[World Tribune] The Wuhan coronavirus has four more amino acids than other coronaviruses, making its transmission easier, according to a French research team which examined the gene sequence of COVID-19.
The research team’s findings have led some in the research community to speculate about whether it is "synthetic" and whether China’s scientists intended to develop a virus more difficult to contain than SARS.
Such alarming conjecture is impossible to test without original reports and data which China continues to withhold.
National Taiwan University (NTU) public health researcher Fang Chi-tai, who cited the research team’s findings, said that given China’s poor track record with lab safety management the virus is likely to have escaped from a Chinese facility, possibly the Wuhan Institute of Virology which is located near the original epicenter of the outbreak.
Fang said he had heard that many U.S. and Europe-based researchers had asserted that the virus was linked to the institute, adding this assertion was highly possible as the facility’s biosafety level 4 laboratory houses samples of SARS, Ebola and other deadly viruses.
Analyses of COVID-19, Fang said, have shown that is has a 96 percent genetic similarity with an RaTG13 bat virus at the institute.
While viruses need to be at least 99 percent similar to call them "the same," it is the differences in particular that have led researchers to speculate that COVID-19 was manufactured by modifying RaTG13, Fang said, according to a Taipei Times report.
Mutations of viruses that occur naturally only result in small, singular changes, Fang said, adding that one would not normally see a naturally mutated virus suddenly take on four amino acids.
While such a large mutation is not impossible, it is highly unlikely, Fang said.
However, only an internal administrative review at the institute could rule out whether the virus was manufactured there, Fang said, adding that such an investigation would require access to lab records, which is unlikely to happen in communist China.
#10
^Pérez-Losada, M., Arenas, M., Galán, J. C., Palero, F., & González-Candelas, F. (2015). Recombination in viruses: mechanisms, methods of study, and evolutionary consequences. Infection, Genetics and Evolution, 30, 296-307.
#11
From the link in #4 - Despite the ominous discovery, the researchers were also able to discover that SARS-CoV-2 "has a much lower mutation rate and genetic diversity" than severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which appeared in China in 2002.
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/16/2020 9:40 Comments ||
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#13
"Despite that, we found the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 is particularly more conserved, we identified a mutation that leads to weaker receptor binding capability, which concerns a SARS-CoV-2 sample collected on 27th January 2020 from India."
In other words, less infectious. Still not sanguine about a vaccine any time soon.
#16
"^You worry whether vaccine to seasonal flu works?"
What's the average hit rate on this? 40%? I realize that's due to other issues though. No. I worry that the vaccine candidates won't generate sufficient antibodies, which instead of providing immunity can make the disease worse.
Don't get me wrong, I believe there will be a vaccine. Too much money to be had. I just have doubts about its ultimate utility. At least one vaccine candidate is an attenuated version of the virus, which you'd want many years to test for safety before even thinking about whether or not it works.
#17
Look Iblis, the vaccine will be based on the spike protein. If the later mutates, the vaccine won't work. However, the lethality of Xi's Gift is in the un-mutated spike protein.
#19
Dunno. Clearly we don't have vaccines for everything. Been hearing that some vaccines are harder than others, and that this could be one of the hard ones. Guess we'll see.
#23
Thanks much, trailing wife. I also remember some stories within the past year or so about humans getting sick (and dying, I think) after a dog licked them.
[Zero] It should now make sense why China was so adamant in cremating bodies as the fast-spreading virus terrorized Wuhan earlier this year. That is because, a new report published on April 11 says a medical examiner recently passed away after contracting COVID-19 from a corpse.
The incident took place in Bangkok, Thailand, at an unknown date, when a medical worker was infected with the virus after conducting tests on a COVID-19 corpse, the study said, which was recently published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine.
The death of the medical examiner "is the first report on COVID-19 infection and death among medical personnel in a Forensic Medicine unit," according to the authors.
#3
My best friend (since 3rd grade) died in an apartment fire last week. Brutal, found him up against his door. Heard the firemen after breaking the door in tried to revive him.
Bill typically spent 3 hours a day in the gym. But for some 10 days before he had been desperately sick. HE hadn't really told anyone, typical Finnish guy. Been very concerned about the firemen and coroner...
