for the coronavirus and shared the directions
online for how to make it so labs around the globe can duplicate it, according to a report.

While testing for COVID-19 has been ramping up in the US, attention also has been focused on finding a way to detect virus-fighting antibodies
from the blood of survivors.

Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Mount Sinai school in Manhattan, told Science Magazine that labs could easily scale the test to “screen a few thousand people a day” for antibodies.

Though the study has been posted on the preprint server medRxiv, it’s too early to use with patients because it has not been published yet in a peer-reviewed journal, according to Live Science

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said state health officials were testing the process of taking plasma from someone who has been infected, processing it and injecting the antibodies into a sick person to stimulate their immune system.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the trial, which will begin this week on a “compassionate care basis,” the governor has said.

Regular tests being used to diagnose infections look for COVID-19’s genes in samples taken from people’s noses and throats, which indicate that a person is actively infected, according to Live Science.
 
Grant Cunningham is a pistolsmith (some consider him the finest Colt Python smith still practicing) and firearms trainer. A small excerpt from his latest blog:

Vacation Retreat?

The concept of the second home as a bugout retreat has been very popular in recent years. The idea is to buy a vacation home and visit it frequently. This allows for maintenance and rotation of the survival supplies kept there, but it also supposedly gets the neighbors used to seeing you. This, the proponents believe, will make you “one of the locals”, and in difficult times ensures that they’ll accept you as one of their own.

Being a rural dweller myself, I’ve never believed that to be true — any more than I believe locals would welcome people camping in their forests and poaching their deer. As it happens, my skepticism has been validated by the current coronavirus panic.

Maybe It Isn’t Such A Good Idea

Reports are coming in from far away places like Scotland, and chatter from the coastal communities here in my own state of Oregon. People who own vacation homes have been encouraged (or, in some cases, ordered) to leave and go back where they came from.

The general feeling in these smaller municipalities is that rural areas — which are the most popular for retreat homes — have very few resources to take care of affected locals, let alone the tourists and vacation home owners who visit for a few weeks out of the year.

When something bad happens, they want those scarce resources to be spent on the people who live there and make the community what it is.

When there isn’t enough to go around, rationing will happen, and people tend to want to see rations go to their friends and neighbors first.

Despite the predictions of retreat protagonists, the full-time residents of these areas most definitely do not consider part-time residents to be “their own kind”. In fact, the part-timers appear to be about as welcome as carpetbaggers in the postbellum South.

I am going through this right now in the Outer Banks of N.C.
we’ve had a house here for about 12 years now and typically come down in the spring to get the house ready for the rental season. We had made plans to come down here two months ago.
Last week the Dare County Control Group ( the group responsible for managing disaster responses like hurricanes) gave the order to restrict visitors from coming to the Island. There are only 3 access points so it’s relatively easy to do.

We came up to the checkpoint last Friday about 4pm. I presented my paperwork showing that I was a non resident property owner and was waved through.

At 10 PM that night the order was given to restrict access to only full time residents. Dare County has yet to have any cases of Covid-19 and the people down here are terrified of it coming here... Now keep in mind that residents are free to leave, go to Raleigh or Norfolk to do their shopping or whatever and return...which makes zero sense.

We stopped in the small grocery store here a few days ago to get some milk and the cashiers were almost hostile towards us. My wife was shocked...but this is the mentality of a small community sometimes.

on the other hand the beach was deserted (which is common for this time of the year anyways...)
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People who intentionally spread the coronavirus could be charged under federal terrorism laws, according to a report on Wednesday that cited a
top Justice Department official.

“Because Coronavirus appears to meet the statutory definition of a ‘biological agent’ … such acts potentially could implicate the Nation’s
terrorism-related statutes,” Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen wrote in a memo, reported on by Politico

“Threats or attempts to use COVID-19 as a weapon against Americans will not be tolerated.”

In the note sent to top officials in the Justice Department, law enforcement agency heads and US attorneys, Rosen warned that prosecutors and investigators could see cases of “purposeful exposure and infection of others with COVID-19.”

He did not elaborate on whether any threats have been reported.

The agency has also created a task force to look into hoarding and price gouging of supplies needed in the fight against the outbreak, as part of a
multi-pronged approach to coronavirus by the DOJ.

At the White House coronavirus briefing Monday, Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department would go after people hoarding supplies
considered crucial, as designated by the Department of Health and Human Services.
 
This appears to contradict the info I posted in #198.

The coronavirus isn’t mutating very quickly as it spreads — which means a vaccine could potentially provide years of protection, according to a
report.

Peter Thielen, a molecular biologist with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told the Washington Post that the strains currently in US only have seen around four to 10 genetic variations since the outbreak in Wuhan, China,

“That’s a relatively small number of mutations for having passed through a large number of people,” Thielen said. “At this point the mutation
rate of the virus would suggest that the vaccine developed for SARS-CoV-2 would be a single vaccine, rather than a new vaccine every year like the flu vaccine.”

Stanley Perlman, a virologist at the University of Iowa, agreed that the virus appears to be fairly stable compared to other illnesses.

“The virus has not mutated to any significant extent,” Perlman told the newspaper.

But other experts said that that only time will tell whether the virus will require a one-time shot for protection, which is the case with the measles.

“Just one ‘pretty bad’ strain for everybody so far. If it’s still around in a year, by that point we might have some diversity,” Benjamin Neuman,
a virologist with Texas A&M University at Texarkana, told the Washington Post.

The coronavirus had infected more than 436,000 people across the world as of Wednesday, causing around 20,000 deaths, according to the latest
figures from the John Hopkins University.
 
I am going through this right now in the Outer Banks of N.C.

We're seeing something similar in upstate NY. County governments are telling NYC residents not to come up - that there are not enough test kits and hospital beds to care for the locals. One county executive has asked all the airbnb people in his county to pull their ads down for the time being.
 
One county executive has asked all the airbnb people in his county to pull their ads down for the time being.

It's pretty sad that even needs to be discussed. Because people can't just follow simple instructions and stay home.

How damn selfish is it to be trying to travel and book air BnB's during these times like nothing is going on? The all about ME culture really needs to change.

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The Atlantic has just published an article on the situation in Britain which also applies to us. Namely, the fragility of the just-in-time supply chain and the problem of being TOO efficient.

As pictures of empty shelves dominated our social-media feeds here in Britain, armchair critics denounced their fellow citizens as selfish and
greedy. Stop hoarding! End the panic-buying!


Hang on, though. Were hordes of selfish Britons really squirreling away 90 tins of tuna each? As the fog of panic dissipates, the answer is clear: No. Instead, the data show that small changes in the habits of a minority of shoppers prompted lurid headlines about empty shelves—which then made others, quite rationally, change their behavior. That HAS led to short-term supply issues. (Neither of the two stores closest to me in south London has any eggs in stock, for example.)

Any student of economics will tell you that modern supply chains rely on just-in-time ordering. In the case of British supermarkets, production
schedules are tailored precisely to demand, so that unused stock does not sit in warehouses or go to waste. In the current crisis, the country has not run out of essential goods such as toilet paper; the difficulty is getting them onto the shelves quickly enough.


Urban couples and families, unlike their parents and grandparents, have their own version of just-in-time supply chains. They pick up milk on their way home from work. They buy six eggs from a local store, rather than driving to an out-of-town supermarket to load their larder for the week. That approach makes sense: British new-build houses have been getting smaller for decades, so some families simply do not have the space for a full-size freezer. Fewer of us drive now than did in previous decades, and keeping a car in a city can be expensive, particularly when it’s rarely needed. Young Britons also eat out more regularly than previous generations, so like supermarkets themselves, they don’t want to hold on to produce they might never use.

Under normal circumstances, this just-in-time system is convenient. Yet it is also, as we have discovered in the past fortnight, fragile.