Shit. Bill was literally one of those scary ex-Seagate smart genius men. He'd been gathering food to share with a rather bad off family. Unfortunately I guess he had boxes of noodles on top of his electric stove. The firemen thought he was trying to turn on, warm up the oven for a pizza but hit the top burner knob by mistake. Flash fire.
Then, the next morning his brother Alan came out of his shower. There were two word written on his fogged sink mirror, "I'm sorry". I saw the mirror photo. Cried like a child. You'd have to know Bill but that was so like him, Scandinavian man of few words.
I had coffee with him earlier that morning discussing some of your Rantburg stories and posts. Bill greatly enjoyed and respected the Burg. Had to share.
Please folks if anything good can come of this, never leave anything on your stovetops.
But this comes to mind. Before we were teaching martial arts at Bethel College and still TAs. I got knocked rather silly after walking into a student's aerial crescent kick. My fault. And in all fairness I'd knocked the poor fellow stone cold out the week before. Bill knew I was pretty off and waited outside the lockers.
As typical we walked into the lower student's lounge to get a few bananas and maybe a coke. Late and few were there.
Coming in I remember noticing this amazing Scandinavian blond girl working behind the counter and said with great heartfelt conviction, "excuse me but honestly you are the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life".
Bill was right behind, proceeded to lightly grabbed me from behind. With his hands on both of my shoulders, pulled me away saying to the young lady with an honest Finnish apology, "sorry you will have to excuse him, he just got hit very hard in the head". The look on her face...
Typical Bill. Genius but with limited social Sheldon skills. It still brings a smile to those that remember that night.
Then there was the night I introduced him to his future wife. From then on they were together, until her death. But that's another story.
Sincerely I thank you for asking TW. And I thank each and every one of you. God Bless you one and all.
[The Hill] Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) warned on Wednesday that without an increase in coronavirus testing it would be difficult to start reopening the country, something President Trump has signaled he hopes happens soon.
"Without more tests with quick results, it will be difficult to contain this disease and give Americans confidence to go back to work and back to school," Alexander, who chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a statement.
Alexander's comments come as Trump and several Senate Republicans are signaling they want to quickly start to reopen businesses and other sectors that have been closed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Some Republican lawmakers have warned that the economic damage being sparked by the coronavirus and the subsequent social distancing restrictions outweigh the health impact. The United States has more than 630,000 confirmed cases and more than 27,000 deaths.
"We’ve got to deal with the economic devastation of all of the people who are hurting and I’ll tell you it is time for Texans to go back to work," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told a local Texas TV station on Wednesday.
[Slate from March] Policy changes in reaction to the coronavirus reveal how absurd so many of our rules are to begin with.
Maybe it will be the hand sanitizer that finally exposes the sham.
The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that due to the coronavirus outbreak, it’s waiving the familiar 3.4-ounce limit for liquids and gels—for hand sanitizer only.* You may now bring a bottle of Purell as large as 12 ounces onto the plane to assist in your constant sanitizing of yourself, your family, your seat, your bag of peanuts, and everything else. All other liquids and gels, however, are still restricted to 3.4 ounces.
Among many shocks of the past week—school closures, Tom Hanks, the shuttering of one sports league after another—this rule change registers as major. The liquid restriction has been a key component of air travel ever since 2006. If people are now allowed to bring 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer onto planes, won’t the planes blow up?
The TSA can declare this rule change because the limit was always arbitrary, just one of the countless rituals of security theater to which air passengers are subjected every day. Flights are no more dangerous today, with the hand sanitizer, than yesterday, and if the TSA allowed you to bring 12 ounces of shampoo on a flight tomorrow, flights would be no more dangerous then. The limit was bullshit. The ease with which the TSA can toss it aside makes that clear....
#3
Policy changes in reaction to the coronavirus reveal how absurd so many of our rules are to begin with.
Did someone just take the red pill over at Slate? For decades this liberal rag has never seen a government 'rule' they didn't like and only now they have a problem with additional ones in the face of a variant of the flu virus?
#4
Your America is a sham. The real America of ordinary non-Woke, non-chattering class, non cool city-dwelling men and women who do real jobs in the real world -- that America is most definitely not a sham.
We're the ones holding things together, keeping our heads when all about us are losing theirs.