This month, the government advised those with coronavirus symptoms to spend seven days at home “self-isolating.” Like many others, I read this advice, looked in my fridge, and thought, YIKES! My subsequent trip to the supermarket wasn’t evidence of hoarding; it was proof that I had been
running an overly efficient supply chain into my own home. Changed circumstances meant I had to change my behavior.


Unfortunately for us all, so did many others. “Temporary shortages are being caused by people adding just a few extra items and shopping more
often,” said Fraser McKevitt the head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar, which monitors consumer spending. The company’s study of 100,000 British shoppers found that only 6 percent of those buying liquid soap, and only 3 percent of those buying pasta, “have taken home extraordinary quantities.”


Yet that relatively small, unexpected surge in demand was enough to generate social-media snapshots of bare shelves at inner-city supermarkets. When amplified by the traditional media, those frightening pictures convinced more of us that there was a problem with food supply.

And, like in a bank run, perception quickly became reality. Big queues started to form. Online slots for supermarket deliveries filled up. The situation spiraled.

What happened at supermarkets is worth dwelling on, because it reveals a problem with one of the modern world’s most hallowed concepts:
efficiency. As businesses and governments chase ever-tighter margins—ever-greater efficiency—they have created systems that are finely tuned, but also delicate. Many of us are individually guilty of indulging this tendency, encouraged by the trendsetters of Silicon Valley. “The tech sector’s overarching philosophy remains bent towards treating the human brain and body like a machine that can be tweaked and perfected until it is running at peak efficiency,” the journalist Lux Alptraum wrote for Quartz in 2017.


This is, however, a fundamentally inhuman philosophy. People aren’t machines. We are inherently inefficient, with our elderly parents and sick children, our mental-health problems, our chronic diseases, and our need to sleep and eat. And, as the past few months have demonstrated,
our susceptibility to novel viruses.


We have been trained to see efficiency as a desirable goal. We often don’t see, or don’t acknowledge, the risk of catastrophic meltdown.

Think of efficiency as a high-performance engine. Under perfect conditions, it delivers maximum power and minimum waste. However, that very efficiency makes it less robust. Highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity.

That’s a problem because perfect conditions rarely exist for long in the real world, and “rare” events happen more often than you’d think.

(Climate change, for example, has turned “once in a century” challenges such as extreme heat waves and floods into more regular occurrences.)

The coronavirus crisis has also exposed how efficiency can be a false economy. Even before the pandemic, Britain’s National Health Service was
losing doctors at a worrying rate, to either the private sector, opportunities abroad, or simple exhaustion. Last year, the NHS’s understaffing problems were so acute that the service launched a recruitment campaign overseas. A recent study published in the British Medical Journal, found that a third of doctors surveyed had burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Emergency medicine and general practice—the local doctors who are typically a patient’s first point of contact, where each appointment is supposed to last less than 10 minutes—had the highest rates.


On the surface, a health service working at close to maximum capacity looks efficient. But it’s not if it is driving doctors out of the profession. Every lost doctor is a waste of years of training and (in Britain, where medical school is subsidized by the state) taxpayer investment—and creates more work for those who remain.

Heading into this past winter flu season, nearly all NHS beds were occupied. “If you think about things from a financial perspective, you can see why that looks like an efficient way to manage resources,” Dr. Julia Patterson of Everydoctor, a membership organization for health-care staff, told me. But clinical guidelines state that average bed occupancy levels should remain below 85 percent for a reason. “We need capacity in the system to deal with annual changes in disease,” Patterson added. “Otherwise, it’s a false economy.

When surges occur in January, February, there simply isn’t enough capacity.” Government hospitals either have to purchase space from private ones, or transfer patients to other parts of the country, “and that’s not cheap.” And all this was the case even before the arrival of a pandemic.

Like the NHS shortfalls, other coronavirus challenges can be traced back to the “austerity” agenda of the Conservative-led government elected in
2010. Its architect, the former chancellor George Osborne, believed that the public sector was bloated and inefficient. He regularly invoked
“efficiency savings” to make his numbers add up. His penultimate budget, in 2015, reported that the government had an “aspiration to find £10
billion in further efficiency savings by 2017–18.” (The E-word itself appears 18 times.)