#6
The point of the "Arbitrary" rule by the mean and nasty TSA is that Islamic terrorists, supported by the Muslim community in America and Soddi attacked us from within. All of these rule would be nonexistent if Islam was wiped from the earth. We have been fighting to protect civil human beings from the hate and scourge of Islam hidden in the benign term moderate muslims for hundreds of years... GFY
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
04/16/2020 11:14 Comments ||
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[CBC] - Quite uncharacteristically, the Russian state TV host did not bury the bad news as he led off the show.
"We're now following the same model as Italy," Yevgeny Popov said in a stunning about-face from just two weeks ago, when the host of the popular Russian talk show 60 Minutes said the government was getting the coronavirus outbreak under control.
Now, Russia's most widely watched Kremlin-funded news programs are telling people they should prepare for thousands of deaths.
Along with that shift in messaging has also come a change in behaviour from President Vladimir Putin.
Putin had been keeping an unusually low profile as the virus spread, preferring to make good news pronouncements such as paid holidays for workers and help for businesses, while leaving unpopular decisions such as enforcing quarantines to lower-level officials.
But this week, a concerned-looking Putin has made daily addresses, emphasizing that the situation has become dire and Russians should prepare themselves for plenty more bad news.
...But the biggest reversal came on Wednesday with a decision to postpone the May 9 Victory Day parade marking the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe — a hugely symbolic event, arguably more important to many Russians than even the Olympics.
...Russia has developed its own COVID-19 tests that the government claims have been administered to more than a million people, but there have been repeated criticisms about large numbers of false-negatives.
...Prominent economist Alexei Kudrin, the architect of many of Russia's most successful financial reforms and now an auditor of government spending, told a Russian business publication that the economic implications of the outbreak are close to catastrophic.
He predicts more than eight million Russians may be unemployed by the end of 2020 — a threefold increase from the start of the crisis.
Compared to Canada, which has a robust unemployment system and has introduced other benefits to help during the emergency, Russia's social supports are relatively meagre.
The TASS Russian news agency reports that the amount available to a single person per month ranges from between $30 and $150 Cdn.
#1
You want any help from the U.S. with regard to CV, oil, or anything else, you might consider reining your fighter jocks in a bit and practicing safe aviation distancing protocols.
h/t Instapundit
[Fox News] - There is increasing confidence that COVID-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory not as a bioweapon, but as part of China's effort to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China's government and seen relevant materials tell Fox News. Now that makes sense. My experience with Chinese "scientists" is that the f*cktards are technically superb, insanely competitive - leading to cutting corners, and have nothing - even remotely - resembling the ability to look at a broad picture. If they were military, they'd be "All tactics, no strategy".
#2
This theory is entirely plausible. Their initial delay in reporting, deception, and rush to buy up global supplies of PPE only contributes to the theory. The bastards are ruthlessly mercantile, long referred to as the Amish of the orient.
The bio-weapon theory should not be totally discounted. The two theories are certainly not mutually exclusive.
I doubt it will matter much however. The euphoria of a residing virus, return to normalcy, and throngs of shoppers hitting the Chinese box stores, will send the market skyward. All sins will be forgiven as await the next self-inflicted crisis.
[Babylon Bee] In a candid speech Tuesday, President Xi Jinping stated he was "pretty impressed" by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer's handling of the coronavirus outbreak, specifically praising her totalitarian policies.
China's dictator said he was actually a little jealous he hadn't thought of some of her ideas himself.
"She has some pretty great ideas -- stopping people from gathering together even with their families, ordering people not to buy seeds -- they can't even plant their own food now! We hadn't even thought of some of these innovative approaches," the Communist president said. "We're always looking for more ways to oppress people, and we were really inspired by Whitmer's approach."
"Not bad, Gretchen."
Other dictators across the world also chimed in with words of support and affirmation for Whitmer's policies, from North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un to Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei.
The Chinese government quickly offered Governor Whitmer a consulting position with the Communist Party of China, which she readily accepted.
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/16/2020 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[7 views]
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#1
Guessed Bee, again. They're slipping.
Looks like reality has become too absurd for satire.
#3
When the VA governor was interviewed on FOX and asked about the constitutional aspects of his order his reply was it was over his pay grade. He said he did not care. We are lost.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
04/16/2020 11:16 Comments ||
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[The Guardian] - There has not been a lot of good news lately. But with the discharge of Boris Johnson from hospital on Sunday, and statements that the "peak" strain on the National Health Service would be over the Easter period, you might be under the impression that the storm is passing, and the Covid-19 pandemic will soon be a memory.
Fueling this mood are reports from studies of communities already hit by the pandemic. At long last we are beginning to see the results of work looking for signs that people have already been infected, through the presence of antibodies against Sars-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19. Some of this data suggests strongly that many infections may have passed unnoticed, with the only symptoms being mild things such as loss of the ability to smell and taste, and that as a result, more people may be immune than had been thought. Surely this is a sign that communities around the world can breathe a sigh of relief and start getting back to work?
Unfortunately, it is nothing of the kind.
...An editorial in the British Medical Journal has reported data from China suggesting that as many as four in five cases of Sars-CoV-2 infection could be asymptomatic. It then goes on to quote people from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford, who say that if this is true "What the hell are we locking down for?" I wish those people would be brave enough to go and repeat that opinion in an ER in the Bronx right now, in which actual medicine is going on. Worrying about the exact rate of asymptomatic infection, or the currently unknown duration of immunity and a possible "second wave", is like politely applauding the performance in a jazz club and murmuring "nice" while the building is demolished around you and the piano player gets decapitated. Look at the data from S. Korea: they defeated the virus in the beginning of March and have a constant low rate of new cases. And, IMO, it's low because they maintain a system of extensive survey for new cases - a very big brotherish one, the kind that could not be used in the West.
There have been more than 93,000 cases of Covid-19 identified in the UK. Let’s round that up and say it is 100,000. So if the reports from the BMJ editorial are accurate, the actual number would be that multiplied by five, in which case there would have already been half a million infections in the UK. If this really is the peak and we see as many cases on the way down as on the way up, that would total 1 million infections from the initial surge in the UK — hopefully all of those people would then be immune.
That would leave about 65 million people in the UK still without immunity.
I am going to be unusually optimistic here, and assume that everyone who has Covid-19 becomes fully immune (not a given), and that the virus is towards the less transmissible end of the range of estimates currently available. If this is the case, you would need half your population to have been infected to achieve a level of population immunity that would stop the epidemic continuing to grow and overwhelming healthcare systems.
...Governments around the world are attempting ways to keep jobs and businesses afloat while lockdowns are in place — but the pressure remains to swiftly end such shutdowns. I get that this is going to be a mammoth strain on the economy. But the deaths of many thousands of people would be too: it is simply not possible to thoroughly insulate an economy from the impact of a pandemic of this kind.
Where I live, in Cambridge Massachusetts, I keep hearing sirens. This crisis is not close to over, quite the reverse. The pandemic is only just getting started.
#4
Maybe flattening the curve just prolonged the agony.
Maybe you missed the point of 'flattening the curve'. It will prolong the agony as secondary and tertiary ripples occur. 'Hopefully' the peak of those ripples will not exceed the capacity of the healthcare to care for the victims. That is the intent.
#9
And buy the time it takes to come up with a vaccine.
As long as we have effective treatments, a vaccine is not necessary... though it would be awfully nice. We don’t have vaccines against headaches, after all.
#3
Perhaps the average 'Joe citizen' would prefer governance via FEMA region military governor/commanders with the State and Federal POLS sitting this one out.
Go ahead, continue to bitch and moan, but please don't forget the potential alternatives. Alternatives by the way, which do not require legislative deliberation.
#4
Remember the Arizona traffic camera experience. The good people of Arizona decided en masse to just ignore the whole thing and refused to pay. The state looked into it and discovered that it would take every uniformed and non-uniformed officer in the state, state, county, municipal AND federal to just enforce the traffic cams.
That said, we must never let them forget that they govern with our consent. The promiscuous use of the term 'our leaders' must be banished in favor of the traditional public servant.
#5
Our politicians have no idea what happens if they damage their veneer of authority the way the media has flushed its credibility away.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/16/2020 13:43 Comments ||
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#6
The lockdown will phase out, and the case numbers will rise, hopefully just a bit. Flareups will occur, and spot lockdowns will may needed. Hopefully, the number of cases will be small enough to track and quarantine.