In practice, though, fat was not the only thing cut from public spending. Local councils, which are responsible for trash collection, park maintenance, and an array of other issues, had their budgets reduced by 60 percent in the past decade. The money given to local business watchdogs has fallen by that much too. These services are now expected to monitor compliance with the government’s closure, announced this week, of nonessential shops, and ensure that scammers are not cashing in by selling fake face masks or preying on elderly people stuck in their homes. Police numbers were also reduced during the austerity era—a policy that the prime minister, Boris Johnson, pledged to reverse as part of his election campaign. The cuts that made the force more “efficient” now leave it ill-equipped to enforce Britain’s lockdown. Officer numbers are at their lowest since the early 1980s.

One more glaring example of the problem with efficiency is this: What should you do if you have coronavirus symptoms and live with an elderly
or vulnerable person? The NHS advice is straightforward: Stay two meters apart, try not to use shared spaces such as living rooms at the same time, and “do not share a bed, if possible.” This advice makes sense for Britain’s middle class, as does the injunction to exercise in the garden if possible. However, seven years ago the government decreed that no one living in public housing and claiming welfare benefits should have a spare bedroom. The penalty for doing so was to lose up to 25 percent of their housing benefit.


The so-called bedroom tax was needlessly punitive, given the size of the savings made

Some families protested that their area had no smaller properties into which they could move. Foster carers complained that their housing benefit was reduced in months when they had no children living with them, leading some to abandon the practice.

In December last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the British government, which had tried to penalize a domestic-violence
survivor for the panic room intended to shelter her and her 11-year-old son from her ex-partner.


All of these changes, carried out in the name of efficiency, have made our society more fragile: tired doctors, overstretched police officers, families forced to live in cramped homes. People living highly tuned lives have faced more disruption as the system overheats.

It is too early to say how many of the changes caused by pandemic lockdowns will last. But we already know that survivors of disasters, wars, and famines have a tendency to hoard food. Regaining confidence in a system once you’ve seen its essential fragility is difficult. So here is a post-coronavirus suggestion: We should make our peace with a little inefficiency in good times, because it makes the bad times easier to bear.
 
dunno about GB but stores here are back to normal. I went to wally world this morning (first time in 2 weeks) from 10-1030. normal crowd. shelves completely full. everything in stock. only thing missing was ramen noodles, which is fine by me. i got 1 carton of eggs, 1/2 gal milk, some ground beef and chicken, and a bunch of fruit.
 
State Department says 50K stranded Americans requesting help to return home

More than 50,000 Americans abroad are asking the U.S. to help bring them home, the State Department said Wednesday night.

The number marks a dramatic increase in U.S. citizens the government has reported as needing help leaving countries that have closed their borders to stop the spread of coronavirus. The State Department earlier said it was aware of 13,500 requesting assistance, and an official warned the latest number is also bound to fluctuate.

“Our posts around the world have received requests for assistance with getting back to the United States from over 50,000 U.S. citizens,” said Ian Brownlee, who serves as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs on COVID-19, at a briefing late on Wednesday.

"At the moment, we are keeping a running tally of the number of U.S. citizens we estimate will seek our help in returning to the United States. This number changes daily, hourly. At the moment, we’re tracking approximately 50,000 we think might seek to return to the United States," he added.

Brownlee is also the lead of the State Department’s repatriation task force, set up last week to coordinate efforts to assist Americans stuck in countries that have closed their borders.

Brownlee added the State Department is expecting to evacuate 9,000 people on 66 flights over the next nine days, with those numbers likely to increase.

The State Department has already managed to bring home more than 9,000 Americans from 28 countries since mid-January, including from China,
Guatemala, Haiti, Cabo Verde, Ghana and Ukraine, as well as the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was quarantined in Japan.

“These are truly extraordinary times,” Brownlee said, "The State Department is working tirelessly all around the globe to fulfill our oldest and most important mission: the safety and security of the American people.”