I’m still at home, still over 70, and still not immune. As part of the at-risk group, I’m planning on staying incommunicado until there are almost zero new cases. That should be doable in central NH.
Kurt at Town Hall
You cannot have a social upheaval like the Bat Gobbler Flu and expect everything to go back to exactly how it was before the ChiCom’s fetish for eating weird Schiff turned the world upside down. Pressure has a way of changing what it is applied to. Sometimes it makes diamonds, other times it makes things go splat. No one expected something like this to come out of leftist field and derail our booming economy. We wanted to let the good times roll, but no one saw them rolling right off a cliff.
The pandemic and the response are going to not change some things much at all. For example, once the economy gets rolling again the survivors will rally and we’ll knock unemployment way down while pumping the Dow back up. But other things are another story. Some things were changing anyway, and this body blow is going to accelerate the trends towards creative destruction as old ways of doing things fade away quicker than expected and new ones come to the forefront. We’re going to see many areas where change was always coming, and now it’s come faster. In many cases, it will help crush our enemies, which is awesome.
#1
The slashing satirist speaks truth. A new Mencken for our Age of Unreason.
He's bang-on about the collapse of the American four-year bullshit-degree bacchanal that we call "higher education." If you thought hairdressers and pizza shops and millions of other small businesses were vulnerable to ruin thanks to the lockdown, apply the same logic to about 3,000 little four-year colleges. Those without big endowment funds are now dead.
Which means we can finally kill the sorta-college-but-not-really for all model that Clinton and Zero pushed, disastrously, for 20 years and that has given us $1.5 trillion in student debt, a corrupt and incompetent elite, and an unbelievably shitty "Woke" media & entertainment industry.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/16/2020 14:16 Comments ||
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#6
Smart companies will hire the best people from all over the world and let them work at home. The best people will work for the best companies and the dinosaurs will be left with the morons.
If you can't trust your employees to work from home then you can't trust them at all. You can't breath down their necks in their cubicles all day long, you have no way of knowing if they're working in their cubicles of playing solitaire or reading Rantburg. The only thing that matters is that their assignments are completed on time.
Gridlock on the freeways will be a thing of the past. Demand for gasoline will fall as will the price of gasoline. Car insurance will be cheaper because miles driven will be less and cars will last a lot longer if they're sitting in the garage most of the time. Air pollution will decrease. Companies will spend less on buildings and more on being productive. Workers will spend less time commuting and more time being productive. Workers will have more disposable income without the companies having to increase salaries.
But there could be drawbacks. Beware of locating your home office next to the laundry room or a bathroom. Your home office must be quiet, functional and free of distractions. Beware of spouses and children who suddenly think they have access to you for stuff that has nothing to do with work. Beware of getting hooked on daytime television. It is not a vacation.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/16/2020 15:04 Comments ||
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#7
The 70K a year is for the country club and the sheepskin. Most student time these days is spent in activism. The actual education an afterthought and is only a shadow of what it was 50 years ago.
Only STEM is relatively untouched, and they are working on that.
#8
We-l-l-l-l... let's not get carried away. The video conferencing tools have to become a LOT better before remote workers will be on the same plane as face-to-face team members.
Currently, given the shitty state of videoconferencing, if you're not at the table then you don't count. You're out of the loop.
2. Can't detect eye movements accurately i.e. can't discern skepticism, inattention, obliviousness, scorn, hostility, other warning signals that your message is either unwelcome or unheeded
3. Can't pick up on side conversations that indicate resistance or conspiracy against your plan / intentions.
4. Can't follow up with confidential and impromptu 1:1 hallway conversations.
etc
In the game that is corporate guerrilla warfare, if you're remote you're flying blind.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[World Tribune] The Wuhan coronavirus has four more amino acids than other coronaviruses, making its transmission easier, according to a French research team which examined the gene sequence of COVID-19.
[Slate from March] Policy changes in reaction to the coronavirus reveal how absurd so many of our rules are to begin with.
[Babylon Bee] In a candid speech Tuesday, President Xi Jinping stated he was "pretty impressed" by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer's handling of the coronavirus outbreak, specifically praising her totalitarian policies.
Perhaps the average 'Joe citizen' would prefer governance via FEMA region military governor/commanders with the State and Federal POLS sitting this one out. 