The State Department last week increased its travel warning to a Level 4, instructing all Americans abroad to return to the U.S. or prepare to shelter in place.

The State Department typically encourages Americans abroad to fly whatever commercial airlines are available, but the last-minute border
closures have required the government to step in and set up chartered flights to ferry Americans home.

Embassies abroad are learning about border closures in real time, Brownlee said, with often less than 48 hours notice for travelers to get on commercial flight options before airlines end service.

“We are not being told well in advance that this is coming. We really get the same notice that the public gets, 12 hours, 24, 36 hours, whatever it is in the case of a particular country,” he said.

In Peru, a logjam at the airport, miscommunication with the Peruvian government, and a shortage of airport workers has delayed up to 4,000
Americans from returning home quickly.

The U.S. has managed to evacuate 1,000 Americans from Peru and flights are ongoing, but the State Department says it is facing a “capacity issue.”

U.S.-chartered flights only have access to a small military airport adjacent to the shuttered international airport in the capital city of Lima.

More than 1,000 Americans are stranded in Cusco, a city in southeastern Peru, and hundreds more Americans are in smaller towns and cities facing
challenges to travel to the nearest airports because of police or military blockades.

The State Department recently dispatched to Peru a senior official in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs to coordinate the evacuations on the ground.

“So we’re doing what we can to help the Peruvians fill that sort of capacity gap,” Brownlee said, “and we hope — we hope — that this will keep things moving more fluidly in the future.”

The State Department says it is trying to prioritize for evacuation people with health risks, the elderly and children but anecdotal reports from Peru describe chaos with the assignment system.

At least two Americans say they received notifications to arrive to the airport for an evacuation fight after they had already returned to the U.S. and healthy travelers have posted on Twitter that they are getting flights before the most vulnerable.

Brownlee said that policy is to prioritize the most vulnerable but that they also are trying to get people on planes who are already present at
airports.

“Our policy is to prioritize the more vulnerable populations. Part of it comes down to who is available at the airport at the time the manifest is being built up,” he said.

In addition to the large number of Americans stranded in Peru, Brownlee said they are tracking between 5,000 to 7,000 U.S. citizens in Ecuador
requiring assistance and are working on a mix of commercial options and government charters to help evacuations.

There are also several thousand Americans in Honduras but Brownlee said the local government was helping to keep commercial flights running for
tourists to return home.

“We’re committed to bring home as many Americans as we possibly can,” he said.
 
https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/What-we-still-don-t-know-about-this-15160234.php

Vexing questions about COVID-19 scientists still can't answer

While scientists and physicians are learning more about the novel coronavirus every day, there is still much that we don’t know about the pandemic.

We compiled several of the murkier questions about the disease with the intention of updating them when more data become available.

Can you get COVID-19 twice or are you immune for life after recovering?
"We really don't know." There have been few, unsubstantiated accounts of individuals in Japan and China testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 after fully recovering from COVID-19, but the science is still uncertain.

“There is some anecdotal evidence of reinfections, but we really don’t know,” Ira Longini at the University of Florida told New Scientist.

It may be that the tests those patients were given were faulty. However, if people do not develop immunity, then we all could be reinfected until an effective vaccine becomes available.


How long can you be infected yet show no symptoms? And if you are asymptomatic, how long are you contagious?
Unknown. One analysis of the Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak showed that nearly a third of the 104 infected passengers remained asymptomatic even after an average of 10 days of observation at the Self-Defense Forces Central Hospital in Japan.

If you are asymptomatic, then you are contagious for a period of time, but how long is not known. The kind of testing to screen for asymptomatic infections is not yet available, according to the Guardian.

What percentage of carriers are asymptomatic?
Unknown. The data aren't clear, but a study in Iceland found that 50 percent were asymptomatic.


If you have a mild infection, you can test positive by throat swabs for days and even weeks after being ill. When is it safe to be around others?
Unclear. But one study that has not been peer-reviewed suggests that those who were only mildly sick can’t infect others by about 10 days after first getting symptoms, according to the medical journal Stat.

Is there any way to know whether someone has had COVID-19 in the past?
Not yet. However, antibody tests to check for a prior infection are reportedly under development.

Can the new coronavirus linger in the air for hours?
Plausible, but likely very rare: Coronaviruses are generally thought to be spread from person to person through respiratory droplets, according to the CDC. However, a recent National Institutes of Health study found that under lab conditions, SARS CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — can exist in an aerosolized form. (The pathogen becomes suspended in a gas.) Under such limited conditions, it can survive airborne for up to three hours in still air.

But so far, there’s no evidence that aerosolized SARS CoV-2 is a main form of transmission of the virus in the real world, according to Stat.

Can chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine really help treat coronavirus patients?
To be determined. President Donald Trump called the drugs potential “gamechangers” during a press conference last week, causing some individuals – and even countries — to stockpile them. One man in Arizona was so swayed by the endorsement that he took a non-pharmaceutical version intended for use in home aquariums and died.

A small study in China found that patients who got hydroxychloroquine, a medicine for malaria, didn’t fight off the new coronavirus more often than those who did not get the medicine, according to Bloomberg News.

“The president was talking about hope,” Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said with his usual diplomacy. But some scientists lashed out at Trump’s support for the drugs, calling it irresponsible in the absence of robust, large-scale testing.

The Mayo Clinic published a paper Wednesday warning that “off label” re-purposing of drugs such as hydroxychloroquine could lead to “drug-induced sudden cardiac death,” according to the Guardian.

The hoarding of the drug has led to a shortage impacting patients who need the drug to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

When the novel coronavirus curve finally turns down and quarantines, lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders are lifted, will undetected asymptomatic patients create fresh transmission routes?
Possibly. Reuters reported that some experts warn this could happen, but it’s far from clear. Widespread testing to screen asymptomatic carriers could mitigate this danger.
 
Odd.. several outlets reporting the good news about how slow it mutates..

https://www.google.com/search?sourc...0....1..gws-wiz.......0i131j0j0i3.RbeC5LPCF9I
This appears to contradict the info I posted in #198.

There are different types of mutations. The kind that happen generationally as it copies itself, and the kind that happen when an "anomaly" occurs and things go crazy.

Think of it this way. When virion particles burst out of an ACE2 cell that a coronavirus co-opted as a factory for itself, they come out with RNA sequences they co-opted from that cell. Now floating around in blood or next to other cells, it invades those cells. Each time it infects a new cell with a newly generated copy of the virion, it changes ever so slightly. Photocopies of photocopies of photocopies about 15 generations is never good. Who remembers ditto machines? Over time the master sheet gets worn down and runs out of the carbon that was imprinted on it from the beginning making each successive sheet weaker and weaker until no copying occurs. When its weak, nature has a way of "interpreting" what should be there, this is also when mutations can occur.

However, the biggest changes happen between different kinds of animals like from a Bat => Pangolin => Human.

Bat's for example have very similar coronaviruses to what humans have in the common cold, except where it counts, viral attachment proteins. They're exceptionally dissimilar to what we have in our lungs. Pangolins probably are a different story since it was able to jump from bats to Pangolins. In this case, this is a huge mutation that changes the nature of the virus and by definition, is now a zoonotic transmissible virus. From here combined with the Pangolin, this coronavirus now has what it needs to infect humans.

There are questions on how long it will take for it to get worse, or how long will it take to get less worse. Viruses are governed by the same laws of nature that all living beings abide by, to replicate and to stay alive.

Nature might dictate that to prevent itself from irradication it should become less virulent and cause far milder symptoms. At the counter point, nature might change its mind.
 
People who intentionally spread the coronavirus could be charged under federal terrorism laws, according to a report on Wednesday that cited a top Justice Department official.

There's actually a homeland memo mentioning white supremecists running around licking doorknobs and elevator buttons. so yeah, that's probably what this is from.
 
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